Blatherings

Back In Time for Data Backups on openSUSE | Retrospective

Backup-02

The lack of data security is something that has recently affected some municipal governments in a negative way. Atlanta in 2018 was attacked with a ransomware and demanded $51,000 before they would unlock it. Baltimore was hit a second time this past May [2019]. I am not a security expert but in my non-expert opinion, just keeping regular backups of your data would have prevented needing to spend a ransom to get your data back. It would also help to run openSUSE Linux or one of the many other Linux options on the desktop to reduce the impact of a user induced damage due to wayward link-clicking.

If you are interested in keeping your personal data “safe,” offline backups are an absolute requirement. Relying only on Google Drive, Dropbox, Nextcloud or whatever it may be is just not not adequate. Those are a synchronizing solution and can be a part of your data-safekeeping strategy but not the entirety of it.

I have been using Back In Time as my backup strategy, in this time, I have only had to restore a backup once but that was an elected procedure. Back In Time is great because it is a Qt based application so it looks good in KDE Plasma

Installation

For openSUSE users, getting the software is an easy task. The point and click method can be done here:

https://software.opensuse.org/package/backintime-qt

The more fun and engaging method would be to open a terminal and run:

sudo zypper install backintime-qt

It is, after all, in the main openSUSE repository and not playing in the terminal when the opportunity presents itself is a missed opportunity.

How it has been going

Since this is a retrospective on using Back In Time, you can find more about usage and other options backing up your system here. I am not going to claim that I was 100% disciplined performing weekly backups like I suggested. The sad reality is, I got busy and sometimes it was every other week… I may have forgotten to do it entirely in April… but for the most part, I was pretty good about keeping my system backed up.

Since Back In Time is really quite easy to use it is as simple as connecting a specially designated USB drive into my computer and I start “Back In Time”. Yes, in that order because I don’t I get a rather angry message.

BackInTime 04-Snapshots folder.png

Something else you have to do is either manually or automatically remove old snapshots. I didn’t pay attention and some of the snapshots completed “WITH ERRORS!” I am sharing this as a cautionary tale to pay closer attention to your backup medium, whatever that may be, to ensure you have enough space.

From there, all I would have to do is click the Save Snapshots Icon.

BackInTime 05-Take Snapshot Icon-box

The application will evaluate the last snapshot against your filesystem and create an incremental snapshot. The first snapshot is the most time consuming, the subsequent snapshots don’t take nearly as much time.

BackInTime 01-Main Screen.png

With Back In Time, there is a feature to adjust how many snapshots it keeps. I ultimately decided to have it automatically delete snapshots older than 6 months (26 Weeks). For my purposes, anything older than 6 months is likely useless. I could probably reduce the length of time that I keep. I really just need the data should something catastrophic happen to all the machines that I keep synchronized.  Your requirements may vary, of course.

BackInTime 03-Auto-remove

I have been told that I should do a separate monthly and weekly offline updates but it is my opinion that for my personal usage, weekly is fine. I would also say that if you are responsible for an organization or business data, doing the separate monthly and weekly backups, maybe even daily would be better. I am not a professional here, nor should you take my advice on what is best practice for your organization. I do recommend that you do backups at some interval and find out what is best for you.

Final Thoughts

After fumbling my way through Back In Time a bit, adjusting it’s settings for my purposes, this has proven itself to be a fantastic application I can count on to keep my data “safe.” I can personally attest to the ease of backing up and restoring data. The way I use it isn’t necessarily the best way for you. Back In Time can do a LOT more than the limited way I am using it.

Even if you don’t use Back In Time, find an application that will help you make backups that is easy to do and sustainable enough to stay consistent. There isn’t a single downside to it.

References

Data Back Up | Better to Prevent than to Regret

Back In Time on GitHub

Back In Time Documentation

Back In Time from openSUSE

Atlanta Ransomware Attack from SecurityMagazine.com

Baltimore Ransomware Attack Article

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Bodhi Linux 5.0 | Review from an openSUSE User

Bodhi review title.png

Linux is a fun thing and trying out other distributions can result in a myriad of experiences. Some distributions concentrate on user experience or mostly the technical underpinnings. Some distributions put their own feel while others minimize their modifications. I am a long time openSUSE user and am perfectly content with all that it has to offer, not just as a distribution but as a project in its totality.  As a part of the Big Daddy Linux Community, there is an optional weekly challenge to try out a Linux distribution. My process for this is to put it in a VM first and then go to “bare metal” for further testing if my initial experience is compelling enough and I have the time.

The latest challenge is Bodhi Linux it is built on the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS but targeting machines with fewer resources. The Bodi Linux Project offers forums for help and advice, they have a wiki to help with configurating the system, and offer a live chat through Discord to get help or just get to know members of the community. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice any IRC options. I downloaded the ISO from here. There are few different options from which to choose. I went with the “AppPack” ISO as it has more applications bundled in it. For more information on choosing the correct ISO for you, see here.

Bottom Line Up Front, Bodhi Linux is well put together and the Moksha Desktop is a crisp, low resource, animated (almost excessively) environment that is worthy of giving it a spin. This distribution is certainly worth the time, especially if you have an older system you want to keep going a little longer. The Moksha Desktop looks good and is more functional than GNOME so that is already a leg up on many distributions.

Installation

When you first spin it up, you are greated with the typical boot menu you would get from a Linux media. My only complain here is that it doesn’t have an install option from here. That is always my preferred option.

Bodhi Linux 1 Live Installer

Booting from the Live Media was pretty rapid. The default desktop was clean and themed correctly, dark. I didn’t even see a light option so well done there! All the icons and menus lend themselves nicely for a dark themed desktop.

The Welcome Screen is nothing more than a local html file of places to go to get started using Bodhi Linux. You are almost immediately greeted with the notice that you are not running the latest Enlightenment. I know that this desktop, Moksha, is forked from it so, just odd that I would see “Enlightenment” there.

Since I wanted to play with this distribution and do things with it, I needed to install it. Although I prefer being able to install out of the gate, I can get along with the Live process well enough. My only issue was. I didn’t know where the installation laucher was to get the process started.

After some searching I found it was “hidden” in the menu under Applications > Preferences and the entry is called Install Bodhi Linux 5.0.0 AppPack.

The rest of the installation process is pretty trivial. You will start off by selecting your language and then deciding if you want to download updates while installing Bodhi and third-party software. I selected both for my installation

Next is the installation type. For the purposes of this installation, I want to wipe the entire disk to do whatever Bodhi wants to do with it. The default setup is to have one partition running, ext4… I’m pretty sure… I should check again…

You are then asked for your location and user information. Once that is complete, the installation will commence. The installation process is very similar to what you would see on many other distros, a slide show of propaganda about the distribution and optionally you can see what it is doing by selecting the fly-out just above the progress bar.

When the installation completes you can Restart Now or to Continue Testing the live media environment. I of course was anxious to get into the real thing and start mucking about so an immediate restart was warrented.

Bodhi Linux is incredibly easy to install. Assuming you don’t have any hardware issues, such as with proprietary drivers (which I do not have). You should be all tip-top and ready to rock with Bodhi Linux in very short order.

First Run and Impressions

Bodhi has a pretty decent looking desktop. It loads quickly and uses very little RAM. The file manager is acceptable and bonus, it reminds me of the Konqueror File Manager mode back in the KDE3 days. The clock widget is pretty nice and very functional. The good part about the default settings is that it has the task bar, or shelf, as it is called here, on the bottom of the screen like a good and proper desktop.

The effects that are enabled by default are interesting. It is a very live and active feeling desktop. It’s maybe a bit on the hyper side, if anything. I am not exactly sure what to think of the effects but they are neat to look at none the less.

I think if the labels were to float above the icon as opposed to on top of it, that would look better, but that is my opinion. Obviously, that is not an opinion shared by all.

The file manger does have the option to open up applications from it, which is another call back to the KDE3 days for me. I think it is handy to have for sure. Interestingly enough, you can still do that in Dolphin File Manager today on Plasma by putting “applications://” in the location field.

I appreciate that LibreOffice is installed by default. As much as “Cloud Office” is all the rage by kids these days, my old man ways still heavily use office applications locally. I am a fairly heavy LibreOffice user and I don’t see any way that would change anytime soon.

The system settings are a bit light in Bodhi. Perhaps it is an encouragement to learn more functions in the terminal but this is not my preference. I like the terminal and I like my GUIs and I especially like my hybrid approach openSUSE gives me with YaST as a traditional GUI and CLI application with ncurses. I am finding that when I use a distro, this is now a feature I am expecting to have available, to aid in the management my system.

The GUI tweaks are nice. Although mentioned just a bit before in this blathering, what I would normally call a panel is called a shelf here, which is fine. Enlightenment has been around long enough to have developed its own terminology so they should stick with what works for them. I just bring this up because it may be a bit confusing for some.

Bodhi Linux 31 Shelf

Switching the themes is pretty straight forward, although, they all look about the same, and they are all dark which is perfectly fine for me. It is clear to me that the developers and maintainers of Bodhi are concerned about users with light sensitivity issues. At least, that is what I am going to consider it. They are very thoughtful.

The settings panel is really where the meat of the settings are for the desktop. There are some odd menu locations for somethings, like the themes but that can also be found in the Settings Panel. If it were up to me, I would probably dump some of those menu entries to clean things up a bit.

Interestngly, Steam is installed by default. I ran it, expecting to have an issue with it but that was not the case at all. I am not sure why I would have expected an issue because it is built on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS so that was really screwy thinking on my part.

Bodhi Linux 20 Steam

Sadly, I have no Steam friends… as you can see.

I do want to note that the memory usage is very light on a settled system. I let it sit a while before I checked and it was using 183 MiB of RAM. I thought this to be rather impressive. That would make this a fantastic choice for low end netbooks or cheap laptops.

I played with some of the other applications and in the end, I have determined that this is just as functional of a portal to your applications as any other Ubuntu Linux Desktop. Pretty decent selection of applications, satisfactory defaults. Some notable applications that I wanted but wasn’t readily available in the system or on their AppCenter was Telegram and Discord. I could just as well use a browser but I do happen to like those bloated Electron apps taking up valuable RAM on my system. I would probably have to add some PPAs to fill in the gaps there.

Bodhi Linux 22 Leave Dialog Box

The logout action button brings up a six basic functions for stepping away from a computer. I chose, in this case, to shut the system down as my journey around Bodhi Linux was complete.

What I Like

Bodhi Linux has a very low memory usage and it is quite responsive. This would be a fine candidate for using on low end hardware and I am putting this in that use-for-low-end-hardware stack. Though, since 32-Bit is being dropped by Ubuntu, I think having this built on Debian or openSUSE Tumbleweed would be preferred.

The default themes are very acceptable, since they are all dark. I wouldn’t need any more variety in that regard. The interface is also quite configurable and has a system tray so that makes it better than GNOME.

The “Quick Start Guide” is quite fantastic. It gets you to all the places you need to go to get up and running with Bodhi. It has a decent wiki, helpful forums and a fairly active “Live Help” through Discord. I can’t see any reason why someone would not beable to get along fine in Bodhi Linux.

What I Don’t Like

As much as I liked the provided themes, something seemed or felt dated about it and I can’t put a finger on it. Maybe the layer of effects with the animations with text description or the amount of effects while hovering over an icon… the icon colors themselves… I am not sure, really. Although, this comes from a guy that likes the bouncy launch Icon on Plasma which is very much an early 2000s thing, so take that for what it’s worth.

The installation launcher was hidden and that annoyed me a bit. I knew that it was not right on the desktp going into it so I wasn’t surprised but still annoyed I had to go through the menus to find it. An easy fix for that would be have the icon on the desktop or at least on the root menu.

The menu layout feels clunky and there isn’t a search feature in the menu, something of which I have grown accustomed in the last few years and doing without is almost a non-starter for me in the desktop world. I like menus but I also like to search. A search feature would also make finding the hidding installer a bit easier to get to as well.

Final Thoughts

Bodhi is a fine experience. It is very resource conscious, feels responsive and for the most part seemed to work well. The desktop does feel a bit dated, not horribly and I don’t have a particular thing I can point to that says it feels dated. I also don’t know that my impresson there would be universal. My guess is that most users wouldn’t have that impression out of the gate. This is likely the strong influence Plasma has had on me with the Breeze theme.

Althought I think I could get along fine with Bodhi, it just happens to lack some of the things I rely on regularly that openSUSE has provided me. It is not that I find the Bodhi experience lacking but that there are things of which I am quite accustomed that I don’t see the benefit in giving up.

Would I recommend Bodhi to a new Linux user? I am not sure on that. Some of the notable mising packages would make getting going a bit more of a challenge. I do think that I would recommend this to anyone that has old hardware that they want to keep chugging along a little longer or perhaps they have a computer that acts as some kind of portal to the Internet with other basic applications like LibreOffice.

Enlightentment or Moksha Desktop as it is called here makes for an interesting, maybe esoteric experience in Linux. There isn’t anything bad about it, it is just different but yet, highly functional. It is certainly not my preference but I would absolutely encourage anyone to give this a spin.

References

Bodhi Linux Download

Selecting the correct Bodhi Linux ISO

Moksha Desktop

openSUSE Main Site

More about Ncurses from Wikipedia

YaST Main Site

Bodhi Linux Destkop Challenge Discourse on BigDaddyLinux.com

Wavebox | Chat Unification Snap Application on openSUSE Tumbleweed

Wavebox on openSUSE

From time to time, I like to play around with the universal packaging available in Linux. It has mostly been AppImages and Flatpak but I wanted to Snap something into my system. After working out an AppArmor issue. Snaps were working fantastically well once again. The application I wanted to try was another Chat Message Unification Application. I had heard wonderful things about Wavebox so it was time to try it out. It’s described as, “A clever new home for cloud apps on your desktop bringing Gmail, Inbox, Outlook, O365, Trello, Slack & over 1000 more apps into a configurable client.”

You can look at the details here on the SnapCraft store.

Wavebox Snap 19

In a terminal I installed Wavebox from the Snap Store:

sudo snap install wavebox

Installation was a snap (haha) and it created an entry in the application menu of KDE Plasma, just as one would expect. It should also be noted that the system tray icon also looks great next to the rest of the icons sitting there too.

Wavebox Snap 20 System Tray.png

When the Application started up, I didn’t notice any lengthy start up time that has been complained about in the past with Snaps. It was delightfully… snappy… and when it settled I was greeted with a pleasant interface. There was no question as to what I needed to do, create an account.Wavebox Snap 2

Going through the process was really quite trivial. You begin by entering your name, email and password. I elected to setup two-factor authentication which did require me to install an application on my phone…

After you have logged in, you can add your first application. I went with Slack, specifically the Bad Voltage slack group. There is a convenient search box right at the top of the uncluttered interface.

I am not 100% sure what the “Pic a Colour” section does, entirely but it does create a ring around thee account on the side tab of the service. Setting up Slack was trivial and has the same basic feel of what you would have in the web browser.

What I think is interesting is the different customization features you can specify for each module you add. What is interesting to me is the ability to put a tab to sleep and stop it after some time of inactivity. I don’t know exactly what that means and how it is implemented but if that is what I am thinking it is, that should be more kind to your system when on battery power. I find with all the services running in either a browser or other Chat Unification applications, the CPU usage is noticeable.

Wavebox Snap 11

I wanted to install the G-suite of tools and began that process by selecting the Gmail icon when adding an application. There is a similar “Pick a Colour” selection then you can choose which services it loads into this “tab”. I didn’t test all the functions but the ones that did worked as expected. The Hangouts button doesn’t give me the hangouts configuration I prefer but it is functional, none the less.

Wavebox Snap 13

Setting up the account is much like logging in through a browser or even Kmail, for that matter. When you sign in, you then configure the default inbox configuration.

The display of the email is as you would see in a web page but the added benefit is that you have all the other services on a menu bar at the top of the Window. This is, by far, the best implementation of interfacing with the Google Services I have ever seen. It is far more functional than the Google defaults and even nicer than what I have been using on similar services.

Memory Use

It’s very easy to see how much of your drive is taken up by the application

/dev/loop11 156M 156M 0 100% /snap/wavebox/180

I don’t view this as outrageous at all. The application has another 181 MiB of storage on my home directory in the snap folder. I haven’t fully investigated the the contents of the folder but it does keep historical snap version configuration files, which is interesting.

Running the 10 Google Services, Riot and Slack, I am using about 490 MiB of RAM, so, 12 services in all on this so about 40.8 MiB per service. Combine that with the sleep function, this doesn’t feel too bad.

What I like

The way that Wavebox bundles the Google Services into one tab and how integrated and purposeful it feels makes this application really quite special. There is a lot of thought and detail put into it. I would say that this is a far better “Google Experience” than what you would have on a Chromebook. It is, seemingly a much more efficient and integrated experience, really, the best I have ever seen.

The Sleep Tab feature is very interesting and I have not studied it enough to know exactly how it works because I have received email notifications while the tab was sleeping so it must check periodically. somehow. I would really like to run this on a long term basis and determine, or at least, better determine what it is doing. Maybe even do some CPU usage comparisons between Wavebox and similar services but I just don’t have the time for that.

The conveniences of having all the different communication and collaboration services in one window, everything unified, is very conducive to productivity. That feature alone makes this application stand out from others similar to it. I would determine that it is a better experience than what you have in a browser with a string of pinned tabs.

What I Don’t Like

Wavebox does requires a login to an external server someplace to manage your accounts. This is like the Franz application I have also reviewed. It was an area for which I didn’t particularly like. I do see the utility of it and since these are all services you are logging into, one more isn’t that big of a deal… really… but somehow that is still a sticking point for me.

Wavebox isn’t free. Not that I think everything should be free but I would rather spit out a one time payment for this application. It costs $48 per year to use this application. For my purposes, since my efficiency with any of these services is not a part of my job, (arguably maybe Google could be), it isn’t a good value for me to make the investment. However, if your work required you to communicate on numerous  services regularly, I could absolutely see this as being a vital piece for improved quality of [computing] life.

Final Thoughts

Wavebox LogoRambox and Franz are both similar applications I have reviewed, albeit with a slightly different lens, they are all really quite fantastic applications. Any one is a good choice and I am glad that they all exist. There are features from each application that I appreciate so each application has their merit. I would say that of all of them Wavebox does seem to have just a bit more polish than the rest. There are more tools and tweaks with this and the way all the Google Services are rolled up with a very convenient menu makes this the best experience for using G-Suite. Far better than even with Chrome or using a Chromebook. This is so nicely integrated that it makes a mediocre web application experience feel like a real, nicely polished, and purposeful, native application.

Wavebox is, undoubtedly, suited for the professional user, not so much a dude like me that can’t seem to stick with an application like this for more than 6 months or so. This is extremely well thought out and well executed. Features like the Sleep Tab make this stand above other options.

Another final thought, having access to Snaps (along with other universal packages) available on openSUSE Tumbleweed really opens up a very wide array of available applications for my use. Snaps seem to integrate well into openSUSE; just as long as nothing gets messed up with AppArmor again. Snaps are a great choice for application delivery for many cases and I am thankful that I have access to them.

References

Wavebox from the Snap Store Web Frontend

Snapd Resolved bug on Bugzilla

Rambox | Chat Message Unification Application for openSUSE

Franz | Chat Messaging Unification Application on openSUSE

Budgie 10.4 on openSUSE Leap 15.1

In my ongoing mission to ensure that I am keeping up on as many wiki pages for openSUSE as I can, I noticed that the information I put in for the terminal installation process for the Budgie Desktop was not right, I didn’t look through the history but I’m sure it was absolutely my fault. Regardless, I decided to test it out in a VM and see that it installs properly and I could play around in it without crashing. Sure enough, it seems to be working well and after switching things up to a dark them, I thought it looked pretty darn good.

A simple command in the terminal makes the magic happen:

sudo zypper install budgie-desktop

After Zypper does its thing, logging out and logging back in will give you a pretty darn decent implementation of the Budgie-Desktop. There isn’t any openSUSE customization with it, as far as I can tell, it runs well and feels clean.

Oddly, instead of a Budgie Logo for the menu it is a GNOME logo. I am not sure if that is the upstream default or not but it just seems odd to me.

Screenshot_opensuse15.1_2019-07-15_19:08:20

Though, I don’t much care for the light theme, that is easily fixed in the Budgie Settings. I went for Breeze-Dark with everything, just because I think that is the best thing going as of today. I must say that the settings are nice, neat and simple which I think works well for this desktop.

Screenshot_opensuse15.1_2019-07-15_19:10:13.png

I noticed that when I switched the icon theme to Breeze Dark the Plasma logo appeared on the menu icon. I guess if you have Gnome with the Adwaita theme it is only reasonable that you would have the Plasma logo with the Breeze theme. It still seems a bit odd to me.

I hung out here and played around, browsed the web, and tested out a few of the tools. I don’t feel like Budgie is quite right for my “home”. It’s a nice home, very well put together, from what little I experienced hanging out, it is just not one I feel compelled to move into.

Final Thoughts

The ease of installing other Desktop Environments (DEs) in openSUSE is super simple and I truly appreciate it. It is also nice to see that playing with other DEs doesn’t seem to mess things up at all. They all seem to cohabitate quite nicely on a single installation.

I am quite sure this is the vanilla configuration of Budgie that is just how openSUSE does Desktop Environments. I do, however think the Budgie Logo or the openSUSE logo would be preferred on the menu but that would be the only real change I would make.

Budgie is a nice, crisp Desktop Environment but it just isn’t for me. I think KDE Plasma has spoiled me. I also need to do a better job of keeping on top of the different wikis hosted by openSUSE. It is very easy to neglect them. Thankfully, I can play with it all in VMs for testing while I work on other tasks.

Dang openSUSE Linux is awesome!

References

https://en.opensuse.org/
https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Budgie
https://getsol.us/

Outside the Cubicle | Gladiator Geartrack Gardening Pack

In my quest to remove inefficiency in my life and make activities more functional, I purchased this Gladiator Geartrack Gardening Pack by Whirlpool Corporation. I want to make it understood that I do work for Whirlpool and they in no way sponsor, support or endorse any of this. I was given an opportunity to get this pack at a bit of a discount and the purpose of this kit “fit the bill” for an organizational pain-point at my house. My gardening items have been sitting in a 5 gallon bucket in the garage in the corner with several other items scattered about on the floor or haphazardly shoved on a shelf.

I am continually looking for ways to enhance efficiency. I have more tasks to do in any single day, generally more than I can effectively accomplish. Time is short when running a house, being the sole provider, home educating and wanting to give my kids as many fun or interesting memories through their childhood. Gardening is an activity that I enjoy. It doesn’t take up much time and I can teach my kids a thing or two about caring for plants.

This is another “best effort” attempt at learning Kdenlive, a video editing software package for Linux. I am running this on openSUSE Tumbleweed seemingly trouble free. Feel free to be critical of the video, I have my list of things I need to do in order to improve video content creation. Maybe… someday… it won’t be terrible. I also can evaluate all my areas for improvement on presentation of an idea or thing.

Unboxing, packaging engineering

Since spending time in the product engineering area, I have become more and more impressed with packaging engineering. So much time and effort is put into making sure that products arrive to their destination without damage and most consumers just chuck it and don’t take the time to appreciate it.

Installation

The instructions that come bundled with this pack are nicely detailed. As long as you have the least bit of knowledge and the right tools, following these instructions will be no problem.

The tools I used were a cordless drill, stud finder and a level. It is recommended that you fasten the Geartrack into the wall studs for maximum strength

Quality of Components

The quality of components is pretty clear when you handle them. The Geatrack Channel is solid and stout. It doesn’t have even the slightest bit of flimsiness to it. I think you would be hard pressed to really mess it up.

Gladiator Geartrack Gardening Pack

The hooks are all of solid steel construction with pretty generous welds. The spring retention keeps the hooks in place so they are not likely to just fall off the Geartrack.

The gardening basket is a fine piece of kit that is not only well made, it gives you more storage options than I can immediately use which is far better than the typical insufficiently featured and lacking utility designs you often find. It should also be noted, I don’t see myself ever having to handle this gingerly in fear of breaking something off of it. The chosen materials are not lacking in strength at all and looks to have many, many hard and abusive years ahead of it.

Populated with Items

After I installation, I was able to place all my gardening equipment in the provided basket as well as hang other things on this system. I ended up placing my small garden hose on one set of hooks and hanging a netted sack of outdoor fun equipment like soccer balls and things.

Final Thoughts

I am quite pleased with this purchase. It truly is a fine kit that I will happily use for many years to come. The big selling points for me is the quality of the build, ease of installation and how extensible the system is designed. There are numerous home organization products out there, many for much cheaper but the nature of this design and the time it has been on market as well as the backing of a company that has a track-record of long term product support. All this does inspire me to make more purchases of this system.

I want to note again, I am a Whirlpool employee and I have not been sponsored, or endorsed to make these remarks. These are my own statements. There are official corporate reviews, installation guides and the like. I am just a dude that happens to like what his employer makes… which frankly makes it enjoyable to work for such a company.

In my mission to further simplify and organize my life, there will be future Gladiator purchases. It is simply put, a buyer’s remorse-free purchase. A better organized and efficient life makes for a more enjoyable life.

References

Gladiator Gardening Geartrack Pack Official Video

Gladiator GaragWorks product information

Kdenlive Home

 

Debian 10 | Review from an openSUSE User

Debian review title

I have used Debian for years on and off… probably more off than on… but when I had some odd hardware to install Linux, Debian is always the go to distribution. In my mind, Debian is known for old packages and a crusty installer. For many applications, old packages are fine and a crusty installer is not a big deal, after all, my early Linux experience did include installing Debian Linux on HP PA RISC systems. It wasn’t a cake walk but it wasn’t exactly difficult. The Debian installer works well if you are willing to read what is on the screen.

This is my biased review of Debian 10 from an extremely entrenched openSUSE user. I am perfectly happy where I am and have no intention on switching to any other distribution. I will be looking at the KDE Plasma Desktop on Debian and comparing it to my regular home of the KDE Plasma Desktop on openSUSE Tumbleweed.

The bottom line, up front, Debian is great. It is a pure and sterile experience, not much emphasis is put onto the look and feel but it is very apparent that they put their effort into the technical underpinnings. If I had to choose between an artistic piece or a technically sound technology, I will go for the technical merits and do the last mile of polish to satisfy my needs. I can highly recommend Debian to any intermediate user.

Installation

Installation was pretty straight forward. I went with the graphical installation tool and being familiar with the text installer, this was much the same but with more “modern” graphics.

The installer will start off by asking you to select a language and your country.

Next you need to select the keyboard map. The installer will then load components. This takes just a bit.

Next you will set the host name and the domain name. These are each on different screens. I think they could have consolidated this to one screen but that is just my opinion.

Your first “account stop” is setting up the root password with a well written instruction and precautions about setting up the root user. You are also notified that if you leave the password empty, the root account will be disabled and the initial user will be given the power to become root using the sudo command.

Debian 10 8 Installation

You will then be prompted for a Full Name followed by the Username. This too could have probably been put on a single screen but stepping through one at a time has its merits.

After you enter your password for your user account, you’ll be prompted to set the timezone of the system clock.

The partition setup of the system will be next, for the purposes of this installation, I chose the guided – use entire disk and the virtual disk presented itself on the next screen.

For the Partition disks setting, I chose the option recommended for new users and that is all files in one partition. This is seemingly more and more common now. Next you are given a breakdown of the automatic partition screen and a final sanity check before committing the changes to disk.

Base system will install. When complete, you will then be asked if there is any other CD or DVD media you want the system to scan for additional media. In this case, I do not have such a thing and I find it interesting that this is even an option. I am struggling a bit to find the use case for it but I am sure there is one.

The package manager will need to be configured. In order to pull the packages from a mirror closer to you, you are asked to choose a country. Then you are given an option of mirrors. I chose the default highlighted deb.debian.org. I didn’t have to configure an http proxy so I left that blank.

After the package manager configures apt, you will be asked if you want to supply the developers with statistics about your system. This will run once a week and send the packages to the distribution developers. If you are okay with that, select yes.

The options you are given for desktop environment is pretty fantastic. You can even choose no desktop environment! Right out of the gate you can choose between GNOME, Xfce, KDE Plasma, MATE, LXDE and LXQt. Interestingly, they are not presented in alphabetical order. It actually baffles me a bit why GNOME would be at the top when clearly, the best desktop is KDE Plasma.

The next step is to install the GRUB bootloader on the drive. Should you select, Yes you will be given a list of drives or to enter a device manually.

GRUB is the last step, you will be notified that the installation is complete and you can boot into your freshly installed system, which, undoubtedly will have the new car smell.

First Run and Impressions

The GRUB bootloader looked pretty typical an I saw my “GNU/Linux” option sitting right there so a quick tap of the Enter key began the loading of the operating system. I was unpleasantly surprised by the login / greeter… blah, not sure what display manager that is but, blah. It certainly does not go well with a Plasma Desktop.

I shouldn’t complain, it does the job, it just looks… Xfce…

The splash screen was the default Plasma splash and you are presented with a vanilla KDE Plasma 5 Desktop with the not-so-fantastic Application Launcher. That is easily enough fixed.

The default theme is the Breeze So-bright-it-burns-your-retina but that is also easily fixed with the more comfortable Breeze Dark theme. I also played around with some other settings, the region settings is all wrong for my preference and I wanted to see how the Info Center presented the operating system. It didn’t pull a Debian Logo, not a big deal. I also went there to check the Plasma version 5.14.5. Just a bit older but not a big deal. Still better than not having Plasma.

I was interested in checking out the default applications in Debian. It was pretty sparse, but had the basics. I would call it a pretty lean installation. Thankfully, by default this Plasma installation does have the GTK widget style module installed. Not sure if it is even an option to not install but I do remember, once upon a time, that this was not an automatic thing.

Firefox, after tweaking the GTK theme, looked great, and looked great going into the Big Daddy Linux discourse page. No complaints there.

Debian 10 45

Here is a little bonus with the Debian KDE Plasma, Discover works and works very well. I do believe it is the best Discover experience I have ever had. I was not able to find Discord but Telegram was there.

I wanted to check to see if I could install Kdenlive and indeed it was available. It was version 18.12.3, so a bit behind but seemingly worked well enough. I was just surprised it was even available. Should I be surprised?

I truly enjoyed using Plasma on Debian. It far exceeded my expectations and although I don’t intend on moving from my happy place called openSUSE, this was a great place to visit.

What I Like

Pure experience, no distribution specific influence almost in a kind of sterile hospital feel. That might sound like a negative but having no “cruft” as it were does have its merits.

Discover works great in Debian 10. Not that this should be on my top “what I like” list but it is great to see Discover working and working well.

The package selection in Debian is pretty robust. If it is not in the repository, getting the package elsewhere is almost a trivial process. Everyone builds a deb package.

What I Don’t Like

System configuration tools are a bit light. Being used to having a tool like YaST, navigating Debian can be a bit daunting. If you have experience with Linux and you know what tools you need this is not a problem

The Default Display Manager was almost jarring as I was expecting the wonderfully polished, silky smooth SDDM as my greeter. I know that I can​ change this but at this stage, I am just a bit too lazy to do so.

What I’m Not Sure About

There is this option to send the developers statistics from your system. This Debian popularity contest package statistics is run on a weekly basis and sent up, I don’t know how I feel about it running weekly. I like giving developers information but I am just unsure about the frequency.

Final Thoughts

Some distributions focus on technical merit, others on creating a visual experience. Debian is very much a technical merits distribution. You can polish it up to your own personal tastes, and frankly, this is what I am used to. The other reality is, Plasma doesn’t need much work to make look good, Breeze Dark and it looks great.

Debian popularity contest package statistics is a bit dubious to me but I am glad it is there… I think… The jury is still out on that one.

Overall, Debian is a fantastically stable, but sterile experience. I see this is a great place to go to support multiple hardware platforms and something you can count on. I highly recommend dipping your toes in Debian.

Reference

Debian for PA RISC
Get Debian
BigDaddyLinux Live Stream Debian 10 Distro Challenge
BigDaddyLinux Debian 10 Distro Challenge Discussion

Outside the Cubicle | Sledgehammer Repair, Handle Replacement

Sledgehammer Repair.png

Last fall (2018) I broke my “new” sledge hammer. I had maybe gotten all of 3 months of use out of it and snapped the wooden handle right below the business end. After much consternation, I picked up a fiberglass handle instead of a wooden one mostly due to the feel and finish of the handle.

I started out by removing the remnants of the old handle out of the the sledge as to get it ready for the new handle. This was a more aggravating process than anticipated. Lots of drilling, chiseling and hammering to free the steel from the splintered wood.

Outside of working and playing in Linux, I have always enjoyed working with my hands on projects. Sometimes, my fingers need a break from the keyboard and I need to break or fix something.

This is my folly and success in fixing a sledge hammer. The installation of the handle was academically not a complicated process but the execution did have its challenges.

I am trying to learn Kdenlive in hopes that I can become effective with the software. This is a cobbling together, learning to edit video through the various features. It’s been enjoyable and this is my cobbled together result.

References

Truper Handle from Lowe’s

Kdenlive Home

YouTube Video Link

SimpleScreenRecorder on openSUSE

A fine tool for which I recently had some use is this very capable application called SimpleScreenRecorder. I used it to create a couple simple videos mostly to see how well it works but mostly for the purpose of creating something useful as a reference.

To install it on openSUSE use the one-click method here:

https://software.opensuse.org/package/simplescreenrecorder

Or, my preferred method, in the terminal, enter:

sudo zypper in simplescreenrecorder

Fantastically, it is built using the Qt toolkit so it looks much better in the KDE Plasma Desktop Environment.

I have used it for a couple videos and have plans for more, mostly as notes to myself but in video form.

Basic Usage

After installing the software, it will sit in the multimedia subsection on the menu. It can be called up in a search as well, at least on Plasma.

SimpleScreenRecorder 1

Select Continue

Next you are presented with your Input Settings. You can create different profiles for different purposes. You can also select if you want to record all the screens, a single screen, a fixed rectaning, follow the cursor or to record OpenGL. I have only used the options to record the entire single screen or a fixed rectangle.

SimpleScreenRecorder 2

You can choose to record the cursor or not and whether or not you want Audio. I have only used PulseAudio and it has seemingly worked just fine.

When you Continue, you will have to select the Output Profile or create your own, set the file name, the video and audio codecs settings. The settings pictured below has worked quite well for me in terms of quality but are a bit excessive in the memory usage.

 

SimpleScreenRecorder 3

After all that is set, you can start recording at anytime. It is also not a bad idea to Start the preview if you want to make sure it looks right before beginning the recording. The information frame on the left side of the window is quite nice. It tells you all kinds of useful information about the process. What is especially good to know is the file size. Depending on your available system resources, this could become somewhat of a concern.

SimpleScreenRecorder 4

Once you have completed the recording, hit Stop Recording along the top of the window and Save Recording if you believe you are satisfied with the results.

And that is it!

How I’ve Used It

I wanted to demonstrate how to set up switching from left-to-right typing to right-to-left typing on LibreOffice

I also did a quick little video just to play with SimpleScreenRecorder and showing how to turn on and off tooltips within KDE Plasma 5.16. I did edit both of these videos with Kdenlive for practice because someday, someday, I might get good at it.

Final Thoughts

SimpleScreenRecorder is a fantastic example of easy to use software to create simple videos for any number of things. This is great for demonstrating how you accomplish something on the desktop, sometimes video is the best way to present it. This is a fine example of easy to use open source and free software that has an incredible value.

Since I am able to install this application from the official repository with my favorite Linux distribution openSUSE Tumbleweed, it is just another straw on my pile of reasons I use it. Additionally, it requires no fancy configuration to get going, there is nothing peculiar about running it and it has been seemingly quite reliable. I have even thought of other fantastic uses besides providing quick little help videos and really, the limits of this application are at the limits of your imagination with this tool.

openSUSE Linux and all it’s fantastic tools add just a bit of happiness to my life, and I am so incredibly grateful to everyone that has had even the smallest part in making this possible.

References

SimpleScreenRecorder from software.opensuse.org
SimpleScreenRecorder Home Page

OpenMandriva | Review from an openSUSE User

OpenMandriva review title

My beginnings of using Linux started in 2002 on Mandrake Linux. I transitioned to full time Linux for my home computer in November of 2003 with Mandrake Linux on a Sony Vaio Laptop. This was my first serious attempt and getting the Winmodem going was… challenging. This is where I really learned to start documenting how I did things because nothing seemed as simple and straight forward as they were on the Amiga platform. This Sony didn’t last long as it did have a hardware failure, twice so I purchased a Dell 5100. It had the same Winmodem troubles but was quite solvable.

This is my biased review of OpenMandriva as an openSUSE Tumbleweed user using Plasma Desktop that once used Mandriva as a daily driver. I have a soft spot for Mandriva and consequently OpenMandriva, just on name sake.

To give you the option to bail here, I like OpenMandriva and think it’s a great distribution to use. At no point did I have a bad experience when installing and using it and would have no problem recommending it to anyone.

Installation

Good bad or otherwise, OpenMandriva will boot to a live media before you are able to install it. I can see the benefit of this but this is not my preference. Regardless, this is your only option. The installation system is the Calemares Universal Installation Framework to install the operating system to the computer, or in this case, a Virtual Machine (VM).

The installation is straight forward. You start out by providing your Language and Location details. I haven’t noted this before but just clicking near where you live will select the correct time zone so the drop down is not really necessary but I don’t think it would be a good idea to remove that feature.

Next, select your keyboard layout. I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to use a Dvorak keyboard… someday perhaps. The partition setup on this VM was to use the entire Virtual Disk so I selected Erase Disk. If I were going too use Manual partitioning, I would have likely set a separate root and home partition. For the purpose of this level of testing, it was not necessary to set it up for long term use.

You will then be required to enter your user information, select whether or not you want to log in automatically and if you want Root (Administrator user) to have a separate password.

The summary gives a nice brief look at the system changes.

You are given one final sanity check and when you commit, the installer goes through the rolling slideshow about OpenMandriva and upon completion will reboot the system.

Overall, the Installation process is painless. It should be noted, that I don’t use any proprietary drivers on most of my systems so I have no problems with OpenMandriva.

First Run and Impressions

The first run of OpenMandriva is a pleasant experience. It is a great implementation of the KDE Plasma desktop. The login splash screen presents itself in a kind of springtime freshness to it. Not that flowers are my preference on my desktop but most certainly around my home, especially in the spring and early summer is very welcoming.

OpenMandriva 22

I really appreciate the OpenMandriva Welcome screen. It gives a great introduction to the project. It is 100% community driven, uses KDE Plasma by default and what I find interesting is the Automated Build Farm.

The OpenMandriva Control center is a nice callback to the days of Mandriva. This has been at least, on the surface, a visual rewrite of the original control center. It has a more “welcome mat” feel to it. Rather than having the purpose hidden away, it is presented very clearly what the OpenMandriva Control Center is.

OpenMandriva 30

The package manager for OpenMandriva was familiar yet a bit different from what I remember during my Mandriva days. It seemed to function similarly and presented the necessary information for doing what needed to be done.

The update application, dnfdragora-updater, was a bit of a departure from what I was expecting on the desktop. openSUSE uses the KDE Plasma native Software Updates tool, which is what I was expecting for OpenMandriva. I really don’t care what tool they use as long as it works. My issue here was that this just opened up the Software Manager from the Control Center and in order to do the updates, you have to Select all packages and select Apply to begin the updates. I can see some benefits to tweaking installation applications as they come in but on the other side this is a somewhat tedious addition to the update process. The jury is out on this one for me. I see the utility in it, I just don’t think it is what I am used to.

For additional software availability, I selected the OpenMandriva repo-picker and added the 64-bit repositories and later, the 32-bit repositories because, I wanted to see if there were more options of applications to install.

Unfortunately, I was not able to install Discord or Telegram one was not available for installation and the other had some dependencies.

The default multimedia applications are a real nice mix and also highlights what is of project importance to the OpenMandriva community. Installed by default are Kdenlive, a very fine professional level video editor, Kwave Sound Editor and Simple Screen Recorder. I can’t recall any other distros that install that by default but my memory can be lacking.

I played around with OpenMandriva for quite some time. Not all of the tools, time in a day and week makes that somewhat prohibitive but I like a lot of what I saw. Unfortunately I was not able to install Telegram for the Desktop as there was a missing dependency.

Overall, I like what I see and I could be very comfortable here.

What I Like

OpenMandriva has a simple installer that is used by many distributions called Calemares. It works well on many distributions and this is no exception. A quick setup and off to the OpenMandriva races you go.

The OpenMandriva Welcome Screen and introduction is simply fantastic. I think all distributions should have something like this as a part of the on-boarding process into the project. It could be argued that there is almost too much information but in some ways, more is better.

The OpenMandriva Control Center is a fantastic centralized configuration system for the operating system. Like the Mandriva Control Center before it and not far off from the power of YaST, these Control Center tools are essentially a requirement for me to consider a Linux Distribution.

What I Don’t Like

The software selection is not as large as many other distributions but with enough effort, I could get what I want. There is the Automated Build Farm that would allow me to build whatever applications I see as necessary.

The initial layout of the desktop has a large taskbar on the bottom. Since it is Plasma, it is easily modified. The color theme of OpenMandriva is not a more comfortable dark theme. This is of course also easily adjusted.

It looks like at some point, OpenMandriva went from URPMI as the package manager to DNF. I realize that URPMI is in a kind of maintenance mode at this point and isn’t getting any more love. I would have preferred OpenMandriva had switched to using Zypper instead of DNF as I think Zypper is more mature and DNF doesn’t quite yet have feature parity with YUM. I must also say that DNF is great, I just happen to think Zypper is greater.

Final Thoughts

OpenMandriva is a fine Linux distribution with a fantastic history and strong roots. It is a very approachable distribution that feels well polished. I am will continue to watch this distribution with great interest and hope that they continue to progress and develop the distribution. The community has done a fine job up to this point.

I am not exactly sure where OpenMandriva sits in the spectrum of Linux Distributions. I don’t know who their target audience is. I am not sure if they are going after the “new to Linux” users or the more advanced users looking for something else.

I am very happy with openSUSE, the community and the supporting technology. If all of that were to disappear on me, OpenMandriva looks like a very welcoming and comfortable home for my personal computing life.

I would highly recommend giving OpenMandriva a spin. Check out the tools see how they work for you. It has a fine implementation of Plasma and the project very much appears focused. I truly wish this project great success.

References

OpenMandriva Home

OpenMandriva Automated Build Farm

Calamares Project

 

Blathering | Raspberry Pi to Monitor Air Quality with an Arduino based Thermostat

Arduino Test Board.jpg

I’d like to call myself a tinkerer, but I don’t tinker enough hold that badge. I do like to look at other projects and see what is out there for things to make my life more efficient. My target is to make my home, work for me, to automate every aspect that is feasible that has real value to me that will make life a little more efficient and have a bit better resolution on the control of the world around me. One area that needs some work is the HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) controls. I have been pondering this for a while and I think I have a good project plan to make my house work for me just a little bit better.

This is just a blathering of a project to come. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, think that this is ridiculous and a waste of time, fire those off too. I’m open. It may not change my mind but it is always worth listening to a dissenting opinion.

Project Goal

I want a home thermostat and environmental control system that is under my control and doesn’t babble off to a cloud someplace. I want it to be intelligent enough to manage the room temperatures, know if a window is open in the house, adjust the dampers in my ducting to cycle air between the floors differently depending on the time of year. I want it to be aware of the current outdoor weather as well.

Why Weather Aware?

Weather Station.jpgI want the system to know how humid it is inside and outside of the house. Much of the summer in Michigan, I don’t need to have the air conditioning on, but I do want to keep the humidity down inside of the house. I also prefer my windows open to closed, so it would be nice if I could have my thermostat would know if windows are open. There is no reason to dehumidify the house when my windows are open.

Targeted Features

The Arduino portion can handle a lot of the functions I am targeting but there is another angle, I am interested in knowing what the pollution is inside the house. I have only dug into this a little bit but the Enviro Raspberry Pi Accessory is able to measure indoor air quality, humidity, pressure, light and noise levels. This could even tell me how effective my filter is too and find the most cost effective filter that does the job. It would allow me to run a Design of Experiments to test and maximize the cleanliness of the air in my home. I don’t know the extent of the on board air quality sensor but it could really do the job.

The Plan

Thermostat.jpgConfigure and build the Arduino thermostat, that is robust, reliable and extensible to control the HVAC system. Once I can do that reliably, I’ll add more sensors to it, window sensor, temperature sensors of different rooms, duct pressure at the blower, then I can start to add automated dampers in the system to control temperature leveling in the house more precisely. Also, to shunt airflow to unused rooms in the house as well during extreme weather conditions. I want to have all the data, inputs, outputs, status and so forth to be accessible on my network so that at any point in time from any computer terminal, I can look at my “environmental system” status. Of course, it will somehow be running openSUSE Linux, someplace. Either a Raspberry Pi running openSUSE or better yet, something x86 based. It’ll be incredibly, joyously nerdy.

Next Steps

For now, I am still gathering information, parts lists and so forth. The first step in this chain will be to replace the thermostat with an Arduino Smart Thermostat that will have better functionality. Once that is working and I have a good understanding of how to manipulate it. I will start to add sensors to it. From there, I’ll figure out my greatest need to further improve efficiency and add the functionality needed.

References

Enviro Raspberry Pi Accessory to Monitor Air Quality at FOSSBYTES.com

Arduino Smart Thermostat

JohnsonControls.com equipment dampers and louvers