Manjaro | David's Blog

Manjaro fresh install – oof, things changed

I’m playing the new Factorio Space Age game, and so far I like it. One thing that has bothered me though is that it is not as smooth on Manjaro as it was on OpenSuSE. So I went looking for tweaks to fix things, and even get to a point where gamemode doesn’t work (cannot adjust CPU speed), and that may be due to a missing BIOS upgrade. Wow, talk about going down the rabbit hole.

Previously, I would install an OS, then mount my second hard drive as /home, and reboot. With this process, all the software I install later is pre-configured: they already have their config files in place from the previous OS.

One of the changes I made was to switch from legacy BIOS mode to UEFI BIOS mode. So I thought that a complete fresh installation of Manjaro was the best chance for success.

I did install some software prior to mounting my second hard drive as /home.

Things went pretty well, except for one thing: Manjaro uses Z shell (Zsh) instead of bash. Man, Zsh broke a lot of the terminal I use (Konsole).

When I tried to uninstall Z shell in the package manager, it barked at me with “removing zsh breaks dependency 'zsh' required by manjaro-zsh-config“

Okay, I uninstalled manjaro-zsh-config first.

Then trying to uninstall Z shell barks at me with “removing zsh breaks dependency 'zsh' required by manjaro-kde-settings“. Sigh. This will likely get rid of more than I’d like it to, but here I go….

Although I have successfully uninstalled Z shell, my terminal key bindings are still all fucked up. The <home> key doesn’t take me to the beginning of the line; the <end> key doesn’t take me to the end of the line. Sometimes the <end> key inserts a tilde (the ~ key).

Logged in as root, this sets me back to (a) default:

cat > /etc/inputrc << "EOF"
# Begin /etc/inputrc

# Make sure we don't output everything on the 1 line
set horizontal-scroll-mode Off

# Enable 8bit input
set meta-flag On 
set input-meta On

# Turns off 8th bit stripping
set convert-meta Off

# Keep the 8th bit for display
set output-meta On

# none, visible or audible
set bell-style none

# All of the following map the escape sequence of the 
# value contained inside the 1st argument to the 
# readline specific functions

"\eOd": backward-word
"\eOc": forward-word

# for linux console
"\e[1~": beginning-of-line
"\e[4~": end-of-line
"\e[5~": beginning-of-history
"\e[6~": end-of-history
"\e[3~": delete-char
"\e[2~": quoted-insert

# End /etc/inputrc
EOF

Bad news is, I’m still getting nothing for the <home> key, and a tilde for the <end> key.

And I cannot tell why. Clearly, something other than /etc/inputrc and ~./bashrc are at play here.

I did get switched to Wayland, instead of X11. Factorio does seem smoother now. That is what I really wanted.

A web page, scrolling quickly (Firefox on Amazon), did spontaneously crash to reboot. Oof, that’s bad. Thankfully, I didn’t have anything else running which suffers from catastrophic failure of a spontaneous reboot.

Quarterly inventory – 2024 Q3

Dear FutureMe,

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

How is your personal life going?

How is your work life going?

How is your Volunteer Service life going?
Future me

Personal Life

Not really a whole lot going on. I have flat feet, and so when I recently got to be Master of Ceremonies at a volunteer service event, I wore my nicest shoes, but all that time in them injured my left foot something fierce. Here a week later, my foot still hurts.

I’d injured my foot several weeks back. My son had told me about Hoka shoes, and indeed they are like walking on marshmallows. Between them and keeping my foot elevated while sitting, I’d recovered. But then I felt the need to dress as sharp as I could for the event, and I re-injured my foot.

Yesterday I was rather depressed. That shows up rarely, maybe two times in a quarter, but it was present yesterday.

I had a ton of fun about a month ago, migrating one of my volunteer service websites to a new host. I moved from Amazon Lightsail to Linode. I was thrilled that the move went so smoothly, so I did it again, this time to my internal Proxmox server, documenting the whole thing for that blog post.

Oh – and I gave up on OpenSuSE and moved my main machine to Manjaro. Manjaro has been pretty good. I wish the KDE tilling window manager script worked on it; although I can keep hitting meta+arrow to tile windows, it is kind of dumb that I have to. This is a KDE problem, not a Manjaro problem – but because I did migrate, I also got the KDE “upgrade”. That would have happened had I stayed on OpenSuSE too.

Work Life

If $34,000 dropped into my lap today, I would retire tomorrow. I did finally clear my retirement service credit buy-back. I talked about that in Quarterly Inventory 2023 Q2. It is done. Magically, I gained 6.1 years of service credit overnight. The better part is that it frees up $300 per month, which I need because of inflation.

We added a new product, Kiteworks, to replace a service that Proofpoint exited. So far, the Kiteworks company and support are terrible. Because Proofpoint has been going down in quality because of the sell-out to Thoma Bravo, I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason they (Proofpoint) recommended Kiteworks is that they got a kickback. I have zero evidence of that, but it seems to me like the kind of thing Thoma Bravo would do. Anyway, Kiteworks sucks: would not recommend. I’ll probably do a blog post about it later; but there are four problems:

The interface is somewhat opaque, and difficult to figure out where particular things are, when I need to change them.
There is no documentation. What documentation there is, is from three years ago when the service was vastly different: it in no way applies to the product today.
The implementation engineer didn’t explain to us what the effects of the choices were, so we deployed badly to 2,200 of 5,000 users. 5,000 users would have been blindsided with a surprise “what the hell?” situation, except that we caught it some 1,800 users in.
So … we’ve had a stable environment for several years now, we’ve deployed Kiteworks, and 1% of machines the Outlook Plugin is deployed to are now crashing randomly and silently, losing all work, … and your technical support is blaming Outlook? Repair Outlook and the problem will go away? Re-image the machine to a fresh image and the problem will go away? Y’all are clowns. How many sets of log files do I have to upload before y’all will start looking at the problem? The problem is Kiteworks Outlook Plugin. We did not have this problem prior to installing your program. If there were a virtual clue-by-4 I could deploy over the Internet, you’d be badly bruised right now.

I’m not really enjoying work right now. I’m thankful I have a good boss, though. He’s great.

Volunteer Service Life

I very much enjoyed being Master of Ceremonies at our Fall event. The speaker was wonderful. It didn’t hurt that he grew up and joined our fellowship 45 miles north of here. The whole event was great.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that this year I get to be President of the Board on our little 501_(c)(3) here. That job title, plus $5, will get you a fancy coffee at Starschmucks.¹

Anyway, it weighs on me that our finances are not sound. We previously had a member who contributed $1,200 per month to our Central Office, and he died three years ago. We’d gotten a $6,000 refund on taxes due to Covid-19 and keeping our employee on the payroll, so it looked like we had money. During Covid-19 a meeting started up in a shack, off-the-record, to avoid government interference. Well, last August, they hooked up a second air conditioning unit in serial (electrically) and then overnight the shack burned to the ground. People showed up for the 7:00 AM meeting to find smoke and embers. No injuries, thankfully. Well, that meeting contributed $300 per month, and poof, that’s gone. Between this and inflation putting the hurt on everyone, our Central Office contributions are not meeting our expenses. We’re going to have to fire or reduce the hours of our single part-time employee. It is depressing.

I’ve got another website, which hosts recordings of speaker meetings. Something in WordPress 6.6 caused it trouble, so I downgraded to WordPress 6.5. But now the login screen takes two minutes to complete. That box is on Ubuntu, and I’d like to migrate to Debian instead. So I need to do a migration again (mentioned above), but I also need to schedule that with the guy who does most of the uploads to it. I don’t have analytics running on it, either, so I don’t have a good feel for what days / times of day it is least used.

I first read that joke in 1981 or 1982, in the Garfield comic, where Jim Davis was commenting on inflation. A cup of coffee went from 25 cents to a dollar at restaurants. Jon made some inane observation and Garfield replied with “that, and a buck will get you a cup of coffee.” When Starbucks became popular in the mid 1990’s I revived the joke with the Starbucks attribution. I still see it being used once in a while on Slashdot or Reddit. ↩︎

Migrated to Manjaro on my main machine

I actually did this several weeks ago. I like it.

What I like about it is that it is a rolling release, so for example, Firefox is version 129.0 – not stuck on an older ESR (Extended Support Release). I wanted the newer Firefox for PDF editing, including graphic file insertion.

I did have to go through all the different KDE plugins I’d installed for tiling window managers, and delete them and the hidden subdirectories they had configuration files in. KDE no longer automatically tiles nicely the way the previous KWin tiling script did; but, I have a few keystrokes assigned to tile right or left, and it is not too bad.

I have not yet figured out the correct installation order for Proton + Wine + Steam + other stuff to get Windows games to install and run on Steam. That was the last thing I’d done on OpenSUSE, and it was very nice. I’m glad I’d seen that it can work – now all I have to do is spend some time experimenting or hanging out in the Manjaro forums to get it to work.

The only thing that is a little broken is that sound sometimes just quits in Firefox. If I hit the volume mute and unmute, it comes back. That is slightly annoying; but if that is the worst thing that happens to me, I’m still a pretty lucky guy.

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.