MX-14 beta 2

[BitJam]

What about adding ''killall tumblerd'' to Thunars Custom actions, or as a launcher on the panel.

IIUC, the problem is that tumblerd keeps respawning so killing all instances just once doesn't do much because it will just respawn. That's why people added a cron job that periodically wakes up and kills all tumblerd processes. IMO, the lack of an easy "off" switch indicates a poor or immature design. Having to make a cron job that keeps running killall tumblerd over and over is a really ugly solution. It is a significant waste of resources and it doesn't fully solve the problem unless killall runs every second or so. Even if tumblerd wasn't so broken, I would still want it to have an easy off switch. Hopefully, such a switch exists but was just not well advertised.

I'm not certain tumbler is responsible for the crashes on systems with 512 Meg of RAM but it is the only hypothesis I've come up with that explains why some 512M systems crash consistently while others work fine. If you do a fresh install with no existing data on a hard drive then tumbler should not be a problem. Likewise if you have plenty of RAM and CPU then even if you have a hard drive with lots of stuff for tumbler to work on, you should be fine. It is just the combination of a small system and a lot of data for tumbler to work on when you get a problem.

[anticapitalista]

We have a solution to tumbler in the next version. It won't be included.

What would be an alternative? Anyone know?

[Jerry3904]

I seem to remember some discussions on this in the Xfce forum, if someone wants to go over and do a search.

[lucky9]

This time I tried the command line install. I told the installer to put grub on /dev/sda1 (root) not the mbr (there isn't one). It reported completion but when I rebooted there was no grub, just a blank screen with a cursor. Couldn't bring up the console. No keyboard. No nothing. It was just dead. So I popped in the refracta live disk and tried to chroot into mx1 to reinstall grub. I had never tried this before but have read quite a bit. Anyway, this is the resulting message:

There isn't one? No MBR? What do you have?
If you don't install GRUB to the MBR you won't get to the /boot/grub/menu.list which is where the OS will boot from. You didn't use another distro to chainload either. How could you think you could boot the OS? There has to be a way for /boot/grub/menu.list to be called so it can boot the OS.

Good heavens! I've been using distros with grub2 for the last 3 years at least, probably longer. This distro doesn't??? I can barely remember /boot/grub/menu.list . . .

Sorry for the confusion. I intended to say the boot portion of the root filesystem. My most direct experience is with Legacy GRUB which uses a menu.list. So insert 'boot portion of the root filesystem' to make it easier for you to understand, anywhere there's a menu.list. They all mean the portion of the root file system that actually boots the OS.....instead of the portion of (Legacy or GRUB2) that's resident on the MBR.....or whatever bootloader you choose that rests on the MBR.

In other words, there's little difference in duties performed by either version of GRUB (or any other bootloader). All MS-DOS-based hard disk partitioning schemes will have a part of GRUB (or other) bootloader on the MBR.
If using a GPT partitioned HDD, then there will be a partition set aside as a Boot Partition which will have the (former) MBR code for finding the OS that you want to boot.

[golinuxgo]

Sorry for the confusion.

No problem. I also suffered from confusion all my own. Maybe a senior moment? In either the GUI or CLI install there was mention of Windows in reference to the MBR and my knee-jerk reaction was "there's no stinkin' Winders here!" so I don't need an MBR. On my testing box where I have several versions of Debian installed, I think I have even installed without installing a bootloader and of course the one on sda finds it anyway. Thanks for the excellent explanation, which is now (hopefully) permanently seared into my pea brain. (My approach to computers tends to be more Zen than RTFM.)

[KBD]

Did a fresh install on another netbook tonight of MX. It went well and I ran the updates. Just one odd thing, the icon is messed up for the shutdown/logout action button. I changed the icons then changed it back to tango but it still shows a red X for some reason:
http://imgur.com/SIQSkFV
Not a big issue just an odd one on this new install.

[muskt]

I got that too today on a fresh install. Fresh download, too.

Was not like that this morning prior to the download/install--same machine, same drive, same USB stick--different download.

Jerry in Anchorage

[Stevo]

So I see a lot of questions on forums about updating the Flash plugin, since it does not inform the user when there's a new version, and I heard about yet another critical 0-day exploit in Flash, with exploits already in the wild.

I found a post on the Siduction forums about adding a script to /etc/cron.daily to do so:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh

test -x /usr/sbin/update-flashplugin-nonfree && /usr/sbin/update-flashplugin-nonfree --install --quiet

which seems like it would do the trick. Laptop users should install anacron if they are going to be off the Net at times.
Would this be a good idea to have as default in MX? I know some old machines without SSE2 will not be able to use the new plugin, but they'll have to be a special case.

There's a Debian bug report about it, but the reason for refusal to add the cron job now does not apply, IMO.

There's also a slightly different version of the cron script:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=700092

[BitJam]

You could prevent the script from upgrading flash on non-sse2 systems by adding one line:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh

grep -q "^flags.*\<sse2\>" /proc/cpuinfo || exit 0

test -x /usr/sbin/update-flashplugin-nonfree && /usr/sbin/update-flashplugin-nonfree --install --quiet

[lucky9]

(My approach to computers tends to be more Zen than RTFM.)

An excellent way of putting it.

I used to say I used the Gestalt way. Lots of different information and I try and connect the pieces. Occasionally I actually do.