Format Flash Or Pen Drive Using GNOME Disks on openSUSE Leap 15.2 GNOME Version 3.34.4

Format Flash Or Pen Drive Using GNOME Disks on openSUSE Leap 15.2 GNOME Version 3.34.4

 You can use GNOME DISKS application to format flash drive on Linux . You can use your flash drive on Windows machine(MS compatible) too by choosing FAT filesystem when formatting the drive. You can add a name or label for you drives too. Adding a drive name helps you find the correct drive if multiple drives are mounted/loaded onto your machine. The below screencast will provide a step by step process to format a USB drive on your openSUSE machine.

 

Use your Android phone to control your Linux machine

 Use your Android phone to control your Linux machine

 If you watch lot of videos on your big computer monitor by sitting at some distance away from screen, it becomes a pain to get up each time and change the videos. Sometimes i wished I had a remote control for my computer. I  found that i could use a tool called WiFi Mouse to operate my computer remotely from my phone. This post is about how i could successfully configure and use WiFi Mouse. I am using WiFi mouse on an Android phone, but according to WiFi Mouse website Apple products like Iphone and Ipad are also supported. Using WiFi Mouse i could use my phone as mouse as well as keyboard for my computer. The user interface of  WiFi Mouse is pretty intuitive and easy to use. The only issue i found is that it is not supporting letters in CAPS when using keyboard mode on the App.

Steps to configure Android phone as remote control / remote mouse for your Linux machine

• Ensure that both the computer and phone are connected to the same network. My phone is on wifi and Linux system is connected to the LAN port on the same router. The router must always be "ON" for using the tool.
  
• Download WiFi Mouse App on your Android phone.  
• Install Mouse Server on Linux machine. My machine architecture is  64 bit and i use openSUSE and hence I downloaded and installed this rpm. You can check about Linux architecture using this post. You can create a local repo and install rpms using this post.
  
• Restart the Linux machine to ensure that Mouse Server has started up .
• Open  TCP port 1978 on the Linux Firewall. Check out this post for opening firewall.
• Now open the Wifi Mouse App on your phone. It will automatically show your computer / Linux machine if the Mouse Server is already running.
  

Default Screen when you open in WiFi Mouse on phone.

Denied Access Error if Firewall is not configured Correctly

(Failed to Connect:localhost)

Screenshot of WiFi Mouse After Successfully connecting to Linux Machine 

Note:- Solution tested on openSUSE Leap 15.2, GNOME SHELL VERSION 3.34.4

Open TCP Port on openSUSE Firewall

Open TCP Port on openSUSE Firewall

 In this post i will show how to open a firewall on openSUSE and ensure that the setting is made permanent. I will now open terminal on GNOME and open TCP port 1978

Opening Port using GNOME TERMINAL

 Command to add port to

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=1978/tcp

Command to keep the port open permanently
sudo firewall-cmd --runtime-to-permanent

Remove open Port
sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --remove-port=1978/tcp

Error that you will see if we try to re-open an Open Port
opensuseleap@localhost:~> sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=1978/tcp
[sudo] password for root:
Warning: ALREADY_ENABLED: '1978:tcp' already in 'public'
success

 GNOME terminal showing addition of port 1978 on openSUSE 15.2

Opening Port using YAST / GUI

• Search for firewall in GNOME Shell Activities
• Click and open Firewall tool
• Provide password
• In the firewall tool
  
• Click on "public" Zone in the left pane
• Then Click on "Ports" tab to open ports
• Enter TCP Port 1978
• Click on "Accept" button to save changes.

GNOME Shell Activities Showing YAST Firewall

 

Screenshot of YAST Firewall Tool with Labels explaining Addition of port

Refer:- Opening Ports YaST2 Firewall

Note:- Solution tested on openSUSE Leap 15.2, GNOME SHELL VERSION 3.34.4

Add a Startup sound when logging in or when machine starts up - Login Sound / Melody on Linux Desktop

 Add a Startup sound when logging in or when machine starts up - Login Sound / Melody on Linux Desktop

 I was looking a way to play a sound/melody when my machine boots. I found a potential solution here. But the "Start Up" application mentioned in the article was not available on my Gnome Shell installation. It tried various options from that web-page and ran the commands available in console / terminal. Results are as follows. 

This solution did not work

opensuseleap@localhost:~> /usr/bin/canberra-gtk-play --id="desktop-login" --description="GNOME Login"
Failed to play sound: File or data not found


This solution worked

opensuseleap@localhost:~> paplay /usr/share/sounds/purple/login.wav

When i ran the above command in terminal i could hear a pleasant melody.

To Play sound when logging in

 I added the above command to my ~.profile file and voila . I can now hear pleasant sound when i start my machine. To open the .profile file you can press ALT+F2 followed by typing in the text ~.profile and then pressing Enter/Return key. Usual location of .profile file is /home/<ReplaceWithUserName>/.profile

Open .profile file using Run Command Window Alt+F2

.profile file showing the paplay command to play login sound/melody

Note:- Solution tested on openSUSE Leap 15.2, GNOME SHELL VERSION 3.34.4

Fix Huge Emojis or Emoticons in Seamonkey on openSUSE Leap 15.2, GNOME Version 3.34.4

Fix Huge Emojis or Emoticons in Seamonkey on openSUSE Leap 15.2, GNOME Version 3.34.4

 Lately i have been noticing a irritating issue in Seamonkey web/internet browser. I was seeing huge emojis in all websites. This probably started around the time i upgraded to openSUSE 15.1 and issue continued even in openSUSE 15.2. Sample sites where i found the issue:-

• Browsing though random links like https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/1540
• After Logging into yahoomail.com and hotmail.com

Seamonkey with Huge emojis in  gitlab.gnome.org :(

 Seamonkey with Huge emojis in  yahoomail :(

This issue was not seen in other mozilla browser like firefox or in opera .
No huge emoji/emoticon in Firefox for the same website. The hand and Shell emojis look normal :)

 I saw that thunderbird users reporting similar issues here. I got a clue from that link that a font package by the name fonts-noto-color-emoji was causing these big emojis to show up. For the uninitiated Thunderbird, Seamonkey and Firefox share some of their codebase. So issues seen in one software may potentially appear in the other too.

 I opened YaST and found that i had similar package installed on my openSUSE Leap 15.2, GNOME Version 3.34.4

YaST showing noto-coloremoji-fonts

 I removed that font package / software and noticed that the original issue vanished and then i had font display issues. I could live with those placeholders. They look much better than those huge emoticons.
Font display issues in Seamonkey after removal of  noto-coloremoji-fonts using YaST

 To resolve the font display issue i through of installing some other emoji fount. I found emojione-color-font in YaST and installed the same which resolved the issue.

Install  emojione-color-font using YaST

 Finally everything is good in Seamonkey after replacing fonts-noto-color-emoji with emojione-color-font .
Seamonkey looking good after using emojione-color-font

 If you are using zypper you can remove noto-coloremoji-fonts and install emojione-color-font using following command.
sudo zypper rm noto-coloremoji-fonts
sudo zypper in emojione-color-font

Note:- Solution tested on openSUSE Leap 15.2, GNOME SHELL VERSION 3.34.4