On Wednesday 30 September 2026 00:02:44 Dr. Nikolaus Klepp via tde-users wrote:
Hi Bill!
Anno domini 2026 Sat, 26 Sep 10:49:26 -0700
- audacious won't start up.
Can you run it from a terminal? Most likely you'll see som hints.
Hello Nik!
I didn't try running it from a terminal (yet), but I did get the bright idea to try starting it by way of a firejail profile. And presto! it starts up. So it was something that I blocked in the profile.
However, I didn't get that far. They say that pride goes before a fall, and I was too proud about having done a nearly painless upgrade to excalibur. I even went though a couple reboots, then something went wrong, and I got this weird greenish-bluish login screen (gnome? gnustep?) that I have seen only a few times before, and try to avoid, and try to eliminate whatever installs it. So after some success, I ended up having to reinstall daedalus, anyway.
I did think to go through the motions of another upgrade to excalibur, but this time I just downloaded the packages with apt-get -d install, then save the packages on a separate hard drive for use later, when I am somewhere without internet. That imitation upgrade showed no removed packages, and everything seemed fine, but we'll wait awhile, until I have time and space and no interruptions.
- I also have problems with qmmp. [..] if possible, which have worked
for twenty years or more.
That's why I have xmmp1 on freebsd - it's a good freind frozen in time :) Can't help with qmmp as "audacious"+vlc works for me.
For audacious and qmmp, I think I have found the culprit, which is not anything Gnomish, so far as I know, but what is for me much worse, which is pulseaudio and all its evil spawn.
I would like to find the right commands for apt-get to suppress certain package from being installed; for example, pulseaudio, libreoffice, and maybe a couple others. It would save me time searching out these problems and purging the packages.
- VLC suddenly will not accept my system colors (i.e., TDE colors), but
instead uses some kind of default. At least it's legible, and still plays about the same as before. But I imagine it's related to this same issue.
VLC is back to normal, at least in daedalus. Don't know why, don't care at the moment, although I will probably ask that same question in the future after at last upgrading to excalibur.
Did you try "lxappearance" to set the theme? Things for GNOMEs got wores sice the rise of v3 and continue to get worse with wayland emulation layers (not that of an issue in excalibur, but just brace for impact)
Yes, I always install that and another set of packages, qt5ct and some dependencies, I think. Been doing that for some years now, and my system always looks nice, in a TDE way, unless I upgrade, or install those offending packages.
Sorry for the length. As I said, these problems all seem to be, in some way, the same underlying problem.
IMO you struggle with GNOMEs greatness. Rest assured, you are not allone!
Nik
As I said, these seem to be related to some underlying cause, which here I imagine to be pulseaudio and related packages; whether these are connected to Gnome, I don't know.
How to suppress those packages from being installed in the first place. I did search through the manpages of apt, apt-get and aptitude, but found nothing.
Bill