Monday 28 October 2024

 28th Ocrober 2024

I've been messing around with LLMs on the m93p and also on the Surface Pro for a while.  A few minutes ago I remembered that both Opera and my Office Suite (SoftMaker Office) have their own built-in AI, so I decided to have a quick play with Opera's 'Aria' AI.

One thing I didn;t realise was that Aria has a Text to Image function.
No, that's another thing I had played with in depth when I accidentally discovered 'Perchance AI' some time ago.  The results were pretty 'out there', but I managed some really nice Desktop Wallpapers for my systems.

So I fired up Opera and did this quick test:




The text of the BASH script was:
#!/bin/bash # Set the output file name output_file="combined.mp3" # Concatenate all .mp3 files in the current directory for file in *.mp3; do # Append each file to the output file cat "$file" >> "$output_file" done echo "All .mp3 files have been combined into '$output_file'."

I tested the BASH script and it worked perfectly.  I'm not suggesting I would use AI to write all my scripts, but it might be worth testing it on a few Pyton and other scripts just out of curiosity, because it came up with a result immediately.

At any rate, for anyone running Linux, and I guess other Operating Systems as well, it is worth knowing that ARIA in Opera works fine and as well as being an interesting novelty for creating computer wallpaper or cartoons, it can actually be used for a certain amount of work (with caveats).

Since I use Opera on my Android Mobile, I really must have a look and see if the current version of Opera on Android also has ARIA AI.



Friday 4 October 2024

The Surface Pro LINUX experiment continues Part 2

 It has been a while since I updated this. I played around with a few Linux distros that should have worked on the Surface Pro 3, but I kept coming back to Mint Cinnamon because it had two things that worked pretty well out of the box.

A good deal of this experimenting involved some tiny USB sticks, well, more like USB ‘Buttons’ of various capacities from 64GB to 256GB. The focus was on creating ‘Persistent’ Live Bootable USB drives, so I could properly test each distro and save my work between sessions including enything I had modified.

Both Surface Pros had Windows already installed, the 8/64GB Surface Pro 3 had WIndows 10, and the 8/256GB Surface Pro 3 was running Windows 11 Pro, so I liked the Persistent Live thing because I could easily swap between Tablets and compare the performance of the different RAM in the tablets running each Distribution.

Originally I liked Kubuntu for the way it just felt and looked nice on the Surface Pro. The big annoyances were the crappy On-Screen keyboard and the fact that if I disconnected the Keyboard/Cover to use the tablet standalone, I had to go in manually and select the orientatin of the screen every time I wanted to swap from Portrait to landscape or back.
That function was enabled by default in Mint Cinnamon.
I also ran a few other distros on the Surface with varying results, but it kept coming down to Cinnamon or Plasma.

When my mind was almost made up to stick with Cinnamon because of the screen rotation, Neon had just moved from Alpha to beta, and I had downloaded a copy. On a whim I tried Neon 6 Beta on the Surface Pro, about when Neon was transitioning from Plasma 5.27 into Plasma 6.
Everything was running beautifully and I liked the newer Plasma style better than Kubuntu’s. The trouble was – that stupid lack of autorotate of the screen was still a pain.

Now, one of the beautiful things about Beta testing is that the whole point of the testing is to try to run a new Distro or App on as many devices as possible. So I filed a bug report about it. In the meantime I had found a way to make the screen rotate automatically, so while I was at it, I sent the details about how I was making it happen and asked if this could be implemented before Plasma 5.27 actually released as Plasma 6.
One other beauty of having a go at testing a Beta is that some developers actually read requests and suggestions. Within a few days I had an acknowledgement, and in the next Beta it was operational.

That experience sort of sealed the rest of the search for a Linux Surface Tablet OS.
I’ve been using Neon 6 since that time and it has got better and better. It is one of the best discoveries I’ve ever made in more than 20 years of using Linux as my daily Operating System.

 

(Neon 6.2.2 on a Surface Pro 3 with 8/256GB at October 26 2024)

 Now there is only a single hurdle. Most Linux distros are moving from X11 display for graphics, to Wayland.
One of my major uses for a Linux Tablet is as a terminal into my various other Linux computers that run on my home network.
Also, as I think I’ver written before, I use VNC – Virtual Network Computing, rather than traditional networking. That means I can basically ‘Remote Control’ various other computers from my Surface Tablet. I have a single %% inch LED Monitor, with several computers connected to it using HDMI.
All can be controlled using a single Mouse and Keyboard without having to change or switch anything.

I use the Virtual Desktop function built into Linux to simply open each remote computer’s desktop in whichever other computer, in this case, the Surface pro tablet.
I can also remote into any other computer from my main one viewin them in the same way, on a Virtual Desktop.
Mouse and Keyboard control move from one to another automatically as soon as I move the mouse cursor into the Window of the other machine on its Virtual Desktop. It sounds a lot more complicated than it is.

And the problem?

I use an App called NoMachine to run my VNC. NoMachine does NOT play nice with Wayland just yet.
For now I gan easily get around that by simply log in each machine into a Plasma (X11) session, but eventually if Neon drops X11 support I’l be stuffed. For now KDE has plans to keep supporting X11 for legacy systems.

One last thing. I was so pleased with the way Neon 6 / Plasma 6 works on the 8/256GB Surface Pro 3 that I wiped Windows 11 (which I was updating, but never using) and installed Neon 6 to the internal NVMe.

Sunday 28 April 2024

KDE Plasma Neon and Kubuntu - Randomly Change the Colour of the Prompt and following Text each time Konsole starts

To Start Konsole Terminal so the Colour of the Prompt (and the text you type after it) Change at each time it is Opened:

Open Konsole

Right Click Toobar > Configure Toolbars


Make sure you have Main Toolbar selected (NOT Session Toolbar)

You may have to use the field to choose Main . .

On Left choose ‘Activate Menu’ and drag it into the Right pane

Click Activate menu


Choose Settings > Edit Current Profile

Choose Appearance> Linux Colors >

Click then Choose Edit Button at Right Top

Just below the Colour Block Tick [*] Randomly adjust colors for each session


















Click Apply then Ok

When that closes click Ok again

Close Konsole and open and close it a couple of times to confirm that the PROMPT and subsequent Text colours change each time.


The Surface Pro LINUX Experiment continues

 It is now March 2024 and a lot has been happening with the Surface Pro 3 LINUX thing.  
Among the big things has been that Linux Mint is now at v 21.3, and Mint 21.2 Cinnamon works more or less perfectly on the Surface 3, so I will soon get Cinnamon 21.3 set up on it.

The biggest news however, is that I have finally managed to work out how to best set up a Persistent-Live USB Flash Drive with the right partitioning space.
The less exciting news is that I cannot get a USB stick over 64GB to boot.  A 64GB stick set at 90% for Persistence however, gives me about 45GB of user space for files and Apps.

That's not too bad considering that the Surface Pro 3 has its MicroSD card slot still available, and that takes (so far) a 256GB card.

And just like that another month has passed.
I got Mint 21.3 installed 'Live - Persistent' and for some reason mkusb only gives me a 4GB writable partition and the 45Gb space is now Read Only.  That sucks.  
To top that off, the same thing is happening with some other distros, and even worse, Kubuntu 24 is now out, and that won't boot to a live 'parsistent' desktop at all.

Neither would KDE neon 6.  
The last really successful Neon 6 I had runnign Persistent Live was one of the ver first 'Beta 2' releases.  Those would still boot to X11.  Later releases of Neon 6 started ONLY booting to Wayland, and the most recent ones don;t even seem to have an X11 option 'if' I manage to get them to log out.

In desperation i tried Ventoy and followed the instructions carefully - and that failed, so I followed the instructions for a slightly different setup and that also failed.

It 'seems' something has chnaged in the 'Installers' of some distros neither mkusb nor Ventoy seem to like it.  Once I get over the frustration I will experiment more. 

The last 'Perfect' Persistent-Live'installations I have are Cinnamon 21.2 and KDE neon 6 Beta 2.  It now seems I deleted the ISO files for those early Betas.  There were so many of them, and the way thngs were going I decided I would not need them.

If it was not for needing X11 to run NoMachine properly I would not bother, because the Live Persistent USB drives run pretty well perfectly on the Surface Pro.

So where am I now?

I still have two Live Persistent USB drives running Mint Cinnamon 21.2, so the obvious decision is not to modifyt those in any way - but keep them as failsafes.

My project this week will be to try creating a couple of 64GB Live Persistent USB drives using the most recent Mint Cinnamon 21.3

Mint Cinnamon has so far proved to be pretty robust, and while I prefer the 'look and feel' of Plasma 6 on the Surface Pro, Cinnamon still 'just works'.