Month: August 2021

Removing PulseAudio after migrating to PipeWire

After migrating to PipeWire, you may want to fully remove PulseAudio. The problem is that certain packages, for example libcanberra-pulse, depend on pulseaudio even though they would work just as well if pipewire-pulse is installed. There are several relevant bugs to solve this issue, but meanwhile we can use equivs to generate a fake package that provides pulseaudio.

Copy the following file locally as pulseaudio-fake:

Section: misc
Priority: optional
Standards-Version: 3.9.2

Package: pulseaudio-fake
Provides: pulseaudio
Description: Fake pulseaudio package to satisfy dependencies.
 This solves dependencies for packages like libcanberra-pulse when actually using PipeWire instead of PulseAudio.

Build a package from it using equivs and install it:

$ equivs-build ./pulseaudio-fake
$ sudo apt install ./pulseaudio-fake_1.0_all.deb

Now you can safely remove pulseaudio.

GNOME 40 on Debian Unstable

These are the steps I took to install (most of) GNOME 40 on Debian Unstable:

$ sudo apt install -t experimental gnome-shell gjs mutter gnome-control-center gnome-desktop3-data
$ sudo apt-mark auto gjs mutter

Failing to install gjs 1.68 from experimental will result in white or blue desktop backgrounds, regardless of the wallpaper you choose. This bug was reported in Arch.

Most of GNOME 40’s functionality should now work, including the updated activities overview.

What doesn’t work? Settings->About still displays GNOME’s version as 3.38. I suspect it’s because gnome-session is still at 3.38.

Update 2021-08-24: I upgraded to gnome-session 40.1.1, and it didn’t solve the version string issue.

Update 2021-08-31: Following a comment by Jeremy, I installed gnome-desktop3-data from experimental, and it fixed the version string issue.

[coc.nvim]: UnhandledRejection: Launching server “jedi” using command jedi-language-server failed.

Recently I switched over to coc.nvim, and when trying to edit a Python file, I encountered the following error:

[coc.nvim]: UnhandledRejection: Launching server "jedi" using command jedi-language-server failed.

The first problem turned out to be that while I had jedi installed, I hadn’t installed jedi-language-server. This can be done using:

pip install --user jedi-language-server

Next, coc.nvim couldn’t find the jedi-language-server executable, even though it was on my $PATH. The solution was to specifically define it in ~/.vim/coc-settings.json:

{
  "jedi.executable.command": "/home/guyru/.local/bin/jedi-language-server",
}