Usermod-ing username and /home. Fails to load tracks

Hello everybody.

I tried connecting to Elk form eclipse, but of course my username on my laptop is not ‘mind’, so I used usermod to change ‘mind’ to my usual username along with minds home folder.

This allowed me to connect from eclipse, but starting sushi returns the error, “Failed to load tracks from json config”

Am I missing something obvious? (it wouldn’t be the first time) Are there other files that need to be amended or is there a more suitable way to change the username or create new user with appropriate privileges? Perhaps eclipse can be configured to ignore the host computers username and accept the target user as an option?

If you read this far, Thank you.

Hi OhmGroan.

I personally never used eclipse and don’t know if anyone else at the office has either. To get a better grip on your particular issue I would suggest looking at the sushi log in /tmp/sushi.log however it seems likely that you need to modify the config file you’re trying to run. IIRC this has an absolute path to the plugins you want to use which are probably in /home/mind/plug-ins/… if you changed your username you probably need to update those paths for every config file that we’ve supplied to make them work. So if possible it would probably be more convenient to configure Eclipse with the default mind username.

Good luck!

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Thanks @Ruben.

I guessed it might be due to absolute paths somewhere so I’ll have a poke around and see what I find.

I’m new to eclipse myself, having only installed it as per the documentation, it seems that it polls the host system for current username. There may be a way to bypass this, but it seems the best solution might be to simply create a new user ‘mind’ on my laptop and use that for now.

Thanks for the insight, it’s very much appreciated. I’ll act on them shortly, for now, I’m trying to set up program changes from my Roland A-50, never a fun task, but always worth it in the end.

All the best.

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Ok, silly me. The path is clearly stated in the plugins json config. Changing that has resolved my issue. Of course I will be sure to make the same change to every plug I intend to use/make.

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For the benefit of others, and particularly those who are not so familiar with Linux, I will outline the steps I took here:-

This howto assumes that you have successfully ssh’d into your elk installation.

Now, at your Elk-pi prompt Type: sudo passwd root

You will be asked for a new password for the root account, enter your chosen password, but don’t be put off by the lack of feedback on the screen, your text is being recorded behind the scenes.

You will now be asked to confirm this password by repeating it, again your input will not display on screen.

Now type: logout

Now you can log back in as root by typing: ssh root@elk-pi.local

To change the username from mind (to bob in this example): usermod -l bob mind

Change minds home folder to reflect this: usermod -m -d /home/bob bob

Now you can logout: logout

And back in with: ssh bob@elk-pi.local

At this point it’s worth creating a new password for your user.

Type: passwd

You will be asked for the current password: elk

Now present your new password, enter and confirm with repetition.

I suggest locking the root account for security: sudo passwd -l root

Now you will need to update the “path” variable in the json configs of all plugins you wish to use. Elk provides a few options for text editor, I like vim, but there is quite a learning curve to it’s use, so in this case I would recommend nano. For this example we will use nano to edit the jx10 vst3 file.

Type: nano config_files/mda-vst3-configs/config_mda_synth.json

Look for the line: “path” : “/home/mind/plugins/mda-vst3/mda.vst3”,

And edit thus: “path” : “/home/bob/plugins/mda-vst3/mda.vst3”,

Press ‘control O’ to write the changes to the file, confirm with ‘Enter’

Now exit nano with ‘control X’

And that’s it, you can now carry on exactly as you did before.