Welcome to the Windy Weather Website.
These are musings from my vantage point on the Oregon South Coast.
A long-time software engineer and general geek, I continue my exploration with Photography, 3D Graphics, Linux and other nonsense. Come along for the ride.
In this midst of this world wide tragedy and horror, I want to share a light spot that my daughter and I are sharing.
I want to share this in a way that is accessible and possibly inspiring for folks that have not played MMO video games before. Not to necessarily encourage you to take them up, but to show you a little of that world.
I have been playing video games for many years in my retirement and have shared these games with my daughter, who lives 500 miles away and who has a busy career. We have been playing various games together for some time – a few hours twice a week. But recently it has become more like 5 or 6 days a week. Our current adventures are in Eorzea playing Final Fantasy XIV. Above, you can see recent mounts we acquired in an event that is going on for the next few weeks.
Continue ReadingUPS has done it again. Their shipping will take at least another day.
I ordered a small package from Newegg – Two DRAM Modules. But rather than sending it USPS, Newegg sent it via UPS, which of course uses USPS for the “Last Mile”. Sooooo… UPS, in their infinite logistical wisdom drop the package off 6 hours from my house, by truck, and declares victory and says that the package will arrive today. Sure. Fat chance. You give the USPS 6 hours to get to my house and as the truck drives and don’t allow for any sorting? Have a clue, UPS. No freaking way.
Continue Reading
Ubuntu 20.04
So, Ubuntu 20.04 just released, and there are a ton of Youtube videos reviewing it. After the debacle of file sharing between Linux Mint 19.3 and Windows, I decided to make a VM [Virtual Machine] with Ubuntu 20.04 to see if it had fixed the problem. The short answer is, alas, no. Guess Ubuntu will get the fix when it’s ready, and I’m sure the fix will be back ported to LM 19 when it releases.
Years ago, I used Ubuntu for a time, before Linux Mint came out. It was pretty clunky, but a lot less clunky than SUSE which is what I started with years ago. Things have come a long way. Of course, Mint is based on Ubuntu, but they are very different experiences. This is a diary of sorts of my experiences while I was testing the file sharing problem and setting up Ubuntu to my liking.
So, reaching a Windows File Share on Windows 10 from Linux Mint 19 has yet another problem. But there is a fix. My Post Here drew the attention of someone who had the answer.
The problem is that trying to reach a Windows 10 shared folder from a Linux Mint 19, or Ubuntu 20.04, system, causes an error:
“Failed to retrieve share list from server”
Here’s the workaround.
The Workaround
It’s pretty easy. And you can do two things.
I was able to use the smb://win10-host-name.local/share-name fix.
The bug has been reported here, so we are probably going to get a fix soon.
Update: 30 April 2020
I tried file sharing to Windows from Fedora 32, the latest, and it failed in the same way, and was fixed in the same way. So all the Linux distros apparently share the same samba gvfs code.
May you walk in the light of the Crystal.
:ww
From 2017 – A long time ago
For a while now I’ve been wondering how to print from Linux running in a VirtualBox virtual machine to my local Windows Printer. Well it just works. Sort of.
I did what it says on this page and it did work. I thought I had tried this a while ago and never got it going. But there has been progress with Ubuntu / Linux Mint over the years and it looks like it works now.
Update: All is working now. Get the latest jar file here. And the sources here.
Well that wasn’t that hard. After looking at this page on Java layout managers [TLDR], and then this page on Group Layout again [TLDR]. I just jumped in and tried it out. And whadda you know. It’s not that bad. It’s a little glitchy. Not as smooth as the Qt Layout manager, but it works. Here’s what is working so far.
So the list and path strings resize. And this uses 14 pt type rather than 16 pt, so it’s a little more compact and probably won’t mess up on some screens like the larger font size did.
ImpressShowRunner is running well on both Windows 10 and Linux Mint 19.
Here is a complete description of the program and how to use it.
The program is distributed as a JAR file and requires Java SE 11 or later to run. OpenJDK 11 is built in to Linux Mint 19 and the normal windows SE release is currently Java 8. This will not work to run the program since it was developed for the JDK 11 version of Java. Actually. Let me get back to you on that. I have JDK 14 installed on the system I use to test on Windows 10. I need to sort out these Java version numbers and confirm that the program works on Java 8. Are Java JDK versions different from the RunTime environment versions? Let’s see.
Java App running on Linux
We recently proved that Java desktop programs can be easily deployed to Windows and Linux. Now we have proved that other complex parts of the program to run a series of Impress Shows in a loop.
1 and 2 are pretty easy. In Qt there is a class that executes a command in another process. And you can wait on it or check to see if it is complete. We can’t wait of course since Impress just waits forever for a click on a black screen at the end. Soooo.
3 is not so easy on Qt. The solution differs by OS. On windows you need to call the Kernel to send events to be dispatched through the event handler. UINPUT calls. On Linux, the easiest solution I found was to launch the “xtodo click 1” command to perform a mouse click. The xtodo command is easily installed on Linux, but this is another step to make the program work. But the Java solution is much easier.
Show Runner on Linux
I’ve been using QtCreator and the QtFramework for many years to build apps for Windows / Linux. Deployment is always a struggle with the Qt Framework. Deployment is hard work. Lots of hand work and testing to make sure the installers are correct.
I’m now forever done with Qt for that. Java is sooooooo much easier to deploy.
The above shot is of the prototype Java Impress Show Runner app running on Linux from a JAR file built on Windows 10. It runs on Windows 10 and it runs on Linux, with no changes and instantly. No fiddling required.
Here’s what it takes to build apps this way. Just an overview, not the entire story, but it has only been Five days since I started with Eclipse and Java. So it’s not that big an effort.
Update 11 April 2020: Using the xdotool method, the QtShowRunner works well on Linux, so there is a portable version for Windows and Linux. Get the latest at the github repo. I’m still investigating “Deployment” for Windows and Linux. Now, previously…
I have beat my head against the wall trying to fix the QtShowRunner program that works on Windows to work on Linux. None of the methods have worked.
Finally I found a command called xdotool which does many X things including sending mouse clicks and key presses. Here’s a shell script that uses the xdotool to launch soffice impress to show a slideshow and then terminates the show and then exits the script.
The script launches the show with the ending & to detach it. Then loops looking for the process using pgrep and if it’s still around, uses xdotool to click the mouse and waits for 5 seconds. When the process finishes the show, and the click ends the show, then pgrep fails and the script exits. Trivial.
