Linux

I’ve been using Arch for just over a year on my older Dell laptop, and have been regularly running sudo pacman -Syu but not once have I had a problem or anything break. What am I doing wrong?

So, I have a Steelseries M800 keyboard and a Corsair mouse. Unfortunately neither of them are supported by Open RGB, and so I'm stuck with my RGB making rainbows.

Well, sort of. My keyboard still has the configuration it had from when I still used Windows over 2 years ago. But my mouse does not.

I use an XP Pen tablet for making art, and the official driver from XP Pen doesn't come with any options to adjust and calibrate the screen's colours, but I managed to figure out how to access these hardware settings through command line. Now this has me wondering if it's possible to do the same for my keyboard and mouse.

I like my Linux installs heavily customized and security hardened, to the extent that copying over /home won't cut it, but not so much that it breaks when updating Debian. Whenever someone mentions reinstalling Linux, I am instinctively nervous thinking about the work it would take for me to get from a vanilla install to my current configuration.

It started a couple of years ago, when dreading the work of configuring Debian to my taste on a new laptop, I decided to instead just shrink my existing install to match the new laptop's drive and dd it over. I later made a VM from my install, stripped out personal files and obvious junk, and condensed it to a 30 GB raw disk image, which I then deployed on the rest of my machines.

That was still a bit too janky, so once my configuration and installed packages stabilized, I bit the bullet, spun up a new VM, and painstakingly replicated my configuration from a fresh copy of Debian. I finished with a 24 GB raw disk image, which I can now deploy as a "fresh" yet pre-configured install, whether to prepare new machines, make new VMs, fix broken installs, or just because I want to.

All that needs to be done after dd'ing the image to a new disk is:

• Some machines: boot grubx64.efi/shimx64.efi from Ventoy and "bless" the new install with grub-install and update-grub
• Reencrypt LUKS root partition with new password
• Configure user and GRUB passwords
• Set hostname
• Install updates and drivers as needed
• Configure for high DPI if needed

I'm interested to hear if any of you have a similar workflow or any feedback on mine.

cross-posted from: https://lemy.lol/post/30548063

I have an old hp pavilion dv6 and I installed windows 7. Then i tried installing Ubuntu 24.04 and the USB wouldn't boot, it just showed "GRUB" in the top left of the screen. I tried with another USB and the same issue emerged.

Recenty I changed my old NVidia GPU with nouveau to AMD. I installed firmware-amd-graphics and set up radron kernel driver. But when I try to start X11 with default config (X -configure) it fails with no screen error. Kernel radeon driver works well and tty resolution is proper. When I try run Debian live usb X.org works well. Xorg.0.log: https://pastebin.com/7tsvGA7r OS: Debian 12

Hi everyone i have some issue with my gpu vbios(i bought an used gpu with custom bios than dont support uefi) and need to flash a good one on it. I really don't want to dual boot window just to do it so i research for a way to do it on linux. I found this post but the github repo isnt here anymore. I found a backup of it on the wayback machine. But i am not sure if it is safe or not. If it is safe why was the repo closed what happened to it?

As far as I know there are these;

• Camel case = coolFileName
• Snake case = cool_file_name
• Kebab case = cool-file-name
• Pascal case = CoolFileName
• Dot notation = cool.file.name
• Flat case = coolfilename
• Screaming case = COOLFILENAME

Personally I prefer the kebab/dot conventions simply because they allow for easy "navigation" with (ctrl+arrow keys) between each part. What are your preferences when it comes to this? Did I miss any schemes?

Adds xdg-toplevel-icon for changing icon in places like the titlebar without needing to create desktop entries.

Also adds ext-image-capture-source and ext-image-copy-capture which is used for capturing outputs/windows, used in wlroots and Cosmic.

The last update was over a year ago it seems. I remember everyone talking about the desktop environment like it was the next big thing. May she rest in peace.

As funny as ever?

Hopefully this means no more blurry Xwayland apps.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1050940

Their resignation is already being discussed in another post here from yesterday: One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down - Cites "Nontechnical Nonsense"

...but I think this LWN reporting (from back in June) deserves its own post as it makes it easier for those of us who are not kernel hackers to follow what is going on.

I recently learned about nsjail, a utility to sandbox applications or provide workload isolation.

It seems to be lighter weight than firejail and possibly better suited for server applications.

Has anyone used this? What's your experience with it? I'm curious about using it for my web server applications as an additional layer of Dr hotty.

In practice, the Linux community is the wild wild west, and sweeping changes are infamously difficult to achieve consensus on, and this is by far the broadest sweeping change ever proposed for the project. Every subsystem is a private fiefdom, subject to the whims of each one of Linux’s 1,700+ maintainers, almost all of whom have a dog in this race. It’s herding cats: introducing Rust effectively is one part coding work and ninety-nine parts political work – and it’s a lot of coding work. Every subsystem has its own unique culture and its own strongly held beliefs and values.

The consequences of these factors is that Rust-for-Linux has become a burnout machine. My heart goes out to the developers who have been burned in this project. It’s not fair. Free software is about putting in the work, it’s a classical do-ocracy… until it isn’t, and people get hurt. In spite of my critiques of the project, I recognize the talent and humanity of everyone involved, and wouldn’t have wished these outcomes on them. I also have sympathy for many of the established Linux developers who didn’t exactly want this on their plate… but that’s neither here nor there for the purpose of this post, and any of those developers and their fiefdoms who went out of their way to make life difficult for the Rust developers above and beyond what was needed to ensure technical excellence are accountable for these shitty outcomes.

...

Here’s the pitch: a motivated group of talented Rust OS developers could build a Linux-compatible kernel, from scratch, very quickly, with no need to engage in LKML politics. You would be astonished by how quickly you can make meaningful gains in this kind of environment; I think if the amount of effort being put into Rust-for-Linux were applied to a new Linux-compatible OS we could have something production ready for some use-cases within a few years.

...

Having a clear, well-proven goal in mind can also help to attract the same people who want to make an impact in a way that a speculative research project might not. Freeing yourselves of the LKML political battles would probably be a big win for the ambitions of bringing Rust into kernel space. Such an effort would also be a great way to mentor a new generation of kernel hackers who are comfortable with Rust in kernel space and ready to deploy their skillset to the research projects that will build a next-generation OS like Redox. The labor pool of serious OS developers badly needs a project like this to make that happen.

Follow up to: One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down - Cites "Nontechnical Nonsense", On Rust, Linux, developers, maintainers, and Asahi Lina's experience about working on Rust code in the kernel

I've been happily Windows-free for about 5 years, but lately I need some Win-only software including a few games that don't work at all on Linux. My main questions:

• How to avoid Windows messing with my Linux install? Having a separate PC is not possible for me right now. I'm considering uninstalling grub and instead selecting the boot device I want from UEFI, idk if this is advisable though.

• I'm also interested in how to get a Windows install that's as minimal as possible: I don't want to log in to a Microsoft account, I don't want telemetry etc, I only want whatever is strictly required to make my system functional. The one thing I do want is Windows Defender cause ain't no way I'm dealing with an antivirus.

• Should I go for Win 11 or stick to 10?

Any tips or experiences are welcome!

Ps: I know this information is probably all out there, but I thought a post in this community about it would be useful for others as well.

UPDATE: I ended up going with a regular old dual boot using Windows 10 iot LTSC - there's a few games I wanted to run and a driver as well so I chose to install directly on hardware as opposed to a VM. I created the install media using Ventoy, and UNPLUGGED EVERY OTHER DRIVE during installation except the one Windows was supposed to come on. Afterwards I had to boot in with a live Linux USB (the nice thing about Ventoy is that you can write multiple ISOs to your USB so it came in handy) to manually install rEFInd onto the original EFI partition that my Linux install uses, then I just had to set up the correct boot order in UEFI and everything is working. I also had to fuck around on the boot partition and with efibootmgr to remove all traces of grub so things don't get tangled up which was a bit scary but things are working perfectly now.

There's been a couple of mentions of Rust4Linux in the past week or two, one from Linus on the speed of engagement and one about Wedson departing the project due to non-technical concerns. This got me thinking about project phases and developer types.

Few days ago I did the weekly system update which included latest NVIDIA drivers. Everything went smoothly, no error messages, systems works as usual. Today I wanted to play some game and I noticed that the performance was horrible. This is what I found

lspci -k | grep -A 2 -E "(VGA|3D)"
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-P GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics] (rev 0c)
        Subsystem: Dell Device 0aff
        Kernel driver in use: i915
--
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GA106M [GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile / Max-Q] (rev a1)
        Subsystem: Dell Device 0aff
        Kernel driver in use: nvidia

 
xrandr --listproviders            
Providers: number : 0

I've tried to reinstall drivers, and ran some fixes I found online but still no luck. Any ideas how to fix it?

update

Just remembered. After last drivers update I wasn't able to run any Steam game. I always got some directx error. Before I had no issues.

update 2

I'm on Fedora 40, currently I'm using drivers downloaded directly from NVIDIA website. Before that I was using whatever drivers from these repositories

dnf repolist
repo id                                                                repo name
fedora                                                                 Fedora 40 - x86_64
fedora-cisco-openh264                                                  Fedora 40 openh264 (From Cisco) - x86_64
nvidia-container-toolkit                                               nvidia-container-toolkit
protonvpn-fedora-stable                                                ProtonVPN Fedora Stable repository
rpmfusion-free                                                         RPM Fusion for Fedora 40 - Free
rpmfusion-free-updates                                                 RPM Fusion for Fedora 40 - Free - Updates
rpmfusion-nonfree                                                      RPM Fusion for Fedora 40 - Nonfree
rpmfusion-nonfree-updates                                              RPM Fusion for Fedora 40 - Nonfree - Updates
updates  

The only thing I remember related to messing with drivers was playing with podman containers accessing my gpu (nvidia-container-toolkit).

Currently I'm using driver version 550.107.02

Even before the Bcachefs file-system driver was accepted into the mainline kernel, Debian for the past five years has offered a "bcachefs-tools" package to provide the user-space programs to this copy-on-write file-system. It was simple at first when it was simple C code but since the Bcachefs tools transitioned to Rust, it's become an unmaintainable mess for stable-minded distribution vendors. As such the bcachefs-tools package has now been orphaned by Debian.

From John Carter's blog, Orphaning bcachefs-tools in Debian:

"So, back in April the Rust dependencies for bcachefs-tools in Debian didn’t at all match the build requirements. I got some help from the Rust team who says that the common practice is to relax the dependencies of Rust software so that it builds in Debian. So errno, which needed the exact version 0.2, was relaxed so that it could build with version 0.4 in Debian, udev 0.7 was relaxed for 0.8 in Debian, memoffset from 0.8.5 to 0.6.5, paste from 1.0.11 to 1.08 and bindgen from 0.69.9 to 0.66.

I found this a bit disturbing, but it seems that some Rust people have lots of confidence that if something builds, it will run fine. And at least it did build, and the resulting binaries did work, although I’m personally still not very comfortable or confident about this approach (perhaps that might change as I learn more about Rust).

With that in mind, at this point you may wonder how any distribution could sanely package this. The problem is that they can’t. Fedora and other distributions with stable releases take a similar approach to what we’ve done in Debian, while distributions with much more relaxed policies (like Arch) include all the dependencies as they are vendored upstream."

...

With this in mind (not even considering some hostile emails that I recently received from the upstream developer or his public rants on lkml and reddit), I decided to remove bcachefs-tools from Debian completely. Although after discussing this with another DD, I was convinced to orphan it instead, which I have now done.

Fairly recently, I saw an app that served the same purpose as Barrier or Input-leap, allowing you use one computer to control the keyboard and cursor of multiple. I'm fairly certain it was designed with GTK 4, or maybe 3, and it had Wayland support. I've had no luck getting input-leap working well on my devices, so if anyone knows what app this was (or any other options) I would really appreciate it.

Update: Despite searching for 15 minutes before posting, I found it seconds later, thanks to DDGs reddit bang. It is lan-mouse. Will leave this up in case this software comes in handy for others.