Wheezy annoyances
Well, since Wheezy officially came out a couple of weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my squeeze install this weekend. Upgrading worked pretty well overall, but I'm left with a bunch of little annoyances that leave me wondering if I should just put up with them or reinstall. I'm wondering if anyone out there has fixed any of these.
Gnome 3 was a bit of a surprise. Luckily it was easy to enable classic mode for my work user. My home user is learning to deal with the new interface but so far I'm generally annoyed by the new layout. I also wonder how long I have until the interface is completely re-done again.
I had to upgrade to the latest version of VMWare Player since the version I was using didn't appear to have the tools required to compile itself into the new kernel. Now I have to run "sudo /etc/init.d/vmware restart" every morning before I start my first virtual machine, otherwise the vmware-vmx process just hangs when I first try to start a virtual machine and I have to killall vmware-vmx then restart the vmware process. If the virtual machine is suspended (something I do a lot) it gets hard rebooted when I kill the vmx processes.
I use Kate a lot for editing source code and started getting these weird messages that my files were being opened read-only because they contained lines longer than 1024 characters that were being hard-wrapped at that point. I'm not sure what the point of that is, but you can fix it by selecting "Settings -> Configure Kate -> Open/Save" and setting "Line length limit" to "0". Setting that to "1024" seems like a terrible default.
Next, I no longer seem to be able to run "sudo apt-get install". I have to "sudo su -" then "apt-get install". Otherwise I get errors about programs in /sbin/ not being found and the path not including "/sbin" or "/usr/sbin" and it refuses to do anything. I've never run into that before, and I haven't had time to look into why it is happening now:
dpkg: warning: 'ldconfig' not found in PATH or not executable
dpkg: warning: 'start-stop-daemon' not found in PATH or not executable
dpkg: error: 2 expected programs not found in PATH or not executable
Note: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
Terminal Services Client disappeared at some point in the upgrade process and I couldn't find it in the repositories later. I've installed Remmina Remote Desktop client which is working fine so far.
I haven't been able to connect to my PEAP/MSChap2 wireless service since the update. Finally turned off the wireless card on the machine. Just turned it on and it started working now. Odd. We'll see how it is tomorrow. It may be similar to having to restart the vmware server after startup. Maybe I need to reorder my startup process.
Gnome 3 was a bit of a surprise. Luckily it was easy to enable classic mode for my work user. My home user is learning to deal with the new interface but so far I'm generally annoyed by the new layout. I also wonder how long I have until the interface is completely re-done again.
I had to upgrade to the latest version of VMWare Player since the version I was using didn't appear to have the tools required to compile itself into the new kernel. Now I have to run "sudo /etc/init.d/vmware restart" every morning before I start my first virtual machine, otherwise the vmware-vmx process just hangs when I first try to start a virtual machine and I have to killall vmware-vmx then restart the vmware process. If the virtual machine is suspended (something I do a lot) it gets hard rebooted when I kill the vmx processes.
I use Kate a lot for editing source code and started getting these weird messages that my files were being opened read-only because they contained lines longer than 1024 characters that were being hard-wrapped at that point. I'm not sure what the point of that is, but you can fix it by selecting "Settings -> Configure Kate -> Open/Save" and setting "Line length limit" to "0". Setting that to "1024" seems like a terrible default.
Next, I no longer seem to be able to run "sudo apt-get install". I have to "sudo su -" then "apt-get install". Otherwise I get errors about programs in /sbin/ not being found and the path not including "/sbin" or "/usr/sbin" and it refuses to do anything. I've never run into that before, and I haven't had time to look into why it is happening now:
dpkg: warning: 'ldconfig' not found in PATH or not executable
dpkg: warning: 'start-stop-daemon' not found in PATH or not executable
dpkg: error: 2 expected programs not found in PATH or not executable
Note: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
Terminal Services Client disappeared at some point in the upgrade process and I couldn't find it in the repositories later. I've installed Remmina Remote Desktop client which is working fine so far.
I haven't been able to connect to my PEAP/MSChap2 wireless service since the update. Finally turned off the wireless card on the machine. Just turned it on and it started working now. Odd. We'll see how it is tomorrow. It may be similar to having to restart the vmware server after startup. Maybe I need to reorder my startup process.
Total Comments 2
Comments
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I ended up installing MATE and using that for the primary desktop. Gnome 3 Classic mode still felt really slow and bloated, and LXDE was hard to configure the way I wanted it for dual monitors. MATE is not quite as snappy as LXDE, but it works well and is familiar. I have a second user with the desktop set to LXDE for use on a single monitor.
I was still getting problems connecting to wireless in MATE, but not in LXDE. Apparently this is an issue with gnome-keyring. I did
$ sudo vi /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-keyring-pkcs11.desktop
and changed the "OnlyShowIn" line from
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity;
to
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity;MATE;
and now it seems happy again.Posted 05-29-2013 at 08:07 AM by drask 
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sudo issues
I was able to resolve my sudo issues by adding a line to my sudoers file. Just below the line "Defaults env_reset" at the top of the file should be:
Defaults secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"
This is probably in the replacement sudoers file which I blew past in the upgrade process opting to keep my own rather than adding the repository version or examining the differences since there has never been a reason to in the past when running updates. I guess in the future I need to remember to look for the diffs in all of these configuration files when upgrading.Posted 05-29-2013 at 08:11 AM by drask
Updated 05-29-2013 at 08:20 AM by drask
