Tag: Linux

OpenRGB – An RGB Software I Want to Use (It Runs on Linux!)

Robert LohrLeave a comment

If you are in the market for anything gaming PC or gaming laptop related, chances are, you have come across the industry-wide trend of RGB illuminated hardware and peripherals. Everything is RGB, from the graphics card to the RAM, to your headset (because you can see the lights when you wear it 🙄), and many, many more. I am not against RGB lighting per se, but if you follow the industry as a PC hardware enthusiast, it is evident that in some aspects, this has gone too far.

Quick side note: after a rant about RGB software, I will show examples of using OpenRGB on Windows and Linux. If you are interested in only that, skip the rant and scroll to the bottom.

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Qt5 QtCreator Error on Linux: stddef.h: No such file or directory – Code model could not parse an included file

Robert Lohr3 Comments

The following is an error that has shown itself every time I have installed the Qt5 framework and the QtCreator development environment on a Linux based machine. It never mattered which flavor of Linux; QtCreator always showed this error.

Warning: The code model could not parse an included file, which might lead to incorrect code completion and highlighting, for example. 

fatal error: 'stddef.h' file not found 
note: in file included from /home/rlo/Code/C++/WorkTracker2/WorkTracker2Shared/src/data/taskrepository.h:1: 
note: in file included from /home/rlo/Code/C++/WorkTracker2/WorkTracker2Shared/src/data/taskrepository.h:3: 
note: in file included from /usr/include/c++/9/optional:38: 
note: in file included from /usr/include/c++/9/stdexcept:38: 
note: in file included from /usr/include/c++/9/exception:143: 
note: in file included from /usr/include/c++/9/bits/exception_ptr.h:38:

Although that message never caused any issues compiling the code, I found it rather annoying, and at some point, annoying enough to search for a solution.

As it turns out, this message appears when you have Clang libraries installed. QtCreator detects that and automatically uses Clang to parse the source code and provide inline error messages and code completion.

You can get rid of this error when you explicitly add the STL header files’ include-path to your project. In my case, I have added the following to my *.pro file.

unix {
    INCLUDEPATH += /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/9/include
}

Linux Gaming: Middle Earth – Shadow of Mordor; Get it to run, and run it fast

Robert LohrLeave a comment

Gaming on Linux is a challenge because only a few companies take the time to create native Linux ports of their games. It is even more challenging when those natively ported games do not run at all or do not run well. One of them is Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. I have bought this game specifically because it has a native Linux version – and because I remember that it was well received by media and players.

This game has two issues:

  • It refuses to start in full-screen mode.
  • The performance is terrible.

Let’s go through these two issues and see how they manifest and how to fix them.

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Pop!_OS Linux Fixing Windows Dual Boot Problem

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In a previous blog post I have mentioned that I was not able to add my Windows 10 installation to the Grub boot menu. I have finally found a solution. Now, in my last Linux blog post I mentioned that I ultimately gave up on Linux after trying Ubuntu 20.04. Well, I could not stop thinking about it. I am on Pop!_OS again and although I did not disconnect any SSD on installation, Pop! did not detect Windows 10 and add it to Grub itself. So, I was back at where I started.

Quick recap of the setup: I have two SATA SSDs (yes, SATA, like a cave man), one with Windows 10 (the Crucial MX500) and one with Pop!_OS Linux (the Samsung 850 Evo). The bootloader for each OS is on the respective SSD.

Now, enough background, let us get to the solution!

If you are CLI wizard do your thing, I will be using a convenient UI for the first step. Open “Disks” and locate the Windows 10 EFI partition. It’s around 100MB in size. Once you have found it, click the “Play” button to mount it.

The Disks utility will then display the mount point that is required in the next step.

Now, copy some Windows 10 Boot files to your Linux /boot folder. Yes, you read that right. Sounds weird, but it did the trick.

Do this with Nautilus or use the following command (which I recommend). Replace <mount point> with the path you got from the Disks utility. Note that path completion does not work once you go past /boot/efi. The EFI folder exists, you merely do not have permissions to see it as a regular user.

sudo cp -r /<mount point>/EFI/Microsoft /boot/efi/EFI

The last step consists of making the boot menu show up so you can actually select an entry. Edit loader.conf and add “timeout 10” (or any amount of seconds you prefer).

sudo vim /boot/efi/loader/loader.conf

All you need to do now is reboot and (hopefully) enjoy a boot menu with your Pop!_OS and Windows 10 boot entries. I do not know if this procedure also works with other Linux variants. It might for the Ubuntu based distributions, but I cannot say.

OneDrive Sync On Linux With RCLONE

Robert Lohr1 Comment

Update, 2, July 2021 I have found another tool that I now prefer. Read this blog post to learn more, or read this blog for yet even more information 😉.

In my quest to move to Linux as a daily driver it was important for me that I could continue to use Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage. Unsurprisingly, Windows 10 comes bundled with a OneDrive sync client. There is no official Linux support though, so I had to resort to a 3rd party tool. Luckily, there is a very powerful utility called rclone that does almost exactly what I want and I’ll explain how I have it set up to suit my needs.

Spoiler: it’s not as convenient as Microsoft’s sync client, but it has other things going for it.

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The Linux Experiment: One Month Later

Robert Lohr2 Comments

It has been roughly a month since I switched from using Windows 10 as my main operating system to Linux. The reasons for that have all been detailed in The Switching Windows to Linux Experiment blog post. Now I will share a few of the experiences I have made during the first month (it’s been that long already) and what I think about how well it is going.

Let me address the elefant in the room first, the distribution. I think that is likely the first question you, the reader, would ask. The short answer is Pop!_OS by System76.

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Debian Testing “Bullseye”: The Repository Does Not Have a Release File

Robert Lohr8 Comments

After installing Debian Testing "Bullseye" mid March 2020 I got an error trying to run apt update.

E: The repository 'http://security.debian.org./debian-security 
bullseye/updates Release' does not have a Release file.

Unfortunately, the Debian maintainers managed to let a bug creep into the /etc/apt/sources.list. It’s called "Testing" for a reason, I guess.

The offending lines are this.

deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ bullseye/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ bullseye/updates main

Note "bullseye/updates", which is where the error is. Change those two lines to look like this.

deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ bullseye-security main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ bullseye-security main

After that, the update will work. I have noticed that in a later version of the installer this bug has been fixed.

Debian Testing “Bullseye”: NVIDIA Driver Install

Robert Lohr1 Comment

Debian’s documentation on installing the proprietary NVIDIA driver does not (yet) cover the "Bullseye" release because, as of the time of writing, it is still in testing. However, the documentation for Debian 10 "Buster" can still be used.

The main difference is that there is no "backports" for "Bullseye" – although I have found the folders on repo mirrors. At least to me they seemed to be there. Anyway.

What you have to do is to add "contrib" and "non-free" to your main mirror definition, not to backports. You don’t need to add a repo for backports because you’ll only get an error.

(Unfortunately, I haven’t made a note of the error message)

This is what you have to do:

  • Open /etc/apt/sources.list as sudo/root.

  • Add "contrib" and "non-free" to the end of the main repo so it looks like this.

    deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main contrib non-free

(The observant among you might have noticed that the feature image is from a Pop!OS installation, not Debian. I’ve since changed the distribution.)

The Switching Windows to Linux Experiment

Robert Lohr2 Comments

(Beware of the many text)

For the longest time I have been a Windows user. My first computer came with Windows 98 SE (ignoring the Amiga before it) and I’ve used Windows as the main operating system for almost all that time since then. There was a brief excursion into the Apple world for about a year or two, but apart from that: Microsoft’s creation. It’s not that I have not tried using Linux, it’s just that for many years my needs could not be easily satisfied by a Linux based operating system. For one, I have always enjoyed PC gaming and I still do. I’ve tried going with a console, but that was one of the worst decisions I had made in 2019. There also was a long period where I had used my computer as a TV, a time where Youtube and all the other streaming services hadn’t existed. And although I had managed to get the TV tuners to somehow work, it was not comparable to the experience on Windows. For my use case, over all those years, Microsoft’s OS simply was the Vulkan choice. But now in 2020, this isn’t the case anymore. Things have changed, including the maturity of Linux as well as my own needs and my views. Therefore, it’s about time that I revisit this topic.

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AdoptOpenJDK 8 NullPointerException sun.awt.FontConfiguration.getVersion(FontConfiguration.java:1264)

Robert LohrLeave a comment

I recently had to deal with this little bugger as we moved from the OpenJDK 8 package supplied by the Linux distro of choice to AdoptOpenJDK 8. It is important to know that we completely uninstalled OpenJDK, including all its transient dependencies.

(And in due time we’ll uninstall Java 8 and replace that grandpa as well)

As a result, parts of our application didn’t work any longer, resulting in this nice and shiny Java stacktrace.

2019-05-03 08:22:07,345 ERROR [qtp1896708863-35] [PlotChartController] [/][/][/]- error while creating chart image
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at sun.awt.FontConfiguration.getVersion(FontConfiguration.java:1264)
        at sun.awt.FontConfiguration.readFontConfigFile(FontConfiguration.java:219)
        at sun.awt.FontConfiguration.init(FontConfiguration.java:107)
        at sun.awt.X11FontManager.createFontConfiguration(X11FontManager.java:774)
        at sun.font.SunFontManager$2.run(SunFontManager.java:431)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at sun.font.SunFontManager.<init>(SunFontManager.java:376)
        at sun.awt.FcFontManager.<init>(FcFontManager.java:35)
        at sun.awt.X11FontManager.<init>(X11FontManager.java:57)
        at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
        at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:62)
        at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:45)
        at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:423)
        at java.lang.Class.newInstance(Class.java:442)
        at sun.font.FontManagerFactory$1.run(FontManagerFactory.java:83)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at sun.font.FontManagerFactory.getInstance(FontManagerFactory.java:74)
        at java.awt.Font.getFont2D(Font.java:491)
        at java.awt.Font.defaultLineMetrics(Font.java:2176)
        at java.awt.Font.getLineMetrics(Font.java:2246)
        at org.jfree.chart.axis.DateAxis.estimateMaximumTickLabelWidth(DateAxis.java:1453)
        at org.jfree.chart.axis.DateAxis.selectHorizontalAutoTickUnit(DateAxis.java:1365)
        at org.jfree.chart.axis.DateAxis.selectAutoTickUnit(DateAxis.java:1340)
        at org.jfree.chart.axis.DateAxis.refreshTicksHorizontal(DateAxis.java:1616)
        at org.jfree.chart.axis.DateAxis.refreshTicks(DateAxis.java:1556)
        at org.jfree.chart.axis.ValueAxis.reserveSpace(ValueAxis.java:807)
        at org.jfree.chart.plot.CombinedDomainXYPlot.calculateAxisSpace(CombinedDomainXYPlot.java:364)
        at org.jfree.chart.plot.CombinedDomainXYPlot.draw(CombinedDomainXYPlot.java:442)
        at org.jfree.chart.JFreeChart.draw(JFreeChart.java:1235)
        at org.jfree.chart.JFreeChart.createBufferedImage(JFreeChart.java:1409)
        at org.jfree.chart.JFreeChart.createBufferedImage(JFreeChart.java:1389)
        at org.jfree.chart.ChartUtilities.writeChartAsPNG(ChartUtilities.java:183)

I obviously removed some (a lot) parts to make it more readable and to hide corporate IP 😉 But this is the relevant part.

I found this bug report on Github and for once, plowing through the comments, it helped me. As is mentioned there, the culprit is the missing “fontconfig” package. So, I added another Ansible task to our playbook to provision the server et voila, the problem is gone.

- name: Install fontconfig package
  package:
    name: fontconfig
    state: present
    tags:
      - java

As mentioned earlier, we had wiped all that was relevant to OpenJDK off the system and by doing so, also uninstalled the “fontconfig” package. Otherwise this error wouldn’t have surfaced. But that’s the benefit of starting with a clean slate. This way you know if something is missing and don’t get surprised by errors all of a sudden while, at the same time, it is working on another machine.