What's up with Cindy?

Archived topics about LMDE 1 and LMDE 2
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Penn

What's up with Cindy?

Post by Penn »

EDIT - I do not recommend adding this repo yet unless you are prepared to break and therefore fix your system.

LMDE 3 repo is now up. http://packages.linuxmint.com/ Has anyone tried adding it to an existing Stretch install?

Does one have to edit sources.list manually or does an Update Manager install do that (assuming Mint will do a difference in where it is like Betsy and Jessie)?

If I do this, what is the best way to give feedback for the team to work on?

Yes, I already have a Stretch install I am willing to experiment with.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 3 times in total.
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MintBean

Re: What's up with Cindy?

Post by MintBean »

I would say wait for a beta release before giving feedback. Historically they always ask for feedback when they want it, and that's at the beta stage.
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Pepi
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Re: What's up with Cindy?

Post by Pepi »

WOW ... This will make a lot of people happy :wink:
Penn

Re: What's up with Cindy?

Post by Penn »

Well, I had time to work on a few things today. Some success but had to quit before finishing.

I came across the Cindy repo because I had already decided I wanted mintupdate in Stretch. I now have that but I don't have the Cindy repo working due to NO_PUBKEY A6616109451BBBF2T.

This actually accomplished my original goal of Stretch using the Update Manager from Mint, I think. To verify I just have to wait for it to have available updates.
zorzi

Re: What's up with Cindy?

Post by zorzi »

Hello,

Could you describe the procedure you followed to add LMDE3 repo to Stretch ? This sounds interesting.
Penn

Re: What's up with Cindy?

Post by Penn »

zorzi wrote:Hello,

Could you describe the procedure you followed to add LMDE3 repo to Stretch ? This sounds interesting.
I haven't. I only have Stretch repo. The point to the original question was to hear from someone who has tried it.

All I did was get Update Manager sort of working. I can't update directly from it or even see available updates but the panel icon reads an error when updates exist and is checked when none do.

I have found mintupdate, mintstick and this forum are the only things that make Mint desirable but I am interested in the steps in development.
chrisuk

Re: What's up with Cindy?

Post by chrisuk »

For anyone getting excited by the repos being online; it doesn't mean LMDE3 will be released soon - Mint 18.3 repos are online too, and that is months away from even a Beta release.

(@Penn; I've Mintstick running fine on Manjaro - there's quite a bit of Mint stuff available in the AUR that runs OK on Arch-based Distros)
Penn

Re: What's up with Cindy?

Post by Penn »

True Chris. Last I knew the Mint team was saying LMDE3 wouldn't be until early next year. It is odd that it won't be until the base is nearly a year old. Perhaps I should have considered some might get the wrong idea.

Mintstick is installed on Stretch but I haven't used it there yet.

I ran into unexpected issues with mintupdate so I uninstalled that (and returned the system adjustments I made back to Stretch standards) since I only had time to experiment and explore on that machine that one day. Maybe I'll expreriment again in the future. In the meantime, I installed pk-update-icon which installs a few other dependencies and most of the mintupdate features I like are there.

The only thing I'm not liking is Stretch uses Ubuntu amounts of memory at boot but at least it still seems lighter on CPU usage and doesn't build up memory usage as much over time. I really haven't fully tested it out.
chrisuk

Re: What's up with Cindy?

Post by chrisuk »

One of the reasons I ditched Ubuntu for Debian was the memory usage (also the delay in updating some vulnerable packages) - although most of my boxes have more than enough memory, one Laptop and a Desktop don't. And I never found the extra memory usage to make the desktop more responsive. Although be wary of what you use to measure memory usage, some of the GUIs (Gnome/MATE System Monitor) can report a few 100mb more than is used... free in the terminal is consistently accurate.

So increased memory usage in Stretch doesn't bode well, but I'll see how MX Linux 17 does with Stretch and XFCE 4.14 when it's released later this year (MX 16 only uses 285mb after boot)
Penn

Re: What's up with Cindy?

Post by Penn »

I recall your switch to LMDE and knew memory was important to you. I haven't fully looked at the memory usage yet but I am going of the Cinnamon desklet "Simple system monitor" which I think works the same between editions and distros. However I might compare using the "free" command but I think when I glanced at it before Stretch had more free than LMDE 2 (which in turn had more free than Mint/Ubuntu) after a few hours of use (thus why I say it doesn't seem to build up as much used memory as Mint). So yeah, you may have a point in that the way each used shared and buffer memory may be relevant.
Penn

Re: What's up with Cindy?

Post by Penn »

Penn wrote:
zorzi wrote:Hello,

Could you describe the procedure you followed to add LMDE3 repo to Stretch ? This sounds interesting.
I haven't. I only have Stretch repo. The point to the original question was to hear from someone who has tried it.

All I did was get Update Manager sort of working. I can't update directly from it or even see available updates but the panel icon reads an error when updates exist and is checked when none do.

I have found mintupdate, mintstick and this forum are the only things that make Mint desirable but I am interested in the steps in development.
I was about to post about what I tried over the weekend and realized I did't accurately answer that question.

What I meant by "I haven't" is I didntt successfully do it at that time since the key wasn't working out. Since then I have figured that out but I caution again, most of what is in the Cindy repo right now is actually for Betsy and will break your install. I don't mean to be condescending but if you need a step by step you probably won't be able to fix things. If you can fix things you are exactly who I was hoping would respond to this thread.

So, in answer to your question the way I meant of SUCCESSFULLY adding the repo. Installing the Mint keyring doesn't add the repo signing key to apt. At the time of that post I had determined "apt-key add" wasn't working either. A few days after installing "pk-update-icon" and the resulting packages that were installed I decided to revisit the issue. Adding repos is done in /etc/apt and where exactly and what files varies depending on the distro (which is part of the issue with mintupdate) but the file name ends with the extension ".list". Well revisiting this means I was going to remove the "#" that commented out the experimental Cindy line but something I didn't expect happened. Upon double clicking the file it didn't open as a text file, instead on of the new programs installed as part of the update icon. In that program (software-properties-gtk) is a tab for managing keyrings. Adding the .gpg file from the Mint keyring install adds the repo and there is a way there to add the line which derives from the address in my original post (look at one of those .list files in a text editor to see how the line should look).

Now, what I did over the weekend. I was going to revisit mintupdate and mintsources (and possibly delve into mintinstall) but Debian versions of those three are already installed with the update icon, even if those GUI's aren't as nice as Mint's. So I decided to play with Cinnamon. As expected the result was not good. Don't do this if you can't fix things.

First I had to fix the theme since the main viewing area of Nemo and your background become the same color property which means no wall paper and not much definition change between windows and the background of the desktop until you set that property to be transparent (and it still doen't look quite right).

Next I saw that the shutdown box didn't work anymore. Al the buttons were gone except cancel.

At this point I had other things come up and didn't have time to fix it. At least I have a different install that still works but that one is broken until I revisit this but I doubt I will have time in the next few weeks. I'll probably just reinstall the tester installation any way since I don't see the point. Cinnamon 3.4 doesn't have anything I really feel a need for and 3.6 is just around the corner and, more importantly, I don't really think Cindy will be 3.4 since it will be antiquate by the time it comes out, lol.
Penn

Re: What's up with Cindy?

Post by Penn »

chrisuk wrote:One of the reasons I ditched Ubuntu for Debian was the memory usage (also the delay in updating some vulnerable packages) - although most of my boxes have more than enough memory, one Laptop and a Desktop don't. And I never found the extra memory usage to make the desktop more responsive. Although be wary of what you use to measure memory usage, some of the GUIs (Gnome/MATE System Monitor) can report a few 100mb more than is used... free in the terminal is consistently accurate.

So increased memory usage in Stretch doesn't bode well, but I'll see how MX Linux 17 does with Stretch and XFCE 4.14 when it's released later this year (MX 16 only uses 285mb after boot)
It took a few days for me to get around to it but Stretch and LMDE2 both report nearly the same amount of free -h memory but Stretch does seem to have about 0.1G less free after similar heavy usage of both systems but about 30% more shows as used by the same desklet monitor on both systems. So the "used" gap closes some over time.
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