On Sunday 29 March 2015 14:46:51 Dr. Nikolaus Klepp wrote: It installed and removed 0 packages!! Complained about a systemd stop daemon. Said, I think, that there was a systemd dm running which I had to stop. Complained, I think, about a lack of a tdm systemd service. Told me, I think, to do: (in order to run stop-daemon?) start-stop-daemon --help The result was illegible to me, and therefore incomprehensible. I am really struggling here. I have lost all my nice enlarged fonts! Thanks, Nik. Can anyone meake any sense of what I did manage to see and remember? Lisi

On Sunday 29 March 2015, Lisi Reisz wrote: in contrary to typo or mistake? Did you try to install $ aptitude install tdm-trinity or $ aptitude install tde-trinity? The latter was asked for. Gerhard

On Sunday 29 March 2015 19:23:54 Dr. Nikolaus Klepp wrote: No. I get an error message that xsession is unable to launch and it is launching the default. I have to click on OK and I end up with LXDE, which I have uninstalled and which <aptitude show> says is not installed. :-/ If you don't believe me, I don't blame you. Have just tried that. I managed to get some of the error message. Please allow for the fact that I could barely see what I was copying, not helped by the sides of the television cutting off the edges of the display. And that I am a lousy typist. There are likely to be errors. That is why I prefer copy and paste. ;-) The left-hand edge is missing in what follows: ------------------------------------------------------ up tdm-trinity 94:14.0.1~pre21-0debian8.0.0.2~a)... top-daemon:pid value must be a number greater than 0 start-stop-daemon --help for more information ---------------------------------------- I then tried # dpkg-reconfigure tdm-trinity I got the following error message, left hand edge missing again: ------------------------------------------ 064319]systemd-default-display-manager-generator[1316]:/lib/systemd/system/tdm.service is not a systemd unit. we disable the systemd enabled display manager top-daemon:pid value must be a number greater than 0 start-stop-daemon --help for more information ----------------------------------------------------------- The whole thing is crackers. Since I could reinstall in a couple of hours, from scratch to the point of having configured everything including downloading large mice, is it silly to waste any more of your - or my - time? a) This time, I shall uninstall LXDE as soon as I have TDE up and running. Ditto I shall uninstall lightdm as soon as I have tdm. I have to have a configurable terminal emulator to install TDE, or I would install without a DE and put just TDE on in the first place. b) I shall update more often so that I do not have 313 upgrades to cause problems! Though I don't think that it was the number of upgrades that was the problem initially. I forgot to reconfigure the dm before I rebooted. Thank you very much for all your help Nik. Lisi

On 30 March 2015 at 07:13, Lisi Reisz &lt;lisi.reisz(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: <snip FWIW, I did a fresh install of Mint/Mate, updated, then added TDM from Slavek's repos. A little later, after a couple of reboots, the boot option to use TDE appeared, which I chose. Since then, TDE has been working nicely, including wifi connection and sound. (So far haven't uninstalled anything from Mint - have to be really careful to not break anything) - Robert

Lisi Reisz composed on 2015-03-29 22:11 (UTC+0100): What stops you from not installing LXDE in the first place? Are you unable to function on tty[1-6] in 80x25 mode (with no DE installed)? All my installs are HTTP minimal from netboot[1], after which I apt-get update and apt-get install mc', create /etc/apt/99local containing APT::Install-Recommends "0"; APT::Install-Suggests "0";, adjust sources if necessary or desired, then apt-get or aptitude install whatever DM/DE I want or need. The installation result is lean, upgrades quicker, and doesn't have a menu loaded with apps I've never used or wanted. [1] included on installation cmdline: tasks="standard" vga=791 video=1024x768@60 -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/

Robert Peters composed on 2015-03-30 14:11 (UTC+1000): Not really. "Details" depend on distro, and whether using a boot.iso[1], or starting directly from an already installed bootloader. "Included on installation cmdline" text above was copied and pasted from a working Grub Legacy stanza (out of menu.lst), but could be typed as cmdline appendage if booting from burned media. My primary distro is openSUSE, but all my installations are on multiboot systems. Various instructions can be found e.g. on: http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Network_installation http://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/171 https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Boot.iso_install [1] such as mini.iso from http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/vivid/main/installer-amd64/current/i… -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/

On 30 March 2015 at 18:38, Felix Miata &lt;mrmazda(a)earthlink.net&gt; wrote: <snip> Thanks, there's a lot to go on and I will keep it for reference. Gentoo comes to mind. One of these days (years) I'll have to get back into it. - Robert

On Monday 30 March 2015 10:27:41 Felix Miata wrote: So I can configure it. I know that the console can be configured, though I am not very good at it, but I need to be able to see the text in order to edit the file in order to configure it. And it can only b e limitedly configured. Yes, I know. But it isn't by default. I have to configure it. Edit the file. And I can't see well enough in the default to configure anything. I can't actually see what I am typing at all because it is beyond the border. Yes, I know. But it needs configuring. It isn't like that by default. I thought 80x25 just alter4d the width of the columns. This time it is I who do not understand/know enough. I can configure it. Depends on so many things. Contrast. Clarity. How much text is jammed how close to itself. How close I can get to the screen. (I am about 6" away from this, which is at the bottom of the screen. 4" away from the monitor at the nearest point. It is 15 point Bitstream Vera Sans, which is an exceptionally clear font, and 15 point is a lot larger than, say, 15 point Times New Roman. The text is black on a white background. It is also a very clear monitor. Clearer than many.) On the TV screen, ideally I need *at least* 32 point. And I actually need the paragraph above the sentence above broken up in order to be able to read it. It is too large a block of text, and KMail doesn't allow me to spread it out at all. But I typed it, so I know what it says. ;-) Lisi

Lisi Reisz composed on 2015-03-30 11:18 (UTC+0100): I just booted the Ubuntu aka Debian Installer with the following added to the cmdline splash=0 vga=normal video=640x480 The resulting vtty text is the same size as when booting DOS, 80 columns by 25 rows. On a 41.0 cm x 26.0 cm (19" diagonal) screen that results in text somewhere in the vicinity of 24pt. This to me sounds like it would be usable for you. If not, a bigger screen like 69.8 cm x 39.3 cm (31.5" diagonal) ought to get somewhere around 32pt-36pt. If those produce too big you could try splash=0 vga=785 video=800x600 which would shrink text size down by around 1/3, giving about 100 columns wide by 37 rows tall. I have a hard time imagining a terminal emulator doing better than either of these two simple to implement configurations. -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/

Lisi Reisz composed on 2015-03-30 10:43 (UTC-0400): Until now this was never clear to me. It's been a while since I've done a Debian installation, so don't know if there's any significant difference between its "Jessie" installer and older or Vivid's, or if there is more than one Debian installer to choose from. Understood. Understood. So now the question is what's different between using Jessie and the post-installation ttys? Is Jessie a GUI-mode installer, or still a text-based one *buntu's mini.iso shares? It sounds like Jessie is radically different from any Debian installer I've ever seen. The post-Etch, post-installation ttys for both Debian and Ubuntu for me were for years a significant reason why I've rarely used either. But apparently something's changed not so long ago, probably as a result of post-KMS, post-sysvinit evolution of console-setup and/or font handling. Trusty 14.04, on the machine I just installed Vivid on, by default still uses spindly, ugly fonts on the ttys, along with low contrast colors, in spite of use of video display options on cmdline that since last century have worked nicely in all non-Debians I've ever used. In Vivid that's no longer the case. Whether this was new in Utopic or in Vivid is intentional rather than a bug I can't say. Absent display of /etc/issue on a tty just above the login prompt, I wouldn't know I'd just booted Vivid instead of openSUSE, Fedora or Mageia. Until now, it wasn't clear to me your meaning of the term "terminal emulator". AFAIK, most KDE and TDE users refer to what you call a terminal emulator by the proper name of their DE's native incarnation of a terminal, Konsole, or one of the alternatives' proper names, such as Xterm. "About" in Konsole 1.6.6 in Trinity R14.0.0 reports "X terminal for use with TDE", not terminal emulator. In the R14 menu Konsole is called a terminal program, not a terminal emulator. So, I wasn't aware you were even in X, as opposed to using some emulation application on an entirely different computer. I fully agree Konsole affords a lot better quality than traditional Debian vttys provide by default. I explain these very things in an X context to people quite often, and more often to web stylists in A11Y/U7Y discussion. Pixels are a scourge on PC users that dates back over two decades. When Windows 95 came out, the best commonly available displays were '17"' CRTs that measured 16" diagonally, offering a whopping ugly 1024x768 @80 DPI. Improving to 96 DPI or more took a *lot* more money to get either 1280x1024 (a 5:4 ratio squished into a 4:3 physical area using non-square pixels) and/or larger size, or using a smaller display causing sufferance of everything being tiny. When I explain pixels and DPI to people I typically cite previous explanations, such as these oldies: http://style.cleverchimp.com/font_size/points/font_wars.GIF http://blogs.msdn.com/b/fontblog/archive/2005/11/08/490490.aspx http://tidbits.com/article/5284 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12474 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16927 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23705 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26608 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41115 On a somewhat related note Lisi, a very few significant web sites (besides http://www.trinitydesktop.org/ ) seem to have gotten that user settings ought to be respected and embraced. I'm interested if you have any opinion on some I've noticed: http://www.cnn.com/ http://www.gallupstrengthscenter.com/ http://www.pa.gov/ http://www.zeldman.com/ http://7online.com/ -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/