The officially official Devuan Forum!

mmmna

Member

Registered: 2017-05-12

Posts: 7  

Having some issues with Mate

I know XFCE is Devuan default, but the Thunar file manager has left me wanting: no search, and more.

I found and came to like XFE running under XFCE, but XFE isn't allowing multiple applications to open a file type, and isn't even storing just one application as per the associate link it does offer. Not enough joy for me.

I recently left KDE because the new Plasma 5 icons are just too bland and painful to deal with (just because M$ does it, doesn't mean everyone in the computing world should chase M$ as a lead). That said, I miss KDE Dolphin quite a bit.

So, mostly because I had toyed with a distro that uses Mate as default and I was a little familiar with Mate from that experience, I installed Mate on Devuan 1.0.0.

I like Mate quite a bit, Caja does almost everything I need from a file manager.

A problem I need help with is as follows:
I use USB Flash drives quite a bit. Like constantly. Nothing stays on the spinning disc for very long.

When I insert a flash stick, it pops up on the Mate desktop, which is just perfect.
When I double click the flash stick desktop icon, it opens Caja, again, just perfect.

When I'm done my not so mysterious work on my flash stick, I close Caja.
I wait a few seconds.
Sometimes, I have a terminal window open, sometimes I don't. Sometimes when I have a terminal window open, I will issue a sync command to flush cached writes. Sometimes I do not issue sync, sometimes I sync as root. Syncing makes no difference in the long run.
Whether or not I issue a sync command, I then right click the desktop icon for the flash stick, and I select eject.

The desktop icon disappears, no messages are displayed telling me it is safe to remove the flash stick.

I pull the flash stick out because I'm done. I later reinsert it, and if I don't already have a terminal open, I will open a terminal, issue su, login in as root, and issue a dmesg | tail to see the flash stick /dev association point.

I then issue fsck -p /dev/sdx, and much to my surprise, the dirty bit was set, and the file system needed repairs.

But.... as I stated, I can issue a sync command before the eject command, I always get a dirty bit, yet I expect that either of sync or the eject command should have safely prepared the flash stick for removal.

Seems it makes no difference if I issue sync as user, issue sync as root, or never issue sync at all. That alone stumps me.

These are almost stock flash sticks except I repartition them to NOT have a partition at all, and I mkfs a fat filesystem into the unpartitioned device. Such has worked for a decade and more than a half dozen distros so far....

Anyone know what I'm doing wrong here?

(And a gentle "Oh, by the way": Mate released 1.18.0 not very long ago in March 2017; Devuan offers Mate 1.8.1, from 2014-ish. Maybe the intervening changes have fixed the dirty bit issue?)

Thanks for any assistance!

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,486  

Re: Having some issues with Mate

Newer versions of mate packaged by Antofox are available here -
http://hezeh.org/the-hezeh-repository/

The plan is for these to be added to the main devuan repository. I don't have an exact timeline, but it shouldn't be too long. This is one of the higher priority tasks right now.

If that doesn't fix it, one workaround is to install pmount and use spacefm to mount/unmount usb drives.

mmmna

Member

Registered: 2017-05-12

Posts: 7  

Re: Having some issues with Mate

Thanks.

I tried the hezeh repos, but saw too many problems for my newb-ness. Will wait for the add into the official repos, and will try the suggested pmount and spacefm.

First, I added the repos via Synaptic, refreshed, got a 'no public key' error regarding the hezeh stuff. So, like, whatever, I keep going.

Next, the results of adding the hezeh repo, I definitely see the new version of Mate, with some pleasure, but while selecting the individual items that were version 1.18, I encountered that mate-control-center has unresolved dependencies, and so I stopped there and removed the hezeh repos. To be safer.

I'm assuming the repos will catch the dependencies at some point.

Last edited by mmmna (2017-07-27 22:00:28)

mmmna

Member

Registered: 2017-05-12

Posts: 7  

Re: Having some issues with Mate

fsmithred: again, thanks for the hints about spacefm, that has a lot of interesting power available as plugins.I overlooked that one a while back, looked too rudimentary. I was wrong there!