Whenever I resize the panel or the any other widget on the panel (e.g calendar widget) it doesn't remember its size. It's really annoying me. I am on Fedora 40, KDE 6.0.4. Nothing seems to fix it, thinking of a complete reinstall. Is anyone of you getting this bug?

The only distro I can find that successfully configures a functioning bootable GRUB on this (bastard) machine is Nobara, which looks very cool but is way too heavy! Some things are glitchy; attempting tab completion seems to freeze Konsole for ~5 seconds and does not complete the command as expected. We're working with an Intel Atom [email protected] and 2GB RAM here.

How can a noob figure out what it's doing differently so I can apply that to Linux Mint Debian Edition or Crunchbang Plus Plus?

The weird thing is that once the system is installed, it does not seem to have what I think are the required packages for GRUB to be set up correctly with this type of UEFI.

nextbook@nextbook:~$ sudo grub2-install /dev/mmcblk

grub2-install: error: /usr/lib/grub/i386-efi/modinfo.sh doesn't exist. Please specify --target or --directory.

If you run Windows make sure to install the virtio drivers

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/creating-windows-virtual-machines-using-virtio-drivers/

I've been using VMware Player (free version) for a while now and it's been working fine. Recently I switched to Wayland and VMware's grab input behavior broke. The guest gets most keys correctly but Alt and Super are intercepted by the host. Clicking on the vm also gives me a remote desktop popup on the host prompting to allow remote interaction which gives some weird results both on the host and guest. Apparently this is a known issue with gnome(?) and the only workaround is to add Super to any shortcut (eg. Super+Alt+Tab) but this obviously doesn't work for all shortcuts.

I'm using Gnome on Fedora and Ubuntu and they seem to have the same behavior (but no remote desktop popup on Ubuntu). Both work fine on X11. I've also tested both VMware player 16 and 17.

So if anyone is using VMware on Wayland, do you know of a combination that works? Does it work on KDE? Should I just switch to Virtualbox? I'd really rather keep Wayland if possible.

I was reading the reddit thread on Claude AI crawlers effectively DDOSing Linux Mint forums https://libreddit.lunar.icu/r/linux/comments/1ceco4f/claude_ai_name_and_shame/

and I wanted to block all ai crawlers from my selfhosted stuff.

I don't trust crawlers to respect the Robots.txt but you can get one here: https://darkvisitors.com/

Since I use Caddy as a Server, I generated a directive that blocks them based on their useragent. The content of the regex basically comes from darkvisitors.

Sidenote - there is a module for blocking crawlers as well, but it seemed overkill for me https://github.com/Xumeiquer/nobots

For anybody who is interested, here is the block_ai_crawlers.conf I wrote.

(blockAiCrawlers) {
  @blockAiCrawlers {
    header_regexp User-Agent "(?i)(Bytespider|CCBot|Diffbot|FacebookBot|Google-Extended|GPTBot|omgili|anthropic-ai|Claude-Web|ClaudeBot|cohere-ai)"
  }
  handle @blockAiCrawlers {
    abort
  }
}

# Usage:
# 1. Place this file next to your Caddyfile
# 2. Edit your Caddyfile as in the example below
#
# ```
# import block_ai_crawlers.conf
#
# www.mywebsite.com {
#   import blockAiCrawlers
#   reverse_proxy * localhost:3000
# }
# ```

Ubuntu has too many problems for me to want to run it. However, it has occurred to me that there aren't a lot of distros that are like the Ubuntu LTS.

Basic requirements for a LTS:

• at least 2 years of support
• semi recent versions of applications like Chrome and Firefox (might consider flatpak)
• a stable experience that isn't buggy
• fast security updates

Distros considered:

• Debian (stable)
• Rocky Linux
• openSUSE
• Cent OS stream
• Fedora

As far as I can tell none of the options listed are quite suitable. They are either to unstable or way to out of date. I like Rocky Linux but it doesn't seem to be desktop focused as far as I can tell. I would use Debian but Debian doesn't have the greatest security defaults. (No selinux profiles out of the box)

There is a very annoying problem with archive extraction on Linux. I always sort my files by "last modified" and want my latest files and folders on top in any file manager. When I download and extract an archive, the extracted folder is placed toward the middle or bottom of the list apparently because the original timestamps of files are retained. If I'm not mistaken I didn't have this issue on my MacBook and the extracted archives would appear on the top of the list.

Workaround: In Ark if I choose extract to subfolder and type a name for the new folder, it is treated as recently modified and is placed at the top. But I don't want to enter a name every time.

Shouldn't an extracted folder be treated as recently modified??

Any ideas?

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/much-ado-about-nothing/44236

Not directly related to this blog post but from NixOS discourse forum, a tl;dr from another person about the NixOS drama here :

If you’re looking for a TL;DR of the situation, here it is:

    Nix community had a governance crisis for years. While there has been progress on building explicit teams to govern the project, it continued to fundamentally rely on implicit authority and soft power

    Eelco Dolstra, as one of the biggest holders of this implicit authority and soft power, has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn’t like

    Crucially, he also used his implicit authority to block any progress on solving this governance crisis and establishing systems with explicit authority

    This has led uncountably many people to burn out over the issue, and culminated in writing an open letter to have Eelco resign from all formal positions in the project and take a 6 month break from any involvement in the community

    Eelco wrote a response that largely dismisses the issues brought up, and advertises his company’s community as a substitute for Nix community

On Android, there's an excellent tool called Shelter. One of it's features is to "Freeze" an app. This essentially makes it completely dormant and inactive until you unfreeze it. No background processes, network activity, etc.

I've looked into firejail and fiddled around with it a little bit, and it seems that I can set lots of parameters to a very secure state, but only as overarching rules. Ie, they take effect both while the program is in use and when it is inactive.

Ideally, I'd like to give a couple programs some access when I'm actively using them (ie, let firefox access the internet, and see my ~/Downloads folder, but only when I'm using it. Then, when I kill the process, have it automatically lose all privileges and become "frozen".

To be fair, I'm very unfamiliar with firejail so far, so afaik this could be easily done and I just haven't found the method yet. If someone could point me towards some resources, or suggest another tool besides firejail to accomplish this, I'd be very grateful.

Hi, I'm just starting exploring btrfs volume concepts; currently my testing setup has three subvolumes: root, var, home; is it possible have user home folder (I mean /home/user, not all /home) in a different partition? Thanks for suggestions

Hi guys,

I saw this very informative post talking about how ready Wayland is so I thought to share some info that might be useful for people on i3wm+Polybar who are willing to switch to Sway. Keep in mind I am just a hobbyist that like to tinker with stuff. If you know what you are doing you might want to skip this post and check i3wm Migration Guide and useful addons (I recommend you check those anyway if you are reading this post).

Likely you have heard about Sway but if you haven't Sway is a Wayland compositor(forget picom) based on i3wm that will make you feel at home as an i3 user. Sway has almost all i3 functionalities and some improvements as well but you will have to drop some of the programs like Polybar that you have been running on i3 for Wayland compatible ones. Do check what programs are not Wayland native and look for their replacements.

Ones which make life easier:

• nwg-panel (see picture): Great panel/bar if you do not want to spend much time editing config files since it allows you to do it graphically plus it comes with great defaults. If you want to add a menu like usual DEs you can get nwg-menu. Or a dock too nwg-dock. This guys work is wonderful!
• nwg-displays: Graphical displays manager that automatically export config files for you.
• nwg-look: Simple graphical way of setting GTK3 themes. If you want to create custom gtk themes get gradience
• yofi: Yofi is a launcher that works very fast for me and is customizable. (could not get icons to work but that seems to be a me problem. If you would like a super minimal, blazing fast launcher then tofi is for you. Personally I use wofi but its not being actively maintained.
• For your graphical file manager thunar, pcmanfm and nemo work fine but you will have to do some tweaking to get some of the functionalities they offered in their respective Desktop Environments.
• gammastep: Like redshift but better and for wayland, just configure, set and forget about it.

Little tips:

• Electron apps like Freetube and Obsidian will not work on Wayland unless you use flags either on Electron's config file or specify environment variables.
• Touchpad gestures are supported directly in Sway and you can configure those in the main config file or include it externally.
• When configuring your Sway input options in the config file I suggest making a global option that will catch all devices for a given type and then if you wish you can specify unique behavior for different devices specifying their id. Like this:

input type:keyboard {
$your_options_here  
}

• If you want to immediately focus the workspace of a window you moved you can do so like this:

bindsym $mod+Shift+5 move container to workspace number 5, workspace number 5

• SwayFX: Extends Sway to some UI functions like one could have achieved with Picom on i3 that are not available in Sway.
• autotiling: This lets you achieve the autotiling that Hyprland has by default.

There is much more to it than this post, go check the respective links. Anyway, I hope you find this useful. Peace!

I wanted to install jackett and sonarr, they are complicated to use as is, moreover I am using Ubuntu. I am following fuidleine for installing jackett with STUPID command line making it EXTRA difficult. But now I have to change directory ownerships and what nots. I am the ONLY user on this machine. I want to own everything by default I am root I am admin I am user I am all. How do I make this happen instead of sending stupid commands all the time and making using Linux EASY. Before anyone getting on about Security I don't give 2centa about it .I just want to use and install and do whatever I wish.

How do I make this happen Forever, once inför all.

I thought I'd take the opportunity to share a Bash script I made to automate ripping music off CUE/BIN files. It splits BINs into separate files, so it's 1 file per track, and strips pregap data, encodes audio tracks to FLAC or Ogg Vorbis, and it also generates new CUE sheets.

Link to the script:

https://github.com/linux4ever07/scripts/blob/main/cuebin_extract.sh

The idea came to me some years ago when I noticed that GOG packaged some of their games in a dumb way. It was specifically DOS games (bundled with DOSBox) that had CD audio. They would include the original BIN file, but with a modified CUE sheet that would not let you access the high quality CD audio. On top of that, they included Ogg Vorbis tracks, wasting HDD space for no reason by effectively storing the music twice, but only letting you access the lower quality Vorbis tracks. So, I thought, why not just split the BIN, encode the audio tracks to FLAC, and that way you both get better audio quality and also use less HDD space. DOSBox supports CUE sheets that list FLAC, Ogg Vorbis and even Opus tracks.

I took inspiration from 'bchunk', which is a program that does something similar. However, bchunk converts data tracks to ISO files, which is not what I wanted. I wanted to keep the original tracks completely untouched, so my script will copy data tracks as normal BIN files. bchunk also can't encode audio tracks to FLAC or Ogg Vorbis, but it will produce uncompressed WAV files. And bchunk doesn't produce new CUE sheets for the created files.

I also use the script to extract the OST from random games. I put together a playlist with some of my favorite retro video game music that I extracted using the script:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHI7ghR6XX4

There's other uses for the script, such as splitting BINs in general. For example, many BeOS / ZETA disc images contain boot floppies as the first track, and once you split the BIN you can access the boot floppy image. And you can create frankenstein disc images by exchanging tracks between different disc images.

The script is made for Linux, but should work on macOS / FreeBSD as well if you have a recent version of Bash installed, as well as ffmpeg, flac and oggenc.

I recently switched to hyprland and noticed kde connect wasnt typing what i type from my tablet. Its really hard to type on a physical keyboard due to my disablity. Any suggestions?

Spoiler: GNOME wins

Btw their GNOME Theme manager is here

ThSince last Sunday, I've been trying to install Debian 12 as a server OS on a Dell XPS 8900. I've seemingly been so close and yet so far. I've gotten 2 errors repeatly. One is one I can't avoid, the other one I can.

The one I haven't been able to avoid is "fclose: no space left on device". I have tried changing grub settings to 'pcie_aspm=off'. I tried changing the actual pcie for the hard drive, maybe I had a faulty one. The only thing I can think of is that I took the hard drive out, plugged it into a laptop via USB to check if it had anything important and put it back in to install Debian.

The other issue is an out of memory kernal panic but that's been fixed.

This has been a pretty major source of frustration all week. If anyone can suggest something that might help. I'll try it, cheers

Have a dog with a melon, look at him with his melon, so proud