Authentication dialog for root privileges broken in Debian Trixie XFCE

Update: this issue was fixed in XFCE 4.20.1:

 xfce4 (4.20.1) unstable; urgency=medium

  * d/control: update standards version to 4.7.2
  * d/control: recommends mate-polkit (Closes: #1090384)

 -- Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac@debian.org>  Sat, 19 Jul 2025 18:32:45 +0200

 ------------------------------------

 

Above is a screenshot of the dialog in action so you know what I mean.

The dialog appears launching Synaptic package manager, unlocking printer settings or launching LightDM Greeter settings.

Or should. On new installs of XFCE in Debian Trixie it will fail silently, and nothing will happen when clicking on the relevant menu item or button.

The reason is that the agent required to bring up this dialog (policykit-1-gnome) has been removed from Debian Testing because it's an ancient Gnome package which is no longer maintained. See this bug report.

The removal of policykit-1-gnome has affected XFCE because it is a recommended install with at least one XFCE package that I can see (Thunar) but not a direct dependency of XFCE. XFCE relies on it being there, but does not actively ensure that it is there.

Other DEs that rely on the package like Mate and LXDE have noticed that the writing was on the wall for policykit-1-gnome and produced their own version of the package, namely mate-polkit and lxpolkit.

Other Linux distributions have noticed the same thing and released a package to fulfil the same function in XFCE, for example xfce-polkit in Arch.

There is now a Debian bug report for this rather crucial to the desktop missing agent. Somebody has come up with an agent for Debian (also called xfce-polkit), but it hasn't made it into Trixie, according to this bug report.

So, at the moment, for new installs of Trixie, there are going to be issues such as Synaptic filing to launch. See this topic on the Debian forum. (Anybody with a Trixie install predating the removal will still have policykit-1-gnome installed and not experience the issue.

The solution? For the moment, install lxpolkit or mate-polkit, or compile the proposed Debian xfce-polkit package yourself. (The screenshot at the top is Debian xfce-polkit.)

Does Debian Testing need a security repository?

Debian Testing is for testing the upcoming new release of Debian as it develops. You may think the clue is in the name, but some people seem to regard it as a rolling release. It's not. As a Debian installation for daily use, it is in fact the least secure Debian version. Security fixes go through the normal process of migration from Unstable to Testing, which may take days, because new packages must not introduce release critical bugs, whereas the Stable release gets security updates immediately from a special security repository.

As the Debian Wiki says:

Security for testing benefits from the security efforts of the entire project for unstable. However, there is a minimum two-day migration delay, and sometimes security fixes can be held up by transitions. The Security Team helps to move along those transitions holding back important security uploads, but this is not always possible and delays may occur. Especially in the months after a new stable release, when many new versions are uploaded to unstable, security fixes for testing may lag behind. If you want to have a secure (and stable) server you are strongly encouraged to stay with stable.

The Debian Wiki recommends an active approach to security when using testing.

It is a good idea to install security updates from unstable since they take extra time to reach testing and the security team only releases updates to unstable.

For details of how to do so, see the Wiki link. This involves an Apt pinning process, not just enabling the Unstable repository, which would give you an Unstable installation, aka Sid, the notorious breaker of toys.

A security repository for Testing exists, but I have always believed it was for users of Testing who intended to stay with the next release. Say you have new hardware and find that Debian Stable does not work, but Debian Testing does. You might decide to accept or mitigate the risks by watching for and installing security updates from Unstable - (see above) and use Testing until it becomes Stable.

In which case, Debian sources list would look like this at the time of writing:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ trixie-security main

"trixie" would of course be replaced by the codename of the Testing relase at any point in Time. If you are reading this years in the future, it may be different. Local mirrors for the primary repository are of course also acceptable.

I have always believed (and indeed the Debian Wiki said so) that the repository would be empty, just there so that users would have the security repository automatically when Testing became stable in case they forgot to add it after the release. For that reason, I have never added a security line to my sources.list.

However, I noticed recently (in fact it was pointed out to me by a member at the Debian User Forum) that a security line is recommended for users of Testing tracking either the current codename or Testing in their sources.list.

The Debian Wiki did not explain why, so I contacted a member of the Wiki team to ask for clarification. It seems that under exceptional, rare circumstances very serious bug fixes may indeed be added to the Testing security repository, which is why the Debian Wiki recommends it, and the answer to the question in the title of this post is "yes".

For people tracking Testing like me, source.list should look like this:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ testing-security main

I have edited a couple of Debian Wiki pages to reflect this new information or to make clear why the security repository is recommended for all Testing users. Many thanks to my contact at the Debian Wiki team for providing the information.

(M)utter Madness - application is not responding

I am running Gnome on Debian Testing, and after a recent update to Gnome 42, I started getting the

Application is not responding

dialogue box every few seconds with any application that carries out any processing operations, forcing me to click the "Wait" button to continue. The main culprit was Synaptic, which has to update and check package lists to identify updates: a process which quite normally takes a few seconds. I was getting the "not responding message three times during this process.

I don't know what changed recently to cause this annoyance, but here is how to fix it.

Open dconf Editor and go to /org/gnome/mutter.

Look for check-alive-timeout and edit the period if necessary. Mine was set to 5000 which is 5 seconds in milliseconds. I changed to to 60000, which is 1 minute in milliseconds - a more reasonable period.

Update:

I did a bit more research and found that it may actually be the application at fault,and the issue may be limited to Wayland.

The check-alive feature is there for the user to be able to terminate frozen applications more easily. However, sometimes applications are implemented in a way where they fail to be reply to ping requests in a timely manner, resulting in that, to the compositor, they are indistinguishable from clients that have frozen indefinitely. 

When using an application that has these issues, the GUI showed in response to the failure to respond to ping requests can become annoying, as it disrupts the visual presentation of the application. 

To allow users to work-around these issues, add a setting allowing them to configure the timeout waited until an application is considered frozen, or disabling the check completely.

Gnome has added this setting, which is good.

 gitlab.nome.org

Wayland compositors can send a ping to apps that they are supposed to respond to with a pong. However, if an app caught itself in an infinite loop or other computation that takes a long time, it might not send that pong.

reddit.com

Requests provided by wl_shell_surface 

wl_shell_surface::pong - respond to a ping event 

serial 

uint - serial number of the ping event 

A client must respond to a ping event with a pong request or the client may be deemed unresponsive. 

wayland.freedesktop.org

Firefox on Wayland

I'm using the Firefox release version from Ubuntuzilla on Debian Testing running Gnome, which uses Wayland by default now, so I wondered, does Firefox use Wayland by default? The answer is no, but it is fairly easy to enable it and it seems to work well, with a claimed significant improvement in rendering performance.

To enable Wayland mode in Firefox, edit

/usr/share/applications/firefox-mozilla-build.desktop

to

Exec=env MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox %u

(This will also work with other builds of Firefox and executable paths. See StackExchange.)

To get the performance increase in rendering, set

gfx.webrender.compositor.force-enabled 

to true in about:config. (Arch Wiki)

There is a bug which results in the window icon and title not displaying.

To correct this I had to change the line

StartupWMClass=Firefox

in the desktop file above to

StartupWMClass=firefox

(StartupWMClass must match the executable name exactly.)

I found the solution in this bug report, of which the previous bug is a duplicate, although more descriptive of this issue.

Error updating Debian Testing

I got the following error messages while updating Debian Testing this morning:

E: initramfs-tools: installed initramfs-tools package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1


gzip: stdout: No space left on device
E: mkinitramfs failure gzip 1
update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-5.14.0-4-amd64 with 1.
dpkg: error processing package initramfs-tools (--configure):
 installed initramfs-tools package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 initramfs-tools

Say What? This is a 500G HD and it's only 7% full!

Turns out /boot is on its own 500MB partition and its full.

I had too many old kernels installed, and the solution was to get rid of most of them (keeping one known good backup kernel).

I searched for "linux-image" in Synaptic, but this can be done from a command line too obviously.

When I had finished I ran

# update-initramfs -u

Which is the part of the update precess that had failed.

I will have to pay more attention to housekeeping from now on.

Systemd messages after suspend in Debian Testing -fixed

Update 19/12/21 Fixed - see below

I've been seeing some Systemd messages after this laptop comes out of suspend - but they only appear for a fraction of a second. I tried filming the screen as the laptop came out of suspend but only managed to get a blurry still by freezing the video.

How to read the error messages? I found I could read Systemd messages in real time, suspend and wake up the laptop and see the messages in the output. 

The command is

# journalctl -f

And the error messages were

Oct 24 19:21:38 Toshiba-laptop kernel: debugfs: File 'radeon_ring_gfx' in directory '0' already present! 

Oct 24 19:21:38 Toshiba-laptop kernel: debugfs: File 'radeon_ring_cp1' in directory '0' already present! 

Oct 24 19:21:38 Toshiba-laptop kernel: debugfs: File 'radeon_ring_cp2' in directory '0' already present! 

Oct 24 19:21:38 Toshiba-laptop kernel: debugfs: File 'radeon_ring_dma1' in directory '0' already present! 

Oct 24 19:21:38 Toshiba-laptop kernel: debugfs: File 'radeon_ring_dma2' in directory '0' already present! 

Seems to be a kernel bug (Arch Linux Forums).

Update - fix found

It seems the AMD driver packages in Debian contain both amdgpu and radeon drivers; the radeon driver is used by default on my hardware, but kernel modules for both amdgpu and radeon are loaded, and both try to create the same directory. 

The solution was to use the amdgpu driver as documented at the Debian Wiki. The amdgpu driver supports modern GPUs. Mine is older, and radeon is used by default because it's more stable, but it's also possible to use the amdgpu driver experimentally. For some reason, although both modules are still loaded, the error messages do not appear when using the amdgpu driver.

[More information on amdgpu on older chips in this article:

The Current State Of Older AMD Graphics Hardware On Linux: What Driver To Use And What To Expect (Linux Reviews)]

The following command got me the name of the GPU card:

# lspci -nnk | grep -i vga -A3 

00:01.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Mullins [Radeon R2 Graphics] [1002:9853] 

Subsystem: Toshiba Corporation Mullins [Radeon R2 Graphics] [1179:f910] 

Kernel driver in use: amdgpu 

Kernel modules: radeon, amdgpu

(When I first ran the command, radeon was the driver in use.)

I found that Mullins belongs to the Sea Island family at the Gentoo Wiki.

To enable amdgpu on an older Sea Island card, I followed the advice at the Debian Wiki and edited etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash radeon.cik_support=0 amdgpu.cik_support=1"

Update grub afterwards with 

# update-grub2.

For my GPU, the E1-6010, amdgpu apparently breaks hibernate to disk, but it does fix the Systemd messages as posters have noted at the Arch Linux Forum thread linked to in the original post. It also enables Vulkan, a replacement for OpenGL rendering with better performance.

Although I no longer get the original errors messages, I noticed a new one:

 [6.710082] kfd kfd: amdgpu: MULLINS  not supported in kfd

As far as I can work out, this relates to use of the GPU to assist with mathematical computations by some applications, which doesn't affect me, so I'm calling this one fixed.

Boot message - Failed to start

Update: solved (see below).

Booting up my installation of Debian Testing (Bookworm) I noticed this message:

 

 

[FAILED] Failed to start: Raise network interfaces.

See 'systemctl status networking.service' for detials.

Was this something bad? I hadn't noticed anything like it before. The word 'FAILED' in capital letters and red made me worried.

Systemd does not apparently keep a log of these boot messages. To find a failed command, issue the following command:

# systemctl --failed

  UNIT               LOAD   ACTIVE SUB    DESCRIPTION
● networking.service loaded failed failed Raise network interfaces

LOAD   = Reflects whether the unit definition was properly loaded.
ACTIVE = The high-level unit activation state, i.e. generalization of SUB.
SUB    = The low-level unit activation state, values depend on unit type.
1 loaded units listed.

To see networking.service messages, issue this command:

# journalctl -u networking.service --no-pager

-- Boot e29338dc96c041638d5b465983e41817 --
Oct 02 18:35:32 Toshiba-laptop ifup[618]: Cannot find device "eth0"
Oct 02 18:35:32 Toshiba-laptop ifup[552]: ifup: failed to bring up eth0
Oct 02 18:35:27 Toshiba-laptop systemd[1]: Starting Raise network interfaces...
Oct 02 18:35:29 Toshiba-laptop systemd[1]: networking.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Oct 02 18:35:29 Toshiba-laptop systemd[1]: networking.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Oct 02 18:35:29 Toshiba-laptop systemd[1]: Failed to start Raise network interfaces.

Well, that clears that up: there's no Ethernet cable plugged into this computer. 

 

Update: I found the source of this issue (Debian User Forums). It is not the system looking for an Ethernet connection that happens to be unplugged, but the system looking for an Ethernet connection that does not exist, due to some unexplained entries in a configuration file, namely:

/etc/network/interfaces.d/setup

The entries below were causing the system to try to bring up network interfaces at boot time. Commenting them out got rid of the "Failed" message.

auto lo 

iface lo inet loopback 

auto eth0 

iface eth0 inet dhcp/

The  only mystery now is what added those lines when they shouldn't be there? Suspicion at the moment falls on the Debian Live Non-Free installation media, which I used to install Debian Bullseye.

Installing Brother HL-1212 W-Fi Mono Laser Printer in Debian Bookworm/Bullseye (Gnome)

[Update 2: The latest version of printer-driver-brlaser works without issue now in Bookworm post release and Trixie (Testing), which both at version 6.3 at the time of writing. Bullseye still has 6.1, so the issue may remain.]

[Update: Unfortunately printer-driver-brlaser is affected by a bug that means documents with images sometimes fail to print with no error message at all. Gnome says the document has printed successfully, CUPS says the document has printed successfully, but nothing appears from the printer, not even blank pages, and the printer records no error.

Back to the driver from the Brother web site then.

See Google Groups, and Github. The driver is patched on Github but it seems there is no Debian maintainer for the package, so no hope for the moment that the Debian package affected (6.2) will be fixed any time soon.]

The Brother HL-1212 WiFi printer does not do driverless printing. See previous post. "Modern" printers don't need drivers, but budget printers like this one (still on sale at the time of writing) seem to date back a decade or two and need drivers.

Previously, I downloaded a driver installation tool from Brother (which worked very well). I am now using Debian Bookworm (Testing), and found today that Debian has included a driver for this printer it its repositories in Bullseye, namely in:

printer-driver-brlaser

Adding the printer was a very easy process. In the printer dialogue click "Add". The printer dialogue found the printer without adding the network address, although there is an option to search by IP address. Three options came up - the printer name, the printer name with some sort of address I didn't recognise appended to it, and a CUPS reference. I chose the first one and the printer entry that came up printed a test page straight away. (Gnome Software said it needed to look for additional things to install, went away and did so, and came back to say it couldn't find anything, but the printer worked anyway.) 

The printer entry contained fields for driver and address, so I selected/entered those, even though the printer seemed to work OK already.

The HL-1212W is available in the UK from Argos with four additional toner cartridges for £159.99, which is quite a good deal if you do a lot of printing.

Things that are broken in Debian Testing

I have installed Debian Testing on my laptop, and it's working very well. But there is one thing that is broken. That is Bluetooth, and it doesn't seem to be Debian's fault that it's broken.

I installed Blueman but it immediately crashed. I noticed the red error message in dmesg:

Bluetooth: hci0: don't support firmware rome 0x31010100

The problem seems to be with the chip vendor Qualcomm's habit of re-using identifiers from older chips for new ones, causing the kernel to load the wrong firmware, according to this bug report from 2018, this one from 2106,  and this post on GitHubGist. A similar bug was reported recently.

So, if you have installed firmware for an Atheros Rome bluetooth chip in Debian Testing, you may find that it does not work at the moment.

Can't acces USB Drive over wireless network

So, you have a USB drive plugged into your wireless router, but you can't access it in your file manager over the network.

It may be that your router is using a networking protocol that is now deprecated, and no longer supported by your computer.

It may also be that the manufacturer of your router has not issued a firmware update so the router can use an up-to-date version of the protocol.

If you still want to use your router to access a USB drive, the security risk over a home network seems to be minimal, and there is a way to get your computer to use the old protocol.

If you are using Windows 10, which has dropped support for the old protocol, you should have a look at this guide.

I'm going to be looking at the issue in Thunar on XFCE in Debian Testing (Bullseye). 

I was trying to access the USB drive plugged into my router on a new installation of Debian Bullseye. (Having installed the necessary packages. And this one too, which didn't help, but may be necessary.)

I could do so using the ftp address supplied by the router, but not by using the "Browse Network" option in Thunar, where I could see an icon for the drive but not open it.

I put in the smb address for a folder on the drive and got this error message.

Failed to mount windows share. Software caused connection abort.

After much searching, I found that the reason was the deprecated protocol mentioned above.

The issue is discussed at the Manjaro Linux Forum, and at askubuntu.com, as indeed is the solution, so thanks to users at both of those places.

The solution can be implemented in Thunar by creating the following folder and file:

/etc/samba/smb.conf

And adding the line:

client min protocol = NT1

(Although Thunar uses Samba to access network folders, it does not need Samba to be installed - it's part of the gvfs-smb backend - so unless you have Samba already installed, you have to create the samba folder, which doesn't involve installing Samba and its many dependencies. I can't remember where I read this advice in all the links I looked at, but thanks go to whoever it was that mentioned it - I can't take any credit.)

After logging out and back in, you will be able to open your network drive and access folders and files on it.

Yay!

Debian Buster preview

Two and a half years ago, I updated this computer to Debian Stretch while it was still Testing (the pre-release version) but in freeze (a stage when no new packages are added and bugs are ironed out).

Stretch has been a rock solid and reliable Debian release, both on this machine and on a later purchase, now the main family computer. But with a new version approaching, I always get the urge to try it out.

So, a few days ago, I updated the older computer, now rarely used, to Buster, which again is still strictly Testing but in freeze.

I'll make the same warning as I did at that time: Buster is still in Testing and can break. If it breaks, you get to keep the pieces.

So here is Debian Buster:

I have to confess I ditched the doggy wallpaper straight away and used the Moonlight wallpaper by Juliette Taka Belin.

Back in 2016 I wrote "The update was pleasantly painless with no issues". This time I wasn't quite so lucky. I ran out of disk space during the installation, and got this message:

No space left on device

I had tried to check if there was enough space for the upgrade using a command I found here (which suggested I had just barely enough). This computer has a separate root partition, given the default size of 10GB by the installer. This default size is really too small nowadays- at least for a Gnome install update.

Luckily I was able to run apt-get clean and apt-get autoclean to make enough space to finish the upgrade. Although I was given an error message before I could continue:

dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem 

When the upgrade completed, I rebooted the computer but it froze with just the cursor visible in the top left of the screen. That's my installation borked, I though, and went to bed.

However, the next morning I found I could boot into Rescue Mode and get a command prompt. I cleaned up the disc and found I could load the default installation. Hurrah!

Now I have Gnome running reasonably well. It does seem a bit slower than Stretch at times, despite the claim that Gnome 3.30 is lighter on resources. I may try a clean install at some point to see if that makes any improvement. This is a very low spec machine, it has to be said.

The most obvious change in is a switch from an icon grid to a sidebar list in Gnome settings. There are also minor changes to the file manager, and the addition of a Night Light mode, which changes the screen to a sepia tone, which apparently reduces eye stain at night.

One bug I have found so far is that the Gnome file manager does not create thumbnails for image files. This is a known bug, and quite easy to rectify by installing libgdk-pixbuf2.0-bin.

For me,  Stretch was a big improvement over Jessie. This update by comparison seems to add only minor improvements. My impressions so far are good, but I can live with my Stretch install on my main computer for a while. I will see what bugs get knocked out of Buster (a few fleas?) before updating it.

At least having an old laptop around I can scratch my update itch without inflicting those fleas on the family.

Bluetooth in Debian Testing (Stretch)

I wrote previously about how Bluetooth file transfer from an Android mobile phone doesn't work in Debian Testing (Stretch), and gave a workaround I'd found.

The issue is a release critical bug, still open at the time of writing. However, there is a permanent fix available.

Obviously if you are installing Debian Stretch after this date, the bug may have been fixed, but here is the fix for anybody who needs it:

# systemctl --global enable obex

 Arch Linux forum was where I found it- thanks go to them.

For me, file transfer does not work unless I have the Bluetooth settings dialogue window open.

As the Gnome help for Bluetooth doesn't seem to have been updated since Gnome 2 (!), I have no idea whether this is a bug or a feature.

EFI Vs BIOS

I have a new computer, which came with Windows 10, and I wanted to install Debian on it. With my previous laptop, I ended up wiping the disk, destroying the EFI partition, using BIOS emulation and a MBR, whether by my clumsiness or the installers (Jessie) I don't know.

Since then I've been wondering: is there any advantage to an EFI install? Should I at some point recreate an EFI partition on my laptop and reinstall Debian (it has been working well for- checks- almost two years)?

So now I was wondering, shall I do the same thing with the new computer? Or try an EFI install keeping the EFI partition?

Is there really any advantage to EFI, beyond handling 2TB disks that computers don't come with yet, at least in my price range?

I found this from Rod Smith at ask ubuntu:

There are several advantages to GPT:

• Supports disks larger than 2TiB. 
• Supports partitions larger than 2TiB. 
• Supports more than four partitions, with no distinction between primary, extended, and logical partitions. 
• Uses GUIDs as type codes, which means there's less risk of conflicting/duplicate codes. 
• Uses LBA addressing exclusively, compared to MBR's dual use of LBA and CHS. (Even on MBR, CHS is useless on disks over about 8GB, though, so there's little risk of real conflict on modern hard disks, which are much bigger than this.) 
• Provides duplicate partition table structures at the start and end of the disk, which makes recovery from some types of user errors, bugs, and disk damage possible. 
• Provides checksums of important data structures, which enables detection of some types of partition table damage. 
• Provides a UTF partition description field, so you can give your partitions names. Note that this is independent of the name of the filesystem contained in the partition. 
• Is used natively by EFI/UEFI firmware.

"Most of these advantages are minor ones for most installations", as Rod says. So no reason to reinstall on the laptop I think, but worth trying an EFI install on the new computer.

In the end, the install was very easy: whether down to my expertise or the installers, this time I do know- the Debian Stretch (alpha) installer identified the EFI partition and used it.

So, it looks like EFI wins, by a hair, and if it doesn't work, and BIOS emulation is available, it's not that much of a big deal to use it, unless any of the above issues are of vital importance.

Automatic update notifications in Debian Testing

Automatic update notifications alert you to security and other updates that can be installed- and it's good to be made aware that these updates are available.

As I have pointed out before, automatic update notifications were broken in Debian Jessie, they apparently were fixed, but didn't work for a lot of people including me, they were fixed in Debian Testing, but didn't work for me after a recent update to Testing (Stretch) on this laptop.

I have now discovered that automatic update notifications are working in Testing- I just needed to enable show-upgrade-prerelease in dconf-editor.

After doing that, I started to see notifications.

As I wrote about previously, updates are now done offline in Gnome.

Things that are broken in Debian Stretch- file transfer from Android phone with Bluetooth

File transfer via Bluetooth from an Android phone is currently not working in Stretch. However, I was able to transfer a file today using a workaround.

The solution is to manually start obex and re-pair the phone with the computer. The command is systemctl --user start obex. (Found on stackexchange.com.)

It seems obex isn't auto-started properly. (There's a bug report at Red Hat Bugzilla.)

Shrink title bar and remove border in Gnome 3.22

I mentioned in my previous post that I don't especially like the border line under the title bar in Gnome 3.22 and think it's a waste of space, and posted a screenshot of how it looks in Firefox.

If you want to shrink the title bar and remove the border underneath, create a file gtk.css in ~/.congif/gtk-3.0 and add the following text:

window.ssd headerbar.titlebar {
    min-height: 0;
}

window.ssd headerbar.titlebar button.titlebutton {
    padding-top: 0px;
    padding-bottom: 0px;
    min-height: 0;
}

window.ssd headerbar.titlebar {
  border: none;
  background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom,
  shade(@theme_bg_color, 1.05),
  shade(@theme_bg_color, 1.00));
  box-shadow: inset 0 1px shade(@theme_bg_color, 1.4);
}

Restart Gnome Shell or log out and log in and Firefox now looks like this:

The code above was collated and edited by me from various sources: stackexchange, stackexchange and reddit.

It's also possible to add a line to reduce text height: fedoraproject.org.

Debian Stretch preview

Debian Stretch has entered the first stage of freeze. Life is boring, so I decided to update. (Proviso: do not try this at home unless you understand that Stretch is still in Testing and can break. If it breaks, you get to keep the pieces.)

And so, here it is:

I should point out that Stretch artwork has not being finalised yet: the background is just one of several candidates- it's just my favourite.

The update was pleasantly painless with no issues.

I did soon find one bug- the mouse pointer will disappear after the screen blanks out and is reawakened.

However, Gnome now works with Wayland, and using Wayland, this bug is not an issue, so I'll be trying out Wayland for the time being. An issue with Wayland is that Synaptic does not start. I expect that may be true of other applications.

(See why I cautioned about using testing?)

Otherwise, everything seems to work well.

I will mention a few things that I have noticed.

A minor (but annoying) font artefact that appeared in Jessie does not seem to be present in Stretch- which is good. This is probably only something that affects my graphics card, so other users may not have noticed it.

Stretch comes with Gnome 3.22 (I don't think there will be another update before the final freeze). The most noticeable differences (for me) are that notifications are now at the top of the screen (similar to Android) and the pop-up notification tray at the bottom of the screen has gone. A big improvement, if you ask me- when other people were using Libre Office on my computer, they occasionally caused the notification tray to pop up, and didn't know how to get rid of it.

The Gnome music player can be controlled from the notification drop-down screen.

The Gnome file manager has been updated and the buttons simplified. The new buttons are far more intuitive- I could never find the option I wanted with the old buttons. One changes from icon to list view and the other gives you tab, zoom, sort and revel hidden files options- much easier to use and remember, and more in accord with the Gnome philosophy of intuitive minimalism.

There are of course many new features and improvements in Gnome 3.22, which you can find out about at gnome.org.

One striking visual change is that the title bar is now separated by a line from an application window- which doesn't look especially good in Firefox.

The title bar is a waste of space in Firefox anyway- pity there isn't a way for Gnome to get rid of it (you can with an extension in Firefox).

I've been using Debian Sid for a while on another computer, and have commented before on a number of things that were broken in Jessie, but seemed to have been fixed in subsequent updates. I will try to confirm that update notifications and Bluetooth file transfers from a phone are working in Stretch and post some screenshots in later posts.

Overall, Stretch seems like it's going to be a big improvement over Jessie for me.

It seems like something I could live with quite happily for the next two years, whereas with Jessie I thought, do I have to live with this for two years?

Gnome introduces offline updates

I'm running Debian Testing (Stretch) on my old laptop and I noticed that updates are now done offline. The reasoning, according to the Gnome Blog,is that it's safer and updates are applied immediately, rather than waiting till the next reboot.

Here are some screenshots to illustrate the process:

In distros which use a boot splash, like Fedora, users will see a message like this:

Just as long as offline updates doesn't resemble Microsoft updates...

Just talking care of a few more things
Almost ready
Won't be long now
Have you read War and Peace? Now might be a good opportunity

Things that are fixed in Debian Stretch - File transfer from mobile phone

I wrote a while ago (checks... over a year ago) about some things that were (and still are) broken in Debian Jessie. Like the ability to transfer files via Bluetooth from a mobile phone.

I am happy to report that file transfer from a mobile phone is fixed in Debian Stretch- from which I am now posting.

What? No proof without pictures? Go on then:

Debian Stable users will be able to access this basic functionality (again- it worked in Wheezy) about a year later when Stretch becomes stable.

Not sure why Bluez5 not accepting file transfers from a mobile phone wasn't a blocker bug, but hey ho.

Update Notifications are also fixed in Stretch: I will blog about this when I grab a screenshot.

Google Street View freezes in Debian Jessie

There is a bug in the Cairo 2D Vector Graphics library in the version of Iceweasel in Debian Jessie at the moment (31.2, based on Firefox ESR 31.2) which results in Street View freezing.

A solution might be to install the latest version of Iceweasel from the Debian Mozilla team, as the bug is apparently fixed in Firefox 33. (Haven't tried this myself.)

A work around is to use Chrome or Epiphany/Web, which are not affected.

Update: or use Classic Maps, which uses Flash. (Debian Forum).