An answers to a reader’s concern about this blog

A reader wrote me a mail and asked what the general direction of this blog is going to be. He wondered about the “flood” of formulas lately. Which, in his opinion, have nothing to do with Linux. In general, his impression was that I seemingly have lost my interest in core Linux topics. He, a German, also complained that I write my posts in English.

My first reaction was: I appreciate that some of my readers care. The criticism is justified. And it deserves an answer and some explanations. The easiest part is the question regarding language.

According to my provider and my own blog-statistics 78% of page requests to this blog come from abroad, i.e. from countries outside Germany. Most requests stem from US-systems. Before Russia’s imperialistic war against Europe there also were connections (and permanent attack trials) from both Russia and China. Their percentage has declined (fortunately). Anyway, the majority of page requests comes from outside Germany. Therefore, I try to write in English. My English certainly is not the best, but it is still easier to read for those who are interested in my posts’ contents. And obviously, these are not German readers. So, I will not go back to German again.

Now to the question regarding the declining number of posts related to Linux. In the time when I worked as a free-lancer (up to 2018), I had some German customers who cared about Linux. It was in my own interest to dig a bit deeper as usual into topics like “virtualized VLANs”, firewalls etc.. The articles on these topics are still the most read ones in this blog.

But then I started to work as an employed consultant for IT-management topics in a Windows-dominated company. I simply had no chance and no time to continue with hard core Linux topics until the end of 2022. The only connection that came up was related to minor Machine Learning topics. Since my retirement I again use my private Linux systems – but what I need there simply works. No need to dig deeper at the moment. I intend to shift all of my HW-platforms and in the wake of such an endeavor typically some Linux topics come up, but all of this requires a period of money saving first. The same holds for a private project concerning central Linux-based audio-station. (Side remark: Due to the systematic destruction of the social system in Germany, ironically and mainly by the politics of social democrats, ca. 10 million of the persons going into retirement the next years will get significantly less than 1500 Euros per month. These are official numbers of the German government. I am on the edge of this wave.)

A second point which obviously has an impact on this blog is that I have an education in physics and an inborn interest in math. One of the best aspects of retirement is that you gain a lot of freedom regarding your real interests. No employer longer forces you to focus on things you only work with to earn a living. In my case the physicist woke up in spring 2023. I started to read a lot of books on theoretical physics and cosmology. To find out that I needed to revive some university level mathematics. At the same time I got interested in some admittedly special aspects of my own ML-experiments and network simulations in general. And suddenly you find yourself applying some basic linear algebra and calculus again. An easy but not very thoughtful way to start collecting some simple, but useful results was using this blog. I admit: It has turned the blog’s focus away from Linux.

The solution is clear: This blog has to be split up. I will do this as soon as I find some motivation for the boring task to set up a new blog, database, etc. For the time being I have changed the subtitle of this blog to indicate that other topics have come up.

What I cannot promise is that Linux topics will dominate my interests in the future. As said: What a retired person needs on PCs and laptops normally works perfectly under the control of Linux. Thanks to all the fantastic people of the Open Source community.

 

Flatpak and Blender after system updates – update the flatpak Nvidia packet to match your drivers

Some days ago I wanted to perform some Blender experiments on my laptop. Before I had upgraded most of the installed Leap 15.3 packages installed. Afterwards I thought this was a good opportunity to bring my flatpak based installation of Blender up to date, too.

A flatpak installation of Blender had been necessary since I had changed the laptop’s OS to Opensuse Leap 15.3. Reason: Opensuse did and does not offer any current version of Blender in its official repositories for Leap 15.3 (which in itself is a shame). (I have not yet checked whether the situation has changed with Leap 15.4.)

Blender’s present version available for flatpak is 3.3.1. I had Blender version 3.1 installed. So, I upgraded to version 3.3.1. However, this upgrade step for Blender alone did not work. (In contrast to a snap upgrade).

The problem

The sequence of commands I used to perform the update was:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak update org.blender.Blender  
flatpak list

The second command brought Blender V3.3.1 to my disk. However, when I tried to start my new Blender with

flatpak run org.blender.Blender &

the system complained about a not working GLX and GL installation.

But, actually my KDE desktop was running on the laptop’s Nvidia card. The laptop has an Optimus configuration. I use Opensuse Prime to switch between the Intel i915 driver for the graphics card integrated in the processor and the Nvidia driver for the dedicated graphics card. And Nvidia was running definitively.

The cause of the failure and its solution

Flatpak requires the right interface for the Nvidia card AND the presently active GLX-environment to start OpenGL applications.

A “flatpak list” showed me that I had an “app” “nvidia-470-141-01” running.

Name                    Application ID                                   Version    Branch   Installation
Blender                 org.blender.Blender                              3.3.1      stable   system
Codecs                  org.blender.Blender.Codecs                                  stable   system
Freedesktop Platform    org.freedesktop.Platform                         21.08.16   21.08    system
Mesa                    org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default              21.3.9     21.08    system
nvidia-470-141-01       org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-141-01               1.4      system
Intel                   org.freedesktop.Platform.VAAPI.Intel                        21.08    system
ffmpeg-full             org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg-full                        21.08    system
openh264                org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264                2.1.0      2.0      system

A quick view to the nvidia-settings and YaST showed me, however, that the drivers and other components installed on Leap 15.3 were of version “nvidia-470-141-03”.

Then I tried

mytux:~ # flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-141
Looking for matches…
Similar refs found for ‘org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-141’ in remote ‘flathub’ (system):

   1) runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-94/x86_64/1.4
   2) runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-141-03/x86_64/1.4
   3) runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-141-10/x86_64/1.4
   4) runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-74/x86_64/1.4
   5) runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-430-14/x86_64/1.4
   6) runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-390-141/x86_64/1.4

Which do you want to use (0 to abort)? [0-6]: 2

This command offered me a list to select the required subversion from. In my case option 2 was the appropriate one.

And indeed after the installation I could start my new Blender version again.

By the way: Flatpak allows for multiple versions to be installed at the same time. Like:

Name                 Application ID                                Version  Branch Installation
Blender              org.blender.Blender                           3.3.1    stable system
Codecs               org.blender.Blender.Codecs                             stable system
Freedesktop Platform org.freedesktop.Platform                      21.08.16 21.08  system
Mesa                 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default           21.3.9   21.08  system
nvidia-470-141-03    org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-141-03          1.4    system
nvidia-470-141-10    org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-141-10          1.4    system
Intel                org.freedesktop.Platform.VAAPI.Intel                   21.08  system
ffmpeg-full          org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg-full                   21.08  system
openh264             org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264             2.1.0    2.0    system

Conclusion

Your flatpak installation must provide a version of the ‘org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-xxx-nnn-mm’ packet which matches the present Nvidia driver installation on your Linux operative system.
Do not forget to upgrade flatpak packets for NVidia after having upgraded Nvidia drivers on your Linux OS!

Links

https://github.com/flathub/ org.blender.Blender/ issues/97
Replacing unstable Blender 2.82 on Leap 15.3 with flatpak or snap based Blender 3.1