XPS13 webcam doesn't wake up (BIOS fix)

The XPS13 9370 (summer 2018's model) webcam is horrible anyway (still stuck at the bottom of the display). However, it didn't help that it stopped working when the laptop resumed after suspend (all Kubuntu versions I used from 18.04 upwards).
According to this Dell support discussion, it was a BIOS problem that was fixed in BIOS 1.5.0 - I had 1.3.3. Updating seems to have fixed the problem.
Steps:
Get the current BIOS installer from here.
Put it on a flash drive (unless you've got a USB-C one, the Dell dongle works. MicroSDs don't)
Plug in your power supply.
Press F12 during re-boot, select BIOS Flash Update. There should be a drop-down menu top left on the next screen that lets you select and browse the flash drive. Pick the EXE installer. Install. Reboot.

do-release-upgrade or don't

I couldn't resist the lure of the Dingo, but it took me some time to get there. Long story short: do-release-upgrade is a picky bitch. It kept and kept and kept coming up with a "Your python3 install is corrupted. Please fix the '/usr/bin/python3' symlink." message. That message is produced by a script downloaded into /tmp during the installation process and IMO *should* just make sure that the /usr/bin/python3 symlink points to a correct python binary (might have to be 3.6). After all, the update scripts have a "#!/usr/bin/python3" header.
However, over the years, people have had to resort to the weirdest workarounds:

• Make sure /usr/bin/python and /usr/bin/python3 point to python3.6
• Reinstall default python3 
• Purge anything done by update-alternatives (sudo update-alternatives --remove-all python)
• Purge python2.x

Reader, I tried all of them.
update-alternatives --display python
sudo update-alternatives --remove-all python

sudo apt install --reinstall ubuntu-release-upgrader-core

sudo apt install --reinstall python3
sudo ln -sf /usr/bin/python3.6 /usr/bin/python
sudo ln -sf /usr/bin/python3.6 /usr/bin/python3
sudo apt-get remove --purge python2.7-minimal
In the end, purging python2.7 did the trick. That involved uninstalling inkscape and bits of TeXlive, but it was a small list of dependencies that could be reinstalled after the update. Still, a mess. Serves me right for not bothering to do a clean reinstall.

pylibtiff fails on Ubuntu 14.10

I ran into this while setting up trackpy - after installing a recent git clone and trying to import the module in an ipython console, I got the following message:
Failed to find TIFF header file (may be need to run: sudo apt-get install libtiff4-dev)
A bit of a problem, as recent Ubuntus come with libtiff5-dev and it doesn't resolve the issue.
The message is actually libtiff's as can be easily checked with an 'import libtiff' statement.
According to bug discussions on Launchpad and Google Code this is due to Ubuntu providing a pylibtiff that's too old for its libtiff, so it hasn't caught on to version 5 yet.
The quick fix is to get the missing tiff_h_4_0_3.py and saving it in /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/libtiff/ (sudo that). Haven't put the module through its paces yet, but at least it loads without complaints now.
Also, for recent git versions of trackpy, Ubuntu's python-six is not recent enough (needs to be >=1.8).  Fixable with sudo pip install --upgrade six, if you happen to have pip around.

Broken Saucy update on a Zenbook

Confession: I did a somewhat rash Kubuntu Saucy upgrade while on holidays. It left me with a blank screen at startup. But what better entertainment can you have lying awake with a 6 hour jet lag at 4am than fixing your Linux?

The issue, by the way, is the Zenbook (UX31A) not liking the new kernel. The solution is Joseph Salisbury's inofficial kernel fix.

Alekto - dual booting a Zenbook

After Tisiphone, an Asus Bamboo U43JC, bowed out after 2 1/2 years with FUBAR hinges, a 3/4 working LCD panel and a dead battery, the natural choice was to stick to Asus, of course. In fairness, finding something ultraportable with a full metal body and decent screen resolution that's not a Macbook Air and doesn't break the bank doesn't leave you many options beyond a Zenbook. I went for the UX31A DB71 with a 256 GB SSD and i7 3517U processor.

openSuSE 11.4 on VMware Player Win

Since my Samsung P35 already choked on 11.3 and runs Kubuntu very nicely without hassle, but I still was curious about 11.4, I decided to install it in VMPlayer on my Windows 7 office machine.

Windows 7 SP1 is out…

… and I should know by now my MBR wouldn't survive it. Well, what do we have SuperGrub for? Still, there was too much trial and error involved in restoring it, so, for next time, here's my log on how to restore openSuSE's MBR on the ASUS u43jc after Windows wiped it.

openSuSE 11.4 update notes

As Kubuntu copes better with Medusa's hardware, SuSE isn't my productivity distro right now, so I decided to risk an online upgrade. I mainly followed the SBD instructions on http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:System_upgrade.

New bitch on the blog

To be precise, a partially wooden contraption charmingly christened Medusa (Asus U43JC-X1). Goodies include nVidia Optimus hybrid graphics, USB3 and an i5-450M processor with multithreading support.

Murphy's law - or triple boot using a thumb drive

The good: Windows 7's partitioner is great.
The bad: I did some update on Saturday afternoon which completely fried my KNetworkManager (it keeps claiming "Network management disabled", no matter what I do) - which is not good, considering that the unstable university wireless keeps kicking me out and I have to run YaST's network settings every time to reconnect. Also, for some reason, 11.3's suspend to RAM feature which I had really liked before in terms of shutdown/wake-up speed, froze my system several times. Not exactly good, either.

OpenSuSE 11.3 - less fun on a Samsung P35 - ATI woes continued

After the tremendously positive testing results of avocadohead with Tisiphone, I tried my luck some days ago with 11.3 on Thukydides, a Samsung P35 notebook, not the newest hardware and unfortunately with an ATI graphic card.

Really, openSuSE!

Touchpad control - great!
Improved wireless handling - impressive!
No desktop effects without kernel tweaking - priceless.

The 11.3 installation report:

Dual boot Windows 7 64bit and OpenSuSE 11.1 Linux - GRUB magic

After having installed OpenSuSE 11.1 on my office machine quite a long time ago and found, that Windows 7 was not bootable any more I simply repaired the boot by using the Windows 7 Installation DVD and forgot about Linux on that machine. A few days ago the necessity of having Linux as well showed up again and I wanted to integrate both systems into GRUB, which for whatever reason failed. (I guess it is due to the 64bit Version which in my case added an invisible boot partition of roughly 100 MB as first partition on the hard drive.) I finally ended up integrating GRUB into the Windows Boot Loader using mainly this entry (thanks and credits to the author!) which I will fine tune and enrich with additional information in the following:

Notes on replacing Tisiphone's hard disk

Yet another faulty hard disk…

1. Restoring the home partition from a gz-compressed image with the aid of an Ubuntu live CD: uncompressing the image directly onto the target partition took ages, especially as the amount of uncompressed data is the actual partition size and not what's on it.
   It was considerably faster to uncompress the image in place (even regarding the bottlenecks of booting from CD and the USB connection to the external drive), mounting it and just copying the contents. (see daWuzzz's contributions on gzipped images and image mounting)
2. Just a reminder: only copy the bare necessities using a live system. USB data throughput was about four times slower compared to copying with a system on disk.
3. Importing users from a previous installation, using the copied home partition: This is a bit tricky, as the installer DVD actually needs an existing installation to read from. Inelegant solution: first do a dummy install setting up fresh users with the same properties (easiest way in a single-user environment), then format the home partition and copy your user data, and finally install the OS again, this time importing the user from the dummy setup using your previous home directory. Alternatively, restore both your old root and home partitions before the fresh install and import the users from there (cumbersome if you had a lot of data on the root partition).
   Other variants I tried but ran into problems with: create a new user and use the old home (KWallet password fail); formatting and rewriting the home partition after the system install (ate my GRUB)
   
4. Opensuse 11.2 still reports a failure on the network connection during install despite obviously being able to download release notes
   .

ATI woes

I had a go at installing SuSE 11.2 on Xanthippe, my slightly mercurial desktop computer (Athlon 64bit, ATI graphics, Atheros WLAN chip). The 11.0 kernel kept warring with the WLAN chip, so it was time for an upgrade.
After a normal install, the system claimed to have no working graphics during the configuration reboot (c'mon, it's only an elderly Radeon X1300) and started the console YaST.

It sort of works

First impressions of 11.2
The first one is purely aesthetical: the SuSE 11.2 installer looks like a gothicised version of Win 7's cutesy scrollwork, in a blackish-green colour scheme and without all those birdies.
The setup procedure (64-bit) was not noticeably different from 11.1: in partitioning, I fared best with importing the previous installation's partitioning and setting the root partition to be formatted to ext4 after that.

More fun with Kernel Panic

After an update session sometimes ago (and yes, I didn't need the computer for quite a while, that's why I can't really tell you the cause). I experienced a persistent fault: "Could not find /dev/disk/by-id/blablabla-part2 - Would you like to fall back on /dev/disk/by-id/blablablabla-part2 (Y/n)?"
Regardless of the answer Medea went to everlasting sleep, um, well, till the reset button was pressed.

Yay! Kernel panic!

It's really no reason to rejoice.
On Archimedes (a meticulously preserved SuSE 10.3) the Virtual Box update seemed to have trouble with the fact that there were apparently three kernel versions installed (no idea how they got there), so I decided to get rid of two of them with YaST. And so the catastrophe began…

openSuSE 11.1 on an Apple MacBook Pro

Meet polyhymnia, my new Apple MacBook Pro 13'' with standard processor and 2 GB RAM. For convenience, the first thing I did was exchanging the 160 GB harddrive against a 500 GB one. While installing MacOS X I already left 60 GB free for an openSuSE installation. If you want to install openSuSE as well and didn't do that, follow the hints on OpenSUSE.org.

Texlive 2007 and inkscape 0.46 on openSuSE 10.3

I hadn't thought this would be a problem, but I fiddled quite a while with inkscape's and texlive's alternating complaints about missing poppler libraries.
Poppler is a pdf rendering library (xpdf fork), of which texlive 2007 needs version 1 (provided by the poppler package), while inkscape 0.46 (yes, the new version with built-in pdf import) needs libpoppler2. For some reason YaST apparently deleted one of them :-(
Well, I learnt quite a bit about library linking conventions.
Altogether, it has to be some problem of the expiring support for SuSE 10.3; texlive 2008 probably already depends on a newer poppler version (cf. the 'PageGroup detected' error, which is fixed by now), but it's packaged only for 11.0 and higher. Still, Archimedes is stuck with 10.3 until I've got my PhD at least - or so I thought.