Time travel(s)

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TenderFoot
Posts: 130
Joined: Sun May 03, 2009 2:34 pm

Time travel(s)

#1 Post by TenderFoot »

“The time has come," the walrus said, "to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages and kings”

But procrastination is the thief of time - and I can do it in spades! Appropriately "Countdown" is on the box as I compose this...

I was astonished (mortified?) to realise that my last posting here was back in mid Winter when gazing out of the window (as I do a lot) to observe some of the bulbs coming into flower with the promise of spring whilst enjoying the activity on the bird feeders - saying goodbye to some old friends, welcoming new arrivals and appreciating the all year contingent. The fish in the ponds were coming back to life and frogs had left masses of spawn. Herons are an all year round threat and Egrets have moved into the neighbourhood.

Now tis mid Autumn (or Fall to most of you guys). The trees are mostly naked now and we've had a couple of mild frosts here in central UK. Yet some roses are still hanging in there along with Kafir Lilies and Rosemary plus Caltha (Marsh Marigold) in a pond. There is still some Autumn colouration and berries.

In between has been 9 months of green frustration! Waiting for a reliable 3 or 4 days so that the tools and materials could be left out overnight (or even an hour or two) was hopeless. I couldn't even get on with indoor tasks in case an opportunity was missed and even when one did arise it was a toss up between activity or soak up a few rays! So most of the available times were devoted to hacking back or removing rampant shrubs and climbers rather than the more creative developments that had been planned.

Why do I tell you all this? In the last few days I have just finished planting a batch of bulbs (about 500) most of which had to be hastily temporarily potted up last year. But now it's time to hibernate indoors thus giving me the chance to catch up on matters linux.

The hdd drive on this machine (Tosh) was replaced about a year ago and now suddenly realise that installation and updating tasks were not all completed.

For whatever reason, Mint 13 Xfce (with additional DEs added) was addressed with the simple objective of updating but, horror, it had reached eol back in April. Ok, this is an opportunity to look at their latest offering (even though the prospect of having to reconstruct with the plethora of apps and tweaks) which was installed to a spare partition. Though immediate impressions were not good, persisted with the first objective to get Compiz working, which had always been a (relative) doddle but this could not get window decorations to cooperate other than the default.

Then, a light bulb moment as I remembered similar difficulties in MX and the solution of installing kwin. But which version of MX and on which machine? Rebooted to MX16 and here it is with kwin running at startup. So how was it done? Thank goodness for forums and especially the lovely gurus at MX (and Mepis). Looked at my posts and immediately found viewtopic.php?f=100&t=41597 . Whilst not yet sure to what extent the method will fit Mint it has been a pleasure to be back here in MX.

Naturally, one of the first things to do has been to update which, apart from a couple of gpg errors, resolved by running CheckAptGPG, went smoothly. Next an up to date Snapshot which also went smoothly. However, I suddenly remembered that my last snapshot, taken just before the kwin stuff was probably still present and, therefore, concerned that it may be included in the new one as other distros remastering does! But no - it seems that MX sensibly ignores them.

Thanks MX!

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richb
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Re: Time travel(s)

#2 Post by richb »

Welcome back TenderFoot. With MX 17 beta 1 I have opted for Compiz over kwin. It gives the same effects functionality, perhaps even more, without having to bring in a bunch of KDE packages. It also is not a drain on resources and runs very fast. With the fusion icon in the Notification area, switching back to xfwm4 desktop is a snap. I do this when I am testing the beta so compiz does not influence the testing.
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System: MX 23 KDE
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TenderFoot
Posts: 130
Joined: Sun May 03, 2009 2:34 pm

Re: Time travel(s)

#3 Post by TenderFoot »

Thanks richb, but may I refer you #15 in the link!

Anyway, I'm very happy with the kwin solution but the spirit of OP is tempus fugit...

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