Category: Ubuntu

considering linux mint alternatives

whbeebe
Ubuntu 24.04 w/Cinnamon desktop environment

That didn’t take long. Behold Ubuntu 24.04 with the Cinnamon desktop. It’s a flavor/flavour of Ubuntu available from the Ubuntu website. I installed it as a VM hosted on my current Linux Mint system. Ubuntu Cinnamon uses the same version of the desktop that Linux Mint 21.3 currently uses, so there’s absolutely no difference as far as the GUI is concerned. And wonder of wonders, Ubuntu 24.04 no longer has brltty installed at all. As for all the little tweaks I like to add to my systems, it took all of twenty minutes to find and add everything I wanted. Am I satisfied, and more importantly, is this the path I believe I should go down? Maybe.

Linux Mint 22

One of the most powerful tools in my personal software arsenal is QEMU/KVM, which allows me to create Linux virtual machines hosted on my regular computer. Whenever I want to try something out such as a different distribution, or to try to do something I consider a risk with my current system, I spin up a VM sandbox for those purposes. Gone are the days I felt I had to keep separate machines around for that purpose.

I’ve already shown one VM running Ubuntu Cinnamon at the top. Here’s the second VM running Linux Mint 22. That VM started with Linux Mint 22 beta, and I’ve been installing all the updates until today it’s a full Linux Mint 22 final release. It has all the latest tools, kernel, and desktop environment. If we read what fast fetch shows on both, the Cinnamon DE on Ubuntu is version 6.0.4, which is what I currently run on my main desktop. The latest Cinnamon DE on Linux Mint 22 is 6.2.9. It might not seem like a large leap, but it is. The latest Cinnamon DE is as much about refinements as it is new features, and I would love to have it running as my daily driver. But I’ve already written what happened when I tried to install the upgrade from Linux Mint 21.3 to 22.

So, unless a miracle occurs and the Linux Mint team re-enables the ability to upgrade via Update Manager, that means a full installation of a Linux distribution. Which begs the question of: if you’re considering a new installation of Ubuntu Cinnamon, why not do a new install of Linux Mint 22?

Issues to consider. But I’m in no hurry to act.

building python 3.13.0 rc1 on a raspberry pi 5

whbeebe

This is an interesting time for Python development. Python continues it’s upward popularity increase, while the Python language developers keep pushing the Python interpreter to be more performant with each release. In particular, with the imminent release of version 3.13.0, the developers are now disabling the global interpreter lock, or GIL, for efficient concurrency. Building Python betas and release candidates has become something of a ritual for me. With the addition of the 512 GiB NVMe SSD on my Raspberry Pi 5, I decided to build Python 3.13.0 release candidate 1 on my Raspberry Pi 5 under Ubuntu 24.04.

I documented the build process flow in an earlier post (see in the link section below). I’m going to highlight one key step in that process flow, the installation of build support libraries.

sudo apt install zlib1g-dev \ libncurses5-dev \ libgdbm-dev \ libnss3-dev \ libssl-dev \ libreadline-dev \ libffi-dev \ libsqlite3-dev \ libbz2-dev \ tk \ tk-dev \ liblzma-dev \ libgdbm-compat-dev \ libmpdec-dev

Everything succeeded except the attempt to install libmpdec-dev. You need that library to support Big Number math in Python. In every release before 3.13 that support was internal. However, starting with 3.13 and later, that support is now via libmpdec-dev. Every one of those support packages installed successfully in Linux Mint 21.3, which is based on Ubuntu 22.04. But it doesn’t work on Ubuntu 24.04 on a Raspberry Pi 5. In the end I had to locate, download and manually install the individual deb files:

sudo apt install ./libmpdec3_2.5.1-1_arm64.debsudo apt install ./libmpdec-dev_2.5.1-1_arm64.deb

Those two deb files satisfy the libmpdec-dev requirement. After that I executed the following to configure the Python 3.13 build:

../Python-3.13.0rc1/configure --enable-optimizations --disable-gil

Once built I installed according to the step documented in the linked post below.

Then I gave it a whirl. The first thing I did after installing it was to create a Python 3.13 virtual environment and then pip install luma.led-matrix. That supports silly clock. When I activated the Python 3.13 virtual environment and ran silly_clock.py, the following was emitted by Python 3.13 in the terminal window:

<frozen importlib._bootstrap>:488: RuntimeWarning: The global interpreter lock (GIL) has been enabled to load module 'PIL._imaging', which has not declared that it can run safely without the GIL. To override this behavior and keep the GIL disabled (at your own risk), run with PYTHON_GIL=0 or -Xgil=0.

That’s going to be an interesting problem going forward, as there’s a ton of legacy Python code that will more than likely trigger that RuntimeWarning.

Note

In order to successfully install luma.led-matrix in a Python virtual environment on a Raspberry Pi 5 under Ubuntu 24.04, you will need to install yet another support library, libpng-dev.

Links

building python 3.13.0 beta 1 on linux mint 21.3