The breakage of Wayland login seemed to be related to Problems with wayland after updating to fedora 39 - Fedora Discussion. And interestingly was fixed in the same way: removing ~/.config/dconf/user, logging out and then back in via Wayland. It completely reset my Gnome state, so all my custom docked shortcuts were gone and it offered to run me through the Gnome tutorial again
Running my ansible playbook to configure my machine again, seemed to run for the most part, but failed at installing a pip module -- but that looks like a module build failure, not the playbook.
And now I discovered that there's no F39 of VirtualBox yet, so I guess I'm rolling back for now....
It's been quite a long time since I did any updates on this blog so a couple of updates are in order
House
I've now been living in the new place for just over a year. Generally everything is good, we've started putting in a lawn and currently letting it get its roots in before we try to cut it
Twitter
Oh, boy, what an absolute train wreck. I've tolerated Elon's presence at Twitter because most of the stuff he did wasn't far off what Jack was doing prior. But cutting off all third party clients, forcing everyone onto the new TweetDeck (which likely will be paywalled too) has literally driven users away. Twitter has been losing users and revenue constantly, and it is totally unsurprising.
I've disabled my two TweetDeck profiles (a professional one, and a casual one) from Ferdium. But I doubt I will be going back any time soon.
Red Hat
Another train wreck of a situation. Red Hat's decision to first kill CentOS's stability, then for RHEL sources to only be accessible behind a subscription has pissed of a lot of users, even if it's not strictly speaking against license.
The only one left in its sights will be Fedora so that leads me onto the next update
Manjaro & Archlinux
I've been tinkering with Manjaro more and more lately, with its rolling release schedule meaning I never need to upgrade from a major version to another major version.
It's downside I'm finding is that some packages, especially those in the AUR are essentially "compile from source" packages which does the build on your machine during the install. This can take a varying amount of time depending on the code. With my RSS reader of choice: QuiteRSS, this build takes a mind numbing 2.5 hours to do, even on a high spec machine.
That's where I found out about setting up your own Arch repo. I've been tinkering with that, setting it up on GCP and fronted by a CDN. This works pretty well, but I still need to find how I can do scheduled builds to keep that up to date, but it looks like I'll be switching to Manjaro at some point in the near future. Sound works fine, using lyncolnmd's work.
Another downside with Manjaro, however is that its btrfs filesystem, my home directory backup, and CloneZilla don't seem to want to work well together
Wordpress & Domains
One final update, I will likely be transferring out the blenderfox.com domain out of Wordpress, while I had this registered as part of the blog, I'm finding it much harder to maintain this domain using Wordpress's very limited DNS management tools. I will likely transfer it out to Google Domains, even though there's talk of them shuttering that service. Secondary service would be AWS.
The final issue with the post-upgrade is now fixed (dependency issue) and it self-resolved by a new package update that came through this morning
I did fine one new issue -- a new kernel dropped and installed successfully, but did the same thing as the upgrade and did not generate an initrd line, but did generate the initrd line once I regenerated the grub configs.
And this readded the initrd line and now I am able to boot into F38. Everything still works, I have some errors with VirtualBox and qemu that I will need to fix at some point:
VirtualBox has an error when you start it saying "Unable to enumerate USB"
Qemu has a dependency error (must have changed between F36 and F38) so I'll need to probably remove and reinstall that.
So, quite a few things have been happening recently.
I tried to go the next step on Manjaro and copy my home directory across ready for me to run the Ansible playbook to do the setups (I've been testing it would work via VirtualBox on my Windows laptop)
After waiting ages for the file copy, when I went to do the backup, there was a btrfs checksum error so I'll have to try again some other time.
Separately, I got a message on an issue I raised at Fedora's bugzilla the Fedora 36 (the version of Fedora I raised the bug on), was coming up to EOL so I should look to move away from it or upgrade. So I decided to try doing the upgrade.
The upgrade completed without error, but first boot after the upgrade hung with a weird Kernel Panic error (I have posted this on the Fedora Forums)
So I rolled my laptop back to preupgrade state for now.
I suspect I may need to end up doing a clean install, so I've prepared a btrfs and a ext4 lvm installation and have imaged those in preparation.
Finally, Wordpress posted that they're stopping Autosharing to Twitter because of Twitter's Idiot-in-Chief screwing up the API usage.
Still, they have mentioned they will be adding autosharing to Instagram and Mastodon instead, and that helps me, since I'm slowly moving what little Twitter presence I had onto Mastodon anyway.
My Twitter has been disconnected from my Wordpress and I've revoked its access from Twitter's side anyway.
I've been continuing to tinker with ArchLinux and Manjaro and have since found out about "Oh-My-Zsh" and "Oh-My-Bash" -- basically addons you can add onto your shell via the shell's rc and profile files and it provides a really nice prompt that tells you additional information at a glance, like which branch you are in if you are in a git repo, or whether the previous command returned a non-zero error code.
They are quite polarising though, as I found out when I mentioned this to one of the systems architects here in the office. One of the architects told me someone he worked with even considered OMZ malware.
Vanilla ArchLinux uses bash out of the box, Manjaro uses zsh out of the box, which is how I found out about the OMZ/OMB addons.
OMZ has a ton more plugins than OMB - unsurprisingly since it's also the default shell for Macs (vomit).
I did start copying my files across to my Manjaro installation. It took nearly 6 hours to copy. However, when trying to do the backup afterwards, it failed with a btrfs checksum error. That worried me since I hadn't done anything since the previous backup other than copying files.
I do remember running into similar issues with btrfs last time I tinkered with it when reinstalling Fedora. It could end up with me switching to either ext4 (like I did with Fedora) or trying the xfs file system option in Manjaro.
Finally found a way to do the install on Wine on Fedora -- and that's using Lutris. Lutris lets you install Windows games onto Linux and allows you to script the setup of the game environment to fit the game itself.
So I used it to download the WeChat binary, setup the environment (which involved downloading fonts via winetricks) and adding a registry hack. That seems to work now. Have added it to my app-installs playbook on Gitlab (https://gitlab.com/blenderfox/pixelbook-fedora-setup)
It's not fully automated, it does still require you to run through the setup manually, and then quit both the WeChat application (so Lutris sees that the setup has exited) and Lutris before the playbook proceeds.
However, as Ubuntu progressed on, it was clear this repo was not being maintained and updated and rapidly, stuff starting to fail as it required later versions of packages. Even the kernel was still on 4.4.x even now. I spent a long time trying to compile the kernel while trying to figure out the right options for a working kernel, with not much luck.
Putting in things like the "old-releases" repos helped keep things ticking over, but things were still breaking repeatedly, and the microphone kept breaking during calls due to the way the hacks were implemented.
The final straw came when the office decided to buy Apple M1 Macs for the developers (I refused to use one. My hate-hate relationship with Apple is well documented)
The decision to use M1 macs has now led to a problem whereby the docker images that are used are no longer compatible with the macbooks since they are arm64. The macs can use qemu emulation, but that is not perfect, giving weird errors when running the docker images under emulation. Leaving it to me, who is still using an amd64 machine to try to figure out multiarchtecture builds.
I was (and still am) reluctant to do the multiarch builds. Using multiarch builds would mean the devs are running a docker image that is not the same as that which is running on the test and production clusters and that in itself, means they are not developing on, or testing on an infrastructure that is representative of the test or production environments.
If the infrastructures were arm-based environments, sure, then that would be representative then, but not as it stands.
In fact, right now, if the developers build the docker image locally to test something, then pushed that to production, they would break production, as it runs on amd64 images.
I don't think this was thought through carefully enough, to be honest.
But enough of the rant. We are where we are, and I need to try to bail out the situation.
My hacked Ubuntu would not support multiarch build no matter what I tried, but when I tried to use Fedora in a Qemu VM (virtualbox also wouldn't work, since the virtualbox installer compiles kernel modules and that always failed with the custom kernel used by the hacked Ubuntu installation.)
So I decided to try to wipe the Ubuntu installation and start again from scratch, with Fedora.
Fedora 35 was the version I ended up using, and the latest at the time I started this activity.
Out of the box, it had native support for the touchpad, including two and three-finger scrolling via Unity 41. Two-finger scroll scrolls the active window. Three-finger scrolling up gives the window overview, and three-finger scrolling left or right switches workspaces.
Fedora by default uses btrfs. CloneZilla didn't seem to play well with that so had to start again, but perhaps it was due to the MyChromebox BIOS being too old. Upgraded and that seemed to work better.
After CloneZilla'ing the initial install so I could rollback to that if everything fell over, I started setting up the installation.
First thing I did is visudo'ed myself into the sudoers file, with a NOPASSWD param for passwordless sudo
Next I ran dnf update to update packages. There was about 1G of data to update and install.
Then I ran a CloneZilla to backup the laptop state at this point.
From this point, I started setting up the laptop. I found this repo on GitHub where the owner created a setup for Pixelbook https://github.com/jmontleon/pixelbook-fedora -- similar to the one I used for setting up Ubuntu on the Pixelbook. The repo owner also appears to have compiled his own version of the kernel and has his own COPR repository.
After spending a week tinkering with the instructions and getting some bugs ironed out, audio finally worked.
I built an Ansible playbook to help with the instructions running. This was adapted and incorporated into the repo.
With audio now working, I CloneZilla'ed the laptop state again, to have a good state to rollback to.
I then copied my file backup from my external USB into the laptop and then CloneZilla'ed the state again
With the files copied, now it was time to get the apps installed. I built another Ansible playbook to help speed things up and it's located here https://gitlab.com/blenderfox/pixelbook-fedora-setup/
The repo contains two playbooks one for doing the audio (it's essentially the same one in the jmontleon repo) and the second for app installs.
gcloud threw an error module ‘collections’ has no attribute ‘Mapping’. Followed this: https://gehrcke.de/2021/11/gcloud-on-python-3-10-module-collections-has-no-attribute-mapping/ to fix. Had to make sure to put the export line in ~/.bash_profile
tfenv https://github.com/tfutils/tfenv, making sure to add the path to ~/.bash_profile
helm2 (https://get.helm.sh/helm-v2.17.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz), extract, move the helm binary to /usr/local/bin/helm2 and chmod +x it
helm3 (latest version. At time of writing, it's https://get.helm.sh/helm-v2.16.12-linux-amd64.tar.gz). Call the helm3 binary /usr/local/bin/helm3 instead.
Spotify https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/installing-spotify/ (I used the flatpak)
Lens: https://k8slens.dev/
Steam https://itsfoss.com/install-steam-fedora/
gnome extensions app (dnf install gnome-extensions-app -- can also use the flatpak instead)
ProtonVPN (https://protonvpn.com/support/official-linux-vpn-fedora/) -- making sure to enable the system tray support
qemu static for multiarch builds (https://www.docker.com/blog/getting-started-with-docker-for-arm-on-linux/) sudo dnf install qemu-user-static then docker build ls to check available platforms on the builder. Docker ships with buildx https://github.com/docker/buildx#working-with-builder-instances on later version.
openconnect (if not already installed) dnf install openconnect
Not often I quote from a publication from Ireland, but this was quite an intriguing read. Someone who went from Windows to Mac to Linux (Mint)
Linux is everywhere – and will free your computer from corporate clutches
It was 2002, I was up against a deadline and a bullying software bubble popped up in Windows every few minutes. Unless I paid to upgrade my virus scanner – now! – terrible things would happen.
We’ve all had that right?
In a moment of clarity I realised that the virus scanner – and its developer’s aggressive business model – was more of a pest than any virus I’d encountered. Microsoft’s operating system was full of this kind of nonsense, so, ignoring snorts of derision from tech friends, I switched to the Apple universe.
It was a great choice: a system that just worked, designed by a team that clearly put a lot of thought into stability and usability. Eventually the iPhone came along, and I was sucked in farther, marvelling at the simple elegance of life on Planet Apple and giving little thought to the consequences.
Then the dream developed cracks. My MacBook is 10 years old and technically fine, particularly since I replaced my knackered old hard drive with a fast new solid-state drive. So why the hourly demands to update my Apple operating system, an insistence that reminded of the Windows virus scanner of old?
Apple is no different to Microsoft it seems.
I don’t want to upgrade. My machine isn’t up to it, and I’m just fine as I am. But, like Microsoft, Apple has ways of making you upgrade. Why? Because, as a listed company, it has quarterly sales targets to meet. And users of older MacBooks like me are fair game.
I looked at the price of a replacement MacBook but laughed at the idea of a midrange laptop giving me small change from €1,200. Two years after I de-Googled my life(iti.ms/2ASlrdY) I began my Apple prison break.
He eventually went for Linux Mint, which for a casual user is fine. I use Fedora and Ubuntu (and a really old version of Ubuntu since my workplace VPN doesn’t seem to work properly with anything above Ubuntu 14 - their way of forcing me onto either a Windows or Mac machine)
So, after finally fixing my environment, and manually having to use 3.17 kernel, I have a running environment, but Dungeon Defenders still hangs, and Dota 2 has graphic rendering issues – meaning I miss the opponents and they can creep up behind me, along with enemy grunts.
Guess I won’t be playing anything Steam-based for a while….
I think I have figured out why my machine has been playing up.
In both cases, my machine was trying to run kernel 3.19, but after checking Kernel.org, I found that this kernel version has been marked EOL.
I installed Fedora 21, which came with kernel 3.17 and worked, but after updating, it stopped working, with kernel 3.19. Forcing it to run on 3.17 was okay, though.
Latest kernel release is 4.0.4, so I need to wait for Fedora to update.
Interestingly, it could also explain why I was also having trouble with Ubuntu, as it also ran 3.19. When trying to reinstall Ubuntu from the latest install image, it hung, presumably because it was trying to use the 3.19 Kernel. In theory, I could use an older installer (e.g. Utopic Unicorn) instead.
So now, I’m running Fedora with a 3.19 main kernel (which fails) and 3.17 secondary kernel. I was going to file a bug on Kernel.org, but found out about 3.19 being EOL, which means no bug fixes will be released, so there is no point in filing the bug.
On the plus side, my machine seems SO much more zippier running Fedora. Although trying to run Dota 2 seems a bit quirky. Dust: An Elysian Tail worked pretty well, as did Second Life (I was able to crank Singularity Viewer up to Ultra without major speed loss).
I still need to reinstall BOINC and any other missing apps I might have, and get used to using yum, yumex and dnf instead of apt-get, aptitude and synaptic all over again, but apart from that, it should be all good.
After much tinkering and cursing, I finally managed to get Linux Container running. I had originally wanted a Fedora container, but for some unknown reason, the container would not start. Instead, I tried a CentOS 6 container, and that started up successfully, so I am using that instead. It is actually good, because I can tinker with the CentOS container, experiment with different configurations, maybe practise setting it up as a proper (i.e. no GDM) server. This will help if I decide to go for a Red Hat-themed Linux certification.
Still bugging me why the Fedora 20 container won’t start, though.
I installed Fedora 20 and gave it a test drive. Whilst I was happy it seemed to run well, the graphics driver appeared to be flaky. Under Ubuntu Studio, I was getting a fps fullscreen using glxgears of around 60-65fps. Under Fedora, I was getting ~45 fps. I then tried Linux Mint Debian Edition, and that also had the same problem. So now, I’m back on Ubuntu Studio. But I might be vanilla Debian a go as well and see if that helps…
I dug out my Wacom Bamboo Graphics Tablet and plugged it into my Ubuntu Studio installation, but frustratingly, I cannot seem to emulate a wheel scroll, which I need for my work in Blender. Sure I can use the keypad +/-, but that isn’t the way I’m supposed to work.
I might switch over to Fedora later this week and see if that is any better. Or maybe even put Linux Mint back on. I know that both have gone through new versions since I last used them. Fedora was at Schroedinger’s Cat / Version 19 and Linux Mint was at Maya / Version 13 last time I used it.
Now may be a good time to start looking at other distributions. openSUSE seems appealing, but it has caused me problems with restoring from CloneZilla images in the past, especially cross-operating system.
I’ve just finished work on a dual-boot setup guide with Linux and Windows 7. It covers setting up Dual Boot with Windows installed first or second, and with Linux installed first and second, and covers Linux distros that default to using LVM, such as Fedora, and those which don’t default to using LVM, such as Debian.
Had a very eventful weekend, and my entire Sunday was taking up trying to figure out a weird symptom on my linux installation.
In the weeks leading up to today, I used to get strange behaviour from my Fedora box. The behaviour resulting in an error being detected by the ABRT tool, regarding a null reference. Sunday, my laptop conked out and refused to startup. I tried reinstalling Fedora, Debian, Mint, openSUSE, and even OpenMandriva – none of them could complete the installation. They either failed with error part way through, or hung completely.
I decided to try installing Windows XP over everything. That failed with an IRQ LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO blue screen. Then I tried Windows 7. That installation succeeded, and I started running updates. Then it blue screened me again. This time MEMORY_MANAGEMENT was the message. Hmmm. So, could it be that one of my memory chips was dodgy? That would account for why it was intermittent. I have 2x 2GB chips in my laptop, so I took both out and rebooted. No splash screen. Good. That’s expected.
Put in one of the chips. Booted, BIOS showed 2GB. Good, that’s OK.
Took it out and put in the other 2GB. No splash screen. Looks like that’s the dodgy one. I dug out my 1GB from when I got my laptop originally, and put that back into the other slot, so I get a 3GB installation. Checked boot. Splash screen displayed. Good. So I then ran a BIOS memory check, and all 3GB passed.
So then I decided, maybe I should try doing a restore, in case the dodgy memory was the cause of my failure to restore previously. It worked fine, so now I’m back up with my previous setup. :D
I’ve been running with Ubuntu on my desktop for a long time, even after upgrading it to 4GB RAM (it’s a really old PC). Nonetheless, Lubuntu (which is Ubuntu with LXDE) prompted me to upgrade from Raring to Saucy. I did, and as with all Ubuntu upgrades, it took absolutely ages to complete. But after a reboot, I noticed the login screen is now identical to the LXDE login screen of my Fedora box (which is also using LXDE). This is good and bad – good in that it gives users a consistent login experience regardless of distribution, but bad in the sense that the identity of Ubuntu has been slightly lost.
I tried to install OpenSUSE on my laptop again today, and again it came up with the error about the boot partition. So perhaps I’ll have to tweak the boot partition size the next time I try this.
Instead, I installed Fedora 19, and that went fine - no issues with installing. Next I need to update it.
Well, I tried to install Fedora 19 on my desktop, which previously had Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) and ran fine. Bizarrely, Fedora 19 doesn’t like my graphics card it seems and even after booting the install after using VNC, it doesn’t come up with a graphical environment, even though I had LXDE as my desktop.
It would seem Schroedinger’s Cat has been at it – my installation is both working and not working, much like the cat is both alive and dead….
So now, my installation is back on Lubuntu. Maybe I’ll install CentOS instead of Fedora. At least until the Fedora team get it working, and who knows how long that might be?
I have just tried using the network install disk (and a full DVD) and neither of them seems to start up the graphics correctly on my old PC, so after a bit of research, it turns out I can set the installer to run in text mode rather than graphics mode by changing:
vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img
to
vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img text
when starting up the installer. Then, it will run in text mode, and even offer the option of using VNC to remotely configure. Screenshot:
This is a very useful boot disk - it allows you to download the latest network installer from the relevant site and boot it, without having to burn or create another stick. It supports the major distributions: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, Scientific Linux, CentOS and Slackware.
Be warned, though, Network Installers by nature can be heavily console-based.
Today, I decided to try reverting my laptop to Debian, having imaged it yesterday to provide a rollback option in case something went wrong.
The installation (via Net Install) took absolutely ages, but was pretty much successful. Then I got reminded why I stopped using Debian originally – the Unity style interface. It really winds me up. Then I was surprised by just how long it took to download updates. I usually get a throughput of between 100kb/s and 400kb/s depending on what and where I’m downloading from. I was getting around 20kb/s downloading from ftp.uk.debian.org and downloading the KDE package, apt-get was estimating 6 HOURS to finish downloading, and that’s not including the installing. I even used the tool netselect-apt to pick the fastest mirrors, and it still didn’t improve. I’m going to try again once I’ve downloaded and burned all the Debian DVD images. Maybe I might be able to select the packages and go straight to KDE without using the Unity-like interface.
On the plus side, I checked the DRM test video via Adobe’s web site and I was able to confirm that it works fine and I was able to view DRM protected material in Debian after downloading the hal package, so whatever happens, I’ll at least be able to use Google Movies now.
I might also take a look at openSuSE and see what that’s like. Hey, have to keep my options open. :-)
