I’ve known about the void-packages repository for a while, it is quite similar to the AUR. Its a place where you can contribute new programs and libraries to be packaged in Void Linux, and its needed if you want to install some non-free packages like Discord.

OpenLP is a free and open source worship presentation software, mainly for churches. Basically, it lets you display Bible verses, lyrics and the like. Its a tool used in my local church and I find it quite great! Its latest stable release just came out a few days ago, and since I noticed Void didn’t have the update yet. I decided to try updating it myself.

I expected to do some complexstuff, but after a quick read of their contributing guide, and after checking the history of commits previously done for the package I was going to work with, I realized it shouldn’t be too difficult.

In my case, I only changed the version and the checksum, I did ./xbps-src pkg OpenLP and, like magic, I was able to build it and install it without a problems.

However, when I ran some tests (using the -Q flag in xbps-src) I noticed that it was mostly fine, but a few tests failed to run. I had already submitted a PR, and I decided to try and look for solutions.

Sidequest: IRC Chat

I went to the []Libera IRC network](https://libera.chat) to chat in the #openlp chatroom and ask some questions. I eventually realized that there were some changes done in Python 3.11 that were not accounted for just yet in this latest release. Although a few MRs later they should be fixed.

Regardless, I now knew that the problems were on their side, and even if the tests failed, the program was working alright.

Then I felt like selhosting my own IRC web client to not miss any messages, just in case. So I went ahead on my Yunohost applications and ended up trying out The Lounge, which can be easily installed. I found it quite good, and its always connected, which was incredibly useful for me. I was initially on Libera’s public Kiwi instance, but I find TL to be quite good, and its also more up to date, relatively speaking.

Updating dependencies

So anywyays, I got a couple suggestions on my PR’s GitHub thread and ended up updating two other Python dependencies in my PR, I was actually unaware of them, but another mantainer, who is also a fellow Joel, sent me the patch so I could commit them myself without much trouble.

After adding a couple other lines to skip tests that still are not working on Python 3.11, building the package with ./xbps-src pkg -Q OpenLP is now successful on my end.

Finishing words

By the time I write this, my PR is still not merged just yet. There is also a chance that the OpenLP devs make a new version by tomorrow and I have to update my PR once again.

For now, this was quite a fun project, I kind of wanna look for other simple programs and tools that kinda build themselves just fine, and contribute that way, even if I only change a couple of lines everytime.

I will update this blogpost if my PR is successful or some other news happen.

This is day 10 of #100DaysToOffload

New laptop

I’ve used a fairly old laptop for a while, it has served me really well and I don’t really have complaints, other than the hardware being quite damaged. The laptop fell and a corner is pretty much busted, alongside 2 USB ports. I’ve done fine with a dongle, but it was really annoying. The hinge was broken too. It was flimsy and whenever I opened the lid it would turn on by itself, or turn off if I moved the screen a bit too much.

It also used dual graphics (Optimus? I think?) with an Intel integrated graphics card and a discrete NVIDIA GPU, which gave me some problems and it made the device incredibly hot at times. I actually disabled it via the BIOS for a while because the fan was also quite annoying and it never felt right when playing games or doing graphically intensive stuff. It was more laggy than the Intel graphics.

I’ve thought about running Windows on this device again since the NVIDIA drivers worked better there, still undecided, to be honest, since running Intel graphics is just fine most of the time.

I got an ASUS Vivobook S15 The new laptop does not have dual graphics, it has the new Intel Xe graphics that I’ve heard are a lot better than the old integrated HD Graphics (terrible name btw). It has an 11th gen core i5, 8GB of ram and 500GB of nvme storage. Which is a lot more than I need, since I lived with 240GB for the last 4 years.

Its been quite fun to use. It came with Windows 11 installed and I have decided to keep it there since I want to do some gaming and I also depend on some software for school that only runs well with that OS. I have ran some on Linux before, but I always had annoying hiccups. I decided to stop that and just use what they expect me to use. Also I wanted to try a couple games, that seem to be a bit harder to setup on Fedora, the distro I chose to dual boot alongside Windows.

New distro

It’s not as new, since I’ve been using Fedora on my old laptop for a bit more than a month now, I am also trying KDE Plasma with it. I’ll write about all that later in the future.

For the new laptop, I considered running EndeavourOS once again, but it did not support Secure Boot, and while it was easy to disable and run everything fine, Fedora supports it out of the box, and it was just nice to have, even if not really, so I just went with it.

I decided to try out BTRFS and also encrypt my partition. Both things have been going fine, but I’ve only used that for a couple of days, I’ll write about it later, probably.

I also installed GNOME, which I kinda avoided in the past not only due to it being hard to customize, but because it was laggy on my old device. However, in this new hardware, all the animations are perfectly rendered and buttery smooth. I think I’ll stick with Plasma for now.

Another thing I wanted was fingerprint support, since my device has a sensor for that, but it looks like neither DE detected it, which was quite sad. I will look into it another time, probably.

Windows again

I don’t know if I ever mentioned it in a blog, but I had tried for a while to get Linux installed on our family desktop. So I installed Linux Mint on it a few months ago. It worked fine, but unfortunately the graphics drivers were not ideal (It has an NVIDIA Quadro on it, which I would use for CAD and such, but I never did) but other than that it was good.

Sadly my sister was not a fan of LibreOffice, and even tho I installed a virtual machine with the software she wanted, she just would not use it. Instead she would ask my parents to use their laptops whenever she had to do pretty much anything, and basically nobody would use the desktop at all.

That’s why I ended up going back to Windows there, since my parents were annoyed too at having to lend their devices for such simple things. At the device works and will see some more use now.

Finishing up

Its really fun to have the latest software in decent hardware all running like a charm. Its great to have a laptop that feels super solid instead of feeling cheap and plastic. I am really happy with what I got, and I also have a place to fill with cool geeky stickers without the thought of “I will replace this in a few years so why bother” I used to have before.

Thanks for reading, I’ll keep y’all updated

First I tried to check the graphics driver settings, the desktop has a low end NVIDIA quadro card, so I assumed it could be having issues of some sort. I looked up some useful information and ideas in a few forums, but nothing seemed to be solving the issue, however, sometimes the screen would just not work even when left alone, and others, it would be fine despite heavy use. I was struggling to find some pattern that could give me any other hints at what was causing the issue.

Then I decided to change the plug. The graphics card uses mini Display Port, which is not really that great of a port, so I finally figured it might as well be the root of the issue.

And voila, the problem was solved, I was just about to try and put something like Solus OS in there, but the problem was not even that.

And I don’t really know why I did not figure it out earlier. The screen didn’t even showed up the monitor logo at boot or anything else, it was just barely keeping itself on.

So, today I learned that you should not jump to conclusions when you have not even tried the simplest solution there is to a problem.

This has been day 85 of #100DaysToOffload

I decided to go with Linux Mint for a couple of reasons, first of all, I already have Linux Mint on my family computer, and I have already used Debian based distributions, such as MX Linux and Pop_OS!, so it’s not like I am diving into totally unknown territory, which would have been the case with Fedora or OpenSUSE, a couple distros I was also considering.

The switch was actually incredibly easy and fast, this is due to me being clever before and having a separate /home partition, which made it so I just had to replace the root partition and everything else would stay the same.

When it comes to configs and such, I didn’t really have any caveats other than Thunderbird’s version being too old in Mint’s repositories, which meant that I had to set up everything again, but nothing too difficult to manage.

Firefox however, worked perfectly, I just left my configured .mozilla folder untouched and my profile got picked up as expected. I guess the new changes made with the collaboration between Linux Mint and Mozilla might have helped with that, or at least it did not interfere.

I ended up having to add quite a few PPA’s for stuff like Inkscape, Tailscale and Alacritty, the only package I wish had a newer version is newsboat, since FreshRSS support was only added in version 2.24, so I can’t really access it easily. However, I realized I don’t really view my feeds from the terminal that often, so I’ll just stick to the Web interface.

I installed Steam and NVIDIA drivers and everything is working just fine so far. All of the games run perfectly without any caveats as far as I could see and the Optimus hybrid graphics things that tend to suck is working decently so far, I can switch between different modes and everything, so I am happy with it.

In case you are interested, I had to leave Void Linux due to the same graphical glitches that I also got the first time I tried it, and also some Steam games did not display correctly either.

Wrapping up, I am quite happy with Linux Mint, I have managed to try and install everything I needed, only a few exceptions showed up, but they are not super important for me. If you are seeing this post, it means Jekyll also got setup flawlessly, which is great.

This has been day 80 of #100DaysToOffload

Touchpad tap to click, natural scrolling

So, for some reason my touchpad was not working properly, since I could not tap it to trigger a click, and I wanted to avoid unnecessary hand movement.

After some research, everything I needed to do was create a new file located in etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf.

The folder itself didn’t exist for me, so I had to use mkdir too. The contents of this file are the following:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "touchpad catchall"
    Driver "libinput"
    Option "Tapping" "on"
    Option "NaturalScrolling" "on"
    Option "ClickMethod" "clickfinger"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
EndSection

After a system restart, my touchpad was working as expected. It is worth noting that the original files to handle this are in a different location, which is in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d, but those files should not be edited, because they might be altered in a system update.

Printer drivers

This is one of many problems that made me quit Void Linux the first time I took it for a spin. Now I understand CUPS a little better, and I also know that I am able to install RPM packages with Void Linux, since RPM it’s available in their repositories.

Doing this might not be ideal, since I could write a proper installation script using tools provided by Void itself to turn either deb or rpm to an xbps file.

Basically, my Brother printer has a simple bash script that uses RPM to install everything, I ran it, filled the things that were asked like printer model, IP, terms and conditions, and in the end, it just worked.

Since I am lazy, the package won’t get any updates and I knew it was not as big of a risk, I just went for it, and now I can do wireless printing painlessly.

Switching to Pipewire

Pipewire is kinda awesome now, and I decided to use it once again in Void. I’ve already used it back when I left Void, and I also set it up for Endeavor too, I am confident on it, it has not failed me and it handles audio a lot better than PulseAudio ever did in my experience.

For example, under PulseAudio, some application’s behavior was not as it should be. From time to time, volume changes weren’t applied to current audio devices, or after I muted, I was unable to unmute, and stuff like that.

Now on Pipewire, everything just works so far.

Wrapping up

So, yeah, I have done a few more small changes, like switching to Spectrwm once again or changing my GTK theme, as well as other details, but nothing specific, other than the problems I just mentioned.

This has been day 68 of #100DaysToOffload

First, it was a school assignment, I would win some extra points and I was already willing to make the move. But also, I was pretty dumb and couldn’t figure out printing, as well as some graphical issues, where the screen would blink and glitch seemingly at random.

Endeavour OS is great

I really enjoyed my time using Endeavour, it was a really easy to use distribution that provided me with everything I needed out of the box. I was finally able to enjoy a pretty minimal, yet usable Arch configuration, I had everything working almost perfectly, and if something was going wrong it was usually just me being dumb and setting some config incorrectly.

I may go back to this distro in the future, or even finally give a change to pure Arch in my machine, since I found it all pretty smooth and it was always fun to have updates waiting for me almost everyday.

The problem

My main problem has nothing to do with Endeavour or Arch itself, its just an AUR package that required an old Python version, and prevented me from updating my system once Python got an update. There where some comments in the AUR website, but it seems like it can’t be easily fixed until the maintainer decides to step up.

Another slight problem was just the amount of stuff I felt was not needed by me. For example, Endeavour OS comes packaged with a lot of small terminal utilities that can do everything from changing wallpapers, checking for updates, making logs and such. All of these had small dependencies that were quite annoying, because I didn’t really use them. A lot of those packages depended on each other too, and it was difficult to get rid of them all.

But, being honest, I guess the main reason I left Endeavour was because I was no longer able to update it, which is kind of the whole point.

Letting go of my early tether

I have went with many distros for a while now. But something they all had in common was that all of them were dual-booted alongside Windows, and of course, all of them had broken bootloaders at least once in their lifetime, because of some random Windows update.

Funnily enough, as soon as I was done backing up my files and config files to a second hard drive, I rebooted to Windows to do the same to the files I had there. Then rebooted once more, for a second check on my Linux site, and voila, my bootloader was gone.

Frustrated, I decided to just go for it and plug my USB drive, change the boot order and install Void alone, once and for all.

Void everywhere

Have you ever heard of Guru Laghima?, he was a wise man, who wrote something I decided to apply here:

“New growth cannot exist without first the destruction of the old.”

I ran the void-install script, an ncurses screen showed up, I configured everything. It was finally the point of no return, the partitions had to be wiped and reset, I also finally made a new, separate /home partition, and wrote the changes.

Endeavour was gone, Windows was gone, and even some files I forgot to back up, were also, gone.

But you know what, that is completely fine, as Guru Laghima once said:

“Let go your earthly tether. Enter the void. Empty and become wind”

With nothing installed, I was finally born again, Void was even more beautiful than I remembered, there were a lot of new things and the packages available have grown quite a bit. There are still some problems here and there, but in the end, I know everything is going to be alright.

This has been day 64 of #100DaysToOffload

I am actually quite happy of how much icons I managed to do during the days before my previous blog, since the following days after that were quite tiresome. I wonder if spending that time playing around on Inkscape affected the amount of work I got after, but there was no hurry at the time, and while there was work and projects I could have done instead, in the end there would have been no difference.

One of the assignments I got was from a teacher who is a bit of a Linux evangelist. He asked us to install a Linux distro and showcase how it works, as well as how to install a program on it. It was just an optional thing that would only score a few more points to the final grades, but since I was already using Linux, I couldn’t help but going the extra mile

Switching to EndeavourOS

Obviously, I already knew how to do all of the requirements, and the teacher said we could do it on a Virtual Machine if we wanted. However I decided to take the opportunity and switch my distro once again.

I was also having a few caveats with Void, there were some random graphical glitches, almost as if the display connector was not working anymore, sometimes the screen became just glitchy lines and I had to close my current window or switch workspace in my window manager (so it was not a hardware issue, and it has not happened since I switched).

Another “problem” was that I just could not figure out how to make cups work with my printer and stuff. In the end I realized that I was just dumb and managed to make it work, but I was already on EndeavourOS, and as I plus I managed to use the AUR to get scanning working too!

I ended up choosing EndeavourOS mostly because I wanted to experience Arch without the hassle of installing it. In the end I was quite happy, because Endeavor is almost as light as Void, it only had around 800 packages installed, which is quite less than I thought compared with the ISO’s weight.

The installation had no problems, but the online installer took a lot of time to finish up since my internet connection is not that great.

Overall I am pretty happy with how it turned out and despite a few hiccups getting Jekyll running again, I managed to make it all work and it has been wonderful.

Delivering final projects

So, somehow, I managed to go overkill on all of my projects despite my severe lack of confidence on the knowledge I have acquired during this semester. I really struggled with most of the subjects and professors. I felt like most of them were lackluster in the content given each class, or maybe its just me not paying enough attention in class.

I am not really that sure of whats the best way to learn for me. I thought I would like to have online classes this time, that my teachers would learn how to manage Google Classroom, how to setup their meetings on Google Calendar, or something like that. Instead, we had to wait for their message sharing a photo taken from their phone showing the Google Meet link.

Anyways, the point is, I had to deliver two pretty big projects, one of them consists on simulating the production process of something, in my case,chose Yogurt. The second one was about the text adventure game I had to do for my Discrete Math class.

I felt quite dissapointed by having to do the first project as a simulation only. I learned about LabVIEW, a proprietary software that uses a graphical programming language known as G We learned a bit about DAQ cards, PLC’s and other protocols related to human-machine interfaces. But in the end, I only used basic algebra, booleans, event structures and for loops to “simulate” the whole process, and I didn’t know if I should be proud or sad, because it looks like my block diagram was the most complex one in the class.

I felt like I should have learned more, that I should have actually connected some PLC to my computer or setup a server somewhere. I have learned more about computers and communication protocols just by switching to Linux and setting up a blog!

Now, the second project was a bit more exciting for me. I had to make a text adventure game for my Discrete Math class. I wanted to go with full force and use Godot Engine as my working environment. I followed a tutorial series to understand the basics, but since at this moment it’s still incomplete, I had to keep going by myself, I am used to that so that was no big deal.

Most of my companions had games based on predefined choices and a small story to tell. That is alright, but I wanted to make stuff like command processing and an actual room layout where you can move, pick stuff up and unlock pathways.

I managed to get it all working just in time, and you can get the source code and binaries here. The game is in Spanish and its also quite short. But let me know what do you think of it, if you manage to complete it. I wanted to have some kinda story but I just managed to do simple descriptions and hints.

The only thing I am a bit upset about is everyone has their python and C++ binaries which are around 200kb and my files are around 40mb, but well, that’s how Godot works, and I have a full graphical interface there too.

Finishing up

After all, I managed to get this two big projects. I will talk more later about the second one, since I am quite happy and I have a lot to tell about it.

This was quite a long post, and I didn’t expect to write this much, so I am gonna call it here. I still have a lot of work to do for other final projects, but they have to be delivered next week, so I still have some time. Endeavor is awesome, my projects were great and I am cant wait to finish this semester.

This has been day 45 of #100DaystoOffload