New Adventures: Zen Browser and Mageia 10

Recently, I have been trying to take some time to come back to blogging, an activity that I really enjoyed and let me record all my learning in the world of FLOSS.

So, these are the new experiences I had:

1. Zen Browser

I do not remember how, probably it was thanks to a Reddit post, but I came across Zen Browser. Or maybe it was a YouTube video? In any case, the author, a long time Firefox user, described a new browser that was very strange at first, but that that author ended loving.

Since Firefox has always been my browser of choice, I grew curious about this new software that was, in fact, very unusual: its features did not seem to make a lot of sense to me (just as the author described when first using the browser). Tabs arranged in a vertical fashion? Multiple spaces? Design whose main purpose was not to be intrusive but that did not sacrifice functionality? Privacy-oriented?

I have to admit that I could not resist and visited the Zen Browser site to download this new way to surf the Web. I got the Linux version, decompressed it, and gave it a try.  True, the design was attractive, but the idea of the spaces to organize the vertical tabs was not resonating with me... until I remembered experiencing something similar the first time I used the four desktops in Mandriva, back in 2009. The idea of switching workspaces seemed confusing to me. Yes, the Compiz cube was cool, but what was the point of having your windows scattered in four different isolated spaces? 

Then it dawned on me.

And then, the four workspaces became completely essential for my productivity.

This was exactly the same experience when KDE introduced activities. First, bewilderment sprinkled with anger, then disbelief, and finally understanding and total acceptance. 

Thus, I created two spaces in Zen to test them... and I loved the concept! 

I loved it even more when I discovered that it is based on Firefox and, therefore, not only do I get to import my bookmarks into the new browser, but I can also sync it using my Mozilla account!

The installation in my portable Mageia 9 desktop was easy: I only unzipped the file and then ran this command as root: curl -fsSL https://github.com/zen-browser/updates-server/raw/refs/heads/main/install.sh | $SHELL 

Somehow, that was it. I got Zen in my menu and pinned it to Favorites.

However, when I tried to replicate the process in Mageia 10, I never got the menu entry. So, I had to follow the indications in the Bluebird Documentation page: 

1. I went to  /usr/share/applications

2. I opened kwrite, opened a new file, and pasted this info (substituting <your-name> by my home folder: 

[Desktop Entry]

Name=Zen Browser

Exec=/home/<your-name>/zen/zen

Terminal=false

Type=Application

Icon=/home/<your-name>/zen/browser/chrome/icons/default/default128.png

Categories=Network;WebBrowser;

StartupNotify=true

And that was it!  I am actually writing this from home, using Zen Browser on my new Mageia 10 desktop install.

Which takes me to my second adventure... 

 2.  Mageia 10

After a long wait, and according to DistroWatch.com, my favorite distro released version 10. After all this time, I have not had any major issue with Mageia 9, which explains, however partially, why I have not blogged regularly. Yet, I wanted to see the new Mageia...only that I wanted to be careful.  That's why I decided to install the new release to a USB drive. 

After downloading the classic install ISO, creating a USB with it, I tried to put this 10th version into a pen drive but, alas! I have become rusty! 

Yes, I made a n00b mistake: Instead of placing the GRUB2 in the EFI partition of the USB drive, I inadvertently put it into the EFI partition of my home desktop computer. So, when I attempted to boot from the pen drive, all I got was a black screen with a J and a blinking cursor next to it.

Of course, I thought that the problem was limited to a dysfunctional USB install. After removing the pen drive, I booted the desktop. To my horror, I saw the splash of Mageia 10 replacing the splash of my Mageia 9 computer! 

And then... NOTHING!

Realizing that I had ruined two machines in one install, I plugged the pen drive again and restarted the desktop. My idea was to change the booting device, but I was not quick enough and the wayward machine booted from its EFI partition...this time into my renewed desktop environment (Luckily, I did not format the /home partition!).  

In addition to the stupid mistake with GRUB2, I had also installed the / partition into the pen drive and created a two-factor verification computer... Good grief!

I had to reinstall my / partition and fix the GRUB2.   

And that's how I forcefully migrated my home computer to Mageia 10. 

Concerning performance, everything seems to be working, just as expected. While several technical reviews claim Mageia 10 is a lackluster release, I am grateful EVERYTHING WORKS.

Those of us who do not belong to the bleeding-edge, dangerously-living, excited-to-tinker tribe are happy with a distro that looks renewed but keeps thing in place, maybe a bit too familiar, but reliable when work demands keep piling up, hehe.

 

And another year flies by! 16 anniversary?

 

The Linux landscape has changed a lot since I started this humble blog to record my experiences with GNU/Linux and FLOSS in general.

Today, I visited Distrowatch and CachyOS is distro #1. Ubuntu, which used to be the top dog back then, is #10.

Linux Mint and MX Linux, distros that once held the top position, are now #2 and #3, respectively.

Mageia, my main distro, is #51! I am using Mageia 9, which was released in August 2023. I can see that they have been busy this year as they released Alpha 1 and Beta 1 and there will be another general extraordinary assembly this coming May 7 because the required quorum was not reached to vote the constitution changes. I hope everything goes well this time. 

OpenMandriva sits at #94. They have been releasing more frequently (both Rock and ROME are now in version 6!). Unfortunately, when my pentaboot laptop died, I had to stop using that distro along with Manjaro and Elive.

Elive, by the way, released a new version at the end of March this year. I might try it, who knows? I really liked the last version of that OS... Thanatermesis really produces art with the OS. 

But where do I put it? Can I run it smoothly from a USB drive to work with it? 

The thing is that I do not want to buy a new laptop to run new distros. The prices they are charging are ridiculous for the specs that they offer.

I do not want to deal with the TPM chip nonsense, to be honest.

And then there is the age verification debacle and the controversy with LibreOffice!

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Even so, I can say I am happy I have been working all this time with Linux: MX Linux in classrooms and Mageia in my work and home offices.

That is good!

 

 

 

Happy Belated 15th Anniversary!

Wow!  Another year flew by! 

Yes, I have not been very active posting on this blog for some time now. In fact, the last post was precisely on the 14th anniversary of this humble space.

These are the major changes since last year:

1.  My ZaReason Strata laptop is dying

The system I purchased from the now gone ZaReason company in 2014 is finally on its last breath. The battery malfunctioned six years ago and there is no replacement, so I had to keep it connected to a backup battery to be able to use the machine.  However, because its speakers started producing strange noises, I have not used this machine since 2022. 

When I tried to use it last month, it would not start at all. I thought it was finally out, but then changed the power brick and the laptop booted normally. Manjararo, OpenMandriva Lx, Mageia, Elive, and MX Linux are still there, fully operational.

However, the lid is showing signs of wear and the cables of the screen are now showing in between the broken hinges.

Well, it is, after all, an 11-year old laptop. 

I remember how, during the pandemic of 2020, the ZaReason people issued a statement concerning their closing of operations. Those were troubled times and, the message, with an apology to clients, made me very sad.

Yet, your product is still here... Battered after a long time, but working.

No, ZaReason people. You did not disappoint me. 

2.  UEFI mayhem and portable Linux machines

Last year, I wrote:

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.

Well, turns out that, at the beginning of this year, the university decided to replace all HDDs for SSDs. This created a problem for me since all my portable Linux machines booted using legacy mode.

I had to reinstall all systems into the USB drives from the physical computer at the university office to make sure that no UEFI or secure boot setting prevented me from booting the devices.

It was a somewhat slow process, but everything worked. So, I am still doing all of my job from those portable machines.

3. The new laptops 

I had to find a Windows 11 laptop for my daughter since she needs Windows and office for a high school class.  I decided to get second-hand laptops and, thus, I bought an HP slimbook for her and an HP ZBook for me.

I dual-booted hers with Mageia 9 and wiped Windows from mine entirely to also boot Mageia 9. The two laptops work great, but I miss the wired internet connection.  I am posting this from the ZBook with Mageia.

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So, this is what has been going on.

I wish I could have more time to post, but family and work responsibilities keep me busier and busier every year.

 

My Linux journey has not ended!

 

 

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... 

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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!