Monthly News – April 2019

Last month we talked about what it was like to develop free software and I shared some thoughts about the team, our work and our relationship with the community. I want to thank you all for your amazing response and the support you gave us. I don’t think we’ve ever received that many emails, comments and messages and that many encouragements. I didn’t expect it to be that big but here it is, it’s huge, right in front of us and we’ll always be able to look back at it whenever, if ever, we’re in doubt, you’re here for us, and you love our work. I’ve seen many people come here and post their very first comment after years of just reading the blog just to say they enjoyed what we were doing. That means a lot to me, I’m sure it means a lot to other users and developers too and all the people who contribute to Linux Mint. I wasn’t exactly looking for TLC when making this post last month, and we’re not “depressed” (as we could read in some blogs on the Internet), I wanted to address some points and spread the word a little more on what it was like for us as well… but I’m glad it was interpreted as it was, I’m glad the news was covered outside of our community and I’m really touched by your response to it. Thank you so much for this.

Last month I think I also talked a tiny bit too much about what was going on within the team. On the one hand it is part of my role to report on the progress being done, on the other hand we’re dealing with individuals, there are people involved, efforts being made, feelings which can be hurt and it’s part of my role also to protect that. If something won’t work out, we part ways, if something can’t make it in, we postpone it or reject it but when that happens I’m not sure we should necessarily talk publicly about it. There isn’t anyone involved who doesn’t want the best for Linux Mint and we all share the same goal, we all want more features, less bugs and an amazing new release. How we get to that isn’t always smooth and we can’t always agree on everything, but we’re a team and so I might mention individual names when things are great, but I hope you’ll understand I don’t when things don’t work out. We’ll face these issues together as a team and I don’t want anyone to feel bad or get the feeling that it’s their fault. Trying to help, no matter what the outcome is, is a great thing. You can’t be blamed for trying, especially not in public and I don’t want anyone to feel like they need to justify themselves one way or another.

Looking ahead I feel very comfortable again. Some issues are still on the horizon, there is uncertainty about some of the large things we’ve been working on (for me personally this includes the website and logo redesign), but we’ve reaffirmed what was important to us. We will get a great 19.2 release, no matter what, and we’ll enjoy working on it.

Server issues

The server issues we experienced at the beginning of April should hopefully be over. They were caused by power and capacity issues in one of the datacenters we’re using.

Developer Guide

The Developer Guide is ready. It describes the projects we work on, the technologies we use, and explains how to get set up, how to build packages and how to alpha-test. If you’re interested in development and you want to get involved this is a must read.

The guide is available in English, in HTML, PDF and ePub at https://linuxmint-developer-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

Let us know if you think anything isn’t clear or if you feel something is missing. We’ll add more content within the guide as we go along, not only as an introduction to newcomers but also as a reference for best practices.

Mint 17.x reached EOL

After 5 good years of service, Linux Mint 17.x (i.e. 17, 17.1, 17.2 and 17.3) reached “End Of Life”. Although the repositories will continue to work they will no longer receive security updates.

If you are running Mint 17.x, you can install Timeshift from the repositories, prepare system snapshots and plan to upgrade to Mint 18 using this tutorial: https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2316.

Don’t hesitate to ask for help or to report issues so we can get you to version 18 safely.

Samba

With every new package base we experience regressions. This was key in our decision to stick to LTS and it helped us focus on development while underneath, the base we were using for 5 years could continue to mature. This decision boosted our development pace and increased the quality of our distribution. When with Linux Mint 19 we jumped to Ubuntu 18.04, along with the many improvements and new software versions, we also inherited regressions, some of them quite frustrating to users: Wine, scanner and printer, and Samba to name a few.

These kind of issues are common on new package bases and they happen often in rolling distributions or in non-LTS releases. They eventually get fixed, in these rolling distributions and non-LTS releases first and then the fix usually gets backported to the LTS base.

This hasn’t happened with Samba yet. When something important we don’t maintain doesn’t work properly, and it’s been a while, we usually consider pinning it. In other words we look at whether or not we can backport a newer version which fixes the issue, or bring back an earlier version which didn’t suffer the issue. In the case of Samba this is not possible, not only because of Samba’s complexity and large number of dependencies (it just doesn’t easily compile like that across bases) but also because pinning this package in Mint would be a maintenance issue due to the number of vulnerabilities found in Samba and how often it receives security updates.

Samba supports different communication protocol versions. In Mint 18.x Samba 4.3 was mostly using a protocol version called NT1 which worked well and continues to work well. After Windows was badly affected by ransomware attacks, Microsoft decided to retire NT1 and the Samba team worked on switching more towards some of the newer protocol versions such as SMB2 and SMB3. These changes created regressions and Ubuntu is currently in the process of trying to tackle them.

Two of the most important issues are reported on Launchpad at:

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/samba/+bug/1827041
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gvfs/+bug/1778322

Additional information was put in the release notes and the fact that Samba worked better in Mint 18.x was clearly stated. It is my opinion that users relying on Samba a lot should be recommended to stick to Mint 18.x until these issues are fully resolved.

While looking through all of this, we also identified areas of improvements within Linux Mint. In particular, although samba itself still shouldn’t part of the default installation, smbclient should. It will be there by default again in Linux Mint 19.2 and future releases.

In Cinnamon, nemo-share is responsible for integrating samba with the desktop and making it easy for users to share directories. Although nemo-share itself doesn’t do all that much, it is key in how easy sharing feels to the user. Here is what it does for you in Mint 19.1:

• It installs samba
• It adds you to the sambashare group for samba to work properly
• It creates the share and checks/fixes its permissions if appropriate

Thanks to nemo-share, you don’t need to use the command line or install samba manually. You right-click a directory, share it, reboot, and you’re done. It just works! Well… most of the time it does.

While troubleshooting Samba and working on this I saw many people on the forums experience the same issues and receive help from other users. I saw a really cool checklist on the forums (I want to thank the few people in our forums who documented these issues by the way and helped so many users already) and I though.. wait.. some of these issues shouldn’t happen at all, we can identify them before they happen and make the user aware of them. So that’s what we did, in Mint 19.2 nemo-share will do a little more than before:

• After it installs Samba it will add firewall rules to let it work with UFW
• When setting up a share, it will check the permissions not only on the directory itself but on its entire path, to make sure other users can access it.
• When sharing a directory within an encrypted home directory, it will mention to the user that the share won’t be accessible without using “force user” in the Samba configuration.

In essence, it still doesn’t do much more than before, but by reporting these issues earlier we go from a situation where the user doesn’t understand why Samba isn’t working, to a situation where an explicit warning and a clue are given the minute an issue might require the user’s attention.

Last but not least, we thought it was a little tedious that you couldn’t go back “up” (i.e. with the toolbar button in Nemo) towards “network:///” when at the root of share, so we fixed that as well.

Some of these changes might make their way into caja and caja-share as well.

On Github this is documented at https://github.com/linuxmint/linuxmint/issues/125.

Sponsorships:

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in March:

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