14 Years?! Happy anniversary, Mandriva Chronicles!

 Yes, today is the 14th anniversary of this humble blog, which I created to register my experiences as a Linux user.

What has changed since last year?

1.  Stability and fewer posts

Well, the Linux distros I use have become so stable that I rarely face a challenge.  This has reduced my post quantity.

Plus, where I work, they have decided to keep people extremely busy, so free time is rare.

2.  Portable Linux machines: always reliable!

In the university where I work, they did a suspicious full 180 turn and switched to Microsoft products.  However, that has not stopped me from using Linux for my work every day: I always use USB drives, which I made portable Linux machines, to stream my virtual lessons and teach in class as well.

As the classroom computers have low specs, MX Linux is my distro of choice.  In my office computer, I generally use Mageia 9.  If fact, I am synchronizing my portable Mageia machines right now following this old post here.

3. The new exam notification system  

This week, they sent an email about a new oral exam notification system.  The funny thing was that they said that it only worked on a Windows computer and urged us NOT TO USE MACs.  Many of my colleagues are Mac users, so I grew curious and decided to test it from my Linux station.  It worked perfectly!

I then replied informing them that the system ran flawlessly from Linux, he,he.

4.  My laptop distros

I upgraded most of the distros and my old ZaReason Strata runs Mageia 9, OpenMandriva Lx 5.0 ROME, Manjaro 23.1, MX Linux, and Elive 3.

I do not use this machine often because the battery is dead and I could never get a replacement.  So, I must keep it plugged to UPS all the time.  

5.  A nephew's migration

My sister in law's son called me once because he installed Linux Mint to a laptop and ran into a problem.  I tried to help him to the best of my abilities and the piece of advice I gave them worked: he could solve his first Linux challenge.

6.  My wife's English course

My wife took an English course and she was very worried because all the software was Microsoft's.  Or so they said.

However, the platform was Moodle and she could work from my Mageia desktop.  Las Monday was her final exam. Everything went fine because Firefox played the audios for the listening exam without a problem.

And that's that.  My productivity has not been affected because of the stability of Linux this year.  So, I am focusing on my health, my daughter's high school matters, and my family in general.

All is good!

And the Magic is Ready!

Two weeks ago, DistroWatch reported that Mageia 9 had been released.

Back then, I was swamped with work and, even when the Mageia notifier displayed the announcement a week later, I could not perform the upgrade.

Well, that, and the fact that I normally prefer to do clean installs.

However, I do not have the time I need to perform a clean install right now, so I decided, rather adventurously, to do the upgrade.

Yes, this can mean that, if something goes terribly wrong, I might actually end up doing the clean install to fix the problem, which defeats the purpose.  And there are things that can go wrong: the printer-scanner, Steam, my personal configurations...

The notifier told me that I needed 9GB or so of space. I found that rather excessive, but, since I had space, I proceeded.  The upgrade took like 3 hours to complete and the notifer told me that everything was ready and I needed to reboot.

So, I rebooted expecting, well, the worst.

After a while (there was a new kernel, so I counted that as normal), the splash screen showed.  It was a bit different.

Then the login screen looked a bit nicer.  My icon was there, by the way.  It was not removed.

I logged in and the KDE animated cat that I had installed was still there and I landed into my old desktop wallpaper, with the neon icon theme and everything seemed the same.

Oh, but I noted that the machine was more responsive.

I printed.  It went fine.

I sync'ed my documents.  All normal.

My Firefox bookmarks were kept.

And the Steam games worked fine.

I, scratching my head, was dumbfounded.  This felt like my same old machine, but with a renewed vitality.  The upgrade was perfect.

The magic was performed.

 THANK YOU, MAGEIA DEVELOPERS AND COMMUNITY!

 

 

Artificial intelligence, education, and the forgotten 13th anniversary of this blog

Maybe it's just me... Who knows.  The thing is that I feel that my workload this year is going through the roof in a nice tower that reminds me of those gigantic toothpicks piercing the landscape, all in the name of cellular signal and communication.

Yet, even 5G seems like a foggy dream of a distant past.  The new technological wave that everyone is surfing is AI.

So, in addition to my normal work activities and my family responsibilities, I have been interacting with the chatbots in www.poe.com.  Hey, if they are going to steal my job eventually, at least I want to meet my replacement!

I have devoted a significant amount of time to talk to Sage, GPT-4, Claude-plus, Claude-instant, Dragonfly, ChatGPT, and NeevaAI.  Somehow, I am beginning to sense their different "personalities" as I read their outputs, be it to simple or more sophisticated questions.

I have even "created" my own bots to see if they are capable of providing a distinct response, something that makes them unique.  

In any event, I have been so busy with all of this that I missed the 13th anniversary of this blog!

And then I got this poem:

 

 

BoingoPlus (yes, it IS a JoJo reference!) is the chatbot that my brother created in www.poe.com.  This bot answers with riddles and poetry. I must say that I really liked the poem that BoingoPLUS wrote.

 

For fun, I even made a simple YouTube video about this experience.

I believe that the pretty-much-undisturbed educational world in which we grew up is changing abruptly.  It's like Pangea dividing.

And I am afraid that, as is usually the case, people in the education sector are not paying enough attention. I hope we do not miss this second opportunity to shift our Victorian-inherited teaching practices (and evaluation!) to something that is more humane and congruent with the realities of the Information Age... 

-------

P.S:

I ran this blog post through the chatbots to see how they analyzed it.  

"The world has changed, Johnny.  You wouldn't believe how much the world has changed"  (Jake Tremont, Dad, 1989)

 

Using dd to clone my portable Mageia Linux desktop

Since I returned to the office in 2022 after the remote work mandate was lifted, I have been using portable Linux desktops that I made.

These are convenient USB drives with persistence that I boot and so I can circumvent the restrictions (not to mention the spying) in the Windows desktop.

Anticipating that the USB drive can eventually fail, I have made several copiesÑ I have two MX Linux machines and two Mageia machines.

Even though I synchronize document files using FreeFileSync, I need to make absolutely sure that all the settings of OBS studio are updated, and since I keep changing the configuration for the didactic live streams, the best solution is to clone the USB drive machine I have been using to the backup USB drive machine from time to time.

Doing so is very easy.  First, I plug the source USB and open the Mageia Control Center just to make sure which is the source device (I need this machine in dev/sdb).  After that, I plug the other USB drive, which is the backup.  This is the target USB (the system must identify the target device as /dev/sdc). 

Then I open Konsole in Mageia and type su and my password to be able to type this command:

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=1M status=progress

The status=progress part lets you see how things are going while dd is doing the copy, otherwise the command line gives no feedback and, since the process takes a long time, one might think that nothing is happening.

 

First 2023 post: OpenMandriva Lx ROME 23.01 is here!

Two days ago, Distrowatch published the announcement that OpenMandriva is making its debut into the world of rolling distros with its ROME (Rolling OpenMandriva Edition, I presume) release. 

I had upgraded the system not long ago, but I wanted to make sure that I am using this release, so I followed ben79's most detailed walkthrough here.  Big thanks, ben79!!!

Everything worked perfectly and my system is stable as a rock.

I checked with uname -a and kernel 6.1.2 is running, so everything is updated and working.  So far, no disruption whatsoever.

AWESOME!!

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!

My #1 Reason to Love OpenMandriva Lx

I want to start this post with a disclaimer: I am aware that all Linux distros have their pros and cons, and my purpose is not to berate any OS choice readers have made.  I simply want to share with you what happened to me recently, as I upgraded to OpenMandriva Lx 4.3.  This experience reminded me why, after all these years, I still love OpenMandriva.

A second point I'd like to clarify is that I am not discussing benchmarks, compilers, package managers or any other technical matters here.  To be honest, they go beyond my understanding: I am a non-technical Linux user.

I was running the rolling version of OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 and I realized that a major upgrade was available.  So, I decided to upgrade and here is where my story starts.

After a whooping number of packages had upgraded in a process that took like 45 minutes (I do not have a very fast connection), I booted into a soundless system: the computer said that there was no sound. I did not panic and visited the OpenMandriva forums.  There, I found a post that I should have read BEFORE attempting the upgrade.  In it, ben79 described all the steps to have a successful upgrade.

Of course, I had not followed any of the steps, so my system was operational, but erratic. And, although I could enable the sound easily following the post instructions, I decided to roll back and start over.

So, I put my old OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 back in, upgraded following the steps and this time I booted into a far better system.  I corrected the sound issue by installing the pulseaudio package from the repository and then started to configure the system.

That's where, inadvertently, I messed up again.  When I tried to configure the printer, I put a third party package and later discovered that cups refused to work.  Regardless of what I tried, the system would say that there was a bad descriptor and it was impossible to have the printer to work.

This problem took me to the OpenMandriva forums once again, where I posted my situation to the best of my abilities without expecting prompt help.  But I was wrong, the reply came fast as lightning from ben79, who did all his best to point me into what had gone wrong and, after trying several approaches with no success, I decided to start from scratch by rolling back again to version 4.2.

With a professional, friendly and polite demeanor, ben79 suggested me to use the rolling snapshot and pointed me to it, which definitely was going to save a lot of time.  Indeed, in a matter of 20 minutes after the download, I booted OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 with sound and with no printer problems!

You see, this is the number 1 reason why I still love OpenMandriva: its community members!  I thank all developers for their work and community for their eagerness to help others.  And thank you very much to you, ben79, for your politeness, patience, and willingness to help me!

  

Some Issues and Challenges

The excessive amount of work has kept me away from my blog, that's true.  However, the fact that my Linux distros have been performing beyond my expectations has also, in a way, stopped me from writing here.  

I mean... There's very little to write about when nothing breaks.

But then I noticed several problems:

1.  Insync and OpenMandriva Lx:

The upgrade to OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 removed my Insync client on my laptop.  I do not know what the problem was (a Python issue, maybe?).  I have not been able to make it come back.

2.  Insync and PCLinuxOS:

The update I applied yesterday produced the same problem with Insync that I had in OpenMandriva.  So, my laptop cannot sync files with Insync in PCLinuxOS, either. 

3.  Mesa updates and sound problems in Mageia 8:

This is something I have seen before in my desktops.  Four Mesa-related packages ask me to uninstall Steam, which I do not want to do, so I've been postponing such updates for a long time.

Then I noticed that VLC stopped working and that my repo database in MCC was acting weird, refusing to install certain tainted packages.  This led to mute audio in videos played with SMplayer, Mplayer, and Kplayer.

I decided to experiment with these because I need the audio in the desktop to work, so I installed the four Mesa-related files and, sure enough, Mageia got rid of Steam.

My year with Fedora helped me there.  Instead of using MCC, I opened Konsole and used DNF following these instructions from the Mageia Wiki:

 

• If nonfree or tainted repositories are desired, they can be activated using dnf config-manager as shown with this example for 64 bit system (replace x86_64 with i586 for 32 bit):
  

dnf config-manager --set-enabled mageia-x86_64-nonfree updates-x86_64-nonfree
dnf config-manager --set-enabled mageia-x86_64-tainted updates-x86_64-tainted

• 32-bit repositories are turned off by default on 64-bit x86. If you need them:
  

dnf config-manager --set-enabled mageia-i586 updates-i586

With that, after running dnf-update, I could get steam, vlc, ffmpeg, and other packages back.  This repaired the problem with video sound, but VLC is still not operational.

I'll try to fix this.  When I get some time.

 

 

It's Been 10 +1 Years Now!

Yesterday, Megatotoro gave me a present.  It was a funny T-shirt that I really liked:

Today, while I was wearing it, I realized that tomorrow is the anniversary of my blog.

So, after 11 years, I am still a Linux user.

Who would have thought?

My walk started almost by accident, with a modest Asus Eee PC with Xandros preinstalled (The legendary MiniMe!)  I never thought that such a humble machine with change the way I use computers in such a profound way.  

I was re-reading the first entry that I posted on this blog and a bitter-sweet wave of memories made me smile.  

So much has changed since then!

I listed there some programs that I do not use anymore... Frozen Bubble, for example.  How come I do not have that game any longer?  THAT cute game was the deciding factor in ditching Windows!

But the world changes and so do people.  New games come (Steam powered, he-he) and even the distros that I started using are different now.  Everything changes.

Yet, I am glad that I can rely on my Linux computers, just in the same way like the day I quit Windows.  Linux  has truly made my work easier and less worrisome... (Boy!  I've been online without an antivirus for 11 years!)

I should make the anniversary picture to decorate this entry.  Yes, I should. Something with a cake and clapping hands.  A celebration picture! (Or I could...)

HAPPY 11TH ANNIVERSARY, MANDRIVA LINUX CHRONICLES!!!