Category: Mint

it may be time for me to move on from linux mint

whbeebe1 Comment

I have always spoken highly of Linux Mint. I might stray from using it, but only for a short time. Then I’d reinstall it and get back to work using it as my daily driver. That’s all changed because of the latest Linux Mint update utility, Mint Upgrade.

I have tried twice to perform an upgrade to the latest Linux Mint release, version 22, and each time I’ve shut it down and restored my system from a Timeshift snapshot. Thank god that the Mint Upgrade tool insists on making a Timeshift snapshot of the system before it does anything. Timeshift returned my system back to the exact state it was before the upgrade utility started to muck around with it.

Here’s my problem with the current upgrade utility: it insists on downgrading and/or removing applications I depend on, because those up-to-date versions aren’t “compatible” with version 22. Things like cmake and fish (the friendly interactive shell), and the Paparus icon theme, just to name three. Folks, all of these are available via standard repos, nothing wild and crazy is going on. And you want to downgrade all my current stock applications I depend upon because your application’s blind adherence to whatever rules were built into the application say it must be this version and nothing newer, even if those up-to-date releases came from your very own controlled repos?

I’m now at an impasse. There’s nothing wrong with Linux Mint 21.3. It continues to perform just fine, and I can get all my work done using it as my daily driver. The problem is upgrading to the latest release that is causing me a fair bit of heartburn. I’ve never ever encountered a problem like this, either with Linux Mint or any other Linux distribution. Every prior Linux Mint version upgrade was kicked off with a menu selection via the Update Manager. This latest Upgrade application is absolute garbage.

I’m holding off making any major changes on my work system until later this year, sometime around October. That should give me a better idea as to what’s coming around the end of this year. In particular my interest has been piqued by System76’s Cosmic desktop running on top of Pop!_OS. I’ve run Pop!_OS in the past and liked it up until they released an upgrade where brltty was so deeply integrated into the system that trying to remove it would have broken the Pop!_OS graphical desktop. The application brltty interfered with my ability to work with development boards plugged into USB ports. I managed to find a way to disable brltty to finish a job I was working at the time, but once I found some idle time I stripped Pop!_OS off and installed Linux Mint, and that’s what I’ve been using until now.

Other alternatives to Linux Mint might be Fedora and Ubuntu. I have Ubuntu 24.04 installed on my Raspberry Pi 5, and it’s rather surprisingly working out just fine. Installing Ubuntu on this system would make sense and I might give Ubuntu with the KDE desktop a serious look. I’m no fan of Gnome, and the only reason I have Gnome Ubuntu 24.04 on my Raspberry Pi 5 is because that’s all that’s currently available.

Bottom line: I’m no longer recommending Linux Mint. And before 2024 comes to an end I expect to be off of Linux Mint and on another Linux distribution.

a bit of awk — unix classics

whbeebe

I have a need to stop a process (or kill it) that is in the background. I can do this the old fashioned way by performing a ps aux | grep <process-name> to look for that specific process name’s process id, then perform a kill --signal SIGINT <process-id> to have it cleanly shut down. The process has a handler for SIGINT so that it can cleanly release resources and exit properly. But that manual process gets to be annoying if for no other reason that I’m lazy and tend to, well, forget some bits from time to time. That’s why automation is a good thing to do, as much as reasonably possible. I have it “written down” correctly so that I can just execute the function in which all of this is defined and implemented.

For this example I have a Python script, silly_clock.py, started every time I log into the pi account on my Raspberry Pi 5. It’s one of the examples in luma.led_matrix. It drives a four digit 8×8 LED matrix display, showing the time and then every minute scrolling the date across the display. I like it, but it’s important because it shows that the Raspberry Pi 5’s SPI device pins are working on the GPIO. I have ways to test the physical computing parts of a Raspberry Pi, and this is one of those tests that I just allow to keep running.

I’m using fish as my primary shell, so that I’ve defined a function in config.fish named stopsilly.

function stopsillyset -l silly_pid $(ps aux | grep silly_clock | grep -v grep | awk -F '[ ]+' '{print $2}')if string length -q -- $silly_pidkill --signal SIGINT $silly_pidelseecho silly_clock is not running.endend

The critical line in the function is line 2. I’m using awk to parse the line that ps and grep find if silly_clock is running. Awk will print out the process ID associated with the running silly_clock. Line 3 in the function looks to see if anything was found, meaning that silly_clock was running. If the process ID isn’t empty then line 4 sends a SIGINT to silly_clock, and silly_clock cleanly exits. If the process ID string is not found, meaning the string silly_pid is empty, then the else section says that silly_clock wasn’t running.

Links

Luma.LED_Matrix — https://github.com/rm-hull/luma.led_matrix

AWK — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWK