On Sunday 30 August 2020 11:19:03 Sl�vek Banko wrote:
> On Saturday 29 of August 2020 13:11:01 William Morder via trinity-users
>
Sorry to take so long to respond. I was AFK and lost in the physical world, 
and dealing with the problems of living in meatspace. 

> wrote:
> > Okay, so I solved part of the sudoers list / root password problem.
> > Turns out that I had not downloaded quite all the sudo packages,
> > particularly some of the tde-trinity packages, or kde-trinity transition
> > packages, or something in that lot.
>
> If you do not set a root password and use sudo, then the tdesudo-trinity
> package is appropriate to ensure that all tdesu calls are actually tdesudo
> => instead of su and root passwords will use sudo and the user's password.
>

The mysterious E (for Enigmatic) raised the issue of su against sudo; and I've 
also heard Nik mention that su is better for the single home user, which is 
myself. Until now, sudo + tdesudo has always done the trick for me, but if it 
is less secure, and my system will work, then at least I ought to make myself 
aware of the distinctions. I've tried out su, but so far I don't see any 
benefit, and only hear about the perils of sudo. 

It is possible that I can change my habits, so I will look into su. But if 
anybody can explain why su or why *not* sudo, I would be grateful, as the 
technical descriptions I can find online, or in my Linux guides, do not guide 
me toward any decisive points, and I see no reason to change what works. 
However, I will suppose that E knows something that I don't on this point, so 
I am considering how to implement such a change in my working habits. 

> > I wonder if developers can be persuaded to create firestarter-trinity
> > packages, updated to handle ipv6? Gufw does have some nice features, but
> > it is good to be able to see my connections, in real time -- especially
> > when it seems that it was being hijacked, or derailed, by a tor exit
> > node. It seems a pity that such a great package should be deemed
> > obsolete, and not worth adapting or upgrading, but there may be
> > technical reasons that make it unavoidable.
>
> Firestarter is a GTK+ application - it somewhat diminishes the motivation
> for inclusion in the TDE tree. Did you try KMyFirewall? I've never used
> it, but it's an application that's already incorporated into TDE.
>
> > Bill
>
> Cheers

Yes, I gathered that Firestarter is probably not worth the effort. Anyway, 
after reading Michael's praise of gufw, I decided I ought to explore that 
option more deeply, but the last couple days have been busy. I did try 
KMyFirewall, and while it looks like it has loads of features, I've never 
been able to get it to do anything more than start up; beyond that, so far as 
I can tell, it does NOTHING. For now I will look into ufw/gufw, as I can see 
a way forward there. 

Thanks to all the other comments and suggestions. (I'll respond to more of 
them individually, as I have time again.) 

I've mentioned before that I wanted to make some hardware upgrades, and needed 
to get a few items that would not only help me in my work, but indeed will 
bestow upon me superpowers. :-} So I have been making the nest ready for the 
new arrivals; yesterday was a big day, and I am still exhausted. 

For these upgrades, I needed to search out the software packages, which are 
posted; for Brother printers, in particular, the deb packages were always 
really old (Hardy 8.04 = Debian pre-Wheezy, I believe). Now, however, I 
noticed that packages were being kept current for certain models, so it 
looked more promising: I could keep a printer working for a few years into 
the future, without force-installing old packages. 

My machine already violates the laws of nature, as well as plain common sense; 
a little of that sort of thing is already too much. Then, when I tried to 
upgrade my Jessie system, I found that the Devuan netinstall disc for Jessie 
no longer could download packages; which, I surmised, had been moved to the 
archives, meaning that the download URLs in the netinstall disc would not 
work. (That's one advantage to using a full installation disc.) So I was 
forced into upgrading, like it or not, since I only had the netinstall discs 
for Devuan. 

When I had tried to upgrade from Devuan Jessie to Ascil/Stretch, I ended up 
with networking problems, but when I tried a new installation of 
Beowulf/Buster, it went well, and moreover it proves much faster to get from 
nothing to a working system (with a working TDE desktop). 

It used to take me about 5 hours to install the Jessie system, sometimes 
longer, sometimes a few days, if I didn't follow all the steps exactly right; 
but with Beowulf/Buster, the initial installation is less than an hour, and 
getting TDE installed is only a little longer -- so maybe less than two hours 
to reinstall completely -- and now that I have packages already downloaded, 
it will be faster yet. 

Michael did raise one interesting possibility, and maybe I ought to direct it 
to the developers: Is it possible to download *all* the packages in the TDE 
repositories (that is, that will run on my system), rather than having to 
pick through and guess? I have lists of packages from Jessie and earlier, but 
then I have to weed out the obsolete packages. What I want is to create my 
own local repository, to use when I have connection problems or Internet is 
down. 

In Debian, for example, I can download not only the installation discs, but 
also all the current packages (which usually takes about 3 or 4 discs, I 
believe). I thought that I had already downloaded tdesudo, for instance, but 
it got lost in the shuffle; also some of the repositories in my sources.list 
had been marked as sid instead of jessie (which worked better for me at the 
time), but with an upgrade to Beowulf/Buster, it is preferable to stick with 
stable, beowulf or buster (which are equivalent, at present), depending on 
which repository I'm using. 

Anyway ... so now Beowulf/Buster with TDE is installed, and my system is 
stable, and I feel confident in deleting all my old packages that are eating 
up space on that hard drive. I miss some of the old favorites that have 
fallen out, but I've also discovered newer packages that fill the void, and 
usually improve upon what I had, so now I have found a way forward again. 

Thanks to the devs for all their hard work, as well as to everybody who helped 
out with suggestions and comments. This was rather a rush job for me, as I do 
not yet have a test machine that I can use for experiments, and I needed to 
get my desktop up and running quickly, within a few days, as I was pressed to 
make some decisions in the real world, here at home, and I had deadlines and 
commitments and so on. Now this part is done, and I can relax a little. 

Bill