Full laptop upgrade

 Finally, with some free time at last, I decided to perform a full upgrade of 4 of the distros that I have in my laptop.

Manjaro Ruah becomes now Manjaro 22 (Sikaris).  This was taken care of by Octopi without any problem.

Mageia 8 had not big deal upgrading some packages.

MX Linux also had like 76 packages to upgrade and everything went smoothly.

OpenMandriva ROME 22.11 is the most challenging distro for me to upgrade now.  I used to mess up the upgrade by not reading the forum post before, but I learned my lesson.  So, I visited this post here, where rugyada kindly reminds one of the commands to do the upgrade correctly: sudo dnf clean all ; sudo dnf --best --allowerasing distro-sync

With that, the process went fine until Konsole asked me what to do with a file.  From previous experiences, I learned that some files must be kept: /etc/shadow, /etc/passwd, /etc/gshadow, and /etc/group.

However, this file was not any of those, so I examined its contents with "d".  To return to the process,  I typed "q" and then "y".

OpenMandriva is working great.  In fact, it is the only distro that is running the Steam game Zen Bound 2 without a compatibility layer.

Now, I am ready to work on my personal projects!




Missing package in Mageia 8

I attempted to update my Mageia desktop yesterday and, although almost everything went well, I got this error message telling me that imagemagick could not update because "nothing provided lib64raw20".

I tried with DNF, but I could only get the i586 version.

So, I located the file here: https://pkgs.org/download/lib64raw20

Everything seems back to normal now.

Happy 12th Anniversary, MandrivaChronicles!

On May 2, 2010, I started this humble blog as my personal project to record what I was learning regarding Linux.

Back then, I never thought of the many changes that would occur in the world, in the Linux landscape, and in me as a person.

Due to COVID-19, my ever-increasing workload has kept me away from posting.  Also, health issues in the family and my daughter's return to to in-person school classes required my attention.  All this has kept me away from here.

It is time to pause, then, and revisit the blog.

This is a quick summary of the major events:

1.  The university where I work decided to roll back and ditch LibreOffice to favor MS Office.  This is sad, but expected, mainly because the personnel's recalcitrance to use LibreOffice.  Interestingly, this same recalcitrance was at place when we were required to telework using Zoom, a paradigm change that many professors hated.  Now the complaint is that, after investing more than two years in Zoom, they will have to learn how to use MS Teams.  This feels full Samsara...

2.  My country has been under intense cyberattacks.  The generalized security-uninterested attitude in which people use their Windows computers has finally came back to bite them.  Now we see the "recommendations from experts to protect yourself against cybercriminals"...

3.  My telework comes to end tomorrow.  The Windows office computer is going to be watched closely.  The institution will  operate on the assumption that the university is a target and that our computers are vulnerable.  I guess that is correct.  The good news?  They offered both my brother and I to install Linux to our workstations.  I must admit that cheered me up!

4.   After the migration from Windows 10 to Windows 11, my daughter's laptop was fine.  Then another batch of updates came and broke it.  Good job, Microsoft!  I had to fix it and it took me two days to have the system operational again.

5.  I have been working all this time from a desktop with Mageia and a laptop with Mageia, Openmandriva Lx, PCLinuxOS, Elive, and MX Linux.  I switch OSs and computers to disrupt my patterns of work.  It's good brain exercise, hehe!

6.  Mental health-wise, I have kept a consistent exercise routine that includes jogging, body weight movements, and QiGong meditation.  This has been beneficial both for my body and mind.

7.  This last week, I created a USB stick with MX Linux to plug it to the office computer and work from there.  I will cover the process tomorrow.

Overall, I feel satisfied and calm with everything.  Let us see what this new stage brings!