Designing your garden with Edraw Max

Design

by Martin de Boer on 16 August, 2018

I watch a lot of BBC Gardeners World, which gives me a lot of inspiration for making changes to my own garden. I tried looking for a free and open source program for designing gardens in the openSUSE package search. The only application that I found was Rosegarden, a MIDI and Audio Sequencer and Notation Editor. Using google, I found Edraw Max, an all-in-one diagram software. This included a Floor planner, including templates for garden design. And there are download options for various Linux distributions, including openSUSE.

Installation

You can download a 14-day free trial from the Edraw Max website.

The next thing to do, is use Dolphin and browse to your Downloads folder. Find the zipped package and double click it. Ark will automatically load it. Then click on the Extract button.

Now you can press F4 in Dolphin to open the integrated terminal. If you type in the commands as listed on the Edraw website, the application will install without an issue.

Experience

From the application launcher (start menu), you can now type Edraw Max and launch the application. Go to New and then Floor Plan and click on Garden Design.

On the left side, there is a side pane with a lot of elements that you can use for drawing (see picture below). Start with measuring your garden and with the walls, you can ‘draw’ the borders of your garden. On the right side, there is a side pane where you can adjust the properties of these elements. For instance you can edit the fill (color) of the element, the border (color) of the element and adjust the properties. I didn’t need the other parts of this right side pane (which included shadow, insert picture, layer, hyperlink, attachment and comments).

Now you can make various different garden designs! This is one of the 6 designs that I created for my own garden.

The last feature that I like to mention is the export possibilities. There is a lot of export options here, including Jpeg, Tiff, PDF, PS, EPS, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, HTML, SVG and Visio. In the unlicensed version, all exports work except for the Visio export. In the PDF you will see a watermark “Created by Unlicensed Version”.

Conclusion

As this is proprietary software, you will have to pay for it after 14 days. Unfortunately, the price is quite high. As a Linux user, you can only select the Lifetime license, which currently costs $ 245. It is a very complete package (280 different types of diagrams), but I find the pricing too high for my purposes. And there is no option to pay less. For professional users I can imagine that this price would not be a big issue, as the software will pay itself back when you get payed for making designs. For me personally, it was a very nice experience to use this limited trial and it helped me to think of different ways in which I can redesign my garden.

Published on: 16 august 2018

A FOSS alternative found!

Thanks to reddit user compairelapin, I have found an open source alternative. It is called Sweet Home 3D and its available in the openSUSE package search. In a future post, I will take a look at this software and compare it to Edraw Max.

Updated on: 17 august 2018

How to create great panorama photos with Hugin

Photography

by Martin de Boer on 1 August, 2018

If you search online for “Best Panorama Stitching software 2018”, chances are very high that you find an article that mentions Hugin (1, 2, 3). The reason is that this is one of the best programs to stitch photos for Linux, MacOS and Windows. And it is free and open source! The criticism is that its aimed at professional users and that it can be a bit overwhelming for new users. This article will provide you with a rundown on how to use Hugin. I have used openSUSE Leap 15 as my operating system, but this tutorial will work across distributions and operating systems.

Tutorial

Start the Hugin Panorama Creator. The Assistant tab is the first thing that you will see. Click on Load images.
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Select the images that you want to use to create a panorama.
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Next, click the Align button to auto-align the pictures.
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Now go to the Projection tab. I recommend that you try different ways of projection. I mostly use the options Rectilinear, Cylindrical or Architectural. This really can’t go wrong, because you can always go back to the default, which is Rectilinear.
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Then go to the Move/Drag tab. I would recommend to only use this feature when the picture has an incorrect angle or is really off-center. It never hurts to try, but be aware that the buttons (Center / Fit / Straigthen) might deform the picture in a way that you don’t like. In that case, it is better to start all over again (Click on File –> New). There is no Undo button! In the example below, I use this feature to correct the angle of the panorama.
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Now it is time to perfect your panorama. Go to the Crop tab. I prefer to use the sliders inside the picture, to determine the correct borders (up, down, left and right). It gives you a lot of control over the final picture. You can also use the Autocrop button, but where is the fun in that?
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After all necessary adjustments are made, go back to the Assistant tab. Now click on the Create panorama button.
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Now you will be asked how to adjust for the differences in exposure. I will always start with either the first option (Exposure corrected, low dynamic range) or the second option (Exposure fused from stacks). This depends on my visual inspection of the photo’s. If I see a lot of differences (some are very bright, some are darker) I tend to choose the second option. If the differences are not so pronounced, I usually stick with the first option.
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You will be asked to save your project and save the picture. The project will always be saved as a .pto file. The picture can be saved in different formats. But I leave it on Tiff. After the panorama is created and if I am happy with the results, I use GIMP to convert the panorama to the Jpeg format.
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Hugin will now create the panorama. This can take a while, so you need to wait for a minute or maybe two. You can view the end result here in a higher resolution.
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Manual alignment

Hugin has an advanced feature for manually aligning the pictures. Although this feature gives you a lot of control over the stitching of your photo’s, most of the time you don’t need to bother with it. In 98% of the times, Hugin does it automatically and does it well. But there are still situations where Hugin is not able to auto-align. And in these cases, you need to use the Panorama editor (View –> Panorama editor). In the Panorama editor you can manually determine the control points (the points that are the same in both pictures) for photo’s that need to be stitched side by side. It is not so hard, once you get the hang of it. You select the pictures that need to be next to each other with the drop down buttons. Then you click on a point that is very distinctive on both pictures. And then click on the Add button. Once you have ~10 control points between the 2 pictures, Hugin should be able to stitch them perfectly.

Conclusion

Hugin might seem a bit overwhelming for new users at first. But once you get the hang of it, it is an easy program to use. It allows you to capture that incredibly beautiful landscape in widescreen.

Published on: 1 August 2018

Review of the ASUS VivoBook X402NA-FA112T

Hardware review

by Martin de Boer on 25 July, 2018

I have recently bought a new 14″ laptop, the ASUS VivoBook X402NA-FA112T as it is called in the Netherlands. On the ASUS.com website, this model is known as the ASUS VivoBook E402NA. Although this is a budget laptop, its a big improvement over my previous laptop (the Acer Aspire One 725). Both machines happily run openSUSE Leap 15. This review provides an overview of the new hardware and how it performs when running openSUSE Leap 15.

Design and hardware

The ASUS VivoBook X402NA-FA112T has a matte black plastic body that flexes when you bend it. You will see your fingerprints on the laptop its body. This is especially visible on the track-pad. It is quite light with 1,65 kilos. The screen looks good and has vivid colors. The viewing angles are not great, when you flip the screen, the colors distort. Professional reviewers will probably have more to say on the screen. In my opinion, it looks good when browsing the web, watching YouTube or playing games. The best thing about the laptop is the keyboard. I think that its a very pleasant keyboard with good key-travel and a nice sound when you type. The touch-pad is also very nice. It has a large area and responds well to your finger movements. It allows for multi-finger gestures like two finger scrolling. The touch-pad doesn’t have real buttons. The left click works perfectly, but the right-click sometimes doesn’t register. This is not a problem with the touch-pad, but rather with the length of my fingers, as I regularly hit the touch-pad slightly above the designated area. The speakers are OK. The volume is not very loud, but its enough for filling a small room with music. The speakers don’t deliver any bass. The mid tones sound fine. On the high-end tones, the speakers sound a bit metallic. These speakers are not very good for playing R&B, rap and rock (because of the lack of bass), but they sound fine when playing classical music or pop music.

Specifications and benchmarks

The specifications:

Intel Pentium N4200 CPU
Intel HD Graphics 505 GPU
4GB SDRAM, Onboard Memory (not expandable)
128 GB SanDisk SATA3 SSD (SD8SBAT128G1002)
14.0″ FullHD LED backlit display (1920×1080 pixels)
1 x LAN port
1 x HDMI port
1 x Type C USB 3.0 port
1 x Type A USB 3.0 port
1 x Type A USB 2.0 port
1 x SD card reader
1 x Microphone-in/Headphone-out jack
VGA web camera
2 cell Polymer Battery
Security lock

This laptop has great connectivity. It has 3 USB ports, a SD card reader, a HDMI port and a LAN port. I don’t think you can ask for more. And best of all, the USB type C port is not used for the power adapter. Instead, this laptop has a separate power connector. (The downside is that its simply not possible to charge via USB type C.)

The battery is not very good. Its only a 2 cell battery and will last around 3 hours. If you use the laptop for gaming, the battery will empty much quicker. This laptop will serve you well if you work from home, from an office or from a coffee shop (Starbucks / Coffee corner) where there is an ability to connect to a power source.

One thing to mention is that you can replace the SSD. At the bottom of the laptop, there is an hatch that can be easily removed. I would recommend anyone who will be using this laptop as his/her main PC, to install a bigger SSD. For instance the 256 GB SanDisk X600 2,5″ SSD (SD9SB8W256G1122), which currently sells for €90 at Amazon.de or the 512 GB SanDisk X600 2,5″ SSD (SD9TB8W512G1122), which currently sells for €170 at Amazon.de. I haven’t tried them out, but the specs look very comparable to the 128 GB SanDisk SSD drive. For my personal use, the 128 GB SSD is enough.

For benchmarks, I always look at the benchmark scores on the websites: cpubenchmark.net, videocardbenchmark.net and harddrivebenchmark.net. In the table below I compare the ASUS VivoBook X402NA-FA112T with my previous laptop. The new laptop is 4 times more powerful than the old one, so that’s a big improvement for me.

	Acer Aspire One 725	ASUS VivoBook X402NA
Benchmark score CPU	564	2022
Benchmark score GPU	138	616
Benchmark score HDD/SSD	481	2712
HDD/SSD size	320 GB	128 GB
Screen size	11,6″	14″
Resolution	1366 x 768	1920 x 1080

Installing openSUSE

I have installed openSUSE and it runs without any problems. I installed it without turning off secure boot. It automatically asked me to add the openSUSE key. WiFi worked out of the box. The touch-pad works without issue. However, that is not to say that there is nothing to improve. When trying out the gaming capabilities, I noticed very low frame-rates. When looking into the issue, it became clear that openSUSE Leap 15 doesn’t install the xf86-video-intel driver by default. This is easily remedied by searching and installing this driver via YaST and rebooting.

Gaming

As stated before, I tried running some Open Source games on my new laptop. This is certainly not a gaming laptop, but Open Source games are not very demanding. I tried OpenArena, Xonotic and SuperTuxKart. Both OpenArena and Xonotic performed admirably. The frame-rate ranged between 30 and 60 fps, mostly hovering around 45 fps. SuperTuxKart doesn’t run well. In full screen mode, you really need to turn down the graphic fidelity. And even in a smaller (1368 x 768) windowed mode, the frame-rate still ranged between 15 and 30 fps.

Multitasking

The ASUS VivoBook X402NA-FA112T is a good machine for tasks like web browsing, document editing or photo editing. However, it doesn’t like to do all these things at the same time. For fun, I tried opening Firefox, Dolphin, Gwenview, Darktable and LibreOffice Writer, while playing music with Amarok in the background at the same time. The image below shows the result. The laptop needed some time to work out all these things at the same time (and was not responding in the mean time). After all programs were running, the CPU load decreased and continued to hover around 40% on all 4 cores. Even though this is a quad-core machine, it definitely has more difficulty running all these programs than my desktop PC, which has an Intel Core i5 4200u CPU. Interestingly, 4GB of memory was enough to handle all of these tasks.

(More powerful) alternative Linux laptops

Its very clear that the ASUS VivoBook X402NA-FA112T is not a gaming rig. So what if you want a bit more performant hardware? There are several companies that sell laptops with Linux pre-installed. Most of them include the Intel i5 8250U and the more powerful Intel i7 8550U CPU, combined with the integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620. These are: Dell XPS 13, Entroware Apollo, Slimbook PRO2 and the System76 Galago Pro. All of these laptops are way more expensive (> €1.000) but do have a better build quality and a better CPU and GPU. These laptops have much better multitasking capabilities. These CPUs are on average 4 times more performant than the Intel Pentium N4200. Although the GPU is a step up from the Intel HD Graphics 505, they are still not great for gaming. From these 4 alternatives mentioned, I would personally be most interested in the Slimbook, because this company offers to pre-install openSUSE. Dell, Entroware and System76 will ship with Ubuntu by default.

One step up is the Entroware Kratos laptop, which has a dedicated Nvidia GTX 1050 GPU. That one already offers a big improvement in gaming abilities. Another step up, you will find the Entroware Zeus or the System76 Oryx Pro laptops, which have dedicated Nvidia GTX 1060 GPUs. As you can see from the benchmark scores in the table below, these laptops will satisfy high-end Linux gaming needs.

	Intel i5 8250U / Intel UHD Graphics 620	Intel i7 8550U / Intel UHD Graphics 620	Intel i5 8300H / Nvidia GTX 1050	Intel i7 8750H / Nvidia GTX 1060
CPU benchmark	7658	8325	9374	12575
GPU benchmark	993	993	4579	8974

Conclusion

Would I recommend the ASUS VivoBook X402NA-FA112T? That depends on your use case. This laptop is a good pick if you use it mainly for web browsing, document editing or photo editing. The keyboard is great and touch-pad works well. There are loads of ports (3x USB, SD card reader, HDMI, LAN). CPU performance is good enough. Sound quality is average. openSUSE Leap 15 runs well, as long as you keep the multitasking limited to 3 or 4 programs at the same time. WiFi works out of the box. Light 2D games will work fine. But light 3D games will max out the GPU, even with the graphic fidelity set to low. And you need to make sure that you have a power outlet nearby at all (or at least most of the) times. Because the battery will only last for 3 hours. One big advantage of the ASUS VivoBook X402NA-FA112T is the price. In the Netherlands this laptop retails (currently) between €439 and €479. It might not be the best 14″ laptop on the market, but it does offer a lot of bang for your buck.

Published on: 25 July 2018

Installing Rapid Photo Downloader 0.9.9 on openSUSE Leap 15

Photography

by Martin de Boer on 18 July, 2018

Have you noticed? After installing Rapid Photo Downloader from the openSUSE repositories, it doesn’t launch. As indicated in an earlier blog post, this program is really great to download your photo’s into the right folders in one go. Version 0.9.9 is a big overhaul for this application. If you want to use it right now, you need to install it using these instructions.

Installation

The first thing to do is to install, then remove Rapid Photo Downloader using YaST. Why install a program and remove it the next moment? Because this ensures that you have 99% of the package dependencies installed, that are needed to run the application. There are 2 more software packages that you need to install:

python3-wheel
intltool

The second step is to go to the Rapid Photo Downloader website and download the install script. If you haven’t changed the Firefox download settings, this should end up in your Downloads folder.

Open your favorite terminal application (Konsole) and run the command to go to your Downloads folder. Replace “name” with your username:

cd /home/name/Downloads

After that, run the command:

python3 install.py

In the end, you will be asked for your root password. Enter it and the installation will finish.

To be able to launch the application from the application launcher, you need to adjust the launch command. Go to the application launcher and right-click on the openSUSE logo (context menu) and choose “Edit applications…”

Go to the Graphics section, click on Rapid Photo Downloader and change the command. Replace “name” with your username:

/home/name/.local/bin/rapid-photo-downloader

Click on the Save button and close the KDE Menu Editor.

For everyone who hasn’t installed the openSUSE drivers for exFAT yet, this might be needed to read your SD card. So if you notice that Dolphin cannot mount your SD card, try installing:

exfat-utils

Experience

The look and feel of Rapid Photo Downloader has changed dramatically compared to the previous (0.4.3) version.

This means that you need to configure the application to your liking. This includes:

Choosing the main folder for your photo’s and configuring the sub-folder creation logic
Configuring the photo renaming logic
Choosing the main folder for your videos and configuring the sub-folder creation logic
Configuring the video renaming logic

In my previous blog post, I have showed the way that I have setup my folder creation and renaming logic. Because of the large changes to the application, I will display my configuration for Rapid Photo Downloader version 0.9.9 here as well.

The only thing remaining is to use the application to download your photo’s. Select the photos that you want to download and click the checkbox in the lower left corner of the bottom picture to select them. Finally click on the large blue button “Download ## Photos” on the top right of the application. Now Rapid Photo Downloader will auto-magically download all photos to your openSUSE computer… exactly how you want it.

Published on: 19 July 2018

Control your browser like a pro! Plasma browser integration

KDE Plasma

by Martin de Boer on 11 July, 2018

The KDE Plasma team knows that you want to take control over your computing experience. Many things work out of the box. Like using the multimedia keys on your keyboard to play and pause your music in Amarok. Or controlling the audio of individual applications in the audio volume plasmoid. The only problem: the browser didn’t play nice with the rest of the applications. This is now changing and you can try it already in openSUSE Leap 15.

Installation

The first thing that you need to check is if you have the plasma-browser-integration rpm package installed. In fresh installs of openSUSE Leap 15, this is installed by default. If you have performed an upgrade, you might need to install this application using YaST Software Management.

The second thing that you need to do is go to the Mozilla Firefox Add-ons store. Click the Add to Firefox button. And then click Add.

Experience

This add-on provides you with better control over your media. It is now possible to play and pause YouTube videos with the multimedia keys on your keyboard or with the media player plasmoid. It is also possible to hover over the browser in your task manager and pause the video from there.

The browser integration also makes it possible to send hyperlinks to your phone, using KDE Connect. You right-click on a hyperlink and select “Send Link to Device”, then select your phone from the list of connected devices.

It also integrates your downloads in your browser with the notifications plasmoid in the system tray area. You will see the progress of your download and a notification when it has completed.

The last feature is that you can search your browser tabs via the Krunner (Alt + F2) window. Click Enter and you will automatically be transported to the right tab in your browser. This is an amazing feature for people who have 50+ tabs open in their browser at all times. Think of the time it will save you to go to the right tab at once!

Plasma 5.13 or Plasma 5.12?

Plasma browser integration is the main feature of the Plasma 5.13 release notes. Lucky for us openSUSE Leap 15 users, openSUSE has managed to ship this feature in their Plasma 5.12 implementation. So this is something that you can enjoy right now!

Published on: 11 July 2018