Computer Log

Recently QB64 updated to version 2. They have a nice presence on Twitter. In the past I found Freebasic better (at least for my purposes) than QB64. Freebasic doesn’t seem to have a presence on Twitter at all.

So I thought I’d see if the new QB64 still executes in it’s own little window…it does. BTW you can’t cut&paste from this window. Also you compile your program from a MS-DOS looking interface, which by the way is a pain to navigate AND the folders known as paths aren’t sorted so it’s hard to find things.

By contrast FreeBasic just runs in the regular terminal you execute from. And you CAN cut&paste from this window. So it runs just like a regular Linux C or Python program.

Also the QB64 executable for this simple program is 1.5MB. The FreeBasic executable is 31.3K! A huge difference.

I’ve been having issues installing some programs on Linux Mint 20.1. Lately many errors trying to install QB64 V2.0. So a few days ago I upgraded Linux Mint 20.1 to 20.2. Didn’t help. So today I fresh installed Linux Mint 20.2 and QB64 installed with no problems.

Linux Mint failed to add OpenSuse to Grub. So as of right now it is unavailable.

Today I got my BLW website cron job output again. It is emailed to me daily but stopped for 4-5 days. I meant to look into it but forgot. This is the job run at 12AM every night that creates that day’s birthday web page.

I admit this isn’t a very scientific way of diagnosing a GPU problem, possibly related to all my software problems, since the big update, that seem to point to some kind of GPU issue, lately. But…I decided I’d see how some old computer video games played. I first tried Torchlight and it played fine. Then I decided to play Left For Dead II…a little more graphics intense. And it crashed twice in less than 30 minutes. No error messages, it just disappeared and dropped back to the Steam menu. It’s never crashed before! Interesting.

Very confused! So I did a clonezilla partition backup before I applied those 2700+ updates, which I assumed was the beginning of my OpenSUSE problems. Partition restore went well. Sure enough, as expected after restore, Tumbleweed started telling me I needed to apply 2700+ updates after the restore. Except VS Code is still giving me the same error. WTH? Also why did I have to reinstall KeyPass? It should have been there with the partition restore. It’s an essential program that I always install right away. Where did it go?

Contacted my web host by email about a Firefox error message while trying to access my site

Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead

It’s likely the website’s certificate is expired, which prevents Firefox
from connecting securely.

They created a ticket #AEX-894-5995, which they usually do and responded…I have reissued the SSL certificates. Please let us know if you need any further assistance. Now usually when I report a problem by email…they respond by email. They didn’t this time.

No I haven’t. I just may have to pass on it for now. Up till that last big update, it has worked well. I also wonder if perhaps I am an unusual case because the issue hasn’t been addressed. Since the error points to a GPU problem I wonder if it could be related to my old video card. This card has probably followed me through three builds. None of my other hardware is strange. Maybe I should upgrade my video with something inexpensive yet much newer.

So since I found a solution to the OpenSUSE Leap grub screw up, perhaps I should reconsider it. Restarting your computer to find your other OSs missing from grub can be an initial shock. Especially when the disk device names change. So far the SSD where I write my OS root files have always shown up as /dev/sda. But my home directories are usually but not always /dev/sdb. This was the case with OpenSUSE Leap. So when your grub menu doesn’t reflect what you expect there is some initial concern. Did I overwrite some important data? For example I only had one USB flash drive available to use for my installation. So when I wanted to return to Tumbleweed I had to reflash that USB with Tumbleweed. Well Leap showed /dev/sdb (my usual linux /home disk) as my USB device. So when you have to press Enter for your CLI dd command to proceed in creating/overwriting the device there is concern.

Anyhoo I reinstalled Leap, but I couldn’t initially check for updates It kept asking me was I was connected! When I finally did connect there were absolutely no updates available. My system showed up-to-date! Really? I later see below figured out it must have been updating, in the background during the magical black box install!

Or install essential programs like my password manager, which I need to do most anything on the Internet.

Also I realize this is supposed to be a older more stable non-rolling release but Firefox was at v78.13.0 meanwhile Tumbleweed was at v92.0.1 an Mint was at 93.0. Really version 78? Yes nothing I’d rather do more than use a very old browser to enter credit card info or do online banking. That’s a big concern to me. The noob distro (as everyone like to call it)…Mint, had the most up to date Firefox!

One last point…the OpenSUSE install unlike most other installs I’ve done is self contained. So you can’t open another terminal window to get an idea of what is going on. I like to watch the network activity. So after bouncing back and forth between Leap and Tumbleweed I began to suspect a lot of network access, because the over 4GB installs were taking over 30 minutes. So I finally disconnected the Internet while installing which brought my install down to around 10 min. After all, all I often wanted to do was to use dd to create a new bootable flash drive!

So back to Tumbleweed…for now. Until I can rethink all of this.

So I figured maybe in my case Tumbleweed is too risky for me. So I decided I’d install Leap. So I did that and it didn’t add my other OSs to Grub…Leap is the only option! So since I didn’t have any grub problems with Tumbleweed I reinstalled it. Except it too no longer offers other OSs in the Grub menu. os-prober sees my other Linux’s. But grub-update isn’t offered.

The solution “grub2-mkconfig”…turned out to be an easy fix. See below. Still why didn’t install do this? As you can see os-prober was executed and the missing OSs were found and added.

bill-MS-7B79:/boot/grub2 # grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
Generating grub configuration file …
Found theme: /boot/grub2/themes/openSUSE/theme.txt
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.14.6-2-default
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd-5.14.6-2-default
Warning: os-prober will be executed to detect other bootable partitions.
Its output will be used to detect bootable binaries on them and create new boot entries.
Found Linux Mint 20.1 Ulyssa (20.1) on /dev/sda1
Found Manjaro Linux (21.0.5) on /dev/sda2
done
bill-MS-7B79:/boot/grub2 #

Maybe OpenSuse Tumbleweed itself didn’t break…a package it used broke. I knew it is a rolling release, so this can be expected. However I would have thought by now it would have been fixed. Unless I’m one of the few that has this problem. I know I’m not the only one as it has been reported. If I want to use OpenSuse, perhaps Leap would be a better option…for me.

I will say I have applied updates to Mint since this problem and I’m not having any problems.