News Item: Debian 6.0: Cleanup
(Category: The Debian Adventure)
Posted by Brad R
Tuesday 24 May 2011 - 16:15:54
It's been a slow process of cleanup, fixing everything that was broken by my upgrade to Debian 6.0, and KDE 4. Some things were fixed when I replaced KDE 4 with Trinity. But Trinity brought its own issues, so I'm fixing problems as I encounter them.
Deleted Applications
As I mentioned before, KDE 4 replaced some long-standing applications with new ones. I discovered that the scanner program "kooka" was replaced by "skanlite". Apparently the replacement for the image viewer "kview" is the new "gwenview". I understand their not wanting to keep the old versions around when changing to a new program, but some kind of a pointer to the new application would have been helpful.
I had configured my email client, Claws Mail, to run ogg123 to beep the speaker when email arrives. ogg123 was deleted in the upgrade; it took me a while to find that it's installed in the "vorbis-tools" package. I also lost the KDE 3.5 sounds (.ogg files), which I was using for other programs. Those, I was able to restore from a backup.
Vanished Applications
Less damaging, but more annoying, was that the upgrade removed many programs from my launch menu. And not just parts of the distro it was upgrading -- it removed programs which I had installed myself, independently, which were never part of the distro: programs like "claws" (email), "kdesvn" (Subversion client), and "kompare" (file comparator), and doubtless others that I haven't stumbled across yet. It also removed the menu item for "kwrite" (text editor), which was part of the Debian distro. In all these cases, the programs were still present; only the menu items had been deleted.
KDE 4 also removed "kdesu" from the /usr/bin folder. Luckily it is still present in the system, though well hidden, and searching the 'net turned up a simple fix.
The upgrade broke my desktop shortcut to DOSEMU 1.2, which I had installed in my home directory (i.e., as a user's private program, rather than a system-wide program available to all users). Rather than fix the shortcut, I saw that DOSEMU 1.4 is now available in the Debian repository, so I decided to install that. And I discovered that it didn't work. More 'net searching revealed that Debian had decided to change a system setting, mmap_min_addr, and that needs to be changed back to make DOSEMU work:
echo "vm.mmap_min_addr = 0" > /etc/sysctl.d/mmap_min_addr.conf
/etc/init.d/procps restart
Lost Settings
I'll give KDE 4 credit for trying to preserve some of my application settings. In particular, my alarm clock notifications in "kalarm" and my to-do list in "korganizer" were converted to the new KDE 4 format.
Other applications weren't so lucky. I lost all of my session information from "kate" (advanced text editor), which is a major annoyance because I use those sessions to keep track of what files I'm working on for a dozen different projects. I also lost all of my bookmarks from "kdesvn", which means I have to reconstruct where in the Subversion repository I checked out many files. Almost all KDE applications, including kwrite, lost the "recent files" history, which I do use.
Unfortunately, I lost more when I installed Trinity (bascially reverting to KDE 3.5). Specifically, those files which KDE 4 successfully converted -- alarm notifications and to-do list -- are now gone. But if I log in using KDE 4 as my desktop manager, the converted files are still available; so I'll be doing a lot of exporting and importing to get them reinstalled in my usual desktop.
Trinity Glitches
I mentioned before that when I installed Trinity, I forgot to specify "kdm-trinity" as the default desktop manager. Trinity seemed to work ok with the "kdm" (KDE 4) desktop manager, but a few applcations failed -- most notably the KDE Help Center, which wouldn't run at all, and the Konqueror file manager, which crashed when I tried to display my home folder. I managed to fix both of these by restarting the Trinity configuration process, and this time, selecting "kdm-trinity" as the default:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure kdm-trinity
I imagine this may cause problems the next time I try to use KDE 4.
Under Trinity I still have the problem that the Synaptic package manager fails to run from the launch menu. KDE's "kpackage" manager seems to run ok, but I really prefer the Synaptic user interface. I can launch "synaptic" from a terminal window, so this will just be an annoyance until I get around to debugging it.
CD-ROM Problems
The first time I tried to do my weekly backup to DVD, it failed. I discovered quickly that the old name for the DVD writer, /dev/hdd, is now /dev/sr1. I had to edit a few configuration files for sdvdbackup (and I really should use the symbolic link /dev/cdrom1, which always aliases the correct device name).
But sdvdbackup still failed. It would write the first disk, but wouldn't eject it, reporting that it was unable to find the device. Searching for "eject: unable to find or open device" debian squeeze, I finally found this forum comment, which provided illumination:
A quick read of the man page suggested the command
udisks --inhibit-all-polling
which solved the problem. I'll need to edit this into my backup script, though for that script I'll just I'll just inhibit polling for /dev/sr1 and not all devices.
The Debian Adventure continues.
This news item is from Goodbye, Microsoft®
( http://www.goodbyemicrosoft.net/news.php?extend.648 )
(Category: The Debian Adventure)
Posted by Brad R
Tuesday 24 May 2011 - 16:15:54
It's been a slow process of cleanup, fixing everything that was broken by my upgrade to Debian 6.0, and KDE 4. Some things were fixed when I replaced KDE 4 with Trinity. But Trinity brought its own issues, so I'm fixing problems as I encounter them.
Deleted Applications
As I mentioned before, KDE 4 replaced some long-standing applications with new ones. I discovered that the scanner program "kooka" was replaced by "skanlite". Apparently the replacement for the image viewer "kview" is the new "gwenview". I understand their not wanting to keep the old versions around when changing to a new program, but some kind of a pointer to the new application would have been helpful.
I had configured my email client, Claws Mail, to run ogg123 to beep the speaker when email arrives. ogg123 was deleted in the upgrade; it took me a while to find that it's installed in the "vorbis-tools" package. I also lost the KDE 3.5 sounds (.ogg files), which I was using for other programs. Those, I was able to restore from a backup.
Vanished Applications
Less damaging, but more annoying, was that the upgrade removed many programs from my launch menu. And not just parts of the distro it was upgrading -- it removed programs which I had installed myself, independently, which were never part of the distro: programs like "claws" (email), "kdesvn" (Subversion client), and "kompare" (file comparator), and doubtless others that I haven't stumbled across yet. It also removed the menu item for "kwrite" (text editor), which was part of the Debian distro. In all these cases, the programs were still present; only the menu items had been deleted.
KDE 4 also removed "kdesu" from the /usr/bin folder. Luckily it is still present in the system, though well hidden, and searching the 'net turned up a simple fix.
The upgrade broke my desktop shortcut to DOSEMU 1.2, which I had installed in my home directory (i.e., as a user's private program, rather than a system-wide program available to all users). Rather than fix the shortcut, I saw that DOSEMU 1.4 is now available in the Debian repository, so I decided to install that. And I discovered that it didn't work. More 'net searching revealed that Debian had decided to change a system setting, mmap_min_addr, and that needs to be changed back to make DOSEMU work:
echo "vm.mmap_min_addr = 0" > /etc/sysctl.d/mmap_min_addr.conf
/etc/init.d/procps restart
Lost Settings
I'll give KDE 4 credit for trying to preserve some of my application settings. In particular, my alarm clock notifications in "kalarm" and my to-do list in "korganizer" were converted to the new KDE 4 format.
Other applications weren't so lucky. I lost all of my session information from "kate" (advanced text editor), which is a major annoyance because I use those sessions to keep track of what files I'm working on for a dozen different projects. I also lost all of my bookmarks from "kdesvn", which means I have to reconstruct where in the Subversion repository I checked out many files. Almost all KDE applications, including kwrite, lost the "recent files" history, which I do use.
Unfortunately, I lost more when I installed Trinity (bascially reverting to KDE 3.5). Specifically, those files which KDE 4 successfully converted -- alarm notifications and to-do list -- are now gone. But if I log in using KDE 4 as my desktop manager, the converted files are still available; so I'll be doing a lot of exporting and importing to get them reinstalled in my usual desktop.
Trinity Glitches
I mentioned before that when I installed Trinity, I forgot to specify "kdm-trinity" as the default desktop manager. Trinity seemed to work ok with the "kdm" (KDE 4) desktop manager, but a few applcations failed -- most notably the KDE Help Center, which wouldn't run at all, and the Konqueror file manager, which crashed when I tried to display my home folder. I managed to fix both of these by restarting the Trinity configuration process, and this time, selecting "kdm-trinity" as the default:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure kdm-trinity
I imagine this may cause problems the next time I try to use KDE 4.
Under Trinity I still have the problem that the Synaptic package manager fails to run from the launch menu. KDE's "kpackage" manager seems to run ok, but I really prefer the Synaptic user interface. I can launch "synaptic" from a terminal window, so this will just be an annoyance until I get around to debugging it.
CD-ROM Problems
The first time I tried to do my weekly backup to DVD, it failed. I discovered quickly that the old name for the DVD writer, /dev/hdd, is now /dev/sr1. I had to edit a few configuration files for sdvdbackup (and I really should use the symbolic link /dev/cdrom1, which always aliases the correct device name).
But sdvdbackup still failed. It would write the first disk, but wouldn't eject it, reporting that it was unable to find the device. Searching for "eject: unable to find or open device" debian squeeze, I finally found this forum comment, which provided illumination:
"I have had fits in Squeeze due to the udisks daemon. I'll mount a CD-ROM or floppy disk, and udisks will immediately unmount it. Or vice versa. ...you don't want that pesky udisks daemon running while doing CD mounts and umounts."
A quick read of the man page suggested the command
udisks --inhibit-all-polling
which solved the problem. I'll need to edit this into my backup script, though for that script I'll just I'll just inhibit polling for /dev/sr1 and not all devices.
The Debian Adventure continues.
This news item is from Goodbye, Microsoft®
( http://www.goodbyemicrosoft.net/news.php?extend.648 )