Category: opensuse

Migrated from Manjaro to Fedora KDE Spin on my main machine

Around six months ago, I migrated my main machine to Manjaro, as mentioned here. I liked it, and I liked it enough that I also switched to using it as my home media PC / alarm clock.

It has been great, using it as my alarm clock. I don’t think I’ve been happier with my alarm clock setup, ever. The interface of using KAlarm is super easy, and as a proper calendar ought to, it can handle “second Sunday of the month” or “on the 15th of the month” events (for example). That Manjaro hooks into the high-quality audio on the soundbar I use on my television, makes the music it plays a joy to wake up to.

Alas, on my main machine, I drive Manjaro harder, and it crashes.

Of course, I have a lot more installed on my main machine. I do more with ImageMagick, Tesseract OCR, The GIMP, Kdenlive, and Mozilla Thunderbird. Although I have webmail, my primary interface to my mail server is Thunderbird. I like Thunderbird enough that I do a monthly donation to the project to help keep it going.

Both machines have the Nextcloud client on them; that’s how I get the MP3 files to the alarm clock PC. But I tend to do more file organizing on my main machine than on the alarm clock PC.

I don’t do Discord on the alarm clock PC, and I do on my main PC.

The problem I was experiencing with Manjaro was that I’d click on something, and then Manjaro would crash to reboot.

The crash to reboot would happen maybe twice or thrice a week. This last Sunday, it did again, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so-to-speak.

What to move to? Although OpenSuSE has always been super stable, I still dislike how woke they’ve gone. Also, the last time I tried to install from an ISO of theirs, there was definitely something broken in the image.

I decided to try the Fedora KDE Spin. So far, I like it. It did present a couple of problems, however.

The first was that after I rebooted, I changed /home to mount to my second hard drive and I rebooted again. I could not log in as me. I could log in as root, but attempting to log in as me failed. In the journalctl the message was that an attempt to cd to my home drive failed, due to permissions.

I was fortunate that (logged in as root) the very first search I did found a Stack Overflow article which showed that the /home ownership had the wrong owner. I wish I could find that article now, so I could link to it. Anyway, the solution was:

restorecon -Rv /home

from the command line. I was already logged in as root, so I didn’t need sudo. If I could have gotten logged in as me, I wouldn’t have needed restorecon.

The second problem was that Firefox does not come with all the codecs for playing multimedia preinstalled. Manjaro did this beautifully. OpenSuSE is like Fedora this way, but it is easier to solve on OpenSuSE.

I ended up having to do a Firefox Refresh, which is less than fun. All my Multi-Account Containers now need to be redone, and I have a lot of them.

There are only two things that I don’t like about moving to this Fedora KDE spin.

One is that I have two monitors, and every time I move the mouse between them, something in KDE Plasma wants to “stick” the mouse cursor to the boundary between the two. I have to push the mouse an extra bit, to push past the current monitor and to the next one. I haven’t taken the time to find out if there is an easy fix for this, but I suspect that there is.

The other is that in Thunderbird, apparently Tools > Message Filters are stored in the Thunderbird directory and not in my user profile. This isn’t Fedora’s fault; it is something in Thunderbird.

I did choose to install the non-Flatpak version of Thunderbird, because I don’t like Flatpak. I have no idea if me keeping everything in my /home on a separate hard drive plays nice with Flatpak. Admittedly, I have not done the research. But it seems to me that when one changes distributions with significantly different packaging (rpm versus deb versus tar) that Flatpak would be a problem. I don’t know, but I doubted that Flatpak was the universal image for all Linux’s forever. Wasn’t Snap supposed to be that? (I don’t like Snap, either).

Anyway, I had more than 30 message filters, some with 20 email addresses in them, for filtering my mail into folders. Those message filters are gone. Rats!

I am thrilled to find the Thunderbird Add-On quickFilters which is delightful.

I do like how Fedora KDE Spin puts the OK and Open buttons in the upper-right corner of dialog boxes instead of the lower right.

Quarterly Inventory 2024 – Q2

Dear FutureMe,

Today would be a good day to do a quarterly inventory.

Question: How is your personal life going?

Question: How is your work life going?

Question: How is your volunteer service life going?

Personal Life

There hasn’t really been much change this quarter in my personal life.

One event that was noteworthy was that my 86-year-old mom was in the hospital for three days, (well, four, if waiting in the emergency room waiting room counts as “in”), with a C-diff gut biome infection. Apparently, an antibiotic she was taking for an eye infection allowed Clostridioides difficile to run amok.

I’ve been a little sad and depressed about how much WordPress work I need to do. This blog needs to be moved to a new server, but I really don’t want to take all the crap along, that the various plugins have added to the database, never to leave. That is a more complicated migration than just shipping all the junk over. “Complicated” is proving disheartening to document and plan. I have another couple WordPress sites to migrate in the volunteer service life category, too.

I had a need to edit a PDF; I get to submit an application to our local Sheriff’s office to meet with people about to leave incarceration. The good news is that Firefox (my favorite browser) has PDF editing capabilities now. Alas, the PDF application form wants signature and initials. The bad news is that Firefox ESR is version 115, and adding graphics to PDFs doesn’t show up until version 119. So I need to upgrade. I tried to upgrade from OpenSuSE Leap 15.6 to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed Slowroll, but the ISO image is broken and spontaneously reboots almost immediately after booting. Now my main machine is broken, big time. I installed Debian with KDE. That worked fine, except guess what else uses Firefox ESR version 115? At least I was back up and functional, but now I need to find a rolling release with KDE. I tried PCLinuxOS. It was quite amusing to me that they call themselves The Boomer Distribution. Technically, I’m a Boomer, although when the real Boomers were off doing drugs sex and rock-and-roll at Woodstock, I was 8 years old and discovering that I liked reading / wasn’t great at sports.

Anyway, I gave up on PCLinuxOS after a week. I couldn’t get Steam to work, and the PCLinuxOS forums don’t let me just sign up: I’d have to email some guy at a Google email address my preferred User ID and password. Yeah, no – I’m out.

I have installed Manjaro. I like it pretty well. I have become a part of the Oh by the way, I use Arch club.

There are still things I want to tweak, to make using it smoother. But it does run Steam, and it does run KDE with Kröhnkite. I’m happy with this.

Work Life

If $39,000 dropped into my lap today, I would retire tomorrow.

One fun thing sprung out of taking on printers and the print server. It had a problem because old printers would be deleted from the print server, but not from the client workstations that used to print to them. Some portion of 5,000+ workstations printing to 830+ printers were configured for more printers that are no longer there. I’m guessing that about 5% of the workstations are configured for printers which no longer exist. Microsoft Windows apparently just pounds on the print server, asking if the (deleted) printer is back online yet. I’d be curious if they abuse their own print server that way. They probably don’t have a print server because network printing is hard.

Anyway, I get to bring in a print server log file, parse it for missing (deleted) printers, and generate a service ticket to have the desktops group visit the user and remove the missing (deleted) printer. Of course, one user can have multiple deleted printers, and I don’t want to generate six tickets for six printers for one user. I’ve been getting to keep track of these in a Maria DB database, and doing all sorts of Perl scripting to help me with this mini-project. It has been fun.

The other aspect is that I got print server reboots to work in about a minute; where before it was problematic. If there were more dead printers than Apache threads, the server would get into a deadlock, waiting for the dead printer threads to time out – but the polling cycle was faster than all of them could time out. Oof.

Volunteer Service Life

I still have too many volunteer service commitments. One dropped off on May 19. The event was successful, with 178 people attending from all over northern California. Another dropped off on June 8, when the Founder’s Day Picnic was over. We were hoping to feed 300 people, but only 83 showed up. I had been flying pretty blind on this one. We came out in the black, but only barely.

Migrated from OpenSuSE to Debian on my main machine today

This morning, I hadn’t planned on that, but….

I had a need to edit a PDF. I know that Firefox has the ability to do so; and I filled in information. But then it asked for a signature and initials – I have those in .jpeg form, but Firefox didn’t have the buttons for inserting images. Whoops: Firefox ESR version 115 doesn’t have that, because that showed up in Firefox 119.

Well, it has been a while since Tumbleweed was disappointing because of a lack of KWin tiling script support. I had downgraded from Tumbleweed to Leap 15.6. Maybe I should try Tumbleweed again.

Also, I’d been listening to the FLOSS Weekly podcast over on Hackaday, and their guest Brodie Robertson had mentioned Tumbleweed Slowroll as something new. I kind of liked the idea, so I tried a few steps.

These are list here, at the official page:

 zypper ar https://download.opensuse.org/slowroll/repo/oss/ temp
   zypper in openSUSE-repos-Slowroll -openSUSE-repos-Tumbleweed
   rm /etc/zypp/repos.d/*.repo # or backup
   zypper dup

This got me an empty screen with a blinking cursor. Yay. Not.

I downloaded the Slowroll ISO and put it on a USB stick.

I used the BIOS to choose the USB stick to boot off of, and got the “Install” option. Sure, that can be a little drastic, but I’ve done this many times before. Mostly, it is a little annoying to find that I don’t have an application installed that I’d like to use at the moment. But because my /home is physically on a different drive, I’m safe to not lose any data (reasonable precautions taken).

I go to install Slowroll, and it reboots before starting the installation. The motherboard logo briefly shows, and then I’m back at the “Install” menu item again.

I’ve got a boot loop.

Great. Just great.

Did I mention that I dearly love systemd and journalctl (not). Back in the good old days, something would append to /var/log/messages, and I’d have a chance to figure out what went wrong. But with systemd, the journal is new every boot, and although I can successfully boot to a previous read-only snapshot, there’s nothing there from an aborted installation. Nothing at all. There’s only the current boot messages (which being from a successful snapshot tell me nothing).

Okay, maybe there’s something wrong on my boot drive. Physically disconnect the /home disk drive, boot off of a gparted ISO, and delete every partition on the boot / OS drive.

Try the Slowroll ISO USB again.

I’ve still got a boot loop.

Just great.

I’ve been building some Debian machines, as servers, so I can practice WordPress migrations. I pop in that USB stick, and Debian installs fine.

I still have to wrangle bringing in my /home disk drive and mounting it as /home, but at least it will work.

And here we are, a few hours later, on Debian with KDE. Thunderbird looks pretty different.

It was a little disconcerting that KDE > System Settings > Display and Monitor > Display Configuration > Scale works on each display independently of each other. OpenSuSE applied the scale to both screens simultaneously. I can see why it could make sense that one monitor (say a 4K monitor) might have a different scale factor than another way smaller one. But it was unexpected, so disconcerting. It can be really hard for me to read the screen when the screen is at 100% scale on both large monitors.

It is mildly amusing to me that I get to do How to make Ubuntu have a nice bash shell like OpenSuSE all over again, but for my main machine this time.

Abandoned OpenSuSE Tumbleweed for Leap 15.6 beta: much better

In a previous post, I said how I made a huge mistake by “upgrading” to a fresh installation of OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, which came with KDE 6 and Wayland. This broke the KDE window tiling, and every interaction I had with KDE reminded me of what a huge mistake I had made. I’ve re-installed a fresh OS install from Leap 15.6 beta, and everything is good, back to the way it was before.

Firefox did bark at me that my profile was newer than previous; I had to start it with firefox --allow-downgrade

Also, I lost all my Firefox multi-account containers I had set. Thankfully, I had a previous containers.json file lying around.

But yes, now, everything is working excellently. Well, I haven’t tried Factorio or YouTube videos yet: but the important stuff is working.

Previously, I’d moved off Leap to Tumbleweed because tesseract-ocr was too old. It looks like in Leap 15.6 beta that it is a pretty new version.

New OpenSuSE install – whoops, that was a mistake (no KDE tiling window manager) – HUGE mistake

OpenSuSE Tumbleweed was acting squirrelly, so I downloaded an ISO and installed the latest OS from scratch. That was a huge mistake. Now, sometimes my machine spontaneously reboots, and other times windows get blocked for keyboard input.

On the good side, getting back to a working production system was never easier: delete the HDMI sound card and sound works again, add the external repos and codecs, and YouTube works again, add tesseract-ocr and The GIMP, and I can do my web work again. Install my Epson printer, and I can print a document for an upcoming event I’m a volunteer for.

On the bad side, that brand-spanking-new install came with Wayland and KDE 6, which is so new that it doesn’t have automatic window tiling. I hate it.

Whining about a problem isn’t the same as proposing a fix, so here’s what I wish I could fix:

When a new window opens (and it is not a dialog box), re-tile everything on that screen so that everything that showed before, still shows, but the new thing too, takes half the screen. I use “focus follows mouse”, so it is infuriating that as I move my mouse toward the newly opened window, the window underneath activates focus and hides the new screen behind it because the window underneath is full screen. I wouldn’t mind so bad if my old keystrokes worked, and I could shove the full-screen to half-screen: but that doesn’t work either. The previous behavior, which is what I want, is that the previous full-screen window would automatically resize to the other half of the screen when a new window opens.

This weekend I went to the Southern California Linux Expo, and had thought someone might be able to guide me to a solution. Nope, the KDE guy was anti-helpful, pointing me to a non- KDE solution. Checking it out, it is not what I want. I just want the old KWin tiling script to work.

Self-will got me a brand-new OS installation that frustrates me. Yay. I should have just lived with the squirrelly behavior until I heard the “all-clear” signal from the OpenSuSE forums.

Man, openSUSE updates kick my ass

My work machine was on openSUSE Leap 15.4, and I saw (I think it was in Reddit) that they were going to delete the 15.3 sources because they are already working on 15.6 and people should have moved to 15.5. I hadn’t moved to 15.5 yet, but I thought I ought to.

I downloaded the ISO and used SUSE Image Writer to put it on a USB stick. From it, I booted and chose “upgrade”. It turns out that I had two Leap installations on my hard drive: 15.3 on /dev/sda2 and 15.4 on /dev/sda4

Also, the upgrade wizard complained that the USB booted to UEFI, but the boot config on the hard drive is Legacy BIOS.

I found an article that said I could tell the installer to configure the machine to use grub for booting instead of grub-efi, so I selected that.

Yes, of course, on boot I got a single blinking cursor in the upper corner of the first monitor. This happens far too many times when I upgrade openSUSE.

So now, I’m in the middle of my second attempt at upgrading, but this time choosing install instead of upgrade. I did choose to delete every Linux partition on /dev/sda, so at least I won’t have two versions of it sitting on the hard disk.

I’m going to have to go back and fix /home – I learned a long time ago to put my home directory on a second hard drive. This lets me move to a whole PC if I need to. But it also protects my home directory from getting messed with during an upgrade. The upgrade wizard, intentionally, keeps its work to just the one disk with the operating system on it.

I’ll also have to go back and add those pieces I used to have: KVM and Perl.

This is such a pain in the ass.

OpenSuSE updates this morning: 1,671 (but Discord isn’t one of them)

Every time Discord updates their app, I don’t use Discord for many days. This is a bummer because I have a circle of friends on the Internet I’ve known for 20+ years, and Discord is where we have settled (so far). So when Discord does an update, I go through a dry spell of not being in contact with them.

The OpenSuSE folk tell me I should install the Flatpak version of Discord or the Discord Snap app. I’m not a fan of either Flatpak or Snap. Snap fouled up a machine months ago (and it’s still broken to this day) when I installed it. Flatpak seems like a (no better) replacement for my RPM repositories. Worse, it duplicates storage and doesn’t integrate unless I convert everything over; so that just creates more points for stuff to break. But at least the single developer doing the Flatpak doesn’t have to integrate, so that’s not his problem.

I can use the web version of the Discord app. It has keystroke conflicts with the web browser, though, and because I use temporary containers for everything, it treats me like a new user who didn’t see that sticky post from five years ago….

So, I wait until someone asks the Discord people to update the RPM in the OpenSuSE repository. Eventually it happens. Time before last, it was eleven days.

New OpenSuSE Tumbleweed cannot ssh in

Problem: I’ve installed OpenSuSE Tumbleweed fresh on new hardware, and I cannot log in as root with ssh. The solution is three steps.

I should also mention the symptoms: I could try to log in with ssh root@host and I would get prompted for the password – as if it was going to work. But no matter how many times I put in the password, I would simply get prompted to enter the Password again, as if I had typed it wrong.

I used an ISO of OpenSuSE Tumbleweed and the super easy to use Imagewriter to make a bootable USB. I installed openSuSE Tumbleweed fresh, with the option to delete every existing disk partition no matter what: this is about the simplest OpenSuSE Tumbleweed install I can make. Oh, and I installed it as a server install, without a graphical user environment. It’s going to be a Nextcloud server. Actually, the whole idea of installing Tumbleweed for a server was a bad idea. I’m going to wipe it and install OpenSuSE Leap. Problem is, I’d like to install and configure and the database and Nextcloud from the machine I’m typing this on, and not from the text console attached to the physical hardware. For that, I’m going to need ssh.

Care to guess what doesn’t work out of the box?

Solution:

  1. cp /usr/etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/
  2. edit sshd_config and change the following
    • PermitRootLogin yes
    • PasswordAuthentication yes
  3. reboot now

So, apparently the idea is that allowing root to ssh in with “just” a password is a bad idea. This is why the default settings were changed to make it not work. But this does leave us with a bit of the “pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps” problem: how can I use ssh-copy-id root@host if I cannot complete the operation by logging in as root?

We’ve got to be able to authenticate before the keys can be copied up; otherwise any random bad guy would load their keys in. But if we’re not allowed to authenticate “because passwords are bad”, then we’re not allowed to authenticate….

This is way less of a problem if I’m working on a virtual machine. VMs have a virtual console, and opening that is trivial. I can log in as if I were on the physical console at the same time I have web pages open searching for the way to fix this problem.

But today’s case wasn’t a virtual machine – it was a physical machine in the other room. Without a web browser.

Well, okay, sure, I could install Lynx, but last time I tried, most web sites (including Google) didn’t work. I’m pretty sure the text ssh session doesn’t have a clipboard I could copy/paste “/usr/etc/ssh/sshd_config” to and from, either. But I digress.

The other minor pain point is that there are many articles on the Internet that talk about the PermitRootLogin option and the PasswordAuthentication option. But they say to edit the file: /etc/ssh/sshd_config

That file doesn’t exist there, in a freshly minted ISO from OpenSuSE. They moved it to /usr/etc/ssh because that’s where packages place these files. If someone in the sshd project comes up with a better version, this is where the updated configuration file can be put (without warning) because users are not supposed to store user data in /usr. It’s too much of a hassle to then copy the default file from /usr to /etc without clobbering the user supplied updates: so they don’t. That’s up to me.

But it does mean that the config file I need to edit isn’t there. Gee, thanks.

Now that I have the ssh key copied up to the new server, I’ll go ahead and turn off the root-allowed-to-log-in-with-a-password option.

But man what a PITA it was to get to this point.

The more I use OpenSuSE, the more I wish I was on something else

I recently did an “upgrade” from OpenSuSE Leap 15.3 to 15.4. As expected, it did not go well.

I ended up doing a manual install (as if the disk were new, except for /home), and then re-installing every application I need. Thankfully, there aren’t that many I need.

But I didn’t add any weird repositories. Today I happen to need to use Audacity. Hmmm. The version on this machine is 2.2.2 The current version is 3.3. Well that would explain why the Noise Gate plugin isn’t present.

I did add some weird repository to get the latest version (there appear to be seven of the them). Nope. Doesn’t work.

I happen to be running NextCloud. Every time I start the machine, it warns me that the desktop client is out of date. Okay, I’d like to add a repo please. Nope. Only manual installs, like the uncivilized practice, are what is done here.

I suspect that repositories are considered difficult, so the decicion was to do away with them over time: let programmers define flatpaks and snaps, instead. I kinda hate flatpaks and snaps; but, what I’ve got here isn’t working, either.

Another new irritating thing is that I use “focus follow mouse”. Every time I’m on a Windows machine (one day a week), I’m reminded how nice it is to wave the mouse over the screen I want to work on, and that’s the window with current focus. Lately, however, this stops working after a while. Time to reboot. What is this, MS Windows?

Did I mention that about four times in the last three weeks (out of multiple times a day), the power down function doesn’t? It appears to go mostly down, but leaves the motherboard running. I’m trying to save electricity here, since rates went way up, and if I’m not using the machine, there is zero good reason to be burning electricity wastefully. Power up takes less than 20 seconds, so why not?

Well, because sometimes the machine doesn’t go fully down. I later want to power it up, but it’s locked up in the mostly-down state. I have to go to the back of the machine and flip the switch on the power supply. That could just be a Linux thing instead of OpenSuSE thing, though.