Sync Updates for Week 25, 2023

I guess I don't need to tell all y'all that this is my GNOME VM. It's pretty ... uh ... distinctive, I would say. As with the Plasma and Budgie VMs, this is minimally configured as a daily driver. I'll add more configuration in time, but I want to get MATE to this level first.

More congratulations are due to the dev team. I encountered no errors during setting up and configuring this VM.

Finally, here's the MATE testing VM, such as it is. Solus MATE has always been the most difficult DE for me to work with, and as such, this isn't configured exactly like the other three editions, but it's close. I couldn't access my NAS via Caja, and I couldn't connect with the USB drive plugged in to the host, so I was unable to modify /etc/fstab to access my NAS shares, and thus replace the home directory's folders with NAS shares, as I did in the other VMs.

But Vivaldi, Thunderbird, Spider sollitaire, Shisen-sho, and Mahgongg are all installed and configured, as on the other VMs. There are several virtual desktops displayed in the bottom panel that are represented by rectangles instead of application icons. In fact, the only ones with icons are Thunderbird, Vivaldi, and the MATE terminal. I think I've noticed this lack of icons before, but I'm not positive. If someone with more experience using MATE has an opinion on that, I'd defer to that person.

Since I started with Solus, I've used mostly Budgie and Plasma personally, so I'm less familiar with the other DEs. At any rate, this VM will make it possible for me to verify fixes and try new features, so it should serve its purpose.

Axios but I have never had a problem with anything usb on Mate. (I find it very strange)

yep. I find the theming rectangles very strange after the usb.

WetGeek Solus MATE has always been the most difficult DE for me to work with

I always found it the easiest. but like axios said I have no NAS. Caja otherwise picked up all drives.
Gnome is gnome-y, plasma has 684 settings where it needs about 200, budgie easier than both but can get cantankerous...but Mate is so perfect it's boring. I can't wreck it. It's lets me operate it.

I often wonder if the VM doesn't add layers of differences in some way? I mean, OOTB with rectangles instead of icons in workspace thumbs is not something I'm familiar with. Seems a lost in translation thing.
That said, you are testing so it's all valuable.

Axios Myself I just dont have issues with it Does everything I want.

Obviously you and I are trying to use the OS differently. I'm very happy that it works well for your needs. And keep in mind that I don't have anything against MATE, it's just that Budgie, Gnome, and Plasma will all connect with my NAS using the smb protocol (Samba) that lets Linux machines talk with Windows machines remotely. Smb is how Windows servers talk with each other, and with the workstations in a workplace.

All I need to do is click on the Network link in that DE's file manager. It even works for distros that I can't get to connect using the Linux native nfs protocol. (My NAS supports both, so in a mixed workplace, it can support Windows and Linux computers.) But why is a NAS so important to some folks, like me, for instance?

My NAS (network attached storage) is important to me, because it holds family pictures, music, movies, documents, downloads, source repositories, ebooks, backups, and more -- that I've collected over decades. It's a little Linux server in a case with four huge disks (10 TB each) in a RAID array. At this point, it's about half full. It communicates with every machine here (hardware and virtual), so that they don't need to store all that data themselves.

And that happens to be where some of the software I use to configure systems resides, So when I create a VM, or when I buy a new computer, it's important for me to be able to connect it with my NAS. Not everyone needs to be able to do that, but I do. And when a system makes it difficult or impossible to do that, I say so.

And with Budgie, GNOME, and Plasma VM's, I can share certain resources with the host machine the VM is running on, like the clipboard, files, or USB ports. I keep a set of files that I use to configure a new machine on a USB drive. I did that originally so that I could set up identical classroom computers without the need for a network, but I've also found it useful even outside of the classroom.

With Budgie, GNOME, and Plasma VMs, their file managers will automatically mount a USB drive that I've inserted in a port on the host machine. It's a feature of VirtualBox VMs, but MATE doesn't take advantage of it. At least not that I've found so far. It's the TRANSFERS that's mounted in the file manager, like in this shot of Nemo in my Budgie VM.

The issue of the rectangles instead of application icons in the display of virtual desktops is an interesting one. Plasma, for example, displays, by default, empty rectangles that show the approximate size and shape of the windows running on that desktop. But if you right-click on one of them and choose to configure the Workspace Switcher widget (a.k.a. Pager), the first setting in the list is the one that displays application icons instead. Some DEs, like MATE, don't have that setting, but simply display the application icons all the time -- or rather, sometimes. As you can see, it appears to be selective in MATE's case, as some apps appear as rectangles and others show up as icons. The rest of the applications that appear as icons in other DEs just show up as the rectangles I mentioned. Here's a better look at them.

From left to right, these represent Thunderbird, Vivaldi, Spider solitaire, Shisen-sho, Mahjongg, Settings, Caja, and the MATE terminal. I don't know why the terminal displayed as an icon yesterday, but not today. Thunderbird and Vivaldi are apps that I installed from the repository using eopkg, but so are Spider, Shisen-sho, and Mahjongg. The others are native to MATE. So I don't know how it decides to display icons for some and outlines for the others.

This has been a long message, but I wanted to explain why I mention whether a distro supports a NAS, or its DE works in ways that work for me. As I said in the beginning, I have nothing at all against MATE, if it does everything its user wants and needs. I could even live with it if I had to. But with Solus, I don't have to. Also, I hope it's clear why I appreciate a distro or DE that makes it easy for me to access my NAS, whether by smb or nfs. And I love that many will work with VirtualBox so that a VM can access its host's resources.

My goal yesterday was to get four Solus .ISO files installed on VMs, and minimally configured as a useful daily driver. I'll likely be using them differently over the coming days, and I'll certainly be doing more configuration. Maybe if I install the VirtualBox guest additions for the MATE DE, it will be able to access more of the host's resources, for example. I haven't needed to do that with any of the other DEs.

Has anyone using VirtualBox tried to install the guest additiion into a VM, and been told that they can't be found, and asked, would you like to download them from the internet?

And then, when you try to do that, you get this error?

This used to work for me, but recently it hasn't. Before, I'd just tell the host to insert the image file, and it would happen. Some time later, I'd need to grab it from the Internet, but that worked without an erorr. Now I can do neither. It's something I rarely need to do, so it doesn't affect me much, but I believe I have all the VirtualBox packages I need on my host machine, and can't understand either of these errors. I don't understand why the host can't just insert them, and if it can't, why I get a useless error message when I try to fetch them from online.

Today, I'm trying to install the guest additions into a MATE VM, but so far I've failed at that. I can report it as a bug in the Dev Tracker, but I'm reluctant to do that if it could just be something amiss on my laptop. That's why I'm wondering if it happens to anyone else.

brent I often wonder if the VM doesn't add layers of differences in some way?

When exploring interesting distros, and working with unfamiliar DEs in a VM, sometimes I've thought that might be the case. But usually it turns out to be something else. VirtualBox does a remarkable job of providing all the resources that a VM needs. The .ISO file doesn't have any reason to believe that it's not being installed and used on hardware. It even supported efi and secure boot before some OSs did.

And just because I've never seen something not work on a VM that does work on hardware, that doesn't mean it can never happen. It just means that I've never seen it happen to me. A problem has always turned out to be caused by something else. So I treat the idea with a respectful skepticism.

WetGeek https://help.getsol.us/docs/user/software/virtualization/virtualbox

Here's the rest of the story. I haven't solved the biggest mystery yet, but it's become irrelevent, as you'll soon see. Up until yesterday, I'd had so much trouble with the MATE virtual machine, I couldn't believe it. So I figured I'd create a new VM for MATE, and this time I wouldn't create the partitions manually to start with, but I'd just give the brand-new empty virtual disk drive to the installer and let it do its thing. That didn't make much sense to me, as the cause of all my MATE grief, but it was the only thing that seemed to separate this accident-prone virtual machine from the three VMs that were working perfectly.

So I set aside the vm-solus-mate-4-4 VM, and created another that I called vm-solus-mate-4-4-2. I made it identical to the first one -- same size, and all the same property settings. But this time I didn't create any partitions in advance, so there was no need for me to delete any partitions before passing it to the MATE installer. The installer created the disk like this.

That's nearly identical to the partitioning I'd used, except for the sizes. As I wrote in an earlier message, I'd given the boot partition 1 GiB, as I always do, and the swap partition 6 GiB instead, so I'd always be able to hibernate the VM. (I love being able to start up with the previous session all intact.) And I used GPartEd to assign the flags, just as they are here. I don't think there were any other differences, and yet the installer swore that it could find nowhere to put the bootloader, so I couldn't continue with the installation. I double-checked that the boot partition I'd created was formatted FAT32, and that I'd assigned the flags correctly, and tried to install again, but again it failed.

That's when I decided to delete the partitions I'd created and start over. I deleted everything, right down to an empty partition table, and tried to install it one more time, this time choosing the option to allow the installer to use the entire disk and create its own partitions. It created what you see above, and the installation went on to a successful conclusion.

I identify as a human, so it's always posible that I made some other mistake with the first virtual disk drive, but it's a slim possibility indeed. I've done this so many times I could create one of these disks in my sleep. And besides, by the time the installer saw this drive, I had cleaned it up down to the gpt partition table. Maybe the installer thought my partitions were too big? None of the reasons I could think of made any sense. To me, they were still mysteries, but working is working, and I'm glad that that's what had just happened.

When I started working with the new VM, it seemed as if nothing had changed, other than I knew I'd never be able to hibernate it with less than a GiB of swap partition and 4 GB of RAM in the VM. I set out to configure the VM the same as the first one, but this time a remarkable thing happened. Stuff worked. I had no trouble accessing my NAS using the file manager's built-in smb protocol, so there was no problem fetching the bashrcAdditions file that contains my macros for the terminal, and copying them to my home directory. And the file containing the 12 extra lines I add to /etc/fstab in order to mount my NAS shares. The result of that is here.

This is my home directory now. The curved arrows attached to most of the folders indicate that they aren't the originals, but instead they're symbolic links to my NAS shares that happen to have the same names. This is a result of my being able, this time, to append the additional lines to /etc/fstab, change to /mnt, issue a mount -a command that resulted in an error message listing the missing mount points per the modified /etc/fstab file, create those missing folders, issue mount -a again, and see no error this time.

Then I changed back to my home directory and deleted every folder there except for Desktop. (You might notice that there's no curved arrow attached to that one in the image above.) That's the original Desktop folder, and I assumed that I should leave that one alone. So I then created 5 symlinks, connecting my home directory to five of the shares that were now mounted in /mnt. For example, if I click on the Music folder here, this is what I get. There are 234 albums of music, and 23.3. TB of free space, so obviously this isn't a folder in this 32 GB VM.

You might also notice the TRANSFERS device entry in the leftmost column. That's because the VM is now able to access that USB drive that's mounted in its host. TRANSFERS contains a lot of files that I use to configure computers, both virtual ones and hardware ones. Like address books for Thunderbird, and a list of comic feeds. Before yesterday I couldn't do any of this with the VM I was working on. And most importantly, all of this configuration happened without a single error, and this time the result is just like it is in my other VMs.

Speaking of Thunderbird, here's what it looks like in the new VM. It now has three of my email accounts, two Google calendars, a Comics account for feeds, two fully populated address books, and as such it is a perfect working replica of the Thunderbird on my daily-driver laptop, the VM's host. The only thing it lacks is my collection of inbox rules that sort the incoming email into categories. I haven't found a way to copy those and use them elsewhere yet, so I have to start a new collection for each new computer.

It looks like my new keyboard is on the way from Amazon today! And I need to go see my cardiologist this afternoon. I've already seen the result of my stress test, and I know my heart's in perfect shape, but it won't be official until she tells me it is. Once more, all this happened without any errors.

Continuing, here's the new Vivaldi. I've installed LastPass, and fetched Vivaldi's password. so I could later do a sync, resulting in the 50+ start screen shortcuts you would be able to see here if not for the page I selected. Then I created 8 named tab stacks using those, thus resulting the "menu" you see as the two lines of tabs at the top. The "Forums" named tab stack is selected on the top line, and the Solus forum tab is selected from the second line. I love Vivaldi. As with the configuration I did for Thunderbird, there were no errors of any kind this time around.

I could go on, and show you image after image of solitaire games and MATE settings, but I'll spare you that. The point of all this is that I've modified my new MATE VM into a nearly perfect duplicate of my daily-driver laptop, software-wise. Of course, one is MATE, and the other one Plasma, so they're not a perfect match. The menus are very different, and so is the bottom panel. But they're otherwise very similar. And throughout all this configuration, I ran into no errors of any kind. Zero. Nada. @EbonJaeger, any bugs I reported regarding the earlier VM can be closed. It's no longer a mystery why you couldn't reproduce them. I have none to report for MATE now.

WetGeek The secret is that the application window on that workspace is maximized.

Later, I found out that this isn't entirely accurate. In order for the icons to be displayed, the application in the workspace doesn't need to be maximized. It just needs to be a substantial part of the workspace's display. I don't need to maximize a smaller window in order for the icon to appear. All I need to do is grab a corner with the mouse and make it bigger.

It's beyond my skill to quantize the percentage of the display that needs to be occupied by the application window in order for the icon to appear, but that's essentially what happens. I can toggle from an outline to an icon just by making the application window bigger. I wondered why my Thunderbird, Vivaldi, and terminal windows were causing an icon to be present, when they weren't totally maximized. They were just mostly so.

@EbonJaeger, I know if I were coding this Workspace Switcher, and left it like this, I'd never get it past QA anywhere I worked. They would reject it as a serious bug. But I don't know if we should do that that here, especially while we're trying to get the new .ISO files released. If you'd like me to write it up in Dev Tracker, I'll be happy to do that. Otherwise, I'll just consider it an idiosyncrasy of MATE.

WetGeek I'd given the boot partition 1 GiB, as I always do, and the swap partition 6 GiB instead, so I'd always be able to hibernate the VM.

As I figured, this was the result when I tried to hibernate this VM instead of just shutting it down.

@EbonJaeger, This is why I originally created a swap space of 6 GiB when I created the first virtual disk drive. The installer reduced that to <1 GiB when it partitioned the second one. And it's why I entered the suggestion in the Dev Tracker to change the swap partitions the installer creates to at least the size of RAM in the target machine.

@EbonJaeger: To summerize, my four Solus VMs have now been re-created as version 4.4, and configured to match their host computer. I'll be able to confirm any fixes that still need to be checked, so let me know if my help is needed with that.

All throughout this process, there have been no bugs to report, so I'm really impressed with the state of Solus 4.4 at this time. I hope any remaining showstoppers will soon be fixed, and the new .ISO files can be released before long.

WetGeek I think I'll re-create my MATE and Plasma VMs with these larger partition sizes, as I usually keep these VMs around for a long time.

Just finished with that. I nuked the MATE and Plasma test VMs, and created new ones from scratch. Gave them 1 GiB boot partitions and 6 GiB swap partitions. That leaves 25 GiB for the root partitions All software installed, and mostly configured. They both hibernate beautifully, as do the Budgie and Gnome VMs.