Leaving Linux Mint After Doing MATE 1.6 Update

[rbeltz48]

I am using LM 13 and just did the major update from MATE 1.4 to MATE 1.6 etc. which showed up today in the update manager. It destroyed my desktop and made all applications unusable. In addition, my wife's laptop can't be updated because of some error which no one on the forum has as solution to. I can no longer depnd on Linux Mint to be a stable distro and will be looking for another distro which IS stable. Very sad indeed as I had such high hopes for Mint as a long-term OS.

[rbeltz48]

The normal way, through Update Manager.

[thorx89]

Same here. So pissed off.
I fixed everything but I can't get mintmenu to work. :/
I tried to revert back to MATE 1.4, but those packages are no longer available and I don't have them cached. At the same time, MATE 1.2 has issues (and those packages still are in the repo), so I'm kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.

[thorx89]

Anyhow, if you want to fix your system, the issue seems to be that mintupdate doesn't get/upgrade all the necessary packages.
Try something like

Code: Select all

$ sudo apt-get install mate-desktop 

in your terminal (virtual console, if you can't get the GUI to work) or somehow fix the broken dependencies manually (I don't recall what I did exactly).

Then, MATE 1.6 seems to store desktop settings differently , so you'll lose your settings but you can get most of them back by
getting this migration script:
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-de ... onf-import

Code: Select all

$  wget https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-desktop/edit/master/tools/mate-conf-import 

and running it

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$  python mate-conf-import 

This got most of my desktop settings back.

Still, no mintmenu yet. :-/

[BrunoMiranda]

@rbeltz48,
Yes, you are right these things shouldn't happen in a stable LTS, and your anger is justified. But you know have a solution for it, hope you can get it working back again and unboil yourself down... Computers have no brains, so they are as fallible as the ones that program them, and I know they work a lot for my great OS free as in free beer! So the Mint and Mate devs still have all my patience, respect and gratitude.

The same thing happened to me while I was doing serious work, but there again, even knowing chances things break are low, I shouldn't update while working, mea culpa here on my behalf.

Since I'm no expert, it took me an hour of trial and error until I find the solution, but I made it work back again on my own so I'm happy, I've learned a couple of new tricks. Came here to see if there were people needed help but someone helped first, so it's always nice to see the community working fast! Kudos!


Ok, so I can boot my system now but I've got my notifications changed and I cannot see where to configure it. Shouldn't it be in the Control Center? It's not!

Meanwhile, I've been digging around and I've checked that mate-notification-daemon is not installed. I tried to, but it depends on libmatewnck (>= 1.5.1) and apt says I have hold packages. libmatewnck depends on libmatewnck, in turn depending on libmatewnck-common (= 1.6.0-1+precise) but 1.6.1-1+maya is to be installed.

So it's my turn to ask for help and suggestions...

Any hints, or, since this is not critical at all, should I just wait for a couple of days and hope the solution is inserted into the repos?

Please note that I upgraded from mate 1.6 (.1, I guess). I've done a dist-upgrade on the terminal.
Should I also run

Then, MATE 1.6 seems to store desktop settings differently , so you'll lose your settings but you can get most of them back by
getting this migration script:
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-de ... onf-import

Code: Select all
$ wget https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-de ... onf-import


and running it

Code: Select all
$ python mate-conf-import

[jazz.h]

One more Mint 13 setup destroyed...

[mfreeman]

I had very little trouble getting my desktop back after some searching and figuring things out. But, I'm a bit annoyed that the new Mint menu button on the panel doesn't do transparency. So, I have a nice, semi-transparent panel that looks great, but then there's this big, ugly, blah-gray button messing up the whole effect. Anyone know how to fix this problem? I noticed someone posted a bug report about it on Github about 4 months ago, but no one ever replied, and apparently the problem was never fixed. I'd appreciate some help getting my desktop back to looking nice again. Especially since this is probably the last Mint I'll ever be able to get running on this aging laptop (I've read that the AMD/ATI legacy drivers don't run on the newer Xorg versions).

I want it to look as good as it's gonna get. MATE 1.6 ain't cutting it, and I'm a little ticked off about it.

[rbeltz48]

I couldn't do anything. All the themes were changed. I first tried to add a new panel at the top. Then my screen went crazy with all the icons jumping up and down, like fluttering. The bottom panel completely disappeared! None of the applications would run! A complete disaster!! I managed to backup all my data files to a flash drive. Then re-installed Mint 13 and turned all updates OFF until I figure out what I want to do for another distro that is really STABLE.

This has got to be the biggest screw up ever from the Mint team. VERY upsetting to say the least.

[JoeInMN]

Update Manager bumped my netbook up to MATE 1.6 just a little bit ago here. Everything seems to have gone well for me, or at least I haven't run into anything actually seriously broken yet, but yes, I did have to redo most of my desktop and panel settings. That was a little unexpected and annoying, but I guess it took me only about ten minutes. I run a single MATE panel on the bottom of the screen.

Edit: And all of my keyboard layout options were reset, and I had to redo those.

[Trapper]

Everything seems to have gone well for me, or at least I haven't run into anything actually seriously broken yet, but yes, I did have to redo most of my desktop and panel settings.

This is the experience we are having with all our boxes here. Various hardware and software configurations. No major damages but we do have to reset our panel(s) and a number of other MATE configuration settings. No meltdowns, disintegrating or permanently disabled boxes though. For us it's been a hiccup rather than a barf.

[fraxinus_63]

The update seems to have gone smoothly for me, and on two quite different computers. I simply ran Update Manager and let it do its thing.

* I found I lost my MATE desktop settings but I had no trouble re-creating them manually. Admittedly, it helps that my own desktop is not heavily customised.
* I lost sound, but was able to set it up again in Control Centre.
* I had problems getting Pluma to work. Looking in Synaptic I found an update listed and installed it manually - now it is fine.

Perhaps I have been fortunate, and I do sympathise with people who have had issues after big upgrades like this.

I think the important thing for Mint to emphasise in documentation (perhaps in information that appears on screen during first install?) that the user has choices to make when they decide which repositories to enable. This will affect how you manage a LTS release in particular, because enabling backports in your Software Sources will lead to pretty significant changes over the distro's life span.

The update being discussed in this thread is an "optional" one that users receive by accepting backports. You can choose the safest/"stablest" route by leaving this option unchecked. If you opt to take backported packages as well as the main updates, you are opening yourself up to much more comprehensive updates from time to time. When these updates include (for example) a new version of MATE or Cinnamon, it is perhaps not surprising that things like desktop settings return to factory defaults. I agree that in an ideal world they probably would not (!) - but at least one can be prepared before a big update for the fact that a bit of "sorting out" might be needed afterwards.

[clem]

I couldn't do anything. All the themes were changed. I first tried to add a new panel at the top. Then my screen went crazy with all the icons jumping up and down, like fluttering. The bottom panel completely disappeared! None of the applications would run! A complete disaster!! I managed to backup all my data files to a flash drive. Then re-installed Mint 13 and turned all updates OFF until I figure out what I want to do for another distro that is really STABLE.

This has got to be the biggest screw up ever from the Mint team. VERY upsetting to say the least.

There are no "updates" to MATE 1.6 in Maya. You must be mistaken. Only "backports" to people who opt-in to the backport repository.

[mfreeman]

Hey, Clem,

Any way to get panel transparency working on the new Mint menu applet? That's the only real problem I have with this. Everything else works fine. Functionally, it's much better than 1.4, but visually it's messing up my nice transparent theme to have this big gray button on the left side of my panel. Any way to fix it?

[clem]

The update being discussed in this thread is an "optional" one that users receive by accepting backports. You can choose the safest/"stablest" route by leaving this option unchecked. If you opt to take backported packages as well as the main updates, you are opening yourself up to much more comprehensive updates from time to time. When these updates include (for example) a new version of MATE or Cinnamon, it is perhaps not surprising that things like desktop settings return to factory defaults. I agree that in an ideal world they probably would not (!) - but at least one can be prepared before a big update for the fact that a bit of "sorting out" might be needed afterwards.

Yes. It's hard to please everybody. Some people want a stable OS, others want backports, the best we can do is to make this available as an opt-in, and that's exactly what we did.

The quality of the updates themselves is pretty good. Sure there are some rough edges here and there and of course novice users should not engage in upgrades of this magnitude but things work out of the box on vanilla installs and the migrations are easy for anyone with a bit of experience with Linux. The real problem here, as I see it, is that it's way too easy for people to enable backports without worrying about what it means.

We no longer use software properties, but the situation is similar in mintsources. I'll add this to our roadmap.

[clem]

Hey, Clem,

Any way to get panel transparency working on the new Mint menu applet? That's the only real problem I have with this. Everything else works fine. Functionally, it's much better than 1.4, but visually it's messing up my nice transparent theme to have this big gray button on the left side of my panel. Any way to fix it?

I'm not sure it's possible unfortunately.. MATE 1.6 switched from mateconf to gsettings. Gsettings doesn't have any python bindings so we had to use gobject introspection. GObject introspection means we could no longer use pygtk... We still wanted to stick to GTK2 but we had to use ctype for things to work ok (gi is awful with gtk2) and we had to give up on some gtk2 functionality which we could not port.

Long term the migration to gsettings and dbus is good for the MATE project, but it's been real tough on us with mintmenu. We managed to get a functional menu and that is quite an achievement already

I'll add that transparency issue to our roadmap for mintmenu and I'll have a look to see if we can get it working.

[mfreeman]

OK. Understood. Thank you for your reply on this! I'll just have to make due until another solution is found. Unfortunately, Mint 13 is probably the last Mint I can run on my poor old laptop, unless the open source graphics drivers get on par with the speed of the AMD proprietary drivers, because I've read that the Xorg version used in newer Ubuntus don't work with the legacy AMD drivers. So I may be stuck with this unless a fix is found before Mint 17LTS is out.

[TheDynamicHamza21]

The update destroyed my desktop as well. I can't downgrade to mate 1.4. The is first time in my six years of using Linux my DE broke.

https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-de ... onf-import

That link ends with 404 error here's right link

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https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-desktop/blob/master/tools/mate-conf-import

and running it
$ python mate-conf-import

Running this throws up another error:

File "mate-conf-import", line 4
<!DOCTYPE html>
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

There's no way I reinstalling, so I guess I going have make do with XFCE until this gets sorted out.

[Trapper]

There's no way I reinstalling, so I guess I going have make do with XFCE until this gets sorted out.

I am not sure you should be expecting it to be 'sorted out'. This isn't a bad update that is going to get fixed. It is an opt-in backport of LM16 MATE 1.6. MATE 1.6 'does not' use mateconf settings. It uses gsettings instead. That's why everyone's desktop is screwed up when they install MATE 1.6 over Mate 1.2 or 1.4. It is up to the user to reconfigure their desktop settings and prefs just like they would with a new install.

There are reasonable options other than bailing out for something else. If you can't fixed what's messed up you can always opt to do a new install of LM 13 and not opt in to backports in your repository sources (there's no harm in staying at 1.4) or you can install LM13 and do the backport install of MATE 1.6 prior to setting anything else up, restoring your home, etc. I tested the latter today and it works just fine. I am on that box right now. Or just use LM16 with MATE 1.6 for now. LM17 is out next and I believe it's LTS too.

[mzsade]

I am using LM 13 and just did the major update from MATE 1.4 to MATE 1.6 etc. which showed up today in the update manager. It destroyed my desktop and made all applications unusable. In addition, my wife's laptop can't be updated because of some error which no one on the forum has as solution to. I can no longer depnd on Linux Mint to be a stable distro and will be looking for another distro which IS stable. Very sad indeed as I had such high hopes for Mint as a long-term OS.

Why did you find it so necessary to do that "major update"? What did you hope to achieve? What's my point, you ask? I just can't resist the opportunity to say, I still use Isadora.

[TheDynamicHamza21]

There's no way I reinstalling, so I guess I going have make do with XFCE until this gets sorted out.

I am not sure you should be expecting it to be 'sorted out'. This isn't a bad update that is going to get fixed. It is an opt-in backport of LM16 MATE 1.6. MATE 1.6 'does not' use mateconf settings. It uses gsettings instead. That's why everyone's desktop is screwed up when they install MATE 1.6 over Mate 1.2 or 1.4. It is up to the user to reconfigure their desktop settings and prefs just like they would with a new install.

What I meant was a simple way to downgrade to Mate 1.4 or make 1.6 work well with Mint 13.

The first time logging into 1.6 everything seemed stable, despite the missing panels but when I tried to add the Mate menu bar that's where the trouble began. My cpu hit 100%,the icons on my desktop started flickering up and down (first time I ever seen that happen!) and I had to perform a hard reboot.

If you can't fixed what's messed up you can always opt to do a new install of LM 13 and not opt in to backports in your repository sources (there's no harm in staying at 1.4) or you can install LM13 and do the backport install of MATE 1.6 prior to setting anything else up, restoring your home, etc. I tested the latter today and it works just fine. I am on that box right now.

That may be an option since I do have my home folder on a separate partition. It looks like I know what I'll be doing this weekend. Hopefully, what ever caused the cpu issue won't be a problem on the new install. I'm happy using 1.4. The only thing missing was caja doesn't display any audio/video metadata like nautilus,thus unless Mate 1.6 has added this feature, I'll stick with 1.4 until Mint 17 arrives.