Tag Archives: Linux

Fixing the unbroken

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For many months now I have been using Linux Mint 13 MATE edition.

While I had no major complaints about MATE, there were a few features of Cinnamon I thought I might like.  I decided to change.

I backed up my /home partition just in case, and then installed Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon, formatting the root partition but leaving the /home partition as it was.  All went smoothly.

I played around with Cinnamon for a couple of days and decided that yes, my decision to switch was a good one, apart from the fact that the system seemed to be a bit slower.

Being a bit of an experimenter, I decided to update Cinnamon to the Nightly version to see what lay in the future.  This was a mistake.  I immediately ran into problems with my ATI video and some of the minor features of Cinnamon failed to work, such as the ability to customise it.

For a couple more days, I worked with my new setup but the more I worked with it, the slower it seemed to become.  It reached the stage where the disadvantages heavily outweighed the advantages and I decided to cut my losses and return to MATE.

Once again, I took the lazy way out and left my /home partition alone while reinstalling Linux Min 13 MATE.

Very soon I was back to where I started with my original setup and configuration.  I reinstalled all my applications and all went well.

The problem now was that I missed the features of Cinnamon.  I decided in a fit of madness to install Cinnamon Desktop on top of MATE, so at least I would have a choice if I got too frustrated with one desktop or the other.

To my surprise, Cinnamon works very well on top of MATE.  Naturally, all the settings from my previous install of Cinnamon were intact so it worked straight away just as I wanted it.  It appears to be a lot faster that the standalone Cinnamon version, and I have been using it all this week with no problems whatsoever.

A major bonus that resulted from all this messing around is my new choice of Desktops –

Logon Screen

I not only have a choice of MATE or Cinnamon, I also can run Gnome Classic, or even Ubuntu.  As a bonus, I can run XBMC as my desktop.  This is my preferred Media Platform which I installed as a programme.

I am very happy with this setup.  It is running very smoothly and the only thing I can’t do is upgrade Cinnamon to the Nightly version.    That was a hard lesson.

“If it ain’t broke then don’t fix it”?

Rubbish!

Mint 14 Nadia and Remote Access

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I see preparatory work has started on Linux Mint 14 (“Nadia”).

I just hope they integrate Remote Desktop properly on this release.

I wrote some time ago about the difficulties I had with enabling Remote Desktop on 13.  That page has become the most popular page on this site by a factor of about ten.

This is a sample of keywords used to reach here –

Keywords

Let’s hope they don’t make the same mistake with 14?

No Internet access in VirtualBox

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I had a bit of a problem the other day.

I run VirtualBox on Linux Mint and have a copy of Windows 7 running on a virtual machine.  I use it to run those very few programmes that don’t have a Linux equivalent.

For various reasons I decided to install a new copy of 7 and delete the old one.

The installation ran without a hitch and everything worked perfectly except for one thing – I couldn’t access the Internet.

NoInternet

I was able to browse my local network all right and to connect to and browse the other devices.  However I could not access any web sites.  I was able to ping external sites but that’s all.

I tried searching the Net for a solution and found loads of suggestions about changing the network configuration of VirtualBox, mostly suggesting I attach to Bridged Adaptor instead of NAT.  I tried all the suggestions without success, so I had to rely on my own efforts.

The solution was simple and quite obvious.

The installation of the guest software [Windows 7] had configured the Network to default values.  The IP4 was set to “Obtain an IP address automatically” and the DNS to “Obtain DNS server address automatically”.  The solution is to simply manually enter the DNS server IP addresses (I used the addresses supplied by my ISP, though any DNS servers should do).  The main IP address should be left as is, to obtain automatically.

The only thing that baffles me now is how I got the original guest Windows to work!

Time trials

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I thought I would try a little experiment.

I use a Packard Bell Easynote LJ71, with an AMD Athlon II X2 M300, 4Gb memory and a 320Gb Hard Disk.  I have it partitioned roughly 50:50 for Windows 7 and Linux Mint 13.

My experiment was to cold start into each partition with a target of getting a particular web page to display. 

First off I booted into Windows 7.

At first, it seemed to run fairly well, with the wallpaper soon displaying, and the various desktop icons appearing.  I clicked the Quick Start icon for Firefox.

However, Windows wasn’t ready.  It promptly announced that it was doing a few updates, each of which seemed to involve downloading the entire application from scratch.  I was faces with a stream of questions about whether to install Quick Start icons, or Desktop icons.  Did I accept the licence agreement?  Did I want the programme to run after installation?

By this stage, Firefox was running but Windows insisted on grabbing all the resources for the updates.  Finally I got into the web page I was looking for, despite the fact that the anti-virus software update was still loading.

Time taken from switch on to reading the web page?  7:23.8

I then cold started into Linux.

At one stage I thought I had a slight problem as the screen stayed black for a while, but next thing the desktop and all its icons appeared.  I launched Firefox, and went straight into the website.

Time taken from switch on to reading the web page?  1:41.7

So if any of you are wondering why I go on about Linux so much?……….

Running Tweetdeck on Linux Mint 13 MATE

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I am not one of Twitter’s greatest fans.  However I do have a couple of accounts and occasionally I like to keep an eye on them.

My Twitter interface of choice is Tweetdeck, and for the last while I have been having some problems.  My original problem was that Tweetdeck requires Adobe Air, but Adobe don’t support Air for Linux any more.  I eventually sorted that one out and life was quiet for a while.

Six months ago I started using MATE as my desktop of preference and once again I ran into problems with Tweetdeck.  It refused to work on MATE but was quite happy if I logged in using Gnome.  I posted a query on this on the Mint Forums and the reply was that Tweetdeck only runs on Gnome or KDE.

I like challenges and can be quite stubborn when it comes to sorting little problems.  I have upgraded to Mint 13 MATE version and my challenge was to get Tweetdeck running as a normal application.

I decided that one way to do it would be to run Tweetdeck in Windows 7, running in VirtualBox.  I already had the latter set up so I installed Tweetdeck and tried to log in.  No go.  Possibly there was some way or fixing that, but I didn’t fancy firing up VirtualBox just to see a few Tweets anyway.

My next idea was to install Wine and to install Tweetdeck using that.  Success at last.

Tweetdeck was now running very nicely, but I had a new problem – I had to drill down to “/home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Twitter/TweetDeck” to run the programme.  Painful!  I decided to add it as an Application in my Menu.  The command I used was “wine /home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Twitter/TweetDeck/TweetDeck.exe”.  That failed.  It reported that there were files it couldn’t find.  So obviously it had to be run from within the Wine drive.

The solution is simplicity itself.

I created a small shell script that would be run by my Menu entry….

cd “/home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Twitter/TweetDeck”
wine TweetDeck.exe

I saved it as “TweetDeck.sh” in my Home folder (and of course made it executable) and ran that as an Application from my Menu.

Problem solved.