palordrolap

@palordrolap@kbin.social

Some middle-aged guy on the Internet; Seen a lot of it and occasionally regurgitate it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4.

Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Now I'm here.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

palordrolap,

Pretty sure Cinnamon panels are designed to fit to the width (or height if they're attached to the side) of the screen and can't be altered. (The depth/breadth/"thickness" of the panel can be changed, but that's not particularly relevant here.)

The same may also be true of panel-like features in XFCE and MATE too, but I can't easily confirm.

My friend didn't have a great experience with Linux

I have been daily driving Linux for over two years now and I have switched distros many times. So, when my friend bought a new laptop, I convinced him to install Linux Mint on it. I asked him if he wanted to dual boot, he said no because it would fill up all his storage. We installed Linux Mint. The other day, he wanted to play...

palordrolap,

Do. Take a boot USB for a spin. Try a few distros.

I've been on Linux (Mint) for years and never had a mouse-wheel not work or any problems with sound (hardware failure notwithstanding). The computer's been the same all the way through, but it is a bit of a Ship of Theseus at this point. Mint has had no problem with new (and old) parts that I've thrown in. Or new mice, as I implied before.

Getting old Windows games to work has been the biggest non-starter, which is pretty much where OPs friend was having trouble too.

Minecraft (Java) runs fine with the standard launcher, but I do get FPS problems if I've had an Xorg update. That's more of a "your graphics card is so old Mint doesn't really support it any more" problem, which I know how to work around.

I did have problems getting Linux to run on a laptop once, but then it was 1998 and Linux drivers weren't quite so plug and play. I had no idea what refresh rates my TFT screen needed and neither did Linux, boldly warning that if I set them wrong I could burn out my screen. Since I needed a GUI, I went back to Windows 95.

palordrolap,

You need to lay at least some blame on Logitech for that one.

They've sold drivers to Microsoft, but since no-one writing Linux would give them any money, they wouldn't provide drivers for their proprietary hardware.

This then lead to early Linux adopters buying non-Logitech devices and not seeing a use-case for rolling a reverse-engineered driver into the kernel.

Logitech still haven't written their own Linux driver. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the money from Microsoft is so that they don't.

Viruses & Task Viewers

Hello everybody! I can say I’m a newbie at Linux. Wanted to ask about Linux’ task viewers. On the famous task viewers such as bpytop, htop etc., can viruses hide from them? Excluding the injected codes, can virus & tracker/logger softwares hide from classic task viewers of Linux? Do they show all kinds of services and...

palordrolap,

True. There are various legitimate tools that are only really one step away from malware, so it's not too hard to imagine going that one step further.

Thinking specifically of the fact that a new process is allowed to change its apparent name, as well as creating secondary process pools, but there are bound to be other, deeper ways.

palordrolap,

Be aware that for some removable (or otherwise non-local) media, some systems will create a .Trash-### directory on the media itself in the root directory.

This prevents unnecessary copying of files from the media to a local disk, and only a few media-specific location indicators actually need to be changed for the Trashed file(s).

The ### is generally the user's ID number as stored in /etc/passwd, and, on Debian derivatives at least, is usually 1000 for the first user, 1001 for the second, etc., but I have heard of some systems that just use .Trash with no suffix, or did so at some point in the past.

palordrolap,

They need to update that. They jumped to version 24 for 2024. 24.2.3 is the current version.

palordrolap,

Ones I have used: GNOME Disks' create and restore image features. Possibly Mint's mintstick for writing a distro's .iso out to a USB stick. I am not too sure on that.

I assume old-school dd still works as well, which might be a better option for scripted backups or minimal systems.

palordrolap,

So, it's trying to replace Emacs?

palordrolap,

A wild username reference appears!

There's an editor called Kate. It's probably not named after you, but if you're young enough and the person who named you was into tech, you might be named after it.

palordrolap,

named myself

Programmer error: I totally missed a bunch of edge cases there. Cases 32 to 35 for sure

Buuut I'm guessing you didn't name yourself after the editor.

palordrolap,

This is pretty big if it has a completely separate browser rendering engine to the two remaining families, even if the feature set is small.

The more current alternatives we have, the better.

palordrolap,

I was counting WebKit and Blink (Chromium) as cousins, both descendents of KHTML, but maybe they've diverged enough as to not easily be able to borrow from each other any more and it really is three.

palordrolap,

The gsettings command can change things on the fly in the dconf, assuming that's where the setting actually resides. It's a pain to do, but that means it's possible to write a script that makes the necessary change(s) and that can then be assigned to a keyboard combo.

For example, I have one that toggles a Cinnamon panel between the top and the bottom of its screen (I won't get into why) and currently have it bound to Ctrl-Alt-Space.

It's currently a hack that uses a couple of hardcoded values that I pulled from the dconf by observing what it was set to with the panel in each location. If it finds the first value it changes it to the second, and vice versa.

(In the unlikely event I come to change the layout to something it doesn't recognise, it bails out, doing nothing.)

Anyway, you could probably do something similar to toggle the dark/light mode.

palordrolap,

Most shells will issue $PS2 as the continuation prompt if you quote a filename and try to insert a carriage return.

Ctrl-V Ctrl-J is the explicit keypress pair to insert a carriage return without triggering $PS2, but beware: If the carriage return is outside of quotes, that's equivalent to starting a new command in much the same way a semicolon or a new line in a shell script would.

echo "hello^V^Jthere" [Enter] echoes hello on one line and then there on the next, but echo hello^V^Jthere [Enter] will echo hello then try to run a command called there

We'd have to assume that whatever fixes spaces in filenames would also have an option to fix this subtlety. And I say to whoever tries: Good luck with that.

palordrolap,

Most terminals start a shell as the first program, so you're not really learning "Terminal" so much as whatever program it starts first. Bash is a pretty common shell, so you might want to search for things like "Bash examples" to get a feel for it.

If that's too simple, or you blast past that, then reading bash's manual might give you some more ideas. The man command is your friend. The manuals are not necessarily quite so friendly, but they're aimed at someone who's already somewhat competent.

Anyway, here's one link from a Bash examples search I did: https://linuxsimply.com/bash-scripting-tutorial/basics/examples/

If Bash isn't what you have where you are, substitute its name instead. Zsh and Fish are pretty popular. There are others, but I don't think any mainstream Linux uses them by default.

To check what shell you're using try an echo $0 or echo $SHELL.

Finally, a bit of advice: Don't go running commands you see on the Internet unless you're sure what they're going to do is something you have no problem with. And be careful with copy/pasting from web pages you don't know or trust - I can't vouch for the examples in the link I gave earlier, for example. It's possible to make things look like a completely innocent command but when pasted does something else entirely.

palordrolap,

This is the sort of thing I was talking about with "Don't go running commands [...] unless you're sure what they're going to do [...]"

I did a breakdown of this one on the snoosite back in the day. Searching "fork bomb" on YouTube is probably a better way to get that breakdown these days.

palordrolap,

I remember using Pico, Nano's predecessor, in the mid-to-late '90s. Nano was created because there was a desire to distribute Pico with Linux. Unfortunately, the licensing was unclear so a clone had to be made. Fortunately there was no argument about editor appearance and behaviour.

As shocking as the 2001 date might be, it seems like Pico might have ceased development as recently as the end of 2022 along with its e-mail reader parent program Alpine (formerly Pine).

If true, Nano still has a few years to go before it will overtake its parent for longevity.

(Both vi and Emacs are far older, of course.)

palordrolap,

Eh. Not quite. Yes, the main editions use Ubuntu as a starting point, but they remove a load of Canonical's cruft, like Snaps. They have their own suite of applications, the XApps, that are forks of other tools, as well as a number of other improvements and changes.

I couldn't say whether it's as far from Ubuntu as Ubuntu is from the original Debian, but it's some distance removed for sure.

And LMDE is based on Debian, skipping Ubuntu entirely.

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...

palordrolap,

You could probably rig something up to periodically check RAM usage and if it's dangerously high, send a system notification - or make an xmessage popup - to tell you to restart Brave ASAP. That is, before the death loop begins in the first place.

You might also want to install an extension that unloads tabs that haven't been accessed in a while, especially if you're a tab hoarder.

I don't use Brave, so I'm making assumptions that such an extension exists and that Brave can be restarted without losing all tabs, etc.

palordrolap,

English is an open-source project with no overarching plan and several major variants that has had literally millions of contributors over thousands of release cycles per branch. There's bound to be some cruft in the code.

Anyone who suggests reform is enacting that one xkcd about standards. And no-one will use their variant except for a few enthusiasts who think it's the best thing since sliced silicon.

palordrolap,

Statistics. It's a menu option.

If you look, be thankful it only shows per-world information. And there's no count of server time once you lose access to a server's world.

No-one can know.

palordrolap,

The Robustness Principle may seem like little more than a suggestion, but it is the foundation on which many successful things are based.

To boil it down to meme-level old-school Torvaldsry: Assume everyone else is a f--king idiot who can barely do what they're supposed to and expect to parse their files / behaviour / trash accordingly.

If you do not do this, you are, without doubt, one of those f--king idiots everyone else is having to deal with. If you do do this, it does not guarantee that you are not a f--king idiot. Awareness is key.

Examples where this works: Web browser quirks mode; Driving a car; Measure twice, cut once. This latter one is special because it reveals that often, the f--king idiot you're trying to deal with is yourself.

Assume everyone else is worse.

Fun corollary: In altering his behaviour towards f--king idiots people who should know better, Linus has learned to apply the robustness principle to interpersonal communication.

palordrolap,

Maybe I want to say it without saying it. There's no rule against doing that, but people somehow think there is - or that there ought to be.

Most of the time I don't swear, so it makes me uncomfortable to use the word. There have been and undoubtedly will be exceptions. When the mood takes me. When the word, unfettered, feels right. Today was not that day.

Funny how the partial omission offends some people more than the original word does. Adapt your parsers.

palordrolap,

It's not about whether other people are willing to accept it. It's about whether I'm willing to generate it. This is the other half of the principle.

palordrolap,

I turned the volume down to a more comfortable level.

palordrolap,

One might exist already: lzlib.

I admit I haven't done a great deal of research, so maybe there are problems, but I've found that lzip tends to do better at compression than xz/lzma and, to paraphrase its manual, it's designed to be a drop-in replacement for gzip and bzip2. It's been around since at least 2009 according to the copyright messages.

That said, xz is going to receive a lot of scrutiny from now on, so maybe it doesn't need replacing. Likewise, anything else that allows random binary blobs into the source repository is going to have the same sort of scrutiny. Is that data really random? Can it be generated by non-obfuscated plain text source code instead? etc. etc.

palordrolap,

Technically, it's inherited from older, non-x86 systems that had a dedicated 'Compose' key on the keyboard. Here's a picture of a Sun Microsystems UK-layout keyboard; take a look at the bottom right of the main section: Link to a wiki hosting the image

(These keyboards also had the Sun (looks like a diamond) key well before Microsoft decided they'd like a Windows key on every keyboard. But then lots of other non-Microsoft computers did that. Apples, Commodores, etc.)

Note that the tiny circle on the key is a light which comes on when the key is engaged and goes off when the composition is complete. The Caps-, Num- and Scroll Lock keys also have built-in lights. For that reason, some people will use Scroll Lock on PC keyboards, especially if the Compose-emulation is able to toggle the Scroll Lock light in the same way.

(Even though I used similar keyboards many, many years ago, I'm not actually sure if the key has the light in it or whether the light is under the key and the circle is merely a window, but that's not really important right now.)

palordrolap,

If I remember correctly, clicking distro links on Distrowatch causes Distrowatch to increase its ranking of that distro, so it's theoretically possible that MX Linux is only at the top because people who don't use it and haven't heard of it think "wtf is MX Linux?", click the link and push its rank ever higher.

Urban Dictionary (not Linux related nor particularly SFW, but bear with me) had a similar problem with their table of "popular definitions" links. (They eventually took them off the site.)

If memory serves (for a second time), some of the links went to non-existent definitions, but those links looked like the only way to reach those definitions, so people clicked them, increasing their popularity and keeping them in the list. Along comes another visitor, "oh what's this", repeat ad nauseam.

palordrolap,

Sounds like a TempleOS advocate. Someone out of the 1980s where everything on a machine was integrated and standard across the line. If you stuck with a particular manufacturer. And didn't look too close.

palordrolap,

Been feeling old and out of touch lately, and seeing this was comforting somehow.

I mean, I'm still old and out of touch, but it's nice to see that one particular ancient technology might still be considered the best way to do something.

On the other hand, desktop computers are getting a bit long in the tooth as a concept these days...

palordrolap,

LMDE is already on pipewire as far as I can tell. I have a process running by that name, as well as one called pipewire-pulse which I assume is providing some or all of the old pulseaudio functionality for whatever might be expecting it.

No problems I'm aware of. I thought I was having problems early last month, but that turned out to be hardware failure.

palordrolap,

That started out as a fictional implementation in the turn-of-the-century webcomic User Friendly (main site died a while back, unfortunately), and then someone decided that it would be fun to implement it for real.

The one in the comic was deliberately created to be evil. Not sure about the real-world implementation.

Are there any CPUs that work well with Linux that aren't made by Intel or another company on the BDS list/that supports Israel?

I have a Ryzen 3 1300X at the moment and it’s always had this soft lock freezing bug on Linux. I used to dual-boot Windows on this machine and Windows never had the same problem, so I think it is an issue with the Linux kernel (I’ve also replaced nearly every bit of hardware that I originally built the PC with, except for...

palordrolap,

Attempting to avoid politics is itself a political stance. Enjoy your paradox, fellow lemming.

palordrolap,

Linux Mint is basically Ubuntu without snaps. Flatpak is available for that sort of thing where necessary.

palordrolap,

Call me lazy if you like, but I use GNOME terminal. Comes as standard with my distro. Does what I need. Supports fonts that aren't pixel fonts and has various look and feel tweaks accessible by GUI if I really want to get in there. I do that once after every fresh install and it's been a while since then.

Given that I loved a bit of Quake back in the day, you'd think I'd like drop down terminals like ddterm and Guake (which might not work on Wayland?), but weirdly no. I like it in a box I can move around.

I also keep the ancient xterm installed just in case and for when I get nostalgic for the old pixel fonts, but it's not exactly my go-to.

Looking for a tool to visualize folders based on number of files.

There are plenty of utilities (GUI, such as filelight and TUI, such as dua as well) for analyzing disk usage by space, but I would like to view my folders based on the count of files, as I’m making backups, and folders with lots of small files (e.g. node_modules) take very long to move around, so I guess that I’d be better...

palordrolap,

Cinnamon's Nemo (GUI) file manager shows folder item count in the List View's "Size" column rather than a byte value. It started as a fork of Nautilus (now GNOME Files), so that and its descendents may also have the same feature.

The equivalent GNOME gio list command line command doesn't seem to do this.

It wouldn't be too hard to whip something up in Python, Perl etc. if you can't or don't want to install anything else for some reason.

e.g.

perl -wle '$a=$ARGV[0];opendir D, defined $a && -d $a?$a:".";@x=readdir D; print -2+@x'

is a Perl incantation that will return the number of entries in the current directory, or the supplied directory if that's added as a parameter after the command.

The -2 in there subtracts the count for . and ... That's off by one for the root directory where there's no ".." but that's rare and I didn't want to add too much for a quick proof of concept.

palordrolap,

The find command could be your friend for getting a full depth count. Something like:

find /path/name/here/ | wc -l

Or just:

find . | wc -l

for the current directory.

There's also a command called locate (often with another letter in front, but accessible by just that word) which maintains a database of filenames on a system that can be used, provided it's installed and has built that database.

Pro: Faster than churning the disk every time with find. (Though disk cache can help alleviate some of this).

Cons: Can get out of date with a changing filesystem. Harder to search for relative paths like .

locate -r '^/path/name/here/' | wc -l

... would be roughly equivalent to the first find example.

palordrolap,

At a guess, it's because the function of preserving file dates and times is more likely than setting the port to something other than the default, so it gets the lowercase character, whereas ssh doesn't do anything with files so the port option gets the lowercase character.

The inconsistency is annoying though. I wonder if they could make ssh's -p option case insensitive so -P works across the board. (Maybe -P is reserved for some unknown future purpose?)

A work-around would be introducing long options and having --port be the option's long name across all the commands, but then, that comes with its own problems.

palordrolap,

This, or wmctrl that has some overlap. OR if this is Wayland (and not Xorg), whatever alternatives for those the window manager provides.

Anyone know what those are?

LMDE just rocks (lemmy.ml)

I have been testing for a few weeks Mint, originally started on 21.2 on an old 2012 MacBook Air… the OS was flying! As I was looking at this now 10 years old machine, now back to usable speed again I was pleasantly surprised. On my desktop was still running Fedora that is just a bit more shiny and has the latest “stable”...

palordrolap,

Not if it's really old. My dinosaur is over 12 years old and Debian stable (on which LMDE is based) no longer officially supports my graphics card.

If I want the graphics to work properly, I have to install the proprietary driver the hard way, and reinstall it every time Xorg updates.

There are alternatives but all of them require more work or giving up features.

(And no, I can't just buy a new computer.)

palordrolap,

The card's Nvidia. Mint comes with the Nouveau driver which doesn't quite cut it, at least not for me. Maybe some of that's baked into the kernel these days, I'm not sure.

Earlier Mints (LMDE included) provided an installable package of the OEM legacy driver for cards as old as mine, but Debian 12 (which LMDE 6 is based on) doesn't.

I should point out that graphics works without the OEM driver, but it doesn't work well. Work is offloaded to the CPU that the card is perfectly capable of doing.

palordrolap,

Obligatory meme versions (contain strong language):

Oh no

Oh f--k

palordrolap,

"Where do you think we are?"

palordrolap, (edited )

The jump from 7.x right to 24.x had me thinking this was an AI generated article at first, but the main LibreOffice website does indeed show that the new version number is 24.

EDIT: The article literally talks about this and I missed it. Twice. I would like to claim to be on drugs, but sadly(?) this is not the case.

The choice of 24 makes me think they've decided to switch to using the last two digits of the current year as the main version number, rather than the previous arbitrary increases, but I can't find anything obvious about this on the site.

Their current release schedule is every six months, and as long as they don't accelerate the way web browser releases do, this probably wouldn't come back to bite them.

The sub-version being .2 and it being February soon makes me wonder if that's intentional as well.

As for commentary on LibreOffice itself: I use it every once in a while, so I don't dig deep into its feature set(s) at all. In a previous update I noticed a few things had been moved around in Calc (the spreadsheet) which I'm still getting used to, but by and large all I can do is appreciate those working on it and, for whatever it's worth, thank them for their efforts.

palordrolap,

Clearly I did not. And now I am concerned because I thought I did.

palordrolap,

To use the trash as an analogy, I even picked up the bag and walked around with it a bit (the tab was open. I know I looked at it and scrolled down), but did it make it to where it was supposed to go? (information can into brain?) Doesn't look like it.

palordrolap,

The latest Mint (21.3) does have experimental Wayland support. Definitely worth keeping an eye on.

palordrolap,

Just going to leave this xkcd comic here.

Yes, you already know what it is.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • fightinggames
  • All magazines
    •