Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!
Forcing Discord
I worked with my father on his Debian 11 (Bullseye) computer this week. The program he’s been missing the most has been Discord, the chat platform. The official .deb package relies on a library package called libappindicator (or similar) despite it being depreciated. Ironically, this happened so long ago, the change has now made it to the stable branch of Debian. Discord, PLEASE look into this!
Feeling optimistic, we redownloaded Discord and installed it with dpkg. The Apt package manager wasn’t happy with this arrangement, and wanted us to
sudo apt-get --fix-broken install
where it said it was going to remove Discord. We launched Discord anyway; it worked.
The missing dependency would still be a problem though, so I looked into reinstalling while telling apt to ignore it. Before I finished researching that solution though, I found a repository on GitHub set up by user Guna [1]. This individual replaced the dependency, a procedure I have tried and not succeeded at. You can read more about the repository’s precautions under in SECURITY.md under the project’s root level directory. Many thanks.
Projects Around LXDE
LXDE is a desktop environment aimed specifically at people who don’t want to spend excessive system resources on a flashy user interface. Our experience with it would suggest it is not for beginners as a few annoying tidbits require beating into submission.
The first annoyance we fixed was the panel along the bottom hiding itself. While looking through some the panel’s settings as part of an unrelated issue I spotted a relevant tic box to make it stay.
While multiple desktops may be a great way to organize a swarm of windows, not everyone thinks in terms of them. LXDE came configured with a mess of shortcuts you can accidentally trigger, leaving yourself stranded in the wrong desktop workspace. To fix this, we followed a guide [2] to a file called ~/.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml and specified 1 desktop instead of 2.
Similarly, volume and mute keys are often taken for granted. While following a guide on wiki.lxde.org [3], we copied a block of configuration code into the same ~/.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml file as above and modified it per instructions for PulseAudio. In theory, it links appropriate keyboard button presses to corresponding events within the system. Mute cooperated, but the volume keys refused to work until we were almost zeroed in on the problem. Our problem vanished while playing around with commands based off where the script was actually trying to set the volume. At least it sticks around through a reboot.
Takeaway
There remains one thing we have yet to figure out: getting Ctrl+Alt+t to open a terminal. A keyboard shortcut list from around 2020 listed it, but perhaps something changed since then.
Final Question
Let me know what you think: Why might LXDE have solved itself? What is with the terminal keyboard shortcut not working? I look forward to hearing from you in the comments below or over on my Discord server.
Works Cited
[1] Guna, “discord-debian-bullseye” github.com, Feb. 18, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/gunalabs/discord-debian-bullseye [Accessed: May 16, 2022].
[2] “Help:Configuration”openbox.org, May 1, 2018. [Online]. Available:http://openbox.org/wiki/Help:Configuration#Desktops [Accessed: May 16, 2022].
[3] “LXDE:Quesions”wiki.lxde.org, Feb 27, 2017. [Online]. Avalable: https://wiki.lxde.org/en/LXDE:Questions#How_do_I_make_my_special_keyboard_buttons_.28mute.2C_volume.2C_screen_brightness_….29_work.3F [Accessed: May 16, 2022].