Technology Tales

Sorting a kernel upgrade error in Linux Mint 13

Linux Mint 14 may be out now, but I'll be sticking with its predecessor for now. Being a user of GNOME Shell instead of Cinnamon or Mate, I'll wait for extensions to get updated for 3.6 before making a move away from 3.4 where the ones that I use happily work. Given that Linux Mint 13 is set to get support until 2017, it's not as if there is any rush either. Adding the back-ported packages repository to my list of software sources means that I will not miss out on the latest versions of MDM, Cinnamon and Mate anyway. With Ubuntu set to stick to GNOME 3.6 until after 13.04 is released, adding the GNOME 3 Team PPA will be needed if 3.8 arrives with interesting goodies; there are interesting noises that suggest the approach taken in Linux Mint 12 may be used to give more of a GNOME 2 desktop experience. Options abound and there are developments in the pipeline that I hope to explore too.

However, there is one issue that I have had to fix which stymies upgrades within the 3.2 kernel branch. A configuration file (/etc/grub.d/10_linux) points to /usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib instead of /usr/lib/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib so I have been amending it every time I needed to do a kernel update. However, it just reverts to the previous state, so I thought of another solution: creating a symbolic link in the incorrect location that points to the correct one so that updates complete without manual intervention every time. The command that does the needful is below:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib /usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib

Of course, figuring out what causes the reversion would be good too, but the symbolic link fix works so well that there's little point in exploring it further. Of course, if anyone can add how you'd do that, I'd welcome this advice too. New knowledge is always good.

Getting rid of a Dropbox error message on a Linux-powered PC

One of my PC's has ended up becoming a testing ground for a number of Linux distributions. The list has included openSUSE, Fedora, Arch and LMDE with Sabayon being the latest incumbent. From Arch onwards in that list, though, a message has appeared on loading the desktop with every one of these when I have Dropbox's client set up on there:

Unable to monitor entire Dropbox folder hierarchy. Please run "echo 100000 | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches" and restart Dropbox to correct the problem.

Even applying the remedy that the message suggests won't permanently resolve the issue. For that, you need to edit /etc/sysctl.conf with superuser access and add the following line to it:

fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 100000

With that in place, you can issue the following command to sort out the problem in the current session (assuming your user account is listed in /etc/sudoers):

sudo sysctl -p & dropbox stop & dropbox start

A reboot should demonstrate that the messages no longer appear again. For a good while, I had ignored it, but curiosity eventually got me to find out how it could be stopped and led to what you find above.

A place for GNOME?

There has been a lot of doom and gloom spoken about the GNOME desktop environment and the project behind it. These days, it seems to be the fashionable thing to go constantly criticising it, especially after what Linus Torvalds said. KDE went through the same sort of experience a few years ago and seems to have got far enough beyond it that some are choosing it instead of GNOME. For a good while, it was the other way around.

Since its inception, the GNOME Shell has attracted a lot of adverse comment. However, since my first encounter, it has grown on me to the point that I added it to Ubuntu and Linux Mint and use it as my default desktop environment instead of Unity, Mate or Cinnamon. The first of these may not be so surprising because of the unique approach that has been taken. The use of lenses and an application launch bar are items to which I could adapt, but it is the merging of application menus and title bars with the top panel of the desktop that really puts me off it. Application window buttons can be moved to the right everywhere but on this global menu, so I tend to view things from afar instead of using it every day. There just is something about the experience that won't grow on me. Strangely, that also applies to my impressions of KDE, albeit differently; there just is something less slick about the appearance of the bottom panel, the plasmoids and other items like them.

Given that Mate and Cinnamon continue the GNOME 2 approach to things that dominated my home computing for much of the last five years since I turned to Ubuntu, my decision to use GNOME Shell instead of either come as a surprise. It isn't that the environments aren't slick enough, just that I have come to prefer the way that GNOME Shell handles workspaces, spawning them as you need them. If that could be an option in Cinnamon, then it might become my desktop of choice. However, that seems to go against the philosophy of the project, even if someone adds and extension for it.

For a time, I played with going with LXDE rather than either Unity or GNOME Shell; as it happened, my first impressions of the latter weren't so positive until I spent a day with the GNOME variant of Fedora 15. Being not dissimilar to GNOME 2 in the way that it worked was the main attraction of LXDE and my initial use of it was with Lubuntu running on a netbook; the LXDE version of Linux Mint 12 now runs on it so there hasn't been so much change on that machine.

Sometimes, the only way to deal with change is to have a look at it to see what's coming and to decide what you need to do about it. In the case of GNOME Shell, my day with Fedora 15 on a backup PC changed my impressions, and Linux Mint 11's GNOME 2 desktop looked a bit old-fashioned afterwards. In fact, I popped GNOME 3 on there and have been using it as my main desktop environment ever since.

With computing, there always are some who expect things to just work and be the way that they want them. The need for extra configuration is a criticism that still can be levelled at GNOME Shell. Before going with Mate and Cinnamon, Linux Mint went the same way for a while, leaving me to wonder what can be done with such an approach. Will someone else pick up that baton and do the handiwork so that users don't have to do it? Not yet, it seems. Since no one is following the lead of Linux Mint 12, the need for user tweaking remains, even if I have found which ones work for me.

The first place to begin is GNOME's Extensions website, from where I raid a few extensions every time I do an operating system installation. The Alternative Status Menu extension is among the first to get added so that I have the shutdown option again on the user menu, a common criticism of the default set up. Since I always install the GNOME Tweak Tool from the distro repositories, I add the Advanced Setting in User Menu extension to get an entry in the status menu that grants quick access. Frippery Bottom Panel comes next on the list because of its workspace switcher and application window list. Others like Frippery Move Clock, Monitor Status Indicator, Places Status Indicator, Removable Drive Menu, Remove Accessibility, Shell Restart User Menu Entry and User Themes follow in some order and make things feel more pleasing, at least to my mind.

You aren't stuck with the default theme, either, and I have chosen Elementary Luna from deviantART. For adding your own themes, the above listed User Themes extension is needed. Because I want the Frippery Bottom Panel to match the top panel, I tweaked its stylesheet and that's where the Restart User Menu Entry extension comes in handy, though some care is needed not to crash the desktop with constant shell restarts.

Doing the above makes GNOME Shell really amenable to me, and I wouldn't like to lose that freedom to customise. Saying that, the continued controversial changes aren't stopping yet. Those made to the Nautilus file manager in GNOME 3.6 have caused the Linux Mint project to create Nemo, a fork of the software, and Ubuntu is sticking with the previous version for now. Taking some action yourself instead of just complaining loudly sounds like a more positive approach, which makes its own statement. However, at a time when many want the GNOME project team to listen to users, the new Nautilus appears and is not to be what they needed to see. Could the project go on like this? Only time can answer that one.

While it appears that many have changed from GNOME to other desktop environments, I haven't come across any numbers. A reducing user base could be a way of sending a message about any discontent, one that makes use of a great feature of free software: there is plenty of choice. If the next version of Nautilus isn't to my taste, there are plenty of alternatives out there. After all, Cinnamon started on Linux Mint and has gone from there to being available for other distros too; Fedora is one example. Nemo could follow suit.

Now that GNOME's constituent applications are seeing changes, GNOME Shell may be left to mature. Computer interfaces are undergoing a lot of change at the moment and Microsoft Windows 8 is bringing its own big leap. Though controversial at the time, change can be a good thing too and us technical folk always like seeing new things come along (today saw the launch of the iPhone 5 and many folk queueing up for it; Google's Nexus 7 ran out of stock in its first weeks on the market; there are more). That could be what got me using GNOME 3 in the first place, even if my plan is to stick with it for a while yet.

Renaming multiple files in Linux

The Linux and UNIX command mv has a number of limitations, such as not overwriting destination files and not renaming multiple files using wildcards. The only solution to the first that I can find is one that involves combining the cp and rm commands. For the second, there's another command: rename. Here's an example like what I used recently:

rename s/fedora/fedora2/ fedora.*

The first argument in the above command is a regular expression much like what Perl is famous for implementing; in fact, it is Perl-compatible ones (PCRE) that are used. The s before the first slash stands for substitute, with fedora being the string that needs to be replaced and fedora2 being what replaces it. The third command is the file name glob that you want to use, fedora.* in this case. Therefore, all files in a directory named fedora will be renamed fedora2 regardless of the file type. The same sort of operation can be performed for all files with the same extension when it needs to be changed, htm to html, for instance. Of course, there are other uses, but these are handy ones to know.

Removing VMware Player from Linux Mint Debian Edition

A whole slew of updates has appeared for my Linux Mint Debian Edition PC. However, to instate them, I needed to remove VMware Player and this is the command to do so:

sudo vmware-installer -u vmware-player

It worked in my case, and my system updates are in progress as I write this. The same command should work for other Linux distros where VMware Player was installed using the *.bundle installer. VMware Player remains in place on my main PC though, so I am not ditching it just yet, even if I have to be careful when running it on Linux Mint 13 so as not to freeze the system on myself.

Synchronising package selections between Linux Mint and Linux Mint Debian Edition

To generate the package list on the GNOME version of Linux Mint, I used the Backup Tool. It simply was a matter of using the Backup Software Selection button and telling it where to put the file that it generates. Alternatively, dpkg can be used from the command line like this:

sudo dpkg --get-selections > /backup/installed-software.txt

After transferring the file to the machine with Linux Mint Debian Edition, I tried using the Backup Tool on there too. However, using the Restore Software Selection button and loading the required only produced an irrecoverable error. Therefore, I set to looking around the web and found a command line approach that did the job for me.

The first step is to load the software selection using dpkg by issuing this command (it didn't matter that the file wasn't made using the dpkg command, though I suspect that's what the Linux Mint Backup Tool was doing that behind the scenes):

sudo dpkg --set-selections < /backup/installed-software.txt

Then, I started dselect and chose the installation option from the menu that appeared. The first time around, it fell over but trying again was enough to complete the job. Packages available to the vanilla variant of Linux Mint but not found in the LMDE repositories were overlooked as I had hoped, and installation of the extra packages had no impact on system stability either.

sudo dselect

Apparently, there is an alternative to using dselect that is based on the much used apt-get command, but I didn't make use of it so cannot say more:

sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

All that I can say is that the dpkg/dselect combination did what I wanted, so I'll keep them in mind if ever need to synchronise software selections between two Debian-based distributions in the future again. While the standard edition of Linux Mint may be based on Ubuntu rather than Debian, Ubuntu is itself based on Debian. Thus, the description holds here.

Uninstalling VirtualBox Guest Additions on a Linux Guest OS

Within the last few days, I updated my Linux Mint Debian Edition virtual machine installation to Update 4. Between not following the instructions so closely and problems with the update server, a re-installation preceded the update itself. When all was done, no desktop environment appeared, and issuing the startx command revealed that it was one of the VirtualBox drivers that was the cause of the problem. With my being unable to see any files on the VirtualBox virtual CD, something else needed doing and the executing following command (replacing [VboxAddonsFolder] with VBoxGuestAdditions-4.1.12 in my case, but it is different for each VirtualBox version) resolved the situation:

/opt/[VboxAddonsFolder]/uninstall.sh

When it was complete, a scrambled desktop began to appear, so a reboot was to set things to rights. Then, I could set to looking at what Update 4 had brought to Linux Mint Debian Edition.

Widely differing approaches

The computer on which I am writing these words is running Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop environment, a fork of GNOME Shell. This looks as if it will be the default face of GNOME 3 in the next version of Linux Mint, with the MGSE dressing up of GNOME Shell looking more and more like an interim measure until something more consistent was available. While some complained that what was delivered in version 12 of the distribution was a sort of greatest hits selection, I reckon that bets were being hedged by the project team.

Impressions of what's coming

By default, you get a single panel at the bottom of your screen with everything you need in there. However, it is possible to change the layout so that the panel is at the top or there are two panels, one at the top and the other at the bottom. So far, there is no means of configuring which panel applet goes where, as was the case in Linux Mint 11 and its predecessors. However, the default placements are very sensible, so I have no cause for complaint at this point.

Just because you cannot place applets doesn't mean that there is no configurability, though. Since Cinnamon is extensible, you can change the way that time is displayed in the clock, as well as enabling additional applets. It also is possible to control visual effects, such as the way new application windows pop up on a screen.

GNOME 3 is there underneath all of this, though there's no sign of the application dashboard of GNOME Shell. The continually expanding number of slots in the workspace launcher is one sign, as is the enabling of a hotspot at the top right hand corner by default. This brings up an overview screen showing what application windows are open in a workspace. The new Mint menu even gets the ability to search through installed applications, together with the ability to browse through what's available.

In summary, Cinnamon already looks good, though a little polish and extra configuration options wouldn't go amiss. An example of the former is the placement of desktop numbers in the workspace switcher, and I already have discussed the latter.  It does appear that the Linux Mint approach to desktop environments is taking shape with a far more conventional feel than the likes of Unity or GNOME Shell. Just as Cinnamon has become available in openSUSE, I can see it gracing LMDE too whenever Debian gets to moving over to GNOME 3 as must be inevitable now unless they take another approach such as MATE.

In comparison with a revolution

While Linux Mint are choosing convention and streamlining GNOME to their own designs, it appears that Ubuntu's Unity is getting ever more experimental as the time when Ubuntu simply evolved from one release to the next becomes an increasingly more distant memory. The latest development is the announcement that application menus could get replaced by a heads-up display (HUD) instead. That would be yet another change made by what increasingly looks like a top-down leadership, reminiscent of what exists at Apple. While it is good to have innovation, you have to ask where users fit in all of this when Linux Mint already has gained from what has been done so far and may gain more again. Still, seeing what happens to Ubuntu sounds like an interesting pastime, though I'm not sure that I'd be depending on the default spin of this distro as my sole operating system right now. Also, changing the interface every few months wouldn't work in a corporate environment at all, so you have to wonder where Mark Shuttleworth is driving all this, though Microsoft is engaging in a bit of experimentation of its own. We are living in interesting times for the computer desktop, so it's just as well that there are safe havens like Linux Mint, too. Watching from afar sounds safer.

A few thoughts on Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha 1

After an aborted installation in VirtualBox using the direct installation, I got a VM instance of Ubuntu 12.04 in place by installing from a loaded Live CD session. That proceeded without any trouble and downloaded the required updates too. First impressions revealed a polished Unity interface that ran without any crashes. The task of adding VirtualBox's Guest Additions in the usual way was all that was needed to tart up the experience even more. However, there remains a wish list for improvements to the Unity desktop, so here are mine:

• Merging of an application title bar with the desktop's top panel on maximisation: In 11.10, removing the appmenu packages does force menus into application windows and that seems to be destined as a configurable item in Unity at some point; it'd be good to see it in 12.04 though it's not in the first alpha release. The merging of the panel and title bar would be a good thing to have as a user setting too because I am unconvinced by the current behaviour when there is plenty of screen space.
• Rearranging icons on the application launcher: There appears to be no obvious way to do this at the moment and attempting to move them with a mouse only moves the launcher up and down. There is no doubt that this behaviour is a bonus for those working with small screens, but it is a nuisance unless there is another means for achieving the same end.
• Desktop environment switcher on the login screen: This seems to have disappeared for now. Hopefully, this is an oversight that will see correction in later stages of the development of Ubuntu 12.04. This is how I currently get Ubuntu 11.10 to boot into GNOME Shell, so its loss would be a step backwards. Then, a Gubuntu project would become truly necessary, though I have to say that Linux Mint makes such a viable alternative that I wonder how they would get going.

In summary, it does look as if the Unity interface is getting more and more polished. However, there are niggles that I have described above that, I think, need addressing, and I hope that many of them will be addressed in either 12.04 or 12.10. Though usability seems to be improving, I still am left with the impression that it has a way to go yet.

Getting Gnome Shell going for Fedora 16 running in VirtualBox

There are a number of complaints out there about how hard it is to get GNOME Shell running for a Fedora 16 installation in a VirtualBox virtual machine. As with earlier versions of Fedora, preparation remains a matter of having make, gcc and kernel-devel (kernel headers, in other words). While I have got away with just those, adding dkms (dynamic kernel module support) to the list might be no bad idea either. To get all of those instated, it is a matter of running the following command as root or using sudo:

yum -y install make gcc kernel-devel dkms

The -y switch ensures that any Y/N prompts that usually appear are suppressed and that the installation is completed. Just leave it out if you are inclined to get second thoughts. Another item that has been needed with a previous release of Fedora is libgomp, but I haven't had to add this for Fedora 16 if I recall correctly.

Once those are in place, it is time to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions.  Going to Devices > Install Guest Additions... mounts a virtual CD that can be used for the installation of the various drivers that are needed. To do the installation, first go to where the installer is located using the following command:

cd /media/VBOXADDITIONS_4.1.6_74713/

Note that this location will change according to the release and build numbers of VirtualBox, yet the process essentially will be the same aside from this. Once in there, issue the following command as root or using sudo:

./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

Hopefully, this will complete without errors now with the precursor software that has been added beforehand. However, there is one more thing that needs doing, or you will get the GNOME 3 fallback desktop instead. It pertains to SELinux, an old adversary of mine that got in the way when I was setting up a web server on a machine running Fedora. It doesn't recognise the new VirtualBox drivers as it should, so the following command needs executing as root or using sudo:

restorecon -R -v /opt

Doing this restores the SELinux contexts for the /opt directories within which the VirtualBox software directories are found. The -R switch tells it to act recursively and -v makes it verbose. When it has done its work, hopefully successfully, it is time to reboot the virtual machine, and you should have a GNOME Shell desktop interface when you log in.