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Neil Bothwick made anewyear resolution to stop talking in Python code.

The Min browser is nice, but can play up if dependencies are not installed first.

Q Blank browser

On page 85 of LXF307 is an item about the Min browser. I would like to use it, so I downloaded the DEB file. When I ran it, I found that it needed some extra files. These were gconf2, gconf-service and gconf-service-backend. I installed these files and made a fresh start. The program loaded and provided its icon.

When starting there are two options: Start Browsing or Take A Tour. I took the tour, which worked OK, but when I started the browser, all I got was a blank screen. Please help me to get it working properly! I am using Ubuntu 23 LTS.

Bryan Mitchell

A Ubuntu 23.04 and 23.10 are not LTS releases, or was this a typo and did you mean you are running Ubuntu 22 LTS? We tried with 22.04 (LTS) and 23.04 with the same results. The problem appears to be that Min was installed on the first attempt, but not set up correctly because of the missing gconf dependencies. The solution was to run: $ sudo apt -fix-broken install to clean things up, then: $ sudo apt install gconf-service

This pulls in the other gconf-related dependencies. Then reinstall the Min DEB package with:

$ sudo dpkg -i min-1.29.0-amd64.deb

Min should work correctly now; it does here. If you still have problems, try running it from a terminal with:

$ min

This will not magically make it work, but it should provide some messages that indicate what is going wrong. When we installed the gconf dependencies but did not reinstall Min, this is what happened, with complaints about the GPU. After reinstalling, the errors went away and Min worked as you would expect.

Q Keyboard confusion

We had three PCs: a desktop, a recent laptop and an older ThinkPad. Each is set up with Linux Mint 21 and the same keyboard layout: Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts > English(US) > Options, with a third-level key defined (Left Win) for use with the Esperanto accented letters. They were all working fine with Firefox and other programs. Recently, we bought an NUC mini PC and set it up the same but…

Using Linux Mint 21, Firefox version 118.0.2 won’t accept input with the Left Win key – the cursor does not move. Every other program works OK. I added EN (US, intl, with dead keys) and it allows me to input Esperanto and other letters in Firefox, but only using dead keys, not using the third-level key. In the meantime, I am using the Brave browser. It is excellent – thanks for the review (LXF301).