On Monday 02 July 2018 07:33:44 Gene Heskett wrote:

[trimming just a bit ...] 
> > > It might be a good idea, and it may not.  But the fact is that I
> > > have 5 machines here still running wheezy and one jessie, which
> > > wheezy is now officially EOL even for security stuff. Until the lcnc
> > > crew have made up a jessie or stretch installer, So the likelyhood
> > > of my playing with this is quite low.
> > >
> > > The jessie install is quite stable, but I have a rock64 running
> > > stretch that while its 20x faster than a pi, has problems with the
> > > login screen that in 6+ months, has not been fixed, so there is no
> > > way I could honestly say stretch is stable. Reboots after an update
> > > are a try this and see if it works, then try that, each one taking a
> > > full 10 second powerdown to get it to even try to reboot.
> >
> > Yup, I remember that hangup from running Debian with systemd. Once I
> > changed to Devuan, it no longer hangs on reboot. However, changing
> > over to Devuan is not necessarily smooth and easy - although some here
> > would disagree. I think it all depends on what one already has
> > installed.
>
> Don't forget that the rock64 is NOT an armhf like the pi's, its a full
> arm64. I don't think the compiler is quite ready for a full 64 bit 4
> core arm. In any event, the login screen becomes locked if not logged in
> within 10 seconds of its appearance. If the screen locker and its pw
> requirement could be nuked, that would help since ones pw is no good
> with the screen locker, once it kicks in, its power button time to get
> back into it. I'd a lot druther it just turned the monitor off in 10 to
> 20 minutes of inactivity. Barring a prowler in the night, I am the only
> one that will ever make new fingerprints on any of these keyboards here.
> The paranoid security, as if all this was sitting on a kiosk in Grand
> Central Station is extremely anti-productive. In a single user
> environment, its very poor quality BS because it only grows resentment.
>
You ought to be able to diable the screen locker. I never use them except 
manually. Like you, I am the only one here, if one doesn't count the 
occasional vermin in this building, so there is no reason for ultra-security 
about physical access to my machine. When I leave, I lock everything down 
manually. 

> > > Until you finally get the ducks in order and a successful login can
> > > be done. That same rock64 runs jessie perfectly from power
> > > restoration to the next power failure. That I'd call stable.
> > >
> > > > > > Be careful, if you haven't used that before; although I
> > > > > > suspect that you know it. Don't make changes there unless you
> > > > > > know what to do.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Also, look in
> > > > > > Trinity Control Center / Sound & Multimedia / Sound System
> > > > > > Both parts,
> > > > > > General / Hardware
> > > > > > ought to be examined.
> >
> > On the whole, I agree with your approach, I think, which seems to be:
> > take it slow, and don't mess with a working system. Even when my
> > system is not running quite perfectly, it's still better than one that
> > doesn't run at all, and time wasted with reinstallation.
>
> I would not go so far as to say that, because I am forever twiddling the
> lcnc configs. Adding a function or expanding the gui. But thats not the
> os, its an app, so if I screw it up, the machine keeps on keeping on.
> And I see the errors so I can fix it.
>
Oh, I am a constant fiddler & an habitual twiddler. I just mean that I stay 
away from doing a full installation, as I don't quite have it to the point 
(as I used to do on my old Hardy Kubuntu machine) where I could go from not 
working to completely restored system in about half an hour. However, I am 
almost there, and when I get that with my Jessie system, I want to make it so 
that upgrades (to Stretch/Ascii) will not be any big deal. But at a glance, 
it looks and runs almost exactly like my legendary desktop of yore, the one 
that poets used to sing lays about, and that the bards composed epics to 
celebrate. It's almost there, but not quite. 

> Going off-topic a  bit:
>
[interesting ... but snip ... sorry ... to please Felix ...]
>
> > Right now I have a lot of little glitches that keep building up, but I
> > have a feeling that most are somehow related, as I've never had them
> > before; and all are new since installing Devuan. So I mostly just keep
> > trying to trace the source (or sources) of these issues, waiting until
> > the inevitable reinstallation ... which could be another month or two.
>
> That shouldn't be the case, Bill.
>
> Cheers, Gene Heskett

Well, I have discussed some of them, and got help, but the solutions don't 
quite resolve my issues. And these glitches are annoying, but don't interrupt 
my work. 

For example, I mentioned in an earlier thread that the GUI of some programs 
suddenly gets "bleached" white, like the default KDE3 or maybe Gnome setting? 
No matter what I've tried, they refuse to use my system colors. Yet when I 
reinstall my system, generally everything returns to normal. This seems to 
happen about every third time that I reinstall, without apparent rhyme or 
reason. I install everything by specific steps, so this should not change, if 
my system itself hasn't changed. And sometimes, if I just reinstall yet 
again, immediately, everything is back to normal. 

The same with my mount points. I create special mount points for all my extra 
hard drives (beyond sda partitions, that is). Some are internal, and continue 
to work fine, but my external drives suddenly cannot be mounted except as 
root, and remain accessible only within a root environment (for example, if I 
open Konqueror as root). This means that I cannot play media files from those 
partitions, for example, though I can transfer them back and forth. I have 
gone into fstab and mtab settings, examine ownership and permissions, etc., 
and nothing changes. Only one drive, which is formatted as a Linux 
filesystem, has become partially accessible, though I still must jump through 
hoops to mount it. My other external hard drives remain inaccessible except 
when I access them through a root environment; that is, either a root shell, 
or by opening Konqueror as root. Yet when I reinstall, most likely this 
problem will go away, as again, it only happens maybe on every third 
installation (and never happened when I ran Kubuntu Hardy 8.04). 

There are a few other annoyances, but as I say, I prefer to keep working at 
the moment, rather than spend a day or two reinstalling everything. 

However ... unless somebody has some really useful suggestions to make about 
how to solve these problems, I am not asking for help. I am just making 
observations about some of my minor annoyances. As I said, my system is 
getting close to perfect, and then the Dragon Kings will yield their Jewel of 
Enlightenment, the President will probably arrange to pin a medal on my 
chest, or maybe there will be a Nobel Prize for personal modification of a 
desktop environment? Anyway, almost perfect ... *SIGH* 

Bill