I thought I'd attempt to get at least one new blog entry penned for 2020, even though given the farcical 'lock-down' we've been subjected to over the last few months, and the long stretches of idleness concerned, this ought to have been one of my most productive blogging periods. Evidently not! About the only thing of note that I seem to have achieved during lock-down, was the completion of the 2 RTC units that I'd been promising myself for decades that I'd build. But I'll leave that as an addendum for the blog entry in question. Besides that, I've seemed to mostly spend my time watching movies or sitcoms, to the point where I'm now sick & tired of television. Anyway, forgive my little preamble, on to the topic for consideration.
I'm still using Linux Mint 17.3 as my main OS, despite the fact that it has been EOL'ed for at least a year now. I gave Mint 19.1 a go about a year ago and was initially enthusiastic. This proved to be short-lived however when I realised that compared to 17.3, it was a bit of a piggy as far as memory was concerned. As my main computer is still my old Dell laptop - and shall remain so until either it or I depart this realm - I am somewhat constrained by the fact that although the machine has two 2gig SODIMMs fitted, the stupid hardware is limited to using only 2.5gig of this. I was so peeved when I discovered this (about a decade ago, when I upgraded its memory!) and never would have bought the laptop had I been aware of the fact at the time.
Anyway, as a result, I decided instead to hold off until the next Mint release. This I only got round to trying a week or two ago - or would have, had it even been available! You see, the Mint Developers have thought it prudent to drop 32-bit support from Mint 20 onwards, at least with its Ubuntu-based releases. Instead, what they have added is 32/64-bit versions that are Debian-based, named LMDE 4, in case, and I quote, "Ubuntu were ever to disappear" - which sounds a bit ominous for Ubuntu's future prospects...
So one download of LMDE later, I was happy to discover that it installed & ran without issue. Initially anyway. What was soon apparent was that the Nouveau graphics drivers didn't work properly, often only scrolling part of the screen when browsing with Firefox. It also transpired that the 'Driver Manager' app was no longer available, robbing me of the standard means of installing native Nvidia drivers! This was unacceptable. I then proceeded to waste days trying to install manually, driver versions downloaded from Nvidia's site, all to no avail - LMDE seems an impenetrable maze to Nvidia's old installers.
And there it lay, until I decided a day or so ago to give Mint 19.1 another go, more as a last resort than anything else. On the plus-side, after playing with it for a few days now, Nouveau seems to work well, no glitches so far at any rate. What had me cursing and swearing yet again at the Mint Developers was the realisation that once more, those idiots had not bothered to fix the audio-preview in the Caja file manager. What they had done, yet again, was to disable audio-previews by default, in the hope that most users wouldn't notice the bug! This kind of laziness is maddening to me. A previous post here will recall the fact that this bug has been an unwanted addition of Mint-Mate releases at least as far back as version 17.1.
Given the amount of time & energy I had spent re-building the various buggy packages from Mate's source-code, I was more than reluctant at the idea of a repeat performance, but persevere I did. And it proved surprisingly easy this time around! One huge plus I noticed regarded the compiler. Prior to this, issuing a './configure' would find the script stopping at each & every dependency issue that it encountered. This resulted in my having, after resolving the highlighted dependency issue, to re-issue another './configure' - and again & again & again, often dozens of times, until all the dependencies had been resolved - which was soul-destroying. Now what happens, after the first './configure', ALL missing dependencies, not just the first one encountered, are listed as packages "not found", which allows you to resolve all of the dependency issues in one go.
I was also delighted to find that after building the needed packages (caja-common & caja-extensions) and removing the 'broken' caja-common (which automatically removes Caja, as well as other packages that would conflict with the new build's installation), the new packages installed & worked without a hitch! All that's needed is to add a Home Folder icon to the Panel to allow a one-click opening of Caja - just drag & drop the Home Folder onto the desktop to there, or navigate to Caja via Menu->System Tools, right-click on Caja and select 'Add to panel'. Once old Caja has been uninstalled and its executable 'killed' using System Monitor, all that's left is to re-install 'mate-control-center' and fire up 'new Caja' via its panel icon. In short, it works, no more Caja locking up during audio previews. I'll include the built packages below, more for my own future use than anything else.
Right now I'm writing this on Mint 19.1, listening to some background music and everything seems to be running fine. The memory problem hasn't gone away by any means - presently, with just Firefox and Streamripstar running, 2.3gig of my 2.5gig of memory is being used, with swap also starting to be impinged upon.
Will this prove usable, or will I end up back with Mint 17.3? - only time will tell.
Edit:
After posting above about the memory limitation of my old Dell XPSM1210 laptop, it got me thinking. On the one hand, I was 99% certain of my facts - that the laptop had a limitation on the maximum amount of memory that the hardware could work with, 2.5Gig, which was well below the the 4gig limit imposed by 32-bit hardware. On the other hand, this 2.5gig seemed an almost arbitrarily chosen number, which didn't make sense, so I went looking for confirmation of my long-held belief - and couldn't find any! But I was certain that I had bought two 2gig SODIMMs when I did the memory upgrade, but was disgusted to discover that only 2.5gig was available to the user when it was installed. I therefore removed one, replacing it with a 512Meg SODIMM instead. This is my recollection of events anyway - I can't actually find the second SODIMM that I thought I'd bought! That was more than 10 years ago. [Did a little checking, (re)discovered that Amazon keeps a long purchase history and that I bought just ONE 2Gig SODIMM, and it was 8.5 years ago, not 10+ - so wrong on both counts!].
Well, I was gifted an old HP laptop, minus PSU or working battery pack, about 4 years ago, and which I think I've already commented on in another post. Long story short, after letting it gather dust for 6-9 months, I finally got a cheap Chinese PSU, powered it up and left it on a soak-test for 24 hours - which promptly killed it, or at least the Nvidia graphics part of it. What it does have though is 4gig of SODIMM memory, that is Dell-compatible, and which for the first time, I've tried with it.
And yes, I was flabbergasted to discover on booting the Dell that I now have gone from having just 2.5gig, to having over 3.2gig of memory available to the user!!! How could it have taken 10 years for the penny to drop! Though I should be elated (and am a bit), what's bugging me now is the almost 800meg of memory that's 'unavailable' with 4gig installed, whereas with 2.5gig installed, all of that is available to the user. The BIOS informs me that this 800meg has been allocated to the system, but nothing is allocated when 2.5gig is installed - so no doubt it's just using the top end of the address-space to map hardware to, with the 800meg left blowing in the wind. Yep, always moaning, my glass is always half-empty.
Edit2:
Wow, all for naught, this thing really knows how to toy with me - after a few hours running perfectly, with the GPU sitting at around 60DegC the whole time, (normal for badly-designed laptops - my 14 year-old Dell, running 24/7 from new, never goes below 50DegC, often well exceeding 60DegC under load), the screen just goes blank. Pulling the plug and powering it back up, it now exhibits a new behaviour - gone is the infernal beeping, the screen is just remaining blank, but with back light illumination. I tried it again this morning and it powered up normally, but only remaining so for a few minutes before the screen went black again.
Well, I'm done with it, that thing goes into the bin next week, before garbage day. I've sweated bullets for that piece of HP crap. It could only have been worse had I spent money on it, never mind having bought it new. Anyone considering buying 'prestige' brands such as HP should really do a little research into the quality/reliability of the junk that these clowns produce. Add to that, this POS company uses 'white-lists' to decide what user hardware upgrades are allowable - anything not on the list is instantly black-listed. Since HP can't foretell the future, the user is forever prevented from adding 'current-hardware' add-ons. I discovered this when I tried upgrading the pissy 54Mb/s wireless card that came with this laptop, to something more current - all were black-listed, cited as not having been approved by HP. Well, Good Riddance to HP.
At least I'm left with 4gig of ram and a usable 100gig hard-drive for my pains.
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