[Wolves] how to keep linux mint 13 alive a bit longer?

[Adam Sweet]

On 18/02/16 22:23, Kevanf1 wrote:

> On 18 February 2016 at 18:21, Mark Croft Redditch Linux Mint
> <mark.croft.lug at gmail.com> wrote:
>> hi
>>
>> how do  i keep a laptop with linux mint 13 keep going? i am having
>> issues with firefox corrupting its profiles every so often?(i have
>> made backup of the profile directory/folder and make firefox account
>> which seems to back up bookmarks n passwords etc)
>>
>> I can't find out if firefox is still supported on linux mint 13 , is
>> that the problem really should be upgrading the machine to linux mint
>> 17.2?
>
> I think Mint 13 has been out of support for a long time now.  I am
> personally running Mint 17.3 and I love it.

According to the following, Linux Mint 13 has long term support until
April 2017, which means that there should be updates available:

http://www.linuxmint.com/oldreleases.php

If it's a Firefox bug, then you won't be only person to have suffered
from it and it would have been fixed at some point, so updating the
system *should* resolve it.

I don't know what Mint's policy with keeping Firefox up to date with new
versions is but there are plenty of instructions on Google. Some people
are downloading a tarball from mozilla.org and extracting it. The Linux
Mint forums might be more help to you in this case.

Doing a quick Google though, I can't see anyone else complaining about
Firefox corrupting the profiles on Linux Mint 13 which suggests that
there's something else going on. My first thought is that the filesystem
is corrupting or the disk is failing.

If the filesystem is corrupted, it would get repaired at boot time. I
don't know Linux Mint well enough to say whether you can see it happen
at boot time, but booting would take an unusually long time. It's worth
making sure the owner actually knows how to shut the laptop down
properly. I've seen some weird issues in my time and it wouldn't
surprise me to find some people just hold the power button until the
laptop switches off. With Firefox open, that would corrupt the profile
eventually.

With regards to the disk failing, I don't know if Mint has a GUI log
viewer or a disk utility. Ubuntu has 'System Log' and 'Disks'
applications. If it has a disk utility, open it and see if there are any
warnings. If it has a log viewer, open and look for lines which relate
to 'sda'. If the disk is failing you'll probably see 'I/O error', 'read
error' or 'Medium Error' messages like:

Feb  4 12:52:52 somehost kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 0
Jul 11 23:52:30 somehost kernel: [   25.552475] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda]  Sense
Key : Medium Error [current] [descriptor]
Jul 11 23:52:30 somehost kernel: [   25.552543] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda]  Add.
Sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed
Jul 11 23:52:30 somehost kernel: [   25.552587] end_request: I/O error,

If you see any of those errors, it's time to backup and start shopping
for a new disk, it will die eventually.

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