Caja audio-preview (still) broken - Rebuilding Caja prob...

[omelette]

I've just installed Mint 18.3 on one of my pc's and am disappointed, though not surprised, to find that the Mint devs. still haven't fixed Caja audio-previews - it's been freezing Caja since at least Mint 17.1, and all versions since! What I am surprised about is that most users seem to find this acceptable.

This also occurred with Mint 17.3 LTS, and as a last-resort, I rebuilt Caja (1.12) from source - lo and behold, it worked perfectly and has continued to do so for about the past 2 years. So, the problem is not with Caja, it has to do with the way the Mint packages are being built!

So, back to now, I'm trying to build Caja on my fresh 18.3 install and seem to have hit an insurmountable problem. I have downloaded from the Git-hub, source for the same version of Caja that is installed - 1.18.5 https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja/tr ... eced28dfc2. When I try building this, I receive the following errors;

Requested 'glib-2.0 >= 2.50.0' but version of GLib is 2.48.2
No package 'mate-desktop-2.0' found
Requested 'gio-2.0 >= 2.50.0' but version of GIO is 2.48.2

Question, how can a Caja 1.18.5-build be requiring Depend-versions that are newer that the current repository installations? It seems to me that the Devs. built these packages using newer libraries, probably from Mint 19-Beta repositories. If so, this laziness prevents Mint 18.3 users from 'rolling their own' Caja, and likely a whole lot of other packages, until the repositories receive a major update. This is in a word, unconscionable.

[Hoser Rob]

.... So, the problem is not with Caja, it has to do with the way the Mint packages are being built!
....

It has to do with Linux and the fact that there's little backwards or forwards compatibility in general. This is also why you're having trouble with dependencies in the newer release. Mint is hardly unique in this, and it's why new users are usually discouraged from installing apps by building from source.

What version of caja does 18.3 come with? You sure it's not the right one already?

[inRAIDius]

From personal experience I can say with certainty that Caja is the worst file manager I've ever used - had nothing but trouble with it. The worst of it is the file transfer rates that drop off so significantly it forced me to abandon the transfers on multiple occasions. Now the complaining is out of the way; My remedy was to replace Caja file manager with Nemo.
Nemo, imho, is the best file manager I've ever used and I tip my hat to Team Mint for doing such a good job - Thanks Team Mint!

Contrary to popular belief it's not a difficult task at all and does not cause any undesirable effects if you follow the instructions accurately. There are certain settings that must remain in place for the desktop to still function properly, you'll figure it out.

Navigate to this site and follow the instructions: comes from the Mate community

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/use-nem ... -caja/4124

Additionally: Read through this first and do some research if you're unsure about anything in the tutorial.
webupd8.org also has good info on this
Careful not to install cinnamon or unity dependencies.
Be sure to install the extensions you need.

Have fun

[trytip]

i get mixed results and TONS of .xsession-errors when trying to preview audio files in caja 17.3 i had it turned off in caja>edit>preferences>preview>sound files>never but turned it back to test again. yes it did freeze but i believe it froze while thumbnails were generating as i was trying to preview. if i wait to thumbnails to be completely generated i could then open a folder full with mp3 or flac and no freezing, but that doesn't redact the fact that .xsession-errors is still not happy when i try to preview audio files so, i disabled it since i don't really need this.

when developers pay attention to .xsession-errors things can be somewhat fixed, but i just noticed that some new updates always undo extra work i did to try to patch something and am left with new updates that have different configurations while the system still has a lot of old file configurations that i forgot about and have no clue what i actually changed.

it's a constant battle between user and developer especially gnome (can suck it) not giving a crap about anything else but gnome

[omelette]

.... So, the problem is not with Caja, it has to do with the way the Mint packages are being built!
....

It has to do with Linux and the fact that there's little backwards or forwards compatibility in general. This is also why you're having trouble with dependencies in the newer release. Mint is hardly unique in this, and it's why new users are usually discouraged from installing apps by building from source.

What version of caja does 18.3 come with? You sure it's not the right one already?

Well, I'm using Linux exclusively since 2009 so I'm hardly a new user. The Caja installed is version 1.18.5, the same version I downloaded from Git-hub. What makes no sense is that this version is demanding higher version number dependencies - this can only mean that the Mint developers built Caja 1.18.5 on a system other than Mint 18.3. That's frankly, sloppy. It's one thing to release a distro with bugs, quite another to prevent the user from fixing said-bugs themselves - as they seem to have done here. The only work-around is probably to install Mint 19-beta somewhere and build Caja there.

[omelette]

From personal experience I can say with certainty that Caja is the worst file manager I've ever used - had nothing but trouble with it. The worst of it is the file transfer rates that drop off so significantly it forced me to abandon the transfers on multiple occasions. Now the complaining is out of the way; My remedy was to replace Caja file manager with Nemo.
Nemo, imho, is the best file manager I've ever used and I tip my hat to Team Mint for doing such a good job - Thanks Team Mint!

Contrary to popular belief it's not a difficult task at all and does not cause any undesirable effects if you follow the instructions accurately. There are certain settings that must remain in place for the desktop to still function properly, you'll figure it out.

Navigate to this site and follow the instructions: comes from the Mate community

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/use-nem ... -caja/4124

Additionally: Read through this first and do some research if you're unsure about anything in the tutorial.
webupd8.org also has good info on this
Careful not to install cinnamon or unity dependencies.
Be sure to install the extensions you need.

Have fun

I have to admit, I hate Nemo and I've experienced no slow-down when transferring files. In fact, coming from 17.3, I really like the option to Pause & Resume downloads. Everything seems to work perfectly with 18.3 apart from Caja's audio-previews - which I'm sure is 100%-fixable by rebuilding it. Mint 18.1 on the other hand was a disaster on my system - Compiz crashed regularly, Nouveau didn't work properly etc. All fixed with 18.3 - except for all of those damn Nvidia drivers, they are all incapable of detecting my monitors highest resolution, a paltry 1360x768. Whereas, Nouveau works perfectly.

[omelette]

i get mixed results and TONS of .xsession-errors when trying to preview audio files in caja 17.3 i had it turned off in caja>edit>preferences>preview>sound files>never but turned it back to test again. yes it did freeze but i believe it froze while thumbnails were generating as i was trying to preview. if i wait to thumbnails to be completely generated i could then open a folder full with mp3 or flac and no freezing, but that doesn't redact the fact that .xsession-errors is still not happy when i try to preview audio files so, i disabled it since i don't really need this.

when developers pay attention to .xsession-errors things can be somewhat fixed, but i just noticed that some new updates always undo extra work i did to try to patch something and am left with new updates that have different configurations while the system still has a lot of old file configurations that i forgot about and have no clue what i actually changed.

it's a constant battle between user and developer especially gnome (can suck it) not giving a crap about anything else but gnome

I presume you meant Mint 17.3 - yes, there was a load of bugs in this, not least of which was the one you mention - it continuously re-generated thumbnails; logout/restart, and it would regenerate the same thumbnails again - maddening, as it slowed everything down. Mint 18.1 was a complete joke - here it regenerated thumbnails continuously, I couldn't believe it! Rebuilding the power-management app fixed this problem. 18.3 finally has this fixed.

I do a huge amount of work with audio files, so find audio-preview invaluable. What annoys me is that the Mint Developers seem well aware that it doesn't work properly. Not only has it been like this for years, Mint also disables it by default which suggests that they're well aware it causes problems. And like I said, build it from source, and the bug disappears - so it's the Mint-build, not the Caja source, is where the problem lies.