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.

Thoughts on Linux Mint 21.1

In January, I upgraded two desktops and three laptops, from Linux Mint 20.3 Una to 21.1 Vera. Overall, I’m happy with upgrade on my main desktop computer, but not on the laptops. The laptops, all HP ProBook 6570b’s, are a bit underpowered for it. Applications are slow to open, some updates take an excessively long time time download, and when streaming video from YouTube and other sites, there’s a lot of buffering.

Firefox updates on all of my Mint 21.1 systems are slow. The file itself is about 70 MB and it’s downloaded from the Mint repositories. I’ve noticed that their mirrors are generally much slower than the Ubuntu mirrors. Still, it shouldn’t somewhere between 6 and 15 minutes to just download the file. It’s almost like being on dial-up.

Part of the problem may be that the laptops all have third-generation i5 processors, 8 GB of RAM, and spinning drives. More memory and SSD drives would undoubtedly speed them up, but I’m not willing to make that investment in them, at least not right now. The desktop machines have newer processors and more memory, and they’re running well.

For now, I’ll thinking about installing Linux Mint Debian Edittion (LMDE) on one of the laptops and minimal Debian with i3WM on another. The third one is kind of a production machine, and for what I do with it, I can live with the performance. I’m curious about the performance increase I’ll get by switching to a Debian-based environment.

I’ve been thinking about transistioning some of the Mint computers to either LMDE or Debian i3 for a while, wondering if I could live in them. I’m starting to think I could. My recent experiences with Mint 21.1 and the contortions that the Linux Mint team have to go through to circumvent all the changes that Ubuntu has introduced over the past couple of years, are definitely leading me down that path.

I’ve getting much more comfortable with a tiling window manager and with the Mint 21 updates, I’ve gotten away from using the Ubuntu PPAs. Flatpaks have found a place in my environment whenever I feel I need current software. I’m finding that maybe I don’t need the Ubuntu base. I haven’t messed around much wth Arch-based distributions, but I’m sure I could adapt without too much effort and it might be fun to adapt my scripts to worth with either.

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.

Special Laptops

In a podcast I heard a couple weeks ago, one of the hosts mentioned that he had one computer dedicated to his online banking and nothing else. That struck me as an excellent idea., especially from a security standpoint.

I dug an HP Probook 6570b out of my pile of unused laptops and installed Linux Mint 19.3 on it. After getting it configured, I installed the necessary applications and copied my data over from my main desktop computer. I also wrote some new scripts to synchronize certain folders with the main computer. I have certain directories and files that I keep up to date on all my systems but there were a few that really didn’t need to be maintained on this laptop.

It’s been working out very well, especially since I hooked it up to a KVM, giving me a second monitor. The only issue I’ve been having has been my rsync backup to an external drive. I have a Seagate Black 320 GB, (7200 RPM) in a USB 3.0 enclosure connected to a USB 3.0 port. There isn’t much data to back up, usually less than 200 MB, but it takes about 10 minutes to complete. I get pretty much the same results when I attach the drive to a USB 2.0 port.

I have much the same setup on my main system, except that it’s a USB 3.0 enclosure connected to a USB 2.0 port. My daily backup on that is a great deal larger yet it completes in a couple of minutes.

I’ve been wondering if it might be the difference in the CPUs but that seem likely. The main system is a second generation i7 at 3.9 GHz while the laptop is a third generation i5 at either 2.6 GHz or 3.2 GHz, depending whether you go by lscpu or Neofetch. If the laptop is running at 2.6 GHz, then the difference in CPU performance might be that significant. Monitoring the backup with Htop didn’t tell me much except that rysync hit 40 – 50 percent of the CPU a couple of times. There is only 17 GB used on the backup drive. Why does it take 10-12 minutes to backup up less than 20 GB of data?

An organization I belong to wanted to do a video conference on Zoom. I hadn’t used Zoom but I knew with proprietary software and I was unsure of how they dealt with user data, I I was hesitant to put it on any system that might have personal or sensitive data. I pulled another laptop from the pile, this time an HP EliteBook 2560p. I installed Lubuntu 18.04, the Zoom software, my scripts, and not much else.

It worked pretty well. I took a few minutes to figure it out and where to find the right places to set the speaker and microphone levels. Zoom seems to integrate with the systems audio controls. I doubt that I’ll put Zoom on anything else, this laptop is a good place for it.

Last Upgrade of the Year?

I’d been wanting to reload my Lenovo desktop machine for quite a while. I bought it a little over a year ago. I installed Linux Mint 18.3 in one partition, leaving the uninstalled Windows 10 in a 500GB partition. A year later not only hadn’t I installed the Windows 10, I had no desire to do so. Given my previous experiences with Windows 8, 8.1 and 10, I didn’t feel inclined to install it but kept it available just in case.

Yesterday I to go ahead and reclaim that 500 GB. I removed all the partitions and installed Linux Mint 19.1 with separate root and home partitions. I managed to get UEFI and Secure Boot disabled and the drive partitioned.

I have a USB key with 19 ISO’s installed but I wasn’t able to successfully get 19.1 or 18.3 installed. I’d get it installed but when I rebooted it, the hard drive wasn’t bootable. I ended up downloading the 19.1 ISO to my LMDE 3 machine and putting it on a USB drive by itself. Installing from that was successful.

Then I started on some of the tweaking and customization, installing updates, and the like. Before going to bed I started restoring my home directory from my backup, letting it run overnight.

This morning I went back to work on it. I had redone my new-install scripts earlier but they didn’t seem to be working properly. I ended up doing most of the application installs manually from the terminal. I wasn’t able to get the Synaptic Package Manager to open from the menu and there seemed to be a host of other problems. There were some programs that I had to download and install the Deb packages. Others I had to copy and paste the commands from the script to the terminal.

When I tried to install the Atom Editor from my script, a Microsoft EULA for MS fonts popped up in the terminal and there was no way for me to accept it. I downloaded the Deb package and installed it with Gdebi. This time when the EULA popped up I was in a GUI so I was able to accept it. (I’ve come to like the Atom Editor because it allows me to have split screen, gives me a markdown preview, and works with Git.) Apparently Microsoft acquired the Atom Editor when they purchased GitHub and changed something in the package to require their fonts. Hopefully, I won’t have any problems with updates.

Once I finally got everything I needed installed, I looking into my remaining issues. After launching Synaptic in a terminal, I did an on-line search of the expected error message (which often happens when I open a GUI application in a terminal) and found a suggestion to resolve the problem by cleaning the apt cache. That seemed to resolve that problem.

When trying to run scripts that needed root/sudo access, I was running into a problem where I needed to preface the script name with the path if I was outside of the ~/bin directory or with ./ if I was in the directory. In a forum someone suggested that I take a look at the secure path in my /etc/sudoers file which is the path where the sudo command looks for the command it needs to give root access. Then it dawned on me that I’d been trying to run the script as root when I should have been just running the script and giving it my password when the script found the first sudo command. I obviously hadn’t been thinking straight and was overlooking the obvious. Everything was working properly, I was just doing it wrong.

Since I’d restored a snapshot of my home directory, my SSH keys were still there and I was able to connect to the other computers on my network. I did, however, have to go to each machine and send their keys to my main machine again so they could connect. I’ve got a couple that were off line so I’ll have to remember to do that when I get them online again.

It’s been a week or so of upgrades, affirming my belief that there’s no such thing as an easy upgrade. Just the same, I thinking about putting LMDE 3 on my HP ProBook 6570b. It’s currently running Linux Mint 18.3 and running great but I’m still thinking about it. I’ll probably wait until after the first of the year.

LMDE 3 Installation Fun

Yesterday I attempted to install Linux Mint Debian Edition 3 on an HP EliteDesk 8300 USDT but ended up giving up on it. I wasn’t able partition the hard drive with Gparted and the installation process didn’t give me the option to choose the automatic partitioning. For some reason I was not able to set the mount points for the partitions.

I ended up installing Linux Mint 18.3 instead where I also had problems setting up the partitions but I was able to let the install the default partioning scheme. Later, running lsblk on the system, I saw that it had created a /boot/efi partition. During the installation, I had gotten some messages about UEFI even though I’d reset the BIOS to factory defaults, enabled Legacy boot, and turned off Secure Boot and Fast Boot. Maybe I missed a BIOS setting somewhere but I looked at every setting I could find.

It took some searching but this morning I found a Gparted how-to that covered partitioning a drive for a Linux install. So much of what I found were focused on dual booting with Windows or adding a second drive.

I made another attempt on another USDT. This time I booted to the LMDE 3 live USB and partitioned the drive with the appropriate partitions to include the /boot/efi partition at the front of the drive. This time the installer saw the partitions and I just needed to assign the mount points and set the boot flag on the boot/efi partition which I probably could have done in Gparted before starting the installation.

LMDE installed with no problems and I’ve added many of my personal touches. I’ll use it and get a feel for it. It certainly has the Linux Mint look and feel to it and I’m liking it. We’ll see how it goes.