Leaving Meltdown and Spectre Behind?

Updating to the T the W530.
Happy so say, that after installing the whole thing and rebooting, the beast, er.. The lappie works A Ok... In these days of Meltdown and Spectre this is no small potatoes.

Updating The Monster

Showing some love for the W530 by installing a bunch of updates.
Its been a while since I've used the huge lappie that delivers.

Carpe Linux (Install)

At last!
Today I've been able to start with my personal Linux chores list..
The W530 now sports a fresh -over an encrypted LVM- Linux Mint XFCE installation.
What a fucking ball breaking deal is configuring a bare bones install to suit your needs...

Linux Chores Are Happy Chores

Or so they say, anyway...
Couple of things I have to do on zhe here boxens:

• T430:

Make the installation on top of an encrypted LVM
Switch to XFCE
Install Linux Mint 18
It currently has an ancient Linux Mint Cinnamon, and that its a shame, since it is starting to show its age.
And even tho it has an encrypted $HOME install, I feel more confident in having the whole enchilada encrypted, specially on a take out of home lappie.

• W530:

Make the installation on top of an encrypted LVM
Switch to XFCE
Right now has Linux MInt 18 Cinnamon, but I'm growing fond of XFCE, so..
Once again, the encrypted $HOME feels unsecure.

• Optiplex 755:

Swtich to a 64 bits install.
It currently has Linux Mint 18 XFCE, but 32 bits, and I want to switch to 64 bits, mostly because of Chrome and then Netflix... Even tho this boxen can only get a hold of 4 GB RAM.

Kernel Crud Delete Mode for Opti

And then it was Colossus turn to flush all those old kernels...
Nearly 1 GB worth of HDD recovered.
No initial error, like happened with Opti a few days ago... Deletion went on without any problem.

Captain Nemo Wants Your Password

I came across this a couple of times already...
Both on the Optiplex as well as on the W530, not sure why on Earth it might require sudo to do exactly what tho...

Cinnamon Panel Without Text

This happened a couple of times... Always when returning from a Suspend...
All the text vanishes from Cinnamon's Panel, so you basically get a "Text-less Cinnamon Panel" ;)
To fix it, restart Cinnamon by:

Alt + F2 and type r and press ENTER

Linux Mint 18 on the Thinkpad W530 (2)

A little screen shot of the HDD partitioning used on the LM1 8 install on the W530, that is, the almost obligatory image of the sliced SSD for the current Colussus incarnation.
I've used it a bit these last couple of days, it fucking flies!
Also, it looks amazing on the W530's FHD display...

Linux Mint 18 on the Thinkpad W530

So, Wednesday it was finally time to move the W530 to Linux Mint...
No biggies... Just part of my plan of getting out of Unity, guess this time for good.
Swapped HDDs with the one that was on the T60p (I guess...) and fired up the installer.
The thing literally flies... And I mean right from the very same installer.
No problems at all during the install, it took less than 30 minutes IIRC.

Typical Mid-Friday Mess

Yesterday, around noon...
I've been playing a bit with the Optiplex once again... You know, the usual distro/ hardware hopping here and there...

Finally! ~/Desktop/sync.local.sh

I can't believe I haven't done this before...
I've been doing local backups to a series of external USB drives for ages and ages, I have way too much data to make backups on internet or to a remote server, what I do is that I simply stored on a different location one os those USB drives.
Of course, one of the boxes is the Master, and it pushes to the external USB drives the changes, and the other boxes are the Slaves, getting the changes from the USB drive.
Problem was that, since obviously the function changed, I had to remember which script file was the one I was supposed to execute on each box.
What I finally did was to create an alias on the Desktop of each of the lappies I'm using at the moment, pointing to the correct script for either backing up or restoring to or from the external USB drive.

The Unity Desktop

Well, a modern one, I guess...
Sort of a solarized palette... Seems like the cool kids nowadays replaced their Fuzzy Eco desktop backgrounds for these solarized, sometimes flat, images.
I'm Ok with that.
The image is, for what I Googled, from an upcoming video game or similar.

In Praise of Trusty Tahr

Guess that I'll maintain my main rig (my beloved W530) running Trusty for a little longer...
I've tested Xenial on the X140E, and even tho it does work Ok, and looks quite well, there are few glitches here and there that might become a show-stopper, so, keep it simple stupid and all that...

The Unity Desktop

I've mentioned this theme before:

Numix Touch Flat

I love it a lot, but, there are two things that don't make this an amazing theme (for me, of course)...
It doesn't have top rounded corner windows, and it has the damn "black spaces" plaguing, most of all, Gedit.

My Weather Indicator Story

So, the other day I was looking for something here on OE10, and I've noticed some of the old screenshots, most of those had an applet to show the temperature around here. I really miss those... Is nice to go back and be able not only to see an old screenshot of a desktop from halcyon days, but also get to know the temperature at that moment.
Getting one up & working became a necessity!
After a bit of Googling and after adding it repository, installed "My Weather Indicator":

colossus > sudo apt-get install my-weather-indicator
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree      
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  account-plugin-windows-live empathy-common folks-common gnome-contacts
  gstreamer0.10-nice gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-x
  gstreamer1.0-nice guile-2.0-libs libavahi-gobject0 libfarstream-0.1-0
  libfarstream-0.2-2 libfolks-eds25 libfolks-telepathy25 libfolks25 libgc1c2
  libgupnp-igd-1.0-4 libhdb9-heimdal libkdc2-heimdal libmeanwhile1
  libmission-control-plugins0 libnice10 libntdb1 libpurple-bin libpurple0
  libtelepathy-farstream3 libtelepathy-logger3 libupstart1 libzephyr4
  linux-headers-3.16.0-30 linux-headers-3.16.0-30-generic
  linux-image-3.16.0-30-generic linux-image-extra-3.16.0-30-generic
  python-ntdb signon-plugin-password telepathy-gabble telepathy-haze
  telepathy-logger telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  geoclue-hostip gir1.2-geocodeglib-1.0 gir1.2-json-1.0 libgeocode-glib0
  python3-dateutil python3-requests-oauthlib python3-tz
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  geoclue-hostip gir1.2-geocodeglib-1.0 gir1.2-json-1.0 libgeocode-glib0
  my-weather-indicator python3-dateutil python3-requests-oauthlib python3-tz
0 upgraded, 8 newly installed, 0 to remove and 14 not upgraded.
Need to get 4,269 kB of archives.
After this operation, 17.2 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

Ok, so, 17 MB... What a hell!! But...
Anyway, installed it, and then problems started for good.

It crashed upon starting it a couple of times, not the best way of starting things...
In the end, it did started, but didn't update any weather at all, so changed the source of weather info to Weather Underground, and restarted the program... well restarted is just a saying... After that My Weather Indicator refused to start at all.
Digging a bit, I found this:

colossus > ./my-weather-indicator
(my-weather-indicator:12951): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: unity.css:29:40: Missing opening bracket in color definition

#####################################################
System: Linux
Machine: x86_64
Node: colossus
Release: 3.16.0-76-generic
Version: #98~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jun 24 17:04:54 UTC 2016
Platform: Linux-3.16.0-76-generic-x86_64-with-Ubuntu-14.04-trusty
My-Weather-Indicator version: 0.8.1-0extras16.04.1
#####################################################

****** Requesting timezone identificacion
1
***** refreshing weather *****
--- Updating data in location 0 ---
****** Updating weather
****** Calculating rawOffset
-------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------
Underground Weather Service url: http://api.wunderground.com/api/87582/conditions/forecast/lang:EN/pws:1/q/-34.5873579,-58.3915699.json
-------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./my-weather-indicator", line 69, in
    mwi = MWI()
  File "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/my-weather-indicator/share/my-weather-indicator/myweatherindicator.py", line 143, in __init__
    self.load_preferences()
  File "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/my-weather-indicator/share/my-weather-indicator/myweatherindicator.py", line 369, in load_preferences
    self.update_weather()
  File "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/my-weather-indicator/share/my-weather-indicator/myweatherindicator.py", line 158, in update_weather
    self.update_menu(i)
  File "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/my-weather-indicator/share/my-weather-indicator/myweatherindicator.py", line 682, in update_menu
    weather = self.weatherservices[index].get_weather()
  File "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/my-weather-indicator/share/my-weather-indicator/wundergroundapi.py", line 225, in get_weather
    weather_data = self._get_weather()
  File "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/my-weather-indicator/share/my-weather-indicator/wundergroundapi.py", line 165, in _get_weather
    gvff('low', i, parsed_json)['fahrenheit'],
TypeError: string indices must be integers
And that's when I gave up on it:

colossus > sudo apt-get remove my-weather-indicator
[sudo] password for esteban:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree      
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  account-plugin-windows-live empathy-common folks-common
  gir1.2-geocodeglib-1.0 gir1.2-json-1.0 gnome-contacts gstreamer0.10-nice
  gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-x gstreamer1.0-nice guile-2.0-libs
  libavahi-gobject0 libfarstream-0.1-0 libfarstream-0.2-2 libfolks-eds25
  libfolks-telepathy25 libfolks25 libgc1c2 libgeocode-glib0 libgupnp-igd-1.0-4
  libhdb9-heimdal libkdc2-heimdal libmeanwhile1 libmission-control-plugins0
  libnice10 libntdb1 libpurple-bin libpurple0 libtelepathy-farstream3
  libtelepathy-logger3 libupstart1 libzephyr4 linux-headers-3.16.0-30
  linux-headers-3.16.0-30-generic linux-image-3.16.0-30-generic
  linux-image-extra-3.16.0-30-generic python-ntdb python3-dateutil
  python3-requests-oauthlib python3-tz signon-plugin-password telepathy-gabble
  telepathy-haze telepathy-logger telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  my-weather-indicator
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 14 not upgraded.
After this operation, 16.3 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

And then the repo:

colossus > sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:atareao/atareao
 Applications from atareao
 More info: https://launchpad.net/~atareao/+archive/ubuntu/atareao
Press [ENTER] to continue or ctrl-c to cancel removing it

The Unity Desktop

Been a while since the last Unity Desktop Post around here...
So here it goes...
Using my own customized version of Ambiance, with the enhanced (at least IMHO) Launcher that I stole from a beautiful theme named Numix Touch Flat.

The BIOS Update That Demands a Battery

And if you don't have one, fuck you, dude!
I love Thinkpads, I've been using them with Linux for ages now; but crap like this (and I don't want even start on the sh*t they pull wiht batteries nowadays) really makes me mad.

Ok, so, I wanted to upgrade the BIOS on the T430, in order to try to get a battery, since the one that came with the lappie died...
But, it turns out that:

The battery needs to be charged to avoid an accidental power-off during an update. Turn off the computer and connect the AC adapter to charge the battery.

The thing is, the T430 battery is wiped dead... I was screwed...
Luckily, the battery from the W530 worked A Ok...

Get Back To Synergy, You Fool!

One of those things, you know... You stop one day, and then you don't use it for a while...
And then, you forget completely about it...
A senior moment, no doubt about it...
Anyways, I'm back onto Synergy, big time.
Here is the synergy.conf file from Colossus, as I'm using Synergy at least right now, with Krull & Colossus, as usual, tunnelling the whole thing thru SSH...


## /etc/synergy.conf

section: screens
        colossus:
                switchCorners = none
                switchCornerSize = 0
        krull:
                switchCorners = none
                switchCornerSize = 0
end

section: aliases
        krull:
                10.120.10.3
end

section: links
        colossus:
                left = krull
        krull:
                right = colossus
end

section: options
        switchDelay                             = 500
        screenSaverSync                         = false
        keystroke(shift+control+left)           = switchToScreen(krull)
        keystroke(shift+control+right)          = switchToScreen(colossus)
end

The Optimess

Last Thursday, installing Ubuntu Server 14.04 on the Optiplex...
Made a mess of the working table during the duration.
The idea is to, eventually, get this server, via Plex, to work as a media server at home.
Will see..

The Unity Desktop

It's been a while since the last Unity desktop post around here...
Right now playing a bit with the Yosembiance theme, specifically, with the "Yosembiance-Ubuntu-Orange" variant.
This is hardly news worthy, but, once again, there are problems with Evolution.& Gedit's upper tab.