Color management

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Ruud

Hello to all,
I'm happy my 'conclusion' lead to some helpful suggestions  ;D
The experienced 'linux-user' I mentioned had a look for me and took the route of the ppa to try it out. It appears it needs some fiddling to make it work (something with different branches and editions of Scribus and Ubuntu etc) but it looks like the way to go and he is going to help me solving the situation. Thanks again for your input.
Regards
Ruud

a.l.e

the PPA only needs some fiddling because you're not using the latest ubuntu.

PPA are created for ubuntu.

if they need fiddling on the latest ubuntu, please write a ticket in https://bugs.launchpad.net/~scribus and it's very likely that the issue will be timely fixed.

GarryP

I think this situation is quite worrying.

Mint is one of the most popular Linux distros and - if all Mint users have the same issues as mentioned above - there could be thousands (millions?) of people out there who cannot use a properly working version of Scribus. Or, to put it another way, there could be a very large number of users who have tried Scribus and, simply because it doesn't work properly on that distro, think that Scribus is worse than it actually is.

The expansion of the user base of Scribus could be seriously hampered by this. I realise that the Scribus team probably has very little influence on the distro packages but I can't see this as being a good situation to be in.

a.l.e

i think that from our side there is not much we cannot, no.

in the wikipedia article, i read that mint uses the ubuntu repositories. which in the case of scribus means that the  original debian packages are used (because the ubuntu packager is smart enough to first create the packages for debian and then let ubuntu use them! did i already mention that ubuntu and debian have a wonderful scribus maintainer? : - ).

i have to confess that i have only little pity for those who get stuck while using one of the many "small" but hip distributions, that have been created because somebody had a political agenda on some detail.

if somebody has only basics (or no) linux skills, he or she or it or they should stick to one of the big names.
that is: ubuntu, fedora, debian (and opensuse?).
those with good linux skills are free to use whatever they see fit... but must be ready to get the hands dirty if something does not work.
and report it to the right folks.
and refrain from suggesting clueless users from using the same distribution.

now, i can ask our ubuntu maintainer, if he wants to volunteer and look into this,  but i fear that the chances are slim that he will want to take it on him.

but first, we should know if ruud's friend could get it work and how he did it.
sadly, "does not work" and "some fiddling" are not concepts that will help him/us sort this out.

GarryP

I liked to use Ubuntu in the past (on my old laptop, as a replacement for [eugh] Vista) but I think it might look a bit "scary" to some users, those coming from Windows for instance. (I rarely use Linux nowadays, mostly for little experiments.)

Things like Mint are advertised - in plenty of "Best Linux for 201x" articles - as being more "beginner friendly" than the big three/four you mentioned and I suppose that's why it's popular. It's advertised as being friendly and popular so it gets more users, and round and round we go.

Mint is perfectly fine if all you want to do is the basic office applications and web browsing, but once you start to need more you can begin to see the cracks emerging, I.e. weird software versions etc. It starts to get more awkward to use than the other distros but there's also less support because it's an offshoot.

Anyway, I hope, as you say, that Ruud gets back to the forum with some kind of fix.

If it's just a case of installing a few extra packages then that could be added as a note to the "Installing Scribus on Linux" pages of the Wiki so people having the same problem can simply be pointed to the instructions.
If it's a lot more difficult than that then it might be worth making a note on those same pages to warn people that they could have problems with Scribus on Mint. Could be better to warn people that there's an issue with Mint rather than having people think it's a Scribus problem. (Easy enough to remove the warning when everything is fixed.)

I have no problem chipping in with some testing work here and there if that will help. Re-installing a VM to get it back to the "basic user" state isn't exactly a huge task.

Ruud

Here the comments of my helper:

All of the following was done on an up-to-date Linux Mint 18.1 (amd64).

Mint indeed uses the ubuntu packages and takes most of its software from the ubuntu repo's. This is true for scribus, at least:

$ apt-cache showpkg scribus
Package: scribus
Versions:
1.4.6+dfsg-2ubuntu0.1 (/var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_xenial-updates_universe_binary-amd64_Packages)
Description Language:
                 File: /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_xenial_universe_binary-amd64_Packages
                  MD5: b9d4fea57ce9587e9ebbeb5ad30011e4
(more of the same)

1.4.6+dfsg-2 (/var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_xenial_universe_binary-amd64_Packages)
Description Language:
                 File: /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_xenial_universe_binary-amd64_Packages
                  MD5: b9d4fea57ce9587e9ebbeb5ad30011e4
(more of the same)

Adding the Scribus PPA to the local apt sources has little effect, the PPA itself lists the "scribus" package as "Newer version available", making apt install scribus still take the package from the ubuntu repo's.

Manually downloading the .deb files for both scribus and scribus-data from the PPA does work. The fiddly bit for unexperienced users being that this requires the removal of both packages from the system before the package thingy allows you to install the package, for which it warns that it's an older version than is available in the repo's. After installing this, though, starting scribus and opening the preferences does show the color management settings section. I personally have no idea what I'm supposed to be seeing there, but I gather just having that section was the problem in this thread.

The same thing goes for the scribus-ng package, but I'm guessing the reason for this is the same.

One annoying detail with this solution is that the package manager will keep thinking there's a newer version in the repo's, marking scribus for update everytime the user is prompted to install them. Installing that update will break the color management again.

If the packages from the ubuntu repo's work with ubuntu but not with mint, it would seem some difference in the way ubuntu and mint create / package some other component in the system throws scribus off. I wouldn't know how to debug this, but I can reproduce the symptom and fix on a second mint system (also 18.1 and amd64).

Hope this info brings you guys a step closer to a (hopefully simple) solution for the curious behaviour in mint.



As for now, I'm out of town for a few days, so do not expect a swift reaction on your posts.......

Kind regards
Ruud

Nermander

As far as I know all .deb package managers allow you to "freeze" a version of an application.