MINTINSTALL/SOFTWARE-MANAGER WILL NOT START FOR ME

[RPeters52]

So I did a clean install on an old Acer aspire 7750 that has run many versions of Linux Mint (THANKS!) After the install, many updates and a bit of cleanup, I tried running the software-manager. Nothing happens – Tests below. It is not obvious what the problem is!

After the "Software Manager" failed to start, I tried it (mintinstall) from a terminal and get:

ralph@ralph-Aspire-7750:~$ mintinstall MintInstall: Detected system architecture: ‘x86_64’ Failed to register: Timeout was reached

which isn’t very helpful...

So, I successfully installed aaphoto from the terminal, which proves that connectivity, etc. is NOT A problem. ralph@ralph-Aspire-7750:~$ sudo apt-get install aaphoto Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree Reading state information… Done The following NEW packages will be installed: aaphoto 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 38.8 kB of archives. After this operation, 105 kB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/universe amd64 aaphoto amd64 0.45-1 [38.8 kB] Fetched 38.8 kB in 1s (48.7 kB/s) Selecting previously unselected package aaphoto. (Reading database … 330549 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack …/aaphoto_0.45-1_amd64.deb … Unpacking aaphoto (0.45-1) … Setting up aaphoto (0.45-1) … Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.1-1) … ralph@ralph-Aspire-7750:~$

Please help, as this is really irritating. Twice, I have purge-d mintiinstall, clean-ed, autoclean-ed, autoremove-ed... and then re-installed mintinstall and I have the same problem.

I have been running linux since the late 1990s and Mint for at least 10 years and have not seen a problem like this! Please ask for additional info and I will get it! Thanks Ralph

[mtwebster]

What desktop environment is this in? Is there an old instance of mintinstall running (ps -A | grep mintinstall)? Have you rebooted at any point between these attempts?

The timeout error looks like the program is trying to register with the session manager (this provides facilities like keeping the screensaver from starting when watching a video, for instance, or making sure it shuts down cleanly when you log out). This is why I want to make sure a) the program isn't already running or misbehaving and b) the session manager is working properly.

Can you provide the output from G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all mintinstall

[RPeters52]

Hi Michael!

I am running cinnamon on a new, clean install of LM20

ralph@ralph-Aspire-7750:~$ uname -a Linux ralph-Aspire-7750 5.4.0-40-generic #44-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jun 23 00:01:04 UTC 2020 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Hmmm... I was fairly sure that I did a reboot a time or two while investigating this, but maybe not -- who knows! Anyway, I shut the laptop down and then started it. I ran "G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all mintinstall" and it started after a bit!?! Surprise!! I shut it down, checked to see that mintinstall was gone with: ....... (mintinstall.py:2265): As-DEBUG: 07:36:36.166: Emitting ::changed() [from-root] MintInstall: Downloaded new reviews ralph@ralph-Aspire-7750:~$ ps -ef | grep mintinstall ralph 2351 2253 0 07:37 pts/0 00:00:00 grep --color=auto mintinstall ralph@ralph-Aspire-7750:~$

and then started it just fine with the icon from the menu!

So, your analysis of the problem was correct! THANKS!

My problem is "fixed". I do not know why or how another copy of mintinstall was running.

In my case, the software-manager was not starting and there was no indication of what had happened! I had enough experience to try starting mintinstall in the terminal to get more info. Many users, particularly newbies, would not know to do that!!

SO, I would like to suggest that some error-trapping could/should be added to the software that is used by icons to start stuff. A simple pop-up window that says "Failure" would be better than the current system which shows nothing when there is a problem. I have not used python, but it looks like some error trapping capabilities exists.

I wrote software to display and manipulate 3d scanner data for many years using c++ and tcl/tk and error-handling with popup windows was a small but very important part of the job.

THANKS FOR YOUR HELP! Ralph

[marco4mp]

@RPeters52 I see that the problem has already been solved. I think it's time to close the issue.