Petra backports available in Linux Mint 13

Introduction

The most significant improvements in Petra are being backported to Maya.

Among other things, this gives Linux Mint 13 LTS users access to the following packages:

  • MDM 1.4
  • Cinnamon 2.0
  • MATE 1.6
  • The latest versions of mintwelcome, mintstick, mintnanny, mintupload, mintupdate, mintinstall, mintsystem, mintmenu and mintdesktop.

How to

To enable the backports in Linux Mint 13, follow the steps below:

1. Open the “Software Sources” tool from “Menu -> Preferences -> Software Sources”
2. Click on the “Backported packages (backports)” checkbox as illustrated in the picture below

3. Launch the “Update Manager” from “Menu->Administration->Update Manager”
4. Select all level 1, 2 and 3 updates
5. Click on “Install Updates”

Once you’re finished installing the updates, restart your computer.

Enjoy πŸ˜‰

FAQ

– Why isn’t this happening automatically via the “main” components of the repositories?

It’s an opt-in. Some people are interested in getting the latest features (and they can follow the easy steps described above). Others prefer not to change what already works. By using the backports component of the repositories, which are disabled by default, people have the choice to upgrade these components or to keep them from being upgraded.

As with every upgrade and new version of software, there is a risk of regression. These upgrades have been thoroughly tested in Petra and are known to work in Maya, but the decision to stick with the current versions or to upgrade to the newer ones is entirely yours. Note that both versions are available in the Linux Mint 13 repositories (via main and backports) and that although the process is a bit tedious, it is possible to downgrade all or some packages back to their original versions.

– Will these backports also find their way into LMDE?

Yes, LMDE will receive these backports as well as a major upgrade called Update Pack 8 in January 2014.

Upgrade Notes

Cinnamon 2.0:

  • Cinnamon 2.0 no longer needs nautilus or gnome-session-fallback. Feel free to remove these components. If you don’t need support for bluetooth and wacom tablets you can also remove gnome-control-center.
  • Make sure to install mint-meta-cinnamon to retrieve all the new important packages coming with Cinnamon 2.0
  • Cinnamon 2.0 uses a Cinnamon backend. Your current settings applied to the GNOME backend, so you will lose your default Cinnamon configuration.

MATE 1.6:

  • MATE 1.6 uses gsettings. Your current MATE settings are stored in mateconf. You will lose your MATE configuration during this upgrade.

MDM 1.4:

  • MDM triggers the installation of numlockx. This may activate numlock on your behalf. If on a laptop you find yourself unable to type your password, please make sure to disable numlock. You only have to do it once. After that, your preference is configurable in MDM.
  • Make sure to install the package “mint-mdm-themes”
  • Make sure to restart your computer after the upgrade, especially if you upgrade MDM.
  • If MDM complains that it cannot find a theme and consequently fails to start, do the following:
    • Make sure you have a file called /usr/share/mdm/distro.conf, if you don’t then upgrade the package ubuntu-system-adjustments
    • Delete your MDM configuration with the command: sudo rm -f /etc/mdm/mdm.conf
    • Reset the MDM configuration with the command: sudo touch /etc/mdm/mdm.conf
    • Reboot the computer

165 comments

  1. Updated mdm 1.4, when restarting, I got “There was an error loading the theme mdm”, and was unable to see the login screen.

    Edit by Clem: As a workaround you can log in via the console (ctrl+alt+f1), “sudo killall mdm” and “startx”. Then launch mdmsetup or “Login Window” from the menu to select a theme. I’ll update ubuntu-system-adjustments to make the transition smoother for other users.

  2. I have never succeded in installing Linux Mint Cinnamon, it always leave a message saying it has crush!!. Please advice

  3. Don’t use a HTML-Loginscreen during update, otherwise you’ll have “fun” to get a working Log-In screen again…

    Are the settings for system-sounds and screensaver miss in general, or is that a misstake from me?

    Edit by Clem: They’re provided by cinnamon-control-center which joined the list of backports this morning and was added to mint-meta-cinnamon only a couple of hours ago πŸ™‚

  4. Rop: Samsung drivers can be downloaded and installed easily from their homepage.
    Will the cinnamon-control-center arrive to Mint 13? Today Mint updated to Cinnamon 2.0, but I have problem with screenlock, can’t disable password. I read that the mentioned package is the solution.

  5. clem

    there is no sound effect in Cinnamon 2.0.14 for Mint 13 but the old window.i have sent you an email with a screenshot to see that if you want.

    “Cinnamon 2.0 no longer needs nautilus or gnome-session-fallback. Feel free to remove these components. If you don’t need support for bluetooth and wacom tablets you can also remove gnome-control-center”.

    it’s clear that you know to remove the components but not me for instance because i don’t know what to take out without to brake the system.
    please write o list with the components i can take out with synaptic. if you know another method please describe it here (terminal?!)

    Edit by Clem: Well, you don’t “need” to remove them. If you’re afraid to brake anything, leave them there.

  6. I just tried upgrading and have 3 broken packages

    cinnamon
    cinnamon-screensaver
    nemo

    I’m not sure if I reboot if it will fix the problem or leave it unusable.

    Edit by Clem: I need more info sd. I can’t see anything wrong with the packages from here.

  7. dd@6

    Clem gave you the exact package names to remove if you so desire, it won’t brake your system.

    In other words, if you decide that you don’t want the gnome fallback anymore, then go to Synaptic Package Manager, and search for “gnome-session-fallback” and remove it. Clem actually gave a list of exactly what can be removed at this time without causing an issue. Same is true if you don’t need bluetooth support. Just search on “gnome-control-center” in SPM, and if it’s installed, feel free to remove it if you want.

    It’s that simple.

  8. Very nice update! Just one question: How can i disable/change the sound effects in Mint 13 with cinnamon 2.0?

    Edit by Clem: Make sure “cinnamon-control-center” is installed. Then run “cinnamon settings”, go to “Sound” and then “Sound Effects”. It’s a bit confusing in Mint 13 because you probably still have gnome-control-center, and its sound plugin looks similar but without the effects. Also, both gnome-control-center and cinnamon-settings call themselves “System Settings” in the menu. If you don’t need bluetooth or wacom support I recommend to remove gnome-control-center.

  9. some problems:

    1. [lost] my desktop settings with the upgrade,

    2. wast[ed] space in the panel. You could lower the spacing to make it equal to the space between the Mint menu Show Desktop icon on the left/right of the “taskbar” area.

    3. Cinnamon has a problem with a VMware guest running in full-screen. When I press the key-combo to bring up the VMware toolbar and press the “minimize” button to minimize VMware to get to the Linux host desktop the screen “gets stuck” until I press some random key … that’ll show the Cinnamon desktop again. However, if you do nothing the VMware screen will be shown till all eternity (GeForce GTX550Ti running the “nvidia-update” proprietary driver). Didn’t happen with the old Cinnamon before the update.

    4. how about adding an option to dismiss the “snap zone” overlay?

    Edit by Clem: Merry Christmas to you too. I removed all the drama. Thanks for what’s left of the feedback. I’ll make sure we add an option to remove the HUD.

  10. I have some problems with keyboard layout in mint 13. i corrently use mint 13 in english version but I have an italian keyboard. since now it worked perfectly.

  11. Hi Clem, when i active the backports repositories to upgrade “only appears” a package: MintUpdate 4.5.6 What is happening..?

    Tanks.

    Edit by Clem: Hola, mintupdate always wants to update itself first before showing you the list of remaining updates. That’s by design.

  12. Now Mint 13 is a real good Operating System. Very nice. Thx to all…

    But i think now is the time to think about an remasterd ISO File
    “Mint 13 with Cinnamon 2.0” and without a 630MB update after installing…

  13. Thanks for the clarification and congratulations for the distro .. I would ask yo if Linux Mint 13 Mate will shows now “real-time” updates (mintupdate).

  14. Clem – Just curious – would like to to know why old MDM themes break?
    I can wait for the artists to update their themes (posted in respective them forums you started) but if a simple fix is required (like removing some deprecated functions), perhaps I can give it a try.

    If theme works in ‘mdm-theme-emulator’ will it work while boot?

    BTW, am hoping that soon you will share some reflections of Petra release and also give us direction (perhaps in segfault after KDE and XFCE releases) of what we can expect in next version…

    Clem and Team – Merry Xmas and New year πŸ™‚

    Edit by Clem: Thanks. They don’t “break”, they just weren’t tested and we had new features in MDM 1.4 which some of them probably had to support (user pre-selection for instance).

  15. Nice to see the additions of the latest version of Cinammon, MDM and Mate backported to Mint 13, there’s another couple of questions if I may:

    1) My laptop does have bluetooth, so do I have to keep gnome-control-center in order to use it or cinnamon-bluetooth (or gnome-bluetooth in this case) comes bundled in the backport update?

    2) About MDM, I try to install manually the “Mint-X” theme and restart it but I receive the error β€œThere was an error loading the theme mdm” too, being unable to see the login screen. Im using MDM in ArchLinux/Manjaro.

    a) Does that have to do something with the distribution?
    b) Should I try to install it as a tar.gz (can’t find where to download it) instead of doing it manual?
    c) Back to Mint, does that mean that I can remove gnome-settings-daemon, and (almost) all the gnome components that I won’t use with no worries?

    For the record, it’s the Mint-X theme which is not available as a theme in Arch and the packager uploaded the latest MDM version (1.4.8 at the moment of writing) to the repositories. Thanks for the help and sorry for the inconvenient

    Edit by Clem: 1) yes, we’d need to write a cinnamon-bluetooth 3.4 otherwise and this wasn’t done. 2) the mint-x theme is part of mint-mdm-themes. the mdm theme is part of the mdm-themes package. Ask your packager to package “mdm-themes” as well, it’s in our github repo.

  16. In an off-topic if I may, you said that you planned to do a couple of videos about Cinnamon, can I discuss that with you and/or the team? If so in which channel so I won’t bother the others?

    Also, Merry Christmas and Happy New 2014, hope you can keep going with the goodies and I expect to see what the future will be with all of you. Enjoy it with your families =)

    Edit by Clem: Thanks Sam. Definitely, we’re in #linuxmint-dev most of the time.

  17. Very strange… somehow this blog post doesn’t mention the old problem – that all MATE settings may be reset when updating from 1.4 to 1.6.

    Edit by Clem: True. Same for Cinnamon 2.0 moving to a cinnamon backend. I’ll add that to the notes.

  18. One more bug detected:
    Nemo fails to thumbnail pictures/videos properly.

    I’m not entirely sure if this relates to my modification, but things worked flawlessly before the update:

    I actually dismissed Totem (as well as VLC) entirely in favor of UMplayer (with mplayer2 out of the mplayer-daily PPA) therefore “replaced” the default thumbnailer, which got uninstalled with Totem’s removal, with ‘ffmpegthumbnailer’.

    Nemo seems to build up the thumb cache in $HOME/.thumbnails, but doesn’t show the thumbnail for the file but just the generic “PNG” or “JPG” or “Video” icon. Once I open, for example, a picture in “Image Viewer”, close it right away and refresh the folder the thumbnail for that particular file shows up.

    This is also a “worked before” problem.

    Oh, I actually like the many little subtle changes you introduced to Nemo with this release, though there’s one thing you could bring back from the old Nautilus:

    Having a “Bookmarks” category in the sidebar where the SMB/SFTP/… bookmarks show up would be great – I loved that sorting until the Gnome Devs decided to take it away and mix the bookmarks into the “My Computer” category of the sidebar.

    Edit by Clem: Check Edit->Prefs->Preview, the “only for files smaller than” in particular, in case it’s due to the default configuration.

  19. Thanks Clem. It is time to release an updated Maya (downloadable ISO). (just a loud thought :-))

    Edit by Clem: Oh no, the next release is our next LTS. We were happy to take Mint 13 users out on a 2 year ride with opt-in backports, and we’ll be looking forward to doing the same with Mint 17 LTS next.

  20. PB – 12

    if you search in synaptic gnome-session-fallback have also gnome-session-common.

    with gnome-control-center have another 3 things: libgnome-control-center1, libgnome-control-center1 and activity-log-manager-control-center.

    search nautilus and have a lot:
    nautilus-data, libnautilus-extension1a, nautilus-open-terminal, nautilus-wallpaper, nautilus-gksu, nautilus-sendto-empathy, gnome-icon-theme-full, libgnomevfs2-common, libgnomevfs2-0, gnome-icon-theme, gnome-icon-theme-symbolic, libgnomevfs2-extra.

    if is so simple tell me what to take out from all of this!

    so above you have a real list. πŸ™‚

    clem

    i don’t like to break the system but if it happens i have a backup with redo the best tool for linux. in 10 min the system is back.

    http://redobackup.org/

    who don’t want to install the system every day as i did in the first 2 weeks with linux πŸ™‚ have a very good solution.

  21. well …

    did the update – got an error with a mdm theme
    then killed mdm via the update and startx
    now I’m stuck with a desktop in CHINESE language.
    I’m not joking here.

    not possible to change anything, because i don’t understand anything.
    not good.

  22. Hi,

    it’s great to have the current LTS version supported properly. It’s good that improved software is backported so that it’s really possible to stick with a stable LTS fpr five years without being totally outdated.

    By the way: What about mintsources? I think this little helper is one of the greatest new mint tools of the last years. I’d really be looking forward having it in Mint 13 too…

  23. dogbert-30

    search with google how to change the language in mint 13 and take the links where you can find screenshots. take a look on youtube too. is not necessary to understand a language but to see where to click. google translate can also help if you know where to go to make the change.

  24. dogbert-30

    and in the future make a backup with redo. if something don’t work you can have the system back in minutes with 3-4 clicks.

  25. @dd
    tnx – I already did – back in dutch again

    now how do i change the mdm theme?
    can’t use the login-settings in the system settings, because i says mdm isn’t running (right, i killed it)

    starting mdm from the console and trying again gives the same error.

  26. @Daniel

    So I used HTML for my log-in screen. Now I don’t know how to get a workable log-in screen again. I can’t even get a terminal working. Any good advice?

    Even grub is lost so I can’t start in repair mode either…..

  27. Hi Clem, I have an question (im curious): Is that possible to have xubuntu 12.04 and then install the cinnamon 2 from mint backport repo on it?

    If so, we can have an working “buntu” family os with the great cinnamon 2 on top of it but without the unnessessary packages from unity or gnome3.

  28. I replaced mdm with gdm for the moment.

    Lesson learnt: installing custom themes from the community is dangerous when you update cinnamon, because if it’s incompatible, you may end with a broken system.

    Reset everything to default first!

  29. Wow, I’m really impressed, thank you so very much team !
    Having created a precautionary Backup of my 32bit Mint13 Cinnamon and Swap partitions on my E5200 rig with my Redo Backup&Recovery CD, I have applied the backports for Level 1 and 2 to find that my old Nvidia-295 driver with multiple resolution selection plus HDMI port Overscan Correction still seems to be working whilst conferring the other new improvements.
    I’m continuing to explore but it’s looking really great !

  30. Thanks.
    But I lost my desktop background during update, can’t find the old image now?

    Also, have duplicate entries in the menu now.

    And, the old ‘brightness and lock’ no longer works… there’s no menu for ‘screen saver and lock’ which I guess is the new menu access…

    (I add the ‘brightness and lock’ to the panel– now no option for that for the ‘screen saver and lock’?)

    The old functionality of ‘brightness and lock’ should still work… yes? work around to make it work?

  31. Well, I just updated MATE on my Mint 13 system, and now panel transparency no longer works on the Mate menu applet. Is there any way to fix this? A bug report was filed by someone on MATE’s Github 4 months ago, but nothing was ever done from what I can tell. I want the transparency back, because otherwise it is a huge, blah gray eyesore on my otherwise beautiful desktop! Please help!

  32. Hi Clem, hi Team,

    tanks for your work! Nice to see Cinnamon 2.0 running now on all my PCs, not only on such with Mint16.
    One Pronlem I had, is that I now I have a lockscreen, befor the update it was disabeld. The Option to disable it again is now gone…. No drama, but if anyone has time to look at it I am glad πŸ™‚

    Like answer 28. I would ask about an updated ISO from Mint13. I see your answer too clem. But I think when you and the team dont have time (or see the need)to make an updated ISO, so give the community the permission to do it.

    Thaks for all
    LMUCS

  33. Sadly I spoke too soon again at Comment 37.
    Any attempted changes of ‘Displays’ resolution now result in an Error message as follows:
    Failed to apply configuration:%s
    GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: No such interface
    ‘org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.XRANDR_2’ on object at path /org/gnome/SettingsDaemon/XRANDR
    So I’m now restoring my precautionary Redo Backup of 32bit Maya Cinnamon.

  34. Just updated my system (Maya with MATE 64-bit) but am now faced with a blank screen. I’ve tried sudo killall mdm, which did seem to do what it’s supposed to do.

    But trying startx just threw lots of errors (though they aren’t consistent: one time it said X10: fatal 10 error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) but it says different things each time.

    Typing mdmsetup just took me back to a blank screen.

    Has anyone got any ideas? Thanks!

  35. One more question: In the past it seemed like MATE was sort of hard-coded to use Caja. I could never get it to use anything else. Has this been fixed? Can I use Nemo or Nautilus or Thunar to run the file management and desktop icons, or am I stuck with Caja? (not that Caja’s bad, just asking)

  36. New .iso files ._.

    in my opinion, all releases should be based on Ubuntu LTS or Debian Stable and a new upgrade .iso every semester

  37. “By using the backports component of the repositories, which are disabled by default, people have the choice to upgrade these components or to keep them from being upgraded.”

    This is a major reason why I like the LM team and use LM.

    Keep up the good work!

  38. When I minimise a window it disappears, it doesnt show in the task bar but still runs. Then I have to kill it in system monitor. Running Maya MATE 32. This bug was not present until I installed this backport.

  39. Actually windows dont show at all in the task bar, even if they are opened.

    Edit by Clem: Hi Rakym, it looks like you’re missing the window list applet. Right click the panel to add the applet.

  40. I have Nadia and after checked backports, nemo, cinnamon and muffin are in update manager.
    This feature is as good as in mint 13?
    Can I proceed safely?

    Edit by Clem: Yes, although note that Nadia backports will bring you from cinnamon 1.6 to cinnamon 1.8.

  41. Hello Clem,

    I’m really liking Cinnamon 2.0. And it feels surprisingly slick/smooth… well… at least -more- than I was expecting it to be.

    But the only problems I’m having with it are the same exact problems I found when I tried earlier versions of Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition (Maya through Olivia; straight from the DVD .iso) and even when I tried to install Cinnamon separately (using Synaptic).

    I’m still seeing white drop shadows on my windows… and the background for the Mint Menu is either missing or is totally invisible. I detailed this as best I could on my forum posting: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=208&t=136419&p=797351#p797351

    Is this a type of bug that has any likelihood of being resolved in any upcoming updates (or perhaps by or before the release of Linux Mint 17)?

    Edit by Clem: It looks like a problem with the GPU/drivers. I would suggest to try a different theme, one that doesn’t use transparency in the menu (the default one sets it to be 97% opaque if I remember well).

  42. In trying to solve my black-screen problem (#45 above) I tried installing LightDM. It didn’t work. So I uninstalled that and tried sudo apt-get update and apt-get upgrade.

    Now I get to a screen of varying shades of green, fading down to grey, which proudly proclaims Linux Mint 13 Maya. I presume this is mdm1.4.8 — and it looks very nice. But …

    I enter my password in the box and have three choices, one of which is the last session, so obviously that’s out. The third is XBMC, which works perfectly, but doesn’t get me into my files “proper”. So I choose the second, which is “Run Xclient script”.

    Sounds promising, but when I do, I get Failed to load session “gnome”.

    And then I get taken back to the green screen.

    I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling mdm, but that didn’t work. Is there a way to uninstall mdm1.4, and go back to mdm1.2?

    Edit by Clem: Tim, it looks like you’re missing some packages here. If you’re running cinnamon please make sure you’ve got mint-meta-cinnamon installed. If you’re running MATE, install mint-meta-mate. It looks like you’re missing the session packages at the very least.

  43. Merry Xmas and best wishes to everyone in 2014.
    I tried to update my Cinnamon Mint 13 using backports and had similar problems as noted on forum comment 14.1, 14.2 comment 27 and comment 46 related to file managers Nemo, Nautils and Caja, desktop behavior/icon size change and login/logout issues.
    I tried to uninstall Nautils, thought conflicting with Nemo, so I removed Nautils and the system is broken, I had similar problem in the past with Mate’s Caja file manager. The updated Cinnamon desktop could not load properly after the update, I could only login as Gnome desktop.
    Luckily I had a backup with Acronis, restored back my original Cinnamon 13 settings in 10 minutes.
    I do not use Mint Mate version 13 because of Caja-too slow, I am satisfied with Mint Cinnamon 13 LTS and Nautils.
    NormPot

  44. Here are the error messages I get when I try tologin using “Run Xclient script”:

    View details (~/.xsession-errors file)
    /etc/mdm/Xsession: Beginning session setup …

    localuser:tim being added to access control list

    Setting IM through /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/all_ALL linked to /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/default

    Failed to connect to the VirtualBox kernel service

    It says the last line four times, though what VirtualBox has to do with it, I haven’t a clue. Nor do I understand why it talks of “Failed to load session “gnome” when I’m trying to login to mate. Perhaps that’s a legacy of trying to use lightdm, but I don’t know. I hope someone out there knows what to do!

  45. Anand,

    Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, I just end up at a (different, presumably gdm) screen, offering me Recovery Console, User Defined Session, and XBMC.

    User Defined Session leads to the same β€œFailed to load session β€œgnome” as before.

    Any more ideas?!

  46. Last thing I’ll post, and then I’m giving up for the night!

    I followed the advice in the article Anand referred to above, went into the Recovery Console, and tried sudo dpkg-reconfigure mdm

    I got the following response:

    mdm is broken or not fully installed

    That about sums it up!

    Edit by Clem: Ok, you’re basically not fully upgraded then. My guess is that you’re missing some important packages such as mate-session or cinnamon-session. Have a look at the errors apt throws and try to fix the issue with mdm and the remaining upgrades. “apt install -f” would be a good start here.

  47. After installing Cinnamon 2.0 on my laptop I was having problems with Cinnamon starting in failsafe mode, the panel could not be adjusted, no applets were in the systray, no launchers were in the panel, the desktop background could not be changed, many of the system settings could not be changed, and no desktop icons were apparent, among other issues.

    Cinnamon-control-center was not installed by default. Installing this gave access to more of the settings. The panel was still not editable. Panel applets were not working nor visible other than the network manager.

    The sum of the issues was diagnosed by renaming the ~/.local/share/cinnamon/applets folder and restarting cinnamon. I restarted the laptop and all issues were resolved. This restored the default applets in a new applet folder. It would appear that for myself, and probably others, some of the issues are due to cinnamon applets that are incompatible.

    Going to System Settings, I added back the applets I wanted in the panel. h/t to mpk in the forums.

  48. @Scott S

    The two things I did, installing cinnamon-control-center and renaming the ~/.local/share/cinnamon/applets folder may resolve some of your problems.

  49. @ Clem Did the Petra update and OS is using less resources { Previously Firefox was hog now using small fraction} System is Much more responsive overall.
    2 small issues 1 is that bottom screen autohide no longer hides,in control panel is checked. 2 I use 2 monitors previously the system remembered to boot application { such as Firefox} to secondary screen after it was dragged there the first time. Now not.
    Great work you and your team do Merry Christmas

  50. Clem says :
    Make sure to upgrade β€œubuntu-system-adjustments”

    How can i be sure it is upgraded?
    I made all the backport upgrades,
    there is version 2012.10.03.1 on Synaptic now,

    Is it the correct version?

    (sorry for bad English)

    Edit by Clem: Yes.

  51. Hello,

    Everything seems to work fine, but my power button action configuration (ask me what to do) isn’t applied to the real power button of my laptop. Only the power button of the mint menu applies my choice.

    I have also set the “interactive” value with dconf editor to some keys (button-hibernate, button-power, button-sleep and button-suspend) under org.cinnamon.settings-daemon.plugins.power but nothing has changed.

    Any idea?

    Thank you for the great job on Mint and cinnamon.

  52. Hi Clem,

    I haven’t tried it (back when I got the update in LMDE I’ve just tweaked all my settings manually to get everything back). Looks like the user who wrote that post had success with it, but nobody else reported yet.

  53. I did this with 64bit MATE and it worked great, except that now I get an error when I look for updates. It says it cannot locate and has to switch to an older version. Any ideas how to fix this?

  54. I removed the last 2 comments. Everybody has a preference when it comes to their favourite desktop environments and that’s OK. The respective teams behind these projects are passionate about what they do and they should be respected, and that includes projects providing desktops we don’t ship (GNOME and Unity namely). So it’s not OK for people to come here and “hate” this or “hate” that. There’s a lot to choose from, it’s all available for free and there are people working really hard behind all of these. There are also places on the Internet where distro-wars and DE-wars are welcome. This blog isn’t one of them.

  55. Hi Clem,

    I think in the section “Ugrade Notes” should be recommended to backup before upgrading, because I think that is a critical upgrade. It could do with Clonezilla for example…

    Best Regards..

  56. Clem,

    Thanks for the suggestions. I tried sudo apt install -f, but it found nothing to remove, upgrade or change. Nor did it throw any errors.

    I have done another sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get install upgrade, which finished OK, but threw the following error four times:
    /usr/bin/mandb: can’t search directory /usr/local/share/man: Permission denied

    I then tried sudo apt-get install mate-session, but got the message:
    E: Unable to locate package mate-session

    So I guess that means you’re right that I’m missing mate-session, though I don’t know how to go about installing it if apt-get can’t find it.

  57. @Clem Thank you for all of your help. I installed the ubuntu update as you said. Everything was working quite well and then I switched the boot screen to HTML and now the GUI will not boot. Error message says: come back when your MDM is adjusted . Now system said it was fully updated before I switched to HTML and did not reboot. I’m using a bootable disc of Mint #9 to send this and do have access to file system but do not know what to change

  58. Hi Tim, you are in the option recovery mode (grub) ?

    In recent versions of Ubuntu, the file system is mounted as read-only, so we need to have it as read and write, to make changes to the file system.

    mount -o remount,rw /

  59. hectorsales,

    You are a genius! I didn’t know I was in recovery mode at all, but rebooting after sudo mount -o remount,rw / did the job perfectly!

    Thank you very much indeed! If you ever need any legal advice …

  60. I’m a noob so forgive me the noob question:

    Why would anyone be using mint 13 and ‘backporting’ so they can have the mint 16 features? Why not install mint 16?

  61. Great job all round – very smooth upgrade.

    Minor glitch though:

    WALLCH wallpaper changer (which worked flawlessly on startup in Cinnamon 1.6 / 1.8) no longer works on startup. Uninstalled / reinstalled WALLCH to no avail. If I change wallpaper manually in WALLCH, it works – it’s just the startup option is frelled.

    Que??

  62. Forget Post #76 – after three subsequent reboots, it inexplicably started working.

    The only consistent wierdness I have now is that a restart of Cinnamon stops gnome-shell-mousewheel-zoom from working. A reboot cures that.

    Excellent job well done to Clem and team – Thanks and Merry Christmas!

  63. After upgrading my laptop (a Sony Vaio with AMD graphics card) is definitely misbehaving: Cinnamon fails and I am always in fallback mode … I tried to rename the applet dir in .local as suggested above but with little effect πŸ™

    Any ideas?

    Rehdon

  64. A followup to my previous post: it seems that something is horribly wrong because I can’t even type in a terminal or in an Alt-F* window, instead of some characters I get numbers or control codes (in the Alt-F* window) … >.<

    Rehdon

  65. The ability to use the latest version of KDE in Mint 13 Maya has existed for some time, just add the kubuntu backports. I didn’t do this until 4.10.3 came out, but now I’m at 4.11.3. The process went well except for one version update (4.11.0 I think) where they messed up a configuration file and the GUI wouldn’t start without some fiddling, but they took care of this with a further update.

    I will have to say however, that for me, 4.11.3 is not as stable as 4.8.5 was (4.10.5 was also fairly stable). I was able to go for a long time without rebooting with 4.8.5 and 4.10.5, but not with 4.11.3 (or any of the other 4.11.x releases).

  66. @ Clem & Team,
    Hear hear for your comment #69. This morning, I posted this comment (slightly edited here) on my Facebook page, and also on a particular Youtube video on one of the well-known Channels (no, I won’t do any name-calling).
    ————————————————
    “Many people, seemingly, fail to remember is that, after the Gnome Developers decided to commit Desktop Environment suicide, by scrapping Gnome 2x development in favour of Gnome 3x Mint AND Ubuntu (and the rest), had to start developing new alternatives. Depending on the route they took, it was bound to be a long, slow and even painful transition. But things are slowly coming together now. Personally, I hated the Unity desktop from day one, but even I will concede and say, spyware apart, it is much better than its original inception. Same goes for Linux Mint’s Cinnamon Desktop ….AND Mate too.
    I would like to see less distro bashing in 2014 and more encouragement. Obviously constructive criticism is always welcome, but some of the lambasting and griping I’ve seen dished out on certain distros, is way over the top, uncalled for, and can only be rightfully termed as “DESTRUCTIVE criticism.” Remember that all Linux distros are attempting to rescue us from the virus-prone BSOD scourge that’s force-fed to us all from Redmond. I applaud all Linux distros for what they are – at the very least – ATTEMPTING to do …even if they don’t quite get it right with a particular release. So with that in mind, a big thank you goes out to EVERY linux development team for EVERY distro. Y’all have made my computing experience much much more enjoyable and productive with your contributions. Thank you all, and continue the good work in 2014.”
    ————————————————
    Come on guys ‘n’ gals, Linux is FREE! You might not particularly like something, but it’s free and there’s plenty of other choices, and most importantly, YOU can’t or haven’t produced ANYTHING worth mentioning, so please lay off the devs of the various distros, and help them with CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISMS by reporting found bugs. They’re under enough pressure and DON’T need to be doing this at all. Let’s show some appreciation please, and stop tearing down the good and hard work they’ve put in. Happy 2014 to y’all. πŸ™‚

  67. I have the same problem as B Jay in comment 27 in that image thumbnails are not created in nemo.

    I tried setting the the smaller than file size in in preview preferences to the maximum value and they are still not displayed. I also changed the show thumbnails to “always” but still not displayed.

    I then ran nautilus from a terminal and viewed the same directory as nemo and thumbnails were displayed in nautilus. I refreshed the directory in nemo and thumbnails were then displayed in nemo. So this seems to be problem with nemo in Cinnamon 2.0 as it worked fine in Cinnamon 1.8.

    Otherwise good job to Clem and the other developers. Cinnamon is a really nice desktop with lots of flexibility.

  68. @Bart

    “Why would anyone be using mint 13 and β€˜backporting’ so they can have the mint 16 features? Why not install mint 16?”

    It’s a good question but the main reason would be that 13 is a Long Term Support Release so backports give you the best of both worlds – some major updates but still a release that is supported for a good while.

  69. After upgraded to Petra backports and rebooted system there is this message in a window:

    —start-message—————————————————
    “Impossibile inizializzare il plugin applications : Traceback (most recent call last):

    File “/usr/lib/linuxmint/mintMenu/mintMenu.py”, line 330, in PopulatePlugins
    MyPlugin.do_plugin()

    File “/usr/lib/linuxmint/mintMenu/plugins/applications.py”, line 1334, in do_plugin
    self.Todos()

    File “/usr/lib/linuxmint/mintMenu/plugins/applications.py”, line 583, in Todos
    self.buildButtonList()

    File “/usr/lib/linuxmint/mintMenu/plugins/applications.py”, line 603, in buildButtonList
    self.updateBoxes(False)

    File “/usr/lib/linuxmint/mintMenu/plugins/applications.py”, line 1740, in updateBoxes
    item[“button”] = MenuApplicationLauncher( item[“entry”].get_desktop_file_path(), self.iconSize, item[“category”], self.showapplicationcomments, highlight=(True and menu_has_changed) )

    File “/usr/lib/linuxmint/mintMenu/plugins/easybuttons.py”, line 481, in __init__
    ApplicationLauncher.__init__( self, desktopFile, iconSize )

    File “/usr/lib/linuxmint/mintMenu/plugins/easybuttons.py”, line 281, in __init__
    c = c_char_p(iconName.encode(‘ascii’, ‘ignore’))

    UnicodeDecodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xe2 in position 43: ordinal not in range(128)”
    —end-message—————————————————–

    And the Mintmenu has no more the application icons.
    Now, what is the solution to have a working Mintmenu?
    (I like Linux Mint Maya with Mate very much, but now there is a little trouble..)

    Edit by Clem: Hi, is this with the mintmenu 5.5.0?

  70. Will the backport work with the Xfce version of Mint 13?
    Is there a benefit to enabling the backport with the Xfce distro?
    I may go to Mate or Cinnamon in the future. I have the DVDs for both Mint 16 distros and am trying them now.

    My wife and I have been using Linux Mint for a few years now and like it very much.
    Mike

  71. Hey Clem,

    When Update Pack 8 comes out in January 2014, will there be a new LMDE ISO? I figured it would be good to get a respin since the last version is from March 2013 and it would be great to start the new year on the right foot. πŸ™‚

  72. I’ve been using 2.0 all day now, digging into its nooks and crannies and I have to amend my earlier assessment.

    This is not a job well done.

    This is an Absolute Triumph.

  73. Hallo Clem,
    yesterday I installed the backports in my Maya Mate and today I can log
    in but cant put in my password in any application that requires it.(Terminal, updatemanager ect). Tested writing my password but characters are switched or missing(0 *) Have installed English and Greek keyboard layout.
    Some idea?
    Basically I’m locked out and cant do anything to fix it.

  74. Hi again,

    I have done the update now. Unfortunateley I have the mdm problem too. It’s interesting that the error message says that the cloud theme is not working although I was not using that theme before the update.

    Now I have the problem that I am not able to fix the problem to get a working system again. I’ve tried killing mdm and starting X mnaually – which worked. But then I cannot change the mdm them because mdmsetup will not start when mdm isn’t running.
    So – how to fix my problem?

    Another comment: I think the mdm problem caused by this update is really critical. A typical user will not be able to fix it without help. I’d recommend to take this update back until that issue is fixed or at least to write a new blog post when the issue is fixed and everyone can do the update safely…

    It’s a pity that this issue occurs – I was really looking forward for the backports – Cinnamon 2 (and mintsources) especially…

    Best regards,

    Lucas

  75. @lucas
    I can confirm this issue – I tried to describe it yesterday in comment #34.
    My solution for the moment was to remove mdm and install gdm instead.

  76. @Bart #76 Mint 13 is LTS (Long Term Support). It will be supported until 2017 whereas LM 16 will be supported for 9 months (next year). Another reason could be that an older version may run better if you have older hardware, but so far I have been able to run the latest versions of LM in my 4-year-old HP mini. Mind you, LM17 will be the next LTS.

  77. Everything is working great for me, but on a test system I only upgraded cinnamon and then it broke…. because muffin wasn’t upgraded.

    Why aren’t muffin, nemo, cinnamon-control-center (correct version numbers for each as a minimum) a dependency of cinnamon? That way many here would not have the broken problems of not getting all the packages updated needed. Just curious as to why these dependencies are not set in the debian control file for cinnamon.

    Thanks for the great effort to support LTS users. You are doing a great job, especially as this will be the “current LTS” when XP dies this coming spring. I think Mint 13 with backports to Cinnamon 2.0 are fresh enough (and supported long enough) for people to make the jump!

  78. Gents…I usually follow the philosophy:”If its not broke don’t fix it”…..So what would be the advantage to enable these Backports in Maya?

  79. Mint 13 had an old Mate version i did not like. Now its awesome not having to reinstall Linux Mint until 2017. Thanks!

  80. @Lucas (#85): After “startx” switch to tty2, log in and type “sudo service mdm start”, then switch back to the GUI (ctrl + alt + F7 or F8)
    then you can start mdmsetup…

  81. For the nemo thumbnails problem:

    nemo generates thumbnails in “~/.cache/thumbnails/normal/” but *read* thumbnails from “~/.thumbnails/normal/”.

    I symlink “~/.thumbnails” to “~/.cache/thumbnails” and nemo displays image and video thumbs. I don’t know if is technically correct but it works.

  82. Congrats team, good work πŸ™‚

    But i have one question i upgraded my cinnamon on LM 13 using stable ppa

    ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable

    Can i still continue with this ppa or there is need to switch to backports?
    Which is more safe option for me ?

  83. An idea for the future Cinnamon upgrade in LMDE: if it’s possible, create a script for migrating the settings to the new backend. This could be even made a part of the package installation (e.g. in the postinst script).

    I’m not using Cinnamon myself, but I just foresee the same flow of angry comments when Cinnamon 2.0 hits LMDE and the users lose their settings…

  84. @Clem (Re to #27):

    Nemo is set to thumbnail local files up to 1GB.

    Cleared the $HOME/.thumbnails cache directory, logged out, logged back in, opened a folder containing a few test files (PNG, JPG, MP4, MKV, AVI) and Nemo proceeded the same way. Only showing the generic image-type / video icon(s) unless opened in Image Viewer (doesn’t work with the video files and UMplayer) … then the image that was opened in Image Viewer will be shown as a thumbnail (same goes for opening a image and then browsing through the directory in image viewer with the “Next” button).

    That being said … I had a terminal open to have an eye on $HOME/.xsession-errors and the process list. To cut it short:

    – .xsession-errors (nor any other log) does not show any error relating to Nemo and/or thumbnailing (there’s just a Python related error in .xsession-errors relating to a component of Cinnamon).
    – ffmpegthumbnailer actually runs in the background (of course, the cache in .thumbnails is being built up) and goes through each file in the directory (video and image) for as long as the Nemo window is open or Nemo is inside the directory. Works as intended.

    I did a test with Nautilus (installed it for a test), and I get the same result as with Nemo.

    I setup a VM with Mint 13 (updated everything except for Cinnamon), cloned the Host configuration (same packages / modifications) and there it works.

    No idea what could be the cause as I don’t see any error messages anywhere … so I’ll just endure the “dysfunct” behavior and will wait for the next Mint release to hop from Mint 13 to the next LTS-based release (unless you guys have some ideas about what I can try to maybe track down the problem).

    Anyhow, thanks and a merry christmas to y’all.

  85. Hi, I am just a newbie, and I was wondering what are the main benefits of installing the Petra backports into Maya xfce?

  86. Unfortunately dissapointed with this update to Linux Mint 13 Mate 32bit.
    The fonts under the icons on the desktop have turned black; they were previously white and I cannot see how to correct this. This is awkward because the plain dark colour desktop I like to use means that the icon fonts are almost invisible. Also Mint Menu doesn’t function correctly: right click on a menu item to see its properties and all that happens is that the item is added to the desktop. I can drag the cursor down to the “edit properties” item in the drop-down box, but it did not used to function like this.

    I love Mint 13. At least I used to. How can I get back to its previous state?

  87. Dear Daniel (#88),

    thanks for your help. Now I’ve got a working system again. It seems that mdm switched to html themes by itself. Once I switched back to the gdm theme I was using all the time it now works again.

    Another thing: MDM seems to remember the last user – depending on the theme this is not useful. If your theme doesn’t provide a userlist it seems to be impossible to login as another user or am I wrong here?

    Regards,

    Lucas

  88. I have experienced a problem in Mint 13 Xfce (64 Bit): After the upgrade the mintMenu cannot be loaded any more via XfApplet. Now I use the default menu of Xfce but I really miss the mintMenu. I still don’t have a workaround for this problem.

    I have tried to downgrade to an older version of mintmenu but this doesn’t help

    Edit by Clem: It should help. “apt install mintmenu=5.3.7”. The new mintmenu had to switch to dbus/g.i to be compatible with MATE 1.6 and that unfortunately means it no longer works with Xfce. The MATE Xfce compatibility applet was written by the Xfce guys and ported to MATE 1.0 by ourselves… unfortunately neither projects are maintaining it going forward. In the Xfce edition we’re now backing a new native menu application called Whisker Menu.

  89. Lucas@92

    You should be able to go into your login screen settings from the system settings panel and configure how it behaves. Basically, you can turn off the remember last user function by going into the options tab of your login window configuration tool. That’s found at the bottom of your system settings menu. At least you should then be able to type user name and password if you choose not to have a user list. I tested it, and that’s how it works. Hope that helps.

  90. Total disaster…

    I started the pc, went to get a cup of coffee, and it automatically logged me into some new acct and now I can’t get back into my own acct…

    Tried switch user, log off, and restart, shutdown reboot– it just automatically sends me to this new account it created… don’t have any option to get back into my old acct.

    this is what I expect from Windo$, not Linux.

    Buggy, buggy buggy. No more backport nonsense for me.

    At this rate I’ll be going to xfce.

  91. Thank you Mint Team..! Worked like a charm and it feels like a hole different Machine now. Works just beautiful. Just my left handed mouse did not work for like three hours, before another update came in.
    Nice work!!

  92. So I go into the menu, and there’s 2 ‘Users’ in the menu, (had this duplicate icon problem earlier) and the one that says ‘User Accounts’ must be the old one because when I tell this acct not to auto-login it doesn’t change the setting… sure, the gui says it’s changed… but it still auto login.

    But if I try the other menu ‘Users and Groups’ it pops nothing. Even from the System Settings gui under Admin, Users and groups, nothing.

    I booted into recovery, dropped into a root term, used deluser, and it says ‘can’t lock /etc/passwd, try again later….’

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

    so I #login, my user and acct… okay, $startx

    ‘user isn’t authorized to run xserver from startx’ or whatever…
    hahahahahahaha

    man you wanna keep me out of my acct, at least from this new cinnamon backport upgrade don’t you???

    the only way into my acct is from a root shell now. Someone please tell me how to go back to the old login screen…

    xfce…. looking good to me…

  93. wow, scary ! I boot this morning at work and I have this blank screen saying “An error occured while loading BlackNBlue theme”.

    Hopefully I read those previous posts and I applied the switch of the desktop manager. Thank you guys…

    Since I already had lightdm installed (instead of gdm) I only had to do a “dpkg-reconfigure lightdm” and chose lightdm in place of mdm.

    I followed Anand’s (#56) way to do so.

    BTW: before this, I did apt-get dist-upgrade + apt-get -f install; did not solve the pb

    PS: running Maya XFCE 64bit edition

  94. @Clem #108:
    A downgrade of mintmenu to 5.3.7 makes the mintMenu reappear in the list of available XfApplets, but the attempt to load it just produces an error message.

  95. @ Thanos #105. Hi, Thanos: Read my answer in #94. Since LM13 was launched in 2012, there have been a number of improvements, mostly on Cinnamon. If you read them you may be interested in experiencing them in your LTS install, that’s what backports are for.

  96. Thanks Clem.

    I’m confused by this sentence in your introduction:

    “The latest versions of mintwelcome, mintstick, mintnanny, mintupload, mintupdate, mintinstall, mintsystem, mintmenu and mintdesktop.”

    I have just completed the process you outlined above, and removed the packages you said could be removed (nautilus, and gnome-session-fallback).

    However:

    In the main Cinnamon Menu (lower left corner), I still have 2 listings of: Color, Displays, Network, Power, Sound, System Settings.

    In addition, usb-imagewriter (0.1.3-1linuxmint-2) is still present (i.e.-no mintstick).

    I guess I have expected too much??

    For example,to me, the “new-latest menu” looks just like the “old menu” and not what I enjoy in (Mint 16). There is no latest mintstick as indicated, and synaptic does not reflect the latest version (1.1.9). (My Maya synaptic shows latest version of mintstick as 1.1.8).

    Thanks!

  97. Just a follow up to my disaster from yesterday, if anyone gives a poo.

    the auto-login was from an old user that was copied over from Mint Lisa…(I had a dual-boot Mint 12 and 13 for awhile) but the user never did auto-login on Maya, *ever*, until this new upgrade. Then after the first auto-login, (after about 30 seconds) I could never get to any other user using any means in the GUI, (except root term) as described in my previous posts above.

    Using the GUI ‘User Accounts’ wouldn’t stop the auto-login… (even though the GUI said auto-login was turned off… it wasn’t.) 2 icons for User Settings and Users and Groups, the old GUI worked as a GUI, but never actually reset the login to off, the new GUI menu never worked at all… (maybe because the auto-login user wasn’t an Admin…)

    with the duplicate menu items, some not working correctly, and the auto-login forever error with no way to easily fix, my solution was (sadly) the same one I learned form years of agonizing experience using Window$: keep your most important work on a separate partition so you can format the OS partition, then reinstall OS or a better OS…

    First time I ever had to do that using Mint though…
    No more back ports of Cinnamon.
    Nightmares of Windo$ are no fun.

    Cinn. 1.8 is where I’ll stay until I see something that is really worth it — I understand that you’re trying to compete with MS-Gui-BS with all the fancy bells and whistles and jingles.

    I like meat and potatoes, keep the caviar and all the ‘salesmen’s options’

    And since I’m kinda ranting:
    ***** HEY CLEM: *****

    I don’t like / use nemo because I can’t find an ‘Open in Terminal’ option in the toolbar pulldowns nowhere… why not default in Nemo?, also, how-to easily create / edit right-click menus…

    And, if you want to port some Windo$ features, how about the option of showing large thumbnails (using ctrl-scroll-wheel) when selecting files to upload (using the standard file selection gui), (i have to use gThumb and copy-paste the “image” into the file ‘location’, pain)

    And why do we have a huge .thumbnails folder in my home directory? (21k+ thumbnails, ‘normal’ and ‘large’, GBs of space, not to mention the security risk..) Why not cache thumbnails right in the same directory?… or at least give me the option of caching and where… for sure a crypto-cache…

    Just give me the meat and potatoes, I’ll skip keep the caviar.

    If the future of Cinnamon is ‘Windo$ Lite’ then I’m jumping ship to XFCE… not my favorite idea but… gotta do what I gotta do.

    no Windo$ wanna-be, please.

    /end-of-rant

  98. Scott@122rant

    Wow!

    Anyway, I don’t think it’s Clem’s intention necessarily to imitate Windo$. I think he wants something that appeals to MOST users, and works.

    Also, do you not have the right-click menu? I’ve found that the right-click menu has the open in terminal option virtually everywhere within Nemo. Right click on any folder, or within any directory and you get that option.

    Maybe you and I are talking about 2 different things. As for the other issues, I suppose it’s just a matter of taste and what works for you. Maybe XFCE is the better choice for you, but I scarcely think Clem is bothered by that. He’s the one to give us the options to begin with. In the end, it’s up to you.

  99. Scott S@122

    Your statement

    “why do we have a huge .thumbnails folder in my home directory?
    (21k+ thumbnails, ‘normal’ and ‘large’, GBs of space, not to mention
    the security risk..) Why not cache thumbnails right in the
    same directory?… or at least give me the option of caching and
    where… for sure a crypto-cache…”

    struck a chord with me.

    I have an ‘rsync’ script that I run every time I log off after
    making a lot of changes in my directories (web page updates,
    image updates, code updates, distro ISO file download, etc.).

    The first couple of times that I ran it, the semi-verbose option
    of ‘rsync’ revealed that often hundreds or thousands of files in
    the ‘$HOME/.thumbnails’ directory were being backed up to my
    USB disk drive that I used for backup.

    Over following months, I found that various elements of
    the Gnome 2.x environment were making most of those thumbnail
    files — elements like ‘eog’ (Eye of Gnome’) and the Nautilus
    file manager … and the ‘File Open’ dialog of Gnome 2.x.

    I make a ‘cleanup’ script that I now run before a run of the
    ‘rsync’ script. That ‘cleanup’ script removes files from
    the ‘$HOME/.thumbnails’ directory — as well as junk that
    is put in various Flash and web browser (Seamonkey and Firefox)
    sub-directories.

    Scott, your suggestion of allowing the user the option of
    specifying where those files are created sounds like a good
    idea. In my case, I would direct them to ‘/tmp’, where they
    would be deleted automatically by the job that cleans out
    the /tmp directory … every time you logoff(?).

    But I would still have to run my cleanup script, just before
    my rsync script, just before logging off.

    Concerning the implementation of your suggestion:

    I think that Clem does not have control over all the
    various applications that put files in the $HOME/.thumbnails
    directory. For example, I turned off making thumbnails in
    the Nautilus file manager ‘Edit > Preferences > Preview’
    option … hoping that that would solve my ‘tons of thumbnails’
    problem. Unfortunately, that did not keep ‘eog’ and the
    ‘File Open’ dialog of Gnome 2.x from putting files there.

    Although Clem may have the ability to keep Cinnamon from
    putting files in $HOME/.thumbnails, he will not be able
    to control where MATE and ‘Eye of MATE’ and the MATE
    ‘File Open’ dialog put thumbnails — nor where other applications,
    such as image file viewers, put thumbnails. If you use MATE, you
    will have to make your request to the MATE developer-maintainers.

    However, I think it is great that you bring up this issue.
    It is certainly something that ‘desktop-environment developers’
    should consider in their development and enhancement activities.

  100. Hi!<

    I had upgraded my linuxmint 13 to cinnamon 2.0 but i was unable to open session in it. I had to install cinnamon-screensaver to resolv this issue.

    Nice product btw.
    Tank you.

  101. Hi,
    same problem as 91. right side of keyboard just numbers. keyboard layout is english us with euro on 5. but seems totally different only by using Fn key it’s possible to type words.
    β€œubuntu-system-adjustments” β€œmint-mdm-themes” both up to date
    cann’t find ‘disable numlock’ in keyboard layout…

    would appreciatie some help

  102. Hi
    Looks nice, some speed problems on my old laptop.
    But!
    Have probably same problem as @91: Keyboard configured as English (US with euro on 5). On right side of keyboard letters are now numbers. Layout completely different. Have to use the “Fn” button to type letters on the right side of the keyboard.
    β€œubuntu-system-adjustments” en β€œmint-mdm-themes” are up to date.
    Disable numlock key not found in system settings.

    How can i get the use of my keyboard ie my laptop back.

    i’d appreciate some help

    Edit by Clem: Hi, disable numlock on your keyboard/laptop itself.

  103. This is a follow-up to my Post #127 above — on thumbnails.

    For those who think Gnome 2.x was too slow on netbooks:

    I should mention that I think that turning off (MOST OF) the
    creation of thumbnail files in Nautilus via ‘Edit > Preferences > Preview’
    PROBABLY was most responsible for making Gnome 2.x usable on
    my old Acer netbooks with the earliest (slowest) Atom chips.

    Reducing the image processing going on every time I navigated
    to a directory containing a lot of files PROBABLY made the
    use of Nautilus on a netbook feasible (far less frustratingly slow).

    It was interesting to me, however, to find that I could make
    a file-navigation-and-selection utility with Tcl-Tk (a SCRIPTING
    language) that is much faster than Nautilus (a COMPILED program)
    — even with thumbnail-making turned off.

    For example, with the Tcl-Tk script, I could bring up a list
    of over 1500 files (in /usr/share/doc or /usr/lib) in a fraction
    of a second, rather than 5 to 15 seconds with Nautilus.

    Just goes to show that ‘compiled programs’ are not always
    faster than ‘scripts’. It depends on how they are written —
    what they do ‘behind the scenes’.

  104. Chris@123

    “My question is, when are these upgrades coming to LMDE? Seems like we LMDE users are always at the end of the line.”

    You do realize that the LMDE project is not just seemingly at the end of the line. Rather, it is decidedly so in some key ways. It’s not that it absolutely lacks importance to Clem, as he still maintains it. And there seems to be a growing user base. Which is a good thing for you and LMDE fans, because I’m sure that Clem is well aware of the dynamics of his various projects.

    However, in the larger scope, it still takes a relative back seat to the main Linux Mint project, which is still the Ubuntu based version. This is not to say that that won’t change as time goes on.

    But remember, you did choose LMDE. Along with that choice comes its development track. Again, not a bad thing, just a reality. I for one, would love LMDE to work for me as well as the main edition, but there are inherent inconveniences for me that totally rob me of time when bringing a full LMDE system up and running. But that’s been my experience and should not be used to discredit LMDE as a whole. It is what it is, which is a great project, and it is improving.

  105. Clem: I just want to point out to you items in my posts #131 and #127 above
    that may be of use to you — in developing Nemo — and Cinnamon in general.

    The directories ‘/usr/share/doc’ and ‘/usr/lib’ — containing
    more than 1500 files each — are handy to use when checking if
    Nemo is displaying files quickly, when navigating into huge directories.

    Furthermore, handling the $HOME/.thumbnails directory nicely, as
    mentioned in #131 and #127 — in particular, giving the user some options
    to turn off making-and-displaying of thumbnails — and giving
    the user the option of specifying the directory in which those
    thumbnails are put —- would be nice. That includes EVERYWHERE
    — in all software components.

    For example, if Cinnamon includes its own ‘File Open’ dialog,
    (and its own image file display routines), then it would be good
    to allow a user to turn of thumbnail making and image display
    in those parts of Cinnamon — as well as in Nemo. That is something
    the Gnome 2.x developers overlooked — in the Gnome 2.x ‘File Open’
    dialog and in ‘eog’ (Eye of Gnome).

  106. Addendum to post 133:

    The response time of Nemo, in ICON-DISPLAY-MODE, may be pretty slow
    in directories like ‘/usr/share/doc’ and ‘/usr/lib’ — containing
    more than 1500 files each. But in LIST-MODE — which I hope
    Nemo will always support, for ‘power-users’ (like software developers)
    — the list of filenames should appear in a fraction of a second —
    even for 2,000 filenames.

  107. Addendum to post 134:

    ‘Power-users’ would include ‘system administrators’ — and people
    trying to get their Linux distro installed and working properly …
    πŸ™‚

  108. Hello all. To all those that have the MDM login, black screen, “MDM could not load theme xx” error, THERE IS A FIX! This guide is noob friendly.

    THE PROBLEM:

    When updating to the latest Petra backports, a user will get a black screen and will not be able to login through MDM after a system reboot. This will happen if the user was using an HTML theme, or a custom MDM theme before performing the backport update.

    Unfortunately, Clem’s fix from comment #2 will not work. After typing ‘startx’ and getting the cinnamon session to work, the program “login window” does not appear in the menu! Running ‘gksudo mdmsetup’ in the terminal also does NOT work! It returns the error “MDM is not started blah blah” and starting MDM from the terminal will give you a black screen and an error! Please do not run MDM while you are in the startx session.

    THE SOLUTION:

    To fix this mess, you will have to open a terminal (Menu -> Accessories -> Terminal) and edit the MDM configuration file manually. Fear not. Type “sudo nano /etc/mdm/mdm.conf” into the terminal, but without the quotes (only what’s inside the quotes). After typing in your password, you will see the contents of the configuration file. Now, scroll down with your arrow keys and comment out the lines that say:
    HTMLTheme=Clouds GL
    GraphicalThemedColor=#2f2f2

    by placing a ‘#’ pound/hash symbol in front of the lines until it looks like so:
    #HTMLTheme=Clouds GL
    #GraphicalThemedColor=#2f2f2

    *note that your theme name and theme color might be different from mine. Also not that you might not have theses lines in your config. If so, move on..

    Next, scroll to the line that says “GraphicalTheme=XXXX” and replace it so that it looks like so:
    “GraphicalTheme:Mint-X”

    Lastly, press “CTRL + x” to save, press “y” once to confirm the save, then press “enter” to write the changes to your configuration file.

    Done! Now reboot and you should have a working system.

    HOW TO PREVENT THIS ISSUE:
    Switch or make sure you have a stock, not custom, MDM theme selected BEFORE you update the the latest Mint.

    ***
    Note that accessing this config will also allow you to switch to a different user by editing the appropriate line/s. This is for those that are stuck and unable to login with a different user with MDM. Commenting out the default user line might allow you to select multiple users again.

    Have a great day!

  109. Clem: you should probably warn people in the Original Post to revert to a stock MDM theme before updating through the backports. This will save some people lots of headaches. I posted a fix for this problem above.

    Thank you and the team for all your hard work. Merry Christmas!

    Edit by Clem: Hi Anton, Merry Christmas to you too and thanks for looking into this. I think you put the finger on a real issue here. I added instructions on how to solve the problem (it’s easier to reset the config with /etc/mdm/mdm.conf). We’ll also change the way MDM falls back.. it’s currently looking for a theme called Circles and if that theme isn’t found it just fails, we’ll make it default to the GTK greeter when the specified theme isn’t there, that should make it less prone to failure.

  110. First things first: my apologies to Clem..lol… nemo DOES have a ‘Open in Terminal’ option… my mistake. (but I am a 6x mint $ doner so that gives me the *right* to complain and *rant if I want to.) πŸ˜€

    After my disaster with the backport and re-install of Maya, I downloaded a fresh copy of Mint16 and am now running it inside Virtual Box… on a Maya host…. (hey, whatever works.) Side-by-side with the Desktop-scroller extension and Petra in Full screen.. I can scroll between Maya and Petra now with a click of the mouse wheel..

    I skipped all the other releases since 13… so this is new to me…

    And I have to say– it looks darn good!! So kudos to Clem and team from one mean S.O.B. who just wants meat and potatoes…

    1) I like the return of the mint leaf at boot-up, no more black-hole… good move.

    2) Love the launcher!! I’ve been wanting something like that for years! Use a .jpg as an icon for your own shell scripts.. Fantastic!

    3) The desklets are very cool too!

    maybe I’ll try backporting again… (hahaha).. I already re-installed Maya once this week so.. πŸ˜‰

    @uneekname

    the .thumbnails issue…

    my question is, why aren’t the thumbnails cached in a .sub-directory of where the files are? Why are they cached in my Home directory from all over the place, with some md5 check-sum name? (I don’t know if that’s what it’s doing…it’s just a guess by looking at the filename.)

    So, if I have a partition with common files, (which I do) and I have multiple users on my PC, they all have a ~/.thumbnails with the exact same .png thumbnails in them.
    Is it the same way on a server, I wonder…?

    .thumbnails could be / should be IMO a .sub-directory of each directory.

    There’s probably some reason why it can’t be… that don’t make a lick of sense to me..haha

    one way I deal with it if I don’t want to cache thumbnails is:

    mount –bind ../someplace-else/.foo ~/.thumbnails, then just umount and delete .foo

    Okay. That’s all.

    **** Happy Holidays to y’all.

  111. hello clem and team mint, I just wanted to list some problems on macbook 2007 desk maya 13 mint cinnamon lts after updates to petra backports: 1) power button … directly off pc without ‘request. 2) mouse pad … should not be more ‘clicks with touch. 3) disappeared from the system tray icon bluetooth … but ‘functional devices. 4) Double icons in menu ‘… a) startup applications … b) file … c) the system settings … d) color … e) monitor … f) user account. otherwise everything ok, great work …. sorry for my poor english … Merry Christmas and happy 2014

  112. – About the $HOME/.thumbnails issue …

    In my case (ffmpegthumbnailer because Totem and related thumbnailer entirely removed) it seems to be a odditiy between the Shell and the Filemanager.

    Now that I had some time to dive into the problem I noticed that with Cinnamon 2.0 there’s a $HOME/.cache/thumbnails directory now (not worked out yet from where that one comes from, read: what thumbnailer/process is caching into there) which seems to “clash” with $HOME/.thumbnails.

    A “for-the-time-being” (unless Clem or any of the Mint guys feel like wanting to enlighten us) workaround is to remove the $HOME/.thumbnails directory and create a symlink to $HOME/.cache/thumbnails

    This brings things back into order, at least for me.

    – About VMware Workstation and Cinnamon …

    Clem, the Cinnamon 2.0 backport not only has the “Minimizing a VMware full-screen client” issue (to refresh your memory, when trying to minimize a full-screen VMware guest I need to press some random key to make the screen refresh and display the Cinnamon desktop of the host), it also crashes VMware. This means … the longer VMware runs, the less responsive the mouse inside the VM gets (this is NOT a host related hardware issue!). At some point the mouse-cursor in the VM will start to react slower than the actual mouse movement and, in case the VM isn’t shutdown and the system rebooted, lock up the system (causing a segfault and kernel oops in the Nvidia proprietary driver).

    It now happened twice since the Cinnamon 2.0 backport install (I knew I was going to make a mistake), and it _never_ happened with Cinnamon 1.8.

    I guess I’ll use the x-mas holidays to backup my $HOME stuff and VMware related directories to switch to the KDE based flavor where at least the UI is consistent with the file-manager and should even work flawlessly with VMware.

  113. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you.

    I have been using Linux Mint Debian Edition (64 bit) in my Desktop for the last two months. I switched to LMDE from Debian Squeeze. My desktop configuration is intel core 2 quad processor, intel motherboard and no dedicated graphics card. The desktop is a locally assembled one. It works fine and gets updated without any trouble. I liked the mate environment and LMDE rolling distribution. Thanks to LMDE team for the wonderful OS.

    I plan to buy a laptop for my computational/research use. I have identified a laptop with the specs given below and want to install LMDE in that. Before purchasing the laptop I would like to know from the community members and developers whether LMDE has support for the hardware. My major concern is about graphics card and wifi.

    Specs:
    ——
    Lenovo Essential G505s (59-380146) Laptop (Available in India)
    OS: Free DOS

    Processor APU Quad Core A10
    Variant 5750M
    Chipset A76M
    Clock Speed 2.5 GHz with Turbo Core Technology Upto 3.5 GHz
    Cache 4 MB

    System Memory 8 GB DDR3

    HDD Capacity 1 TB

    Dedicated Graphics Memory Type GDDR3
    Dedicated Graphics Memory Capacity 2.5 GB
    Graphic Processor 512 MB AMD Radeon HD 8650G (Integrated) and 2 GB ATI Sunpro HD 8570 Graphics (Dedicated)
    ———–

    Please give your suggestions.

  114. Follow-up-I added to panel “Main Menu”, which “almost” does the job. However, I’d really like to have the “Favorites” again. Please assist; thank you.

  115. Hello mate developers I’m using mate and i have been using it more than 1 month what i wanna say is dat the mate main menu bar needs to be speed up a little bit i can’t describe my problem due to insufficient English but i will do my best what i mean is when I’m opening Firefox and libreoffice and Thunder and I’m working on them if i suddenly clicked on the menu bar it will sometimes to appear which mean a little bit slow only in the first click it’s need to be fast after kick off only i face this when i don’t click on the menu for a while and then click on the first click accretion is slow(means look like there standby time) but forward everything is fine Thank you very much hope my above texts are understandable

  116. Well, just took the plunge again, (round 2 for those of you keeping score at home) lol πŸ™‚

    I backported to a different laptop this time, a 64-bit, but with no auto-login account, and there weren’t any major problems like before.
    πŸ˜€

    But I have found some issues

    1. There a still the duplicate icons in the Main Menu (MM):

    Color
    Displays
    Network
    Power
    Sound
    Startup Applications
    System Settings
    Universal Access
    User Accounts (for gnome-control-center) and Users and Groups (for cinnamon-settings)

    ******@Clem:

    1.0 [Main Menu] and cinnamon-settings, gnome-control-center

    It would be easier to understand the duplicate icons if the Menu ‘Comment:’ changed to “New” or something.. πŸ™‚

    I see that there are actually 2 “System Settings”: one for cinnamon-settings and the other for gnome-control-center, but what makes it confusing to me is the 2 menu icons labeled “System Settings” under [Main Menu (MM)]->[All Applications]. The only difference being the Comment: “Control Center”, for one of them. (Which doesn’t actually refer to gnome-control-center, but to cinammon-settings, btw).

    1.1 If I open the Menu Editor, there is a [System Tools]. So now in the “Menu System” there is: Menu Editor [System Tools], a [MM-Favorites-System Settings] (aka cinnamon-settings), [MM-Administration-System Settings] (aka gnome-control-center), and [Preferences]-[System Settings]-“Control Center” (aka cinnamon-settings).

    Confused yet?

    1.2 Shouldn’t there be a [MM]->[Preferences]->[Cinnamon Settings] aka cinammon-settings, and a [MM]->[Administration]->[System Settings]-“Control Center”, aka gnome-control-center? Would be nice to access each from the other, or at least access gnome-control-center from cinammon-settings.

    ***@Clem:
    Are you planning on deprecating gnome-control-center?
    Because I like the ‘gnome-control-center network’ better than the new ‘cinnamon-settings network’, more info I need quicker with gnome, plus, gnome’s [Options] button.

    The Main Menu System’s icons and labeling / locations are getting confusing for people, especially vis-a-vis gnome-control-center and cinnamon-settings. (as explained above)

    BRIGHTNESS AND LOCK no longer allows changing the brightness.
    (I brought this up before) “Brightness” is now under “Screen Saver and Lock,” and there doesn’t seem to be an individual Menu icon for it, (that works, like the old “Brightness and Lock”; “Screen Saver and Lock is now only accessible through the cinnamon-settings “System Settings” menu. (Now if I can just remember witch “Systems Settings” Menu icon to click) lol πŸ˜›

    ****@Clem & B. Jay & uneekname:

    Thanks B. Jay for pointing out the new thumbnails cache site.

    This whole ~ thumbnails system needs re-worked, IMHO. So now not only do I have a directory ~/.thumbnails from Nautilus / and gThumb, but also a new one ~/.cache/thumbnails from Nemo & Cinnamon2, (twice the amount of thumbnails now? How many duplicates?) but Nemo doesn’t actually create the thumbnails that I’ve seen; it just shows an image-type-icon. I have to use Nautilus / gThumb for the actual ‘thumbnail-factory’ “Creation wizard”, then Nemo will see the thumbnails in the folders.

    I’ll make this an issue on the Cinnamon github. Take a look at how the old M$-Win ACDsee program (and other M$-Win viewers) worked: they make a hidden .cache or .thumbs file, and it gives the user the option of it being placed in the same directory or a custom directory.

    As a general rule, I say avoid copying anything from Micro$oft and it’s “blessed” associates, but in this case, it’s warranted.

    So, bottom-line: the backport to this Maya Laptop succeeded, with some minor issues.

    πŸ™‚

    Scott

  117. Uh-oh, here’s a new one: the brightness control slider in “Screen Saver and Lock” will slide down with the mouse wheel, but won’t slide back up… oops! seems to be missing something like this: {action.OnscrollWheel: x=1++;}

  118. Another quick update @Clem et. al.:

    It looks like Nemo actually creates a thumbnail in ~/.cache/thumbnails, but when loading folders, it looks in the old ~/.thumbnails directory, which explains why using gThumb or Nautilus corrects this issue.

    tsk-tsk guys. Now I have 2 ~ thumbnails folders with exactly the same thumbnails… and maybe even a useless ~/.cache/thumb* folder?

    need to setup an auto move -ow from ~/.cache/thumb* to ~/.thumb* or just don’t use Nemo.

    How many other Cinnamon apps are going to use ~/.cache/thumbnails?

    πŸ™

  119. @B. Jay

    Actually, your work-around solution for the thumbnails issue s/b the other-way-around:

    Copy all *.png from ~/.cache/thumbnails/normal to ~/.thumbnails/normal

    delete ~/.cache/thumbnails, and replace with a thumbnails link to ~/.thumbnails

    Then Nemo will find the thumbnails it creates and won’t show an image-filetype-icon, and gThumb / Nautilus won’t be creating a new ~/.thumbnails folder.

  120. Scott@149

    I also hope Clem manages a Cinnamon solution for network management, but also with users and group settings. You can barely change anything in the Gnome3 derivative users and groups, which presents an issue when spinning up virtual machines from Vbox — or at least it did. Installing gnome-system-tools is a fix, but how long will that last? Who knows?

    This was very similar with the Gnome3 printer utility — couldn’t find an easy way to upload a .ppd file like in gnome2. Sure, you can use the CUPS interface, but not as easily navigated. But it looks like he has integrated the printer management utility that I’m familiar with nicely into Cinnamon system settings, or at least it appears as such. No problem at all browsing to .ppd files if need be.

    Little things like that that aren’t really broken because we have options, but will perhaps be more seamlessly integrated into a nice big Cinnamon control center. Of course, each version of Cinnamon shows nice improvements, so we have cause for hope.

  121. Happy Hollidays!
    I am a noobie and perhaps this is not the correct forum for my problem. If not, please direct me to the correct site. I recently backported and encountered several issues including the loss of hdmi audio output. I tried everything i could read but to no avail and just reinstalled Maya. Now everything works fine except the audio output. All that I get is duummy output. I re-installed dkm packages for this version and as per instructions on another tutorial edited /etc/grub. Can anyone please help? Thanks

    00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 10h-1fh) Processor Root Complex
    00:00.2 IOMMU: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 10h-1fh) I/O Memory Management Unit
    00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Trinity [Radeon HD 7560D]
    00:01.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Trinity HDMI Audio Controller
    00:04.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 10h-1fh) Processor Root Port
    00:10.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH USB XHCI Controller (rev 03)
    00:10.1 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH USB XHCI Controller (rev 03)
    00:11.0 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 40)
    00:12.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH USB OHCI Controller (rev 11)
    00:12.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH USB EHCI Controller (rev 11)
    00:13.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH USB OHCI Controller (rev 11)
    00:13.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH USB EHCI Controller (rev 11)
    00:14.0 SMBus: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SMBus Controller (rev 14)
    00:14.2 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH Azalia Controller (rev 01)
    00:14.3 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH LPC Bridge (rev 11)
    00:14.4 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH PCI Bridge (rev 40)
    00:14.5 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH USB OHCI Controller (rev 11)
    00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 10h-1fh) Processor Function 0
    00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 10h-1fh) Processor Function 1
    00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 10h-1fh) Processor Function 2
    00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 10h-1fh) Processor Function 3
    00:18.4 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 10h-1fh) Processor Function 4
    00:18.5 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h (Models 10h-1fh) Processor Function 5
    01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.

    lsmod
    Module Size Used by
    vesafb 13844 1
    rfcomm 47604 0
    bnep 18281 2
    bluetooth 180104 10 rfcomm,bnep
    binfmt_misc 17540 1
    ppdev 17113 0
    mxm_wmi 12979 0
    fglrx 5291565 119
    snd_hda_intel 39505 0
    snd_hda_codec 143498 1 snd_hda_intel
    snd_hwdep 13668 1 snd_hda_codec
    snd_seq_midi 13324 0
    snd_rawmidi 30748 1 snd_seq_midi
    snd_pcm 97188 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec
    snd_seq_midi_event 14899 1 snd_seq_midi
    snd_seq 61896 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event
    snd_timer 29990 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq
    snd_seq_device 14540 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq
    parport_pc 32866 1
    wmi 19256 1 mxm_wmi
    snd 78855 8 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_rawmidi,snd_pcm,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device
    psmouse 87603 0
    serio_raw 13211 0
    r8712u 189603 0
    joydev 17693 0
    mac_hid 13253 0
    i2c_piix4 13301 0
    soundcore 15091 1 snd
    snd_page_alloc 18529 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm
    lp 17799 0
    parport 46562 3 ppdev,parport_pc,lp
    usbhid 47199 0
    hid 99559 1 usbhid
    r8169 62099 0

    $ aplay -l
    **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****

    ───────────────────────────── AlsaMixer v1.0.25 ──────────────────────────────┐
    β”‚ Card: HDA ATI HDMI F1: Help β”‚
    β”‚ Chip: F2: System information β”‚
    β”‚ View: F3: Playback F4: Capture F5: All F6: Select sound card β”‚
    β”‚ Item: Esc: Exit β”‚
    β”‚ β”‚
    β”‚ β”‚
    β”‚ β”‚
    β”‚ This sound device does not have any controls. β”‚
    β”‚ β”‚
    β”‚

  122. Strange that many of the repo’s are not found…

    Failed to download http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise/Release.gpg Something wicked happened resolving ‘archive.ubuntu.com:http’ (-5 – No address associated with hostname) Failed to download http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise-security/Release.gpg Something wicked happened resolving ‘security.ubuntu.com:http’ (-5 – No address associated with hostname) Failed to download http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/dists/precise/Release.gpg Something wicked happened resolving ‘archive.canonical.com:http’ (-5 – No address associated with hostname) Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/Release.gpg Something wicked happened resolving ‘packages.linuxmint.com:http’ (-5 – No address associated with hostname) Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/backport/binary-amd64/Packages Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http: Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/backport/binary-i386/Packages Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http: Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/main/binary-amd64/Packages Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http: Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/upstream/binary-amd64/Packages Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http: Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/import/binary-amd64/Packages Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http: Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/main/binary-i386/Packages Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http: Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/upstream/binary-i386/Packages Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http: Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/import/binary-i386/Packages Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http: Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/backport/i18n/Translation-en_US Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http: Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/backport/i18n/Translation-en Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http: Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/import/i18n/Translation-en_US Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http: Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/import/i18n/Translation-en Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http: Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/main/i18n/Translation-en_US Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http: Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/main/i18n/Translation-en Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http: Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/upstream/i18n/Translation-en_US Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http: Failed to download http://packages.linuxmint.com/dists/maya/upstream/i18n/Translation-en Unable to connect to packages.linuxmint.com:http:

  123. @Scott S

    Your first “fix” disabled the scroll-wheel in both directions.
    Your second “fix” disabled the scroll-wheel in the up direction.
    Because the statement “x=1++;” will always have 2 as it’s result.
    Are you sure you aren’t using your own code ?
    πŸ™‚

  124. A comment regarding the Backport update to Linux Mint 13 LTS (a new installation) and Firefox. After installing, then updating without the Backport and running the system for a couple of days, (to insure everything was okay), I then ticked the Backport option.

    The update went well, apart from the delay whilst the non-effective servers were skipped over, but on restarting, after the update, Firefox could not be found and so failed to start after the ‘buttons’ in Mint Menu and Launch button on my system Tray are utilized.

    I solved the problem after changing all the launch buttons to point to /usr/lib/firefox/firefox instead of /opt/firefox/firefox.

    Hey @Clem, any chance of reducing the time the search for sources in the Updater pauses when it fails to find a server? Currently my computer is taking >10 minutes to resolve the update list.

  125. @PB

    The whole Users account admin (gnome) has always been an issue from the GUI, imho. The new ‘Users and Groups’ aka cinnamon-settings-users, is taking a step in the right direction.

    One more thing about the networking gui, I’d like to see the [Network connections] menu / dialog merged in with [Network], instead of having 2 places.

  126. Scott@158

    I never ran into an issue myself with users GUI until the Gnome3 disaster. In fact the only time I had to really change anything at all was to add a standard user — until I needed to run vbox and enable the use of usb devices on the VM. Then I had to add a specific user to the vbox group to enable those devices on the vm. That wasn’t a problem until Gnome3 for me. There is not enough control, and simply promoting myself to admin didn’t work.

    Anyway, that’s my only observations, and again, things are looking better a little at a time.

  127. @Clem

    One bug report.

    Restarting Cinnamon disables gnome-shell-mousewheel-zoom. Actually, the zoom function stops working completely even with the keyboard. A reboot fixes the problem.

    Please fix.

  128. I upgraded my mint with the backports but now I’m presented with a blank screen. All the terminal command works and I can perfectly navigate through my partitions too. With mpg321 I can also play mp3 files. In short everything that can be done from the command line, works. Only problem is that applications that require a graphical interface don’t work. I can’t view any image file. gimp doesn’t show up. I get an error message – Cannot open display:
    I’m using Mint 13 MATE Maya. Is there a way I can fix this without an internet connection?

  129. roj@160

    In your bug report, I see an opportunity to learn something. I’m sure there is a perfectly good reason for a Cinnamon restart. In your case, what might that be? I’ve never been presented with the need for that myself, will be interesting to hear your situation.

    On the surface, I would conclude that the real issue would be needing to restart cinnamon, rather than fixing a bug that only happens after the Cinnamon restart. But things are frequently not as they seem. Perhaps it has something to do with certain changes made in Cinnamon that I just haven’t bothered with yet.

    Can you explain further?

  130. @PB Well, to be clear, I’ve only been a full-time Linux user since “Lisa” & Gnome 3 … I “came in” right at the ‘disaster’ … so I admit when I say ‘Users’ have “always” been an issue, that may be a bit misleading… πŸ™‚

    I had tried various Linux distros numerous time over the years hoping to escape the M$ hegemony, and it wasn’t until someone pointed at Mint that I thought it was finally possible to completely ditch M$-Win permanently; a decision I’m happy to have made…btw.

    And I agree: things are getting better, one piece at a time, so we can hope.

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