David Dyess .com

At one time, Eclipse was the IDE for many open source developers. It began at an IBM lab around 2000 (estimated, could be earlier) as a potential competitor to Microsoft Visual Studio (VS) and by the time it was released as open source, in November 2001, IBM had already invested an estimated $40M into it. Hundreds of programs were also built on top of Eclipse's platform, most of them weren't even IDE's, and a lot of them are still in use today - open source and proprietary. It influenced and inspired a whole new generation of IDE's.

It's difficult to pin-point exactly when Eclipse began sliding out of prominence. Many new and, mostly, specialized IDE's came out around the early 2010s, and most of them were simpler to use than Eclipse. The most notable was Atom, which was released in 2015 by Github. Atom came with it's own platform, now known as Electron, which also revolutionized desktop software on a far greater scale than even Eclipse. But that's a different story. After Atom, came Visual Studio Code, which has gobbled up a vast majority of developer desktops and Atom was killed off a few years after Microsoft bought Github, the original creator of Atom.

Eclipse Theia is considered the next generation Eclipse Platform, it was first released in 2017 and has been backed by many of the same companies who backed the original Eclipse. Theia IDE began development in 2019 and has reached a stable version in June 2024 (announced in June, it was technically available 30 May 2024). Theia is built on a lot of the same tech as Visual Studio Code and looks a lot like it. Theia support extensions from OpenVSX, which is the open repository for VS Code extensions, but there's more. You can also install a VS Code extension directly into Theia and it works just fine.

To test a non-OpenVSX extension, I installed the Supermaven extension, which I downloaded from the VS Code marketplace, and it worked just as well as it does in VS Code. Even the chat functionality works, it's exactly like running it in VS Code. Theia IDE is a community answer to VS Code, just as Eclipse was a community answer to VS. The only downside so far is it's only available on Linux, in binary form, as .deb and AppImage, as far as I know. I suspect it will soon be added to some distro repos and I suspect Red Hat's connection to it will lead to an RPM being available, maybe even a flatpak. It's very new, publicly, so it's just getting started.

If you use VS Codium, another IDE to avoid MS, or want to try something new that isn't a big change from VS Code, Theia IDE could be a good candidate for you. I'm going to start using it and I've been pretty faithful to VS Code/Codium for quite a while.

I've been learning how to use SurrealDB and, honestly, I'm kinda loving it. Still learning, but I haven't found anything I don't like. It actually seems to solve my two biggest issues with ArangoDB too...it has very low resource usage at smaller scale and it's incredibly easy to deploy a simple server. Like I said, still quite a bit to learn, but I'm thinking SurrealDB would be a viable primary option for Grazie! 2.0. ArangoDB never was, just because of the issues above. I wish I'd found it sooner.

ArangoDB's new licensing has made me not want to use it anymore. Some of my ideas lean very heavily toward being a SaaS and ArangoDB explicitly disallows it's use as that. I know it states "source code", but I would be using it from the openSUSE repository, which would mean it would be compiled from source and not the binary from ArangoDB. I don't like it. It just feels like it would be too easy for them to make an accusation with the way they have it worded. I also don't want to grow to their 100gb limit and then have to find an alternative or agree some to Enterprise version price that they won't even advertise on their web site. I tried to contact them through the web chat and email [for a quote of the Enterprise version's price] and didn't get a response yet from either. It was really for confirmation (that I can't afford it) and not a last ditch effort to keep using it.

So...I started looking for a new database. Initially, I wanted something with an OSI-approved license. Unfortunately, the one I like the most also uses the BSL 1.1 license, but without the extra conditions that ArangoDB has instated. To me, that's fine. It's the MariaDB license. They have to protect their product. I understand all of this. The ArangoDB's BSL wasn't what I had a problem with, it was their extra conditions; I don't want to run a DBaaS or offer managed database hosting, that's not what I'm interested in doing.

And...it looks like I'll be moving on from ArangoDB to SurrealDB. I considered all of the ways I could get around a change; I don't really like change and I've loved everything about using ArangoDB. I considered staying on a version before the license change and just updating every 4 years when the BSL rolls over to become an Apache license. I just don't want to deal with all of that. I don't want to use 4 year old, unmaintained software. SurrealDB doesn't have an Enterprise version. They've held their BSL license for quite some time and it at least appears that a lot more people use SurrealDB than I've ever found to use ArangoDB. Plus, I may be able to actually find someone else who uses it...who knows, I may want to even hire them.

Yeah, it's becoming a thing. Now I just need to find or create the tooling I need to use it and...start using it.

I was working on one of my several ArangoDB projects and I noticed the version in the Web UI said 3.10, but remembered recently seeing an announcement for 3.12. I started looking into it and found this blog post. According to that post, ArangoDB source code has replace the Apache 2.0 license with the BSL v1.1 license. This is applied to the BSL license:

ArangoDB has defined our Additional Use Grant to allow BSL-licensed ArangoDB source code to be deployed for any purpose (e.g. production) as long as you are not (i) creating a commercial derivative work or (ii) offering or including it in a commercial product, application, or service (e.g. commercial DBaaS, SaaS, Embedded or Packaged Distribution/OEM). We have set the Change Date to four (4) years, and the Change License to Apache 2.0.

Basically, if you are using the source code, you have to use as-is and not build it into a product, including using it with as part of a service. What I have been working on is pretty much providing an interface to use it as a service, but I don't use the source code. The wording and definitions aren't very clear either, does including it in an application include a web site?

The Community version has adopted a Community License:

We are also making changes to our Community Edition with the prepackaged ArangoDB binaries available for free on our website. Where before this edition was governed by the same Apache 2.0 license as the source code, it will now be governed by a new ArangoDB Community License, which limits the use of community edition for commercial purposes to a  100GB limit on dataset size in production within a single cluster and a maximum of three clusters. 

This is at least clearer and would apply to my projects. I don't know if anything I do will get above 100gb, I'd maybe like it to, but I don't know. The Enterprise license didn't change. On top of all of this, ArangoDB's pricing is not very clear, like it doesn't tell me what it would cost to do x with their cloud product, it just shows per hour pricing. There's no pricing for their Enterprise on-premise available without contacting them. I'm beginning to not trust it.

I've spent probably 100s of hours working with, learning, and building with ArangoDB. I've helped people set up migration tools and deployments. I've consulting people on migrations from other databases to ArangoDB. I've written a lot of AQL, a lot. I've been an evangelist, basically. I wish I had seen the previous announcements about the license change. I suspect it won't be included in openSUSE beyond 3.10, because it no longer uses an OSI license. I suspect I'll at least look for another option, we'll see where it goes beyond that.

KDE Plasma 6.1 was released on 18 June 2024 and it has been updated in openSUSE Tumbleweed with snapshot 20240622. It seems to be running very smoothly for me. This release comes with several new features and improved Wayland support with the addition of Explicit Sync. Read more on KDE Plasma 6.1's official release announcement.

Also, there is the Reef wallpaper made for 6.1, but not included with the release, you can get it here.

In order to enable codecs with openSUSE Tumbleweed, we need to use a 3rd party repository for potentially patent encumbered packages. The primary option for VLC with codecs is often Packman, these instructions are for installing VLC using the official VLC repository instead.

Open YaST2 Software Repositories

Click Add

Choose, HTTP, click Next

Choose Edit Parts of the URL

Repository Name: VLC

Server Name: download.videolan.org

Directory on Server: /SuSE/Tumbleweed

Go to this URL to verify the GPG Key: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-suse.html

Click Trust

You'll return to the YaST2 Software Repositories screen. For me, it named the repository Tumbleweed. If you want to rename it, select the repository and click Edit. I preferred VLC for the name.

With the repository still highlighted, use the Priority input and change it to 89 or a lesser value than other repositories. This will put it at a higher priority.

Once you are finished, click OK

I then just performed sudo zypper ref && sudo zypper dup. I also had some conflicts already, so if it doesn't pick up the VLC repository for those file, you can probably run sudo zypper dup --allow-vendor-change.

Note: If you aren't using Tumbleweed, the videolan.org link above provides information for other versions. I used it on Tumbleweed, so I can't vouch for it on other versions.

Every time I post something here, something related shows up in my google feed on my phone. It's kinda creepy google.

I use openSUSE on most of my servers, with the exception being my game servers - LinuxGSM doesn't support openSUSE, my desktop, and my laptop. I've built up some scripts and stuff to make things easier to use, so I'll probably make some generic versions to release here. I also want to do a page that lets you track openSUSE Tumbleweed updates and links to current news. I'd need to automate it, so it may take a bit to build it. Once I have that I want to do a page that helps you track Packman updates. Finally, I wrote some docs for a new documentation project we were doing for openSUSE, but it didn't really materialize. I'll probably put some of the pages up here instead. I think I probably have a few local docs I've put together for reminders too. But yeah, I want to put some openSUSE content on here and maybe help people find info easier.

It's been a while since I watched Part 1, so I'm going to start with a Part 2 review. Part 1 will come later, but I'll still do a series rating for now. I really enjoyed this movie and it was a lot of what I thought it would be, mostly. I need to read the books, but as a viewer more than a reader, I tend to respect artistic license for movies based on books.

I thought character development was good in this movie and it was obvious that was respected as a critical facet of the cinematic experience. There was decent use of foreshadowing and symbolism to drive the story along. There is a lot of symbolism in this movie, a lot. I'd probably have to watch it a few times to pull more out and analyze, but it runs much deeper than I was expecting.

Unfortunately, it felt like the first 75% of the movie was kind of drawn out and slow at times. It kept feeling like something was building, but then it would just kind of wander a bit. That may have been driven by the book, I don't know, but the timeline of the movie just felt a little off. It takes place over about 9 months, I wont tell you how I know that, but it's apparent from the beginning and the scene at the end. The last part of the movie doesn't seem like it would fit in the time frame it was slotted into. To me, it felt like last 30 minutes of the story was rushed, because so much time was spent in the first 75% of the movie. Again, maybe that was driven by the book.

The action in the movie was really good and the fights were well choreographed. The final fight scene was good, not really great, but not bad. Overall it was all the action fitting and realistic enough for the setting.

Rating: 4.7 out of 5 - Highly Recommend

There are maybe 3 or 4 movies, I've ever watched, I'd rate as a 5. The series, so far, Part 1 and Part 2, I'll rate as a 5, even though the individual movies are not 5's, in my opinion. It's a very good movie and I plan to watch it again, after I watch Part 1 again.

First of all, this is just a rant. I do not, sincerely, intend on changing my distro any time soon. I've been using openSUSE Tumbleweed for about 4 years (my first test install was around June 2020, I didn't switch to using it all the time until around August). In that time, it has been the absolute best experience I've had with any Linux distro, across the board. There have been a few hiccups though.

The main hiccup wasn't really openSUSE's fault, per se, but it still kinda falls on openSUSE. It's also the one I'm still having to deal with, to this day, and partly the entire purpose behind this rant. openSUSE is "sponsored" by SUSE, which is a very large corporation with a lot at stake. I have immense respect for SUSE, they are big players in a big game. So, backstory. There is this entirely open source graphics library named VA-API. This library is necessary to have a functional AMD GPU and AMD's drivers depend on VA-API support through the Mesa drivers. Other GPUs get their VA-API support from their own libraries and drivers, but AMD's requires VA-API support directly from Mesa.

Last year-ish, the Mesa project decided to disable compiling VA-API support in Mesa by default. This means that someone packaging Mesa has to manually enable compiling VA-API support. This also means someone enabling VA-API support could be held liable, according to some corporate lawyers, for infringing upon some software patents that are related to VA-API functionality. SUSE, therefore, does not package Mesa with VA-API support, which is required by my AMD GPU.

What this all means is I can no longer use openSUSE's Mesa package; it causes my computer to run like crap and I get next to no performance in games. There are other packages that have the same issues, which basically boils down to some lawyer said no, so there is the Packman repository that packages them with potentially problematic features enabled. One of those packages is VLC, which includes codecs for playing videos, which openSUSE's package does not include - yeah, really useful to have a video player that doesn't play videos.

Well lately I haven't been able to update openSUSE Tumbleweed, because Packman's packages continue falling behind openSUSE's, which then leads to conflicts in the package manager. I can sometimes ignore the package update and choose an option of "keep obsolete". That works when it's packages within the same chain, but the current issue actually ties to a KDE dependency, which is outside of that chain. That's rather inconvenient, considering Tumbleweed is a rolling release distro, which is currently not rolling for me. That means I'm not getting the latest security updates, one of which is actually in the newest VLC package. It's very annoying. Meanwhile, some people at openSUSE just recommend using their Mesa and VLC, along with flatpaks for the drivers and codecs. I could do that, except my computer just runs like crap with their Mesa.

I have this deep suspicion that someone behind the scenes at Mesa removed VA-API support to either harm AMD or for some kind of Khronos Group, whose members own nearly all of the patents, plan to attack companies who publish Mesa with VA-API support. I have no proof of that, zero, it just feels like that was what happened. Mesa has a lot of ties to Khronos Group, so it likely was not itself at risk by continuing VA-API support, it doesn't make sense to me that they would disable it.

So that's my issue. I have to rely on a 3rd party to compile some of my packages, because openSUSE wont compile them with needed support, because SUSE wont allow them to. If you are using Fedora, then you have the same issue leading to 3rd party packages, except Packman isn't your 3rd party and you probably don't have that part of the issue. Most other distros ship Mesa with everything you need enabled, but Red Hate and SUSE get in the way in this case.

What am I going to do? Well...nothing, yet. I could use Debian with Distrobox. I'd get a stable base, with Mesa, and I could run newer packages in a Tumbleweed distrobox. I could use Arch. I've used it before and never really had any issues. I could use Gentoo, then I'd just compile everything myself. I could use OBS and just have my own repository for my needed packages. Or, I could just wait, some more, and eventually this will be resolved...until the next time. It's annoying, I don't want to install a different distro, but I don't want to deal with these issues. Software patents need to die.

I used to try Wayland every once in a while and I'd always run into something that was a show stopper. Then, around October of last year, something changed and it became usable for me, so I used it into November. Then, my SSD began failing, I had bought a new SSD, re-installed openSUSE Tumbleweed, and couldn't remember how I had fixed KWallet to work with everything on Wayland. I've still tried it, off and on, and it worked for most things, just not those pesky passwords. Fast-forward to this morning and I dedicated some search time to finding the fix again. I blogged about the fix earlier, it's in the How-to category.

So I've been using Wayland again and it's really really good. I'm gonna play some games later. I'm hoping I can just use it all the time. I normally go from dev work to gaming and I don't like having to log out, re-log into X/Wayland, and vice-versa. I'm just gonna use one or the other, but I prefer Wayland if possible. Anyway, giving it a try again. I'm sure I'll blog an update some time :)

Back in November my SSD began failing and I had to re-install openSUSE Tumbleweed on a new drive. The downside to not having to fix my computer often is I don't have to do it often enough to remember how I did it. One of the things I hadn't fixed yet was being able to use KWallet with programs like Git GUI using on Wayland. It's actually the only reason, I know of, that I couldn't use Wayland. Well, I finally did some searching and found the fix:

• Open the .config/plasma-workspace/env folder in your Home folder

• Create a file, named something like startup.sh

• Insert this into that file:

#!/bin/sh 
SSH_ASKPASS=/usr/libexec/ssh/ksshaskpass 
export SSH_ASKPASS 
[ -n "$SSH_AGENT_PID" ] || eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"

• Save and close

• Open the .config/plasma-workspace/shutdown folder in your Home folder

• Create a file, named something like shutdown.sh

• Insert this into that file:

[ -z "$SSH_AGENT_PID" ] || eval "$(ssh-agent -k)"

• Save and close

• Logout

• Log in with Wayland

I hope this helps someone else. :)

For the past week and a half, I've been working to preserve someone's life work. Someone passed away and they've left behind a giant cache of data, which could, one day soon, be gone forever. Unfortunately, we don't have access to the raw data, just the resulting web site. It has been sobering, combing through it and trying to archive as much as possible. My initial goal is to archive the web site and everything generated from his data. I've mostly accomplished that.

I've also been writing scripts to scrape the data from the thousands of pages, scrape links that aren't in the site map, scrape links to external data sources. It's been a lot of work so far and I don't really have a lot to show for it, in comparison to what it will be eventually. The first step is preserving it, but there are further steps. I don't want to announce what data I'm currently talking about; I don't want someone else swooping in and trying to somehow monetize the opportunity.

I try to watch most of the Linux Experiment videos and this one stood out, because it's saying what I've been saying for quite a while. Now, I know there is missing data in his results, but the point wasn't the best optimized distro for gaming. The video is all about usability and what the user actually sees. You don't have to install a gaming distro to play games. Some of the worst distros I've tried were gaming distros, so just use what you want to use and game on that.

A funny video of friend of mine made...

Oops! I messed up. I forgot my SQLite database was in a certain folder, which I needed to do a refresh of said folder...so I deleted it. This means my database is brand spanking new again. Luckily I'd only added a couple of pages and about 9 posts, so not a huge loss. I definitely need to find somewhere else to put that database file though!

Reflection

On 12 May I wiped this site and installed a CMS I'm building named Grazie!, replacing my old Word Press site. I had been fixing some bugs, which I finally updated here earlier. I then decided to fix a few other things, so I did another update a few minutes ago.

I'll recreate the change log and fix my navigation links again. I did at least fix quite a few things today...damn it.