Quick Search in Synaptic Package Manager is greyed out - LMDE 64 bit

[Arun Lakshmanan]

Have been a long time Mint user and wanna start out by thanking you guys for a great distro.

I recently installed the December 2010 release, 64 bit LMDE on a Lenovo T400 laptop. Found that the Synaptic Package Manager has the "Quick Search" filter greyed out. I can still press the "search" button and initiate searches but the "Quick Search" filter is inaccessible.

Fwiw, I have /boot in a different partition, / in a separate partition and I dual boot with Vista 32 bit using the Vista bootloader + EasyBCD + GRUB (which has been written to the /boot partition).

Have used both the menu shortcut and the terminal to open up Synaptic and both have same results - Quick search greyed out.

[Ikey Doherty (ikey)]

Hi, thank you for reporting this issue!
Please confirm whether you have the following package installed:
    apt-xapian-index
This is required to use the Quick Search functionality of Synaptic.
Please also confirm whether package was removed by yourself
or never present on the original ISO.

Thank you

[Arun Lakshmanan (alakshma9)]

It is not installed and I did not remove it manually. I think it was not
present in the original ISO. Is there any package which it has dependencies
with it which might have contributed to its inadvertent removal? Fwiw, I
manually removed Openoffice Base, GIMP, Thunderbird, Rhythmbox, Gwibber,
GKRellM and then did a "sudo autoremove --purge" after that.

One more thing I just discovered...this problem is not there in the 32-bit
LMDE version which I recently installed on an older (P4) machine...

Arun

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 1:24 PM, Ikey Doherty <email address hidden>wrote:

> Hi, thank you for reporting this issue!
> Please confirm whether you have the following package installed:
> apt-xapian-index
> This is required to use the Quick Search functionality of Synaptic.
> Please also confirm whether package was removed by yourself
> or never present on the original ISO.
>
> Thank you
>
> ** Changed in: linuxmint
> Importance: Undecided => Low
>
> ** Changed in: linuxmint
> Status: New => Incomplete
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/702886
>
> Title:
> Quick Search in Synaptic Package Manager is greyed out - LMDE 64 bit
>
> Status in The Linux Mint Distribution:
> Incomplete
>
> Bug description:
> Have been a long time Mint user and wanna start out by thanking you
> guys for a great distro.
>
> I recently installed the December 2010 release, 64 bit LMDE on a
> Lenovo T400 laptop. Found that the Synaptic Package Manager has the
> "Quick Search" filter greyed out. I can still press the "search"
> button and initiate searches but the "Quick Search" filter is
> inaccessible.
>
> Fwiw, I have /boot in a different partition, / in a separate partition
> and I dual boot with Vista 32 bit using the Vista bootloader + EasyBCD
> + GRUB (which has been written to the /boot partition).
>
> Have used both the menu shortcut and the terminal to open up Synaptic
> and both have same results - Quick search greyed out.
>
> To unsubscribe from this bug, go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/702886/+subscribe
>

[Justin Krehel (jkrehel)]

After testing, it appears this package is installed on the 32-bit iso by default, but not present on the 64-bit iso. Installing apt-xapian-index on 64-bit enables the quick search in Synaptic.

The 64-bit build should be updated to include apt-xapian-index where possible to enable quick search functionality in Synaptic. I will milestone this for the next release of LMDE.

- Justin

[Allan W. Macdonald (allan-w-macdonald)]

On Ubuntu 10.04LTS:
Rebuilding Xapian index... 73%
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/update-apt-xapian-index", line 720, in <module>
    buildIndex(dbdir, addons, progress)
  File "/usr/sbin/update-apt-xapian-index", line 395, in buildIndex
    db.add_document(get_document(pkg, addons))
  File "/usr/sbin/update-apt-xapian-index", line 298, in get_document
    addon.obj.index(document, pkg)
  File "/usr/share/apt-xapian-index/plugins/apttags.py", line 106, in index
    rec = ver.record
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/apt/package.py", line 389, in record
    return Record(self._records.record)
SystemError: Negative size passed to PyString_FromStringAndSize

[Marshall Kelly (mfandbk)]

I have just loaded LMDE 64 bit. I have the same problem. apt-xapian-index was not loaded. I loaded it with synaptic package manager. The area is still greyed out and non operational. Marshall

[Marshall Kelly (mfandbk)]

After my previous post I went back to synaptic and found that it now works. I guess I did not wait long enough for it to take effect. Marshall

[Tom Pino (metalsmith-rangeweb)]

I marked this as effecting me. It does.

I thought it was a feature enhancement that I liked very well.

Can't stand the thing, always thought it a waste of space.

Obviously there are folks that do not agree with me.