Category Archives: Opensuse

Opensuse Leap 15.4 – get the PA Ladspa equalizer running

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Some days ago I have upgraded to Opensuse Leap 15.4 on an old laptop which had Leap 15.3 installed. I once again ran into a problem regarding Pulseaudio and its Ladspa based equalizer. The equalizer did not work, although you could start its GUI.

The problem: The Ladspa equalizer’s interface shows up – but the equalizer is not working and not usable as a Pulseaudio sink

You can start the pulseaudio-equalizer, its graphical interface shows up on your desktop (in my case a KDE desktop) – but it is not doing its work on any sound streams. One could also say: You can switch the Pulseaudio LADSPA equalizer on, but it has no effect on any sound. You do not see it as a sink in the Pulseaudio tools either. pavucontrol will not show it as a device we could attach a sound source to. Regarding KDE we can not define it as the standard device which sound sources should use for handling their output. A Pipewire installation alone does not solve this problem.

The Cause: A missing link to a library

A lot of programs try to find shared system library objects in the directory “/usr/lib64/”. Normally, an installation procedure would set up a soft link to required so-libs it brings with it in a sub-directory of “/usr/lib64”. The problem is that such a link is missing after the installation of the RPM “pulseaudio-equalizer” on Leap 15.4. The missing link is one to /usr/lib64/ladspa/mbeq_1197.so.

Solution

mytux:~ # cd /usr/lib64
mytux:/usr/lib64 # ln -s /usr/lib64/ladspa/mbeq_1197.so  mbeq_1197.so

And your Pulseaudio – Ladspa – Equalizer will work again.

 

Opensuse Leap 15.4 on a PC – III – fixing the order of multiple screens for SDDM and for Plasma, Gnome on Wayland

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In the first post of this series I have covered the upgrade procedure of a Linux PC from Opensuse Leap 15.3 to Leap 15.4. In the second post I tested the system’s behavior for Plasma and Gnome on (X)Wayland. Which was surprisingly good.

Opensuse Leap 15.4 on a PC – I – Upgrade from Leap 15.3 – repositories, Nvidia, Vmware WS, KVM, Plasma widget deficits

Opensuse Leap 15.4 on a PC – II – Plasma, Gnome, flatpak, Libreoffice and others on (X)Wayland?

The upgrade to Leap 15.4 may come with an inconvenience on systems with multiple attached screens:

You may loose your preferred screen order.

This means that your mouse cursor may not move across your screens as you expect it for your desktop display manager or for your graphical desktop spanned over the number of available screens. And windows moved on the desktop across the right edge of a particular screen may appear on another screen physically positioned to the left of your current screen. Which is not really funny.

Actually, my upgrade to Leap 15.4 confronted me with a wrong screen order for both SDDM and my KDE Plasma desktop sessions. This happened on two of my systems – both equipped with Nvidia graphics cards. Regarding Plasma and Gnome on X11 I have previously often used the nvidia-settings application to fix the screen order and put related statements into the xorg.conf. But on (X)Wayland this is currently not an option. nvidia-settings simply lacks the required functionality there.

Some people recommend in such a case to switch cables between the available plugs at the graphics card. No need to do so. In the present post I show you how to get your screens into the required order again without moving their physical positions or putting their video cables into different plugs.

But I only describe the measures for the display manager SDDM and for KDE Plasma and Gnome on Wayland / X11. For other display managers and desktop environments other tools and steps may have to be applied. Below I use the term (X)Wayland when the methods apply both to a native Wayland session or a Xwayland setup.

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Opensuse Leap 15.4 on a PC – II – Plasma, Gnome, flatpak, Libreoffice and others on (X)Wayland?

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In the last post of this series

Upgrade to Opensuse Leap 15.4 – I – a look at repositories, Nvidia, Vmware WS, KVM, Plasma widgets

we saw that an upgrade from Leap Opensuse 15.3 to Leap 15.4 is a relatively smooth operation. After the basic upgrade I wanted to look a bit at an interesting detail – namely (X)Wayland. And got surprised – positively and negatively. This post summarizes some of my experiences.

Nvidia and Wayland

For a long time it was almost impossible to use Wayland in combination with Nvidia and KDE. Which mostly was the fault of Nvidia. See an Heise article on this topic here. See also the experience of a Gnome user here – although I do not share his bad experience with a X11-based KDE Plasma on Nvidia. For years I have not seen a realistic chance for a productive use of Wayland on my PCs and laptops with Nvidia-cards. KDE PLasma did not work at all on Wayland. Also with Gnome I experienced terrible difficulties. But Nvidia has improved its support for Wayland significantly in 2022, starting with driver version 470. For Nvidia driver version 525 we would expect some stability.

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