Good-bye, 2020! Thanks for the lessons!

2020 was a year to remember.  It started well too normally, with some distant news about a suspicious disease in Asia.  

However, we had heard similar news before, so nobody here paid a lot of attention.  

Everyone was in a rather hopeful mood.  It was the Year of the Metal Rat and sites were anticipating great luck to the natives of this sign, such as myself.

Little did I know how this year was going to affect me and everyone around me.

Soon, everything turned upside down, uncertainty was oozing from every wall as I was trying to find my way through a slippery moss-covered maze that seemed never-ending.  

I lost money, work increased three-fold and became an alien activity, family members got very sick, and, in general, stress and anxiety became the two monumental columns upon which collective experience rested... 

Some goals had to be postponed, daily life was interrupted and contradicting instructions were issued regularly, adding up to the reigning confusion.  Even my blog was almost abandoned!

When I look back, 2020 does not feel like a year; it is more like a zipped quinquennium, one that got the best of us and wrecked many lives.  It's the zombie year.

But today is the last day of 2020 and I would be truly ungrateful if I said that it was a year to throw away and forget.

This year pushed me to experiment with video/audio resources in Linux in a way that I never thought possible.  Kdenlive, the program that I never understood, became a friend for me and my everyday support for work.  My dream of working from home became an odd reality.  I intensified my home training physically, technically, and intellectually.

This year also drew me close to my loved ones in a way that it is very difficult to put in words...  Family and friends... But I am talking about the good friends, the ones that see you through in dark times.  "The strength of the wolf is the pack", said the wolves in The Jungle Book.

And I would not be lying if I said that there are things that 2020 brought that I do not want to lose when "normal" comes back.

The overwhelming events today feel like heavy, absurd gifts that I do not know how to use.   Like a rain of gigantic popcorn that buried me.

Yet, at dawn, I can say...

Good-bye, ZaReason!

 I had seen this unfortunate day coming...

The best laptop I have ever owned (and still own, despite being purchased 6 years ago) is a ZaReason Strata.

It is still working great, but I was one of these days fishing the market for Linux laptops, just in case.

When I visited the ZaReason page several months ago this year, I saw that they had very few products.  This year has been tough.

Today, I saw this message on their site:

I must admit that this made me sad.

 

Problems with Video Files and a Nice Solution

Because of the sanitary emergency, I have been teleworking all this year.

For me, this has implied making lots of videos for my students, so I use InShot and Textro on an Android phone to record/ add effects and then I work on the computer for the post production.  I have been relying on Kdenlive (on PCLinuxOS) and OBS Studio (on OpenMandriva and MX Linux, for live streams).

But then, half way this year, I noticed that sometimes the audio of the videos that I edited on the phone with InShot was out of sync when I loaded them to Kdenlive.

As a solution, I used Pitivi on Mageia to convert the videos, which fixed the problem.  This additional step, however, is time-consuming and time has become an even more precious resource right now when one is teleworking. 

Today, I shot four videos and edited them on InShot.  When I loaded them to the Kdenlinve project, to my distress, the audio was not in sync.

I could not afford to run them through Pitivi and use up an average of 15 minutes on the conversion of each clip. I thought that, if I could join the clips together, the audio might be OK in Kdenlive.  I was worth giving it a shot.

I did a quick search for a Linux tool to merge the four clips together.   I found this page here.

The section on MKVToolNix caught my attention.  I installed it on PCLinuxOS and tried the GUI version.  I could not figure out what I had to do (I was really in a rush), so I closed it and, after opening Konsole, I typed the command (substituting the file names, of course):

mkvmerge -o output.mp4 file1.mp4 \+ file2.mp4 \+ file3.mp4

The konsole window displayed some info in less than five seconds and told me that the operation was completed.

In disbelief, I opened the output video file and... yes, the four clips were there in one.

I put that output file on my project folder in Kdenlive and ran the preview to see if the audio was OK. It was perfect.

This helped me finish the post production a lot earlier.

Japanese IME on PCLinuxOS 64 KDE5 Magnum 2020 1015

I recently saw that my install of PCLinuxOS was behaving funny after and update: the effects ceased working and web pages were loading slowly.

Last time this happened to me, I had to install a new iso because I had been working with a very old one.

This time, however, I had kept up with all the updates thanks to the convenient Simple Update Notifier, but something was not good.

Anyway, I decided to install the new PCLinuxOS 64 KDE5 Magnum 2020 1015.  The installation went well, but I was worried because I normally install the PCLinuxOS GRUB2 on the distro partition, not on the MBR, but it was not possible for me to do it this time, so I was predicting a mess trying to boot OpenMandriva, Mageia, MX Linux, and Elive.

When the installation finished, saw the PCLinuxOS GRUB2 replacing my old Mageia GRUB2, so I booted all the other distros to see if something was broken.  Nevertheless, there was neither a kernel panic in OpenMandriva nor a horrible delay to boot in Mageia.  All was well!  YAY!

I then booted the new install of PCLOS and I was greeted by a more dynamic splash screen and neon icons on a new wallpaper:

The effects were not working, but it was a matter of activating them.  I read the solution in the PCLOS forum:

System Settings>Hardware>Display and Monitor>

The only problem I had was getting the Japanese IME to work.

After trying, I managed to get iBus working with Mozc.  So, everything was good.

But then, after a KDE update, the iBus icon disappeared.

I have tried everything to make it come back with no positive results.

Even so, and although it's a bit inconvenient, I can still invoke iBus from the terminal with these commands:

pkill -9 ibus 

ips -ef | grep ibus  

/usr/bin/ibus-daemon --xim &
 

It's the Ides of August!

In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Roman general Julius Caesar is given an ominous message by the Soothsayer.  The message is a simple warning:

"Beware the ides of March!"  The ides means the first fifteen days of the month and, come the third month, Julius Caesar is stabbed to death in those first fifteen days.

However, it seems that the ominous month for electronics is not March, but August.  In 2015, I had shared the story of how Nixie Pixel's cellphone, laptop, and desktop broke as soon as August started and how some people believed that this eighth month seemed to bring the death of beloved electronics. I even had to replace my laptop screen that month!

Well, today I woke up to the battery indicator of my ZaReason Strata 7140 sending out an intermittent red flash.

It was the laptop's way of saying to me "Aye, the ides of August have come!"

I turned on the machine and discovered that the battery is at 20% health and needs replacement.

This is pretty expected since the Strata has been working since the first half of 2014. 

Getting a replacement battery for this machine is not going to be easy, though... much less now that the government has shut down many commercial activities due to the Covid-19 emergency.

So, I took out the battery and connected the laptop to the backup power supply for the time being.

While I was doing that, I can swear I almost heard the voice of the Soothsayer delivering the ominous reminder: "Aye, the ides of August have come, but not gone!"

Brace yourself!

MX Linux: The Ugly Duckling

Three days ago, I decided to test a Linux distro that has become very popular in DistroWatch, MX Linux.

Megatotoro started using it as soon as it came along, carrying the legacy of the extinct, but amazing  Mepis Linux combined with the speed and versatility of AntiX.  Although, back then, this distro was but a faint bleep in the DistroWatch radar, today it has the top 1 spot in the chart, way above Mint and Ubuntu, once rulers of Linux popularity.

What prompted me to try it was an experiment with OBS Studio, which required me to use a 64 bit distro that worked with .deb packages.  I have always used .rpg distros: Mageia, OpenMandriva, PCLinuxOS, and Fedora.  Well, I have Elive 3, but it is 32 bits, so it did not work for me.

I needed to replace one distro, so I chose to erase Fedora.  Anyway, I could always put it back once I finished my OBS Studio experiment, I said to myself.

MX Linux installed very quickly and without any problem.  I had no GRUB2 issues and found myself quite at ease with the DE.  Thanks to my experience with PCLinuxOS, using Synaptic in MX represented no learning curve at all.

So, I carried out my experiment and failed miserably.  However, contrary to what I had originally intended, I had already customized the appearance of the DE and stuffed the system with my favorite programs.  When I saw myself syncing my files and Firefox, I knew that the distro was staying in my laptop.

Now I understand why so many Linux users prefer MX.  Just like in Andersen's story, I had grossly underestimated this distro... until it became a beautiful swan-like OS powering my computer with grace and ease.

It is no coincidence that its code name is Patito Feo.

 

COVID-19, Telework, and Linux! Happy Anniversary, Mandriva Chronicles!

With the present sanitary emergency created by COVID-19, I've been away from this blog for two months already.

It's not that I have not had the motivation to post, no.  Actually, my work load blew up to three times its normal size because of the mandatory teleworking policies of the university where I work.

In the course of three weeks, I saw everyone move to cyberspace (willingly or reluctantly).  Anxiety, contradictory policies, and uncertainty became the new educational environment for many.  And, with this, I forgot that last Friday was the 10th Anniversary of this humble blog.

 What can I report?

1.  Well, the idea of the younger generations being "digital natives" shattered into a million pieces; as I had always suspected, it was nothing but a myth.  This crisis forced students to use the Web to study and, in great numbers, they are admitting defeat.  It turns out that their online skills seem nothing else that proficiency for using social networks: they cannot read and concentrate, have problems understanding how to post in forums, and become confused when submitting their assignments in an online mailbox.

2.  Linux has been up to the challenge: even though I have been forced to install programs such as Zoom and (yuck!) MS Teams on my laptop and my daughter's desktop, PCLinux OS and Mageia have been reliable, helping me attend meetings and helping my daughter continue with her elementary school classes.

Megatotoro and I decided to ditch Zoom and favored a more flexible online approach.  This idea implied producing lots of audiovisual material --something that we have no training on.  Thus, we had to learn how to produce videos in Linux for our courses.  In a week, I taught myself Kdenlive and Openshot, became more proficient with Audacity, and relied more in the image-editing of the always trustable GIMP.

In the meantime, other professors have been struggling trying to adapt their lessons to something they can deliver through Zoom meetings.  How successful that attempt is I cannot say.  Students claim that Zoom sessions generate anxiety and make them very tired, which has been confirmed in this article.  

So, yes, it has been a busy time.  But, all, in all...

Linux truly saved me from this technological virus that seems to be eroding the mental health of my colleagues...

HAPPY BELATED ANNIVERSARY, MANDRIVA CHRONICLES!!

Steam client crash in OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 Fixed!

After fixing some boot problems (due to a careless update of another OS), I discovered that Steam is now working in OpenMandriva 4.1.

Great!!

Honestly, I do not know if it was fixed or if my installing of GRUB editor (which was removed in the new OpenMandriva) did the trick.

Whatever the case, Steam is now working!

Steam client crashing on OpenMandriva Lx 4.1

I downloaded and installed OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 and the OS looks good.

The main problem with it right now is that Steam is not working properly: even though the client starts, downloads updates and unpacks the Steam runtime, it crashes right before login.

There was not much I could do about it.  Apparently, this problem has already been reported.

So, I have to wait...

A Surprise!

Today, my daughter wanted to play some Steam games and, since we were in my home office, I let her use my laptop.  I booted OpenMandriva Lx and dragora showed me that there were some updates. I had updated the machine like a couple of weeks ago, so I thought the process could wait until after the game.

My daughter played and, afterwards, I saw that the updates were massive: more than 1800 packages!

I decided to install the updates, but nothing was going on.  So, I checked the OpenMandriva site and found this:

Thinking that I had misread something, I went to Distrowatch.org and saw that the RC of OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 was out in  January 29...

Boy, I missed all that because I had been working so much writing!

I guess I will have to wait to be able to download the new release.