Summary of Seven Days

This is a quick post to list the latest events.

1.  Mageia 6.1 was released six days ago (Oct 6).  I was sick and busy and, because of that, I missed the announcement.  I do not need to install it on my computers, but I will download it to install it on my daughter's machine and fix the problem with the MCC.

2.  Google+ is being killed (Oct 9).  That marks the end of my 3-year experiment with this social network.  Wow, excluding Blogger, that was the only social network in which I have been active for more than a year... I tried Tagged, Hi5, Facebook (before it became so popular here), and YouTube. Right now, I have been looking for a replacement and tried MeWe and Pluspora... MeWe is too Facebooky for my taste.  Pluspora feels like a merge between Facebook and Twitter with limitations and a really geeky flavor.  I guess I will continue my test drive in Pluspora for a while.

3.  Microsoft and the patents (Oct 10).  Megatotoro shared this article with me.   I was confused.  Either Microsoft is changing its position or it is a masked move that, in reality, does not help Linux at all.  Which one will be, I wonder?

4.  My Fedora acted weird (Oct 11).  As I was attempting to update Fedora, some WINE-related packages were not found because the repos were absent.  I updated without them and the screen locker got broken.  I had encountered that before in OpenMandriva, so I switced to a virtual terminal with Ctrl+Alt+F2, logged in with my user and password, and then executed loginctl unlock-session 5.  Then I switched back to the running session with  Ctrl+Alt+F1.

5.  The Forest on Steam via WINE ate up my home space (Oct 12).
I was playing this Windows game on Fedora using the Windows Steam client via WINE.  It works fine, but then the system told me that I was running low on space.  I checked with Dolphin and I had only 340Mb free!  After a while, this number went down to 467Kb.  When I finished the game, I rebooted and my free space came back.

Openmandriva Lx 3.03... Nice!

Yesterday I saw that Openmandriva Lx 3.03 was released. 

The version that I had installed on my laptop was 3.0.  I tried 3.1 and 3.2 but they simply would not launch properly and it was until much later that I found a way to circumvent the problem.

I gave this new version a try and I can happily report that:

1.  This version is considerably faster.
2.  It launches without any problems.
3.  Despite the fact that the Openmandriva GRUB 2 replaced my existing Mageia GRUB 2, Mageia now does not have to run the check that makes the system wait for 1:40 before starting.

In addition, Steam works perfectly and Openmandriva picked up my Epson scanner/printer perfectly, too.

Those good surprises...

Yesterday I decided to update PCLinuxOS on my ZaReason Strata laptop. 

PCLinuxOS has always remained a reliable OS to work and, as the update included Lomanager, the distro's method to update LibreOffice, I couldn't delay.

Although the update was fast,  LibreOffice was taking a considerable time to finish.  Yes, I must thank my ISP for that: my connection has been unstable for over a week, with a speed sometimes down to a crawl.

Speed was abnormally slow.  I became a bit restless.

That was when I saw the Steam icon on my desktop...the round icon that had not been clicked on since October 2015.

Back in 2014 or so, PCLinuxOS was, among my OSs, the one that best worked with Steam; all of my games ran like a charm.  However, due to a mysterious problem that I could never solve, the Steam client refused to work after an update.  I read the forums and tried suggestions to no avail.  My Steam on PCLinuxOS was broken.

By then, Steam in Mageia and Openmandriva was going good, so I didn't worry much.  Later, I also started playing on Fedora.  It was not a real loss.

Yesterday, I don't know why, seeing that the LibreOffice install was slow, I clicked on the Steam icon without actually expecting anything to happen.  A window displayed the hopeful message, "connecting to your account."

And, before my eyes, Steam came back from the dead!

I don't know for how long the issue has been fixed.  That's, in my opinion, unimportant.  Shame on me for giving up and not staying on top of the matter.  I learned a lesson here.

Thanks, devs and community members!

PicarOS is back!

I had not noticed that a Mageia 4 GRUB2 update in my daughter's desktop had erased the entry for PicarOS.

When Eimi mentioned PicarOS yesterday, I remembered I had not seen the entry in quite a while, so I tried to fix the problem.

Oddly, neither GRUB customizer nor the Mageia GRUB2 installer could fix the problem.

I thus tried the GRUB2 tool that is included in KDE.  Fortunately, in a matter of three clicks, KDE reinstalled the PicarOS GRUB2 to the distro's partition.  After that, I ran GRUB customizer and it added the missing entry.

I cannot describe Eimi's happiness when the computer booted to PicarOS once again.  She played a lot with GCompris and drew many pictures.

PicarOS is a child's magnet without any doubt.  The comfort with which my little daughter uses the computer when booted to that OS is truly notorious...

Update Day

I updated my PCLinuxOS and my Mageia laptop installs today.  The process finished without any problem and everything is working as expected.

What to say about it?

Update to PCLinuxOS KDE 2013.04 successful

I ran the update yesterday on my laptop and it was a breeze.  Now the machine is running KDE 4.10 at last.

I checked and all of my configuration stays:

• IME for Japanese (SCIM) is perfectly functional.
• Auto-hiding panel works flawlessly.
• Wine is responsive
• Latest version of LibreOffice running fast

I even added a keyboard Spanish layout and it picks accents without any problem.