Installing Virginia

I’ve been using Linux Mint for years, at least a decade, and it’s been my daily driver for many of them. Currently, I’m running it on four machines, my main computer, a laptop dedicated to my finances, another laptop that used to be my main laptop, and a desktop I’d intended to replace my wife’s Windows 10 PC. I’d upgraded all of them except my main machine soo after Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia was released, and these upgrade went quite well, with few, if any, problems. And they’ve been working well.

Generally speaking, the updated and new features that have been included in the Mint 21 point releases haven’t had anything that excited me or anything I had a particular need for. Mostly, they were minor cosmetic changes, although I can see the usefulness of the some of the changes made to the Cinnamon desktop and the Nemo file manager might have for someone who primarily uses a GUI interface. I, however, spend most of my time in the terminal and don’t use the GUI all that much. I keep up with the new releases mainly to make updates and upgrades easier down the line.

Yesterday I decided that it was time to upgrade the main machine. The upgrades to the other three Mint machines had been relatively quick and easy, so I didn’t anticipate any problems. Prior to starting the upgrade, I’d installed updates to the other Mint installations, and among the updates was Firefox. Linux Mint, because of their dislike of Snap packages, mantains their own version of Firefox which, I’ve noticed, usually takes twenty to thirty minutes to download and install. I’ve been surprised on occasion by a quick download, but that’s the exception, not the rule., and the latest updates followed the rule.

In over thirty years of working on computers I’ve found that an easy, problem-free upgrade is a rare event, so I should have been wary. While the previous upgrades to Virginia had taken less than an hour, this upgrade took over four hours to complete. (I probably could have installed it from the ISO quicker.) On average, the download rate when downloading packages was about 25 kilobytes per second. I occasionally saw it go as high as 52kb/s and drop down as low as 3kb/s. I do have reasonably fast Internet and while my computer and my network topology isn’t the latest and greatest, it’s quite adequate for the task at hand. Other than the download speeds, the upgrade was otherwise trouble-free.

Already, I’m starting to see information about Linux Mint 22 which will be coming out sometime this summer, and I’m having reservations about my future wth Linux Mint. It has worked very well for me over the years and I really like it. The biggest irritation I have about it lately has been the overall slowness of Firefox updates. Firefox hasn’t been my primary browser for years, preferring chromium-based browsers.Right now, I’m only using Firefox on mly main PC as the web interface for my git repositories.

Yesterday I began an experiment on a Mint laptop where I removed the Mint version of Firefox and replaced it with the Mozilla DEB package. I’ll be keeping an eye on it to see how well it goes.

When Linux Mint 22 Wilma is released this summer will I upgrade to it or try something else as my daily driver? I have Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) running on a couple of machines and it has been working quite well. I can actually see myself living in LMDE on my ‘production’ machines, particularly when considering Canonical’s and Ubuntu’s increased emphasis on pushing Snap packages for applications. It’s going to be increasingly more difficult for the Mint team to work around that.

Debian has become the dominant operating system on my network in the past year or so. I’m running minimal Debian installations with i3WM on several machines as well as Debian-based distributions such as Bunsen Labs, MX Linux, and LMDE. Migrating from the Ubuntu-based Mint to LMDE would likely be a natural transition. As a near term project, I’m planning to install i3WM on one of the LMDE systems as an alternative to the Cinnamon desktop.

So far, Virginia seems to be working well and I’ll likely stay on it until after Wilma is released. Mint 21 will be supported until April 2027, so I don’t have to be in a hurry to upgrade or move on to something else.

Mint 21.3 Upgrades

After a month in beta, Linux Mint finally release 21.3 Virginia last Thursday, and I downloaded the ISO and the checksum files. A couple of days later, the updates appeared in the Update Manager. A day or two later I began updating the four Linux Mint systems. Like the entire 21 series, the updates didn’t contain anything that was particularly important to me. For the most part, most of the changes in the current distribution have been cosmetic. But I think it’s good to upgrade anyway because it will make it easier to do an in-place upgrade to Mint 22 when it comes out this summer.

Three of the four systems have been upgraded with the main system being the only one left to upgrade. I started with the HP ProBook 6570b on the back shelf to see how well it would go. I’m happy to say that it went very well, and was quicker than I’d anticipated. Then, a couple of days later, I upgraded the Finance laptop (another ProBook 6570b) and the HP 800 G1 USDT. Neither of them encountered any problems and the upgrades completed even faster than the first. So far, the only new feature I’ve used is to center the login in the display manager screen. I’m not that concerned about the enhancements they’ve made to the file manager, the icons, and the GUI in general.

I will more than likely get around to upgrading the HP 800 G2 SFF within the next few days. There are still four machines running some form of Debian 11 on the network. It will probably be a while before I upgrade the Gitea server because I want to be sure I can back up and, if necessary, recover the Gitea database. The next Debian upgrade will likely be the HP 800 G1 desktop mini which is currently running Debian 11 with the Cinnamon desktop environment. I will probably do a minimum installation of Bookworm with i3. That leave the Gateway E-475M laptop and the HP 110 Netbook which are both running BunsenLabs Beryllium (base on Debian 11). They both run OpenBox which is okay, but I’m thinking I’ll go with minimal Debian and i3.

Debian Upgrades

After putting it off for a long time, I began upgrading my Debian 11 systems to Debian 12. After reviewing the in-place upgrade process, I wrote scripts to handle each stage of the process. There’s probably a way to do it in one script, but I didn’t feel like messing with that.

The first script updates the current Debian installation. Then, after a reboot, the second script uses sed to replace all the isntances of bullseye with bookworm in /etc/apt/sources.list and in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/bullseye.backports.list if it exists. The script also adds non-free-firmware where necessary, and if the backports list exists, renames it to bookworm.backports.list. Then it performs a full upgrade using the updated source lists. Finally, the third script confirms the upgrade by displaying the release and version information. Then it cleans the apt cache and removes orphaned packages.

Overall, the process has worked quite well for me. The only real problem I’ve come across so far was with my main laptop, an HP ElietBook 850 G3 with the i3 window manager. In a termnal window, I lose the half of the bottom line when the window is full. Applications run unside the terminal such as Micro and Bat look fine, but the bottom line of Htop is cutoff when it’s maximized. It only occurs on this particular laptop. The only change has been the upgrade to Bookworm, none of my configuration files have changed. Online searches have provided me with nothing useful.

I’ve got one more deskotp computer on which to do an in-place upgrade, my Gitea server. I’m going to hold off on that for a while until I get a feel for backing up the database. Maybe once I feel comfortable with that, I can do a complete rebuild of the system and provide it with a larger root partition or maybe just a single partition.

Other than that, I have an HP mini-PC that’s currently running Debian 11 with Cinnamon. That one was upgraded in-place from Debian 10. I plan to wipe it and do a fresh Debian 12 installation with i3wm. I also have two older laptops that are currently running BunsenLabs 11 which I’m considering changing to Debian and i3. BunsenLabs uses Openbox and after using a tiling window manager for a while, a floating window manager just doesn’t have much appeal. Plus, on those laptops, I really don’t need most of the applications and utilities that are included with the distro.

i3 on Bookworm

I’ve been planning to upgrade my Debian systems since Bookworm was released earlier this summer. Of course, I plan to maintain i3wm on those systems that already have it, and I spent a lot of time researching what I needed to be done to accomplish that.

Drew Grif’s (JustAGuy Linux) video and scripts were very beneficial in helping me get i3 up and running on Debian 11, and I was thrilled wihen he came out with a video where he installed several window managers on Debian 12. I cloned his scripts from his GitHub repository and studied them, but found a ittle difficult to separate the the i3 specific files from the rest. I’m not really interested in the other windown managers, although I may install all of them in a VM or on hardware, to check them out.

What I ultimately decided to do, was to take my current install script and update it to install i3 on Bookworm. I added the appropriate Polybar file, and make the necessary adjustments to the i3 configuration files. Then I upgraded one of my test laptops, a Dell Latitude E-6500, installing Debian 12 on the root partition and keeping the home partition. It took some work, but I got Polybar working with it, and it’s running great. I’ve since updated my local i3-Debian repository, so I think I’m ready to try it on another system. This time I’ll probably do a clean install and then restore my home folder from the backup.

I was able to install Polybar on my HP Elitebook laptop which is working out great. I’m not sure if the current version of Polybar actually supports applets in the taskbar , but I have them loaded by my i3 autostart script after Polybar has loaded, and it seems to be working okay. The Elitebook is a production machine and will probably among the last to be upgrade.

It’s strange that I can’t find Polybar in the Debian 11 repositories on the other systems running Bullseye. That’s not a big deal since the Bumblebee-Status bar works well on those systems, and they’ll all be upgraded to Bookworm before too long.

Drew Grif’s videos and repositories:

• i3-gaps Installation using shell script on Debian Bullseye minimal. – YouTube
• GitHub – drewgrif/i3gaps-debian
• Speed Challenge: Install 5 Customized Window Managers on Debian Bookworm – YouTube
• GitHub – drewgrif/bookworm-scripts
• GitHub – drewgrif/dotfiles: current configuration files

Coming Upgrades

Debian 12 Bookworm has been out for about a month , but I haven’t installed it on anything yet. I haven’t even upgraded any of my Bullseye systems. I found a YouTube video by Drew Grif on the JustAGuy Linux channel that was very helpful. In his video, Drew install five different window managers, i3 among them. I’ve been looking at his script and trying to figure what what files go with each window manager and if I can separate which ones I need for i3. He’s also using Polybar as his status bar which I’m familar with. Maybe I should use his installation scripts and install all of them on a system. Maybe I’ll find that I like one of the others better.

I have been adding and deleting files from his installation script to fit my needs. Today I created new repositories on my Gitea server, cloned them to my main computer, and copied the files to them. Now I’ll be able to modify the scripts and configuration files, and track the changes using git. Having a “fork” of Drew’s repository on my Gitea server will enable me to clone the repositories to a new installation.

I’ve been seeing a lot of of good reviews of Debian 12, and I’m looking forward to upgrading from Bullseye, particularly with window managers. I’m also looking forward to LMDE 6 when it comes out. Now that Linux Mint has released Mint 21.2, LMDE 6 will hopefully be out in a few months.

I’ll probably be upgrading my Mint systems before too long once the inplace upgrade procudures are in place. From what I’ve seen, most of the new features are cosmetic or things I don’t really use. There really hasn’t been much in Mint 21 that wows me. The HP ProBooks that I’d been running Mint 20.x on without much problem haven’t been performing nearly as well with 21.x. They’re running noticeable slower. One of those laptops is a “production” machine that I use daily. To help it out, I installed an SSD and that has helped. I also had an HP USDT that’s a dedicated media system and Mint 21 slowed it down considerably. I ended up installing Debian 11 with i3 on that.

I realize that most of my computers are older, acquired during refresh projects. It’s been five years since I worked on one those projects. Most of the machine have third or fourth generation i5 processors, I can’t expect great performance out of them. Maybe it’s time to start acquiring newer old hardware.

This is a bit off the subject, but the HP ProBook that I use a lot seemed to be running a little warm, so I opened it up to take a look. It’s a bit old, so I figured it might be time to put some fresh thermal paste on the CPU. I pulled out the fan and the heatsink, cleaned everything up, applied new paste, and put it all back together. It’s now running several degrees cooler now, still a bit warm but I think this model tends to run warm . It was nice that I didn’t need to completely disassemble it like the service manual wanted me to.

Links for Drew Grif’s

• Speed Challenge: Install 5 Customized Window Managers on Debian Bookworm
• GitHub – drewgrif/bookworm-scripts
• GitHub – drewgrif/dotfiles: current configuration files

Mint Upgrades

My current project is upgrading my Linux Mint 20.3 systems to Linux Mint 21.1. So far, I have two of the laptops done, and they went quite well. The Mint team has done a great job with their mintupgrade utility for upgrading from one LTS version to the next. It worked well with my LMDE upgrades and it’s working well with Linux Mint.

Since I didn’t upgrade until after the Mint 21.1 release came out, the process had to be done in two phases. First, I had to upgrade to Mint 21 (Vanessa) with the mintupgrade tool and do a little cleanup. Then I used the upgrade feature in Update Manager to upgrade to 21.1 (Vera). With those upgrades completed, I reinstalled the applications I manage through GitHub. Naturally, I ended up modifying some of my installatinon scripts to work with Jammy and Mint 21.

The apt-key functionality has been deprecated for a while and I’ve noticed that Jammy/Mint 21 complains about it more. I’ve read a number of articles on how to manage the keys, but I haven’t been able to get a good understanding of it. Some packages I use have updated their installation instructions to do it correctly, but many still haven’t. There were a handful of PPA I use and I’ve seen nothing on their respective pages to circomvent the apt-key problem, nor do they have a link to download their .asc or .gpg key. As I upgrade to Vera, I’m forgoing the use of PPAs. In a couple of cases, I’ve found Flatpak versions of the applications that seem to work.

I’ve got three more machines to upgrade, two desktops and a laptop, and I don’t foresee any problems with any of them. I’m glad that I can use this method. I haven’t had to redo any of my static addresses or SSH configurations. Everything is pretty much working as before. I’ve rarely experienced such painless and seamless upgrades. Of course, now that I’ve said that, I’ve probably jinxed myself.

Inplace Debian 11 Upgrade

A while back I’d come across instructions for doing an in-place upgrade from Debian 10 to Debian 11 and a few days ago I decided to give it a try. I chose a Dell Latitude E-6500 laptop running Debian 10 with the Cinnamon desktop environment as my test subject. It’s a test machine on my network, so I wasn’t worried about losing anything if something went awry.

One of the preparatory steps involved replacing the references to buster with bulleye in the /etc/apt/sources.list file. The debian-security sources needed to be changed from buster to bullseye-security. It wouldn’t have been difficult to edit the file in a text editor, but to avoid mistyping anything and to make the task easily repeatable, I created a sed script to make the changes.

I accessed the laptop via SSH from my main machine. I wasn’t sure if the upgrade would work remotely, but it actually worked quite well. I updated the Buster installation, cleared the apt cache, and removed any orphaned packages. Then I rebooted.

After rebooting, I logged back in via SSH and made a backup copy of the original sources.list file in the root home directory. Then I ran the sed script against it. That done, I ran apt update and apt full-upgrade . Be sure there is plenty of free space in the root partition as about a Gigabyte or more of new packages will be downloaded and installed. A lot of older packages will not be overwritten. There may be prompts that require user intervention, and the installer will allow services to be restarted as needed if you choose. The process will take a while, probably 20 to 30 minutes. Once the installation is finished reboot. After rebooting, you will want to run autoclean and autoremove to clean up the apt cache and remove orphaned packages.

During the actual upgrade I did get a couple of messages about dependencies, dealing with fuse and Python. I had to manually install these packages afterwards.

One persistent problem I’ve had is when I run the df command, I will get the following message before the output is displayed: “df: /run/user/1000/doc: Operation not permitted”. This apparently has something to do with a fuse.portal mount point. I updated the fuse package, which seemed to fix it temporarily, but the message returned. If I run the command using sudo, the message does not appear. Regardless, the command still display the proper output. I haven’t found a solution yet, but I can live with it.

$ df -hT | sed -n '1p;/^\//p'
df: /run/user/1000/doc: Operation not permitted
Filesystem     Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1      ext4       23G   14G  8.5G  62% /
/dev/sda3      ext4      432G   33G  378G   8% /home

Another problem I ran into was with a cron job script that checks YouTube-DL for updates. When I ran youtube-dl -U to update it, I got the following message: “/usr/bin/env: ‘python’: No such file or directory”. I installed the Python package which solved the problem.

I use Timeshift to create system snaphosts, and the day after the upgrade, a daily snaphot hadn’t been created. I logged into the laptop directly and opened up the Timeshift GUI where I saw that the scheduled snapshot checkboxes had been unchecked. After checking the boxes again, Timeshift has been running normally.

Aside from a couple minor issues, the in-place upgrade was a success. I have another machine that’s running Buster, but I think I may opt for upgrading that one from a USB drivie containing the ISO.

New year adventures

It’s three weeks into the new year and, almost on impuilse, I decided to upgrade my Lenovo M91p. I’d been meaning to replace the hard drive and install Linux Mlint 20.1 once it was released. It turns out that I’d grown tired of the computer’s little idiosyncracies and decided to see what Microcenter had to offer. I found a refurbished HP EliteDesk 800 G2 SFF for about $260 ($290 with shipping and taxes). I was surprised when it took less than a week to arrive.

The G2 sat on my desk for a few days while I got ready for the upgrade. I installed the 2TB drive I’d ordered sometime last year as a second drive for my home partition as it came a 256GB SSD. I considered trying to find a smaller drive for the operating system since it seemed like a waste to use it essentiaily for the root partition. Why is it so hard to find lower capacity USB drives and SSDs? I have a genuine need for these items.

Anyway, I backed up the Lenovo, then installed Mint 20.1 on the HP’s SSD. Then I began setting it up, installing software, and transferring data to the new system. There are still some programs and applications to be installed but I have what I need at the moment. The rest will be installed as I need it.

I do need to purchase and install another 8GB of RAM. It only came with 8GB but I can see that it needs to be pushed up to 16GB.

With the switch from the M91 to the G2, I had to change some of the scripts to use the new machine but they were minor changes that I was able to set up in advance. These were mostly sychronization scripts.

I haven’t really done anything with the Lenovo since the upgrade. I have it set up on the bench and I’m using it for virtual machines since it already had Gnome Boxes installed along with a few virtual machines. It may stay in that role for awhile, at least until I get more RAM in the G2.

I do have to remember not to leave it running too long. The other day, after leaving it run for over 24 hours, it froze up and disconnected everything on my switch from the network. It took me a while to figure out that the Lenovo was the culprit. I checked my gateway router which was working fine. Everything on the other switch was working. I tested the cable from the gateway and it seemed to be fine too.

Then I remembered that my wife’s computer which also happens to be a Lenovo M91p running Windows 10 would sometimes locks up and mess with everything on the the other switch. I shut down my Lenovo and everything was working again.

I’m beginning to suspectd that that Lenovo model tends to run a little hot. The CPU temeperature tends to be warmer than my laptops. On mine, I replaced the thermal paste on the CPU but it really didn’t seem to make much difference. Maybe it’s a bad desktop design.

I worked deployed and maintained Lenovo desktops and laptops for five years and I was never really impressed with them. For the last couple of years, I’ve been messing with various HP laptops and desktops and they’ve been working well for me. I have some older Dell laptops and a small form factor desktop and they’ve served me well. All in all, I feel pretty good about HP computers.

Of course, I’ve been tinkering with scripts although I haven’t written any new ones yet. As I often say, “A script is never finished, only abandoned once it’s no longer useful.” I still find ways to improve my scripts and make them more efficient.

Windows 7 to Windows 10 Upgrade

It’s been two weeks since the Windows 7 end-of-life and I figured that I’d procrastinated long enough, so I bit the bullet and upgraded my Windows 7 PC. I might be able to run the two Windows applications I used on the VM I created but I still haven’t worked out the USB pass through problem.

The upgrade process took most of the afternoon. It ran into some sort of problem near the end of the upgrade and reverted back to Windows 7. The error message was:

0xC1900101-0x4000D
The installation failed on the SECOND_BOOT phase with an error during MIGRATE_DATA operation.

I looked it up on Microsoft’s site and the suggested solutions were to remove any external drive, remove my anti-virus program, and start over. So I removed my external backup drive, uninstalled my anti-virus, turned off Malware Bytes, and tried again. This time the upgrade was successful.

I do recommend that you do remove any external hard drives and USB sticks before you upgrade, and uninstall third party security programs (i.e., anti-virus). You can reinstall them after the upgrade and Microsoft claims that you will be protected by Windows Defender during the upgrade.

Now that Windows 10 was installed, it was time to debloat it. I used the tool recommended by Chris Titus in his “Debloating Windows 10” video on YouTube. The script he used can be from Sycnex/Windows10Debloater (Download the ZIP file). I suggest watching the video to get a good overview of the process.

1. Download the Debloater script package from GitHub, then extract the file.
2. Open Powershell as administrator and navigate to the folder where you extracted the file.
3. Change the Execution policy to allow the script to run in Powershell.
4. Run the Windows10Debloater.ps1 script. Be sure include the “./” at the beginning.
5. Follow the prompts but don’t reboot until the script has completed.
6. When the script has completed, reboot.

​Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted
./Windows10Debloater.ps1

I’m not intimately familiar with Windows 10 but I’ve heard that Win 10 updates can be rather resilient about replacing some of the bloatware and other “features.” You may need to debloat it again after a feature upgrade, I don’t now. Chris Titus has videos on his channel that cover various settings that can be applied to lessen the impact of these updates.

But anyway, my Windows PC has been upgraded and everything seems to work. I need to upgrade my wife’s computer and my son’s. My other son has several Windows PCs in his household but he should be able to handle the task. However, I’m willing to assist him in any way I can.

Upgrades

I waited a few days after the release of Debian 10 Buster and Linux Mint 19.2 Tina to upgrade some of my systems.

I started the adventure with installing Debian 10 on my trusty Dell Latitude E6500 laptop. I had Linux Mint 18.3 MATE on it so I created a Timeshift snapshot of the system and backed up my home directory just in case anything went wrong. I kept the same partitioning scheme and installed Buster, keeping my home partition.

It took me a while to reinstall my applications and get things configured. Debian is much more minimal than Linux Mint and I began appreciating many of the features that Mint includes that are absent out of the box in Debian. I’ve got nearly everything the way I like it on the Debian laptop but for some reason it won’t display my custom prompt in the terminal.

Next was an in place upgrade of my Lenovo M91p desktop from Mint 19.1 to 19.2. I had considered a full upgrade from a USB stick because the partitioning is kind of wonky. But it is my main machine so I decided not to jump into the deep end just yet. I’ll do it eventually but I need to get a system ready to fill in for it first. The upgrade went quite well.

The M91 upgrade when so well, I did an in place upgrade from 19.1 to 19.2 on my HP EliteDesk GI USDT which also went quite well. So far, I’m liking the Mint Upgrades. Many of the changes between 19.1 and 19.2 were relatively minor but I do like some of the new feature very much, such as the ability to make my scrollbars a little wider.

Finally, I upgraded my HP Probook 6570b laptop from Mint 18.3 to 19.2. I kept the partitions and my home directory. My installation scripts for new systems worked quite well on this system although a few applications didn’t install. One was a program from a PPA and the other two I used a temporary directory which for some reason wasn’t accessible. The scripts I have to install these programs individually work just fine.

With the upgrades done, I tackled the task of making sure that all of the public ssh keys were shared, including my Windows 7 machine. I’ve been tinkering with scripts to generate keys, to copy the public keys, and to clean up the authorized_keys files.

That will probably be all the upgrades for a while. I still haven’t decided how I’ll deal with the Windows 7 end of life next year. There are only about three programs I use it for – a genealogy program, iTunes to backup photos and videos from my phone, and tax software. I think I can probably get my wife switched to Linux. Everything she does is through a browser so it may be a relatively easy transition. I’ll deal with it when the time comes but I’ll be thinking about it.