Re: mc Digest, Vol 105, Issue 7

[Theodore Kilgore <kilgota banach math auburn edu>]

On Sun, 27 Jan 2013, chris glur wrote:

> } it happened (and happened on my little RPI too)
>
> How did you get mc to run on RPI?
> I bought 2 RPI.
> 1 with the default debian OS, and
> 1 with no CF-card yet.
>
> After booting RPI, the first apps I checked for were `mc` & `gpm`.
> Neither existed.
> I lent the RPI to someone, to find out how to make sounds via `scratch`.
> I couldn't believe that the <sound card was included in the CPU-chip>!
>
> Since you use slak64, what about ARMslak?
> Someone else on the USEnet-slak-group has it on his RPI.

I do. And probably not relevant here, but it is running on a 32-gig SD 
card, too. So I almost have a real machine out of the RPI. The biggest 
limitation of the RPI seems to me to be the apparently flaky USB setup, 
and the fact that the NIC is hooked to the USB, too. So, if something gets 
overloaded then the keyboard, the mouse, and the network can all crap out 
simultaneously. An adequate power supply mitigates things but does not 
solve all of the problems.

As an example of a problem which seems to be related to the funky USB 
setup on the RPI, some of the USB webcams which I have supported in the 
kernel do not work. But some others which use the same driver code do 
work. Strange. Someone high up in the Linux media project has advised me 
to give up trying to track down the problem. He says that the basic 
problem is the RPI's USB hardware and consequently one will probably never 
be able to locate where exactly the problem is. If he is right, then that 
is kind of too bad.

But BTW, xdg-open can be made to work well enough in Slackware. Here is 
what Patrick Volkerding says about it: 

"Both xdg-open and shared-mime-info come from freedesktop.org.  We include 
both of them, so unless the mime support package that you're speaking of 
is something different, we already have it.  Maybe running 
update-mime-database would help?"

Indeed, running update-mime-database does fix the problem. Patrick also 
says it is one of the standard options when doing a new install. Thus, 
probably the way that I got into the soup about that is, I rarely do a 
completely new install these days, but just do incremental updates and so 
the update-mime-database was not run when I upgraded MC. Why it did not 
get run when I did an install on the RPI I am not sure, but it obviously 
did not get run there, even though it was a "new" installation.