Level1noob needs help

Software & Operating Systems Linux
1

Hey guys, I recently made the switch from Windows to Linux. I’m using Mint 19.1 and the kernal is 4.15.0-43-generic. It feels like literally everything I try doesn’t work and I’d appreciate if someone could tell me what I’m doing wrong here!

Things were going great until I tried to customize some things like the desktop environment using tutorials/forum posts. The GUI tutorials don’t match up with what’s showing on my system. For example I tried to install an applet called Slingshot via GUI and it’s no where to be found under “available applets” as it was in the tutorial. I was using a Mint tutorial that was only a year old. I also tried installing some stuff via the terminal. I tried to install the Conky manager looking at several tutorials but I just get “Unable to locate package conky-manager”. Other things would install correctly via the terminal but I couldn’t find them in the GUI. Should I change distros? Is this just how things go with open source?

Thanks

#helpdesk

2

Just for some detail, when trying to install the Conky manager, one of the command lines I used was:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:teejee2008/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install conky-manager

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I wouldn’t change distros, I have never come across an open source program made for Linux that couldn’t be made to run on any distro of Linux. The reason you are probably having trouble installing open source software is either you don’t have some dependency install or there was an error when you tried to install it. I don’t have my laptop available to me right now, but tomorrow I could try spinning up my Linux Mint cm and see if I can install the two programs you mentioned.

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Awesome! That could help me figure out what I’m doing

5

Tagged your original post as help desk. Id love to help. Lets go ahead and clear some stuff up

Are you referring to conky? in this statement

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Here is your primary issue. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu 18.04 which is code name Bionic Beaver. The conky packages are not compiled and packaged in this repository for this version of ubuntu.

Here is my proposed solution:

sudo apt-get install conky-all
sudo apt-get install realpath
wget https://github.com/teejee2008/conky-manager/releases/download/v2.4/conky-manager-v2.4-amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i conky-manager-v2.4-amd64.deb

Let me know if this helps. @Goalkeeper not sure if you use linux or conky frequently but any tips for our new linux journeyman

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6

I tried to install Conky Manager the way you did, all the commands for setting up Conky Manager seemed to work except when I tried to install it, I got the following error message, Unable to locate package conky-manager. So it seems Heimdallr is right The conky packages are not compiled and packaged in this repository for this version of Ubuntu. I will try installing Conky Manager the way Heimdallr suggested.

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I am trying to install Conky Manager just like @ketsu and I am running Ubuntu 18.04 and have run into an error.

sudo] password for Shadowbane:
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Package realpath is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
manpages-pl manpages-fr-extra

E: Package ‘realpath’ has no installation candidate

If you could help me fix this error I would be very grateful.

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The main issue is there’s been no development on this package for ages… hmm I can but not at the moment… I’ll reply a bit later when in more free and maybe have a solution lol

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9

I run mint 19.1 on my laptop. What tutorial specifically are you looking at? maybe I can give it a shot and see what I come up with.

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10

No, everything in terms of desktop customization. I tried to install 5 applets/extensions(including conky manager) and I could only install one of them and I was unable to find it in the GUI after it installed.

Thanks, I tried that and got this:

dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of conky-manager:
conky-manager depends on realpath; however:
Package realpath is not installed.
conky-manager depends on conky; however:
Package conky is not installed.
conky-manager depends on imagemagick; however:
Package imagemagick is not installed.

dpkg: error processing package conky-manager (–install):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Processing triggers for bamfdaemon (0.5.3+18.04.20180207.2-0ubuntu1) …
Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf-2.index…
Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.13.3-11ubuntu1.1) …
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.23+linuxmint4) …
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.60ubuntu1) …
Errors were encountered while processing:
conky-manager

It says “Package conky is not installed.” yet I’m able to lunch it(conky, not conky manager) from the terminal so that doesn’t make sense.

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11

Here’s an example of one of several I looked at, IIRC they all shared the same command lines: https://itbeginner.net/install-conky-conky-manager-linux.html

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Thanks for the replies guys. I’d like to get conky manager working, however my main goal is a better understanding of how to customize/add things to my system. I see all of these awesome looking desktops and am jealous that I’ve been unable to create my own, haha. I just got Plank working so I’m making progress

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Hey sorry it took me so long to get back to this. Havent had a bunch of will power to sit down and mess with my laptop and my desktop is windows only.

That said. I found the original project on github and in the issues listed is a link to a fork called conky-manager2 which seems to be more actively maintained. It has its own install instructions which worked for me.

See install instructions here

After completing the install steps I was able to begin using conky via conky-manager2’s built in configs.

Screenshot%20from%202019-01-15%2019-46-01
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Also make sure you have conky installed

sudo apt install conky-all

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14

I would recommend to use apt-get for one thing: apt-get install aptitude
And then use aptitude from that point on.

It helps you in places where apt-get does not.

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