MX 19.1 - problems and solutions

[newguy]

This past weekend I upgraded my MX Linux 17.1 box to MX 19.1. Well, I say "upgrade", but what I did was perform a fresh install of 19.1 on my root partition and simply kept my /home partition from the former install.

The initial install of 19.1 went well and most of my desktop settings (apart from wallpaper) were copied over. This seemed like a good beginning. However, over the next 24 hours I ran into a lot of little problems. Nothing truly show stopping, but tricky little problems. So far I've found solutions to most and, this is key, many of them could probably be fixed by updating the dependency information on packages or making sure some packages carry the same version across versions of MX.

Here is a list of problems I have encountered so far and my fixes:

1. I was running Thunderbird 68.8.0 on MX 17. When I switched to MX 19, the latest Thunderbird package was 68.7.0. This caused Thunderbird to refuse to use my existing profile because of a version mismatch. I eventually had to download the Thunderbird package from Mozilla, unpack it, read the /usr/bin/thunderbird shell script to find the location of the Thunderbird libraries, and copy the contents of the tarball into that directory.

Then I had to go into ~/.thunderbird/profiles.ini and remove the fresh profile Thunderbird has created and set my original as the default. Keeping the Thunderbird package up to date across MX versions would probably have side-stepped this issue.

2. The same problem happened with Firefox. Firefox created a new profile for me and told me to access my original I'd need to sign up for Firefox Sync. Instead I found a tip in the Firefox wiki for launching the Firefox profile manager. (about:profiles) Then set my original profile as the default for Firefox.

3. Rhythmbox did not respond to global shortcuts or KDE Connect signals. A little poking around showed Rhythmbox was not working with D-bus. A little digging showed Rhythmbox uses a plugin to implement D-bus, but no plugins were available. I eventually found installing the rhytmbox-plugins package and restarting the music player fixed this issue. I think the plugins package should be a recommended (or dependency) of Rhythmbox as it is required to provide full/expected fucntionality.

4. The VirtualBox GUI displays white text on a white background when running Xfce with a dark theme. This seems to be an issue with multiple Qt applications. Not sure if there is an elegant solutions for this. Maybe offer a tool in MX Tools for managing Qt themes?

5. Falkon cannot spellcheck. The browser cannot find any dictionaries. This one tool me down a rabbit hole. The Falkon wiki says we need to install the qtwebengine5-dev-tools package, run the qwebengine program to convert an existing dictionary file and copy it into the Falkon directory. I installed qtwebengine5-dev-tools, but it does not include the necessary program/script. Or at least this package doesn't place its binary in my PATH.

I ended up copying my Falkon dictionaries from another computer onto MX 19 as I could not find a working solution for converting my local dictionary files. I think the Falkon package should either include dictionary files or depend on the qtwebengine5-dev-tools software so a dictionary can be added with minimal fuss.

6. Kwrite also does not spell check as it cannot find a spell check program for its backend. Installing the "sonnet-plugins" package fixed this issue. I think sonnet-plugins should be a dependency of Kwrite (and Kate) as otherwise the editor cannot run spell check and does not display an error as to why.

7. The KDE Connect software will silently fail to connect to local devices if a firewall is enabled. I suggest this should probably be mentioend somewhere. Maybe the KDE Connect GUI or in a message at install time letting the user know which ports to open.

That's all so far. I hope the above is useful to people trying out MX 19. I also hope that some packages can be tweaked, especially Kwrite Rhythmbox and Falkon, to address the missing dependencies in the future.

[Jerry3904]

Thanks, much appreciated.

[asqwerth]

This past weekend I upgraded my MX Linux 17.1 box to MX 19.1. Well, I say "upgrade", but what I did was perform a fresh install of 19.1 on my root partition and simply kept my /home partition from the former install.

The initial install of 19.1 went well and most of my desktop settings (apart from wallpaper) were copied over. This seemed like a good beginning. However, over the next 24 hours I ran into a lot of little problems. Nothing truly show stopping, but tricky little problems. So far I've found solutions to most and, this is key, many of them could probably be fixed by updating the dependency information on packages or making sure some packages carry the same version across versions of MX.

Here is a list of problems I have encountered so far and my fixes:

1. I was running Thunderbird 68.8.0 on MX 17. When I switched to MX 19, the latest Thunderbird package was 68.7.0. This caused Thunderbird to refuse to use my existing profile because of a version mismatch. I eventually had to download the Thunderbird package from Mozilla, unpack it, read the /usr/bin/thunderbird shell script to find the location of the Thunderbird libraries, and copy the contents of the tarball into that directory.

Then I had to go into ~/.thunderbird/profiles.ini and remove the fresh profile Thunderbird has created and set my original as the default. Keeping the Thunderbird package up to date across MX versions would probably have side-stepped this issue.

2. The same problem happened with Firefox. Firefox created a new profile for me and told me to access my original I'd need to sign up for Firefox Sync. Instead I found a tip in the Firefox wiki for launching the Firefox profile manager. (about:profiles) Then set my original profile as the default for Firefox.
....

4. The VirtualBox GUI displays white text on a white background when running Xfce with a dark theme. This seems to be an issue with multiple Qt applications. Not sure if there is an elegant solutions for this. Maybe offer a tool in MX Tools for managing Qt themes?

....That's all so far. I hope the above is useful to people trying out MX 19. I also hope that some packages can be tweaked, especially Kwrite Rhythmbox and Falkon, to address the missing dependencies in the future.

Thanks, newguy, for your helpful observations.

With regard to points 1 and 2, this might be a new thing from Mozilla. I installed MX19 over 2 different installs of MX15/16 (ie, Jessie, not Stretch). I don't even know if the MX15/16 installs at that time had exactly the same Firefox/TB version numbers as in MX19 because it was getting close to EOL. For 1 installation, I preserved MX16's /home. On the other, I made a fresh install of MX19 on a completely new partition but copied over the /home configs for Firefox from that older MX15/16 partition (which has since been deleted). In both cases, I didn't get any error message about the version mismatch and both instances of FF ran as if they were continuations of FF from my MX15/16 installs.

However, last week, I made a fresh install of an Arch-based distro and copied over the configs from the /home of an older Arch-based distro that was experiencing some issues. I faced the same error message you did, but in my case, I decided to make do with the new profile and just import in the bookmarks file I had backed up.

Nevertheless, it looks like this is something to take note of from now on, when advising people about preserving /home.

For Virtualbox, the workaround given in this forum is to edit your Virtualbox whisker menu entry to

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VirtualBox -style fusion %U

[newguy]

Thanks asqwerth for the tip on using VirtualBox. I tried the "-style fusion" flag and it worked. VirtualBox is still ugly, placing black text on a bright white background, but at least it's not white font on a white background so I can see what I'm doing now. This is much better.

I also agree the Mozilla issue seems to be new. I've done updates in the past jumping versions in Firefox and Thunderbird without any issues. This is the first time I've run into the profile version mis-match issue. It's a nasty one, especially for someone like me who maintains a lot of e-mail accounts and message filtering rules.

[BV206]

For the Firefox & Thunderbird non-transferable profile problem you can start them from a terminal like:
firefox -ProfileManager
thunderbird -ProfileManager
then select the profile you want an make sure you check "Use the selected profile without asking at startup"

I have to do this every time I copy the profile from my hard drive installation to the MX live USB even though I have the same version of FF and TB installed on both. For some reason they know that it's a different installation and try to create a new profile.

[newguy]

Thanks for the tip on using the profile manager in Mozilla product,s BC206. That will be helpful in the future so I don't need to mess about with profiles.ini files.

Side note, I found another proble when I upgraded my laptop today:

8. MX 19 does not include the ecryptfs software previously found in MX 17. This meant that my encrypted home directory was no longer accessible. I ended up using a rescue disc, using ecrypt_recover_private to mount the encrypted volume, and moving files manually to the new install. Not the end of the world, but an unpleasant surprise when I found MX 19 couldnt' access an encrypted volume a previous version had made.

[BV206]

For the Firefox & Thunderbird non-transferable profile problem you can start them from a terminal like:
firefox -ProfileManager
thunderbird -ProfileManager
then select the profile you want an make sure you check "Use the selected profile without asking at startup"

I have to do this every time I copy the profile from my hard drive installation to the MX live USB even though I have the same version of FF and TB installed on both. For some reason they know that it's a different installation and try to create a new profile.

I forgot something.
I don't know if this happens with all add-ons but the few I use have toolbar icons. When I copy a the profile and start it with firefox -ProfileManager the add-on icons don't appear. I have to go to the add-ons preference page, disable them, restart firefox, then enable the add-ons again in order to get the icons back. I haven't figured out why that happens and I don't use any add-ons in Thunderbird so I don't know if the same thing happens.

[jeffreyC]

Mozilla wants to force everyone to make an online (Sync) account with them, so the transfer of your Firefox and/or Thunderbird profile by other means has been intentionally broken.

[dolphin_oracle]

Thanks for the tip on using the profile manager in Mozilla product,s BC206. That will be helpful in the future so I don't need to mess about with profiles.ini files.

Side note, I found another proble when I upgraded my laptop today:

8. MX 19 does not include the ecryptfs software previously found in MX 17. This meant that my encrypted home directory was no longer accessible. I ended up using a rescue disc, using ecrypt_recover_private to mount the encrypted volume, and moving files manually to the new install. Not the end of the world, but an unpleasant surprise when I found MX 19 couldnt' access an encrypted volume a previous version had made.

I can see where that would be irritating.

we removed the ability for ecryptfs in mx18 but the libs were still available. I'm not sure they are in debian 10 anymore. the installer currently uses luks encryption for all encrypting chores.

[Stevo]

The MX 19 Virtual Box thread has several additional ways to theme the newer versions, including getting various dark styles. To start with, try replacing "fusion" with "gtk2", "gtk", or "gtk3" (I forget which one works) Mine is

Code: Select all

VirtualBox -style kvantum %U

, but you have to install and configure qt-style-kvantum first for those cool options.

We don't install recommended packages by default, unlike Debian, and we don't have the time and hardware to rebuild even a small fraction of Debian's 50K packages to fix that. MX Package Installer and Synaptic both have checkboxes to let you install recommended packages, or you can add "--install-recommends" to the apt command line if you're using the terminal to install packages.