Last minute shopping... I need a new Fedora!

Linux has become really stable.  I remember that, when I migrated, I waited for the two yearly Mandriva releases.  Then, it was for the yearly releases of Mageia and OpenMandriva. But releases have been slowing down.  While Mageia and my daughter had pretty much the same age at first, my child will be 9 this year and Mageia is not 7 yet.

PCLinuxOS has to be updated frequently and PicarOS Diego and Elive are special.  I once updated PicarOS and the result was a major disaster: it became a weird Minino spin.  Elive took more than 5 years to move from 2 to 3, but it's awesome.

And then, there's Fedora.

I installed Fedora 25 as an experiment and upgraded to 26 and 27.  But then I became lazy and lost track of its development because, once that everything worked the way I needed, the thought of installing the new distro releases went to the back on my brain.

However, today I tried to upgrade the Fedora packages and all I got was a message saying that my distro was up-to-date, which I immediately suspected because Fedora releases upgrades quite frequently, just as PCLOS.

So, I went online and read that Fedora 27 had reached EOL on November 30, 2018... Three months ago!

It goes without saying that I have to download the ISO and install it before the start of the new semester.  I am on it, getting the Fedora 29 KDE spin.  Darn, I feel like that client that rushes into the store in the very last minute before it closes! 

Well, at least I know that Fedora is changing the logo :P

Install, install, install! The dance of panic!

In 2011, I wrote about my bad day installing ZenWalk...  I described how a graceful dance can morph into a hectic aerobic string of contortion after contortion, an accurate metaphor to remember my weekend activities. 
Yes, I used this last weekend to fix some installation problems I had.

1. PCLinuxOS.  Three days after I fixed my Fedora broken screen locker, I updated PCLOS.  After finishing, unexpectedly, the system would not allow me to log in.  I am not sure what went wrong because I update my system regularly... Or maybe I forgot to update in a long time and my OS fell a victim of a false memory of mine?  Whatever the case, I downloaded the June 2018 iso and installed it without formatting my /home partition.  That took care of the problem.  I had to struggle a bit getting my Epson XP 231 scanner to work, though.  That was funny because PCLOS was the only distro that picked it upon install when I bought the all-in-one printer, but this time was different.  I  could not get screenshots with the PrtScr button.  I also discovered that it was because Spectacle had been removed in the installation, so I simply put it back and, presto!

2.  Mageia 6.1.  My Mageia 6 has been working great and, after updating to Mageia 6.1, everything when fine on my laptop.  My daughter's Mageia 6 desktop, however, has been a nightmare and I don know if I should blame the hardware, the UEFI maze, or a defective install media.  The thing is that, one good day, I discovered that the Mageia Control Center would not open and I could not install packages either via GUI or CLI.  The release of Mageia 6.1 was a great opportunity to reinstall and fix that once and for all.  The installation process went well, but the complication was after I dicovered that WINE was not allowing the Windows Steam client to download my daughter's current favorite game.  I reinstalled several times, changed the drivers, tinkered with the WINE configuration to no avail.  And this problem took me to my greatest installation failure: PicarOS Diego!

3.  PicarOS Diego.  My daughter's desktop dual-boots Mageia and PicarOS Diego, a great MiniNo GalpON respin for children.  Since the game she likes is neither running with WINE on Mageia 6.1 nor with Windows Vista, I tried to run it on WINE in PicarOS.  The packages were old, so I updated the system.  Big mistake!  In the end, I was left with an up-to-date  MiniNo that removed all the special tweaks for children and, to add insult to injury, the game would not run at all!


Oh, but the best part was that MiniNo removed the Mageia entry from the GRUB.  So I lost my access to Mageia as well.

Thankfully, in my dealings testing Elive betas, I learned about Super Grub2 Disk, a tool that becomes real handy in cases like that one. With it, I could get back to Mageia once that I had reinstalled PicarOS Diego.  So, in the end, all of my OSs are back to normal.

But I could not solve the issue of the game.

I guess I can let her use my laptop to play her game on Mageia or Fedora.

Or I can use the Windows 10 iso that I downloaded to upgrade Windows Vista on her laptop and see what happens.

System Updates, Functionality and Popularity

As I have some free time, I decided to update all of the OSs on my laptop.

I started with PCLinuxOS.  The update was painless and everything is working perfectly.  Well, I noticed that my KDE History is never refreshed and that the Favorite tab displays nothing.  Aside from that, all is well.

Then I went for Fedora.  Nothing special to report there; all seems normal.

After that, I updated Mageia.  Again, no problem, either.

OpenMandriva was next.  This distro sometimes gives me problems if I try to update packages using Discover or the Control Center, so I ran urpmi --auto-update.  OpenMandriva did not show any weird behavior and the process completed flawlessly.

It was time to update Elive.  As this is a relatively old beta (Elive releases many betas), I was a bit worried.  The OS greeted me with an announcement that read something like this:  "There are new features available.  Do you want to install them?"  I agreed and then the OS played some music and performed an installation that, after a short while, was finished.  I noticed that, as the installer warned me, my wallpapers were gone, but there were applets for the clock and the wifi.  The OS looks as beautiful as ever.

Interestingly, and despite all the beauty and functionality that all of the distros I use provide, they are sliding down in popularity in Distrowatch.org:

Fedora is right now #8
PCLOS is # 21
Mageia went down to #35
OpenMandriva and Elive are not even included in the list of the 100 distros.

The list also shows that, apparently, Ubuntu never recovered its position as #1 after Mint took it.  However, Mint is now #2 and Manjaro has been #1 for some time now.  Oh, and MXLinux, the successor of the long-gone Mepis, is gaining traction: it has the 6th position.

Everything changes...

Update Shyness

You know, when an animal eats a poisoned bait in a sublethal dose, the said animal learns to identify the poisoned bait and avoids it.   This is referred to as "bait shyness."

Updates? I know you mean well, but...

This month was a bumpy ride regarding updates and, consequently, I think I developed some kind of update shyness. 

It all started when I fired up Synaptic on PCLOS to update packages.  Normally, the process is completed with no hassle.  This time, however, there was a message about "broken" packages and, since I had never had broken packages before, I decided to log out and back in to see if everything was alright.

It was a poor choice.  The DE did not load, so I ended up with a black screen in front of my eyes and desperation all over me.  Fortunately, when I logged in as root, the DE was operational, so I fired up Synaptic again and fixed the broken packages.  That rectified the problem.

But the update madness had just started.  A couple days after the PCLOS incident, I booted OpenMandriva and Discover notified me that there were updates.  I must confess that the update process in OpenMandriva has not been easy for me: I prefer to use the Control Center, but sometimes it cannot install some packages and those have to be installed with Discover.  Sometimes, the latter simply refuses to load the package list.

In an attempt to circumvent the duality, I used urpmi instead.

I ended up with a system that refused to boot and had to reinstall from scratch.  Oddly, after the reinstall, the update went fine.  Go figure.

To finish my story, I started Fedora 25 and, again, Discover told me that there were updates. I updated confidently because Discover has never failed in Fedora.  The process seemed smooth and I went to sleep, but there was a surprise for me the next morning: Fedora was unable to see the wifi.   In fact, there was no kernel module for wireless connection at all!

Then fall, Caesar!

I saw that the problem was that, by an unknown reason, Fedora had installed a very old kernel and was booting with it by default.  When I tried the advanced options and booted a different kernel, the wifi worked without a problem, so I specified this kernel in GRUB2 to boot it by default.

Curiously, when Discover updated packages again, there was no problem.

****

So, my distros are working fine now.

But I do get a bit anxious every time I see that there are updates.  Even so, it is comforting to see that the problems are temporary. 

Let Users Bear the Burden of Updates: MS Latest Windows 10 Idea

I read this article today.  Apparently, Windows 10 users will be able to choose if they want to grab updates from PCs over a private network or, more disturbingly, from the Internet.

To be honest, I don't know why the author thinks users will love this P2P "feature".  All he worries about is the --very real-- potential risk of hackers getting new toys to play with.  However, I think he missed a very significant point, one that affects clients directly.

With this P2P updating idea, Microsoft can put the burden of the downloads away from its own servers (where it should be located) and re-locate it on the machines of its customers.

This means that the customer's PC will become slower as it will serve the updates to another client.  And who pays for the upload?  If my machine is uploading, it is using the internet connection that I pay for.  In other words, I am not only letting Microsoft use my machine to relieve the burden on its servers, but also letting this abusive company use my internet connection for free.


"Yes, Microsoft, come use my resources with no benefit for me and, while you're at it, please charge me a yearly (maybe monthly) subscription to use my own computer!  I will love that!"

What kind of a deal is that?  Why should Windows users be happy about it?

The only thing I am happy about is that I DO NOT USE WINDOWS, so that this abusive company cannot reap me off so shamelessly!

Pentaboot Laptop Changes

My HP Pavilion g4 laptop has undergone some changes.

Let's see...

1.  GRUB2 is now provided by OpenMandriva Lx RC1.  Formerly, I used Mageia's, but it was difficult to get it to see PCLinuxOS, which uses legacy GRUB.

2.  PCLinuxOS has been updated and it now fixed the SCIM IME.  That is simply great!  PCLinuxOS 32 bits is my gaming OS as it gets to play my DESURA and STEAM games perfectly.

3.  Mageia 3 remains the same with some updates.  This is my academic distro and my family OS (it was user accounts for my family)

4.  Pisi Linux 1.0 RC1 replaces Pardus 2011.

5. Mandriva 2011 was replaced by OpenMandriva Lx 2013 RC1 and now this distro was upgraded to RC2. I also tested the Live/installer DVD and the keyboard problem was finally fixed. This seems to be a promising release.

6.  PicarOS, the OS for children based on GalpON MiniNO, was updated to Diego.  At first, the installation lacked sound but I fixed the problem after a while.  All I had to do was disable a sound card that is useless.  To do so, I used the sound tools.

I am now waiting for the new Elive release...

Updates knocking on the door!

Ah, updates!

I remember that, back in my days as a Windows ME user, I learned to be truly afraid of them.  Updates were supposed to help your computer but, almost inevitably, something would go very wrong after applying them.

I would have thought that, by now, Microsoft mastered the process of providing updates that do not break your computer.  However, that is not the case.  A colleague told me that her husband applied updates to her Windows 7 desktop and the old MS magic was performed just the same: the sound card went crazy and refused to work with the microphone and the webcam also stopped working.

And then, there's the celebrated Microsoft update to convert your Windows 8 RT computer into a Windows 8.1 RT... brick!  It went so bad that Microsoft had to prevent people from installing it.

I don't know if they fixed it but, according to this post, the update to Win 8.1 now seems to convert your computer into a cat (because it does not play nicely with mice).

To be fair, I have also heard complaints on updates coming from Linux users.  I myself have messed up with some Linux installs because of carelessness during the updating process.  My last experience was when I tried to install PCLinuxOS 2013.10.  Of course, it was all my fault: I had been sluggish with my bi-weekly updating process and, being PCLOS a semi-rolling distro, that is a rather serious mistake.

I learned my lesson and today's PCLOS update went smoothly.  It was a major one, too: it converted my KDE 4.10.5 laptop into a KDE 4.11 machine.

By the way, I am also getting a Mageia update with Firefox 25... At last!  This thing of not being able to read PDF files directly from the browser was getting me frustrated...

It's great that updates come around!