Linux

Five years ago, I bought a Supernote A5. It was (and mostly still is) a great device for reading and writing on an eInk display, and it runs plain old linux.

The deciding reason I went for this device instead of the competition is that I was "under the impression" that they were about to enable full SSH access to the device! Awesome!

"Why were you under that impression?", I hear the skeptics ask. Well, their spokesperson has stated that they would do so. Via mail, and on reddit, publicly, multiple times. I was still torn, so sent them a DM, asking if this was ineed factual. "Yes", they said, "the next quarterly update will enable SSH access!".

Great!

Well, it's been 5 years. They did not follow through. A couple updates were published, none contained the promised functionality, the spokesperson stopped answering questions about SSH. The last software update I received is from 2.5yrs ago. Mentions of the original Supernote A5 have largely been scrubbed from their website.

Let me be clear, the device still functions perfectly. But it is in danger of becoming e-waste because it is so needlessly complicated to get stuff on the device. I'm currently in need of an ebook reader with (ideally) OPDS capability, and I am pretty confident I'd be able to get something like koreader running on this, or at least just run a script to sync files over SSH. Also, I frankly feel wounded in my pride having a Linux device in my possession which refuses to do my bidding (I'm joking of course, but also I am 100% serious).

Here's all I know:

• plugging it in via USB, the device reads as an MTP device, with access only to the documents/books/... stored on it
• you can place an update.zip file (obtained from the SN website) into the root of that MTP directory, and upon reboot, the device will update. To me, this appears to be the most promising route of gaining access.
• unfortunately, the zip file is encrypted. The decryption key clearly has to be known to the device, but since I have no access to it,...

I'm a software engineer, but I have zero knowledge of the "dark arts", so to speak. If anyone could help me (or point me into the right direction!), I would really be grateful. I don't want this (generally nice) product to turn into a paperweight instead of a paper replacement :(

The dark system theme I have set seems to make some applications look funny, with dark boxes where they should be light. Is there any way I can manually set a theme on a per-application basis?

Hey! I've been wanting to make the switch to Linux for a while now, and I've dual booted Mint for a while. I realize that most games work well with Linux, but I can't seem to get my Elgato HD60 Pro to work. (Pci-e capture card)

I just want to be able to grab gameplay with HDMI passthrough on Linux, and right now, this is my biggest hurdle (along with Adobe not working well, but I'm gonna switch to davinci resolve for that)

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Don't know if this is really the right place for this, but I can't imagine trying to do this on windows! Not saying it couldn't be done, but I wouldn't know where to start

I got a new laptop with a backlit RGB keyboard, but no capslock, numlock indicators. I figured I could solve that by just setting the backlight of the key if capslock is enabled. I got that working, but that's boring.

While I was doing that I realised that I was baaaasically working with a 20x6 LED display sooooo...

Behold! Playing snake on my laptop!

Source code is very specifically for my Kfocus M2 Gen 5, which I believe is just a branded Schenker KEY 17 Pro (M24)

Having said that, it could be adapted to other keyboards fairly easily:

https://gist.github.com/Kraiden/5393bc30f4c29d8b8dd51b4c21c0c829

Hi,

I need to setup a Rsync server to backup a 😡 NAS.

So I want to run it under SSH.

but when I do rsync --config=/etc/rsyncd.conf --rsh=ssh --dry-run
I get:

rsync: --rsh=ssh: unknown option (in daemon mode) So there no way to specify that rsync daemon should run under ssh ?

Also is this following A.I statement is correct ?

The rsyncd.conf file is only used when the rsync daemon is running on the remote host and the client connects to the daemon directly, without using an SSH connection.

So there is no way with Rsync (under ssh) to set settings (config file or other) that will apply to all clients !!??
So it's the client that configure rsync and the server !? there is no way around ?!

So with the recent drama it looks like bcachefs isn't going to stay in the kernel for too long. What do I do now? I have my root filesystem as bcachefs on multiple devices. Is it possible to migrate to btrfs or ext4?

Hello,

I had a working wireguard peer on my laptop, which I didn't want anymore, so I decided to uninstall wireguard. All was well until I restarted the laptop and now I can't access the internet anymore.

I think it's because of some config left over from wireguard, but I'm not sure how to fix it.

Running pop os 22.04.

Any advice?

The xev output for both left alt and right alt is given below. I could not use right alt for any purpose due to this. What could be the problem? Thanks in advance.

KeyPress event, serial 39, synthetic NO, window 0x1400001,
    root 0x409, subw 0x0, time 14963499, (139,64), root:(818,407),
    state 0x10, keycode 64 (keysym 0xffe9, Alt_L), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyPress event, serial 39, synthetic NO, window 0x1400001,
    root 0x409, subw 0x0, time 14964219, (139,64), root:(818,407),
    state 0x18, keycode 108 (keysym 0xfe03, ISO_Level3_Shift), same_screen YES,
    XKeysymToKeycode returns keycode: 92
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

I usually use Tor Browser to scan files online for viruses, which I then send to Windows users (I use Linux) if they are clean.

Lately, I've noticed that the User Agent in TOR is showing up as Linux, when it used to show up as Windows.

Is this a problem with my system or a change made by the TOR team? The fact that Linux has far fewer users increases fingerprinting.

My laptop has a display resolution of 1366x768. Every now and then, I'll encounter a window whose default height is over 768 and thus won't fit entirely within my screen. The GTK file picker comes to mind, though it is resizable without much fuss. But then there are those that cannot be resized and being unable to move the titlebar further up, I am forced to use Alt+F7 to see what's at the bottom.

I suspect that many programs today are designed to work comfortably on higher resolution displays, but not really tested on smaller ones. Understandably, developers only have so much time and 1366x768 is getting long in the tooth. Just wanted to put this out there since nobody seems to be talking about it.

i've instaled opensuse tumbleweed a bunch of times in the last few years, but i always used ext4 instead of btrfs because of previous bad experiences with it nearly a decade ago. every time, with no exceptions, the partition would crap itself into an irrecoverable state

this time around i figured that, since so many years had passed since i last tried btrfs, the filesystem would be in a more reliable state, so i decided to try it again on a new opensuse installation. already, right after installation, os-prober failed to setup opensuse's entry in grub, but maybe that's on me, since my main system is debian (turns out the problem was due to btrfs snapshots)

anyway, after a little more than a week, the partition turned read-only in the middle of a large compilation and then, after i rebooted, the partition died and was irrecoverable. could be due to some bad block or read failure from the hdd (it is supposedly brand new, but i guess it could be busted), but shit like this never happens to me on extfs, even if the hdd is literally dying. also, i have an ext4 and an ufs partition in the same hdd without any issues.

even if we suppose this is the hardware's fault and not btrfs's, should a file system be a little bit more resilient than that? at this rate, i feel like a cosmic ray could set off a btrfs corruption. i hear people claim all the time how mature btrfs is and that it no longer makes sense to create new ext4 partitions, but either i'm extremely unlucky with btrfs or the system is in fucking perpetual beta state and it will never change because it is just good enough for companies who can just, in the case of a partition failure, can just quickly switch the old hdd for a new one and copy the nightly backup over to it

in any case, i am never going to touch btrfs ever again and i'm always going to advise people to choose ext4 instead of btrfs

I am trying to install Linux (Fedora KDE spin specifically, but this problem is probably not distribution related) on an older Acer Switch 3 (SW312-31P) tablet. The installation always fails when trying to setup grub with "failed to set new efi boot target". Grub shows up when I boot the device, however only UEFI fimware setting is present in the GRUB menu. I repartitioned the whole internal drive as GPT added ext4 partition to be mounted at /, swap partition and FAT32 EFI partition to be mounted at /boot/efi and even told the Fedora installer to reformat it as EFI, however the result is still the same. I think the problem lies somewhere within the EFI firmware of the device itself, because when I run

sudo efibootmgr -v

I get this result:

Skipping unreadable variable "Boot0000": Input/output error
error trace:
 efivarfs.c:271 efivarfs_get_variable(): read failed: Input/output error
 lib.c:140 efi_get_variable(): ops->get_variable failed: Input/output error
Skipping unreadable variable "Boot0001": Input/output error
error trace:
 efivarfs.c:271 efivarfs_get_variable(): read failed: Input/output error
 lib.c:140 efi_get_variable(): ops->get_variable failed: Input/output error
Skipping unreadable variable "Boot0002": Input/output error
error trace:
 efivarfs.c:271 efivarfs_get_variable(): read failed: Input/output error
 lib.c:140 efi_get_variable(): ops->get_variable failed: Input/output error
Skipping unreadable variable "Boot0003": Input/output error
error trace:
 efivarfs.c:271 efivarfs_get_variable(): read failed: Input/output error
 lib.c:140 efi_get_variable(): ops->get_variable failed: Input/output error
Skipping unreadable variable "Boot0005": Input/output error
error trace:
 efivarfs.c:271 efivarfs_get_variable(): read failed: Input/output error
 lib.c:140 efi_get_variable(): ops->get_variable failed: Input/output error
Skipping unreadable variable "Boot2001": Input/output error
error trace:
 efivarfs.c:271 efivarfs_get_variable(): read failed: Input/output error
 lib.c:140 efi_get_variable(): ops->get_variable failed: Input/output error
Skipping unreadable variable "Boot2002": Input/output error
error trace:
 efivarfs.c:271 efivarfs_get_variable(): read failed: Input/output error
 lib.c:140 efi_get_variable(): ops->get_variable failed: Input/output error
Skipping unreadable variable "Boot2003": Input/output error
error trace:
 efivarfs.c:271 efivarfs_get_variable(): read failed: Input/output error
 lib.c:140 efi_get_variable(): ops->get_variable failed: Input/output error
show_order(): Input/output error

Does anyone know what does this mean? I tryed asking Generative AIs, however they would usually advice me to remove faulty entries with some command that wouldn't work (usually using the efivar utility which would at least list all the variables without throwing an error).

I tryed using the "load optimized defaults" option in UEFI settings. That didn't help. I have secure boot disabled.

On start grub prints out "checking media [fail]" before showing boot options.

Ding Ding Ding

It comes down to this, the heavyweight desktop championship between two powers in the Linux world.

In the blue corner, we have the mighty KDE, KDE comes with a wealth of customization options and good features with every update. It serves a nice alternative to windows 10 or 11s desktop and itself as an OS.

KDE has got so good that even legendary distro, Fedora, wishes to use it in its dealings.

In the grey/black corner, we have GNOME, This is a heavy distro with some ram usage, but it strives to be a simple desktop for usage and has had some good features every new version it comes packaged in as well.

GNOME has had a long history much like KDE, But controversial changes from its older brother.

However.. big name distros like Ubuntu have used it across millions of machines in different sectors.

What desktop do you favour and why? Explain your thoughts.

Round 2... GO!

Ding

This week we of course continued the customary bug-fixing, but got some nice new features and UI improvements too!

Let me also remind folks about KDE's end-of-year fundraiser. We're 84% of the way to our goal, and it would be amazing to get all the way to 100% before December! Then we can focus on those stretch goals from December to January.

Anyway, enough of the sales pitch, back to the free stuff!

And isn't that amazing? Let's zoom out a bit here and remind ourselves just how incredible it is that this software is made available for free, with no contract or license agreement, to everyone. To you, to your school, to community organizations, businesses, governments, even our direct competitors to study and examine (which goes both ways, and helped me fix a bug in GTK this week; read on for details). It's kind of wild, if you think about it. But, here we are, and we want to keep on being a light in a tech world that sometimes seems to be darkening. Help us keep that light glowing!

I made Cathode - don’t vote for it (or at least, don’t give it a high rank, since Debian uses ranked choice). It kind of sucks, honestly; I was just having fun.

I have a feeling Juliette Taka’s going to keep being the de facto face of Debian for a long time - I ranked hers first in the voting.

I have a "Dell Inc. Latitude 5290 2-in-1", and it comes with a stereo microphone array that, by default, has a gain that is way too extreme.

A value of 100% is screeching / over-blasted to any listener, while a value of 25% is most reasonable.

Thus, I wanted to limit the gain of the microphones through PipeWire.

I created the following WirePlumber configuration file.

# For "Dell Inc. Latitude 5290 2-in-1"
# The analog input array is way too loud

monitor.alsa.rules = [
  {
    matches = [
      # This matches the value of the 'node.name' property of the node.
      {
       	node.name = "alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1f.3.analog-stereo"
      }
    ]
    actions = {
      update-props = {
        node.description        = "Dell Latitude 5290 2-in-1 Stereo Microphone"
        channelmix.min-volume   = 0.0
        channelmix.max-volume   = 0.25
        channelmix.normalize    = true
      }
    }
  }
]

I know this is applying to the correct node, because executing wpctl status shows that the node description has been properly changed.

The problem is that the "channelmix.max-volume" is not applied as I expect it to be. I expect it to make it so that 25% max volume is the new 100%, Instead it seems to do nothing.

What am I doing wrong, and how can I achieve what I want?

Edit 1: Channel Mix is working, but it seems the "Volume" as of wpctl get-volume is referring to gain. Essentially Channel Mix is making it quieter, but the gain because of "Volume" is nonsensical.

Edit 2: RedHat developer says there isn't support for thatcurrently :( https://fosstodon.org/@wtay/113532113977083665

Edit 3: EasyEffects is not the solution here, This is a lower level issue, not something done via an affect to the audio stream. EasyEffects cannot "undo" gain changes.

An HOA (home owners associations) can say what color you can paint your house, What you can plant in your yard, What you can have in your driveway, and some even say what color your blinds can be.

Microsoft controls your computer, they say what info is sent back to Microsoft, and they say when you must upgrade. They can shut down your computer when they want whether you like it or not.

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/19559845

after trip-digit linux installs in the past year or so, here's my list for a seamless transition for people escaping windows/macOS who need to get work done:

1) don't tailor linux to your hardware, do it the other way around. get hardware that works OOB. no nvidia. no latest hardware. no weird realtek chipsets in budget deal-of-the week e-waste, no gaming (i.e. nvidia) laptops.

that don't mean breaking the bank, a thinkpad with 8th gen or newer CPU can be had for $100ish; add $50 or so to expand RAM and storage and that covers like 90% of use cases. a competent all AMD desktop a gen or two behind current tech that can game almost anything can be easily assembled for less than $400.

fedora and adjacent forums are littered with cries for help about stuff breaking or not working at all; 90% of those are nvidia related. can you make it work - absolutely. is that something you're willing to dick around on a deadline - hell nah.

2) no theming. no icons, no fonts, no plymouth screens, nada. as few extensions/plugins as you can, run it as close to stock as possible. shit's gonna break, this is a work device, you can't afford downtime because the single dev maintaining the thingy hasn't updated it for the newest Gnome of Plasma. Gnome don't feel like macOS? you'll get used to it; muscle memory is a removed but it's a tameable one.

an additional moment, especially if you're on a laptop, is to make the thing as fungible as possible. that's an easily breakable/losable thief-magnet, you want a setup that can be reproduced with as little fuss as possible so you can be operational again.

3) don't dual/triple/whatever boot. that's an advanced scenario, it's gonna break eventually and if that's a device you depend on for work or education, you don't want any of that. run it as a single OS occupying the whole disk; encryption on a mobile device is mandatory. if you absolutely need multiple OS, a 2nd device is stupid cheap and it compartmentalises your shit, i.e. one for work, one for private/gaming, etc.

4) no weird distros. no arches, no gentoos, no immutable thisisthefuture shit. when it becomes mainstream, we'll switch. until such time, middle of the road - fedora for newest hardware, mint for ancient stuff, ubuntu for everything else. a lot of people made sure they're operational OOB, it's less likely stuff will break and if it does, there's an army of folks who asked and answered whatever's bothering you.

5) no weird DEs. wayland only, gnome for laptops and tablets, plasma for desktops, there is no third option. you're transitioning from an infinitely polished UI and the best tech that money can buy, you want the closest possible experience and the widest used environment, worked on by the largest dev community aware of the widest possible usability issues, working towards fixing/implementing them. you're already relearning shit, invest that time wisely.

6) separate your system stuff from your applications as much as possible. purge all user-facing apps, like firefox and media players and such from the system's package manager (apt or dnf) and reinstall them from flatpak. that was a headache a few years ago, nowadays almost everything works OOB on wayland. the apps include everything they need to work, the setup is easy to maintain and recreate, upgrades are better (no reboots necessary) and all your settings and data are in one place.

this covered 90% use cases of 90% of the users I've dealt with. naturally, edge cases are gonna have a bad time - you want to ollama this and that and rock bleeding edge hardware and have a normal desktop experience? it's gonna hurt. you need mac-like power management and days away from power? doable but that needs work.

remember, this is a work device. for the same reason you don't decide to "upgrade" the suspension on the car that's supposed to get you to work the morning of, you don't mess with what's likely the only device you need for work/education.

greybeards dunking on you because you're not a "real" linuxer? enamoured with the spicy screenshots from linuxporn? get a $20 thinkpad and go wild - arch it, sway it, have the scrolling text on boot, rice it till it bursts. but leave your workhorse be.

For example Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Enterprise Linux.

I'm considering switching to RHEL, to get a "professional" Linux, since it's free if you register an account, but is it worth it?
Is the experience very different from Fedora?

If the distribution does not have it by default, please include the instructions to use it on the system.

Note: I can't compile the libre kernel from the source.