Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

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LifeInTheGrey
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Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by LifeInTheGrey »

squeezy wrote:
GeneC wrote:Squeezy

Very good tip, thanks. I did not have Mate pinned. I just set it up and had a ton of updates to Mate. :D
The update I like best is in the System Monitor, the old stretched cat is replaced with a nice MATE logo :lol:

Pinning the Mint and MATE repos at the same level means that one won't dominate. Whoever does an update first, Mint or MATE, you'll get notified 8)
In truth, if you just have the MATE, Mint packages, and Debian Testing repos set up in sources ... there isnt any need for apt-pinning at all. The only reason Mint includes those preferences is because way back when LMDE first came out it used the DT repos straight instead of their own, so they pinned the DT repos lower to force DT to update certain things only when they did not conflict with the higher-pinned Mint sources. It is no longer necessary for either the new LMDE (because they have their own repos for everything), nor with this Mint/MATE/DT setup (because the MATE repo for testing is meant to work with what is currently in testing, and Mint packages are bonus stuff.

A larger theoretical experiment that I have is to install Cinnamon in the same vein. This would likely require pinning to avoid regression issues with GTK3 and GNOME dependencies, but that is another story for another day. For the MATE setup, pinning is just adding an (albeit very small) extra unnecessary computational process.
the beauty of linux is that the rabbit hole goes as deep as you want it to go.
squeezy

Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by squeezy »

LifeInTheGrey wrote:In truth, if you just have the MATE, Mint packages, and Debian Testing repos set up in sources ... there isnt any need for apt-pinning at all.
I found I had to keep the apt pinning in place or the wheezy repo would want to install the non-Ubuntu modified font related files and I lose the nice font rendering.
LifeInTheGrey
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Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by LifeInTheGrey »

squeezy wrote:
LifeInTheGrey wrote:In truth, if you just have the MATE, Mint packages, and Debian Testing repos set up in sources ... there isnt any need for apt-pinning at all.
I found I had to keep the apt pinning in place or the wheezy repo would want to install the non-Ubuntu modified font related files and I lose the nice font rendering.
Ah yes ... if you've Ubuntized your LMDe setup that would be the exception.
the beauty of linux is that the rabbit hole goes as deep as you want it to go.
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Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by squeezy »

LifeInTheGrey wrote:Ah yes ... if you've Ubuntized your LMDe setup that would be the exception.
Just the standard Ubuntu-modded font files that LMDE ships with, nothing else. Gotta have the pretty screens!
KBD47
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Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by KBD47 »

I was just reminded today why I love to have a Stable setup that I can run for years vs. months, it's all the little tweaks you do over long periods of time, the small nuisances that once you have them fixed on a stable setup they don't come back to haunt you like with a new setup or a setup with huge or frequent updates. Just today I found myself rummaging across the net because my recent install with LibrOffice the spell checker quit working again. I found myself repeating steps I made last year for a similar problem. I keep a document with notations of many common fixes I have had to make with various Linux systems, but I still find myself at times having to google similar problems that were already fixed in previous setups. I'm looking forward to the Wheezy freeze and locking down some current setups.
KBD47
squeezy

Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by squeezy »

LifeInTheGrey wrote:A larger theoretical experiment that I have is to install Cinnamon in the same vein. This would likely require pinning to avoid regression issues with GTK3 and GNOME dependencies, but that is another story for another day.
LifeInTheGrey, have you gone ahead with this experiment? I did yesterday. Installed a bare console setup (I have a Squeeze 6.0.3 iso I use for this), changed repos, updated to wheezy, then installed Cinnamon as the only DE. I also installed mdm as the login manager and I always install Synaptic. I had to do a bit more tweaking than the same procedure using MATE.

General things I've noticed so far:
1. You'll need to install a terminal app yourself. Cinnamon doesn't pull in a dependancy for any terminal. I installed Gnome terminal.
2. You have to install the "menu" app in order to get Synaptic to work properly. It won't launch from its menu item until you do.
3. I still haven't gotten samba to work properly. No problem in MATE, but I'm having difficulties in Cinnamon.

Cinnamon issues. These are probably noted somewhere else already but I haven't dug through the tons of Cinnamon postings yet:
1. Dual menus. Alacarte is installed in the Cinnamon DE and gives you the expected Main Menu entry in Preferences. However, when you right-click on the Menu button and select "Edit menu" you open a different menu structure than the Main Menu app opens. There are two menu files under ~/.config/menus. You have cinnamon-applications.menu and gnome-applications.menu. There seems to be some, but not complete, overlap. Edits made in Main Menu, for instance, might not show up in the right-click edit session, but some do. And vice-versa.

For example, I deselected Brasero in the Accessories category from Main Menu since it also appears in the Sound & Video category. It did not dissappear from Accessories. I had to use the right-click edit and deselect it there before it was removed.

I also created a custom application launcher in Main Menu under the Administration category. It showed up in the menu under Other and was in the Other category when I used right-click edit from the Menu button. Very confusing.

EDIT: I found when I run the right-click edit option from the Menu button a process called cinnamon-menu-e starts. Alacarte, of course, starts a process called alacarte. Two menus, two menu editors.

2. Mouse pointer in themes is whacky. I like the DMZ-White pointers so installed that package and selected it in Cinnamon Settings under Themes/Other settings. The white pointers work in some apps, like Iceweasel, but the black Adwaita pointers appear when using other apps, like Synaptic. I'm using the std Cinnamon theme and Adwaita window and GTK+ themes that are the defaults.

There are a couple other small things that I don't recall right now but ran across while working in the DE.

Overall Cinnamon is a very nice DE but still a little rough around the edges. At this point MATE is a bit more polished IMO. Interested to know how you find the pure Cinnamon setup.

My sources.list file:

Code: Select all

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import
deb http://debian.mirror.frontiernet.net/debian wheezy main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ wheezy main non-free
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bimsebasse/cinnamonextras/ubuntu oneiric main
I plan to try some of the themes and applets in bimsebasse's repo :)

My preferences file. Std Mint, again to retain the font formatting Mint is famous for:

Code: Select all

Package: *
Pin: release o=linuxmint
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: *
Pin: origin packages.linuxmint.com
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: 500
Last edited by squeezy on Sat Apr 28, 2012 5:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
LifeInTheGrey
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Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by LifeInTheGrey »

squeezy wrote:LifeInTheGrey, have you gone ahead with this experiment?
I did, but on a limited scale and in a VM, but even there it performed quite admirably and was relatively lightweight (more than KDE, anyway). The things I noticed were mainly visual: I get the "Me..." instead of "Menu", the theming was rough around the edges, etc. Just playing with it for a few minutes, I could already see the massive improvement over GNOME 3 / Unity, and the project is slowly starting to reach its potential. I'm going to boldly predict that by 2013 Cinnamon will be held in the same category of GNOME and KDE (in terms of widespread adoption). My opinion though, if you really want an LMDE Stable setup that is still fresh and updated, I think MATE is definitely the way to go between the two. My experience with it has been that it is rock solid stable, and with MDM it really completes the package as a truly compete DE.

That said, its hard to leave XFCE. Its just so damn fast. If I had to vote for the best DE to use, XFCE hands-down. It takes a little work to get a system going that doesn't have a ton of extra GNOME libs in there, but man ... what a HUGE difference in speed. And likely when UP5 rolls out, it will likely include the 4.10 update (which was supposed to be officially released today, but there's no word yet).
the beauty of linux is that the rabbit hole goes as deep as you want it to go.
squeezy

Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by squeezy »

Yeah, I got the Me.. menu title, too. Did you notice when you open an app the full menu title appears? :lol: As for being lightweight, it is. From a cold boot and logging into the desktop I see 103 MB of RAM use, with about 4-5 MB being System Monitor. That's less than I see on MATE which shows around 120 MB at initial login.

I'd have to agree about MATE, it's really nice. I did a long stint with Xfce and my MATE installs have been just as quick. Cinnamon is a great piece of work too and will be a wonderful DE in time.

Life is good in Linuxland :D
LifeInTheGrey
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Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by LifeInTheGrey »

squeezy wrote:Life is good in Linuxland :D
I'd agree that theres a sunrise breaking over the horizon. Not enough to leave behind my Windows ME install, though.

Kidding.
the beauty of linux is that the rabbit hole goes as deep as you want it to go.
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limotux
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Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by limotux »

hmmm... asking the same question I asked earlier somewhere else...

After I updated recently and having Cinnamon, I ended up not receiving updates frequently, so not feeling I'm on a rolling release!

How would my repos look like?
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squeezy

Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by squeezy »

Look at my post four posts up from yours. I get updates from Debian every day with those repos.
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limotux
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Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by limotux »

Thanks squeezy,
But this won't give the error message of conflicting repos?
I've noticed that using debian repos gives this message in update manager -> info.
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Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by squeezy »

No, I don't get any errors about conflicting repos. These are all I have in my sources.list file, no other Mint repos or anything, that's the entire contents of the file.

Oh wait, are you talking about the Info button in the Mint Update app? Yes, that will say you're not pointing at any Mint repos but you can ignore that.
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Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by limotux »

Yes, that what I was talking about.
Just changed repos and will see how it will go.
But would these repos remain forever or need to change them after another release?
Thanks a lot.
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limotux
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Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by limotux »

I got this error message:
W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY CC482EE74FA9719D
what you think?
Lenovo G580
Desktop: Cinnamon 4.8.6 - LMDE 4 Debbie
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squeezy

Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by squeezy »

Run this in a terminal...

Code: Select all

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 4FA9719D
sudo apt-get update
Full details on bimsebasse's cinnamon ppa here...

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=208&t=98316
KBD47
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Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by KBD47 »

These are the sources I plan to use for the new Stable:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-freedeb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-freedeb http://www.debian-multimedia.org wheezy main non-freedeb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-updates main contrib non-freedeb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports wheezy-backports main contrib non-free
deb ftp://ftp.debian-multimedia.org wheezy-backports main

My concern is that I have no repo there for MATE/Cinnamon, so do I need to add another repo to keep them updated in Wheezy?
Thabnks.
kbd47
LifeInTheGrey
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Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by LifeInTheGrey »

KBD47 wrote:These are the sources I plan to use for the new Stable:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-freedeb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-freedeb http://www.debian-multimedia.org wheezy main non-freedeb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-updates main contrib non-freedeb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports wheezy-backports main contrib non-free
deb ftp://ftp.debian-multimedia.org wheezy-backports main

My concern is that I have no repo there for MATE/Cinnamon, so do I need to add another repo to keep them updated in Wheezy?
Thabnks.
kbd47
Yup, the overall linux mint packages repo.

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import

when you add it, install the keyring by running

sudo aptitude install linuxmint-keyring

That repo contains everything for both MATE and Cinnamon, so you should be set for a while. That said, wheezy will come out with a specific version of GNOME 3 that will likely not change much in the stable repos, so the possibility of Cinnamon dependencies and the wheezy stable GNOME 3 dependencies conflicting will grow over time, like it did with GNOME 2. Just a heads up.
the beauty of linux is that the rabbit hole goes as deep as you want it to go.
KBD47
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Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by KBD47 »

My concern with having a Mint repo on the New Stable was that it might bork everything. Is that repository specific to just MATE and Cinnamon, or will it pull in other stuff that will cause me issues running Stable? I was thinking there was a Debian repo somewhere specific to just MATE and Cinnamon.
Thanks!
LifeInTheGrey
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Re: Linux Mint Debian Stable (For Those Running This Setup)

Post by LifeInTheGrey »

KBD47 wrote:My concern with having a Mint repo on the New Stable was that it might bork everything. Is that repository specific to just MATE and Cinnamon, or will it pull in other stuff that will cause me issues running Stable? I was thinking there was a Debian repo somewhere specific to just MATE and Cinnamon.
Thanks!
There is a debian repo for MATE (run by MATE themselves), but not Cinnamon. But no, I've been running Debian Testing with the Linux Mint packages for a long time without problem. I'm a web developer, so I did it to easily install Firefox and Opera, but I've been updating my MATE-based DT virtual machine since I begin my experiment and no problems. MATE is a self-contained desktop environment, so I HIGHLY doubt there will ever be problems there (no guarantees of course, I'm not omniscient). The chances increase with Cinnamon, but I believe they have built it to be a self-contained DE as well, so it likely will not either.

If you remember way back in the days before linuxmint maintained their own repos for everything, DT repos were used. The conflicts that existed were primarily multimedia-based, because the codec updates broke things like mint-meta-codecs (which will not exist in your setup, if you do it right). Other breakages occurred because of the GIANT leap between the ISO install and the updated system (remember the 1200 updates that needed to be run after installing the 012011 ISO? like that was going to be a smooth process). Bottom line, if you do a netinstall of DT and add in the linuxmint packages repo to install MATE or Cinnamon, you shouldn't have any problems (other than the ones expected from setting up a system from scratch :P).
the beauty of linux is that the rabbit hole goes as deep as you want it to go.
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