Very weird, I can think of some things I might check:
It is possible that you have files on disk that don’t have a filename anymore. This can happen when a file gets deleted while it is still opened by some process. Only the filename is gone then, but the file still exist until that process gets killed. If this were the problem, it would go away if you rebooted, since that kills all processes.
Maybe it is file system corruption. Try running fsck.
Maybe the files are impossible to see for baobab. Like if you had gigs of stuff under (say) /homeon you root fs, then mount another partition as /home over that, those files would be hidden behind the mount point. Try booting into a live usb and checking your disk usage from there, when nothing is mounted except root.
If you have lots and lots of tiny files, that can in theory use up a lot more disk space than the combined size of the files would, because on a lot file systems, small files always use up some minimum amount of space, and each file also has some metadata. This would show up as some discrepancy between du and df output. For me, df --inodes / shows ~300000 used, or about 10% of total. Each file, directory, symlink etc. should require one inode, I think.
I have never heard of baobab, maybe that program is buggy or has some caveats. Does du -shx / give the same results?
I don’t get how that case statement of yours is even supposed to work. I’m pretty sure that’s just a syntax error. I guess you want to map from description to name? But that’s not remotely what that does.
I’m still skeptical. At the time of the original Pentium (the last 586 from Intel, the fastest of which was 300 MHz), the usual amount of RAM was something like 16 or 32 MB. A 586 with 1 GB of RAM is extremely weird and probably impossible unless it’s some sort of high-end server. This does not check out.
Oh and DDR is also from around the time of the Pentium 4. I don’t think there exists a machine that has both DDR and an original Pentium (aka 586). Again, this does not check out and is probably impossible.
I used unstable for years (don’t anymore). It broke itself in minor and major ways every couple of months. Maybe it wouldn’t boot or X wouldn’t start, or the package dependencies were broken and I couldn’t install certain packages for a couple of days. Stuff like that.
You will have manually to fix these things from time to time, or do a workaround (like manually downgrading certain packages), or wait a week so stuff gets sorted. Most of the time it works fine though. I imagine the experience is somewhat similar to running arch.
You do not get security fixes, but it’s not a massive problem usually, since you’ll get the newest version of most software after a couple of days (occasionally longer) after it is released.
Anyway do not recommend unless you want to be a beta tester. I did report bugs sometimes, but almost always by the time I encountered an issue, it was already reported and a fix was already in the works.
on my last post I wrote device is a redmi 9c. Turns out it’s a redmi 10c and the custom ROM I wanted to install xdaforums.com/…/rom-13-unofficial-lineageos-20-0-… won’t work....
I have never used the Steam beta or Proton-GE or whatever information is spreading out there to noobs about what they should do, and I’ve been gaming exclusively on Linux for more than 20 years. Only do this beta or bleeding edge stuff if you have a problem, and a good reason to believe that will help (like people reporting your specific issue is fixed in beta). Or I guess if you’re bored out of your mind. And expect other issues since it’s fucking beta.
Hey, I wanna know your preferred laptops, used is better and to run Linux on it. Something with at least 16gb and 512 SSD is good. Budget range. Thank you!
Not all Thinkpads work equally well. For the best experience, get an all-Intel one, from one of the more expensive business lines, like the T-series. Consumer models are definitely worse, because employees of big Linux-using tech firms are getting the pro models.
I haven’t kept up with all the various lines they’re up to now, but that looks about right. Also obviously doesn’t hurt to google the exact model. Someone I know got an old tabletty Thinkpad with a touchscreen (don’t know what model) and on that one the webcam doesn’t work on Linux, so something like that can happen.
Maybe it’s fine with now, but I looked into a Ryzen Thinkpad a couple of years ago and Linux users reported problems with something (maybe power management?).
Edit: Last night, I used the “Fix MergeList problems” option in the maintenance tab of software sources and at least for now, it seems to be working. So I probably wont need help with this anymore, hopefully....
I don’t know how to figure out on vlc what sort of output method, codec, or hardware acceleration it’s currently using, so I second the other person who recommended mpv.
Look in the manpage (man mpv) for other settings. I think any option like –brightness=-10 can also be put into mpv.conf by removing the – at the beginning.
I don’t know if there’s a way to make mpv autosave this.
Just had this idea pop up in my mind. Instead of relying on volunteers mirroring package repositories all around the world, why not utilise BitTorrent protocol to move at the very least some some load unto the users and thus increase download speeds as well as decrease latency?
Because HTTP is simpler, faster, easier, more reliable.
The motivation for a a lot of p2p is to make it harder to shut down, but there is no danger of that for Linux distros. The other would be to save money, but Debian/Arch/etc. get more than enough bandwidth/server donations, so they’re not paying for that anyway.
Listen to the parent, this is almost certainly something to do with DNS (i.e. Firefox is not getting an answer for some reason, then timing out, then using maybe a backup DNS server; maybe there are multiple rounds of this). Who knows how your distro and that flatpak produce this interaction, but something is going on there.
extension design and strong content filters make AdBlock for Firefox a solid choice for people who don’t necessarily despise all ads
Do these people exist and if so, have they been checked for brainworms?
The rest is also stupid, ublock origin can and does block trackers, and can be made to block more stuff if you want. It’s strictly better in every way than the competition, which lets through more stuff, and/or sells your info. The article would be very short though if they just said that.
I think the hibernation image is compressed by default (all of it). Also, some of what is in your RAM is just files from disk. I think those don’t need to be saved into the hibernation image, since they’re already on disk. For example, libc.so.6 would definitely be in RAM and in use, but it’s also on disk, so no need to save it during hibernate.
So the hibernation image should be substantially smaller than your used RAM.
I’d like to install linux mint xfce 21.3 and xubuntu 24.04 alongside the already present debian 12.5, but I don’t know if I have to create the partitions before installing or if I’m guided to create the partitions while installing....
Yes. You can use lvresize to reduce the size of your logical volumes.
You first need to shrink the filesystems using e.g. resize2fs (exact command depends on filesystem). See the manpage for details, but for shrinking the filesystem it needs to be unmounted, so you’ll need to do this from a live usb or something.
After that you can use lvresize to resize the logical volumes. Pro tip: You can shrink the filesystem to e.g. 20 GiB, but shrink the partition to 30 GiB, just to make sure you’re not cutting off the filesystem due to some slight error or inexactness, and then afterwards run resize2fs again to resize the filesystem back to fill the whole partition, which it does by default if you don’t specify any size.
Also note, since you have LVM-on-LUKS, when you boot into a live cd, you will need to first use cryptsetup to decrypt your partition, and then run vgscan to make lvm find the unecrypted partition.
I have KDE set to Turn Off Screen after 5 minutes and to Sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity. This works when I first turn on the machine, but eventually stops working after a few hours of general use (mostly Firefox, VS Code, and some Steam games). Sometimes the screen isn’t turning off at all, other times the screen turns...
I think what’s going on there is that your suspend thingy looks at the “idle time” (kept track of by the X server or (I assume) wayland compositor) to know when to do its thing. This idle time gets reset whenever you use the keyboard or mouse, but not when you use a controller, because games talk directly to the kernel for controller input, not X. This used to be a serious annoyance because screensavers/lockscreens/dpms kept enabling themselves while playing with a game controller.
Steam “fixed” this some years back, by interfering with this idle time in some way, so your screensaver/dpms/lock wouldn’t start. But, annoyingly, steam does this all the time, not just while playing a game.
A lot of distros, I think, are started more due to political/social/psychological reasons, and not fundamental technical reasons, and that’s why a lot of them are so similar. Those reasons can be good and legit, but sometimes they are probably wrongheaded (but understandable), like an unwillingness to engage with upstream because that’s tedious and frustrating, whereas the technical work of creating another distro with oneself in charge may be more fun.
Also, of course, once a distro is big enough, with a sizable community of developers and users, there’s a strong incentive to keep it going, even if it’s very similar to another distro. Maybe there used to more of difference in the past, but you’re not going to convince a whole community to just shut down and join some other project. And business-run distros will keep going as long as the company is making money there is some business reason to keep doing them.
While this is generally true, there are sometimes exceptions to this, especially during the freeze.
Even unstable slows down during the freeze, as the usual way to get stuff into testing is through unstable, and packagers, especially of large collections or important dependencies, opt not to disturb the freeze by dumping a bunch of bleeding edge stuff in there. Consequently you also get more new stuff in unstable shortly after a new Debian release.
I’ve been using i3 for a while now, but the xfce power manager doesn’t work outside the desktop environment, is there any alternative you can recommend? It doesn’t matter if it is a terminal based or graphical interface program, I just need something that can suspend the computer after a certain time or lock it when the...
I also have a battery info using i3status in the status bar, and a script I named battery-check, which warns me via a dunst popup and a beep when the battery gets low:
There are various different ways in which USB keyboards can encode keypresses. I’ve seen some BIOSes that just cannot deal with some keyboards due to this. The USB keyboard driver that will be in use during GRUB should be the BIOS/UEFI driver. So I would try updating the mainboard firmware/EFI or try a different keyboard maybe? Or disable the GRUB password if that’s an option.
I’m thinking of picking up a used ThinkPad on eBay for cheap to serve as my daily driver. I’ll likely run LMDE, and primarily use it for web browsing, office programs, coding, and FreeCAD. Any recommendations on which model would best hit the sweet spot of capability vs price?
More expensive business-class laptops, like the T-series, is I think what RedHat and others give to their employees, thus they are usually better supported than cheaper consumer models.
As others have said, if you quote your variables, they won’t get split on spaces. The Unix shell unfortunately has ton of gotchas like this, and the reason this is not changed is backwards-compatibility. Lots of shell scripts depend on this behavior, e.g. there might be something like:
If you quote this (ls “$flags”), ls will see it as one argument, instead of splitting it into two arguments. You could patch the shell to not split arguments by default, and invent some other syntax for when you want this splitting behavior, but that would break a ton of existing shell scripts, and confuse users who are already familiar with the way it works right now. It would also make the shell incompatible with other shells, and violate the POSIX standard.
I disagree. The vast majority of the time when writing shell scripts, I quote variables, because that’s almost always what I want. Splitting is basically only useful if you have a list of arguments, and you know for sure there are no spaces in any of the arguments (so no filenames).
(The workarounds in pure POSIX shell are btw super annoying if you want to pass a list arguments that may have spaces in them: You can abuse the special “$@” variable. Or you could probably also construct something with xargs.)
Ah that’s your point. Yeah I agree that splitting literal a b c is convenient. It is surprising to many (like here) that this happens after variable substitution, and that’s not very convenient since you almost never want that. You could define this to happen the other way around, but then you’d obviously have to invent a new syntax for explicit splitting, which would be its own kind of annoying.
For those of you who don’t know, Linux From Scratch is a project that teaches you how to compile your own custom distro, with everything compiled from source code....
I did it during the gcc 3 transition. I used a very new gcc 3 (maybe even pre-release), which wasn’t at all recommended. A couple of (most?) C++ packages didn’t compile (some change having to do with namespace scope), which meant I had to fix the source of some packages (generally pretty trivial changes, usually having to prepend namespace:: to identifiers). Overall this problem was pretty rare, like it affected less than 1% of C++ files, but with things like Qt or Phoenix (or whatever Firefox was called back then), with thousands of files, I had to fix dozens of things. I guess running into problems made it more interesting and fun actually.
Did I learn anything? The main thing I learned is about all the different basic packages and what sort of binaries and libraries are included in them and why you need them. Also about some important config files in /etc. And a bit of shell experience, but I dare say I knew most of that stuff already. How much you learn depends a lot on how much you already know.
Overall what I learned was not very deep knowledge, nor was it a very time-efficient way to learn. But it was a chill learning experience, goal-oriented and motivating. And it made me more comfortable and confident in my ability to figure out and fix stuff.
Also it’s obviously not practical to keep that up to date, so I switched back to a distro after a couple of months of this.
I’m using linux mint 21.3, and a process (brave aka chrome) sometimes memory leaking, so eats all the RAM, and then linux goes into swap death loop, when everything freezes (sometimes the mouse cursor is moving), and nothing can’t be done, i can just see the HDD led blinking, and do a reset. Is there a way to make the system...
This doesn’t work to avoid thrashing. The kernel may invoke the OOM killer slightly quicker if you have no swap, so I guess that can sort of help, but it doesn’t properly solve the problem.
On Linux, there’s a thing called the page cache (aka disk cache): Every time (part of) a file gets read to or written from, that (part of) the file gets copied to RAM. The file is then kept there unless that RAM is needed for something more important. It is cached in RAM. But since it is also on disk, the kernel can drop the file from RAM anytime it wants.
If you’re low on RAM, the kernel therefore evicts all of the disk cache, because it can, because those pages can be reloaded from disk if needed. This means it will drop all the programs you’re running, the binary code. So any program you’re running is constantly interrupted, because its code is not in RAM.
So it runs a couple of instructions, but oh no! Call to function foo() from glibc, but guess what? That’s on disk. Queue wait for the kernel to load that. Oh now it wants function bar() from zlib, shit! Need to load that. Since loading stuff from disk is about as slow as running like a gazillion instructions, all your programs are like 1000x slower now.
This happens even with zero swap.
The correct advice is the one from @RedWeasel: install/enable systemd-oomd or earlyoom.
I’ll make an appeal to authority (kernel developer working on memory management):
Disabling swap does not prevent disk I/O from becoming a problem under memory contention, it simply shifts the disk I/O thrashing from anonymous pages to file pages. Not only may this be less efficient, as we have a smaller pool of pages to select from for reclaim, but it may also contribute to getting into this high contention state in the first place.
And then he goes on to say what I said, that it can make the OOM killer quicker to react.
Since that bug seems related to the X server somehow, I wonder if your monitor is showing black or actually off/standby (as in backlight off)?
If it’s the backlight, maybe it’s related to DPMS (monitor power management), and you can jolt it back to life with something like
<span style="color:#323232;">xset dpms force on
</span>
after waking up. Or maybe disable DPMS completely and see if that changes anything.
It would also be interesting to know if this problem also happens outside of XFCE. If you just use (say) openbox (which I don’t think does any power management or DPMS stuff by itself), does that work?
It actually starts, and then turns off. I didn’t notice it before you drew my attention.
That does sound like DPMS (“vesa display power management signaling”) shenanigans though.
Maybe you can disable XFCE’s display power management stuff completely? Systemd’s logind (/etc/systemd/logind.conf) can do (and does by default I think) suspend on lid-close without any window manager involvement at all, works fine with i3 here. So disabling XFCE’s stuff probably “only” messes with your monitor not going standby after a while, and you can maybe use xset or xscreensaver and set this by hand (after making sure it’s actually properly disabled in XFCE, so XFCE doesn’t override that stuff).
Found this about how to stop xfce4-power-manager and disable DPMS:
While I was writing a shell script (doing this the past several days) just a few minutes ago my PC fans spinned up without any seemingly reason. I thought it might be the baloo process, but looking at the running processes I see it’s names block-rate-estim . It takes 6.2% CPU time and is running since minutes, on my modern 8...
Btw, based on the name, and looking at the source, I think this block-rate-estim is a benchmark helper program for the libde265 video decoder. I think it takes in a file with log data (like debug output or something) and does some statistical calculation on it. My guess is the “block rate” is the speed/throughput.
It’s not available on Debian here (not part of any package, i.e. not installed/compiled, not sure why Fedora Arch would include this in the package tbh), since I think it’s supposed to be an internal dev tool or something like that.
It expects two arguments: a tag (whatever that is) and a filename for input data. It definitely doesn’t understand –help and I suspect it endlessly loops when it doesn’t get valid filename as the second argument.
I’m sticking to my hunch from my other comment, that it is one of your vim (or maybe shell) plugins. It possibly runs every binary installed on your system with –help, to provide some sort of autocomplete or something like that. If that is the case, that seems like a bad idea honestly.
I see no reason why FreeTube would run this, but if it did, it surely wouldn’t incorrectly run it with just –help as an argument.
I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite....
GUI toolkits like Qt and Gtk. I can’t tell you how to do it better, but something is definitely wrong with the standard class hierarchy framework model these things adhere to. Someday someone will figure out a better way to write GUIs (or maybe that already exists and I’m unaware) and that new approach will take over eventually, and all the GUI toolkits will have to be scrapped or rewritten completely.
You think being a bigot is a skill issue do you? Like everyone deep down is just a bigot (self-inferred I assume?), and some people just have the social skills to hide that better? Have you tried not being a bigot instead of just hiding it?
Finally decided to convert to the penguin. I have live booted mint from a usb, without installing it yet, on a macbook pro 2017. But none of the WiFi networks in my apartment are showing, except for a few weak ones. Help a newbie out :)...
Have you by any chance configured the wifi channels on your router/AP by hand? I had a problem a long time ago, where some device would assume it’s in the US, while the AP was set to another country code and you could choose wifi channels that in the US are verboten.
Btw, if you ever wondered why Debian uses dash as /bin/sh (the switch was a bit annoying at the time), I think the reasoning was something like this:
dash is a bit faster, which might have saved a second or two on boot times (this was before systemd). Same applies to compilation times, configure scripts run faster with dash.
A bunch of #!/bin/sh scripts in Debian did not actually work if you replaced /bin/sh with another shell, which I guess some people wanted to do. Making dash the default /bin/sh forced everyone to fix their scripts.
Also some history on the abomination that is m4sh, famously used by GNU autoconf configure.ac scripts. Apparently when autoconf was released in 1991, there were still some Unix systems that shipped some 70s shells as the default /bin/sh. These shells do not support shell functions, which makes creating any sort of shell programming library pretty much impossible (I guess you could make a folder full of scripts instead of functions). They decided to use m4 preprocessor macros instead, as a sort of poor man’s replacement for functions.
In hindsight, it wish they had told commercial Unix sysadmins to install a proper /bin/sh or gtfo. But the GNU people thought it was important to make it as easy as possible to install free software even on commercial Unices.
Disk space counted twice on root folder? (lemmy.world)
Edit: SOLVED thanks to r00ty !...
Help with sink switching script
I use the following oneliner to switch sinks:...
Linux distro for an ancient Pentium PC
I need some help finding a distro for a very old machine....
what linux OS should I install on a backup notebook if my main one is debian?
I’m your regular end user. I use my computers to edit text, audio and video, watch movies, listen to music, post and bank on the internet…...
Is there any way to brute delete stock firmware on a redmi 10c with debian? do you know of any compatible foss OS I could install on this device?
on my last post I wrote device is a redmi 9c. Turns out it’s a redmi 10c and the custom ROM I wanted to install xdaforums.com/…/rom-13-unofficial-lineageos-20-0-… won’t work....
I Tried Gaming on Linux... (youtu.be)
Which are your preferred laptops?
Hey, I wanna know your preferred laptops, used is better and to run Linux on it. Something with at least 16gb and 512 SSD is good. Budget range. Thank you!
Is Linux Mint's package repository having issues or is the problem on my end? (Solved, I think)
Edit: Last night, I used the “Fix MergeList problems” option in the maintenance tab of software sources and at least for now, it seems to be working. So I probably wont need help with this anymore, hopefully....
why can't I edit hue, brightness, contrast and other video effects with vlc 3.0.20 on debian 12.5?
how do I start looking for the package I need?...
Why does no distro utilise BitTorrent to distribute packages?
Just had this idea pop up in my mind. Instead of relying on volunteers mirroring package repositories all around the world, why not utilise BitTorrent protocol to move at the very least some some load unto the users and thus increase download speeds as well as decrease latency?
Flatpak Firefox (and forks) very slow to start
While other flatpak apps have no problems. Any suggestions?
What’s the best ad blocker for you? - Firefox Add-ons Blog (addons.mozilla.org)
Setting up a swap file on top of using swap-to-zram for Hibernation purposes? (Fedora 40)
So here’s my situation:...
How do I create partitions on debian 12.5 to install other distros in the same M.2 SSD?
I’d like to install linux mint xfce 21.3 and xubuntu 24.04 alongside the already present debian 12.5, but I don’t know if I have to create the partitions before installing or if I’m guided to create the partitions while installing....
KDE often not sleeping when idle
I have KDE set to Turn Off Screen after 5 minutes and to Sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity. This works when I first turn on the machine, but eventually stops working after a few hours of general use (mostly Firefox, VS Code, and some Steam games). Sometimes the screen isn’t turning off at all, other times the screen turns...
Pondering upon (the illusion of) different distros and its consequences - Thoughts?
Pondering upon (the illusion of) different distros and its consequences - Thoughts?...
questions about debian xfce
long time xubuntu user, now on 24.04....
Alternatives to xfce power manager
I’ve been using i3 for a while now, but the xfce power manager doesn’t work outside the desktop environment, is there any alternative you can recommend? It doesn’t matter if it is a terminal based or graphical interface program, I just need something that can suspend the computer after a certain time or lock it when the...
[Help] Keyboard key presses are extremely sensitive in GRUB
I recently upgraded my PC to a AM5 motherboard. My system runs KDE neon with full disk encryption....
What is the best model of used ThinkPad to purchase?
I’m thinking of picking up a used ThinkPad on eBay for cheap to serve as my daily driver. I’ll likely run LMDE, and primarily use it for web browsing, office programs, coding, and FreeCAD. Any recommendations on which model would best hit the sweet spot of capability vs price?
why does noone inprove bash such that you can write a normal foor loop with whitespace in file names?
I know that there are ten different alternatives. Why don’t we simply improve the basic stuff?
Has anyone here ever tried Linux From Scratch?
For those of you who don’t know, Linux From Scratch is a project that teaches you how to compile your own custom distro, with everything compiled from source code....
Auto kill memory leaking processes before swap death loop
I’m using linux mint 21.3, and a process (brave aka chrome) sometimes memory leaking, so eats all the RAM, and then linux goes into swap death loop, when everything freezes (sometimes the mouse cursor is moving), and nothing can’t be done, i can just see the HDD led blinking, and do a reset. Is there a way to make the system...
(partially solved, will update when completed) Please help with an xfce/powerup bug: black screen after suspend/hibernate
MX Linux, Xfce 4.18...
Is Neofetch abandoned?
Ive noticed its has been any activity in their github for a longtime. github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch...
What is this block-rate-estim?? Suddenly came to life
While I was writing a shell script (doing this the past several days) just a few minutes ago my PC fans spinned up without any seemingly reason. I thought it might be the baloo process, but looking at the running processes I see it’s names block-rate-estim . It takes 6.2% CPU time and is running since minutes, on my modern 8...
deleted_by_author
Are there any things in Linux that need to be started over from scratch?
I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite....
Regarding The Hyprland & Vaxry Situation (www.youtube.com)
Just putting this here cause I found it a good overview of a pretty confusing situation I had no prior knowledge about
No wifi on Linux Mint. Macbook pro 2017
Finally decided to convert to the penguin. I have live booted mint from a usb, without installing it yet, on a macbook pro 2017. But none of the WiFi networks in my apartment are showing, except for a few weak ones. Help a newbie out :)...
General Advice for shell scripts
What do you advice for shell usage?...