Tom, Great discussion of your process. I am struck by the mkusb part as I sometimes manage with dd and sometimes not. I have used unetbootin, but try to do more via command line as I grow. Of interest is the current commercial version of Linux Live on usb: "Xtra-PC"(tm). A company is cashing in on the end of life of certain software running on adequate hardware. Some of my neighbors asked me about this and I have offered to install on a usb if they buy the usb. I used to give away disks, but I cannot afford to toss away the $10 or so that a single usb costs and I am not in a position to bulk order. Anyway it is great to have more people doing what we have been up to for several years. Thank you, Ted P. On Fri, May 15, 2020 at 11:35 PM Tom Ashcraft <trailerdog234@comcast.net> wrote:

In some respects I guess I could call this a case of "be careful what you wish for".

Thanks largely to input from Mars and Akkana I was able to succeed in my goal of obtaining a build of Clementine in which the Add Podcast > iTunes Search functionality works properly.

I thought all I really wanted was to get something relatively commonplace to work in the manner it should with respect to particular things I happened to have need of. But now I suspect all the failures and unintended consequences endured will eventually prove to be more valuable than my initial desired outcome. I learned a lot of things along the way.

I got my head wrapped about about half-way around the apt_preferences man page and went through four iterations of attempts to build different versions of Clementine from source. The one that finally built to the point of completion was the generic current version on git hub.

Apparently the developer has little interest in "the debian way". Only about half the dependencies he listed as required happened to be available from Debian repos and installed. Nevertheless, Clementine proceeded to build and do everything I currently feel a need to do with it.

A bunch of the streaming services I have little or no interest in don't work. Not that that matters much in any way I can justify. But aesthetically, anything sloppy or half-complete hanging around always *bugs* me.

Of course the one thing I didn't try yet was to actually completely follow through and expand onhttps://wiki.debian.org/BuildingTutorial. That is, I didn't try to build the current debian version I was trying to replace, the one with the bug, from source and see if I could actually try a little to fix it and maybe learn something worthwhile about debugging. That's a subject I know exactly zero about. So I may decide I have to continue and find out.

The thing I definitely did right was to do all my experimenting on a live USB installation that I created a few weeks ago with mkusb. This was good because not only is it a really bomb-proof way of sandboxing any booby traps, vulnerabilities and non-free blobs, but the USB stick also runs on multiple machines and has a large sharable cross-platform data partition. I didn't have to dedicate any disk space and put time and effort into creating a virtual machine. (Though that would be a good way to do things too.)

Also, now I'm thinking that though it lacks some convenience, I can always use any OS on a live USB stick with sharable data partition and a sound version of Clementine as a general work-around to satisfy my desires, even if I can't completely fix Clementine for my Debian laptops.

But I do think if I can't ever get a Debian version of Clementine to work exactly right that I'd like to try a VM headless server and lxc/lxd/Docker container as a possible middle way.

If anyone has any thoughts or opinions about any of this please let me know.

Thanks,

Tom

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