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

openSUSE 13.1 Milestone 4, GNOME live ISO

Some Juicy Tidbits

Here are some points to note before taking a look at "M4".

• openSUSE 13.1 is expected to be released around November 2013.
• openSUSE 13.1 will be called "Bottle". Yes, it is "weird".
• openSUSE 13.1 will probably feature GNOME 3.10
• openSUSE 13.1 Live ISO features GNOME Version 3.9.1
• openSUSE 13.1 will replace GStreamer 0.10 with GStreamer 1.0. This can have huge impact on openSUSE / GNOME as multimedia playback, Nautilus preview and many applications depend on GStreamer framework.
• openSUSE 13.1 is expected to drop sysvinit completely and move to systemd completely.
• openSUSE 13.1 will feature a new reborn YaST with a Ruby back-end instead of YCP and the project is progressing well and milestone 4 YaST will be powered by Ruby.
• openSUSE 13.1 M4 Live images written onto USBs using imagewriter supports data persistence ( Hybrid ISO ) across reboots.
• You can access, read and write contents from Hard disk to Live ISO session and vice versa

Live ISO Preparation

Download Live ISO

 The openSUSE 13.1 Milestone 4, GNOME live ISO (64 bit ) was downloaded from the developer page using aria2 client which makes use of Metalink technology. Metalink can deliver very fast download speeds since clients support multiple connections, to multiple mirrors, automatically. In addition, it can do automatic error detection and correction.

Verify ISO

The md5 associated to the ISO was downloaded and the ISO was verified using md5sum command. Ensure that both the ISO and md5 files are in the same folder and run the command as shown below. If you get a "OK" after execution, it indicates that the ISO is not corrupted.

$md5sum -c openSUSE-Factory-GNOME-Live-Build0652-x86_64.iso.md5
openSUSE-Factory-GNOME-Live-Build0652-x86_64.iso: OK

Write ISO onto USB

 After verifying the ISO I used SUSE Studio Image Writer to write the ISO onto a blank USB / Flash / Pen / Thumb drive. Imagewriter is available in openSUSE repos. It is also usable on Windows and other Linux distributions like Fedora, Red Hat (RHEL) and Mandriva. The Linux versions can be downloaded from this page.

GNOME Live ISO Overview/Review

The default desktop is no different from GNOME 3.0 and minimalistic but it does have a right click functionality which allows one to :-

• Change Desktop settings (gnome-control-center)
• Change  wallpaper

Curiously, the much hated, "Universal Access" settings has been removed from the top panel.

  openSUSE 13.1, M4 features GNOME Version 3.9.1 and openSUSE 13.1 will be called "Bottle" . Here is a screenshot of GNOME settings "Details" which can be invoked using command "gnome-control-center" and navigating to "Details".

The Details application can be used to:-

• View System info like openSUSE and GNOME versions, System architecture etc.
• Set default applications for mail, browser, calendar, video, audio and images.
• Set default actions for various removable media like CD, DVD, USB etc.

 

 No major changes were noticed in Nautilus and the preview feature works.

 Tweak tool (gnome-tweak-tool) has minimal changes when compared to GNOME 3.6. It now includes facility to customize the wallpaper settings like Stretch, Center, Scale, Span, Zoom and None.

  The "Activities" application window has undergone major changes. The applications are no longer grouped under various types like Accessories, Games, Graphics, Internet etc.. There is a button/slider which can be used to switch between full list of applications and recently used applications as shown below.

Though applications are no longer classified into types, two new type of application categorization/grouping have emerged in GNOME 3.9.1 namely  "Sundry" and "Utilities". Clicking on these application type/group opens a kind of pop up window revealing applications under those categories. The following screenshot shows applications under "Sundry" Category.

 The Application search functionality has been improved in Activities window and the search results appear in an orderly fashion and are grouped appropriately.

GNOME Control Center Improvements

  The Control Center has undergone major upgrades and the number of "configurable" items has been increased drastically. Some of them are described below.

 The Activities based search can be easily customized through Search Settings to allow/disallow searching for Documents, Contacts, Files and passwords

The Privacy Settings can be used to activate automatic screen locking, setting up of cleaning Temporary files, Remove user name from Top panel / bar etc.

The "Users" setting now has a button which on clicking shows a User's Login history.

 Firefox plays html5 videos very well. The video is from Anime "Shingeki no kyojin".

Enabling GNOME Shell Classic

Install GNOME Shell Classic

 I use zypper(command line based package manager) to install the package named gnome-shell-classic and the package gets installed successfully as shown below.

$sudo zypper install gnome-shell-classic

Activate GNOME Shell Classic

 Open Shell Activities(left win key) and locate YaST and then open /etc/sysconfig Editor. sysconfig Editor can be used to set various system level settings. In sysconfig navigate to  Desktop > Window manager > DEFAULT_WM and change it's value from "gnome" to "gnome-classic" as shown below and save it. After logout and login GNOME classic will get applied/enabled.

GNOME Classic Overview

 GNOME Classic restores the classic GNOME 2.X desktop on GNOME Shell. You can see the following changes:-

• Main menu and Places menu are seen in top panel.
• Icons are seen on desktop.
• Time is moved right hand side of panel.
• Bottom Panel has an application switcher to show show and switch between opened applications.
• Classic Alt + Tab behaviour is restored.

 Default Screen for GNOME classic or GNOME 2.X desktop

GNOME Main menu as seen on GNOME classic

Classic Alt+Tab behaviour

Shortcomings of M4 Live ISO

• GTK YaST works but YaST installer is broken. The workaround is to use ncurses version of YaST or zypper
• The LIVE ISO is a bit laggy.

Pleasant Open document format surprise

 The other day, when i asked for some details about outlets from my telephone / cellphone provider by email they replied back to me and sent an attachment (spreadsheet) in ods format which was a pleasant surprise.

 In the "past" I have only seen proprietary formats like .xls, .doc, .ppt in my emails as attachments. I used to tear my hair out when I saw haphazard tables and overflowing text whenever I opened "word" documents in LibreOffice and OpenOffice. The less said about opening Excel with "macros" in LibreOffice / OpenOffice the better. Guess, those days of excruciating pain are finally over and we can all move towards a bright future where data is shared in Open document formats.

 Three cheers ! for the silent revolution brought about by LibreOffice / OpenOffice / OASIS and co.

Changing mouse settings from command line

 To configure mouse settings from command line we can use an utility called "xinput". The manual for xinput defines it as a utility to list available input devices, query information about a device and change input device settings. i.e. xinput can be used to configure a variety of input devices like mouse, keyboard etc...

List Connected Devices

 On a GNOME 3.x desktop we can open command launcher (Alt+F2) and then use the command "gnome-terminal" to open terminal.

 To list all the devices connected to a machine we can run the following command in terminal xinput --list. In the following screenshot you can find that an optical mouse is connected to the machine and assigned a "device id 8".

Enable and Disable the device

 Sometimes we don't want mouse movement to bring up a machine from sleep. To disable the input device(mouse), we find the device id by listing all devices as shown above. After finding the device id of the mouse (8) we can run the following command in terminal to disable the mouse xinput --disable 8. Similarly to enable mouse again we can run the command xinput --enable 8. To make things more convenient we can set keyboard shortcuts for these commands as shown below

Switch mouse buttons from right handed to left handed

 I for one use, "left handed" mouse settings . I find that on some "light weight" desktops, GUI based mouse settings are often not available which makes changing mouse settings a hassle. xinput comes to the rescue in these cases. To get the default mouse button mapping the following command can be used :- xinput get-button-map 8. To change the default mapping from right to left you can use the command xinput set-button-map 8 3 2 1. The following screenshot shows the demo.

 The above setting made through terminal will last only for one login session but, we can "apply" this setting every time we login by plugging the relevant command into the ~/.profile file in "home" directory as shown below.

What is dconf editor, how is it useful ?

Dconf is

• low-level configuration system whose main purpose is to provide a backend to GSettings on GNOME 3.X desktops.
• dconf is a simple key-based configuration system. Keys exist in an unstructured database.
• dconf system can be considered as a kind of replacement for gconf system which was used in GNOME 2.X series desktop.
• dconf-editor is a Graphical Editor for Simple key-based configuration system which is dconf.

Install dconf Editor

• Configure Community Repositories in YaST, GNOME/openSUSE.
• Open quick command launch window (Alt+F2) and run command "gnome-terminal" to open terminal.
• In terminal run the command "sudo zypper in dconf-editor" to install the tool.
• You can also install it using YaST. Refer:- Install package/software using YaST Installer

Launch dconf Editor

• To launch dconf Editor open command launcher (Alt+F2) and run command "dconf-editor".
  
• Alternatively you can press left "Win" key or (Alt+F1) to open "Activities" and type "dconf" upon which you can see dconf Editor appearing grouped under "Applications".

dconf Editor Essentials

Find keys

 The various keys can be found by invoking search settings from top panel and then plugging in appropriate "search string" as shown below

 dconf Editor is a very useful configuration editing tool and the inner "workings" are as follows:-

• All the settings are categorised broadly under Schemas.
• All the Keys that logically belong together are grouped together under Schemas.
• The various key's values can be changed by double clicking on them and entering new values. To save new settings we need to press return key .
• To restore original values we can always use the "Set to default" button at the bottom of the tool.

dconf Editor Usage

The tool can be used for many purposes like:-

• Changing preferences/settings for many native GNOME applications settings. Example:- Get Totem working again after crash by changing schema "org.gnome.totem"
• Perform some advanced settings which is sometimes not possible to do from even the applications. It is possible to reduce inbox refresh time to 30 seconds in Evolution. In this case it is accomplished by changing schema "org.gnome.evolution.mail"

  Evolution interface allows minimum refresh rate of 1 minute

  

  dconf Editor allows reduction of refresh rate to 30 seconds.

  
• Change default directory where the screenshots are stored if "Print Screen" button is pressed. In this case schema that is modified is "org.gnome.gnome-screenshot"
  
• We can change mouse button modifier (Modifier to use for modified window click actions) from <SUPER> or "Win" key to <ALT>. You can use "Alt" key and click on any open window to "drag" it around. The schema to be changed in this case is "org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences".
  
• It can serve as a replacement / alternative for "gnome-tweak-tool" and "gnome-control-center". Most of the settings in Tweak tool are available / changed using dconf Editor.
• Change mouse from left to right click by editing the schema "org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.mouse" as shown below.
  

Why should we install mozplugger on openSUSE 12.3, GNOME 3.6 ?

 MozPlugger is a generic Mozilla plug-in that allows the use of standard Linux programs as plug-ins for media types on the Internet. MozPlugger will help the Mozilla / Gecko based browsers to handle a variety of file formats like pdf, office formats (xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, doc, docx), LibreOffice file formats etc. Without installing mozplugger we find that very few file types are present in "Helper Applications" window in both SeaMonkey and Firefox.

SeaMonkey with few content types in Helper Applications

Firefox also shows only a few content types in Application preferences

When i try to open a sample xls file hosted online SeaMonkey tries to download and open it outside the browser.

Download and Install Mozplugger

Step 1:- First step would be to Configure Community Repositories in YaST 

Step 2 :- Before we proceed to download the rpms we need to understand what type of rpms we need. 32 bit Vs 64 bit OS architecture in Linux

Step 3 :- Since i use a 64bit OS I downloaded the following rpms

• mozplugger-1.14.3-3.fc18.x86_64.rpm from link
• mozilla-filesystem-1.9-8.fc18.x86_64.rpm from link

Step 4 :- I dumped these rpms into a directory and Converted the directory into a repository using YaST

Step 5 :- I open terminal (Alt+F2 ==> gnome-terminal) and install mozplugger using command "sudo zypper in mozplugger"

Post installation lot of content types are present in Helper Applications window

Post installation, I can open same xls "inside" SeaMonkey . LibreOffice opens the file in embedded mode inside the browser.

Converting a Plain RPM Directory into a repository using YaST

 The following are the steps involved in converting a "Plain RPM Directory" into a repository using GTK-YaST on openSUSE 12.3, GNOME 3.6 :-

• Dump all the rpm files you have in a suitable directory under your "Home" directory. I have all my rpms in directory "~/Software/rpms"
• Press Left "win" key / Alt+F1 to bring up Activities window / launcher.
• Then type "install" and it will bring up an application called "Install/Remove Software". Click on that to open YaST Software Manager.
• Click on menu Configuration==>Repositories to navigate to "Repositories" window
• Click on the add button in this window and it will take you to "MediaType" window where you need to choose "Local Directory" and press on "Next" button.
• In the next window provide appropriate "Repository Name" and "Path to Directory" where your rpms are present. Also choose the option "Plain RPM Directory." and press on "Next" to complete the process.
• You will now find  the "rpms" repository in the main window of YaST software Manager.

Screencast showing creating local repository using YaST

Note:- The trick for converting Nautilus Pathbar to textual input entry is to press Ctrl+L

Image resize and rotate using Nautilus on openSUSE 12.3, GNOME 3.6

 The Nautilus-Image-Converter is an extension that allows you to resize / rotate images from Nautilus. This extension is very useful when uploading images to websites (size limitations), creating thumbnails etc.

Installation & Usage

Step 1:- We need to Configure Community Repositories in YaST, GNOME 3.6, openSUSE 12.3

Step 2:- Launch command launcher(Alt+F2) and open terminal using command "gnome-terminal".

Step3:- Using zypper we can install the relevant extension using command "sudo -u root zypper in nautilus-image-converter".

 Step4:- Use the context menu (or) right click menu to "rotate" and resize images. The extension automatically appends a ".resized" and ".rotated" string to the names of newly created files, lest the original file gets overwritten.

Screenshot showing Nautilus "resize". Resize supports "resize to pixels", "scaling" and "custom size" functions.

Screenshot showing Nautilus "rotate". Rotate supports "pre-defined rotations" and "custom angle" functions.