Confessions of a nerd

I never stop to be amazed of the amount of tools that you have on linux.
I had to compare two tables from dos, one generated from excell the other from a custom database.
Both were supplied as csv files.
I wanted to create a tool in my favorite language FPC/Lazarus.
But alas, I got strange characters in the fields, just because of the Swedish letters öäå.
Tried to cat the files and that didn’t help.
Vi, of course, showed everything correct. What would you expect from the best editor in the world.
I determined that the issue was that the files were using unicode for “strange” characters, and linux like UTF-8.
Searched the net for tools in FPC to convert the strings, but didn’t find anything usefull.
Then I thought about finding a command line tool to convert the files before I used FPC/Lazarus to do my stuff.
Lo and behold – I found iconv, already installed in my mint.
First I ran dos2unix to get rid of the crls sequense.
Then I ran iconv -f ISO8859-1 -t UTF-8 > and all my problems disappeared into thin air

I love linux!

I have worked a little more with remmina, but no luck with the NX plugin so far.
It keeps failing in the ssh connection, and I have tried both password login, and certificate based login.
Tried over vpn as well as on the LAN.
I think I will let it rest for a while, since I have better things to do right now.

Bought a Rapoo 6610 bluetooth mouse at Kjell & Company.
The ideapad only has two USB ports, so I didn’t want to occupy one of then with a mouse.
No problem in pairing and getting it to work.
But ……….
It wouldn’t reconnect automatically, whenever the connection was broken — shutdown, sleep turning of the mouse.
I had to go into the bluetooth control panel, select the mouse and click the on/off button.
After a couple of attempts it would reconnect and I would be happy – for a while.
Searching the net I found that people installed the blueman bluetooth manager instead of the build in.
So I did the same, but didn’t manage to remove the deafult bluetooth manager, so I ended up with two bluetooth icons in the system tray.
One showed everything OK, the blueman however didn’t notice that the mouse was connected.
Found that somebody mentioned the command line tool in this thread: https://askubuntu.com/questions/486347/bluetooth-mouse-not-auto-reconnecting-to-laptop
So I tried it. It told me that the mouse was allready paired,and even if I disconnected the mouse I couldn’t do anything.
You can understand my surprise, when I found that the mouse recoonets now, if you move it a little but around after the computer wakes from its sleep.
I uninstalled the blueman, and my mouse still reconnects when needed!

Sometimes you are not supposed to understand, but just accept.

When I was in the shop I bought a USB to ethernet converter. Cursed linux, kjell & company and myself, when the computer did not react, when I connected the USB port.
An hour later I found that linux silently accepted the converter, and it worked flawlessly, so only issue was me not trusting Linux.

I have different hosts I need to communicate with.
I use ssh for linux boxes, rdesktop for windows boxes, NX for connecting to my workstation at work, and scp for file transfer between linux boxes.
All tools that works well.
Then I stumbled over remmina, which seems to combine all these protocols in one tools, and even better uses a tab’ed approach for the open communication windows.
https://www.remmina.org/wp/

I have problems with the authentication for NX, but a little more experimenting will hopefully solve that.
I know that the Unix/Linux philosophy is a single task for a single tool, which will do the work well, but I love to have my many ssh connections as tabs in a single window, so philosophy should not stop you from working efficient!

After finishing the installation of Linux Mint 18.1 I have installed the following software:

The newly installed gramps refused to speak Danish on the buttons on some of the dialog windows.
Filed a bug report for gramps, and shortly afterwards I had an answer from the team.
Amazing!
Turned out that I had to install the language-pack-gnome-da

I have installed Gramps on my laptop and got it to work.
After updating and installing plugins, I got the following error:
The view Graph View did not load and
reported an error. ***No error found, probably error in gpr.py file
***
Looking in the terminal window I found:
Namespace GooCanvas not available

Installing python-pygoocanvas revealed that grapviz also needed to be installed.
After this was done, Gramps works like a chanrm.

OK, a lot of stuff has happened since did anything on this blog.
But I decided to give it a try again.

I just bought a lenovo ideapad 710s-13IKB
It has ann Intel I7 7’th generation
8 Gig memory
256 Gig SSD disk
Screen resolution is 1920×1080
Unfortunately no cabled network, so I have to make do with the WiFi.

I wanted to install linux mint on it, and here are the steps I went through to get it working.
Downloaded and installed the bios from Lenovo: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-Yoga-Series-Notebooks/Yoga-900-and-Ideapad-710S-Linux-Only-BIOS/ta-p/3466850

To boot into the bios, you need to press <Fn><F2> during the boor process.
I decided not to experiment, but follow all the advice I had found on the net, so I did the following:
Changed the hard disk setting from raid to AHCI.
I disabled the UEFI boot, set boot order to legacy, disabled secure boot. save and exited.
When I was in there, I enabled the Intel virtualisation, since I knew that virtualbox required this.

I had linux mint 17 on a multi boot USB key, created with yumi: https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/

I found that the kernel on mint 17, was to old to recognize the hard disk, so I downloaded and mint 18.1 and created an image ont the multi boot usb.

booted the new version, and delected install.
The installation succeeded, and I rebboted.
I found that I could only boot, if the USB key was in place, so apparently the grub was installed on the USB key, and not the hard disk!!
At the same time I found that all content on the USB key had disappeared.
Created a new USB with the mint 18.1 image.
When I installed, accepting the default values, it would not create a boot record.
Found a tip on the net (Sorry I cannot find it again to give credits)
Select “something else” instead of install on the whole disk.
Created a 60 Gig partition mounted it on /
Created 10 Gig for swap
Created and mounted the rest on /home

This time the installation process ran without errors, and I was able to boot, without the USB.

And to my delight, I have yet to discover something that doesn’t work under linux.