Technology Tales

Getting Pylance to recognise locally installed packages in VSCode running on Linux Mint

When using VSCode on Linux Mint, I noticed that it was not finding any Python package installed into my user area, as is my usual way of working. Thus, it was being highlighted as being missing when it was already there.

The solution was to navigate to File > Preferences > Settings and click on the Open Settings (JSON) icon in the top right-hand corner of the app to add something like the following snippet in there.

"python.analysis.extraPaths": [
"/home/[user]/.local/bin"
]

Once you have added your user account to the above, saving the file is the next step. Then, VSCode needs a restart to pick up the new location. After that, the false positives get eliminated.

What to do an error appears when using pip to install Python packages on Linux Mint 22

After upgrading to Linux Mint 22, the following message appeared when attempting to install Python packages using the pip command:

error: externally-managed-environment

× This environment is externally managed
╰─> To install Python packages system-wide, try apt install
python3-xyz, where xyz is the package you are trying to
install.

If you wish to install a non-Debian-packaged Python package,
create a virtual environment using python3 -m venv path/to/venv.
Then use path/to/venv/bin/python and path/to/venv/bin/pip. Make
sure you have python3-full installed.

If you wish to install a non-Debian packaged Python application,
it may be easiest to use pipx install xyz, which will manage a
virtual environment for you. Make sure you have pipx installed.

See /usr/share/doc/python3.12/README.venv for more information.

note: If you believe this is a mistake, please contact your Python installation or OS distribution provider. You can override this, at the risk of breaking your Python installation or OS, by passing --break-system-packages.
hint: See PEP 668 for the detailed specification.

This will frustrate anyone following how-tos on the web, so users will need to know about it. On something like Linux Mint, the repositories may not be as up-to-date as PyPI, so picking up the very latest version has its advantages. Thus, I initially used the unrecommended --break-system-packages switch to get things going as before, since doing never broke anything before. While the way of working feels like an overkill in some ways, using pipx probably is the way forward as long as things work as I want them to do.

There is wisdom in using virtual environments too, especially when AI models are involved. For most of what I get to do, that may be getting too elaborate. Then, deleting or renaming the message file in /usr/lib/python3.12/EXTERNALLY-MANAGED is tempting if that gets around things, as retrograde as that probably is. After all, I never broke anything before this message started to appear, possibly since my interests are data related.

Upgrading a web server from Debian 11 to Debian 12

While Debian 12 may be with us since the middle of 2023 and Debian 13 is due in the middle of next year, it has taken me until now to upgrade one of my web servers. The tardiness may have something to do with a mishap on another system that resulted in a rebuild, something to avoid it at all possible.

Nevertheless, I went and had a go with the aforementioned web server after doing some advance research. Thus, I can relate the process that you find here in the knowledge that it worked for me. Also, I will have it on file for everyone’s future reference. The first step is to ensure that the system is up-to-date by executing the following commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt dist-upgrade

Next, it is best to remove extraneous packages using these commands:

sudo apt --purge autoremove
sudo apt autoclean

Once you have backed up important data and configuration files, you can move to the first step of the upgrade process. This involves changing the repository locations from what is there for bullseye (Debian 11) to those for bookworm (Debian 12). Issuing the following commands will accomplish this:

sudo sed -i 's/bullseye/bookworm/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo sed -i 's/bullseye/bookworm/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*

In my case, I found the second of these to be extraneous since everything was included in the single file. Also, Debian 12 has added a new non-free repository called non-free-firmware. This can be added at this stage by manual editing of the above. In my case, I did it later because the warning message only began to appear at that stage.

Once the repository locations, it is time to update the package information using the following command:

sudo apt update

Then, it is time to first perform a minimal upgrade using the following command, that takes a conservative approach by updating existing packages without installing any new ones:

sudo apt upgrade --without-new-pkgs

Once that has completed, one needs to issue the following command in order to install new packages if needed for dependencies and even remove incompatible or unnecessary ones, as well as performing kernel upgrades:

sudo apt full-upgrade

Given all the changes, the completion of the foregoing commands’ execution necessitates a system restart, which can be the most nerve-wracking part of the process when you are dealing with a remote server accessed using SSH. While, there are a few options for accomplishing this, here is one that is compatible with the upgrade cycle:

sudo systemctl reboot

Once you can log back into the system again, there is one more piece of housekeeping needed. This step not only removes redundant packages that were automatically installed, but also does the same for their configuration files, an act that really cleans up things. The command to execute is as follows:

sudo apt --purge autoremove

For added reassurance that the upgrade has completed, issuing the following command will show details like the operating system’s distributor ID, description, release version and codename:

lsb_release -a

If you run the above commands as root, the sudo prefix is not needed, yet it is perhaps safer to execute them under a less privileged account anyway. The process needs the paying of attention to any prompts and questions about configuration files and service restarts if they arise. Nothing like that came up in my case, possibly because this web server serves flat files created using Hugo, avoiding the use of scripting and databases, which would add to the system complexity. Such a simple situation makes the use of scripting more of a possibility. The exercise was speedy enough for me too, though patience is of the essence should a 30–60 minute completion time be your lot, depending on your system and internet speed.

Resolving “repository doesn’t support architecture i386” error when checking for updates to Brave Browser on Linux

Recently, I started to observe the following message when doing my usual update routine on Linux Mint (Debian, Ubuntu and their variants are likely affected as well):

N: Skipping acquire of configured file 'main/binary-i386/Packages' as repository 'https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com stable InRelease' doesn't support architecture 'i386'

As the message suggests, there was something amiss with the repository set up for Brave, a browser that I added for extra privacy. Since Firefox remains the main one that I use, Brave is something that I have in hand for when I need it. Handily, its installation routine adds in repository information for keeping it up to date. However, there is an issue with what you find in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.list. By default, the line appears like thus:

deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg] https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/ stable main

To avoid the i386 error, it needs to look like this instead:

deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg arch=amd64] https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/ stable main

The difference between the tow is the presence of arch=amd64 in the second version. This stops the search for non-existent i386 files, the 32 bit version in other words. With Y2K2038 in the offing, the days of 32 bit computing architectures are numbered because there is a real limit to the magnitude of the dates that can be represented in any case. Thus, sticking with 64 bit ones is both the present for many and the future for all.

Getting rid of the “Get more security upgrades through Ubuntu Pro with ‘esm-apps’ enabled” message when performing a system update

Not so long ago, I got the above message while running sudo apt upgrade on an Ubuntu Server system. This was not the first time that this kind of thing happened to me, so I started searching the web for a solution. You do get to see complaints about advertising, but these are never useful.

Accordingly, here are some possible ways of remediating the situation:

• Execute the following commands to disable the responsible services, renaming the configuration file to prevent it from being used (deleting or editing the configuration file to remove the unwanted content are other options):

  sudo systemctl mask apt-news.service

  sudo systemctl mask esm-cache.service

  sudo mv /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf.disabled

• Alternatively, simply remove the ubuntu-advantage-tools package, which contains the /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf file.
• Another option is to remove the ubuntu-pro-client package.
• Lastly, there also is the possibility of enabling ESM, though that was not desirable for me.

In my case, it may have been the penultimate option on the list that I chose. In any case, I was rid of the unwanted message.

Removing redundant kernels from Ubuntu

Recently, a message appear on some web servers that I have that exhorted me to upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04.1 using the do-release-upgrade command. In the interests of remaining current, I did just that to get another message, one like the following:

The upgrade needs a total of [amount of space with units] free space on disk `/boot`.
Please free at least an additional [amount of space with units] of disk space on `/boot`.
Empty your trash and remove temporary packages of former installations
using `sudo apt-get clean`.

Using sudo apt-get clean did not resolve the problem so the advice given was of no use. The actual problem was that there were too many old kernels cluttering up /boot and searching around the web provided that wisdom. What also came up was a single command for fixing the problem. However, removing the wrong kernel can trash a system so I took a more cautious approach. First, I listed the kernels to be removed and checked that they did not include the currently running one. This was done with the following command (broken up over several lines for clarity using the backslash character to denote continuation) and running uname -r found the details of the running kernel:

dpkg -l linux-{image,headers}-"[0-9]*" \

| awk '/ii/{print $2}' \

| grep -ve "$(uname -r \

| sed -r 's/-[a-z]+//')"

The dpkg command listed the installed kernels with awk, grep and sed filtering out unwanted sections of the text. The awk command takes the tabular output from dpkg and turns it into a list. The -v switch on the grep command gets the lines that do not match the search expression created by the sed command, while the -e switch makes grep look for patterns. The sed command removes all letters from the output of the uname command, where the -r switch produces the kernel release details, to leave on the release number of the current kernel. On being satisfied that nothing untoward would happen, the full command below (also broken up over several lines for clarity using the backslash character to denote continuation) could be executed.

sudo apt purge $(dpkg -l linux-{image,headers}-"[0-9]*" \

| awk '/ii/{print $2}' \

| grep -ve "$(uname -r \

| sed -r 's/-[a-z]+//')")

This apt to purge the unwanted kernels, thus freeing up enough space for the upgrade to continue. That happened without significant incident though there were some remediations needed on the PHP side to get the website working smoothly again.

Fixing an Ansible warning about boolean type conversion

My primary use for Ansible is doing system updates using the inbuilt apt module. Recently, I updated my main system to Linux Mint 21 and a few things like Ansible stopped working. Removing instances that I had added with pip3 sorted the problem but I then ran playbooks manually only for various warning messages to appear that I had not noticed before. What follows below is one of these.

[WARNING]: The value True (type bool) in a string field was converted to u'True' (type string). If this does not look like what you expect, quote the entire value to ensure it does not change.

The message is not so clear in some ways, not least because it had me looking for a boolean value of True when it should have been yes. A search on the web revealed something about the apt module that surprised me.: the value of the upgrade parameter is a string when others like it take boolean values of yes or no. Thus, I had passed a bareword of yes when it should have been declared in quotes as “yes”. To my mind, this is an inconsistency but I have changed things anyway to get rid of the message.

Getting rid of the Windows Resizing message from a Manjaro VirtualBox guest

Like Fedora, Manjaro also installs a package for VirtualBox Guest Additions when you install the Linux distro in a VirtualBox virtual machine. However, it does have certain expectations when doing this. On many systems and my own is one of these, Linux guests are forced to use the VMSVGA virtual graphics controller while Windows guests are allowed to use the VBoxSVGA one. It is the latter that Manjaro expects so you get a message like the following appearing when the desktop environment has loaded:

Windows Resizing
Set your VirtualBox Graphics Controller to enable windows resizing

After ensuring that gcc, make, perl and kernel headers are installed, I usually install VirtualBox Guest Additions myself from the included ISO image and so I did the same with Manjaro. Doing that and restarting the virtual machine got me extra functionality like screen resizing and being able to copy and paste between the VM and elsewhere after choosing the Bidirectional setting in the menus under Devices > Shared Clipboard.

That still left an unwanted message popping up on startup. To get rid of that, I just needed to remove /etc/xdg/autostart/mhwd-vmsvga-alert.desktop. It can be deleted but I just moved it somewhere else and a restart proved that the message was gone as needed. Now everything is working as I wanted.

Removing obsolete libraries from Flatpak

Along with various pieces of software, Flatpak also installs KDE and GNOME libraries needed to support them. However, it does not always remove obsolete versions of those libraries whenever software gets updated. One result is that messages regarding obsolete versions of GNOME may be issued and this has been known to cause confusion because there is the GNOME instance that is part of a Linux distro like Ubuntu and using Flatpak adds another one for its software packages to use. My use of Linux Mint may lesson the chances of misunderstanding.

Thankfully, executing a single command will remove any obsolete Flatpak libraries so the messages no longer appear and there then is no need to touch your actual Linux installation. This then is the command that sorted it for me:

flatpak uninstall --unused && sudo flatpak repair

The first part that removes any unused libraries is run as a normal user so there is no error in the above command. Administrative privileges are needed for the second section that does any repairs that are needed. It might be better if Flatpak did all this for you using the update command but that is not how the thing works. At least, there is a quick way to address this state of affairs and there might be some good reasons for having things work as they do.

Ensuring that Flatpak remains up to date on Linux Mint 19.2

The Flatpak concept offers a useful way of getting the latest version of software like LibreOffice or GIMP on Linux machines because repositories are managed conservatively when it comes to the versions of included software. Ubuntu has Snaps, which are similar in concept. Both options bundle dependencies with the packaged software so that its operation can use later versions of system libraries that what may be available with a particular distribution.

However, even Flatpak depends on what is available through the repositories for a distribution as I found when a software update needed a version of the tool. The solution was to add PPA using the following command and agreeing to the prompts that arise (answering Y, in other words):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexlarsson/flatpak

With the new PPA instated, the usual apt commands were used to update the Flatpak package and continue with the required updates. Since then, all has gone smoothly as expected.