Tag: opensuse

NOMACHINE on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

A little bit of diagnosing and following up and all is fine.

Switched recently to OpenSUSE Leap on my backup laptop. Then found the simplest solution for me to sync Google Drive with OpenSUSE was to change to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Great. Done. Now time to get Tumbleweed to be a remote client to my Debian primary laptop.

For years, the primary laptop has run Ubuntu. Recently switched it to Debian 12 bookworm for the reasons documented here, From Ubuntu/Zorin to Debian/OpenSUSE. The remote solution to connect to the primary laptop has been RealVNC.

Debian 12 bookworm is using Wayland, and the latest Ubuntu is using it too. RealVNC isn’t compatible with Wayland so isn’t compatible with the latest Ubuntu or Debian. For myself, remote control hasn’t been a need for a few years so I didn’t realize RealVNC wasn’t Wayland compatible. As soon as I wanted remote control again, Wayland compatibility became an issue.

Do a little digging and find NOMACHINE works with Wayland. Install NOMACHINE on the Debian primary laptop, client and server running, no problems.

Install on the OpenSUSE Tumbleweed laptop, install fails. Server service isn’t found and client won’t start. 🫤

Check out NOMACHINE compatibility, it includes OpenSUSE 15.x. Leap is 15.x, current Tumbleweed is 20250714. Tumbleweed is on the backup laptop to make Google Drive work. I NEED Google Drive syncing between the primary and backup laptop. Can I get NOMACHINE working on Tumbleweed?

First, let’s see what NOMACHINE looks like when it’s running. Spin up an OpenSUSE Leap 15.x virtual machine and install NOMACHINE. It works fine, can connect to Wayland displays from X11 virtual machine. Now to troubleshoot the installation on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

Spin up a Tumbleweed virtual machine and do a NOMACHINE installation. (virtual machines are indispensable and readily available troubleshooting and simulation tools)

Terminal output during installation on Tumbleweed is brief and indicates nxserver.service can’t be loaded.

Check the installation log, /usr/NX/var/log/install.log, find an error earlier than nxserver.service . The error, “execstack can't be run.” Check what is exestack and find execstack isn’t installed. Install it and run NOMACHINE installation again. Terminal output remains the same and nxserver.service can’t be loaded.

Back to the log and find a message, Warning: SELinux userspace will refer to the module from /usr/NX/scripts/selinux/nx-unconfined.pp as nx rather than nx-unconfined. Since nxserver.service won’t run and there’s a Warning that SELinux has a problem with something NX related I turn to finding out how to understand the SELinux problem.

Aside from knowing SELinux enforces access control policies on OpenSUSE Linux, I haven’t been aware of it before. Digging around to get an idea of what the warning means I find a tool called SELinux Troubleshooter. It’s in Tumbleweed’s Discovery app library, so I install it.

So, now, the execstack problem has been handled and a way to diagnose the possible SELinux issue installed. Time to run the NOMACHINE installation again.

Bingo!

The Troubleshooter provides two SELinux command recommendations. I apply the commands and NOMACHINE is now running on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed just fine. (At least on Tumbleweed 20250714.)

I still like RealVNC’s interface and modes of operation better. I’ll continue to watch it for Wayland compatible releases and continue to upgrade NOMACHINE with new releases, especially if they include better access to controls, something like a pop up tool bar attached to the host’s window border.

The “page peel,” NOMACHINE’s toolbar, isn’t always available depending on the Display option selected. Knowing the keyboard option, Ctrl+Alt+0, to call the NOMACHINE control center before selecting a display option that can’t display the “page peel” is a real panic avoidance tip.

NOMACHINE client window with “page peel” displayed.

The Ctrl+Alt+0 shortcut displays the NOMACHINE control center that fills the entire client window.

With the control center filling the entire client window the mouse can move outside the client window and interact with other applications on the client pc. In the control center, navigating the menu requires clicking an icon to reveal the icons in the next sub menu and click again and again until the target operation is reached.

Once the operation is completed each menu must be clicked to return to the menu above until reaching the top menu, the control center, and finally close the control center to display the remote control session. That’s really cumbersome navigation.

The “page peel” only has controls for the video connection and causing the “page peel” to appear doesn’t release the mouse to leave the window. The only way I’ve found to leave the NOMACHINE remote client window is to use Ctrl+Alt+0 to bring up the NOMACHINE window overlay/control center, at that point the mouse can leave the window boundaries.

If the machine hosting the NOMACHINE server has multiple monitors an option to display all monitors can be selected. However all remote monitors are squished into a single NOMACHINE client window instead of having one window for each monitor. Not very useful.

If the client and server BOTH have two monitors the “Fullscreen on all monitors” option can be selected. In this configuration one each of the remote system’s monitors fills one each of the client system’s monitors. This feels very much like sitting at the remote system as opposed to controlling it remotely. However, again, there is no way to leave the remote control session’s window and interact with the client system without first displaying the top level NOMACHINE window to then be able to navigate around the client computer.

Cloud Storage, overGrive, and my own cloud?

Host my own cloud? Part of the journey is here. Not a full blown private cloud yet.

Syncing with external (cloud) directories is such a common thing. Providers have big incentives to lock you into their platform and don’t always provide a straightforward or full featured way to connect if you’re not using their connection tool. And there are security considerations that affect the method(s) available to connect to the account.

I’ve had a GMail account for ages because I’ve had Android phones. I got in the habit of using DropBox on the phone as a convenient storage for documents on the phone and my computers, various Linux flavors, and Windows. DropBox changed its policy and limited to two the number of devices a free account can connect with. Now I needed a way for my second computer (primary computer + phone hit the device limit) to sync files.

overGrive to the rescue! A perpetual license, with plenty of personal use seats, for something like $5 back in 2020. Buy once, install on each pc, and have full GoogleDrive sync on my local drives. Make a change using any device, save the file, open it on another device and edit the sync’d copy with the latest changes.

I change my computer’s OS from time to time or do other things that require applications like overGrive to be reinstalled which involves reauthenticating overGrive with Google. Reinstall has always gone without a hitch and GoogleDrive was syncing on the pc. I’ve done this several times over the years with no issue. And all on the same original perpetual license.

When I needed to reinstall back in January because of one of those system changes, overGrive couldn’t authenticate. Google made some changes so the overGrive authentication (and other apps using the same mechanism) didn’t work any longer. Fortunately I was at a point where I didn’t regularly switch pcs and so wasn’t relying on GoogleDrive sync so much.

For a while the folks at The Fan Club had a page up explaining they didn’t know when the issue would be resolved. Google had changed the procedure and cost of licensing and they weren’t forecasting when/if the issues would be resolved.

A recent trip to The Fan Club revealed the problem description page was gone, replaced by instructions for setting up the Google Authentication on your own. I tried them and got authentication set up. Like many guides made for new services the illustrations, label names, and functional paths of the actual website were not were not the same, or in the same order. But overGrive was working again

It still makes GoogleDrive a manual sync for files I want on all devices. So there’s still a risk I cause a sync conflict between Dropbox which is “primary” and GoogleDrive which is meant as one way copy from Dropbox.

Solutions that come to mind are a paid Dropbox account so more devices can connect, switch over to GoogleDrive for all devices, or host my own cloud. There’s plenty of options for hosting my own cloud; FileRun, NextCloud, OwnCloud, Seafile, TrueNAS Scale, and others. And some appeal to knowing no one is monitoring my cloud use.

From Ubuntu/Zorin to Debian/OpenSUSE

Driven away from Ubuntu… by snaps

Ubuntu has been on my primary computer (initially desktop then laptop) for years. Yes, so many years that at one time my primary computer was a desktop. And on my backup laptop I’ve used a few different distributions but primarily Zorin.

The one thing in common with the distributions I’ve tired was being Ubuntu based. That meant lots of features driven by what Canonical was doing with Ubuntu. Then Canonical introduced snaps. For my use snaps have been frustrating. I believe it was Ubuntu 20.04 where snap packages became default for some apps and it has progressed to more and more default snap packages.

Things that frustrated me, and continued to frustrate me until switching to Debian in 2025, was that the snap daemon would often indicate updates needed but would refuse to update. Then also, snaps broke any modification to program launch shortcuts or made the modifications difficult or impossible (or at least beyond my willingness to invest the time) to implement where, when the app packaging was still .deb, updates didn’t break customizations. And, oh geeze, the loop back devices! Go from a third or a half screen of output when mount is issued to more than a screen full. That just makes it unnecessarily difficult to track down what you’re looking for in the mount output. All of this and more caused me to start seriously looking for distributions that don’t include snap, or at least don’t include or enable it by default.

What I’ve ended up doing is migrating my primary laptop to Debian and my backup to OpenSUSE.

There have been a few bumps in the migration, mostly because of my unfamiliarity with both Debian and OpenSUSE. But hey, anytime the OS is changed there’s some bumps. Even when upgrading to a newer version of the same OS.

At this point I won’t be back to Ubuntu for a while. I’m getting comfortable with Debian on my primary and getting comfortable with OpenSUSE on the backup. The initial draft for this post was created on my backup laptop, OpenSUSE, from a coffee shop connecting to my home server. The home server is still Ubuntu but, with the exception of Let’s Encrypt, there are no snaps in use on it.