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.

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.

Small Projects

I’ve been playing around with updating scripts and several small proects since my last post. Updating scripts is a constant endeavor, one that I really enjoy. I’m always learning something new and finding better ways to accomplish a task.

Upgrades

In Feburary, I did an inplace upgrade of my Dell laptop from Debian 10 to Debian 11 which worked out very well. There were only a few minor issues and a few packages that had to be replaced, but it’s been working quite well.

Since then I’ve upgraded all of my Linux Mint systems to Linux Mint 20.3. Two were inplace upgrades from 20.2. There was one laptop where I needed to change the partitions, so that was essentially fresh install. I had two computers that were still running 19.3 and I did a fresh install from the ISO on both of them, preseriving the home partitions. Those are both working well.

I have three machines running LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) and I’ve upgraded two of them. On the first one, I did a fresh install from the ISO, preserving the home partition. There were no problems with that. When I upgraded the HP 6005, I did an inplace upgrade using the beta of the Mint Upgrade tool. That worked perfectly with no problelms whatsoever. I still haven’t upgraded the Lenovo desktop but when I do, I will wipe it completely because I want to set up separate root and home partitions. I don’t anticipate any problems, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Other than the Lenovo, I have only two laptops running a distribution based on Debian 10, the Gateway and the HP Mini. Neither of them is a priority. I’m thinking about putting MX Linux 21.1 on the HP 2570 which is currently running Lubuntu 20.04. It’s on my To-Do list.

Back in November I installed Debian 11 and the i3 Window Manager on an HP EliteBook 850 G3 laptop to play around with i3 and get used to a tiling window manager. I’ve redone it a couple of times since then and now I think I have an overall confguration I like. I found a video on YouTube that walked me through the entire process and I’ve only had to add a few extra packages. Eventually, I’ll create an installation checkiist for it.

One of the biggest issues with the this project had been getting the wireless adapter to work. The system would see the wireless card but I could never bring it up. A couple of weeks ago, I got working by installing the wpa supplicant package and using it to configure the WiFi. I kind of stubled through it, so I’m not exactly sure how I did it. Perhaps Network Manager should be installed in future attempts.

Printers

Both of my printers became unusable recently. I found that I could no longer connect to the HP 1505 laser printer over the network. It served me well over the past 11 years. Then the HP 3150 DeskJet printer stopped working. I replaced them with an HP Envy 6052e inkjet printer and I love it. Once I got my main computer to recognize it, every computer on the network has atuomatically connected to it. It’s awesome.

Scripts

Of course, I’ve been working on scripts, either modifying them or creating new ones. I recently discovered the getopts shell builtin and I’ve incorporated into many of my scripts, particularly installation scripts, along wiith some configuration scripts.

I did a major rewrite of the ip-info script without using the nmcli command and ended up going back to it. The reason I’d changed it was to accommodate the 850-G3 which doesn’t have Network Manager installed. Now I have the script check and if Network Manager isn’t present, to go to the alterate method of getting the information.

Speaking of scripts, I have been neglecting my Github repos. I need to bring them up to date. I haven’t decided how I want to maintain them. I’m considering using Github as a repository and backup for my scripts and configuration files primarily for my own use. They would, of course, be public so anyone could download an use them as they see fit.

Penultimate Day 2021

The refurbished computer I switched to in January has been working great. I upgraded the memory to 16GB and evenually moved the OS to Mint 20.2. I see that 20.3 is still in Beta, but I’ll probably wait at least a couple of months before upgrading. I’ll probably run it on one the laptops for a while first.

I had intended t use the M91 for vitual machines but I haven’t done anything along those lines. I did, however, move the KVM /QEMU pool on the G3 into my home directory so I’m not creating VMs on the SSD.

I spent a lot of time working on scripts, tweaking and improving them. There really isn’t much to say about that.

I haven’t been messing around with the Debian 11/i3 laptop as much as I’d envisioned, but I’m starting to get the hang of it. I have a lot to learn.

Linux Experiments

Earlier this week I did an OEM installation of Linux Mint 18.3 on my Gateway laptop. I’d seen an EzeeLinux video on how to do it and I wanted to give a try. I had a friend who’d seen me using Mint on my laptop and expressed interest in it and an OEM installation would enable to him to go through the process of setting up his user name, password, and all that

I did the set up much like my own systems, setting up Timeshift, adding the Chromium browser and the Htop utility. I added scripts to the cron.weekly and cron.monthly folders to run get updates and do a little system cleanup.

In another experiment, I found my wife’s old HP 110-Mini Netbook and installed Mint 18.3 XFCE on it With an Intel Atom processor and only 1GB of RAM, I wasn’t expecting much. It runs but it’s incredibly slow. I don’t know if bringing it up to 2GB will help much. The netbook originally ran Windows 7 Starter edition. I pulled that hard drive out and replaced it with a different drive just in case the experiment didn’t work out. I’m considering a more lightweight distribution for this device. Maybe Puppy Linux.

Fun with Samba

After replacing my Dell Optioplex 780 with the HP Elite 8300, I wasn’t sure what to do with the Dell. I kind of figured I’d put Linux on it and use it for something. I recently watched an EzeeLinux video on sharing files with Samba. I figured a simple Samba server might be useful for sharing files and making music and videos available across my network.

I installed Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon on the Dell and configured it the way I like it. Then I used sftp to copy my entire music library over. I installed and set up Samba, configured it, and set up the shares – a Music share and a Public share. The Public share is a central location for sharing files on the network.

After some tweaking I got it working pretty well on the Dell and the Windows computers. However, I could not see the shares on the other Linux computers. I did an exhaustive search on Google and various Linux forums and found nothing that helped. My smb.conf file seemed to be okay everything was in the same workgroup..

Then I found a suggestion that looked interesting .Someone suggested opening the file manager (nemo, thunar) in a terminal, pointing it to the share – nemo smb://192.168.0.17 . It worked! I had access to the shared folders. On the computers running the Cinnamon desktop, I created a bookmark and on the XCFE desktops, I created a launcher to access the shares. Maybe not the most elegant solution but it works.

When I replied to my comment on the YouTube video I read through the other comments and replies and found that Linux Mint does have problems with smb shares.

How will I use my Samba server? It’s another tool I can use on my network. One of the shares is make my music library available everywhere on the network. The Public share is an alternative to using Dropbox and flash drives. And it was a good learning experience.

Time for an Upgrade

Linux Mint has always been a little temperamental on my HP 6005. It may been that some minor compatibility issues between the OS and the AMD architecture, I don’t know. But over the last few days, it had gotten flakier, locking up more often, and I’d see one or two of my CPU cores hitting 100 percent quite regularly. It was getting very frustrating to say the least and I’d already been flirting with the idea of upgrading my system.

I found a good deal at Micro Center for a refurbished Lenovo M91p with a 3.4GHz i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive with Windows 10 pre-installed. I reserved one the other day and today I drove down and picked it up.

I’d begun a back up of the HP this morning and it was still going when I returned so started getting the new PC set up. My wife’s PC is the same model and I’d already installed 24GB of RAM in it so I took her 8GB modules and put in the 4GB modules from the new computer taking her down to 16GB and raising mine to 16GB.

My original intention had been to wipe the drive clean and install Mint 18.1 Serena but while getting the system data I knew I’d need later, I discovered that I had a 2TB drive in it. With that knowledge, I figured that I had enough room for a dual boot system. I gave 1.5 terabytes to Linux and left the rest for Windows.

I installed Mint as well as some my must have applications and utilities. There are still a few that still need to be installed and the usual tweaking. I don’t know how much use I’ll get out of the Windows 10 partition since I’ve never really liked it much. But maybe I can learn to live with it and eventually eliminate having a separate Windows PC.

After my backup was completed, I decided to go ahead and take the 8GB modules out of the HP and put them into the Lenovo, bringing it to 32GB . Lenovo’s documentation says it will only support 16GB but I’d been running 24GB in my wife’s system for over a year without any problems.

A more powerful laptop would be nice but my Dell Latitude (with its Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, and 160GB drive) still works well for what I do with it — a little web surfing, email, and some writing.

 

Peppermint Linux

A friend had been talking up the Peppermint Linux distro and had given me an ISO for it. The other day, I needed to set up a Linux virtual machine to test out some commands for installing and configuring my conky script so I figured I’d give it a try.

Like most Ubuntu-based distributions, the installation was very straightforward. The ISO was from December so there were about 167 updates which didn’t take long to install. Peppermint has a different look and feel and it took me a while to get familiar with the menus since they are different from those in Mint Linux and I prefer to use an applications dock on my system. But, as I said, the menus in Peppermint are different from I’m used to seeing. Maybe they’re more similar to those used in Ubuntu. It’s been a number of years since I’ve used actual Ubuntu.

I still had the last PC I’d actually built because during my last equipment purge, I keep it around for sentimental reasons. It has an AMD Ahtlon II X2 245 processor (dual core), an ASUS main board, and 4GB of DDR2 RAM. Not much by today’s standards, but pretty good in its day.

Since I wasn’t doing anything with it, I figured it might be good for testing or checking out other operating systems. I put Peppermint 7 on it. Again, the installation went smoothly and it seemed to detect most of the hardware. When I had run Ubuntu on this machine a long time ago there were some on-board devices that didn’t have the right drivers. I know the sound card was one of them.

I checked Additional Drivers under the Software & Updates menu and found one unknown device that was shown as not working. By default the “Do not use this device” radio button was checked. The other radio button gave the option “Using Processor microcode firmware for AMD CPUs from amd64-microcode (proprietary)”. I selected that option, applied it, and rebooted. Now it’s still unknown but that it’s using an alternative driver. I wonder what it was.

Looking at the other tabs under Software and Updates, I saw that Peppermint 7 is based on Ubuntu Xenial, the latest release. That may explain some of the differences from I see in Mint. I’m still on 17.3 which is an LTS supported until April 2019. At this time, I don’t see much point in upgrading. I did download an ISO for 18.1 (xenial based) because I wanted to build a Linux-based USB drive for virus scanning and diagnostics. Should I obtain another system or need to reload one of my current systems, I’ll probably go with 18.1.

One thing I noticed with both Peppermint installations was that the time displayed in my conky script was a bit left of center. I made a slight change to the alignment setting for that line which fixed it. That change on my Mint system moves the time slightly right of center. Just a weird aberration, I guess. On the installation in the Athlon PC, ifconfig showed me that the network interface was called enp2s6 rather than the usual eth0. It seems to be a strange and illogical name for a network interface.

I’ll probably mess around with Peppermint some more but I think I’ll likely stay with Mint as my preferred distribution. I’m used to it and it has worked well for me for a number of years. Since I have VirtualBox and an available computer, I’ll likely explore other distributions and see what they have to offer.

Dropbox Repository Links

I brought my old Gateway laptop with Mint 17 up for the first in about a year. There were a lot of updates, as one would expect. After the updates I noticed that Dropbox wasn’t synchronizing. After searching forums, I tried various fixes. Finally, I “purged” the existing installation and used apt-get to install nautilus-dropbox. That got it running properly again.

Now I’m getting 404 errors when I run apt-get update or run update manager. These 404 errors refer to the old dropbox repositories that no longer exist.  A Google search on the problem has not produced any useful information.

Failed to fetch http://linux.dropbox.com/ubuntu/dists/qiana/main/binary-amd64/Packages 404 Not found [IP: 108.160.177.238 80]

Failed to fetch http://linux.dropbox.com/ubuntu/dists/qiana/main/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not found [IP: 108.160.177.238 80]

I’ve not been able to locate these URLs in any of the source.list files under /etc/apt/. Nor can I find  any reference to them in the GUI Software Sources app. Yet when I run Update Manager or apt-get update the URLs are queried, thus producing the aforementioned error messages.

I left a query on the Dropbox support forum so I’m hoping to get a response soon.