LincolnBlogs
From the twisted mind of me!

Linux Mint

Special thanks go out to ElectricKite for this one!

Linux Mint 14 xfce

It’s no secret that I have had a thing for Linux Mint for quite a while. It is a solid reliable distribution that “just works” and, personally, it’s the one I have to piss with the least in order to get it working the way I like. That being said, as I posted about earlier, I noticed a few things on Mint 14 (Cinnamon) that contributed to keeping me off of it for a while. Most have been fixed, like the processor pegging, but the nagging issue with not being able to set custom keyboard shortcuts was a stinker. Honestly, at this point I have been so busy the last fre weeks I haven’t had a chance to see if that has been resolved yet. All that being said, I have this old laptop that I have traditionally run the XFCE edition on because it haqs lower resources. The XFCE edition has always worked a treat on this thing and I finally had the opportunity to upgrade from Mint 13 to 14 and really beat on it a little bit. In fact, that is what I am typing on now.

So just to be clear, I followed the recommended upgrade path, which is to say, clean reinstall. This seems to bother a lot of people but in Mint’s defense, I believe this is the best way to go from distribution to distribution. When you do an in place upgrade (which is possible) it takes tremendously longer imho, and then you are left sometimes with little residual bits and bobs issues to deal with that may or may not spring up on you at an inopportune time. Conversely, the clean install method of backing up your important bits, clean reinstall, and restoring the bits again is really relatively quick and painless. It does count on you having good backups, but, for sure, if you are doing an in place upgrade without good backups, you are lighting the disaster fuse

So, what is new on xfce edition? It doesn’t seem like there are any earth shattering changes here, mostly userland and kernel updates. Everything works really well and very quick, just as it did under 13. I would like to say I am surprised, but I am not. I have come to expect a certain level of quality from the Mint folks and they hardly ever disappoint. That’s why I always recommend their distribution, especially to newbies. People need to have a go-to distro that just works.

If you haven’t tried XFCE before and are contrasting it with Cinnamon or gnome (standard) you would certainly feel right at home and comfortable. While being a good bit lighter than the other DE’s xfce does well with providing you a similar set of programs, look and feel. Instead of a nautilus file manager, you generally have thunar, which works very well and much the same. Other differences are xfterm instead of gnome-terminal – still carries much of the same feel and functionality, etc.. You also have many of the same setup options, such as some ability for composting, screensavers, desktop backgrounds, virtual desktops and the rest of the things you are used to having control over. The menuing system has a bit of a different feel, but it is easily navigable.

As a lighter desktop option, there are still some things, some tweaks that you might need to take care of manually though. I will give you one example. For one reason or another xfce’s default icon text color was black. Well, as you can see from my screenshot, that doesn’t really work well for people like myself who like darker backgrounds (the default bg for Mint is a very light grey). I wanted to change that text color to white so I could, you know, read it While not very hard, it involves editing the .gtk-xfce file in your home directory and changing all the color codes (3 there) from #000000 to #FFFFFF. The resulting file looks like so:

style “xfdesktop-icon-view” {
XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha = 0

fg[NORMAL] = “#FFFFFF”
fg[SELECTED] = “#FFFFFF”
fg[ACTIVE] = “#FFFFFF”
}
widget_class “*XfdesktopIconView*” style “xfdesktop-icon-view”

The rest of the customization, outside of fixing network manager’s dns control, which I think is a horrible idea, is pure userland. There are a bunch of programs that I personally use that make me able to do what I do and I naturally put all my customization into a script to be able to share it. You’ll need to run this as root and not just sudo it to get it to work correctly. To oget to a root account simply open a term and do a “sudo su -” and you’ll br prompted for your password. Once you give it, you are root. Just run this program for all the goodies. One other oddity I found was that after the initial reboot, when you are logging in, you *must* choose xfce as your session type. If you do not, you won’t get a desktop environment Once you choose it once, though, it’ll ask you if you want to make it your default. Yes is a good answer here Then you’ll be a rockin’!

Here is fixmint14.sh

#!/bin/bash

clear

# Test for UID=0
if [ "$(echo $UID)" != "0" ]
then
echo “You must be superuser to run this program. Try ‘sudo su -’ then ‘./fixmint14.sh’”
exit
fi

sed -i -e ‘s/dns=dnsmasq/#dns=dnsmasq/g’ /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

apt-get update
apt-get -y install xterm
apt-get -y install openssh-server ssh
apt-get -y install sshfs
apt-get -y install smbfs
apt-get -y install irssi
apt-get -y install vpnc
apt-get -y install screen
apt-get -y install vlc
apt-get -y install mencoder
apt-get -y install vim
apt-get -y install moc
apt-get -y install subversion
apt-get -y install git
apt-get -y install curl
apt-get -y install php5-cli
apt-get -y install mutt
apt-get -y install clusterssh
apt-get -y install html2text
apt-get -y install autofs
apt-get -y install vncviewer
apt-get -y install dropbox
apt-get -y install sqlite
apt-get -y install links
apt-get -y install rdesktop
apt-get -y install expect
apt-get -y install mysql-client
apt-get upgrade

for service in rsync virtualbox-guest-utils dns-clean pppd-dns saned speech-dispatcher ; do update-rc.d $service disable; done

reboot

WTH Mint-14!? Cinnamon runs at 17% cpu (doing NOTHING), Gnome3 at 7.x%, xfce at 2.x% and Fluxbox at 0.x%… GAHHH! FIX ME PLEASE!!!

I really love Mint, just let me get that out of that way first. That being said, there are usually a couple things I catch, per release, that filter down from Ubuntu, that I wish were taken care of before Mint hits my desktop.

This time it is DNS.

I installed Mint 13 and was cruising around my home network and noticed that my dns searches weren’t appending my local domain. I had to use the FQDN to get to *anything* on my home network. Well, this frustrated me a bit because I worked hard to set up my own home network, I have resources on it including DNS, and I would like to actually use it. So, I went on the hunt for WHY I had to use a fully qualified domain name on my network…

For some strange reason, someone, somewhere thought it would be a great idea to mess with the way we handle DNS. In fact, the way Linux/Unix/unix has traditionally handled DNS for ever. That being if you put stuff ™ in the friggin /etc/resolv.conf file, your DNS just magically works. Well, not any more.

I have done 3 Mint 13 / Cinnamon installs now (assuming that Mate is the same here) and, in fact, THERE IS NO RESOLV.CONF file! What has happened is this, as far as I can tell. Someone in the Ubuntu camp (I assume) decided that it would be a great idea to start using dnsmasq through the NetworkManager to take care of DNS because they wanted to skirt some VPN issues with single homing. In layman’s terms, when you use a VPN, you are *ONLY* supposed to be able to connect to that network to be secure. Using dnsmasq, you could conceivably be on your VPN and route local traffic around too (multi homing). IPSEC guys frost themselves over stuff like this, BTW.

So, I set about to correct this injustice. Here is a simple script you can run which will turn off the dnsmasq garbage, put your resolv.conf files back in place where they belong and start those services back up so stuff works like we have been doing it for 20+ years.

#!/bin/bash

clear

# Test for UID=0
if [ "$(echo $UID)" != "0" ]
then
echo “You must be superuser to run this program. Try ‘sudo ./fixmint13.sh’”
exit
fi

sed -i -e 's/dns=dnsmasq/#dns=dnsmasq/g' /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

ln -s /run/resolvconf/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf
resolvconf --create-runtime-directories
resolvconf --enable-updates

reboot

Probably you have either listened to me or read my thoughts or both for several years now, but it occurred to me today that someone out there might be interested in seeing what actually drives the LincGeek.

I currently live in Pennsylvania, but I was born and raised in Upstate NY, with a brief stint in Washington state. New Yorkers and hillbillies are my people and I understand them. Washington is some of the most beautiful country I ever spent time in and I hope to at least visit out there again someday.

Well, first and foremost, computers and Linux are my personal crack. I started on a life long obsession with computers back in 1983 with my first Vic=20 (Thank you William Shatner). I learned to program in BASIC and from there it was all over until I met Linux in the 90s, then that added into the mix.

I like the fastest computers I can get my hands on. I like Apple computers (more for their quality and aesthetics than OS – they do tend to run Linux very well). I love my Kindle, my Android phone and my Asus TF300T Linux Mint is probably the nicest version of Linux I have ever run and I use that almost exclusively as my desktop OS of choice. I am RedHat certified and use RHEL and CentOS for the vast majority of my enterprise and personal server needs, because, IMHO, it’s better than the rest.

I am a music lover. I dig 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, Big Band, Jazz, Funk, Disco, Bluegrass and Classical music. I was a hardcore low brass musician and vocalist in my school years, even making it into “Who’s Who In Music” in my senior year in high school, and those are some of my most cherished and fondest memories. Rap is *NOT* music, by the way.

I have been married once, to my college sweetheart, for almost 20 years now and have an adult (she thinks so at least) daughter, currently in college. I am a Conservative Libertarian, politically, and a proud Christian.

Although I am now diabetic and stick mostly to various forms of Chicken and veggies, I LOVE good food. my favorites are good Irish cooking like my Grandma used to make. Corned Beef and Cabbage. And she made a monster macaroni and cheese too. I would literally hurt someone for some of that again. I strongly believe that vegetables are what food eats.

I like my coffee with (nonfat) milk and sweet-n-low. Buy it from Wawa because Starbucks coffee is overpriced and bitter yuppie coffie IMHO. I like an occasional good cigar (Acid Blondie) and enjoy them most when I can smoke them and hang out with my friends. (Edit, I am a confirmed Vaper now – RY4 absolutely ROCKS!)

I am not a drinker. If and when I do imbibe, I do so with Scotch or Whiskey as I believe beer must be what urine tastes like.

As you can probably surmise, I am highly opinionated, and as I have a monster sized guilty conscience and I am not at all politically correct, so if you ask my opinion, you are liable to actually get it.

I still think the occasional fart joke is funny. I hate unproductive meetings and long phone conversations. I try very hard to be honest, forthright, fair and maintain integrity.

I am a pet guy and love small furry mammals of all kinds. I have and have had cats, dogs, rabbits, mice, rats, ferrets and even a smattering of budgies and small lizards.

And now you know all about me!

I wrote a little script to help me quickly set up a new Mint 12 install the way I like it and to fix a couple random annoying issues. Enjoy:

Script name is fixmint.sh

#!/bin/bash

clear

# Test for UID=0
if [ "$(echo $UID)" != "0" ]
then
echo “You must be superuser to run this program. Try ‘sudo ./fixmint.sh’”
exit
fi

# Add packages you need
echo “install some good packages to have handy.”
apt-get -y install sshfs smbfs irssi vpnc screen vlc mencoder vim moc openssh-server subversion git twinkle curl php5-cli mutt clusterssh html2text autofs vncviewer &> /dev/null

# Turn off guest login
echo “Turning off guest login.”
grep -q “allow-guest=false” /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf || echo “allow-guest=false” >> /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

# Fix dual monitors
echo “Fixing dual monitor mode so that both monitors reflect changing virtual desktops.”
gconftool-2 –set /desktop/gnome/shell/windows/workspaces_only_on_primary –type bool false

# Fix broken login chime
echo “Fixing broken login chime.”
for user in $(ls /home)
do
mv /home/$user/.config/autostart/libcanberra-login-sound.desktop /home/$user/.config/autostart/libcanberra-login-sound.desktop.orig
echo -e “[Desktop Entry]\nType=Application\nName=GNOME Login Sound\nComment=Plays a sound whenever you log in\nExec=/usr/bin/canberra-gtk-play -f /usr/share/sounds/linuxmint-login.wav\nOnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity;\nAutostartCondition=GSettings org.gnome.desktop.sound event-sounds\nX-GNOME-Autostart-Phase=Application\nX-GNOME-Provides=login-sound” >> /home/$user/.config/autostart/libcanberra-login-sound.desktop
done

# Set the login page wallpaper
echo “Setting the login background to /usr/share/backgrounds/mint.jpg. Copy any background you wish to be the login wallpaper to that file.”
sed -i -e ‘s/^background.*/background=\/usr\/share\/backgrounds\/mint.jpg/g’ /etc/lightdm/unity-greeter.conf

echo “All done. Enjoy!”

Found out a couple days ago that there is a problem with the PPA for handbrake with MINT 12 and Ubuntu 11.10 (and probably others as well). There is an easy workaround for it though. That is to use the snapshots ppa instead:

apt-add-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-snapshots
apt-get update
apt-get install handbrake-gtk handbrake-cli

Linux Mint

First, let me say that I am using the default desktop, so to speak. By that I mean I am using the Gnome 3 desktop that comes along with Mint 12 as the default. It is quite nice. Nicer than my previous encounters with Gnome 3 on Fedora a couple months ago. Mint did some of their smart decision making and included sane things like the shutdown menu and icons on the desktop, etc. These are all extensions to the standard Gnome 3 desktop, but are included by default in Mint 12 to help improve the desktop UI experience and, I gotta say, they hit the nail on the head once again. These improvements definitely make the desktop more pleasant and “normal” to use.

There were a couple things I tweaked for my personal preferences, and good thing too, cause what would I write about if there weren’t?

I removed the bottom taskbar. While this may be there to help folks make the Gnome 3 adjustment, the fact is that these days everything has one of those annoying widescreen displays with limited virtical resolution. Having a second taskbar eat that precious screen realestate up just doesn’t seem like a good idea to me, no matter how knoble the reasoning behind it. Removing this is pretty simple. Hit your windows (meta) key and select the “Advanced Settings” icon, go to “Shell Extensions” and disable the “Menu” extension and the “Bottom Panel” extension. I promise you won’t miss them, especially if you have a widescreen display.

I made xterm my terminal that launched with the ctrl-alt-t command. I am not entirely sure why gnome-terminal seems so prevalent everywhere, but I, personally, find it ugly, bulky and slow. I do a *LOT* of work at the command line and I get easily annoyed when I request a terminal and have to wait for it to pop up. You may not have this problem, but try xterm, you might just like it To do this, click your name in the upper right hand corner and select “System Settings”, then “Keyboard”, then “Shortcuts”. Under “Launchers” you will see a “Launch Terminal” setting. Click on the “ctrl-alt-t” text at the right and hit the backspace key. It should now say “Disabled”. Now head to the “Custom Shortcuts” and hit the + to add a new one. Type xterm in both boxes then apply. Click the “Disabled” text and it should say “New Shortcut”. Hit ctrl-alt-t, which should show up where it said “New Shortcut” and from there on in, you should be able to use that key combo to get your xterm open (quickly I might add).

The other thing I really like to have handy quick is my file browser. For Gnome 3 this is nautilus. Using the same process as xterm I added nautilus as a custom shortcut and assigned it to ctrl-alt-f (for files). Obviously, you can use this method to add all manner of goodies as shortcuts.

That brings me to my “issues” with Mint 12. There are so few they are barely worth mentioning, but in the interest of giving a somewhat impartial review, here goes.

Up in the top task bar you will see your network connection icon. If I go there and disable my wired connection, it works as it should, shutting off that connection and marking it so in that menu. The problem is turning it back on. I can click all day and that little “off” indicator never changes back to on. My connection will come back on, but it doesn’t say so there.

Bluetooth. This is not really a Mint issue – I see it everywhere, but I want a way to start my computer with Bluetooth *OFF*. If you have a laptop and don’t use your bluetooth, it eats the battery and it annoys me to have to turn it off after each startup. It would be great if I could somehow default it the other way around and start with it off and turn it on when I want it.

I really love Google Chrome. It’s a fantastic and fast web browser and I have become attached and accustomed to it. Getting it on Mint 12 is slightly problematic though. If you go to google’s website and download the package, you cannot use the gui package management tool to install it. You get permission errors. To install, open up your trusty xterm and run “sudo dpkg -i packagename.deb” on it. Then immediately afterward, “apt-get update && apt-get upgrade” which will install a couple dependencies you need.

Where the heck are the virtual desktops? I am SOOO used to pressing ctrl-alt left/right and getting to a new one I was monstrously frustrated to find they didn’t work the same way any longer. Even more so when I looked at the keyboard shortcuts which *PLAINLY* say they should. Sure, you can get a new desktop by hitting the windows (meta) key and selecting it at the right side, but that is inefficient. After bumbling around for a while I discovered that they are keyboard accessible by hitting ctrl-alt up/down now. Who knew?

Last thing is the screensaver. Now don’t get me wrong, I like the plain black screensaver just fine, I just want it to shut down the backlight too. It simply makes no sense to backlight a black screen. Without attacking this problem programmatically, it seems you must set your backlight to turn off after a period of time under the “Screen” setting and just leave your screen blank until that happens. Programmatically, however, I found a bit of a workaround, although I am still not completely happy with it. I created a script called “lockit” and in that script is this:

#!/bin/sh
sleep 1 ; xset dpms force off ; gnome-screensaver-command -l

Put that somewhere you can run it, go to the keyboard shortcuts again and disable the “System”, “Lock Screen” shortcut. Add a new one to run your lockit program with the ctrl-alt-l keyboard shortcut and violla! When you hit the key combo, after 1 second your screen shuts off and your computer is locked. If you combine this with having your backlight turn off after a half hour or so (just in case you bump your mouse) it seems to work pretty well. What I really wanted to do, however, was run a background program (or daemon) that detected if the screensaver was active and just shut off the backlight, but, alas, there is no reliable way to do so that I have found.

That’s really it, folks, snigglets and all. I still love Mint and v12 is no exception. Great work once again Clem and team and if you all haven’t tried Mint yet, you sure are missing out!