synaptics package maneger

[Gene Heskett]

Greetings;  

On 10.04.4 LTS, synaptics is the cats meow, doing what it should be able 
to do.

But on the new mint-17.1 LTS Cinnamon, its best described as broken as two 
of its most useful features seem to have disappeared, which are:

1, the ability to refresh, is there, but the ability to mark all upgrades 
is gone.

2, regardless of the dependency listings shown, such as a dependency on 
libboost-python >=1.40, it cannot find it when the installed version is 
1.55, nor about 20 other packages most of which are present in newer 
versions.

So which "genius" decided synaptics didn't need to be able to do that 
anymore?  And can I fix it, or install the files by copying the version 
from 10.04.4 over the top of this broken but very important system 
utility.  I see there is a new GEdebi, but its even more broken in that it 
cannot even tell you what the error is if a program cannot be installed.  
Dumb, and dumber come to mind. Fortunately the update-manager seems to 
have survived the transition.

This is going to be the second major impediment to my upgrading my 
install.  The first is that in the new kmail, there does not seem to be 
any ability to move its email corpus from ~/MyMail, which it created with 
the default directories, to ~/Mail where I copied in 5.3Gb of old mail 
from last night.  So I'll mount it and move it again.

The third impediment being NetworkMangler, which cannot/will not accept a 
working configuration, causing me to revert to the same methods I used on 
10.04.4 and which got me into all sorts of hot water on this list years 
ago, which is to copy the /etc/network/interfaces file from the old 
install, and make it immutable.  Ditto the /etc/resolv.conf link to 
something else, nuke it, copy in the old one, and make it immutable too.  
Instant internet on a init.d/networking restart.

The networking I can fix since everything here on my local net is on fixed 
addresses using hosts files.

TBD by a reboot whether or not the NFS lines from this fstab, copied into 
the new fstab will work, I don't seem to be able to mount the nfs shares 
by hand even if the fstab line is exactly the same as what works now. It 
complains that the host share is not in FQDN:dir format, but the instant I 
try to add the :dir portion it totally fails.  Without it, its complains 
gently and then Just Works(TM).

I'll check back this evening as I'm in the middle of carving up some $150 
bd/ft ebony out in the shop. For trim parts, and I only have 1/3rd of a 
bd/ft to play with.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS