Changes in 2018 (Part V): Netflix

Some years ago, I read how Netflix would not easily work on Linux and, since I rarely watch movies, I never gave the movie streaming platform a try.

However, last week, my wife asked me how difficult it would be to find a Netflix movie that she really wanted to watch.  I thought that the easiest way to get the movie was to start a Netflix trial either on the blu-ray or on the Playstation.
I remembered that the blu-ray required a wired connection and we did not have the internet cable, so it was out.  I opened the account on the PS4 system instead and then she could happily watch her film.

But I was curious.  Netflix said that, besides the PS4, it could stream to tablets, Android phones, and computers.  I wondered if that meant that they were also serving Linux users now.  I decided to run a test on PCLinuxOS and Firefox 64.0.  I entered the site and selected Coraline to watch.  It was a success; the creepy adventures of the girl against the Other-mother displayed on my Linux laptop without any problem.  I need to see if the site works on Mageia, OpenMandriva and Elive and Fedora, the other Linux distros I use the most.


Since last week, both my wife and daughter have been enjoying Netflix films and series.   I have also caught one or two old movies that I wanted to re-watch. 

UPDATES:

Netflix runs fine on Mageia 6.1 with Firefox 60.3.0esr

Running fine on Elive 3.0 with Firefox 52.8.0 (32-bit)

Netflix running flawlessly on Fedora 27 with Firefox Quantum 63.0.3

Also running on OpenMandriva with Firefox Quantum 63.0.3

Changes in 2018 (Part IV): Apps for running, updates, and forced migration

I have been jogging regularly since December, 2014.  Those days, I used an app called Run-bike-hike on a Firefox OS phone to track my routes and times.

When I switched to Android, I started using a nice app called Runkeeper. 

This app helped me to stick to my goals and track my progress, so it became my trusty companion in the road.  However, it stopped working after an unfortunate update last October and and had to look for a quick replacement while developers rectified the issues.

 

I had tried Runtastic before deciding to stay with Runkeeper, so that one was a no-go for me.  I eventually found Sports Tracker, which offers many features for free and it became the substitute. 

Sports Tracker lacks some useful features, even in the paid version, like the ability to manually edit routes if the GPS reading is not accurate.  Nevertheless, it compensates with other features, such as the ghost run.  One wins some and loses some.

The Runkeeper support contacted me to help, but the problem with the app remains to be solved.  As the app is unusable on two different phones, I guess the problem is on the app's end, not mine.  I am guessing, though.

Funny... Now that I come to think of it, my migration from Windows to Linux was a lot easier than this change of apps.

Changes in 2018 (Part III) Social Networking... Not-working

I am not a fan of social networks (understood as sites like Facebook.)  Back in time, way before Facebook became cool, both Megatotoro and I joined a social network called Tagged as a one-year experiment to explore the possibilities of such sites for education.  After the year, our conclusion was that those places offered more distractions than anything else and, consequently, were not functional tools for learning purposes.

We tried another social network afterwards, Hi5.  Then Facebook, which effectively marked our exit from those sites.

I do not really remember why, but I started using Google +, the underdog of social networks in 2015 and there was something to it that made me stay.  I cannot put my finger on the reason; it was maybe the kind of posts, or the kind of people, or the interface, or a combination.  Whatever the case, I enjoyed G+ and did not find this social network as personally unproductive.

Yes, privacy was an issue.  However, I never anticipated how big it was to become.

After a silenced breech, Google decided to shut G+ down on August 2019.  Now, after another incident, the date of death became closer: April 2019.

When I first heard of the shutting down, I explored other possibilities.  I tried MeWe and Pluspora.  As the former was simply way too Facebooky, I joined the latter, which has a geeky feel to it and where I found some of the people that I follow online.

And true, Pluspora is not G+.  Not for a mile.  Yet, it has nice points, as micko explains in full detail here.

I do not know if I am staying.  Maybe I quit those sites for good and keep blogging.  That is, unless Google also decides to get rid of Blogger...

Changes in 2018 (Part II) Games in PS4 vs Steam

Some of the greatest changes that I have undergone in 2018 involve the use of the Playstation 4 as opposed to playing on Steam.

Steam, in my opinion, has done a great job to bring games to Linux.  However, sometimes game updates render some titles unplayable for a while (as in the case with Bendy and the Ink Machine.)  Even so, I like playing Steam games better than playing on the console.  Maybe it's just that I prefer the computer because some of the Steam games are also available on the PS4, but I find them more enjoyable on Steam.

Whatever the case, I had to use the PS4 more because I was writing an article for a research project on games like Among the Sleep, Fran Bow, Violett, and Beyond Two Souls.  Eimi, my daughter, seeing the games on the PS Store, found Minecraft, and asked me to buy it.  I really saw no point because I had already installed it to her phone and did not like the MS game, so I refused.  However, my wife bought it for my daughter as a reward for all her effort in school this year.

When my daughter started playing, I understood why this game became so successful.  Pretty soon, both my daughter and I were playing together building structures, mining ore and feeding cubic animals.  The mash-up packs were Eimi's delight, in particular the Chinese Mythology one.  We explored the land, forged tools and, when outnumbered by monsters in the city, fled and fortified ourselves against them inside of a gigantic Buddha statue.  We created a hideout inside the sculpture's belly and connected it with a secret observatory inside the Buddha's head.  I must admit that finding Romeo's secrets (my daughter's fantastic quest in the game) kept me busy and entertained for quite a while. Oh, and the music is pretty relaxing, by the way.

Our stronghold against monsters

Yes, I am a Linux user and I still avoid MS products.  However, I guess I have to thank MS for this game that has made me spend such a good time with my daughter.  That's only fair.

Changes in 2018 (Part I) Who needs Windows?

I have been away from this blog for quite a while, but it is time to come back and summarize some of the main changes that I have undergone. I guess that I will do it as a series of posts.

Who needs Windows?

Yes, in October, I succumbed to the temptation from the evil empire and installed Windows 10 to my daughter's laptop as a dual boot with Mageia.  Well, I actually did it because of two reasons: Windows-based school assignments and a Windows-only game that she wanted to play and that does not run well on WINE. 

In full honesty, I have to say that MS has simplified the install process a lot... to the point that Cortana even convinced me to activate the network.  However, a pair of funny things happened.  First, when Windows started nagging so that I activated the product (by buying a license), the Windows store gave me a message indicating, "we are pretty sure that we do not have the product that you are looking for."  So, the Windows 10 Store cannot find a license for Windows 10. 

The other thing that I saw in the store was the several fake apps that imitate the look of Firefox or Chrome, but are more like skins for Microsoft's Edge.   Mmm, one wonders if those contribute to the illusion of the usage of Edge.

Anyway, since I installed Windows 10, that laptop has been booted on Microsoft's OS only two days to complete a school assignment.

And the game?  It ran terribly, worse than in WINE, so I had to trade it for another game... Microsoft's very own Minecraft.  That will be the subject of another post.

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.

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.

When Windows 10 Becomes Windows ME...

Wow!  A recent Windows 10 update is deleting personal files from the Documents folder!

That's new.

Wait, not exactly.  That has happened before with Windows ME around 17 years ago.  In fact, this OS behavior was so famous that it was depicted in the OS-tan meme collection.

Yes... I still miss you, Windows ME.

The Blue Bird Effect: Scanning with an Epson XP 231 multifunction printer on Elive 3

Mamerto Menapace, an Argentinian monk, wrote a story entitled "El Pajaro Azul" ("The Blue Bird").  In this story, a prince gradually falls very sick and no doctor can determine the source of his disease. A hermit is brought from his mountain as the last hope, and this wise man tells everyone that the prince is dying of nostalgia.  To get cured, the prince must start a journey looking for a rare blue bird.

So, the sick prince travels all around the earth, in an futile attempt to find the blue bird and become well again.  However, no person has seen the bird and, defeated, he returns home as an old man only to discover that, among all the other birds that he had in his palace, there was a particularly blue one.     

Well, that same thing just happened to me with my Epson XP-231 multifunction printer and Elive 3.0, the new OS on my laptop.

Elive has been running magnificently; I could not be feeling happier.  Nevertheless, the real test of the OS is to get my printer/scanner to work.

The first part, printing, was not that difficult.  Even thought Elive comes with a convenient utility to add a new printer (the same one I have seen in Mageia 6) in Applications/preferences/print settings, the process of adding the printer gets stuck.  But this problem can be circumvented by opening the browser and typing http://localhost:631/ to go to CUPS.  From there, one can add the printer (once that the iscan bundle with the drivers is installed).

Scanning was, on the other hand, a nightmare.  I read lots of forums and tried many solutions to no avail.  Defeated, I ran another search and found a blog post with a procedure that looked promising.  I tried this last solution and, sure enough, it worked like a charm.

The great irony here was that it was Megatotoro, my own brother, who had posted here the procedure that I needed!  I looked all over the internet and the solution was closer than I had imagined, a complete blue bird effect.

In Elive, one has to basically use SciTE as root to open the files dll.conf (to add the line example-backend), epson.conf, and epson2.conf (to add the values that one gets with the comand sane-find-scanner in Terminology).  In my case, I had to uncomment, in both files, the line usb 0x01aa 0x0001 and modify it to read:

usb 0x04b8 0x1102

That was it.

Now I can both print and scan on Elive 3.0

One last job for my ZTE Open phone

My first cellphone was a ZTE Open that I bought on 2014.  It ran Firefox OS, which Mozilla discontinued in December 2015.  This meant that cetain apps ceased to work and the phone lost functionality.

I was happy with Firefox OS, but I had to replace it with an Android phone.  My ZTE Open became a museum piece that I turned on occassionally, mainly to play with my daughter some games that still work.

Last week, though, I took the 4-year old phone to an event to serve as an audio player.  I noticed then that the battery has started to swell.

Tomorrow, I will take it to class to play audio again.  I do not know how much time my ZTE Open has left, but it has been a champion.

Good things come to an end...

Elive 3.0 is out! And it is FREE!!

After a long period of development, Elive 3.0 has been finally released today.

Wow, I still remember the first day I saw Elive Topaz 2.0.  Never had I seen a distro most beautiful and efficient.  However, back then, the live CD asked for payment to download an installation module, which put me (and many other Linux users, I learned later) off.

Of course, those days, I was still discovering the world of Linux and Free/Open Source Software, so I had many inaccurate ideas about distros.  I did not know much about KDE or Gnome, let alone mention Enlightenment.  I struggled with GRUB.  I still did not understand the functionality of multiple work spaces and, obviously, I assumed that "free software" was meant to be free of cost.

Gradually, I became more supportive toward the idea of paying for Linux-related work that I loved and that, understandably, was something that I could not do myself due to my technical limitations.  I began paying for Mandriva Powerpacks, for example.  And I donated money, too.

I decided that I wanted to give Elive a chance.  "But I will support version 3," I said to myself.  That was 8 years ago.

Since then, the Linux landscape has changed a lot and those changes have also modified my perspective.  Mandriva, the distro that took me out of Windows, is gone.  Mageia came along, but seems to be stuck at release 6.  I started using PCLinuxOS and OpenMandriva.  I learned how to use GRUB2, made peace with KDE Plasma, and I installed unfinished versions to my main computer.  The unthinkable!

The latter is what happened to Elive.  I have been using beta versions... and I did not mind donating to the project.

Now, I am downloading the long-awaited release of this new version of Elive, which will replace my beta install, and my dream of having Elive 3.0 will become a reality.