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Notes about open source software, computers, other stuff.

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Pinning the Wine package version so I can keep using the reMarkable Windows app

5 January 2025 / / 0 Comments

Back in January 2021 I ordered the reMarkable 2 e-paper note-taking “tablet”. I use it for two things: making notes and reading and annotating PDFs. Especially the note taking has changed significantly my working environment: no more stacks of paper notes lying all over my desk. No more trying to find a certain note in a notebook or on a piece of paper.

I do miss using my fountain pen, but the advantages, including having all your notes with you on your phone outweighs this. And, although the remarkable itself runs Linux, there is no Linux version of the desktop app. Unfortunately.

For some time I used community-developed tools, mainly to up- and download PDFs to and from the device. However, as the reMarkable software and file format evolved, more and more things stopped working, so I had to shift to another solution. I managed to install the Windows application in Wine. This works well and also allows me to e.g. share my reMarkable screen in video calls.

A few weeks ago, however, the app failed to start. I wasn’t sure if this was due to an update of the remarkable app itself or because the Wine version in Ubuntu 24.04 was upgraded from version 9.22 to 10.0rc2. It turned out to be the latter because my laptop definitely had an older (previously known good) version of the app that hadn’t been updated. Updating the Wine winehq-devel package, however, broke the app (a bug has been reported, see the list of links below).

Now, as you may have noted above, I was using the winehq-devel package, so I thought it was as simple as switching to the winehq-stable package. Unfortunately, that package is not available in Ubuntu 24.04. While looking for deb packages I found that the Wine HQ repo contained older package versions. So I decided to use the package pinning functionality of the Apt packaging system. I created the file /etc/apt/preferences.d/wine with the following contents: 

Package: winehq-devel
Pin: version 9.*
Pin-Priority: 1000

Package: wine-devel
Pin: version 9.*
Pin-Priority: 1000

Package: wine-devel-amd64
Pin: version 9.*
Pin-Priority: 1000

Package: wine-devel-i386:i386
Pin: version 9.*
Pin-Priority: 1000

I determined the required package names by starting with the first one and then kept trying to install the winehq-devel package until it actually finished successfully. I set the pin priority to 1000, which means “causes a version to be installed even if this constitutes a downgrade of the package”, according to the apt_preferences man page. And, indeed, that is what Apt proposes: 

The following additional packages will be installed:
  wine-devel wine-devel-amd64 wine-devel-i386:i386
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  winehq-devel
The following packages will be DOWNGRADED:
  wine-devel wine-devel-amd64 wine-devel-i386:i386
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 3 downgraded, 0 to remove and 15 not upgraded.
Need to get 229 MB of archives.
After this operation, 8.414 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

For completeness, these are the Wine packages that are currently installed on my system: 

ii  wine-devel                                       9.22~noble-1                                amd64        WINE Is Not An Emulator - runs MS Windows programs
ii  wine-devel-amd64                                 9.22~noble-1                                amd64        WINE Is Not An Emulator - runs MS Windows programs
ii  wine-devel-i386:i386                             9.22~noble-1                                i386         WINE Is Not An Emulator - runs MS Windows programs
ii  winehq-devel                                     9.22~noble-1                                amd64        WINE Is Not An Emulator - runs MS Windows programs

As a side note, in order to make sure no other Wine settings were influencing my tests, I installed the reMarkable application in a fresh, dedicated WINEPREFIX: 

WINEPREFIX=~/reMarkable/ wine ~/tmp/Downloads/reMarkable-3.16.1.901-win64.exe

After which I could start the application like this: 

WINEPREFIX=~/reMarkable/ wine ~/reMarkable/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/reMarkable/reMarkable.exe

After this fresh install, the Gnome shell menu entry for the app didn’t work any more, so I had a look at the corresponding .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs/reMarkable/reMarkable.desktop. After some playing around I guess the problem was in missing double quotes around the path to the .exe file. The following works: 

[Desktop Entry]
Name=reMarkable
Exec=env WINEPREFIX="/home/lennart/reMarkable" wine "/home/lennart/reMarkable/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/reMarkable/reMarkable.exe"
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
Path=/home/lennart/reMarkable/dosdevices/c:/Program Files (x86)/reMarkable
Icon=94BF_reMarkable.0
StartupWMClass=remarkable.exe

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Shucking hard drives

27 December 2020 / / 2 Comments

I recently bought several external hard drives. After looking around on the Internet a bit I settled for Seagate Expansion Desktop (v2) drives. I had read about these drives before and according to the internet the 10TB and larger drives have very interesting drives inside. In fact, I recently bought two 10TB versions of this drive, which contained Barracuda Pro drives (ST10000DM004). These drives are rated for 24hr/day usage, and spin at 7200 rpm so they work very well in a small NAS machine I use. At the time of writing these 10TB external drives cost around €193, whereas the bare internal drive itself costs around €290. Quite the difference! This is why people love so-called ‘shucking’: removing the drives from the enclosure and using them in e.g. their home NAS or home server.

For my annual offline backups I bough a Seagate Expansion Desktop (v2) 12TB (part nr. STEB12000400). For this drive things are even better: it contains an IronWolf Pro drive (ST12000NE008). These are true server drives rated for 24×7 use in servers of up to 24 drive bays. In fact, I use 8TB and 10TB IronWolf Pro’s in servers I use for work. Here the price difference is €210 for the external drive (a nice discount in a Dutch web shop recently) vs. €360 for the internal drive.

Of course, warranty can be an issue when shucking drives. I haven’t (yet?) had the need to return one of my shucked drives. I guess I’d have to put them back into the external enclosures. This would be possible, although I didn’t manage to remove the enclosures without damaging the little clamps that kept the lid attached to the rest of the case… But at these price differences I will take the risk (at least for personal use; professionally warranty without hassle may be worth the extra cost).

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Experimenting with Google’s AdSense

2 September 2015 / / 0 Comments

I don’t think this blog has any regular readers (especially since I’m not posting very regularly), but if they would exist they would have noticed two prominent changes in the last two days:

  1. the WordPress theme for the site has changed, and
  2. this blog now has several advertisements from Google’s AdSense programme.

Obviously, the two changes are tied together. From almost the first day of this blog’s existence I had been using the Carrington theme, and although I still like it a lot (including the fact that it has two columns on the left), its appearance on mobile devices was sub-par. To fix this I looked around for a theme with “responsive design” and the current one looks quite nice both on my desktop machines and on my phone.

Changing themes had been on my list for quite some time, but the reason that I took the time to actually do it was because of my idea to play around a bit with Google’s AdSense program. Apparently, Google likes it if a site looks well on all platforms. The main reason to add ads to this blog was to experiment a bit and simply to see if this is a viable way of recouping (some of) the costs associated with hosting this blog. I’ve got a decent number of monthly views (at least I think it’s decent 🙂 and it’s definitely more than I expected when I started out) so why not give it a try. Moreover, since this is my personal, low profile site, it can also give me an idea if it’s worth having advertisements on some of the community sites that I run.

So, all in all, I think the theme change is definitely a good one, and about the ads, we’ll see. Maybe it works out, maybe it doesn’t. All in all I hope they don’t interfere too much with normal reading of the site.

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Verandering

9 September 2009 / / 0 Comments

En na de vorige post begint dit blog aan een nieuwe koers. De reiziger is thuis, om Boudewijn de Groot maar eens te citeren, dus tijd voor verandering. De verandering houdt in dat ik op deze plek over andere dingen ga bloggen. Waarschijnlijk computer-, techniek- en muziekgerelateerde zaken, wellicht niet direct interessant voor de mensen die hier hun emailadres hadden opgegeven om op de hoogte te blijven van mijn Afrikatijd. Zij kunnen nu afhaken (mocht het niet lukken om je emailadres af te melden, stuur dan gerust een mailtje, dan kijk ik er even naar). Een andere verandering is die van taal. In principe ga ik nu over naar het Engels om mijn hersenspinsels ook toegankelijk te maken voor de rest van de wereld.

Hopelijk blijven er mensen lezen!

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