Comments on upgrading PCManFM

[utu]

I installed PCManFM 0.9.7-1 from Debian testing
and I'm not too happy with it, because:

1. Mine is now missing the 'Preferences' panel by which PCManFM 0.5-3
formerly provided the capability to load and tweak the desktop background.
Compiz 0.8.2 only provides a capability to specify cube caps,
not desktop cpube faces. My original set-up values are retained, and suit me
at present, but I can't change them anymore;

2. Mine won't mount ntfs volumes, but I'd rather it didn't, anyway,
noting some worrisome comments on performance I've seen;

3. Mine has one menu selection, 'Applications', that's a lock-up.
I have no idea what the author had in mind;

4. Nice to have a 'Trash' option, but if you click 'Properties' to
see how much is there, the gui closes instead of telling you;

5. I had hoped to find fewer PolKit, gtk-2 and gnome incompatibity
problems as evidenced in .xsession-errors. That's not the case; and

6. Working with Synaptic, it looks too scary (to me) to try to
revert to the earlier PCManFM, because some wholesale LXDE changes
are involved.


FWIW, The author of PCManFM is also the founder of LXDE; also
FWIW, I still have ntfs-3g-ng the same as in my original
Knoppix 6.2.1 CD and not ntfs-3g.

[kl522]

I installed PCManFM 0.9.7-1 from Debian testing
and I'm not too happy with it, because:

1. Mine is now missing the 'Preferences' panel by which PCManFM 0.5-3
formerly provided the capability to load and tweak the desktop background.
Compiz 0.8.2 only provides a capability to specify cube caps,
not desktop cpube faces. My original set-up values are retained, and suit me
at present, but I can't change them anymore;

pcmanfm --desktop-pref


2. Mine won't mount ntfs volumes, but I'd rather it didn't, anyway,
noting some worrisome comments on performance I've seen;since you rather not to have it .....Nevertheless, mine is working as of now.



3. Mine has one menu selection, 'Applications', that's a lock-up.
I have no idea what the author had in mind;That's due to some library incompatible with pcmanfm2. I can't remember exactly what already, perhaps it's 'libfm' or 'libmenu-cache1; or something like that. Even if you already have them installed, perhaps re-install it.


4. Nice to have a 'Trash' option, but if you click 'Properties' to
see how much is there, the gui closes instead of telling you; Again, it is associated libraries problem. Need to upgrade the associated libraries.

[utu]

Sequel to my PCManFM rant in the opening post.

1. It turns out that Preference tab labeled 'Desktop' in PCManFM 0.5-3 now
missing in PCManFM 0.9-7 was redundant. The desktop image and background
has an equivalent gui for these settings in Compiz. It can be found at
Preferences/CompizConfig/Utility/Wallpaper/. I happily withdraw gripe #1.

2. I rely on Synaptic to resolve dependencies. In this case, Synaptic
provided all the 'necessary' files but omitted two 'recommended' files:
one is gvfs-fuse, the other is gvs-backends; both depend on yet additional
libraries. Both gvfs files appear relevant to the (new) 'Trash' function.
However, the totality of the apparent changes required looks staggering,
and likely hazardous to attempt with my 2Gb SDCard arrangement.

3. My remaining observations still stand.

[utu]

Here is one type of .xsession error report from PCManFM 0.9.7
which is probably in fact a benign, no-problem, situation:

(pcmanfm:3423): Gtk-WARNING **: Radio group does not contain an action with value '0'
** (pcmanfm:3423): DEBUG: 1 files-dropped!, info_type: 0
** (pcmanfm:3423): DEBUG: total size to move: 772, dest_fs: l15
** (pcmanfm:3423): DEBUG: 1 files-dropped!, info_type: 0
** (pcmanfm:3423): DEBUG: total size to move: 233, dest_fs: l15

These warnings resulted from doing a drag-and-drop of two small files to
a common folder. The operation itself seemed straight-forward and successful.

Just one of several worrisome, probably minor, details regarding this 'upgrade'.

[kl522]

I have mentioned these casually up there, does not seem to "get through". I will try to make it more clearly.

1. For the problem of pcmanfm not managing desktop, change this file
/etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart from

'pcmanfm -d' to
'pcmanfm --desktop

To bring up the GUI, use 'pcmanfm --desktop-pref'.

2. For application menu hang problem, install or re-install menu cache and read this post :-

http://forum.lxde.org/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1481

[utu]

The LXDE forum reference confirms the intended absence
of the Desktop Preferences gui.
It's nice to know a command line input that can provide
the missing, but notably redundant gui.

Peculiar, but not particularly useful, that the gui
menu item is missing while the command infrastructure
still remains.

Adding testing repo to stable allows one to reinstall
libs mentioned in the LXDE forum reference via Synaptic.
Having done does not remedy the lock-up which occurs
on selecting the 'Applications' menu item.

It may be that proper compilation of PCManFM2 works as
intended. I'm not convinced that the current Debian
stable PCManFM 0.9.7 upgraded via Synaptic on
Knoppix 6.2.1 does the same.

Many LXDE forum comments allude to similar troublesome
difficulties with PCManFM2 on several distributions.
The order of compilation of various elements and
dependencies of PCManFM2 seem to be critical to getting
it right.

[kl522]

Peculiar, but not particularly useful, that the gui
menu item is missing while the command infrastructure
still remains.


It is supposed to be integrated with the menu, but obviously
something has failed somewhere. To rectify it, you can
edit :-

/usr/share/applications/pcmanfm-pref.desktop
(If it does not exist, create it, if exists, overwrite it )



[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Pcmanfm Desktop Preference
GenericName=Desktop Preference
Comment=Set up pcmanfm desktop preference
Exec=pcmanfm --desktop-pref
Icon=preferences-desktop
StartupNotify=true
Categories=Settings;DesktopSettings;X-LXDE-Settings;GTK;
NotShowIn=GNOME;XFCE;KDE;


Then you will be able to invoke it via LXDE preferences menu.

[utu]

@kl522

Thanks, again.
That's an excellent primer on setting up a desktop menu item.
I can use this idea in a number of places on my set-up.

Now, as to PCManFM, the upgrade:
mine has so many problems, I'm not going to fix them all.
And,
I already have two alternatives for the missing preferences gui,
I don't need a third.

[utu]

Now it can be said that my PCManFM upgrade is working well.
All the problematic symptoms I have described have now
been ameliorated.

On suggestion of others, I have opened up my Synaptic to
all possible repos and upgraded, in addition to PCManFM,
any element also available for upgrade that begins with
the letters 'lx'.

This amounts to, as I recall, lxinput, lxsession, lxterminal
and lxpanel. None of these were considered dependencies,
per se, by Synaptic, but now we know better.

It is probably not that unexpected, in hindsight, that
if PCManFM were undergoing a significant upgrade, that
a number of other LXDE components might be expected
also to be doing the same. PCMan is at the heart of both
PCManFM and LXDE.

As a postscript, kl522's suggestion in his post #7
would be a nice refinement to add to PXManFM's
Applications/Desktop settings page.

[evenso]

I had some pcmanfm upgrade issues, including the elsewhere mentioned mounting of ntfs partitions. What did it for me was installing the gvfs-backends and gvfs-fuse packages that are recommends for pcmanfm.

I also did the described edit to /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart .

All is well.

[utu]

@evenso

Since I had so many problems initially with PCManFM,
the LAST thing I wanted to do was turn it loose in
my hard drive, potentially poisoning my Win7 or two
other partitions.

I may become braver, now that PCManFM is behaving more
sanely, to access the rest of my laptop. I'm presuming
you've had no bad experineces in the ntfs world,
have you? Thanks.

[evenso]

@evenso

I may become braver, now that PCManFM is behaving more
sanely, to access the rest of my laptop. I'm presuming
you've had no bad experineces in the ntfs world,
have you? Thanks.

Not so sure.

I am installed to a thumb drive and I mount the HD partitions, ntfs & ext3. When I posted above, the drive was plugged into a secondary computer. The primary computer that the thumb drive resides on is not yielding such perfect results.

Don't know why, maybe a different version of ntfs. This is Vista, the others are XP.

I've yet to upgrade (an apparent downgrade of sorts in Knoppix) to a proper ntfs-3g package.

The up-to-date ntfs-3g package is pretty safe and, in itself, shouldn't harm your ntfs partitions as far as I know (which isn't as far as a "real" techie).

The single problem on this computer with PCManFM is automatic mounting of ntfs partitions, which I want.

I am a little stalled on upgrades because I had some packages that didn't install and took a while to back out of. Not the least of which were syslinux and syslinux-common(!). Nothing was broken there, but installs failed.

So I am nursing it one package at a time, when I get time.

I may get a better survey of things around Tuesday.

Will post developments.

Meanwhile, there is always manual mounts and, if you distrust PCManFM, midnight commander, which even has skins or themes or something nowadays. :)

[evenso]

I don't think my problem mounting ntfs partitions is with pcmanfm. When I created a persistent image, Knoppix considerately included all the ntfs partitions on my /etc/fstab . However, I still must mount them manually with
# mount -aI don't see any problem with pcmanfm, other than an aggravating upgrade maybe.

I've been reading and writing from Linux to ntfs partions routinely with ntfs-3g without issue for two years now. However, I am not an expert, I don't use Windows 7 which I think has a minor upgrade of ntfs, and Harry Kuhman just warned against it here as regards system wide data recovery. He may know something I don't:

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/threads/28713-Unable-to-backup-drive?p=121576&viewfull=1#post121576

So I guess I encourage you to stay save but think about trying it.

Post if you find a resolution to auto-mounting ntfs partitions. :)

--
Kind Regards,
Freeman