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!




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!

Upgrading to Mageia 5

I had forgotten to upgrade one of the laptops to Mageia 5. 

To be honest, today I was postponing the upgrade because the machine, a rather old Toshiba Satellite which, oh horror, came with Windows VISTA preloaded, put up a fight when I installed Mageia 2 to it.

I normally perform a clean install, but this time I wanted to see if the upgrade feature in Mageia had evolved to tackle this task as it should.

It was pleasant to see how the upgrade was smooth and fast and, more importantly, the laptop was fully operational afterwards.

Good job, Mageia devs!

Wishful Thinking

Time is flying.  It will be Christmas pretty soon.

So, I thought about gifts I would like to get for myself.  Yes, that is perhaps mere wishful thinking, but I guess I can indulge in some brief daydreaming.


Let's see...

If I go modest, a Raspberry Pi would be my first choice for a self-gift.  Or maybe an Asus Chromebox.

Now, if I can expand the scope... I would definitely buy myself a Steam Machine!  That is weird as I am no gamer and have never owned a gaming console in my life, but I enjoy computer games and I feel thankful because Valve brought many entertaining hours to my Linux computers... I suspect my daughter will claim this gift for herself :D

A new desktop would also be nice.  Mine is so old that my KDE-based distros are beginning to run slow.

Now, if I can really, really aim high (as in high-end), I will go for the mythical ZaReason's Chimera 2 laptop!

OK, that's enough of my frivolous indulgence ;-)  Back to work!

Weekend fun

I braced myself for a weekend marked by work.  So, I turned on my ZaReason Strata laptop and left the room to get a cup of hot tea.

When I returned, I found Lara, my cat, playing with the keyboard.

This is the only "cyber-attack" that I have suffered since I migrated to Linux... And I have to admit that it is, by far, the cutest!

The HP Pavilion Laptop is Back

My poor HP Pavilion, which had a video problem when I was using it, was finally repaired.

I took it to the repair shop the first week of February and they gave it back to me last Thursday... after almost two months.

When they gave it to me, the video display was fixed.  However, when I tried to play a DVD for my daughter, the DVD drive would not read any disc, so I took it again to the repair shop last Friday morning.  In the afternoon, I received a call and the HP laptop was finally operational in all senses.

Well, almost ALL.  It turns out that, after not being able to update the OSs, my rather old PCLinuxOS install got frozen in time.  PCLOS is a semi-rolling distro and you are advised to update it at least every two weeks.  Obviously, after two months, the machine cannot even get the repos.

I will have to migrate it to a newer version of PCLOS.  But I will do that during Easter.  The thing is, I am not sure if I want to do it.  The current install of PCLOS has everything I need to work and play (it even runs the game Braid on Desura), so... why fixing it if it is not broken? 


I upgraded Mageia and OpenMandriva Lx without any problem.

It is good to have this soldier back with the troop.

Multiboot Laptop Update

When I bought the ZaReason Strata Laptop, I asked them to pre-load Mageia 4 to it.  However, I knew that I was going to add more distros to the hard drive as soon as I can, to make it feel like the pentaboot HP Pavilion that died on me.

To begin, I wiped the original install and re-installed Mageia.  Then, I tried to put PCLinuxOS into the hard drive, but the distro had problems with the display.  As I could not achieve a decent display, I decided to do some research and try with PCLinuxOS later.

I dual-booted the laptop with OpenMandriva Lx.  No problem there whatsoever.  In fact, OpenMandriva's GRUB2 controls the booting.

Then I added PicarOS, the awesome distro for children.  Unfortunately, this distro refused to use the Compiz effects properly, losing some of its impressive visuals.  Still, it became my third distro.

After reading some threads in the PCLinuxOS forums, I learned how to enable the laptop to use a larger screen resolution than 800x600.   I still cannot get OpenGL to work properly but, with the resolution fix, PCLinuxOS claimed a partition of the HD as the fourth distro.


Today, thanks to Megatotoro, who posted here about PisiLinux going RC2, I installed the new comer distro, too.  The process was quick and simple.

Pisi's GRUB substituted OpenMandriva's, but I reverted the situation.  Then, I pimped up Pisi's desktop and, in so doing, made a stupid mistake: I added 20 virtual spaces in one row!  If you want to see an ugly bottom panel, do that.

Now the Strata laptop has all the distros I was using in the HP Pavilion.

And I am still waiting for the release of Elive...

ZaReason Strata WebCam problem [SOLVED], Those Silly Mistakes We Make

A while a go, I wrote a post about those days in which we all should avoid computers.  I also posted describing how happy I was with my new ZaReason Strata Laptop.  The only problem I had with it was that the webcam was not working, a weird situation because the laptop would work perfectly with the external Logitech webcam I use in my desktop.

Well, as a follow up of the story of the cam, i have to say that I "solved" the problem like a month ago, but I was so embarrassed that never blogged about it.

Having internalized the emotions, I can now tell the story of how I found the "solution".

When I installed Kamoso, Kamorama, Cheese (and other programs) to work with the webcam and they would say that /dev/video0 did not exist, I suspected that the camera was not connected.  I mean, I tried in Mageia 4, OpenMandriva, and PicarOS without success.  However, the kernel modules seemed to be OK because my machine would detect the external Logitech cam without any hussle at all.

So, after trying for a while, I sent the ZaReason Tech support a message asking for help and waited.  My message only asked for support configuring the cam; I did not want to return the machine.

I waited for a week, but they never got back to me.

After the week had elapsed, I got a bit upset.  From my office, I decided to contact ZaReason again, so I began writing this snarky email when I suddenly noticed a funny function key that I had not seen before in any machine.  It looked like some sort of a satellite dish... or a webcam.

"This can't possibly be it!", I said to myself while pressing both the Function key and the key with the satellite dish.  Sure enough, a blue light next to the cam turned on and my image popped up.  The cam worked, but it had been turned off the whole time!

Luckily, I had not sent the snarky email. I deleted it.

More luckily, I was alone.  Had any other person been there, he or she would have assumed the WebCam was not properly calibrated as my face rapidly  went from my normal color to various shades of red and ended up sort of purplish with embarrassment.

We all have been there: this technological era prompts us to make silly mistakes.  Haven't you ever gotten, for instance, an email from your boss urging you to take a look at "the document attached" only to discover that the attachment is missing?

Has it ever happen to you that end up sending a message to a wrong contact because your email service fills in the address and you assumed it was the right one?

I think most of us have been there.

I guess I am now on the Wall of Fame at ZaReason's tech support... pretty much like the stories here. In fact, I still blush when I remember this mistake.

Oh, well...

On my new laptop: ZaReason's Strata 7440

When Mageia 4 was released, I migrated the two desktop computers in my house.  I also wanted to install Mageia 4 to my HP Pavilion laptop, but it had a hardware malfunction that prevented me from using it at all  (it would not start at all... apparently a chipset/display problem).

I took it to a repair shop I trust and they had to send it somewhere else to find out if the machine can be saved.  This means I had to wait for a month.

But I cannot wait for a month.

So, I decided to buy a new laptop with Linux pre-installed.  As my brother Megatotoro had a very positive experience with ZaReason (and I envied his Alto laptop, to be honest), I went for this beauty: the Strata 7440. 

The Strata arrived this week and its performance is truly great: all the KDE desktop effects could be activated and used without any major impact on the laptop's responsiveness.

However, I wiped the Mageia install to install the OS myself... mainly because ZaReason configured the user account for my brother and I dislike the partitioning they used.

I wanted also to make room for other possible installs.

Getting Mageia 4 on the laptop was no big deal.  In fact, I used the 64 bit version of the OS and everything worked, even the Japanese IME with iBus.  

Then I tried to get PCLinuxOS and, unfortunately, had problems with the display.  I need to see if I can get to correct the problem later.

The other OS that I installed to the Strata was OpenMandriva 2013.  The only problem was the lack of Wifi connectivity... It was solved easily adding the appropriate packages.

But then I discovered that the webcam on the machine is not detected.  Neither Mageia nor OpenMandriva Lx can see the webcam.  I tried a live Linux Mint 16 DVD and it was the same.  I hope this is caused by a lack of drivers rather than by a hardware issue.

I am not extremely bothered by the webcam issue because I don't use it much and, interestingly, this machine can run practically all the games I have purchased in Steam and Desura.  The list includes:

A.  Steam Games

1. The Bard's Tale (real funny)
2. Revenge of the Titans
3. Worms Reloaded
4. Snuggle Truck
5. Hero Academy
6. Cogs
7. Osmos
8. Violett 

B.  Desura Games

1. Braid (I love the concept of this game!)
2. Nihilumbra

It seems that the only game that I lost in Desura is Machinarium... because it is a 32 bit game and would not load.

So, the balance tilts more into the positive side than into the negative.  I only need to figure out how to solve the webcam thing...

On my movement to GRUB2

As I wanted to install Pisi Linux Sueño (Beta) to my laptop, I had to take the leap from GRUB to GRUB2.  You know, Megatotoro warned me about the fact that Pisi has a bug and therefore installs its own GRUB2 menu on the MBR regardless of what you choose.

So far, I've been working --rather happily-- with Mageia's legacy GRUB.  Megatotoro taught me how to edit it and, despite some problems here and there, I have been able to manually add the entries for the new distros I installed.

Although Pisi's GRUB2 menu looks great, I wanted to keep my Mageia background in the GRUB menu.  So, I decided to install the packages in Mageia 3 to boot up my laptop and desktop computers with GRUB2.  Those include some dependencies and I also installed the GRUB customizer package.

After installing them, my computers picked up all the present OSs, which was a great relief.

Then I proceeded to install Pisi.  Everything went fine except for the fact that I, being too tired (it was 1AM), did not double check what I was doing and ended up installing the new distro on the laptop partition that I selected for PicarOS.

I then booted up Mageia and reinstalled its GRUB2.
 
The silly mistake gave me the opportunity to put PicarOS back and see if this new GRUB could pick it up.  Sure enough, it did, but used Debian for the default name.  I edited the name and now my Mageia 3 GRUB2 menu shows these entries on my laptop:

Mageia Linux
PCLinuxOS
Pisi GNU/Linux Sueño Beta
PicarOS (Minino Galpon Linux)
Mandriva Linux 2011

I honestly expected this new stage to be a lot more difficult.  No wonder why I kept reading on forums about the need to move to GRUB2.

Migration season has started

After finishing with all the work this term, including written reports, oral reports in meetings, and two rather risky academic presentations in a Congress (described here by Megatotoro), I can take some free time at last.

Of course, after the crazy rush, I ended a little weak.  But my wife made me an offer I could not refuse: she has been using Mandriva 2009.2 on her Toshiba satellite laptop all this time and wanted me to help her migrate it to a more updated system.

I remember that I had unsuccessfully tried to install Mandriva 2010 Adelie, 2010.1 Farman, and 2010.2 Christmas.  There were some issues with the graphic server.

She asked me to try Mageia 2.  Unfortunately, when I booted this distro from a USB drive,I hit the same problem.

Then, it occurred to me that I had not tried Mageia 1.  I know Mageia 1 has already gone EOL, but I decided to give it a try anyways.

It worked.  Mageia 1 picked up everything: wi-fi, function keys, graphic server, sound, and effects.  But the best part was that my wife's user-defined desktop preferences stayed after installing because I did not format the home partition.

I am going to try to run an upgrade to Mageia 2 later.
UPDATE:  Mageia 1 offered me the possibility to upgrade to Mageia 2.  Although I normally prefer to do clean installs, I accepted and, after a couple hours, my wife was using her brand new Mageia 2 OS.

What comes next is to decide on a system to migrate my desktop.  But I will wait a bit longer because I want to try the next Mandriva release.   

Popularity... or Performance?

Since Microsoft is not being very nice to XP users, I decided to check on some issues a person can have when migrating from dear old XP onto the shiny 7 OS.

This is what I discovered:

1. Remember that you must run a clean install, which means that your HD has to be erased. Some people are saying that this lack of upgrading compatibility is Microsoft's revenge on you for rejecting Vista.

2. Under 7, some users have reported problems with XP compatibility mode. This means that some of your programs might crash.

3. Make sure you can locate ALL of your drivers for Windows 7. So get ready for a good driver hunt...

4. If you have a laptop, CONSIDER THE BATTERY ISSUE.

Regarding #4, I even read there a post of a person instructing users on how to check the status of the battery first... using UBUNTU LINUX!

Can MS go any lower??

A Different World IS POSSIBLE

I had given up hope on the possibility of buying a laptop or a netbook and having the freedom to install the OS of my choice.

I even went to "Gollo", which was formerly selling PCs with Ubuntu and, when I asked for a refund if I rejected the infamous Windows license, the clerk (who had not read the license, I can tell) said that "they would not sell the netbook" to me. Wonderful, isn't it? I wonder how people still fail to see discriminatory practices supported by Microsoft's monopoly.

Then, last week, I found the web page of a store that offered very attractive Dell netbooks, and curiously, there was no mentioning of any OS, so I sent them an email. To my distress, the answer was "Yes, they all come with Windows 7 Starter" (Starter! For crying out loud, what a poor choice!)

In another email, I told the Sales Representative that I did not want Windows 7 and asked if I could get a no OS system. The answer was "NO, but I can install Windows XP or any other, even Mac OS X." This seller was so clever that he even sent me pictures and videos of the netbook running Mac OS X!

Pushing my luck, I sent him another email telling him that I had no interest in Mac OS X and asked if he could install Mandriva Linux One instead. The answer was "I can install Ubuntu." (I counted that one as progress). I then sent him a reply telling him that I prefer to work with KDE and its tools and that, unfortunately, I had decided not to buy the computer from them.

I almost dropped dead when I got an email from the Sales Representative telling me that he had decided to remove Windows 7 Starter and lowered the price from 239.000 to 219.000, which, after checking Amazon, was an excellent deal. However, the best part was that he informed me that, if I decided to buy, he was READY TO INSTALL MANDRIVA LINUX ONE!

I, of course, bought it. And he did keep his word. Today, he brought me this little Dell beauty running Mandriva Linux One, just in time to replace my dear old Asus Eee PC 900, which introduced me to the Linux world with its version of Xandros.

Yes, I know that GNU enthusiasts are going to say that I still gave my money to Billy the Kid. Yet, I cannot express the sensation that this half-victory, won over an exchange of ten emails, produced in me.

So, if anyone in Costa Rica is interested, this is the store's page:

http://TiendaCostaRica.cr