Computer Log

A few days ago, I became aware of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 a new version of their sim, their last version was in 2006. A new version is arriving this year…and it looks very impressive. It will also run on their XBox. For the record I’m not a huge Microsoft fan. I’ve used Linux exclusively…for years and I’m not about to change. However, I recently [last year] surprised myself by installing/using a MS product on Linux for the 1^st time. I never thought that would happen but as I’ve stated elsewhere I really like their free VS Code. I’ve found it to be a very nice IDE.

The visuals are stunning…but according to videos I watched, I couldn’t afford the storage necessary to store the petabyte of data for these visuals locally, so high speed internet is required that access the data stored on their Azure servers. Personally I don’t like being constantly connected to the Internet. It will also run without a constant connection. But, what will the graphics look like then?

Airports
Flying at many of these airports can really add to the enjoyment of the sim. Probably many are aware of the scenic LOWI airport in Innsbruck, Austria. While watching one of these MS videos I learned about a new airport…to me… LFLJ , Courchevel Altiport in France. It’s has a short runway that ends suddenly at the end of a mountain…very scenic.

One of my favorite features of Manjaro over Linux Mint is the network activity when I, and hopefully the system are not doing anything. To be sure I really don’t know what Linux Mint is doing. If I was better with networks I should have used some tools (perhaps wireshark) to identify where the traffic is coming from. At any rate it’s concerning and Manjaro by comparison is quiet. And this has been happening on Mint for quite a while!

Manjaro is a fresher install, so perhaps it’s simply some piece of software I have not running on Mint that I have not yet installed on Manjaro.

A few minutes ago on Linux Mint (this is typical)…

And a few minutes ago on Manjaro…

In my search for a backup distro, I increasingly find myself preferring to be on Manjaro more often than my primary distro…Linux Mint. I’m typing this post in Manjaro. It’s still too early for me tell if I can depend on it. In my case Linux Mint hasn’t had a update that broke it, in years. On the other hand, I may gave broken it a time or two. However if things continue to work well in Manjaro, then it’s possible that Linux Mint will become the backup distro to Manjaro.

Made a few updates to my genealogy program family data.

When using LibreOffice Writer in Manjaro, I notice spell checking doesn’t work. No squiggly red line under misspelled words. I remember it was a problem in the past too. I’ve never had this problem in Linux Mint.

Here is what I did to fix it.

Spellcheck fix (USA) for LibreOffice Writer

The below 3 steps which worked for me was taken from
https://forum.manjaro.org/t/solved-spell-check-in-libreoffice/54978/9

1) sudo pacman -S hunspell hunspell-en_US hyphen-en

2) Go to
Tools > Options > Language Settings > Languages
Under Default Languages for Documents / Western, select English (USA) or any language that displays the SpellCheck icon [The A with the … underneath].

3) restart LibreOffice Writer if it’s open

Last night, I got a scare trying to login into my Ubuntu Server…very strange! Tried to ssh in, and the terminal just looked at me before timing out so I was very puzzled. So I hooked up Ubuntu server to a monitor & keyboard. I attempted to login with the giant cryptic password from my password manager, but before I could type it in it timed out!

So I booted to single user mode and changed the password to something short. But while I was at root I did a directory “ls -la /home” because I wanted to be double check my user id. That’s where I REALLY got confused…no subdirectories were listed in /home!?!? WTH?

I was convinced, I somehow got hacked and almost decided to give-up on NextCloud. But just for the heck of it I decided to reboot locally and try and login to my userid with the short password. To my surprise I was successful and my userid files were all there? From there I did a “sudo ls /home” and it showed my userid directory?????

Tried again to remote login to my server and it timed out AGAIN! Finally realized I wasn’t using the correct IP address. One of the octets was 168 and I typed 198. As Maxwell Smart would say missed it by that much : ) So all the above worry and detective work was for nothing. However I still don’t understand why my userid on the Ubuntu server doesn’t show up in /home (nothing does!). I did do a little googling but saw no answers.So logged in and finally successfully updated Ubuntu Server 18.04.3 LTS by “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade”.

I guess seeing Celestia working again prompted me to look at Stellarium again. Was watching a video where the guy was describing setting your location from list which I was already aware of. But he also said you could manually set Latitude & Longitude for locations not on the list, which I also was aware of. Many years ago I used my zip code to get Latitude & Longitude info that was a little more accurate than the drop down list. Then he proceeds to enter those coordinate from memory for a city he knew. Which is fine, but most people wouldn’t probably know their latitude & longitude. So I think he should have taken 20 seconds to tell people that they could download a app on their phone that could provide that info using the built-in GPS.

I installed/used virtualization on IBM mainframes many many years ago, before Linux existed. So I understand the concept of virtualization. In the past, I used virtualbox for virtualization on Linux. It’s fairly straight forward. I’ve installed many Linux distros in a VM. I’m digging into this again because I would like to use this in Manjaro. But I want to do this the best way. I’ve successfully used the built-in Linux Kernel virtualization (KVM), which seems to be the most often recommended way to do virtualization these days. Since it’s built-in it makes sense that it would be the best and most efficient way to do this. Although I admit I find the procedure somewhat hard to understand…and I don’t like that. I got it working by following someones guide. I should just be happy that it’s working…but I’m not. It would be nice to actually understand the process. If I want to install Gimp on either Manjaro or Ubuntu I basically…install gimp! In order to use the virtualization built-in the Linux Kernel, you must install many packages, and many differ between Ubuntu & Manjaro. For example…any mixture of the following, depending on which distro and guide you follow, KVM, libvirt, libvirtd, virtinst, virt-manager, qemu, qemu-kvm, qemu-utils, vde2, ebtables, dnsmasq, bridge-utils, openbsd-netcat and the list goes on.

I read an article “How to install Virtual Machine Manager (KVM) in Manjaro and Arch Linux” and it’s followed by a list of everything to install but KVM. I know that KVM means Kernel-based Virtual Machine, so I assume it’s built into most Linux kernals…these days! So should the article instead be titled “How to install Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) in Manjaro and Arch Linux” or “How to enable KVM in Manjaro and Arch Linux”? Is everyone else secretly as confused as me and they just pass down what someone else has told them? In one Ubuntu guide I read, qemu-kvm was installed but this is not mentioned in the Manjaro guides I’ve seen. I’m beginning to think that these guides are so different because they followed someone else’s guide and not everything worked so they went to a forum and just started adding things suggested on the forum till it worked on their system. Somebody on another system did the same but their system was a little different so their guide was different. But they publish an install guide it like they know what they’re talking about. That’s why the comment section has so many people saying it didn’t work for them. The end result is we perhaps could be installing many things not needed on our system. I might expect that on an older system perhaps something required for virtualization, perhaps was previously installed while installing some other package, so although required it wasn’t needed on their system…because it was previously installed. Just a guess. I feel these guides would be best if used on a fresh distro install. I’m sure someone exists out there that really understands the process.

I probably should just get it working and pretend it makes total sense. Maybe I should erase this entire post and just say Today I Got Virtualization working in Manjaro using KVM…like it’s no big deal. Later down the road, I’ll show up at some Linux users group and when some young punk starts asking about virtualization I’ll just say I’d recommend using the built-in kernel virtualization modules! You know…KVM. And when he asks how to do it I’ll reply “It’s easy…just RTFM”.

Python defaults to python3, which makes sense since Python 2 is no longer supported!
Celestia was easy one click install.
Docker works…out of the box.
Git was installed by default.
Had to install Gimp.

Below is one of my favorite things about Manjaro! This is something that has bugged me about Mint for a long time.