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.

My Linux Experience in 2019

This is my last post of the year.

In summary, I can say that my experience with Linux during 2019 has been extremely satisfactory.  I mean, my computers have been working great and the distros have been more stable than ever.

This is not to imply that I have not encountered problems along the way.  Mageia 7 has been showing me strange updates that, when I have succumbed to the temptation of installing them, my system has lost functionality (for my particular purposes, that is).  Those two notorious problems are the mesa update, which wants to remove Steam, and the WINE update, which has rendered the few Windows programs I still keep unusable.  I tried the  instructions here to fix issue, but to no avail.  Using DNF, I have seen that Mageia 7 does not seem to be connecting to the mirrors.

So I guess I will use Steam in Mageia and WINE in PCLinuxOS for the time being.

I can always resort to OpenMandriva LX 4 if I want to use both Steam and Wine.
----------------------
 UPDATE: 
I could finally enable Wine in Mageia.  I did it with konsole, using these commands as root:
urpmi.update --no-ignore "Core 32bit Release"
urpmi.update --no-ignore "Core 32bit Updates"
 

to make sure that the i586 repos are enabled to retrieve the i586 dependencies and then

dnf install --allowerasing  wine

this allows dnf to erase the newer packages that were conflicting with Wine.

-----------------------------------

Fedora keeps eating the /root space avidly every time there is an update.

Getting the Epson XP-231 Multifunction printer to work in Fedora 31 KDE spin

This new version of Fedora gave me a bit of a headache trying to get the Epson XP-231 multifunction printer to work.  The main problem was that the OS would not enable the printer and, regardless of my attempts, I could not get the rpm package with the drivers installed.

The Plasma assistant detected the printer, but could not find any drivers.  So, I first tried what has been working before: using a local package called epson-inkjet-printer-201204w-1.0.0-1lsb3.2.x86_64.rpm (which I downloaded and keep around) using either Discover or dnfdragora. Discover told me that the installation was successful, but the Plasma assistant still refused to see the driver.

When I used dnfdragora, it would not start and issue an error message about insufficient permissions. I made my user a sudoer, but it did not help.

Little did I know that the solution was a lot simpler that I expected.

All I had to do was to start dnfdragora and search "epson." This gave me a package with a newer version of the drivers, which I installed and, after that, I simply configured the printer with the plasma assistant, where the drivers could be selected this time.

For the scanner, I used megatotoro's procedure here again.

Now everything is good!

 

The Changes that November Brought

I realized that Fedora 31 had been released on October 29, so I decided to install it to my laptop three days ago.

Putting on the Fedora is a touchy operation: generally, installing this distro implies a fresh install keeping my home partition, running DNF commands to install the RPM fusion repo afterwards, and finally configuring my brand new Fedora desktop.  Although that sounds pretty standard, the problem lies on the fact that I am dealing with a laptop that has OpenMandriva Lx 4, Mageia 7, PCLinuxOS, Elive 3.0, PicarOS Diego, and Pisi Linux.  The changes that Fedora makes to the OpenMandriva-controlled GRUB2 regularly lead to a kernel panic in OpenMandriva and a slow start in Mageia.

This time was no different.  Well, there was a difference: I required a considerable less time to fix the problems, which made me very happy as I needed the laptop for work today.  Yet, I made a change to make my life easier.  I moved OpenMandriva Lx 4 from rolling to rock.  Steam is working, too.  In Mageia 7, I keep avoiding the three mesa updates that want to remove Steam.

I am considering replacing Pisi... It is way too outdated and there is no word about it since 2016.

The question is what distro to pick.  I want something light and, if possible, not rolling.

Or maybe I should try BSD?  Say, MidnightBDS? My daughter and her cat, Mr. Midnight, would certainly like that! :)

I will give it a thought...