Saturday, April 19, 2025

Restoring linux mint 22.1 after major disaster, what to reinstall and setup

After a disaster trying to set up citrix on linux mint 22.1, I reinstalled. I use my mint machine for various aspects of C++ development so need a wide range of tools. Below are the steps I took that got things back in working order. It is a shame that no distro I know of is actually geared for C++ program development.

- The install was unattended unlike in the past when I have had to tell it to use the network, ntp, etc, this was odd. Also, I note that mint 22.1 uses a repo called noble, not jammy. - Welcome screen, driver manager install nvidea driver 470. Tried install but it took ages. The progress bar moved and eventually got there. Had to reboot. - On reboot had to call up welcome screen again, because I unticked that show at startup box, then launched update manager. Declined option to switch to local mirror because in the past I could not get that to work, so just clicked on apply update, then install updates. Eventually it finished and did not demand a reboot, so went on to system settings.

- System settings go to power manager display and change every setting to never. - Software manager, spends a while generating cache..... Then shows a list of featured apps, we want some of them , so picked inkscape, because alfresco needs it, virtualbox, calibre, gimp, then went for categories.

- Accessories: htop, unrar

- Games: wine, mame, quadrapassel, seemd to hang on this, so rebooted

- Graphics: handbrake, shutter, VLC, dia, Gthumb, shotwell, xsane, evince, handbrake-CLI, ksnip

- Internet: openSSHserver, this install also hung, so will revert to using the command line. Rebooted.

- Apt install: Wireshark, deluge, chromium, samba, transmission, gftp, nginX, tor

- Office: vim, libreOffice, emacs, sigil

- Programming: meld, nasm, cmake, clang, git-Gui, gfortran, flex, bison, valgrind, maven, yasm, automake, kcachegrind, rustC, ddd, doxygen, flatpak-builder, intlTool, protobuf-compiler, pylint, python-is-python3

- Science and education: gnuPlot, gnuPlot-x11

- Sound and video: lame, k3b, audacity, mpV, mplayer, menCoder, flaC, id3

- System tools: tmuX, ncDU, ansible, gPart

- Misc: nmap

I eventually found out what entries to add to /etc/fstab to get my NAS mounts back. I have now backed up that file to my secondary drive.

- apt install postgres, postgres-client, unixodbc-dev, odbc-postgresql, meson, lcov, nlohmann-json3-dev, libreadline-dev/

Discovered that the postgres GUI, pgadmin4, is not supported on Mint 22.1 yet so installed dBeaver. Found out that by default dbeaver turns off visibility of all databases other than 'postgres'. Found the tickbox under settings to fix that.

And now, at long last, it looks like I am back in business.

Additional installs (26-Apr-2025)

iotop, gparted, clang-format, matplotlib (via pip)

Don't try to set up citrix on linux mint 22.1

I have spent all of Good Friday and most of Easter Saturday recovering from the disasterous step I took, trying to get citrix to work on my recently installed linux mint 22.1. My advice for those on that distro is "don't go there!". Citrix depends on an ancient Gtk library but the debian install file does not contain it. At version 22.1 it is no longer supported. The citrix version I downloaded was dated March 2025. So it is quite annoying that citrix have still not dealt with this issue. There is a web of dependencies that took ages to chase down, only for me to end up in a right old tangle where eventually I was forced to reinstall linux mint. I even tried a project I found on github where someone tried to solve the problem via a flatpak but that didn't work out either. Citrix need to get their act together. Luckily, I have an old laptop with an older version of linux mint which is just about serviceable, even though it creaks and groans a bit. It does run citrix ok so I will have to stick with that.