Webcore and Infinality Ultimate on openSUSE Leap is awesome

Previously I wrote about using Infinality Ultimate to make the font rendering on my openSUSE Leap looking fabulous. Well, Yuzery Yusoff in the OpenSUSE Malaysia FB group added that he also added the webcore fonts to even make it more fabulous.

Here are his comments :

" My steps installing infinality ultimate:
1. Google "infinality ultimate opensuse"
2. Add repo frm http://download.opensuse.org/.../home:nick31:INFINALITY... ( coz im using tumbleweed)
3. Open yast>software management and view repo. Choose repo for infinality and switch to it and follow further installation
3. After finish with installation, i find "webcore" repo and install "webcore" and "webcore-vista" fonts
4. After finish install both of microsoft fonts, open terminal and type this: sudo fc-presets set
5. It will prompt for choices. I enter no 3 which is meant for ms ( micro$oft)
6. Restart your computer

There u go. The fonts absolutely better, even better than in Windows for me laa..

Because I'm dealing with my peers who still using Windows and Office suite, i need to install WPS Office for exact compatibility

Done. No more just looking tru windows. I ran out from the gates. Go to the open field and play around there...in the open world...hahaha"

And my - the effects are really astounding!!

Better font rendering with Infinality Ultimate for openSUSE Leap

Infinality-ultimate is a set of patches that improves the font-rendering in Linux systems.

I use openSUSE Leap 42.1 and fialed to look for a 1-Click Install  at OBS. Google search yielded a repo for 13.2 and retracing my way up to its parent dir, I found the repo directory for Leap at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/nick31:/INFINALITY-ULTIMATE/openSUSE_Leap_42.1/

As usual I added it via CLI:
# zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/nick31:/INFINALITY-ULTIMATE/openSUSE_Leap_42.1/ Infinality_Ultimate

and refreshed the new repo
# zypper ref Infinality_Ultimate

Since I already have the Infinality repo's fontoconfig installed, I need to force an update from the new repo

# zypper dup --from Infinality_Ultimate

After a reboot, my fonts are indeed much better, especially in my Chrome and Chromium browsers that has been giving me less than perfect fonts.

Anything that runs Qt and generally all now look amazing.

Fixing Totem error ("Missing plugings") when playing vids in openSUSE Leap

Totem, the default video player for the GNOME 3 desktop has always been a difficult beast to tame when I am using openSUSE. My primary work machine runs openSUSE Leap and as predicted, Totem isn't running - no matter what manner of gstreamer plugins added/removed or removing the ~/.cache/gstreamer-1.0 directory nothing works.

Posting in the openSUSE group in FB got me a reply from a gentleman (https://www.facebook.com/NMMoendjen?fref=ufi) who suggested that I should install xine. That jigged my memory and I recalled installing the w32codecs package to make Totem work. Did a zypper search but couldn't find w32codec package even in the Packman repo for Leap.

Going through OBS, a preliminary search yielded w32codec packages for Tumbleweed and 13.x. Not Good! I trawled through the repository manually it yielded me the YMP for it at http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/home:vadimuzzz/openSUSE_42.1/w32codecs.ymp.

If you have trouble installing the package from 1-Click Install, download the package and use zypper to manually install it. Just ignore the "Problem: nothing provides libstdc++.so.5 needed by w32codecs-1.0-20110133.1.x86_64" error message.

Totem is alive again.....

Fixing Totem error ("Missing plugings") when playing vids in openSUSE Leap

Totem, the default video player for the GNOME 3 desktop has always been a difficult beast to tame when I am using openSUSE. My primary work machine runs openSUSE Leap and as predicted, Totem isn't running - no matter what manner of gstreamer plugins added/removed or removing the ~/.cache/gstreamer-1.0 directory nothing works.

Posting in the openSUSE group in FB got me a reply from a gentleman (https://www.facebook.com/NMMoendjen?fref=ufi) who suggested that I should install xine. That jigged my memory and I recalled installing the w32codecs package to make Totem work. Did a zypper search but couldn't find w32codec package even in the Packman repo for Leap.

Going through OBS, a preliminary search yielded w32codec packages for Tumbleweed and 13.x. Not Good! I trawled through the repository manually it yielded me the YMP for it at http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/home:vadimuzzz/openSUSE_42.1/w32codecs.ymp.

If you have trouble installing the package from 1-Click Install, download the package and use zypper to manually install it. Just ignore the "Problem: nothing provides libstdc++.so.5 needed by w32codecs-1.0-20110133.1.x86_64" error message.

Totem is alive again.....

Running LibreOffice 5.2 beta on openSUSE Leap 42.1

LibreOffice to me is an indispensible tool. I have used it professionally, even in Windows, since the pre-OpenOffice 1.0 days; when I typed my final paper for my Bachelor's programme. My supervisor was a kindly Englishman that was intrigued that a free office suite of some quality was available at no cost running on the nascent Linux platform.

Since then, I have used LibreOffice for my all my documentation, creating presentation slides and even diagramming needs that I can honetly say that I am no longer be considered productive with the conventional MS Office.

SUSE has always played a crucial rule ("the rebel ringleader") in making LibreOffice into the awesome suite it is today, from the days of rebellion against the draconian Sun contributor licensing and forking OpenOffice into the go-oo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo) project as a result and later on to collaborating with Microsoft to create an "Enterprise version of OpenOffice" named Novell OpenOffice and later to bring about the birth of The Document Foundation and consequently LibreOffice.

The latest version of LibreOffice is at 5.1.4 downloadable from the LibreOffice site - but for some of us, the "stable" version is the same as the "stale" version - the inner geek in me demands to have the latest incarnation of LibreOffice running on my system (there is a practical reason for this; as I often need to work with MS Office documents, a newer version oftens bring better compatibility with MS Office documents) .

To get the latest unstable/beta version or in SUSE/openSUSE  parlance, Factory version; running on openSUSE Leap - you can add it via the CLI:

# zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/LibreOffice:/Factory/openSUSE_42.1/ LO_Factory

# zypper ref LO_Factory

# zypper dup --from LO_Factory

And there you go - enjoy the freshest from LibreOffice.

Go/Weiqi/Baduk on openSUSE LEAP 42.1

Besides chess (or International Chess as the Chinese are prone to call it), I am also enamoured with the ancient mental game of Go (Weiqi in Chinese and Baduk in Korean).

I have both GNUGo and ElyGo Lite on my Android cell and on my openSUSE LEAP notebook I have qgo2 as my frontend powered by GNUGo.

GNUGo is packaged in the standard LEAP repo (# zypper in gnugo) and qgo2 can be easily installed using the 1-Click Install via OBS. 

I have never used a Go/Weiqi/Baduk application on Linux before and I seem to like what I am seeing. qgo2 also seems to have the ability to connect to Go servers on the Internet. Never tried playing online before - might just give it a shot one of these days. Back to my game now.

Installing ScidvsPC on Fedora 23

I am a huge fan of chess and have been so since I learned the rules at twelve. Growing up in a single parent family money was always tight and chess was way more affordable than football or tennis. I was a pretty good
player in my teenage years and chess was good to me - through it I met two of my exes (ahem!), got to travel to competitions and met some really interesting people and was always known as the chess dude in school - though the jocks would never fail to make fun of me and my team-mates achievements and the lack of our athleticism for "real" games.

Well, of late my passion for chess was once again ignited. As a Linux user, our choices of chess programs are actually quite poor compared to the likes of Fritz, ChessBase, Chess Assistant etc for the Microsoft Windows platform. Shredder Chess has a Linux version but it will not work on the latest distros due to a problem with the display managers and besides its creator seems keener on the mobile platform. Shredder Chess for Android is a good program for a modest fee and I highly recommend it. 

I discovered ScidVsPC after Googling around and found it to be an excellent suite for game manager and analysis. It doesn't come pre-build with any RPMs for Fedora Linux and CentOS/RHEL - installing it therefore will require the venerable 3-step to Nirvana - configure, make and make install. On my Fedora Linux 23 notebook, this is what I did to get it installed:

Install the dependencies and StockFish Engine
# dnf install tk-devel tcl-devel gcc-c++ tkimg zlib-devel stockfish

Download the tarball, extract it and compile:
$ tar -zxvf scid_vs_pc-4.16.tgz 
$ cd scid_vs_pc-4.16
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install
  
To launch it you will need to execute the following from CLI
$ scid 

Or create a launcher by creating a desktop file (save it into ~/.local/share/applications ):
$ vi ~/.local/share/applications/scid.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Scid vs. PC
Comment=Scid vs. PC Games Management
Exec=/usr/local/bin/scid
Icon=/home/eyeoh/Downloads/Scidlogo.png
Terminal=false

Adding the Stockfish Chess Engine - from within the ScidvsPC UI -> Tools -> Analysis Engines -> enter /usr/bin/stockfish20.bin in the Command field and the click on the ~/scidvspc button and finally click on OK.

And you are good to go! Enjoy!