Month: June 2024

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.

Dell Inspiron 16 5630 laptop: mostly good, one flaw

So, I needed a laptop with a USB-C connector because I bought the Tilt Five Augmented Reality system. I hope they work with the publisher to finish the Settlers of Catan game. But I digress.

I needed a laptop with a USB-C connector, and I also wanted something with reasonably good hardware specs. So I went shopping at my favorite shopping site: Techbargains.com > Categories > Computers. This was a while ago.

When they mark an item as an Editor’s Choice, I have found it to be good, and a good deal. They had applied that Editor’s Choice logo to the Dell Inspiron 16 5630 laptop deal they had found, and indeed, it was pretty good. $700 for a 13th Generation Intel Core i7 that can hit 5 GHz, 16 GB RAM, 1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe solid-state drive, and a 16″ screen.

Of course, today they have a similar machine for $520, which shows you what seven months can do with Moore’s Law. But I digress.

Anyway, I’ve been pretty happy with this laptop. It has an interesting feature, where the lid hinge has feet that stick out. When I lift the lid, the feet rotate down, and lift the body of the laptop up off the table.

Also, lifting the lid powers the device on, which is a nice touch. We used to get features like this in the early days of computing. I’m still a little sad that every computer doesn’t get powered on by hitting the space bar. Apple started that, and then some PC makers copied it. But today, I don’t know of any PCs that support it. My main home machine goes from boot to login screen in about 20 seconds. This makes it convenient to power off when I don’t need it: man, electricity bills will be bad in the future. But I’d really prefer to just hit the space bar to power on.

There is a problem with using the lid hinge to rotate feet into lifting the body up for airflow / cooling. You see, the air vents are on the underside of the laptop body. The lifting is needed because otherwise the cooling fans are sucking on a (poor) vacuum: the body, flat on the table, sits flat on the table. There’s maybe a 1/16 inch or 2 mm of space provided by the little rubber feet underneath.

I got the bright idea to hook this laptop up to my TV as an external monitor. It’s a great TV, and what could be better than running Civilization 6 on a large screen with a fast computer in my easy chair? Add in a Logitech M570 Wireless Trackball, and I’ve got a great gaming setup.

Well, I don’t want to look at both screens: so I configured Windows to keep running with the lid closed.

But closing the lid raises the little feet and cuts off the airflow. Whoops.

I’m a little sad that I need to find a way to prop up the backend of the laptop so that it doesn’t go into thermal shutdown when operating in lid-closed mode.

But other than that, I like this laptop.