Linux Mint

Edit: Possibly resolved. Noticed there were a bunch of updates that mint wanted to install, but which required a reboot. Live sessions reset everything on reboot, so I obliterated windows and did a full install, then updated. Mic issues seem to be resolved now, dunno what update it was that fixed it. I only say possibly resolved because I haven't finished fully testing it due to time/location constraints but the tests I did do seem to work fine.

First a quick thanks to everyone who helped me out before; ended up using Cinnamon Edge and the wifi and bluetooth both work.

However, I am having issues with audio inputs. For whatever reason, it seems to detect audio outputs as the audio input (at least from Firefox). e.g. when I have music playing from a youtube tab and try using my mic, it detects the music from the yt tab as the input, and doesn't detect any input from my mic itself. This occurs regardless of whether I have bluetooth headphones connected or not. How can I fix this?

Edit: Still having issues with it. Installed pavucontrol (after a lot of trouble), the only input is from monitors but I don't see anything I can do with it.

2nd Edit: Messed with the configurations in pavucontrol. Shows two, uh, things I guess: HD-Audio Generic and Family 17h (Models 10h-1fh) HD Audio Controller.

HD-Audio Generic has three profiles: the first is Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output (unplugged) (unavailable). The other two are the same thing, except one has Digital Stereo 7.1 and the other has 5.1. None of these seem to do anything.

Family 17h (Models 10h-1f) HD Audio Controller has 3 as well: Analog Stereo Output, Analog Stereo Duplex, and Analog Stereo Input (unplugged) (unavailable).

I don't think I can figure this out. I have the same issue even when connecting my bluetooth headset, where the input mic registers the output audio as the input for some reason. The "monitor" of Family 17h (I don't really know what it means by monitor) picks up the output as input, and the same goes for when my headset is connected.

Just installed it via package manager and I'm trying to get my brain around it. Anyone out there have any experience or tips for running WireShark on Linux Mint? Thanks so much!

Linux noob using mint for the first time, decided to boot from a flash drive before fully installing on my PC, just to try it out first. I'm having issues getting Wi-Fi to work during the live session though; clicking the Wi-Fi icon only brings up Network Settings and Network connections. Network connections lets me try to set it up manually, but I can't figure out how to get it to connect after putting in all the info I can find for my Wi-Fi. Is this normal? Did I mess up the installation somehow, or is a drivers problem?

Hardware: HP laptop, AMD Ryzen 5 7520U w/ Radeon Graphics (Model # 15-fc0025dx). OS: Linux kernel 5.15.0-91 generic, Linux Mint version 21.3, Cinnamon version 6.0.4. Booted off a flash drive (live session).

edit: I also get the following screen when I try to shut my laptop down from the Mint boot:

Hi all! I was wondering if there was anyone who installed Linux Mint on their Non-Retina Intel Silicon Mac (the Mac's up to/around 2012). I have a 2012 15 Inch Macbook Pro with an i7-3615QM. Between possible driver issues, and the fact that it's a Mac with a 3rd Generation CPU, I'm not sure if I can get away with using it or if I should just get some cheap Lenovo Laptop. Just looking for some feedback, thank you in advance!

I have this laptop in front of me that is still on 20.1 and I am trying to get it upgraded to latest.

This is such a pain, but I show you how I worked around it.

The GUI stuff all doesnt work. The update manager always warns about errors with mirrors, even though apt works normally. Clicking on "change mirrors" launched a password prompt but it didnt fix anything. The "package repositories" app didnt launch at all, also not from the settings.

The mintupgrade tool is not available in these repos.

Updates

Problems:

• mintupgrade not even in the repos
• updates are separated into "normal" and "full" updates. Really confusing, coming from Fedora

# clean up the system to make stuff quicker
sudo apt uninstall --purge#as many packages as I didnt need
sudo apt autoremove --purge

# normal updates
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y


# system upgrade to latest. Dont get the logic and the difference behind these commands
sudo apt full-upgrade -y
sudo apt dist-upgrade -y

# you should at least reboot if there was a kernel upgrade
systemctl reboot

This got me to 20.3 at least.

Went into /etc/apt/sources.list and saw that this is empty. But in sources.list.d was a single file official-package-repositories.list that had all the sources. If you use a single file, why not just use sources.list??

Distro version upgrades

Problems:

• you need to know the next underlying Ubuntu version
• you need to know the codenames of target mint AND ubuntu version
• you need to change a file in an unexpected location

I did it manually: search on the internet for the codenames of both latest Mint (virginia) and the underlying Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (jammy).

So I went in there and just replaced the names with the new correct ones. Forgot the old names, was it disco and una? The automated command would be:

# update Ubuntu names
sudo sed -i 's/disco/jammy/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list

# update LM versions
sudo sed -i 's/una/virginia/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list

Then opened a terminal and repeated the above.

This took forever, and when I came back today the mint session had crashed and the error window didnt respond.

I exited to TTY (Ctrl+Alt+F4) and repeated the above. Package casper had conflicts. Never heard of it so tried sudo apt remove casper and it didnt try to uninstall my whole desktop (cough should have done that LTT) so I just removed it. Lol?

Repeated the steps, finished with a reboot and it worked. I am now on 21.3

Post version upgrade

Problems:

• mints updater is kinda iffy
• on stable distros, automatic updates should be no problem
• unattended-upgrades needs to be installed and set up in a very traditional way

First thing I did was

sudo apt install mintupgrade nala fish unattended-upgrades -y
sudo nala upgrade

Nala is poorly pretty bloated and uses tons of python stuff, but it is way more legible and user-friendly than apt, automating tons of stuff. It does not work in non-scrolling TTYs!

Fish is a way friendlier shell but dont set it as your default! It is not POSIX compliant and will give random breakages.

The unattended upgrades are very useful. To configure them, edit this file:

sudoedit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

And uncomment as many as you want.

Luckily this is not my main machine, I can recommend Fedora Atomic Desktops to anyone. I have no idea how this is supposed to be user friendly 😅

Cheers!

I'm testing, after many recommendations, a mint installation on my Lenovo yoga 720.

I found the settings for touchpad gestures but my question is: how do I bind a keyboard shortcut to a gesture?

I tried a workaround and installed touché, since my understanding was that mint uses touchegg. But that worked only until the first reboot and now seems broken. If possibleI'd prefer to just use whatever is implemented anyway.

So, is there a way to bind a keyboard shortcut to a touchpad gesture?

I recently bought a Lenovo L440 Thinkpad. Have installed Linux Mint on it and Keyboard backlit and touch pointer arent working. Rest is all fine. Can anyone help?

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/11305365

Anyone have a list of changes that they've made to increase battery life? I've got about three hours (with 80% limit in BIOS, which I might get rid of), so I'm sure there's a lot that can be changed.

I just hibernated my laptop and then brought it back up, and it went straight into LMDE without asking me for a password on a lock screen. That seems.. like weird behavior. Is there something I can set to fix that?

Anyone been able to set up a fingerprint reader in LMDE 6 with Cinnamon? I can use fprintd-enroll and fprintd-verify successfully, but it doesn't show up in pam-auth-update so I don't know how to add it to the login screen or the terminal.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13934384

Linux Mint 22 Adopts PipeWire, New Linux Kernel Cadence - OMG! Ubuntu

Hey all,

I’ve currently got Mint running on my old Mid-2012 15” MBP, mainly as a hobby project / Linux learning experience. I have a newer Mac as my main computer.

I’ve already had a ton of failed attempts installing other distros which didn’t work out, I’m assuming because of the now quite outdated hybrid Intel/Nvidia GPU.

I’m currently running the Nvidia driver, but have been reading things about the 390 driver not working on newer kernels. Moving forwards am I going to be better protected from updates breaking things if I switch to using the Nouveau driver instead?

Thanks!

EDIT: thanks for the help. Solution was to connect my phone through USB and download the driver through it's shared connection. Just plug in through USB, enable Hotspot, and enable usb tethering.

I am having trouble with my wifi drivers. Before installing mint, I checked that I had them. I ran the test of mint, had the same issue but was able to install the driver from the USB.

After installing mint, I now try to I'd the same, but it can't do it. It asks to mount the instalation drive and when I procede, it tells me it can't download the package whilst offline, even though it did when I tested mint before installing.

Any tips on what I could do? I have no ether/cable connection but I assume that the driver should be on the USB if it managed to install during testing?

Ps: interesting thing is, if I try to boot from the USB, I get the option between the drives that I want to boor from and wifi. The wifi actually works there!

I have been testing for a few weeks Mint, originally started on 21.2 on an old 2012 MacBook Air… the OS was flying! As I was looking at this now 10 years old machine, now back to usable speed again I was pleasantly surprised. On my desktop was still running Fedora that is just a bit more shiny and has the latest “stable” packages.

I had a negative bias on Mint as I disliked the idea of a newbie’s distro and was two steps away from Debian so for some time I left it aside.

A couple of weeks after that I decided to dust off an old 2013 iMac for my wife to be using as desktop machine and, she being a windows gal, I thought a safe bet would have been Mint that doesn’t feel alien for those coming from that OS.

Again, mind blown by the performance.

I decide to play it risky and so I reimagine it with LMDE: everything works out of the box. I just install the NVIDIA driver from Synaptics and then the computer is set.

This was the drop that made me go on the rabbit hole. I went on a spree to install LDME on an old gaming laptop that was hidden in the dust for now 5 years and then to a few other machines. (Yeah I have a bit of spare hardware lying around)

The last few days I have been thinking to put mint on the main desktop but was afraid of letting GNOME go… and so I decided to test GNOME on one of those LDME machines…

Omg…. Mind blown again. Essentially we can now have Debian with all the delicious little Mint tools. This kinda feels like how Debian is supposed to be! But it is Mint! Even GNOME contains all the little things that, on Fedora for example, I used to have to install manually but now they were there already! Like Gnome Tweaks, or extensions like the Places indicator or other small ones…

I am not sure I am managing to convey how this feels… I have always wanted to have Debian but Debian has made it, one way or another, impossible for me to stay. Mint is making it possible today. What a blessing of a distro.

Rant over.

Side note: I think I have fallen in love with Cinnamon, oups!

I added a YouTube livestream as a channel on Hypnotix. It was added to favorites automatically. I don't see any UI to edit it. Is there a way to edit added channels?

Video description:

Mint 21.3 is still based on Ubuntu 22.04 and its super old kernel, version 5.15. You do get the Mesa drivers version 23, but you don't get the latest Nvidia drivers either, you're still on 535.

So, you can select that new Wayland session from the login screen. I tested this on a spare laptop that uses an Intel Xe integrated GPU, and also has a dedicated Nvidia GPU.

At first glance, everything seems to work ok, but it's an experimental session, and it's missing a few things. OBS, for example, has no source for the display: Cinnamon doesn't seem to support the screen sharing protocol through pipewire, so OBS has nothing to display here. You won't be sharing your screen to anyone just yet.

Another issue I encountered is the lack of any sudo graphical prompt: anytime I needed to install a package or update the system, I had to use the command line.

I also got some inconsistencies in the place where menus appeared, there were also a few things that I couldn't find, like changing the keyboard layout in the Wayland session, the "layouts" tab doesn't appear in the settings where it should be. The gestures of Cinnamon also don't work here for now, you can enable them, but they won't do anything.

The hot corners did work though, with their nice animations and features, but there were some weird graphical things happening. Some settings pages also seemed to have some sort of infinite scroll and didn't stop at their own content, which was a bit weird.

After that, I tried the Wayland session on Nvidia, and, all the problems I had experienced previously were still there, obviously, because they all are missing features in that experimental session, so no reason to expect them to work better here. But I also didn't get any other issue that I didn't see in the wayland session with the Mesa drivers.

So just as a little experiment, I also decided to run a game in the Wayland session, namely Warhammer 40K Mechanicus:

• Wayland + Intel: 25-32 FPS
• Wayland + Nvidia: 60-65 FPS
• X11 + Intel: 32-37 FPS
• X11 + Nvidia: 65-75 FPS

Ok, so now, let's talk about the other changes in Linux Mint 21.3. In terms of apps updates, Hypnotix, the TV watching app now lets you set channels as favorites. You can also create your own custom TV channels if you want.

Cinnamon will also now let you download Actions. These are add-ons for the file manager, that will appear in the right click context menu, letting you do, well, custom actions.

Warpinator, the file sharing app now lets you connect to a device manually by just entering its IP address of scanning a QR code. The Sticky Notes app can now be managed by DBus, meaning you can manage notes using scripts, and the bulk rename tool of Mint now supports drag and drop and thumbnails.

As per the desktop itself, you can now use 75% fractional scaling on X11 if you want that, you can also set keybinds to change the window opacity again, you can disable stylus buttons if you use that sort of hardware, and gestures got a bit better with the ability to set a gesture to zoom in on the desktop.

The Linux Mint community has once again released a top-tier Linux desktop: Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia. I've used more Linux distributions than most people, and Mint is my favorite desktop distro.

My bias starts with Mint's Ubuntu 22.04 Long Term Support (LTS) and Linux kernel 5.15 foundation. It's a stable, reliable operating system for both new and experienced users. Since it's also a Mint LTS, you can use it without any worries until April 2027.