I recently installed Linux Mint 22.3 Zena on a brand new ASUS ROG Strix G815LP laptop. The installation went smoothly, or so I thought. Booted up after the install and everything was working, even bluetooth connecting to my Airpods Pro 3 after changing to ControllerMode = bredrin /etc/bluetooth/main.conf.

About an hour into customizing the settings and adding some software, the system freezes. The keyboard, usb wireless mouse and touchpad were unresponsive. The only thing to do was a hard reset. I checked all the logs and reports. Nothing.

Dropbox provides a wrapper package to download Dropbox for Linux if you want to run the latest Dropbox. It WILL NOT update Dropbox automagically. When an update to the software is available, you’ll get a popup window notifying you. The window has two buttons - ‘Exit Dropbox’ and ‘Update’. Choosing update brings you to the Dropbox for Linux page which does nothing for you, Instead, you need to:

1. Exit Dropbox.
2. Delete the directory ~/.dropbox-dist (or rename it id you’re not comfortable deleting it). This directory contains only the program files, not your files or settings.
3. Restart Dropbox. The updated version should now download.

FYI - the download page also contains instructions for a headless istall via command line on a server.

Dropbox, if you pay for it, will keep deleted files for 30 days. Since a lot of my clients use Dropbox, I do, too. It just makes life easier when dealing with the clients. I use it to keep files synced between Linux Mint and Windows on my dual-boot laptop. I’ve never had to recover a deleted file before.

I recently did a reorganization of my Dropbox folders when I was using Linux Mint. I moved some folders around, renamed a few, and deleted about 16,000 old files. When I next booted to Windows, for some reason, Dropbox decided that, rather than deleting/rearranging the files to reflect what my Linux Mint Dropbox had, it wanted to merge everything from Windows and Linux Mint. All of the deleted files were now back and some of the folders were duplicated in two different places. For example, I had a MyMusic folder with all my music in it. I renamed it Music and now Dropbox has put both Music and MyMusic on my Windows drive.

My Macbook pro died and I decided a get a shiny new Windows laptop that I could convert to a Linux laptop. I partitioned the disk and created a dual boot with Linux Mint and Windows. Linux Mint installled like a champ and has been running happily ever since. I don’t think I have booted to Windows but twice in the last year.

Moving to a new OS did mean that I needed to rewrite some of the scripts I use on a regular basis. One of the scripts updates DNS records at Linode with my current IPv4 and IPv6 WAN addresses and is run as a cron job. It’s a bash script I first wrote about here. The updated script can be found here.

It’s a sad, sad day. An online institution, LinuxChix, has shuttered its mailing lists and websites. In its heyday, LinuxChix had over 2500 mailing list members on a variety of mailing lists, from programming to newchix for newbies to linux, I asked a lot of questions on their lists and always got great, considered and considerate answers. Small wonder since the rules for membership were simple - be helpful, be polite. It was a safe space to display my ignorance. I will forever be grateful for it.