Re: [xubuntu-users] xubuntu-users Digest, Vol 207, Issue 6

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 2024-05-29 at 08:31 -0400, Carl Snyder wrote:
> I originally allocated 256M for the EFI partition, but the present
> requirements for the same multi-boot Linux machine is over 1G
> allocated on my 1.5T HDD.

Hi,

the esp partition of my Linux multi-boot machine does use 20.24 MiB,
13 MiB for everything inside of the EFI/ folder and the rest is required
by the fat32 file system for a 4.01 GiB sized partition. The kernels
aren't stored on the esp partition.

You might need between 1 GiB and 4 GiB, depending on how large the
multi-boot machine ist and depending on the way you manage the multi-
boot. However, if the whole space is just 1.5 TiB and if you don't store
the kernels on the esp partition, then 256 MiB are most likely way
enough, even to hold memtest86 and countless memtest86 log files.

• rocketmouse@archlinux ~ 
$ df -h /mnt/M1ESP/
Filesystem  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p1  4.1G   13M  4.0G   1% /mnt/M1ESP
• rocketmouse@archlinux ~ 
$ du -sh /mnt/M1ESP/EFI/
13M /mnt/M1ESP/EFI/
• rocketmouse@archlinux ~ 
$ cat /boot/grub/grub.cfg 
play 1920 440 1 0 1 880 2 0 1 880 1 0 1 440 2
set timeout=60
set color_normal=light-gray/black
set color_highlight=white/light-gray
set menu_color_normal=light-gray/black
set menu_color_highlight=white/light-gray
set default="1"
insmod efi_gop

menuentry " -- HAL 9000-m1 
-" {
true
}

menuentry "MemTest86 V10+ Free" {
search --set=root --no-floppy --fs-uuid 3F5B-F698
chainloader /EFI/memtest86/memtestx64.efi
}

menuentry " -- Arch Linux 
--" {
true
}

menuentry "Arch Linux threadirqs" {
search --no-floppy --set=root --label m1.archlinux
linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/disk/by-label/m1.archlinux ro 
threadirqs ibt=off ipv6.disable=1
initrd /boot/intel-ucode.img /boot/initramfs-linux.img
}

menuentry "Arch Linux" {
search --no-floppy --set=root --label m1.archlinux
linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/disk/by-label/m1.archlinux ro 
ibt=off ipv6.disable=1
initrd /boot/intel-ucode.img /boot/initramfs-linux.img
}

menuentry "Arch Linux Longterm" {
search --no-floppy --set=root --label m1.archlinux
linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux-lts root=/dev/disk/by-label/m1.archlinux ro 
ibt=off ipv6.disable=1
initrd /boot/intel-ucode.img /boot/initramfs-linux-lts.img
}

menuentry "Arch Linux Rt" {
search --no-floppy --set=root --label m1.archlinux
linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux-rt root=/dev/disk/by-label/m1.archlinux ro 
ibt=off ipv6.disable=1
initrd /boot/intel-ucode.img /boot/initramfs-linux-rt.img
}

menuentry " -- Other Linux 
-" {
true
}

menuentry "Alpine Linux" {
search --no-floppy --set=root --label m1.alpine
linux   /boot/vmlinuz-lts root=/dev/disk/by-label/m1.alpine ro 
modules=ext4
initrd  /boot/initramfs-lts
}

menuentry "Xubu 20.04 Linux 6.2.9-custom" {
search --no-floppy --set=root --label m1.xubu20.04
linux   /boot/vmlinuz-6.2.9-custom root=/dev/disk/by-label/m1.xubu20.04 
ro
initrd  /boot/initrd.img-6.2.9-custom
}

menuentry "Ubuntu X Moon Studio lowlatency" {
search --no-floppy --set=root --label m1.archlinux
linux   /.boot/ubuntu_moonstudio/boot/vmlinuz-lowlatency 
root=/dev/disk/by-label/moonstudio ro
initrd  /.boot/ubuntu_moonstudio/boot/initrd.img-lowlatency
}

submenu "*buntu-- Submenu --" {
menuentry "Xubu 20.04 Linux 6.2.9-custom (recovery mode)" {
search --no-floppy --set=root --label m1.xubu20.04
linux   /boot/vmlinuz-6.2.9-custom 
root=/dev/disk/by-label/m1.xubu20.04 ro recovery nomodeset 
initrd  /boot/initrd.img-6.2.9-custom
}
menuentry "Xubu 20.04 Linux 5.4.0-42-generic" {
search --no-floppy --set=root --label m1.xubu20.04
linux   /boot/vmlinuz-5.4.0-42-generic 
root=/dev/disk/by-label/m1.xubu20.04 ro
initrd  /boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-42-generic
}
menuentry "Xubu 20.04 Linux 5.4.0-42-generic (recovery mode)" {
search --no-floppy --set=root --label m1.xubu20.04
linux   /boot/vmlinuz-5.4.0-42-generic 
root=/dev/disk/by-label/m1.xubu20.04 ro recovery nomodeset 
initrd  /boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-42-generic
}

menuentry "Ubuntu X Moon Studio liquorix threadirqs" {
search --no-floppy --set=root --label m1.archlinux
linux   /.boot/ubuntu_moonstudio/boot/vmlinuz-liquorix 
root=/dev/disk/by-label/moonstudio ro threadirqs
initrd  /.boot/ubuntu_moonstudio/boot/initrd.img-liquorix
}
}

menuentry " -- System 
--" {
true
}

Re: [xubuntu-users] USB boot disc? - Was: xubuntu-users Digest, Vol 203, Issue 1

[Ralf Mardorf]

PS:

FWIW

• rocketmouse@archlinux ~ 
$ /bin/ls -hAl /mnt/ventoy/
total 16G
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.5G Jan 13  2023 MX-21.3_fluxbox_x64.iso
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 189M May  9  2023 alpine-standard-3.18.0-x86_64.iso
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 810M Apr  1  2023 archlinux-2023.04.01-x86_64.iso
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 128K Jan  6  2021 ventoy
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.6G Jul 31  2020 xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8.3G Mar 14  2023 xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-pers1.dat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3.1G Apr 17  2023 xubuntu-23.04-desktop-amd64.iso

on a modern and fast USB stick the persistent xubuntu-20.04.1 is nearly
as usable as an install on a HDD or SSD. USB sticks are not that
reliable as HDD, SSD or even SD, but they are more portable. The only
real pitfall of a fast persistent live ISO install compared to a "real"
install is the boot level. If the ISO's kernel does cause issues, or if
there are issues with GPU support and similar things, it's seemingly
impossible to run an upgraded kernel or something similar. You can
install and upgrade all kinds of packages, but some boot time defaults,
such as the kernel remain always to the defaults of the ISO.

While the persistent Xubuntu 20.04 on the Ventoy stick works without
issues on my old machine and a "real" install of Xubuntu 20.04 on an SSD
on my new machines, there are a few minor issues related to the graphics
that I cannot fix, if I want to use the persistent Xubuntu 20.04 from
the Ventoy stick on my new machine.

However, as a non-persistent replacement for a CD or DVD, just to
install e.g. Xubuntu, those issues don't matter at all.

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Re: [xubuntu-users] USB boot disc? - Was: xubuntu-users Digest, Vol 203, Issue 1

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 2023-12-10 at 10:21 -0500, Carl Snyder wrote:
> The latest Ventoy and other USB preparation software ASSUMES that your
> system has EFI and does not properly boot from USB stick on BIOS only
> systems.

Hi,

I'm not sure if this applies to Ventoy. At least it boots fine on my old
Intel UEFI machine with legacy (BIOS) mode enabled.

I have problems with Ventoy using ext4 when I try to boot from my new
Intel machine, where the CPU integrated GPU does not allow to enable
legacy (BIOS) mode. If I stick with exfat, there are no problems either.

Of course, both machines are GPT-capable.

Ventoy's bootloader is GRUB 2 and the partition table is MBR, not GPT,
so from that point of view I don't see an obvious problem.

The last version I used, but not on a native BIOS machine:

• rocketmouse@archlinux ~ 
$ sudo ventoy -u /dev/sdf

**
  Ventoy: 1.0.96  x86_64
  longpanda ad...@ventoy.net
  https://www.ventoy.net
**

Upgrade operation is safe, all the data in the 1st partition (iso files and 
other) will be unchanged!

Update Ventoy  1.0.94 ===> 1.0.96   Continue? (y/n) n

Regards,
Ralf

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Re: [xubuntu-users] USB boot disc?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 2023-12-10 at 06:45 +, James Freer wrote:
> > Does your BIOS recognize the flashdrive?
> 
> How do i check that? I've forgotten a lot of the commands having been
> ill for a year. Much appreciate the reply.

Hi,

first of all I want to second Kaj Haulrich reply. Ventoy is terrific.
You only need to copy an ISO or several ISO to an Ventoy USB stick,
that's all. If you want to, you can even make a live Xubuntu persistent,
that's what I've done. However, even Ventoy has got it's pitfalls. On my
old Intel machine I can use ext4 for the Ventoy USB stick, on my new
Intel machine, I have to stay with the default fat. I know from a power
user, author for Linux magazines, that it does not work at all on some
computers, but even he always recommends Ventoy as the first choice. In
other words, usually Ventoy works without issues and nothing else is
more comfortable than Ventoy.

I suspect that your BIOS/UEFI whatsoever thingy does recognize the USB
stick, but you need to enable booting from an USB device and/or change
the boot device order.

After turning on the computer push the F2-key or the Delete-Key again
and again. One of those keys works for almost all computers. Popular
exceptions seem to be the F1-key or the Fn+F2-key, but there are others,
as well.

What computer or motherboard do you use?

If you should have a working Linux install on you machine, then run

  sudo dmidecode -t0 -t2

and paste the output. On *buntu the name of the package containing this
command is "dmidecode", on Arch Linux it's the same package name, so
other distros probably name it "dmidecode", too.

Regards,
Ralf

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Re: [xubuntu-users] nm-applet has disappeared on an xubuntu 22.04 system

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 2023-09-26 at 07:59 +0100, Chris Green wrote:
> I don't think that's how nm-applet gets onto the panel.  It doesn't
> appear in the available to be added list.  It doesn't appear there
> either on my own (with working nm-applet) xubuntu system.

Hi,

the OP needs to add the Notification Area panel plugin
https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/systray and/or to adjust the
Notification Area panel plugin configuration.

There's something named nm-applet. How to auto-start it depends on the
desktop environment, it either has got a desktop-environment related
wrapper or you probably can use a freedesktop.org auto-start approach
via dbus-launch or a systemd unit to autostart it.

I'm neither using NetworkManager nor xfce4-panel nor a desktop
environment, hence I can't provide the explicit details, but just the
principle things like this do work. I'm an openbox user who does use a
few Xfce4 apps.

I don't know if xfce4-notifyd is involved. This is probably an annoyance
to drop the few xfce4-apps I'm still using in the near future. The more
GNOMEish Xfce4 gets, the more annoying it becomes even just using a few
Xcfe4 apps.

Regards,
Ralf

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Re: [xubuntu-users] New user

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

I can't comment on Windows 10.

To use drives with more than 2 TiB you need to format the drives with
GPT instead of MBR. This should work when using the legacy BIOS boot
option, too. IOW it shouldn't require U/EFI.

Booting an USB stick containing a Linux requires either to enable the
legacy BIOS boot option or an EFI partition, if you can't enable the
legacy BIOS boot option, e.g. due to a modern Intel GPU, that doesn't
allow to enable the legacy BIOS boot option.

However, even if you cannot enable the legacy BIOS boot option, you
still should be able to disable secure boot. You don't need secure boot
to boot a Linux. Secure boot is insecure, since to rely on a security
measure with a bug that cannot be fixed, is worse than no security
measure at all and using it with Linux makes booting unnecessarily
complicated, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI#Criticism . I
recommend to rely on signed checksums when using Linux and if you want
more than that, consider to harden Linux, instead of using a
questionable firmware thingy.

I'm using https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html for my Linux USB sticks.
I noticed just one pitfall. On my old machine it works, if the partition
holding the Linux images is formatted as ext4. On my new machine I'm
forced to stay with a fat formatted partition. Neither Ventoy upstream,
nor I understand why I cannot continue using ext4 to hold the Linux
images on the new machine.

Regards,
Ralf

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[xubuntu-users] A 'friendly-recovery' issue and an 'update-initramfs' issue + [update] Supposedly essential Microsoft-signed binary

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

before I contiue to complain about some annyoances. Some things that
can't be taken for granted are good OOTB.
For example, on Arch Linux the reported scaling_max_freq is 580.
This isn't correct for the CPU in my machine, see
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/processors/core/13th-gen-core-desktop-brief.html
 ,
while 450 as reported by the default Xubuntu install is correct.
For the Xubuntu install I might lower the base_frequency to 340, but
maybe this doesn't matter at all.

  root@xubu:~# hwinfo --cpu | grep Model | sort -u
Model: 6.191.5 "13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-13100"
  root@xubu:~# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/*driver
  intel_pstate
  root@xubu:~# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq
  450
  450
  450
  450
  root@xubu:~# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/base_frequency
  440
  440
  440
  440
  root@xubu:~# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq
  80
  80
  80
  80

Now for a few annyoances, before I finish with good news.
The package "shim-signed" was not removed by an update that I run
manually, it was removed without a warning by the automated update.
Fortunately booting still works without it.
With grub and kernel packages hold still "friendly-recovery" auto-
generated a new, but broken grub.cfg.
Why does this happen? Neither grub nor a kernel was updated.

  root@xubu:~# apt update && apt full-upgrade; apt autoremove
  [...]
  Setting up friendly-recovery (0.2.41ubuntu0.20.04.1) ...
  Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub'
  Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub.d/init-select.cfg'
  Generating grub configuration file ...
  Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.4.0-42-generic
  Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-42-generic
  Found Arch Linux (rolling) on /dev/sda1
  Adding boot menu entry for UEFI Firmware Settings
  done
  [...]

Fortunately I was prepared to restore it from a good grub.cfg copy.

  root@xubu:~# ls -hl /boot/grub/grub.cf*
  -r--r--r-- 1 root root 13K Apr  3 08:38 /boot/grub/grub.cfg
  -r--r--r-- 1 root root 12K Mär 26 23:29 /boot/grub/grub.cfg-2023-03-26
  -r--r--r-- 1 root root 12K Apr  2 11:51 /boot/grub/grub.cfg-2023-04-02
  -r--r--r-- 1 root root 12K Apr  2 17:04 /boot/grub/grub.cfg-2023-04-02.2
  -r--r--r-- 1 root root 12K Apr  2 18:07 /boot/grub/grub.cfg-2023-04-02.3
  root@xubu:~# cp -ai /boot/grub/grub.cfg-2023-04-02.3 /boot/grub/grub.cfg
  cp: overwrite '/boot/grub/grub.cfg'? y
  root@xubu:~# ls -hl /boot/grub/grub.cf*
  -r--r--r-- 1 root root 12K Apr  2 18:07 /boot/grub/grub.cfg
  -r--r--r-- 1 root root 12K Mär 26 23:29 /boot/grub/grub.cfg-2023-03-26
  -r--r--r-- 1 root root 12K Apr  2 11:51 /boot/grub/grub.cfg-2023-04-02
  -r--r--r-- 1 root root 12K Apr  2 17:04 /boot/grub/grub.cfg-2023-04-02.2
  -r--r--r-- 1 root root 12K Apr  2 18:07 /boot/grub/grub.cfg-2023-04-02.3

Why do I need to tell update-initramfs to not use a swap that is
commented out by /etc/fstab?

  root@xubu:~# cat /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume
  root@xubu:~# grep swap /etc/fstab
  # swap was on /dev/nvme0n1p4 during installation
  UUID=bc0419de-6a38-4907-bb46-d2e0398228f6 noneswapsw  
0   0
  # swap was on /dev/sda4 during installation
  #UUID=671cd0ff-0428-4a17-aa63-208d41bdf5c6 noneswapsw 
 0   0
  root@xubu:~# update-initramfs -u -k all
  update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-42-generic
  I: The initramfs will attempt to resume from /dev/sda4
  I: (UUID=671cd0ff-0428-4a17-aa63-208d41bdf5c6)
  I: Set the RESUME variable to override this.
  root@xubu:~# cp -a /usr/src/etc_initramfs-tools_conf.d_resume 
/etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume
  root@xubu:~# cat /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume
  RESUME=UUID=bc0419de-6a38-4907-bb46-d2e0398228f6
  root@xubu:~# update-initramfs -u -k all
  update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-42-generic
  root@xubu:~#

I hope "RESUME=UUID=bc0419de-6a38-4907-bb46-d2e0398228f6" is correct. Is
it?

I'll finish with good news.
Building the module to get Internet access worked without issues:

  [...]
  Warning: modules_install: missing 'System.map' file. Skipping depmod.
  Backup r8169.ko
  rename r8169.ko to r8169.bak
  DEPMOD 5.4.0-42-generic
  load module r8125
  Updating initramfs. Please wait.
  update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-42-generic
  Completed.

Regards,
Ralf

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[xubuntu-users] Supposedly essential Microsoft-signed binary

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

I'm building a new computer and struggle a little bit with the new
hardware. Since the new Intel GPU doesn't allow to enable CSM, I can't
boot using syslinux from an old SSD. On an Ventoy USB stick I had the
Xubuntu 20.04.1 live media at hand, so I installed it, since it was the
fastest and easiest way in this situation to get a working bootloader.
GRUB does the job, but as expected, the menu entries needed editing, so
I edited grub.cfg directly, to get what I need. It's just a temporarily
workaround, in the end I much likely will replace GRUB by another
bootloader.

To get Internetaccess I need to build a kernel module first.

On an Arch Linux install that is on the old SSD I already build a
r8125-dkms package before I migrated the SSD from the old to the new
computer, so I downloaded the r8125 tarball for the Xubuntu install when
running an Arch Linux session, then I booted Xubuntu.

When I tried to build the r8125 module on the fresh Xubuntu 20.04
install autorun.sh returned that I don't have "make" installed, so I
restarted the machine, booted into my Arch Linux install to fix it, by
booting Xubuntu via systemd-nspawn.

   [root@archlinux rocketmouse]# systemd-nspawn -bqD /mnt/m1.xubu20.04
   [...]
   root@xubu:~# ls -hl /usr/src/r8125-9.011.00/ 
   total 20K
   -rwxr-xr-x 1 weremouse weremouse 2,1K Dez  6 13:07 autorun.sh
   -rw-r--r-- 1 root  root61 Apr  3 06:06 log.txt
   -rwxr-xr-x 1 weremouse weremouse 1,9K Dez  6 13:07 Makefile
   -rwxr-xr-x 1 weremouse weremouse 4,0K Dez  6 13:07 README
   drwxr-xr-x 2 weremouse weremouse 4,0K Dez 12 13:23 src
   root@xubu:~# lsb_release -a
   No LSB modules are available.
   Distributor ID:  Ubuntu
   Description: Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS
   Release: 20.04
   Codename:focal

I decided that before I install "build-essential" and probably one or
the other package, too, as a temporarily workaround to hold a few
packages, to avoid that an updated = broken grub.cfg delays building my
new computer.

   root@xubu:~# apt-mark showhold
   grub-common
   grub-efi-amd64-bin
   grub-efi-amd64-signed
   grub-pc
   grub-pc-bin
   grub2-common
   linux-generic
   linux-headers-generic
   linux-image-generic
   
   root@xubu:~# apt update && apt full-upgrade
   [...]
   WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed.
   This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
 shim-signed
   535 upgraded, 9 newly installed, 1 to remove and 9 not upgraded.
   Need to get 654 MB of archives.
   After this operation, 595 MB of additional disk space will be used.
   You are about to do something potentially harmful.
   To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'
?] n
   Abort.

So I aborted to takle a look what this package is good for.
IMO it's good for absolutely nothing. The description is
"Secure Boot chain-loading bootloader (Microsoft-signed binary)"

I guess that I can live without this and I don't understand why this
package is "essential".

When I tried to update again, I got this:

   root@xubu:~# apt update && apt full-upgrade
   [...]
   336 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see
   them.
   Waiting for cache lock: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock-
   frontend. It is held by process 1566 (unattended-upgr)... 70s

So an automation probably does something _really_ harmful, since before
I install updates, I always take a look at all packages. You will never
see me using something like an "--assume-yes" option. An automated
process cannot decide what is essential to me and what not.

IMO this is misunderstood user-friendliness. The personal responsibility
of computer users should be promoted. Consider to make less automated
processes the default, but by default to install packages such as
"build-essential".

Regards,
Ralf

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Re: [xubuntu-users] Odd behaviour on laptop suspend/resume

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 2023-02-16 at 10:47 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> On Thu, 2023-02-16 at 09:22 +, Chris Green wrote:
> > I fail to see the point of any of the screensaver type things, if
> > someone has access to your computer they can get at its contents
> > whether or not there's a screensaver running.  Only an encrypted file
> > system will prevent this.
> > 
> > I simply turn off all screensaver and screenlocking, I just leave the power
> > manager to turn the display off after a suitable time.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> for my main Linux I use the power manger to blank the display after 9
> minutes, put it to sleep after 10 minutes and turn it off after 50
> minutes, but sometimes I like to see funny screensavers.
> 
> Indeed, screen locking doesn't make much sense. However, I added a menu
> entry named "Lock screen" to lock the screen on demand. To shut down or
> restart my computer root privileges are required. This also doesn't make
> much sense. It makes a little bit sense, to protect the 24/7 running
> install against visitors with a Windows or Smartphone user approach, who
> can be left alone or not at all alone at the computer.
^conditionally  

> 
> Regards,
> Ralf


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Odd behaviour on laptop suspend/resume

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 2023-02-16 at 09:22 +, Chris Green wrote:
> I fail to see the point of any of the screensaver type things, if
> someone has access to your computer they can get at its contents
> whether or not there's a screensaver running.  Only an encrypted file
> system will prevent this.
> 
> I simply turn off all screensaver and screenlocking, I just leave the power
> manager to turn the display off after a suitable time.

Hi,

for my main Linux I use the power manger to blank the display after 9
minutes, put it to sleep after 10 minutes and turn it off after 50
minutes, but sometimes I like to see funny screensavers.

Indeed, screen locking doesn't make much sense. However, I added a menu
entry named "Lock screen" to lock the screen on demand. To shut down or
restart my computer root privileges are required. This also doesn't make
much sense. It makes a little bit sense, to protect the 24/7 running
install against visitors with a Windows or Smartphone user approach, who
can be left alone or not at all alone at the computer.

Regards,
Ralf

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Re: [xubuntu-users] firefox & snap, persry ...onal settings folder ..

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 2023-01-02 at 13:17 -0500, Clarence Fender wrote:
> Regardless of what you do, do a duckduckgo search for securing FF.
> There are a few steps you can take to make FF a lot more secure and
> private.

Hi,

please don't suggest searching for it, but make specific suggestions.

To see what you still share with Google when using DDG with FF go to
about:config and search for google.

To see what common strings of information you send to the outside world
go to https://www.whatismybrowser.com/ or similar.

To see... It's never ending.

You will not only end up with a free as in beer activist's VPN that
doesn't collect the IP such as https://riseup.net/en/vpn and tons of
add-ons, even not with another web browser providing more privacy, you
will end up with not using a web browser at all or you try to use a safe
web browser that doesn't work with a lot of websites anymore.

You can monitor a lot with https://jshelter.org/ ,
https://www.wireshark.org/ etc., but you can not do much against the
oddities you'll much likely notice.

Even IceCat by default does send the string "Firefox on Linux". At the
end of last year on the FreeBSD questions mailing list was a thread
mentioning that the string "Firefox on FreeBSD" make some websites
refuse to work.

Don't get me wrong, if possible I care a lot about privacy, I even don't
own a mobile phone and my iPads aren't equipped with "cellular" at all,
I'm strictly using landline. For the iPads the router's WiFi is set up
to the minimum transmit power and my Linux machine and other devices are
connected by wire.

Today I made screenshots of my iPads, https://i.imgur.com/huSnbyZ.jpg ,
as you can see I tend to use FF and Perfect Browser (Pro). On Linux I'm
in favour of Waterfox. I also use other browser on the iPads and on
Linux, but those are the most used once.

Take a look at the "App Privacy" of Firefox
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-sicher-unterwegs/id989804926?platform=ipad
I doubt that it's much different for the Linux version.

Take a look at the "App Privacy" of Perfect Browser
https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1360915927
OTOH you can't trust such "AppPrivacy" claims, see
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brave-private-web-browser/id1052879175?platform=ipad
and then use Google, DDG or what ever you like to read about Brendan
Eich, or trust others and/or my research
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2022-November/308766.html
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2022-November/308768.html

In a nutshell, using Firefox on Linux is ok. It's one of the browsers
I'm using, too. Related to privacy and annoyances consider to install
the uBlock Origin add-on and maybe something to "hide" your IP,
maybe https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-my-ip-free/ to
e.g. watch YouTube content that is blocked for your country. In Germany
it's required to watch GEMA collecting society/mafia music.

Once upon a time I ungoggled about:config, but it's not worth the
effort.

IMO after installing Firefox it's useful to take a look at
about:preferences (not at about:config) and to install uBlock Origin
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ installing
something to hide the IP or a VPN aren't necessary. Nowadays I'm even
back to use the Google search engine most of the times.

I boycott Amazone and similar sharks, but not Ebay or Google. We cannot
get rid of everything that isn't perfect. I quasi don't use my "smart"
TV's Android web things, but to abandon Google doesn't make much sense
to me, even if you block analytics, under the hood Firefox still
interacts with Google.

That's just my opinion.

Regards,
Ralf

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Re: [xubuntu-users] file system window read-only

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 2022-11-06 at 15:20 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> I suspect that
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NTFS-3G#Metadata_kept_in_Windows_cache,_refused_to_mount
> is the culprit, however, here's some more guessing [snip]

PS: Don't care about all that guessing, first check your Windows
install. Ensure that "fast startup" is _not_ enabled.

Much likely it is enabled and much likely this is the reason that
Xubuntu mounts the partition read only.

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Re: [xubuntu-users] file system window read-only

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 2022-11-06 at 08:06 +0100, Marc Coevoet wrote:
> Op 5/11/2022 om 19:43 schreef Alessandro Lin:
> > Hallo,
> > 
> > I have a problem with read-only filesystem.
> > I describe neatly:
> 
> > 
> > ... etc. etc.
> > 
> > /dev/sda3 on /media/alex/B87A648A7A64476A type fuseblk 
> > (ro,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096,uhelper=udisks2)
> > 
> 
> Had the same with a new eternal 2tb disk:
> 
> As root
> 
> cd /media
> 
> chown -R marc .
> chgrp -R marc .
> 
> 
> Where marc is my user name.



Hi,

I comment on chown etc. at the end of my email. Btw. id 0 is for root.

I suspect that
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NTFS-3G#Metadata_kept_in_Windows_cache,_refused_to_mount
is the culprit, however, here's some more guessing:

Even for Ubuntu flavours a starting point might be
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/udisks#Permissions ,
https://github.com/coldfix/udiskie/wiki/Permissions .

You also might want to google for gvfs, optional for Xfce, but much
likely installed by a default Xubuntu. Maybe google for thunar and
xfdesktop.

Maybe

$ grep rw /etc/udisks2/mount_options.conf.example -A4 -B4
### Simple global overrides
# [defaults]
# # common options, applied to any filesystem, always merged with specific 
filesystem type options
# defaults=ro
# 
allow=exec,noexec,nodev,nosuid,atime,noatime,nodiratime,ro,rw,sync,dirsync,noload

### Specific filesystem type options
# vfat_defaults=uid=$UID,gid=$GID,shortname=mixed,utf8=1,showexec,flush
# 
vfat_allow=uid=$UID,gid=$GID,flush,utf8,shortname,umask,dmask,fmask,codepage,iocharset,usefree,showexec
--


### For the reference, these are the builtin mount options:
# [defaults]
# 
allow=exec,noexec,nodev,nosuid,atime,noatime,nodiratime,relatime,strictatime,lazytime,ro,rw,sync,dirsync,noload,acl,nosymfollow
# 
# vfat_defaults=uid=$UID,gid=$GID,shortname=mixed,utf8=1,showexec,flush
# 
vfat_allow=uid=$UID,gid=$GID,flush,utf8,shortname,umask,dmask,fmask,codepage,iocharset,usefree,showexec
#

does help. This is on Arch Linux, but a config must be available by
Xubuntu, too.

I don't know if udisks2 interacts with folder permissions of /media/ or
umask. I don't know how ntfs (IIUC fuseblk is indirectly for ntfs) is
accessed by Linux, since I'm using VMs and wine, no Windows install on
bare metal. IOW if a user has got anyway no write permissions by the
directory, it might mount read only. I don't think so, but you never
know. If it's unwanted that root does access the Windows partition a
group "win" might help, but again even root can't access the ntfs
partition, if it's mounted read only.

FWIW I mount by command line. Gvfs is and empty dummy package on my
machine. I've got udisks etc. installed, but I don't use it.

Regards,
Ralf

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Re: [xubuntu-users] file system window read-only

[Ralf Mardorf]

Please don't useHTML! HTML emailsarehardto read.
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Re: [xubuntu-users] Ubuntu 20.04 and Firefox 90.0.2

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 12 Aug 2021 22:09:48 +0200, Hund wrote:
>https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86

That's a common FLOSS issue, it's just less known by the Linux
community, since most major distros really {re,}distribute binaries.
However, Arch Linux is one of the major Linux distros, that also
provides BSD port alike "recipes". The user can "cook" the packages by
using the "recipes", but is free to change the "recipes". Conflicts
related to "recipes", on how to "cook" a package don't happen often,
but they do happen. Actually a "recipe" neither contains the source,
nor binaries. The Arch Linux "recipe" for a package contains shell
functions to get whatsoever from upstream and to build a package, that
after building the package by individuals, likely contains binaries, as
well as header files. This can lead to "I am not a lawyer, but...
bikeshedding".

Btw. I refrain from recommending any additional browser by this thread.
Some of you might be aware of software development started by good guys
and later was continued by a consortium of investors, that aren't
necessarily nice, too. At least one well known and much liked browser
suffers from this issue, too + it changed from an engine way older than
Chromium, to some Chromium thingy.

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Re: [xubuntu-users] Ubuntu 20.04 and Firefox 90.0.2

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 12 Aug 2021 12:09:46 +0200, Hund wrote:
>On August 11, 2021 9:25:48 PM GMT+02:00, Karel P Coors wrote:
>>That sounds like a great tip.
>>Downloaded Dissenter Browser and enjoying it 
>
>Are you aware of the fact that the Dissenter Browser is made by Gab?

I never heard of gap before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)

Interesting, while I dislike a lot of the big companies, such as Google
or Microsoft, I'm still in favour of browsers such as Chrome or Edge,
since Silicon Valley isn't per se the biggest evil on this planet.

An alternative browser is https://www.falkon.org/ from the KDE project.
I used its predecessor QupZilla a lot, as replacement for Firefox.

All browsers have got their pros and cons.



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Re: [xubuntu-users] Ubuntu 20.04 and Firefox 90.0.2

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 2 Aug 2021 17:02:04 -0500, Karel P Coors wrote:
>I solved the issue by downloading Brave Web Browser and purged and
>removed Firefox.

Sometimes   firefox --safe-mode   to disables extensions and themes
might give a pointer. Maybe just removing an add-on would have solved
the issues, too.

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Re: [xubuntu-users] Ubuntu 20.04 and Firefox 90.0.2

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 30 Jul 2021 10:21:45 -0500, Karel P Coors wrote:
>Good day all, I have been a user of Firefox for years but Firefox
>90.0.2 turns me off. It's slow and freezes intermittently.

Hi,

you are probably using an Intel GPU.

Latest Ubuntu flavours default to the "modesetting" driver. Maybe the
"intel" driver is dropped completely, I don't know.

The reason for this is, that the "intel" driver is unsupported and not
working on kernel > 5.something. Some kernels > 5.something are still
ok, but at some version you can't use it anymore with the "intel"
driver.

On Arch Linux I stay with 4.19 realtime patched LTS kernels and the
"intel" driver, because on my Intel GPU based machine the "modsetting"
driver is a PITA, with at least some software, at very least Firefox.

When using Ubuntu live media, I stay with the "modesetting" driver. I
still can use Firefox, just the performance of Firefox is less good,
when using an Ubuntu live media.

Sorry, I don't want to search for links, but at least you now have got
some keywords, you could use to do some research on your own, assuming
you are on an Intel machine.

Regards,
Ralf

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Re: [xubuntu-users] xubuntu-users Digest, Vol 169, Issue 5

[Ralf Mardorf]

What are MIME and Plain Text Digests? How do I change which one I get?

http://www.list.org/mailman-member/node28.html

Please, digest subscribers migrate from plain text to MIME digest. In
2021 there's no valid reason anymore to prefer plain text over MIME.
When using MIME, it's possible to keep the subject, as well as the
thread.

IMO either the default for digest should become MIME or way better, the
digest option should get dropped completely.

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Re: [xubuntu-users] Keep display on permanently

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 3 Jan 2021 09:33:27 -0800, MR ZenWiz wrote:
>Have you tried uninstalling xfce4-screensaver altogether?

Hi,

when using Xubuntu Live-DVDs I noticed, that after using the power
manager GUI to set everything energy saving for the display to off, then
still the screensaver is active.

However, for whatsoever X based Linux _install_, a starting point is
adding

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "BlankTime" "0"
Option "StandbyTime" "0"
Option "SuspendTime" "0"
Option "OffTime" "0"
EndSection

to either /etc/X11/xorg.conf or /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/some_file

and for whatever WM/DE you are using, to not autostart (if needed
to disable) any power manager and/or screensaver.

For my Linux installs I tend to use plain openbox sessions, no DE
involved and only launch xfce4-power-manager or similar, to allow
turning of the display on demand.

However, AFAIK nowadays at least some Linux media players automatically
do the trick vice versa. If some software turns off displays, then when
using those media players, nothing does turn off the displays anymore.

What I'm missing for Linux is a feature such as e.g. photo related
apps on iPadOS do provide. While the display's light by default is
dimmed, it's not dimmed anymore, when using photo related apps.

For Linux I'm using an EIZO display, if I would use Windows, but I
don't do so, I could chose EIZO screen profiles by the operating system
on demand. On Linux it's possible to chose profiles by the EIZO display
itself only, but AFAIK it's not such advanced, as when controlling
everything by the operating system. IIRC I can control colour by the
EIZO display's profiles, but not dimming.

Linux is a good alternative to proprietary solutions, especially
related to privacy, but hardware related features are a weak point of
Linux. Reminds me of something quite odd I experienced today. For my old
Toshiba SSDs Toshiba provided Linux software, but for my new Toshiba
SSD + the old once I needed to make a bootable USB stick, based upon
an Apple format, but running a Linux and then to copy the software that
runs without issues on any other Linux install, see
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ocz-ssd-utility/#comment-784140 .

To enjoy the pros of Linux (or FreeBSD), we need to accept some
cons. For some tasks I'm using Apple, but I'll never ever drop Linux
(or FreeBSD) as soon as the primary part is privacy or customization of
some other features.

Controlling displays by Linux is a PITA. I've written a bunch of huge
shell scripts to get tailored profiles for different dual-display
purposes, including LCD, but also mode lines for CRTs, even setting
different panel and wallpaper profiles, that fit best to the chosen
dual-display purposes.

Regards,
Ralf




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Re: [xubuntu-users] Signature send to the wrong address - Was: MFP aus hplip installieren

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 10 Dec 2020 17:31:55 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>To: m...@bundestag.de
 ^
 Since I don't receive my own mails sent to the list, just for the
 record, if the chosen recipient shouldn't be visible by mails sent
 via the mailing list ;).

>Cc: xubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com

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[xubuntu-users] Signature send to the wrong address - Was: MFP aus hplip installieren

[Ralf Mardorf]

The below quoted signature obviously was sent to the wrong recipient by
mistake. I decided to forward it to a target that fits the bill.

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2020 16:02:04 +0100
To: xubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com

[...]

Die Welt, die wir geschaffen haben, ist das Resultat einer
überholten Denkweise. Die Probleme, die sich daraus ergeben,
können nicht mit der gleichen Denkweise gelöst werden,
durch die sie entstanden sind. [...]

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Re: [xubuntu-users] Xubuntu 20.04: Qt Library

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 9 Dec 2020 18:17:19 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>On Wed, 9 Dec 2020 15:56:39 +, Peter Flynn wrote:
>>On 09/12/2020 15:35, Hartmut Haase wrote:  
>>> Hi,
>>> to compile LyX I need the Qt Library for qt5-gtk, but I don't know
>>> the name of its Package. Can someome help?
>>
>>I think it's called qt5-style-plugins  
>
>Maybe "just"
>
>https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=qt5-gtk=names
>
>qt5-gtk-platformtheme
>qt5-gtk2-platformtheme
>
>and then the (header) development packages of dependencies such as 
>
>https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/qt5-gtk-platformtheme
>
>libc6-dev
>
>https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/libc6-dev
>
>etc.

PS: If you compile without the required dependency you would get error
messages pointing at the missing files. Then you could use
https://packages.ubuntu.com/, https://tracker.debian.org/, Google and
Co. to search for those files. Btw. there are also tools available, at
least auto-apt and apt-file.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutoApt
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man1/apt-file.1.html

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Re: [xubuntu-users] Xubuntu 20.04: Qt Library

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 9 Dec 2020 15:56:39 +, Peter Flynn wrote:
>On 09/12/2020 15:35, Hartmut Haase wrote:
>> Hi,
>> to compile LyX I need the Qt Library for qt5-gtk, but I don't know
>> the name of its Package. Can someome help?  
>
>I think it's called qt5-style-plugins

Maybe "just"

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=qt5-gtk=names

qt5-gtk-platformtheme
qt5-gtk2-platformtheme

and then the (header) development packages of dependencies such as 

https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/qt5-gtk-platformtheme

libc6-dev

https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/libc6-dev

etc.




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Re: [xubuntu-users] Xubuntu 20.04: qt5 development package

[Ralf Mardorf]

My apologies for another PS.

Since you didn't mention what you want to do. If you just wish to
provide translations, the linguist tool is provided by the Ubuntu
package qttools5-dev-tools.

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Re: [xubuntu-users] Xubuntu 20.04: qt5 development package

[Ralf Mardorf]

PPS:

Correction

[weremouse@moonstudio ~]$ dpkg -l *qt* | grep ii | grep -e dev -e qmake
ii  libqt4-dev 4:4.8.7+dfsg-5ubuntu2 
amd64Qt 4 development files
ii  libqt4-dev-bin 4:4.8.7+dfsg-5ubuntu2 
amd64Qt 4 development programs
ii  libqt5x11extras5-dev:amd64 5.5.1-3build1 
amd64Qt 5 X11 extras development files
ii  qt4-qmake  4:4.8.7+dfsg-5ubuntu2 
amd64Qt 4 qmake Makefile generator tool
ii  qt5-qmake:amd645.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7
amd64Qt 5 qmake Makefile generator tool
ii  qtbase5-dev:amd64  5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7
amd64Qt 5 base development files
ii  qtbase5-dev-tools  5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7
amd64Qt 5 base development programs
ii  qtbase5-private-dev:amd64  5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7
amd64Qt 5 base private development files
ii  qtchooser  52-gae5eeef-2build1~gcc5.2
amd64Wrapper to select between Qt development binary versions
ii  qtcreator  3.5.1+dfsg-2ubuntu2   
amd64lightweight integrated development environment (IDE) for Qt
ii  qtcreator-dev  3.5.1+dfsg-2ubuntu2   
all  Qt Creator plugin development files
ii  qtdeclarative5-dev:amd64   5.5.1-2ubuntu6
amd64Qt 5 declarative development files
ii  qttools5-dev:amd64 5.5.1-3ubuntu0.1  
amd64Qt 5 tools development files
ii  qttools5-dev-tools 5.5.1-3ubuntu0.1  
amd64Qt 5 development tools

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Re: [xubuntu-users] Xubuntu 20.04: qt5 development package

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 1 Nov 2020 19:01:42 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>Maybe this one https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/qt5-default with
>it's dependencies or just https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/qtbase5-dev
>.
>
>IIRC some development packages containing headers aren't available by
>the regular repositories with the suffix -dev, instead they are
>available by another source with another suffix. On the quick I
>couldn't find any pointer by the Ubuntu wiki, the Ubuntu help or by
>launchpad.

PS: The above mentioned packages seems to be what you are looking for. I
remember that I build one or more qt5 apps (IIRC at least qjackctl as
deb and/or snap) from the upstream source a long time ago, but I didn't
need everything. This is what I've got installed:

[weremouse@moonstudio ~]$ lsb_release -rc
Release:16.04
Codename:   xenial
[weremouse@moonstudio ~]$ dpkg -l *qt5* | grep ii
ii  libqt5clucene5:amd645.5.1-3ubuntu0.1   amd64Qt 5 
CLucene module
ii  libqt5concurrent5:amd64 5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7 amd64Qt 5 
concurrent module
ii  libqt5core5a:amd64  5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7 amd64Qt 5 
core module
ii  libqt5dbus5:amd64   5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7 amd64Qt 5 
D-Bus module
ii  libqt5designer5:amd64   5.5.1-3ubuntu0.1   amd64Qt 5 
designer module
ii  libqt5designercomponents5:amd64 5.5.1-3ubuntu0.1   amd64Qt 5 
Designer components module
ii  libqt5gui5:amd645.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7 amd64Qt 5 
GUI module
ii  libqt5help5:amd64   5.5.1-3ubuntu0.1   amd64Qt 5 
help module
ii  libqt5multimedia5:amd64 5.5.1-4ubuntu2 amd64Qt 5 
Multimedia module
ii  libqt5network5:amd645.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7 amd64Qt 5 
network module
ii  libqt5opengl5:amd64 5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7 amd64Qt 5 
OpenGL module
ii  libqt5printsupport5:amd64   5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7 amd64Qt 5 
print support module
ii  libqt5qml5:amd645.5.1-2ubuntu6 amd64Qt 5 
QML module
ii  libqt5quick5:amd64  5.5.1-2ubuntu6 amd64Qt 5 
Quick library
ii  libqt5quickparticles5:amd64 5.5.1-2ubuntu6 amd64Qt 5 
Quick particles module
ii  libqt5quicktest5:amd64  5.5.1-2ubuntu6 amd64Qt 5 
Quick Test library
ii  libqt5quickwidgets5:amd64   5.5.1-2ubuntu6 amd64Qt 5 
Quick Widgets library
ii  libqt5script5:amd64 5.5.1+dfsg-2build1 amd64Qt 5 
script module
ii  libqt5sql5:amd645.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7 amd64Qt 5 
SQL module
ii  libqt5sql5-sqlite:amd64 5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7 amd64Qt 5 
SQLite 3 database driver
ii  libqt5svg5:amd645.5.1-2build1  amd64Qt 5 
SVG module
ii  libqt5test5:amd64   5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7 amd64Qt 5 
test module
ii  libqt5webkit5:amd64 5.5.1+dfsg-2ubuntu1amd64Web 
content engine library for Qt
ii  libqt5widgets5:amd645.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7 amd64Qt 5 
widgets module
ii  libqt5x11extras5:amd64  5.5.1-3build1  amd64Qt 5 
X11 extras
ii  libqt5x11extras5-dev:amd64  5.5.1-3build1  amd64Qt 5 
X11 extras development files
ii  libqt5xml5:amd645.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7 amd64Qt 5 
XML module
ii  qt5-qmake:amd64 5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.7 amd64Qt 5 
qmake Makefile generator tool
ii  qt5-style-plugins:amd64 5.0.0-1build3  amd64Qt 5 
extra widget styles

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Re: [xubuntu-users] Trying to udate browser

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

today I read the complete thread. Firefox is indeed installed by
default for most, if not all Ubuntu flavours. However, updating from
command line isn't explained correctly. To upgrade the complete install
by command line, including firefox, you need to run

sudo apt update   # to download information about available updates
sudo apt full-upgrade # to install the available updates

It make perfect sense to upgrade the complete install on a daily
basis, while it doesn't matter, if Firefox upgrades aren't available by
Ubuntu repositories, in the same minute upstream released them.

In a nutshell, I try to avoid technical language:

Usually Ubuntu doesn't provide new releases from upstream within
an Ubuntu release at all. Usually it stays with a software version and
upgrades only add important changes to those versions. Firefox is an
exception.

Note, some software will never receive an upgrade:

"Main

The main component contains applications that are free software, can be
freely redistributed and are fully supported by the Ubuntu team. This
includes the most popular and most reliable open-source applications
available, many of which are included by default when you install
Ubuntu. Software in main includes a hand-selected list of applications
that the Ubuntu developers, community and users feel are most
important, and that the Ubuntu security and distribution team are
willing to support. When you install software from the main component,
you are assured that the software will come with security updates and
that commercial technical support is available from Canonical.

Restricted

Our commitment is to only promote free software – or software available
under a free licence. However, we make exceptions for a small set of
tools and drivers that make it possible to install Ubuntu and its free
applications on everyday hardware. These proprietary drivers are kept
in the restricted component. Please note that it may not be possible to
provide complete support for this software because we are unable to fix
the software ourselves - we can only forward problem reports to the
actual authors. Some software from restricted will be installed on
Ubuntu CDs but is clearly separated to ensure that it is easy to
remove. We will only use non-open-source software when there is no
other way to install Ubuntu. The Ubuntu team works with vendors to
accelerate the open-sourcing of their software to ensure that as much
software as possible is available under a free licence.

Universe

The universe component is a snapshot of the free, open-source, and
Linux world. It houses almost every piece of open-source software, all
built from a range of public sources. Canonical does not provide a
guarantee of regular security updates for software in the universe
component, but will provide these where they are made available by the
community. Users should understand the risk inherent in using these
packages. Popular or well supported pieces of software will move from
universe into main if they are backed by maintainers willing to meet
the standards set by the Ubuntu team.

Multiverse

The multiverse component contains software that is not free, which
means the licensing requirements of this software do not meet the
Ubuntu main component licence policy. The onus is on you to verify your
rights to use this software and comply with the licensing terms of the
copyright holder. This software is not supported and usually cannot be
fixed or updated. Use it at your own risk." -
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories#Main

Regards,
Ralf

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Re: [xubuntu-users] keyboard and touchpad stop working after a few hours

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 29 Jun 2020 10:25:49 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>On Mon, 29 Jun 2020 09:09:34 +0100, Peter Flynn wrote:  
>>Borrow another and see if the same happens.
>
>FWIW the built-in keyboard and touchpad could suffer from a software
>issue, that doesn't affect externally connected devices. However, if
>the build-in devices should fail to work related to broken hardware,
>you can't be sure that the built-in keyboard and touchpad are the
>broken hardware components.  

You could know, but it requires more advanced testing measures ;).

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Re: [xubuntu-users] keyboard and touchpad stop working after a few hours

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 29 Jun 2020 09:09:34 +0100, Peter Flynn wrote:
>Borrow another and see if the same happens.

FWIW the built-in keyboard and touchpad could suffer from a software
issue, that doesn't affect externally connected devices. However, if
the build-in devices should fail to work related to broken hardware,
you can't be sure that the built-in keyboard and touchpad are the broken
hardware components.

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Re: [xubuntu-users] Trouble receiving e-mail from this group

[Ralf Mardorf]

PS:

If you log in your xubuntu mailing list account, do you see on top
of the page a bounce score? It's ok if you don't see a bounce score,
but if there should be one, it's an issue.

Is "Mail delivery" enabled? Even if digest is disabled, mail delivery
needs to be explicitly enabled.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Trouble receiving e-mail from this group

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 7 Jun 2020 20:17:39 -0400, Phil Staub wrote:
>Looking for suggestions as to why I don't seem to get posts to this
>list.
>
>Yes, I'm subscribed to the list.
>
>I have digests turned off so that I should get individual e-mails 
>whenever there is a post to the list.
>
>I have (temporarily) enabled confirmation mail whenever I post to the 
>list. I get these confirmation mails.
>
>I have enabled receipt of my own postings. I get these.
>
>But I have been having a discussion with another subscriber who has
>been responding to my postings, and the only way I know he has
>responded is to log into the mailing list and look at the monthly
>archive.
>
>What am I doing wrong?

I don't receive my own mails send to the list, but I receive all mails
from other subscribers.

For the Ubuntu users mailing list I needed to migrate from my Zoho
address to one of my Yahoo addresses, since Zoho stopped allowing me to
use the Ubuntu users mailing list a few days back, because only an usual
amount of traffic is allowed. Actually the amount of traffic caused by
the Ubuntu users mailing list is not unusual compared with other
traffic.

Sometimes mailing lists are doing something wrong, sometimes the
providers start to misbehave. From time to time I need to switch from
one to another email address, for almost all mailing lists. It's a PITA
regarding filtering and to ensure that replys are using the correct
email account.

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Re: [xubuntu-users] Slow opening folders on Xubuntu 20.04

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 6 Jun 2020 05:39:35 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>GVFS is still a possible culprit. For testing purpose you could
>install an empty dummy package, so you don't break hard dependencies
>against gvfs, but you could test, if running Thunar or Nemo doesn't
>suffer from a delay anymore.
>
>Build and install a dummy package and remove gvfs dependencies:
>
>$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install equivs
>$ mkdir dummy-package
>$ cd dummy-package/
>$ echo "Package: gvfs" > gvfs
>$ echo "Version: 2020:06-06-test" >> gvfs
>$ echo "Maintainer: Phil Staub " >> gvfs
>$ echo "Architecture: all" >> gvfs
>$ echo "Description: Dummy package" >> gvfs
>$ equivs-build gvfs
>$ sudo apt install ./gvfs_06-06-test_all.deb
>$ sudo apt remove gvfs-common gvfs-daemons gvfs-libs
>
>You can downgrade to gvfs, IOW reinstall gvfs from Ubuntu repositories
>and install it's dependencies by running:
>
>$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install gvfs=$(apt-cache show gvfs |
>grep Version:\ 1 | head -1 | cut -d" " -f2)  

PS:

As long as gvfs is replaced by the empty dummy package some features
aren't available, such as mounting devcies by a mouse click,
accessing Trash by Thunar or Nemo. OTOH IIRC the default install of
spacefm allows to mount devices using udisks2 by a mouse click. I'm
using spacefm, but not a default install. Accessing Trash could be done
by it's path ~/.local/share/Trash/.

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Re: [xubuntu-users] Slow opening folders on Xubuntu 20.04

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 5 Jun 2020 22:19:08 -0400, Phil Staub wrote:
>> Just for testing purpose install spacefm/spacefm-gtk3. It's a very
>> customizable file browser that doesn't have a dependency to GNOMEish
>> bloatware helpers such as gvfs.
>>
>>sudo apt update
>>sudo apt install spacefm-gtk3
>>
>> Do you experience the same delay issue when using spacefm?  
>
>Interesting. No delay using spacefm. It should be noted that although
>I installed spacefm-gtk3, I only found spacefm executable.

Hi Phil,

that's correct, the executable is always named 'spacefm', the packages
just provide a version compiled against gtk2 and another compiled
against gtk3.

>> You can remove spacefm by running
>>
>>sudo apt purge spacefm-gtk3  
>
>For the time being, I'll leave it installed, but it WOULD be good to 
>know what causes the delay with Thunar and Nemo.

GVFS is still a possible culprit. For testing purpose you could install an
empty dummy package, so you don't break hard dependencies against gvfs, but
you could test, if running Thunar or Nemo doesn't suffer from a delay anymore.

Build and install a dummy package and remove gvfs dependencies:

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install equivs
$ mkdir dummy-package
$ cd dummy-package/
$ echo "Package: gvfs" > gvfs
$ echo "Version: 2020:06-06-test" >> gvfs
$ echo "Maintainer: Phil Staub " >> gvfs
$ echo "Architecture: all" >> gvfs
$ echo "Description: Dummy package" >> gvfs
$ equivs-build gvfs
$ sudo apt install ./gvfs_06-06-test_all.deb
$ sudo apt remove gvfs-common gvfs-daemons gvfs-libs

You can downgrade to gvfs, IOW reinstall gvfs from Ubuntu repositories and
install it's dependencies by running:

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install gvfs=$(apt-cache show gvfs | grep 
Version:\ 1 | head -1 | cut -d" " -f2)

Regards,
Ralf

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Re: [xubuntu-users] Slow opening folders on Xubuntu 20.04

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 3 Jun 2020 13:51:11 -0400, Phil Staub wrote:
>Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Hi,

no and I neither have got Xubuntu installed, nor am I using Xfce at the
moment. However, my first guess was, that it might be related to gvfs.
I don't have got gvfs installed, but both Thunar and Nemo are able to
access the Desktop folder without the gvfs dependency on my machine.

Taking a look with 'strace' might help, if Thunar suffers from a delay.
Without a delay it is very confusing, due to the amount of output,
that at least I get on my machine.

If you run 'top' from command line, does it show something when the
delay happens?

What kind of folder are on your desktop? Real folders or links or mount
points? Is the Desktop folder part of the root directory or on another
partition?

What output do you get, if you run

  ls -hAl ~/Desktop/

from command line.

Is there a delay if you run

  cd ~/Desktop/a_folder/

and/or

  ls -hAl ~/Desktop/a_folder/

?

Just for testing purpose install spacefm/spacefm-gtk3. It's a very
customizable file browser that doesn't have a dependency to GNOMEish
bloatware helpers such as gvfs.

  sudo apt update
  sudo apt install spacefm-gtk3

Do you experience the same delay issue when using spacefm?

You can remove spacefm by running

  sudo apt purge spacefm-gtk3

Alternatively install 'spacefm' instead of 'spacefm-gtk3', but start by
testing 'spacefm-gtk3'.

Regards,
Ralf


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Animation Program

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 4 Mar 2020 22:48:00 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>I don't know what kind of animation software Jasc Animation Shop3 is.
>I suspect that pixel graphic software such as Gimp or Krita could
>maybe use layers to generate animated gifs in a flip book/stop motion
>style. IOW you need to draw each picture. However, there are a lot of
>tools with automation features for 2D as well as 3D animations. When I
>tested synfig studio, perhaps more than a decade ago, it was way too
>buggy and blender was way too complicated. IIRC I never tested any of
>the other software. I installed white_dune, since I read that it is
>used by primary school children, but at the moment I'm doing a music
>band project with primary school children instead.
>
>http://wdune.ourproject.org/
>https://www.pencil2d.org/
>http://www.vpaint.org/
>https://opentoonz.github.io/
>https://morevnaproject.org/opentoonz/
>https://sourceforge.net/projects/tupi2d/
>https://synfig.org
>http://www.blender.org
>http://www.k-3d.org/
>
>http://linuxstopmotion.org/index.html
>https://www.gimp.org/
>https://krita.org/en/
>
>Some time ago I used Folioscope on an iPadPro 3rd generation instead of
>Linux. It's nice, but very primitive and limited. It generates animated
>gifs.

PS: Some, but not all Windows software does run on wine,
https://packages.ubuntu.com/eoan/wine . You could run quasi all
Windows software, that doesn't run on wine and that doesn't require
direct hardware access via Windows drivers, on a Windows guest running
in a virtual machine, such as the easy to use virtualbox,
https://packages.ubuntu.com/eoan/virtualbox .

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Re: [xubuntu-users] Animation Program

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

I don't know what kind of animation software Jasc Animation Shop3 is.
I suspect that pixel graphic software such as Gimp or Krita could
maybe use layers to generate animated gifs in a flip book/stop motion
style. IOW you need to draw each picture. However, there are a lot of
tools with automation features for 2D as well as 3D animations. When I
tested synfig studio, perhaps more than a decade ago, it was way too
buggy and blender was way too complicated. IIRC I never tested any of
the other software. I installed white_dune, since I read that it is
used by primary school children, but at the moment I'm doing a music
band project with primary school children instead.

http://wdune.ourproject.org/
https://www.pencil2d.org/
http://www.vpaint.org/
https://opentoonz.github.io/
https://morevnaproject.org/opentoonz/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/tupi2d/
https://synfig.org
http://www.blender.org
http://www.k-3d.org/

http://linuxstopmotion.org/index.html
https://www.gimp.org/
https://krita.org/en/

Some time ago I used Folioscope on an iPadPro 3rd generation instead of
Linux. It's nice, but very primitive and limited. It generates animated
gifs.

Regards,
Ralf

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Re: [xubuntu-users] How to stop firefox 'pulsing' its panel tab when a new site opens?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 22 Feb 2020 19:43:08 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>Ok, there's probably nothing humans in the future could do against the
>warp drive noise

or the impulse drive noise

>but it still should be easy to disable useless computer noises

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Re: [xubuntu-users] How to stop firefox 'pulsing' its panel tab when a new site opens?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 22 Feb 2020 18:22:03 +, Chris Green wrote:
>I find it very annoying when Firefox pulses its tab in the panel just
>because I have opened a new site but haven't yet moved to Firefox to
>display it.
>
>I *know* I've opened a new web site and don't need the distracting
>panel pulsing to tell me.  It also happens when Firefox restarts and
>restores what was showing before, even sillier in this case as there's
>nothing new being shown.
>
>So - is it possible to disable this behaviour?

I can't help with this, but I'm with you.

I dislike unneeded noises as well as unneeded flashing etc., even while
I like simple science fiction entertainment,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LleeMp9aJH8 ,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb3Yxz8bxj8 .

Ok, there's probably nothing humans in the future could do against the
warp drive noise, but it still should be easy to disable useless
computer noises.

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Re: [xubuntu-users] E4rat

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 14 Dec 2019 22:55:12 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>The magic term is "el Chepo TOSHIBA (OCZ) SSD". Very cheap, reliable,
>fast at 6.0 Gb/s, but even at 3.0 Gb/s, not included to the smartctl
>data base, but a proprietary tool called ocz-ssd-utility is available
>for free as in beer, so all SMART data is provided, as well as
>updating the firmware could be done when running a Linux session. The
>only requirement is a SATA port.

Oops, 32 bit hardware might provide SATA at 1.5 Gbit/s only, if at all.
My apologies for the noise.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] E4rat

[Ralf Mardorf]

The magic term is "el Chepo TOSHIBA (OCZ) SSD". Very cheap, reliable,
fast at 6.0 Gb/s, but even at 3.0 Gb/s, not included to the smartctl
data base, but a proprietary tool called ocz-ssd-utility is available
for free as in beer, so all SMART data is provided, as well as
updating the firmware could be done when running a Linux session. The
only requirement is a SATA port.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Hundreds (thousands maybe) of nm-applet error messages in .xsession-errors

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 2019-12-07 at 02:32 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> On Thu, 2019-12-05 at 21:22 +, Chris Green wrote:
> > I have recently upgraded from xubuntu 19.04 to 19.10 on my laptop.
> > 
> > The .xsession-errors file is getting rather large very quickly, it has
> > grown to 8Mb in not much over 24 hours.  A large proportion of the
> > errors in .xsession-errors are from nm-applet:-
> > 
> > (nm-applet:1573): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 20:15:43.847: gtk_widget_destroy: 
> > assertion 'GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed
> > (nm-applet:1573): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 20:15:43.847: gtk_widget_destroy: 
> > assertion 'GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed
> > (nm-applet:1573): Gtk-WARNING **: 20:15:43.858: Can't set a parent on 
> > widget which has a parent
> > 
> > The same three errors repeat, a lot!  There are also similar Gtk error
> > messages from other programs but nm-applet is by far the worst culprit.
> > 
> > I know these aren't that serious, the system still functions OK, but
> > at the very least they tend to mask more serious issues by making
> > .xsession-errors so large.
> > 
> > Is this a bug that should be reported and/or is there a work-around of
> > any sort?
> 
> It's a rhetorical question, right?
> 
> [rocketmouse@archlinux ~]$ cat .xsession-errors | wc -l
> 5
> 
> One of those four lines is caused by an obsolete workaround, the other
    five :D
> four lines are related to either bad maintained packages or issues
> caused by upstream.
> 
> The total size are 248 byte.
> 
> [rocketmouse@archlinux ~]$ ls -hl .xsession-errors 
> -rw--- 1 rocketmouse rocketmouse 248 Dec  2 17:42 .xsession-errors
> 
> To put it in a nutshell, those 248 bytes are already way to much,
> however, getting 8 MB mostly related to GTK warnings is inacceptable.
> It's not your fault. Consider to report it. You could temporarily work
> around it by simply deleting  ~/.xsession-errors*  , after starting a
> user session. During this session no ~/.xsession-errors log file will be
> generated again.



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Re: [xubuntu-users] Hundreds (thousands maybe) of nm-applet error messages in .xsession-errors

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 2019-12-05 at 21:22 +, Chris Green wrote:
> I have recently upgraded from xubuntu 19.04 to 19.10 on my laptop.
> 
> The .xsession-errors file is getting rather large very quickly, it has
> grown to 8Mb in not much over 24 hours.  A large proportion of the
> errors in .xsession-errors are from nm-applet:-
> 
> (nm-applet:1573): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 20:15:43.847: gtk_widget_destroy: 
> assertion 'GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed
> (nm-applet:1573): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 20:15:43.847: gtk_widget_destroy: 
> assertion 'GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed
> (nm-applet:1573): Gtk-WARNING **: 20:15:43.858: Can't set a parent on 
> widget which has a parent
> 
> The same three errors repeat, a lot!  There are also similar Gtk error
> messages from other programs but nm-applet is by far the worst culprit.
> 
> I know these aren't that serious, the system still functions OK, but
> at the very least they tend to mask more serious issues by making
> .xsession-errors so large.
> 
> Is this a bug that should be reported and/or is there a work-around of
> any sort?

It's a rhetorical question, right?

[rocketmouse@archlinux ~]$ cat .xsession-errors | wc -l
5

One of those four lines is caused by an obsolete workaround, the other
four lines are related to either bad maintained packages or issues
caused by upstream.

The total size are 248 byte.

[rocketmouse@archlinux ~]$ ls -hl .xsession-errors 
-rw--- 1 rocketmouse rocketmouse 248 Dec  2 17:42 .xsession-errors

To put it in a nutshell, those 248 bytes are already way to much,
however, getting 8 MB mostly related to GTK warnings is inacceptable.
It's not your fault. Consider to report it. You could temporarily work
around it by simply deleting  ~/.xsession-errors*  , after starting a
user session. During this session no ~/.xsession-errors log file will be
generated again.



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Re: [xubuntu-users] mobile broadband set up ?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 10 Nov 2019 14:41:06 +0100 (CET), Fritz Roth wrote:
>I will re burn the dvd next week at the library
>to see if this will solve this problem

Hi,

I can't help with the "mobile broadband set up", but before you burn a
new DVD consider to not only check the image against the checksum, but
also ensure that it fits to the signing. A long time ago I wrote a
script, to download Ubuntu flavours from this period. This script still
works for xubuntu 18.04. Actually this script does use the short finger
prints of the keys, while this is even mentioned by the Ubuntu pages,
an Ubuntu flavour developers who likes this script, mentioned that the
full fingerprint should be used, instead of the shortened pattern. It's
anyway better to check the ISO with this script or manually, even with
shortened finger prints, than to check without making use of the
signing at all.

Maybe you want to make the attached script executable by running

  cd /path/to_the_directories_script
  chmod a+x luamd64_1610.sh

and then to run it by 

  ./luamd64_1610.sh xubuntu 18.04

and to follow the advices.

Regards,
Ralf


luamd64_1610.sh
Description: application/shellscript
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Re: [xubuntu-users] Changes made into sysctl.conf not getting picked up after reboot

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 20 Oct 2019 16:01:21 +0200 (CEST), Prithvi wrote:
>The problem is that after a reboot the configuration given above is
>not applied. The entries are there in the sysctl.conf file but the
>ICMP services are not disabled. What can be the reason behind this?

Hi,

maybe it's overridden by a file in /etc/sysctl.d/. Those "drop-in"
directories could be a PITA, probably the worst step in the wrong
direction Linux ever made.

Regards,
Ralf


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Removing failed header update

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 16 Oct 2019 16:49:42 +0100, David Wright wrote:
>After a header update to 4.4.0-165.193

Hi,

probably the kernel and the kernel headers were upgraded, right?

Is it an "averaged hard disk drive" that can't get mounted or something
very special? What kind of drive, connected to what kind of port?

Does something hard disk drive related need a module build with dkms?

Regards,
Ralf



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Re: [xubuntu-users] virtual machine

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 2019-05-31 at 10:43 +0200, hans Schneidhofer wrote:
> You know, caution is the mother of porcelain box ... old but true.

:)

https://www.dict.cc/?s=vorsicht+ist+die+mutter+der+porzellankiste

My lovely Mr. Singing club!
https://www.dict.cc/?s=mein+lieber+herr+gesangsverein




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Re: [xubuntu-users] virtual machine

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 31 May 2019 05:44:56 +0200, hans Schneidhofer wrote:
>the VM I'll only use for mathematical Programs

Hi,

VirtualBox is the easiest to use VM, but it's for sure not the best. I
wonder if VirtualBox supports the instruction sets provided by your CPU?

IMO you should use VirtualBox only to test, if you experience any issue
when using snap and flatpack. OTOH instead of using a virtual machine,
just backup your whole install and test it with the real install on
bare metal. If the test should break your install, restore it from
the backup or boot directly into the copied install, this way you also
could just move the new SSD to the new machine later.

To backup the whole install from it's original SSD to the new SSD, run
a Xubuntu live media. The size of the new partition don't need to be the
same size as those of the old partition. After the old SSD is partitioned
open xfce4-terminal and run

sudo -i
cp -ai /media/xubuntu/mount_point_of_the_old_ssd/* 
/media/xubuntu/mount_point_of_the_new_ssd/; echo $?
diff -r /media/xubuntu/mount_point_of_the_old_ssd/ 
/media/xubuntu/mount_point_of_the_new_ssd/; echo $?

The output of 'echo $?' is '0', if the copy is ok. Note the '*' assumes
that the root directory (IOW '/', don't confuse it with '/root') doesn't
contain hidden items.

To see if it contains hidden items (something a root directory usually
doesn't) run after 'sudo -i' and before 'cp'

ls -Al /media/xubuntu/mount_point_of_the_old_ssd/

ls -Al /media/xubuntu/mount_point_of_the_new_ssd/

if there should be items that beginn with a dot '.', then instead of

cp -ai /media/xubuntu/mount_point_of_the_old_ssd/* 
/media/xubuntu/mount_point_of_the_new_ssd/; echo $?

run

cp -ai 
/media/xubuntu/mount_point_of_the_old_ssd/{*,.hidden_item_1,.hidden_item_2,.hidden_item_n}
 /media/xubuntu/mount_point_of_the_new_ssd/; echo $?

If there should be a something on the new SSD, such as 'lost+found/'
or anything else, wipe it out, but before doing so, unmount the old SSD,
to avoid accidents.

Use Thunar to mount the SSDs and replace 'mount_point_of_the_???_ssd/' with
the name given by thunar.

Regards,
Ralf


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Re: [xubuntu-users] snap and flatpak

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 30 May 2019 19:01:33 +0200, hans Schneidhofer wrote:
>The memory should match this also, I have 16 GB-DDR3-RAM installed.

Yes...

>Can I use an extra SSD for this installation ?

and yes :).

I'm using VirtualBox, IMO the easiest to use VM.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] snap and flatpak

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 2019-05-30 at 17:08 +0200, hans Schneidhofer wrote:
> So now my question is, can I have a snap- and flatpak-
> installation on the same machine ?

I don't know the details, but I suspect it should be possible to use
both on one install and it also should work to use other container
systems in parallel, too. I seriously doubt that it makes much sense to
use different container systems, with software from different third
party sources, to me this sounds like a waste of resources and a
security nightmare.

> The bad thing is, I only have one machine available for this. A 2nd
> machine is only planned for the next months.

You could copy your Xubuntu install from bare metal to a virtual
machine, that runs on the Xubuntu install on bare metal, to test the
container systems on the guest install, that is a copy from the host
install :D.



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Re: [xubuntu-users] missing file

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 20 May 2019 03:18:19 +0200, hans Schneidhofer wrote:
>http://ppa.launchpad.net
^^^

Hi,

you add a PPA to your repositories. Don't you remember for what purpose
you add this PPA?

If you shouldn't know what a PPA is, consider to google it.

The package is provided by the official Ubuntu repository, too. It's
available by main. It's just a different version, see

https://packages.ubuntu.com/eoan/libosmesa6

Usually upstream for Ubuntu is Debian, so you could take a look at the
Debian tracker, see

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/mesa

The link to "real" upstream is provided by the Ubuntu package search as
well as by the Debian tracker. If you want to know for what it's good
for, what is using it, take a look at the homepage's introduction:

https://mesa3d.org/intro.html

Upstream not necessarily hosts sources at github, gitlab, sourceforge
and Co., let alone that upstream not necessarily provides a
package"-file".

Hth,
Ralf


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Re: [xubuntu-users] auto logoff happens no matter what I{ do

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 2019-05-12 at 20:09 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> On Sun, 12 May 2019 10:56:27 -0400, Ric Moore wrote:
> > I turned off power management in my xscreensaver program and
> > rebooted.  It still logs me off/out. Is this a systemd thing?
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I suspect it's neither related to systemd, nor caused by a backend used
> by xflock4, that logs you out. My guess is, that power management for
> the display is broken.
> 
> There is no such issue when I use xfce4-power-manager for my openbox
> (not Xfce4) session on Arch Linux, but it seems to be the cause for
> this or a similar problem, when using a Xubuntu 18.10 live DVD. 
> 
> Try running
> 
>   xfce4-power-manager-settings
> 
> select the "Display"-tab. First of all turn on "Display power
> management", if it should be turned off, after that set all values from
> "minutes" to "never" and then turn off "Display power management".
> 
> Regards,
> Ralf

PS: If this should do the trick, you could test if it's screen blanking
or if putting to sleep or switching off does cause the issue.



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Re: [xubuntu-users] auto logoff happens no matter what I{ do

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 12 May 2019 10:56:27 -0400, Ric Moore wrote:
>I turned off power management in my xscreensaver program and
>rebooted.  It still logs me off/out. Is this a systemd thing?

Hi,

I suspect it's neither related to systemd, nor caused by a backend used
by xflock4, that logs you out. My guess is, that power management for
the display is broken.

There is no such issue when I use xfce4-power-manager for my openbox
(not Xfce4) session on Arch Linux, but it seems to be the cause for
this or a similar problem, when using a Xubuntu 18.10 live DVD. 

Try running

  xfce4-power-manager-settings

select the "Display"-tab. First of all turn on "Display power
management", if it should be turned off, after that set all values from
"minutes" to "never" and then turn off "Display power management".

Regards,
Ralf


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Re: [xubuntu-users] TTS: text to speech

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 28 Apr 2019 21:44:36 +0200, Marc Coevoet wrote:
>Op 28/04/19 om 09:37 schreef Hartmut Haase:
>> is there a TTS application foe xibutu 18.04 tjat someone can
>
>I think ORCA is used in Knoppix, but there is at least one more?

Hi,

can you recommend Orca for usage with Xfce? I'm not visually impaired,
but tested Orca years ago. At that point I wasn't satisfied using Orca
running during a Xfce session.

Regards,
Ralf


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Re: [xubuntu-users] 19.04 trouble with waking the screen

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 2019-04-25 at 11:18 +0200, Bjoern Franke wrote:
> Does it stay at "this screen is locked"

I can't speak for the OP. What I've noticed is that screen blanking is
the issue. A blank screen remains until you Ctrl+Alt+Fn...

IOW even if the screen isn't locked, just blanked, this issue happens.



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Re: [xubuntu-users] 19.04 trouble with waking the screen

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 23 Apr 2019 18:39:27 +0300, Matti Pulkkinen wrote:
>I've noticed in 19.04 that whenever I lock my screen and it powers
>down, the only way I can get my display back is to switch to a virtual
>console and then back to the graphical environment. Like before, is
>this a known issue, and is there something I can do to help diagnose
>or fix it?

The same happens here with an Xubuntu 18.10 Live-DVD and it requires
the same Ctrl+Alt+F-keys workaround.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Installation questions

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 9 Apr 2019 16:11:30 +0100, David Wright wrote:
>is TRIM still important/necessary?

Hi,

I don't know if a firmware mechanism could replace trim or if it
shouldn't be needed for what ever other reason. My interpretation of
the information provided by [1] is, that it's recommended to use
periodic trim, if the SSD should support it.

Regards,
Ralf

[1]
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_state_drive

I read it a while back, in the meantime the Wiki likely was edited.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Installation questions

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 8 Apr 2019 18:11:37 -0700, fred roller wrote:
>My experience with the hybrid hdd/SSD was to partition main storage
>(data being less sought) on the hdd and, if memory serves me, put the
>boot partition on the hdd. I wasn't overly concerned with boot time
>since I rarely booted. What went on the SSD was anything that needs
>fast access etc.
>
>Personally, I put the few extra $$ in a 10k rpm hdd to help offset a
>bottle neck. Since then I moved to a pure SSD system and moved the 5
>Tb of media to a network storage device. The one I bought supports ssh
>mounting and ais easily seen as just another directory.

My machine has got 8 GiB of RAM. The default half of the available
memory, in my case 3.9 GiB are used for tmpfs. On Arch Linux, the Linux
I use more often than Ubuntu, /tmp is a tmpfs. It is enough space to
compile something that huge as a kernel in /tmp, but still not enough
to compile bloatware such as Firefox.

On a hybrid it seems to be the best approach to care about everything
that needs fast access. IOW bloatware that is not running the whole
day, recording and playing real-time audio production data etc..

I would not care about boot time or applications that are loaded when
starting a session and then will run forever. IMO it doesn't matter if
starting a session takes 2 seconds or 2 minutes, neither if you turn
your computer off and on two times a day, let alone if it runs 24/7.

As already pointed out, taking care about write cycles is a no-go for
me. I'm using my SSDs without taking special care and without worry. If
I would play my guitars less often, the frets would wear off less. If
I would walk less often wearing shoes... What after all does it amount
to?

For backups and archiving data I'm using HDDs not just because those do
cost less money. HDDs that seldom spin down and up, IOW that either are
on or off most of the times, are safe for ages.

Since SSDs are not that expensive anymore and I like to have a silent
computer, IMO it's best to use SSDs inside the computer only and to use
external HDDs.

You could have archives with hundreds of TiB on external media, inside
the computer likely most of us usually just need between 500 GiB and 1
TiB.

To backup my 1 TiB iPadPro with my Linux PC I soon or later will mount
an additional TiB to the around 1 TiB of SSD already mounted to my Linux
PC.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Installation questions

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 2019-04-08 at 14:22 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> Bought 03.02.2017, OCZ TL100 240GB 77,95€ Health 65%, Power-On Hours Count 
> 15169, Host Writes 278773, Bad Block Count 0
> Bought 27.07.2017, OCZ TL100 240GB 86,50€ Health 86%, Power-On Hours Count 
> 12289, Host Writes 107154, Bad Block Count 0
> Bought 25.07.2018, OCZ TR200 240GB 49,98€ Health 83%, Power-On Hours Count  
> 5645, Host Writes 201040, Bad Block Count 0


> Bought 07.01.2018, OCZ TR200 240GB 37,90€ Helath 91%, Power-On Hours Count  
> 2127, Host Writes  84537, Bad Block Count 0
 07.01.2019 I noticed this typo, there might be other typos,
too.


> Today's price of the TR200 (the successor of the TL100) is 34,50 € by
> the same dealer. Only 100% good reviews. I had HDDs that didn't get 2
> years old, some even didn't make it for a day, while at least one HDD is
> way more than two decades old. I don't have much experiences with SSDs,
> but I'm already satisfied.



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Re: [xubuntu-users] Installation questions

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

people who worry about a write cycle related lifespan of SSDs and treat
SSDs with kid gloves make their lives painful for no reason. It's also
not worth to worry about less fast and very fast SSDs, since even a
"slow" SSD won't be the performance bottleneck.

At the moment I'm using 4 internal SSDs and no internal HDD at all.
Backups and archiving is done on external HDDs.

I'm running Arch Linux and Ubuntu 16.04 on the same machine. On both
installs I'm using periodic trim via fstrim.service, fstrim.timer.

Both installs are copies from HDDs, so apart from taking care about
trimming, there was nothing else to consider. I'm assuming that the
default mount does use "relatime", some of my partitions are mounted
with "noatime", this is pro-audio related and was chosen when I used
HDDs, not to protect the SSDs.

I don't know anything about UEFI, but that I don't need it for my Linux
installs, so I have got no reason to use it.

For the SSDs of my choice I don't need to worry about an incomplete
smartctl data base, since the vendor provides a program to check smart
information, to do firmware upgrades while the SSDs are in use etc.:

[rocketmouse@archlinux ~]$ pacman -Qi ocz-ssd-utility | head -6
Name: ocz-ssd-utility
Version : 2.3.2963-2
Description : A GUI based tool for managing OCZ SSD including
firmware and BIOS updates.
Architecture: x86_64
URL : https://ocz.com/us/download/
Licenses: custom:OCZ EULA

Bought 03.02.2017, OCZ TL100 240GB 77,95€ Health 65%, Power-On Hours Count 
15169, Host Writes 278773, Bad Block Count 0
Bought 27.07.2017, OCZ TL100 240GB 86,50€ Health 86%, Power-On Hours Count 
12289, Host Writes 107154, Bad Block Count 0
Bought 25.07.2018, OCZ TR200 240GB 49,98€ Health 83%, Power-On Hours Count  
5645, Host Writes 201040, Bad Block Count 0 
Bought 07.01.2018, OCZ TR200 240GB 37,90€ Helath 91%, Power-On Hours Count  
2127, Host Writes  84537, Bad Block Count 0

Today's price of the TR200 (the successor of the TL100) is 34,50 € by
the same dealer. Only 100% good reviews. I had HDDs that didn't get 2
years old, some even didn't make it for a day, while at least one HDD is
way more than two decades old. I don't have much experiences with SSDs,
but I'm already satisfied.

Regards,
Ralf



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Re: [xubuntu-users] Xubuntu: End-of-life Question

[Ralf Mardorf]

PS:

On Mon, 2019-04-08 at 08:59 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> IOW since XFCE4 is from "universe" the support provided by community
> maintainers could differ from packages maintained by Ubuntu
> maintainers, but keep in mind that dependencies are kept consistent and
> that XFCE4 depends on packages from "Universe".
  ^^ this should read "Main"
("Universe" isn't wrong either, but important for my argument is that
packages required to run XFCE4, that are security related in an
important way, are likely from "Main")



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Re: [xubuntu-users] Xubuntu: End-of-life Question

[Ralf Mardorf]

>> Is it that the Xubuntu team stops working on 16.04 in April. But,
>> that updates to *Ubuntu* are still available? Can one depend on
>> downloads from Ubuntu's servers for security updates but that
>> Xubuntu bugs will no longer be fixed?

Hi,

if you take a look at the package search, you'll notice that xfce4 is
from "universe".

"xfce4 (4.12.2) [universe]" - https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/xfce4

By mistake I tend to call "Main", "Restricted", "Universe"
and "Multiverse" different repositories. The correct phrase is
"Software in Ubuntu's repository is divided into four categories or
components - main, restricted, universe and multiverse."

"Main

[snip] Software in main includes a hand-selected list of applications
that the Ubuntu developers, community and users feel are most
important, and that the Ubuntu security and distribution team are
willing to support. When you install software from the main component,
you are assured that the software will come with security updates and
that commercial technical support is available from Canonical.

Restricted

[snip]

Universe

[snip] Canonical does not provide a guarantee of regular security
updates for software in the universe component, but will provide these
where they are made available by the community. Users should understand
the risk inherent in using these packages. Popular or well supported
pieces of software will move from universe into main if they are backed
by maintainers willing to meet the standards set by the Ubuntu team.

Multiverse

[snip]" - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories

IOW since XFCE4 is from "universe" the support provided by community
maintainers could differ from packages maintained by Ubuntu
maintainers, but keep in mind that dependencies are kept consistent and
that XFCE4 depends on packages from "Universe". IOW XFCE4 does benefit
from important security upgrades of packages provided by "Main", too. If
e.g. libc6 gets a security upgrade, it still stays a consistent
dependency of XFCE4, it will not break XFCE4. A security leak more
likely happens for an important dependency of XFCE4, less likely for a
XFCE4 package.

Ubuntu security notices: https://usn.ubuntu.com/

Regards,
Ralf




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Re: [xubuntu-users] Repo issues

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 7 Apr 2019 22:03:11 -0400, linux@gmail.com wrote:  
>On Sun, 7 Apr 2019 20:42:03 -0500, Lutz Andersohn wrote:
>>I am wondering whether anybody else has these issues:
>>I did a fresh install of 16.04.5LTS.
>>updated my repositories
>>- I cannot install gimp. Broken packages because libgegl. It
>>essentially conflicts with its own libgegl-dev package
>>- I cannot install build-essential: conflict with the installed gcc
>>and libstdc6 and the -dev. There is no way to resolve these packages
>>that I can see.
>>affects any package that even remotely depends on any of these.
>>I tried archive.ubuntu.com/archive and us.ubuntu.archive.com/archive
>>with the same sad outcome.
>>Some posts on for example askubuntu have been shown down as being not
>>reproducible.
>>Trust me, it's very reproducible for those effected by it.

Hi,  

it cannot be reproducible for other, since you did not mention which
steps you exactly made. It's good that you updated your repositories,
but you did not mention how you updated the repositories. Did you use a
GUI, did you do it by command line? The best practise is to run from
command line...

>>Any help would be appreciated
>Maybe try
>apt-get dist-upgrade  

...don't follow instructions that don't try to troubleshoot, but just
try to tinker and consider to use the official Ubuntu command line
package management tool apt first. IOW run

sudo apt update

Are there any warnings and/or error messages?
If so, copy and paste the command and it's output to an email.
If not, continue with

sudo apt full-upgrade

are there any warnings and/or error messages?
If so, copy and paste the command and it's output to an email.
If not, continue with...

>Or, there is a new version of The GIMP available. Try un-installing
>what you have
>   apt-get autoclean
>   apt-get dist-upgrade
>
>Then download from
>https://www.gimp.org/downloads
>And install.
>
>Always read release notes first.  

...trying to install GIMP. Btw. for what purpose do you need the
libgegl-dev package?

FWIW there at least is no version conflict, see

libgegl-dev (0.3.4-1ubuntu2)
https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/libgegl-dev

libgegl-0.3-0 (0.3.4-1ubuntu2)
https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/libgegl-0.3-0.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install gimp

Copy and paste the command and it's output. The output will show us the
reason for the conflict, so we could tell you what to do, to get rid of
the conflict.

If you copy a command and it's output, then please don't (auto-)wrap the
lines.

>FWIW,  Xubuntu16.04 is at end of life site you might upgrade first and
>go from tbere.  

Any reference for that claim?

Xubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavour, so EOL of 16.04 is April 2021,
see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases.

Not all repositories are maintained in the same way, see
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories, but that doesn't mean
that the dependency chain is allowed to be inconsistent.

FWIW

[weremouse@moonstudio ~]$ lsb_release -a
LSB Version:
core-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-amd64:core-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-noarch:security-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-amd64:security-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-noarch
Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS
Release:16.04
Codename:   xenial
[weremouse@moonstudio ~]$ apt list -a gimp libgegl-0.3-0
Listing... Done
gimp/xenial-updates,xenial-security,now 2.8.16-1ubuntu1.1 amd64
[installed] gimp/xenial 2.8.16-1ubuntu1 amd64

libgegl-0.3-0/xenial,now 0.3.4-1ubuntu2 amd64 [installed,automatic]

[weremouse@moonstudio ~]$ sudo apt update
[sudo] password for weremouse: 
Hit:1 http://ppa.launchpad.net/nilarimogard/webupd8/ubuntu xenial InRelease
Get:2 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security InRelease [109 kB]  
  
Hit:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial InRelease 
Get:4 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates InRelease [109 kB]
   
Get:5 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-backports InRelease [107 kB]  
 
Fetched 325 kB in 0s (478 kB/s) 
  
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree   
Reading state information... Done
All packages are up to date.
[weremouse@moonstudio ~]$ sudo apt install libgegl-dev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree   
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  libbabl-dev
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libbabl-dev libgegl-dev
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 73.8 kB of archives.
After this operation, 1,013 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 
Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 libbabl-dev amd64 
0.1.16-1 [5,346 B]
Get:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 libgegl-dev amd64 
0.3.4-1ubuntu2 [68.4 kB]
Fetched 73.8 kB in 5s (13.8 kB/s) 
Selecting previously unselected package libbabl-dev:amd64.

Re: [xubuntu-users] GUI / GTK visual artifacts after 18.04.2 inline upgrade

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 23 Feb 2019 11:06:05 -0600, Len Philpot wrote:
>So far, changing desktop and window manager themes hasn't made a
>difference

Does those themes include default GNOME themes, that fit to the used GTK
versions?

I'm using Ubuntu 16.04, as well as Arch Linux, a rolling release close
to upstream.

On both distros I don't use XFCE4, just openbox and several GTK2 and
GTK3 apps.

Regarding GTK Ubuntu 16.04 flavours are outdated for the good.

On Arch Linux I maintain my own customized GTK theme, based upon the Arc
theme, which is similar to an old Adwaita theme.

You most likely will dislike a new Adwaita theme, that fits to new
versions of GTK, but for testing purpose, make sure you used Adwaita or
what ever else is provided by the GNOME default themes.

Almost all of the good old GTK themes are broken nowadays and
discontinued by upstream, since nearly nobody is willing to follow the
insane changes that happened even within GTK _dot_ releases.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Xorg with 99% CPU

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 20 Oct 2018 11:03:31 +0200, Ulli Horlacher wrote:
>The xmodmap command itself is fast, produces no messages at all and
>terminates with exit code 0.
>
>Xorg is running on high CPU for several minutes, as before.
>
>What is going on there?

Is it a large $HOME/.Xmodmap? Btw. my Ubuntu (not Xubuntu) does use
lightdm and openbox (no DE) and has got no X rc file in $HOME. You
aren't doing something double and triple?

[rocketmouse@archlinux moonstudio]$ sudo systemd-nspawn -q lsb_release -rc
Release:16.04
Codename:   xenial
[rocketmouse@archlinux moonstudio]$ cat home/weremouse/.Xmodmap
add mod3 = Scroll_Lock
[rocketmouse@archlinux moonstudio]$ ls home/weremouse/.x{session,init}rc
ls: cannot access 'home/weremouse/.xsessionrc': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access 'home/weremouse/.xinitrc': No such file or directory
[rocketmouse@archlinux moonstudio]$


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Xorg with 99% CPU

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 20 Oct 2018 10:10:34 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>On Fri, 19 Oct 2018 16:30:31 -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
>>What browsers are you using, and how many tabs do you use in each. My
>>experience is that piggy browsers like Firefox and Chrome/Chromium
>>make X swell up. When X' usage exceeds 90%, do killall -9 on all web
>>browsers. Most of the time the problem subsides.  
>
>A minute ago, with just one tab opened, Firefox has froozen my openbox
>session. Just Ctrl+Alt+F2 was responsive for a killall -9. After
>returning with Ctrl+Alt+F7 everything was ok again.
>
>I guess the Mozilla team could do better, IMO everything should become
>unresponsive, even the reset and power buttons of the computer, so
>that it is required to to pull the plug. They shouldn't do things by
>halves.

PS: I forgot to mention that the tab crashed. A crashing tab is one of
Firefox's features. It's a practice alarm, to learn how to "Duck and
cover".


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Xorg with 99% CPU

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 19 Oct 2018 16:30:31 -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
>What browsers are you using, and how many tabs do you use in each. My
>experience is that piggy browsers like Firefox and Chrome/Chromium make
>X swell up. When X' usage exceeds 90%, do killall -9 on all web
>browsers. Most of the time the problem subsides.

A minute ago, with just one tab opened, Firefox has froozen my openbox
session. Just Ctrl+Alt+F2 was responsive for a killall -9. After
returning with Ctrl+Alt+F7 everything was ok again.

I guess the Mozilla team could do better, IMO everything should become
unresponsive, even the reset and power buttons of the computer, so
that it is required to to pull the plug. They shouldn't do things by
halves.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Xorg with 99% CPU

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 19 Oct 2018 19:28:39 +0200, Ulli Horlacher wrote:
>Any idea what is going on and how to debug it?

Is anything related in the log files?

$ less /var/log/Xorg.0.log
$ journalctl -b
$ dmesg | less
$ less ~/.xsession-errors


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[xubuntu-users] Off-topic: 18.04: no printing

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 13 Oct 2018 10:37:22 +0200, Hartmut Haase wrote:
>Frauen sind die Hälfte der Menschheit

I guess this is a Xubuntu related mailing list. However, you are using
it as a political mailing list. Please provide a link to a scientific
study to underpin the 1:1 ratio. And while you are on it, take a look
at the life expectancy of women and men.

>besitzen weniger als ein Hundertstel des Eigentums

On paper a lot of people, women as well as men, own absolutely nothing
and in reality several of those women and men belong to the people, who
own way too much.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] How can I install Apple ITunes on Ubuntu 18.01 LTS Desktop or get new software for my Apple IPad?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 3 Sep 2018 07:19:13 -0600, Dan Juarez wrote:
>You can, of course, install software and music/videos directly from
>the iPad without using iTunes at all. Updates to iPad should also be
>downloadable over the air as well.

I run Windows 7 on VirtualBox from Oracle, not VirtualBox from any
distro's repository. With nowadays versions from iTunes it's not
possible to purchase or update apps, this only can be done over the
air. However, I'm using iTunes to save the meta data of my purchases,
since I never ever will use a cloud and to share audio production files
between Linux pro-audio software and iPad pro-audio software. There's no
alternativ to iTunes, since some providers wouldn't allow even to send
a single wav file, let alone a complete audio session with tons of wav
and MIDI files. Btw. Windows XP won't work anymore, since Apple doesn't
support iTunes for it anymore and you can not use an old release of
iTunes, since iTunes needs to fit to the used version of iOS.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Firefox using loads of memory.

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 08:59:25 -0400, lefty wrote:
>We must be using different versions.

More likely we are using different distros, different profiles and
much important, we most likely visit different websites.

Lets take a look at the dependencies [1]. More or less all web browser
suffer from such bloated dependency chains. For security reasons
browsers must be upgraded very often, so what ever distro we are
using, the dependency chain could cause issues. Even if the
dependency chain shouldn't be the culprit for issues, Firefox itself
breaks compatibility to Firefox add-ons and Firefox themes all the
times.

A long time ago the Firefox history worked in the same way the history
of most other browsers are still working, but one day they changed it.

IIRC without informing the users by an opened tab after the upgrade,
they one day added Google's safebrowsing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Safe_Browsing#Privacy

Hash prefixes might add a layer of privacy, however, data exchange
still happens with Google, while the user is online using Firefox, it's
seemingly not done by a databased stored on your computer.

The distros could workaround dependency issues, Firefox automatically
disables incompatible add-ons and themes, let alone that a user could
get rid off all add-ons and special themes. However, we still have
different profiles, that could make a big difference. I never noticed
that different browser settings have that much impact when using other
browsers.

Btw. the OP should consider instead of starting Firefox with the
"--safe-mode" option, to test a new profile, by using the
"--ProfileManager" option, or much better, to add a new user and start
Firefox by a session of that new user.

Just that Firefox could be stable, doesn't mean that it's not prone to
easily become unstable.

[1]
[rocketmouse@archlinux ~]$ pactree firefox
firefox
├─gtk3
│ ├─atk
│ │ └─glib2
│ │   ├─pcre
│ │   │ ├─gcc-libs
│ │   │ │ └─glibc provides glibc>=2.27
│ │   │ │   ├─linux-api-headers provides linux-api-headers>=4.10
│ │   │ │   ├─tzdata
│ │   │ │   └─filesystem
│ │   │ │ └─iana-etc
│ │   │ ├─readline
│ │   │ │ ├─glibc
│ │   │ │ ├─ncurses
│ │   │ │ │ ├─glibc
│ │   │ │ │ └─gcc-libs
│ │   │ │ └─ncurses provides libncursesw.so=6-64
│ │   │ ├─zlib
│ │   │ │ └─glibc
│ │   │ ├─bzip2
│ │   │ │ ├─glibc
│ │   │ │ └─bash provides sh
│ │   │ │   ├─readline provides readline>=7.0
│ │   │ │   ├─glibc
│ │   │ │   └─ncurses
│ │   │ └─bash
│ │   ├─libffi
│ │   │ └─glibc
│ │   ├─libutil-linux
│ │   └─zlib
│ ├─cairo
│ │ ├─libpng
│ │ │ ├─zlib
│ │ │ └─bash provides sh
│ │ ├─libxrender
│ │ │ ├─libx11 provides libx11>=1.3.4
│ │ │ │ ├─libxcb
│ │ │ │ │ ├─xcb-proto provides xcb-proto>=1.12
│ │ │ │ │ ├─libxdmcp
│ │ │ │ │ │ ├─xorgproto provides xproto
│ │ │ │ │ │ └─glibc
│ │ │ │ │ └─libxau
│ │ │ │ │   ├─glibc
│ │ │ │ │   └─xorgproto provides xproto
│ │ │ │ ├─xorgproto provides xproto
│ │ │ │ └─xorgproto provides kbproto
│ │ │ └─xorgproto provides renderproto
│ │ ├─libxext
│ │ │ ├─libx11
│ │ │ └─xorgproto provides xextproto
│ │ ├─fontconfig
│ │ │ ├─expat
│ │ │ │ └─glibc
│ │ │ └─freetype2
│ │ │   ├─zlib
│ │ │   ├─bzip2
│ │ │   ├─bash provides sh
│ │ │   ├─libpng
│ │ │   └─harfbuzz
│ │ │ ├─glib2
│ │ │ ├─freetype2
│ │ │ └─graphite
│ │ │   └─gcc-libs
│ │ ├─pixman
│ │ │ └─glibc
│ │ ├─glib2
│ │ └─lzo
│ │   └─glibc
│ ├─libxcursor
│ │ ├─libxfixes
│ │ │ ├─libx11
│ │ │ └─xorgproto provides fixesproto
│ │ └─libxrender
│ ├─libxinerama
│ │ ├─libxext
│ │ └─xorgproto provides xineramaproto
│ ├─libxrandr
│ │ ├─libxext
│ │ ├─libxrender
│ │ └─xorgproto provides randrproto
│ ├─libxi
│ │ ├─libxext
│ │ └─xorgproto provides inputproto
│ ├─libepoxy
│ │ └─glibc
│ ├─gdk-pixbuf2
│ │ ├─glib2
│ │ ├─libpng
│ │ ├─libtiff
│ │ │ ├─libjpeg-turbo provides libjpeg
│ │ │ ├─zlib
│ │ │ └─xz
│ │ │   └─bash provides sh
│ │ ├─libjpeg-turbo provides libjpeg
│ │ ├─libx11
│ │ ├─jasper
│ │ │ └─libjpeg-turbo provides libjpeg
│ │ └─shared-mime-info
│ │   ├─libxml2
│ │   │ ├─zlib
│ │   │ ├─readline
│ │   │ ├─ncurses
│ │   │ ├─xz
│ │   │ └─icu
│ │   │   ├─gcc-libs
│ │   │   └─bash provides sh
│ │   └─glib2
│ ├─dconf
│ │ └─glib2
│ ├─libxcomposite
│ │ ├─libxfixes
│ │ └─xorgproto provides compositeproto
│ ├─libxdamage
│ │ ├─libxfixes provides libxfixes>=4.0.4
│ │ └─xorgproto provides damageproto
│ ├─pango
│ │ ├─libthai
│ │ │ └─libdatrie
│ │ │   └─glibc
│ │ ├─cairo
│ │ ├─libxft
│ │ │ ├─fontconfig
│ │ │ └─libxrender
│ │ ├─harfbuzz
│ │ └─fribidi
│ │   └─glibc
│ ├─shared-mime-info
│ ├─at-spi2-atk
│ │ ├─at-spi2-core
│ │ │ ├─dbus
│ │ │ │ ├─libsystemd
│ │ │ │ │ ├─glibc
│ │ │ │ │ ├─libcap
│ │ │ │ │ │ ├─glibc
│ │ │ │ │ │ └─attr
│ │ │ │ │ │   └─glibc
│ │ │ │ │ ├─libgcrypt
│ │ │ │ │ │ └─libgpg-error
│ │ │ │ │ │   ├─glibc
│ │ │ │ │ │   └─bash provides sh
│ │ │ │ │ ├─lz4
│ │ │ │ │ │ └─glibc
│ │ │ │ │ └─xz
│ │ │ │ └─expat
│ │ │ ├─glib2
│ │ │ └─libxtst
│ │ │   ├─libxext
│ │ │   ├─libxi
│ │ │   ├─xorgproto provides recordproto
│ │ │   ├─xorgproto provides inputproto
│ │ │   └─libxfixes
│ │ 

Re: [xubuntu-users] Firefox using loads of memory.

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 13:11:05 +0100, Peter Flynn wrote:
>On 14/08/18 12:39, lefty wrote:
>> On 08/14/2018 05:56 AM, Peter Flynn wrote:  
>>> One of the reasons I trashed FF and switched to chromium-browser.  
>> 
>> otoh, Google  
>
>Yeah, something to suffer for the convenience...

So what? I can't stand burger menus, but regarding "Google", Firefox
isn't better. Disabling all that Google crap that ships with Firefox is
a never ending building lot, let alone that some distros (e.g. Ubuntu)
don't compile with ALSA and/or jack support, so if you don't use that
pulseaudio crap on e.g. a real-time audio machine, you need to try
https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse. It's not granted  that Firefox with
ALSA and/or jack support works properly and also not that apulse does
the job. Btw. I dislike the history of Firefox, since it lost focus,
already a long time before Firefox became unstable. If you search for
something, you found it and click the URL and after that you want to
click the URL below in the history, you need to start searching again.

1. Start Firefox

2. In the bar where you usually type the URL, type

   about:config

   and enter. Accept "the risk".

3. In the search bar type

   google

Is safebrowsing a useful feature or does it just offend privacy? It's
just a rhetorical question.

Firefox is _dead_, it at least is unstable on Linux and iOS. The forge
Pale Moon isn't much better and IceCat is a PITA.

The latest releases of QupZilla were unstable, but the successor Falkon
is stable again.

So for general Internet usage, I recommend using Falkon and for audio
and video I recommend Chrome (not Chromium).

Depending on your needs you could test other, such as Vivaldi, too.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] 18.04 issue-bug?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 12 Aug 2018 13:35:10 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>Are you sure that your old SSD reached end of life? Did you connect the
>old SSD to a port using the same controller? Perhaps a microchip on  
 ^^^ This should read "new SSD"

>your mobo is broken? What are the signs you noticed, that let you
>assume the old SSD is fishy?


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Re: [xubuntu-users] 18.04 issue-bug?

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

assuming the issue should be related to the SSD, if you should use
continuous TRIM, stop doing so and use periodic TRIM instead, see

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_State_Drive#Continuous_TRIM .

Using Ubuntu 16.04 and Arch Linux, I don't experience any SSD issue,
excepted of one issue that might or might not be related to SSD usage.
On Arch Linux I've got a Windows 7 guest running in Virtualbox. I'm
using qcow not vdi. When running the Windows 7 guest, the guest as
well as the Arch Linux openbox session often becomes unresponsive. If I
push Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get a terminal and without even logging in directly
push Ctrl+Alt+F7 to go back to the X session, everything is fine again.

A "vintage" Xubuntu 12.10 install doesn't work properly with my new
SSD, see

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/xubuntu-users/2018-August/010695.html .

What SSD are you using? What SSDs I'm using is mentioned by the above
link. Just one SSD user replied to this thread and this only off-list.

You perhaps want to take a look at "Reliability test for hard drives and
SSD", see
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2018-August/045462.html .

Are you sure that your old SSD reached end of life? Did you connect the
old SSD to a port using the same controller? Perhaps a microchip on
your mobo is broken? What are the signs you noticed, that let you
assume the old SSD is fishy?

Maybe the issu has nothing to do with SSD usage.
Btw. I don't know if nowadays Xfce could be used with Wayland instead
of X and if so, if Xubuntu migrated to Wayland. If Wayland should be
used, I would test using X instead.

Consider to take a look at log files, jouranlctl, dmesg,
/var/log/Xorg.0.log, ~/.xsession-errors* and mybe other, too.

You could run:

  sudo iotop

FWIW a lot of users dislike 18.04. If I run Ubuntu Mate 18.04.1
(64-bit, I guess 32-bit is dropped, but I'm not sure about that) from a
live DVD, to backup my Linux installs, I don't experience issues.

Regards,
Ralf


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[xubuntu-users] Thoughts about SSD - Was: 18.04.1 Point Release Testing

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 2018-08-04 at 13:03 -0400, Art wrote:
> Encryption we have today, is just the home folder. If encryption of the
> entire drive is used, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that
> the performance slows severely, that more ram is needed and that more
> SSD read/write cycles will be needed. This increases the wear and tear
> on SSD's, which have a finite lifetime AND more system files need to be
> in ram to help avoid excessive delays.

Hi,

sorry, I couldn't resist to cross-post. A few days ago I mounted the
third SSD.

Take a look at the "cable clutter license" picture at 
https://i.imgur.com/DxcfbSz.png , it does show my PC's old and cheap
case. If HDDs are mounted to this case, you not only hear the even
silent HDDs, sometimes also the sidewalls of the case start vibrating
and make a very annoying noise.

I decided to treat my SSDs in the same way, I treated HDDs.

There are two main differences:

- When I used HDDs my PC usually was up 24/7, since I use SSDs, I tend
  to shutdown and to startup the PC each day.

- The SSDs gets trimmed once a week.

The used SSDs are more or less the cheapest available SSDs.
The vendor's Linux tool is very good, running

   gksudo ocz-ssd-utility &

it's easy to update the firmware, to get some special information and to
get much better SMART output, than provided by smartctl. Checking that
everything regarding the trimming is ok could be done by

   systemctl status fstrim.timer
   systemctl status fstrim.service
   journalctl -u fstrim.service

A 1,5 years old  TOSHIBA TL100 223.57 GiB did  cost 77,95 €.
A 1   year  old  TOSHIBA TL100 223.57 GiB did  cost 86,50 €.
A brand spanking new TOSHIBA TR200 223.57 GiB does cost 49,99 €.

A guess regarding the expected lifespan, based upon the health status
reported by the ocz-ssd-utility.

For the brand spanking new it's: 100%
For the 1   year  old it's:   88%
For the 1,5 years old it's:   65%

The expected lifespan might be around >= 3 years. The lifespan of my
last HDDs for the same kind of usage was around >= 7 years.

An unimportant drawback is usage with "vintage" installs.

My everyday Linux is an Arch Linux install. I'm using syslinux, not
grub, so to avoid chainloading, the Arch Linux install contains the
kernels of all other installs, too. Apart from Arch Linux, lets take a
look at two other Linux installs. The current up-to-date Ubuntu (server
image) 16.04.5 LTS install and the "vintage" Ubuntu 12.10 (Xubuntu or
Ubuntu Studio) install. All three installs support ext4 and are
installed on ext4 partitions.

Arch Linux was "cp -ai from_the_oldest_TL100 to_the_new_TR200", I
removed the boot flag from the original Arch Linux partition and added
it to the new Arch Linux copy and run "extlinux --install ...", to
install the bootloader. The two Ubuntu installs remain on a TL100 drive.

[rocketmouse@archlinux ~]$ grep PRETTY/mnt/moonstudio/etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS"
[rocketmouse@archlinux ~]$ grep archlinux /mnt/moonstudio/etc/fstab
#dev/sda9   /mnt/archlinux ext4   
defaults,relatime 0 2
/dev/sdc1   /mnt/archlinux ext4   
defaults,relatime 0 2
/mnt/archlinux/.boot/ubuntu_moonstudio/boot /boot  none   bind  
0 0

Remember, the Ubuntu kernels are on the Arch Linux partition. To mount
Arch Linux and to bind to /boot makes sense, to be able to upgrade a
kernel. This works without issues for Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS and IIRC it
also worked without issues for the "vintage" Ubuntu 12.10 (EOL May 16,
2014), when the Arch Linux install was on the oldest TL100. After the
migration of the Arch Linux install to the new SSD it still works
for Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS, but fails for the "vintage" Ubuntu 12.10. I get
a message that there should be a serious damage on the Arch Linux file
system, that can't be repaired, a newer version of ext4 is required or
fsck.ext4 or whatsoever. I don't care, I simply commented mounting
archlinux and to bind to /boot out in the "vintage" Ubuntu 12.10's
fstab.

Résumé

If the SSDs will last for >= 3 years it's ok for me. Since I didn't do
any troubleshooting regarding the issue with the "vintage" install, you
could assume that I don't care much about it. Even if it's said that due
to a missing cache those SSDs should be more or less the slowest SSDs on
the market they are unbelievable fast, absolutely fast enough regarding
my needs. To claim that they are slow is like claiming that a 290 km/h
fast car is disgusting slow, since all other cars of this kind are
usually 355 km/h fast. The fuel consumption might be much more
important. All SSDs need less current, than a HDD do, this could make a
big difference, especially for portable computers. I don't know if a so
called "slow" SSD in the end needs less current, than a "fast" SSD, but
I don't care, if a SSD is fast or faster, since I unlikely would notice
the difference.

Since I have long time experiences using HHDs I notice first 

Re: [xubuntu-users] 18.04.1 Point Release Testing

[Ralf Mardorf]

>On Sat, 2018-08-04 at 12:36 -0400, Art wrote:
>> How do I learn about such changes BEFORE they happen??  

A misunderstanding, the release notes are helpful to avoid it happening
by installing the new release, but...

yes, to know about such changes before they are done, requires to follow
the Ubuntu development. To become aware of other changes, it even
requires to stay close to upstream by e.g. using a rolling release
model distro.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] 18.04.1 Point Release Testing

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 3 Aug 2018 20:51:58 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>Don't get me wrong, I dropped Xfce a long time ago. I dislike it. Since
>I've got the skills and the time to set up what I need, to follow
>upstream of a WM, the desired panels etc., instead of the need to stay
>with a LTS only, I could get in contact with developers, of those apps,
>that are very important to me.

That I dislike Xfce as an environment, doesn't mean that for my
self-made environment some parts of Xfce aren't useful. We have got a
choice, we could install Ubuntu from the server image and install
whatever WM we like, install what ever we like from Xfce and replace
what ever we dislike by something else, let alone that my daily used
distro Arch Linux supports this strategy much better, than a minimal
Ubuntu install does. I don't know what is the best approach regarding
your needs, skills and available time, but there are without
doubts options to customize your environment to your needs.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Off topic, suggestions for light weight linux OS

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 15 Jul 2018 16:26:17 +1200, chris wrote:
>On 15/07/18 15:14, Art wrote:
>> I need some help deciding which linux distro to install. It's a
>> special project which needs the following:
>> 
>> Must run directly from a usb or sd card
>> Must support gpg for strong encryption (gpg)
>> Must be light weight and fast loading*
>> Must offer an encrypted home folder option
>> Must store unencrypted files securely if needed, can't be a 'live'
>> usb/sd** Must load FAST
>> Must support wireless
>> Must be secure, high security is a plus
>> Prefer xfce, not mandatory
>> Prefer long life cycle, such as Ubuntu's LTS
>> Prefer no frills
>> Prefer Xubuntu, since it's what I use***
>> 
>> *only needs to do firefox, thunderbird and an IRC client (non
>> browser type) **unless persistence is enabeled
>> ***I'm not sure Xubuntu can be made light weight enough to load fast
>> 
>> This is for family and friends to keep in touch and to store
>> sensitive information on and to send encrypted emails. In a
>> nutshell, the family members that used to call me 'paranoid' because
>> I used linux have seen the light. Two of them have been compromised
>> and have demonstrated that they want to have secure installs (by
>> their actions, not just their words) for comms with family and
>> friends. One family member had a high security employer maintained
>> computer that was heavily bogged down with firewalls and antivirus
>> software! The special linux installs WILL NOT be their primary
>> computers (for the time being), so the linux installs will be
>> basically 'single' purpose.
>> 
>> Any suggestions??
>> 
>> TY.
>> 
>>   
>manjero xfce4

As an Arch Linux user and somebody who has got an Ubuntu install to
help Linux novices, too, I strongly advice against Manjaro, since it's
an Arch Linux derivative. Manjaro claims that a "a user-friendly
installer is provided" [1], 혁헵헲헿헲 헶혀 헻헼 헰헹헮헶헺 혁헮헵혁 헶혁 헶혀 혂혀헲헿-헳헿헶헲헻헱헹혆
혁헼 혂혀헲 헼헿 헺헮헶헻혁헮헶헻, let alone that it is a "rolling release" [1].
However, most important is Arch's "User centrality

Whereas many GNU/Linux distributions attempt to be more user-friendly,
Arch Linux has always been, and shall always remain user-centric. The
distribution is intended to fill the needs of those contributing to it,
rather than trying to appeal to as many users as possible. It is
targeted at the proficient GNU/Linux user, or anyone with a
do-it-yourself attitude who is willing to read the documentation, and
solve their own problems" [2].

While for my needs Arch Linux is the best distro and while I dislike
Tails and also dislike GNOME and even while it doesn't fit to the OP's
listed notes completely, I recommend to test Tails.

"Tails is a live operating system that you can start on almost any
computer from a USB stick or a DVD.

It aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity, and helps you to:

use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship;
all connections to the Internet are forced to go through the Tor
network; leave no trace on the computer you are using unless you
ask it explicitly; use state-of-the-art cryptographic tools to
encrypt your files, emails and instant messaging" [3].

"The Tor Project has provided financial support for its development.
Tails has also received funding from the Debian Project, Mozilla, and
the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Barton Gellman have each said that
Tails was an important tool they used in their work with National
Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden" [4].

Since upstream of Tails is Debian, the same as for Ubuntu flavours,
users later could migrate to an Ubuntu flavour without running into too
many issues, since the user is already used to the package management
and a similar distro's policy.

[1] http://manjaro.github.io/about/
[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux#User_centrality
[3] https://tails.boum.org/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tails_(operating_system)#History


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Re: [xubuntu-users] magic processes

[Ralf Mardorf]

PS: As already pointed out by another subscriber, some processes, such
as e.g. GFVS activity is pushed by something trivial, the trash icon of
your file manager might be the cause you need GVFS running. You can't
blame systemd for the way shallow programmed file managers work.
Systemd has got nothing to do with it.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] magic processes

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2018 15:08:14 -0700, Cody Smith wrote:
>Those are important processes, 
>
>Gvfs is a filesystem mounting daemon from Gnome

For a lot of users GVFS is an absolutely unneeded process, only good to
kill external green drives by causing it to spin up right each time it
spin down. Since there are insane hard dependencies to packages, that
are absolutely useless for some users, such as GVFS or pulseaudio, I
recommend to install dummy packages to fulfil those dependencies.

I for example mount, list, remove, copy etc. from command line and I'm
using a green external drive, so GVFS is useless for me and apart from
this, it harms the green drive. I'm using plain ALSA or the jackd sound
server, so pulseaudio is useless for me and apart from this it's
counter-productive in a real-time audio context. Nowadays it might be
possible to stop pulseaudio, but why installing something just to
execute a command to stop it? I'm using syslinux from my Arch Linux
install on the same machine, so any boot loader installed by the Ubuntu
install is useless. To get rid of the bootloader package, a dummy
package not necessarily always is required, but unfortunately sometimes
it is.

A dummy package could be build by using
https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/equivs ,
http://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/install/blocking-deb-dependencies.html .

[weremouse@moonstudio dummies]$ lsb_release -a
LSB Version:
core-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-amd64:core-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-noarch:security-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-amd64:security-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-noarch
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS
Release:16.04
Codename:   xenial
[weremouse@moonstudio dummies]$ ls
grub-pc  grub-pc_07-13-moonstudio_all.deb  gvfs  gvfs_07-13-moonstudio_all.deb  
pulseaudio  pulseaudio_07-13-moonstudio_all.deb
[weremouse@moonstudio dummies]$ cat gvfs
Priority: optional
Standards-Version: 3.9.2

Package: gvfs
Version: 2016:07-13-moonstudio
Maintainer: Weremouse 
Architecture: all
Description: Dummy package

Another way to get executables clear away is using dpkg-divert. It's
part of the dpkg package. I used dpkg-divert to rename grub-mkconfig
and update-grub.

dpkg-divert --add --rename --divert /usr/bin/new_name /usr/bin/original_name

Even if I ever should use GRUB2 from Ubuntu, I still would
edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg manually. It saves a lot of time, if during an
upgrade no new /boot/grub/grub.cfg is generated, let alone that the
only way to get a slim /boot/grub/grub.cfg is to manually edit it.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] 18.04 destroying my M.2 SSD

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 14 Jun 2018 17:06:40 -0400, Daniel Wastak wrote:
>UUID=[Your blkid here] /  ext4noatime,errors=remount-ro

I'm using "noatime" for partitions used to record realtime audio, but
for anything else I stay with the default "relatime" for good reasons,
see the mount manpage.

[weremouse@moonstudio ~]$ lsb_release -d; man mount | grep 'relatime' -A2 | 
tail -11 | head -3
Description:Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS
   relatime
  Update inode access times relative to modify or change time.  
Access time is only updated if the previous access time was earlier than the 
current modify  or  change  time.
  (Similar to noatime, but it doesn't break mutt or other 
applications that need to know if a file has been read since the last time it 
was modified.)

I recommend to take a look at the Arch Wiki. I'm running Ubuntu 16.04.4
in a systemd-nspawn container, actually the "host" is running Arch,
however, Ubuntu does use systemd, too, so the hints regarding periodic
vs continuous TRIM should apply to Ubuntu, too.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_State_Drive

[root@archlinux rocketmouse]# lsb_release -d; systemctl status fstrim.timer
Description:Arch Linux
● fstrim.timer - Discard unused blocks once a week
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/fstrim.timer; enabled; vendor 
preset: disabled)
   Active: active (waiting) since Fri 2018-06-15 06:12:19 CEST; 45min ago
  Trigger: Mon 2018-06-18 00:00:00 CEST; 2 days left
 Docs: man:fstrim

Jun 15 06:12:19 archlinux systemd[1]: Started Discard unused blocks once a week.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Xubuntu 17.10.1 for Virtualbox to run Windows10

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 11 Mar 2018 21:26:19 +0100, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
>And, yes, of course a SSD makes things massively better for any VM.

That's the whole point. The reason I'm using vbox with QCOW instead of
VDI was the plan to migrate from vbox to KVM. As a side joke, it would
require QCOW2 or RAW to migrate directly, however, while on my old
machine SSD under SATA2 wasn't that much of an enhancement, it became a
pleasure when migrating to my new SATA3 machine ;). Indeed, vbox still
has got disadvantages, KVM unlikely does has got, but IMO it's no worse
the hassle to prefer a less user friendly VM over vbox, unless there
should be a really, really good reason to do this. Regarding
performance the bottleneck were HDDs as well as SDD drives run under
SATA2 instead of SATA3. Once you are using SATA3 and SSDs there is no
performance issue. Just for very, very specific usage, vbox is utter
crap and it's really worse to consider to migrate to a VM that
requieres much more maintenance. YMMV!


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Xubuntu 17.10.1 for Virtualbox to run Windows10

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 11 Mar 2018 20:47:11 +0100, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
>On Sun, 11 Mar 2018 15:35:28 +0100
>Teach  wrote:
>>  It is recommended to run windows 10 in Virtualbox under Xubuntu
>> 17.10 *Virtualbox or VMWare?*  
>
>Just for the record, Virtualbox is user-friendly but not very fast.  If
>you need your Windows VM to be performant you probably want to use
>another hypervisor (such as KVM with virt-manager, or perhaps VMWare).

Pff, I'm running Windows 7 in Virtualbox using the slower QCOW instead
of vbox's defaoult VDI from a SSD. If there should be any performance
issues consider to boot with  nokaiser  or  nopti. Yes, using vbox with
a HDD is a PITA, but when using a SSD there should be no performance
issues. However, as of rencently I expereinced some performance issues,
too, but I didn't run vbox with page-table isolation disabled, to
compare if PTI is really the culprit.

IIRC current *buntu kernels provide the "nokaiser" boot option, for my
Arch Linux kernels I'm using the newer "nopti" boot option.

"Normal" boot:

[rocketmouse@archlinux ~]$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/*
Mitigation: PTI
Mitigation: __user pointer sanitization
Mitigation: Full generic retpoline

When booting with "nopti".

[rocketmouse@archlinux ~]$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/*
Vulnerable
Mitigation: __user pointer sanitization
Mitigation: Full generic retpoline

Regards,
Ralf



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Re: [xubuntu-users] From Ubuntu 17.10 to Xubuntu 17.10

[Ralf Mardorf]

PS: https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=xubuntu=names


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Re: [xubuntu-users] From Ubuntu 17.10 to Xubuntu 17.10

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 24 Feb 2018 16:21:37 +, Eric Curtin wrote:
>On 24 February 2018 at 14:55, Paul Rijke  wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Does anyone has an migration manual or command to migrate from
>> Ubuntu 17.10 to Xubuntu 17.10 (without reinstall)
>>
>> Thank you
>> Paul
>
>Hi Paul,
>
>Don't have a manual. but just install "xfce4" via apt and see how you
>go... Some other xfce packages on my xubuntu 16.04 machine. Some of
>these may just be dependancies of xfce4:
>
> [snip]

Hi,

installng Xfce4 by a meta-package is not the same as migrating to
Xubuntu by another meta-package, since

https://packages.ubuntu.com/artful/xfce4

vs

https://packages.ubuntu.com/artful/xubuntu-desktop

Regards,
Ralf


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Qt apps don't follow the GTK+ theme

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 28 Oct 2017 12:15:12 -0200, Teresa e Junior wrote:
>Em 28/10/2017 02:27, Ralf Mardorf escreveu:
>> If it doesn't work with installed
>> https://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/qt5-style-plugins , you could try
>> to find a Qt5 theme, that comes close to your desired theme, by using
>> https://sourceforge.net/projects/qt5ct/ .  
>
>qt5-style-plugins worked, thank you! But I guess it doesn't come 
>pre-installed in Xubuntu, according to 
>http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/17.10/release/xubuntu-17.10-desktop-amd64.manifest
>
>I'm opening a bug report against xubuntu-default-settings (which has 
>/etc/skel/.config/Trolltech.conf and sets QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2).

You are welcome,

next time please reply to the mailing list only and post a link to the
bug report.

FWIW the variable QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2 should be required by
qt5-style-plugins.

Regards,
Ralf


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Re: [xubuntu-users] System slow, multiple thunar processes running

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 7 Sep 2017 06:38:25 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>what does swap show?

IOW how much swap, if any is used.

If swap is used during a performance slow down, test your drives by
running

for i in $(smartctl --scan|awk '{ print $1}');do sudo smartctl -HA $i;done


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Re: [xubuntu-users] System slow, multiple thunar processes running

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 6 Sep 2017 16:21:12 -0700, John R. Sowden wrote:
>Thanks for the follow up. Most of my machines have 2GB RAM.  I didn't 
>realize it, but when I ran free -m, I found there is only 1GB on this 
>machine.  I think you're right.  Feature/bloat creep?

Hi,

you are guessing based on what evidence/evidences?

If you run

  free -m

or

  top

what does swap show?

If you are running

  top

then sort by memory, is memory really that much needed by bloated apps?

Push X to see by what top does sort, push Shift+M to sort by memory.

If you run

  df -ht tmpfs

is there enough tmpfs available?

If tmpfs should be full

  ls $(df -t tmpfs | awk '{ print $6}' | grep -v Mounted)

shows what is in tmpfs.

Regards,
Ralf


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Re: [xubuntu-users] System slow, multiple thunar processes running

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 2017-09-03 at 08:55 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> I stopped my openbox session and booted xfce4.

*lol* I logged out and logged in without rebooting ;).


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Re: [xubuntu-users] System slow, multiple thunar processes running

[Ralf Mardorf]

Next time please without line wrapping and grep alias.

john@sentry35:~$  ps aux|head -1;ps aux|grep thunar|grep -v grep\ thunar
USER   PID %CPU %MEMVSZ   RSS TTY  STAT START   TIME COMMAND
john 11837  0.0  1.3  45556 13496 ?Sl   10:15   0:00 thunar 
/home/john/Desktop/Old Firefox 
Data/xb9b6md2.default-1445035987460/bookmarkbackups/bookmarks-2016-06-22_479_smiwWhNvqSGFJpzSMHxBTQ==.jsonlz4
john 11838  0.0  1.5  61948 15372 ?Rl   10:15   0:00 thunar 
/home/john/Desktop/Old Firefox 
Data/xb9b6md2.default-1445035987460/bookmarkbackups/bookmarks-2016-06-22_479_smiwWhNvqSGFJpzSMHxBTQ==.jsonlz4
john 11840  0.0  1.3  61948 13320 ?Rl   10:15   0:00 thunar 
/home/john/Desktop/Old Firefox 
Data/xb9b6md2.default-1445035987460/bookmarkbackups/bookmarks-2016-06-22_479_smiwWhNvqSGFJpzSMHxBTQ==.jsonlz4
john 11842  0.0  1.2  45556 13188 ?Sl   10:15   0:00 thunar 
/home/john/Desktop/Old Firefox 
Data/xb9b6md2.default-1445035987460/bookmarkbackups/bookmarks-2016-06-22_479_smiwWhNvqSGFJpzSMHxBTQ==.jsonlz4

I doubt that 0.0% CPU usage and 5.3% MEM usage are the cause for the
bad performance.

How did you sort when running top?

After running top push x to highlight the column you are currently
sorting by, then push Shift+M to sort by memory and after that Shift+P
to sort by CPU usage. This at least should work with a default "classic"
top.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] left Alt key not working in xubuntu 16.04 (mapped to some GUI volume control instead)

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 28 Aug 2017 04:53:07 + (UTC), Richard Fromm wrote:
>I hope this cross posting isn't considered poor etiquette.

Don't worry, it isn't. Asking the same question on several forums about
something existential is ok. If the issue is solved, you just need to
provide the solution everywhere you ask for help.

However, since it's really important for you I wonder that you didn't
find how to get rid of the issue by using a search engine. In emergency
situations I'm using Google, since even noobish search terms, in this
case e.g. "xfce shortcuts" should lead to the desired information.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/44643/xfce-4-change-global-keyboard-shortcuts
https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=8860

 


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Re: [xubuntu-users] How to get the right information about a "crash"

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 24 Jul 2017 20:03:41 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>And perhaps this workaround helps:
>
>https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/issues/580#issuecomment-6
>8306494

Oops, the link is broken, it should red

https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/issues/580#issuecomment-68306494




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Re: [xubuntu-users] How to get the right information about a "crash"

[Ralf Mardorf]

I should explain the command I mentioned.

There are Xorg log files in /var/log.

  [weremouse@moonstudio ~]$ ls -hl /var/log/Xorg*
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 599 Jul 17 22:58 /var/log/Xorg.0.log
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 599 Jul 17 22:58 /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 29K Sep 10  2015 /var/log/Xorg.1.log
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 29K Sep  9  2015 /var/log/Xorg.1.log.old

  [weremouse@moonstudio ~]$ man grep | grep DESCRIPTION -A1
  DESCRIPTION
 grep searches the named input FILEs for lines containing a match
 to the given PATTERN. [snip]

The "EE" is more or less unique for Xorg log files and a starting point
to find errors in those log files. IOW

  grep EE /var/log/Xorg*log*

does search for entries containing "EE" in all Xorg log files, since
the asterisks are wildcards.

  grep EE /var/log/Xorg*log* > /tmp/xorglog.txt

">" redirects the standard output to a file.

Before you post the output, read it, even if you shouldn't understand it.

1. A log file could contain private data.
   Unlikely a Xorg log file contains such data, but...
2. ...you could google possible error messages and find hints, how to
   solve the issue.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] How to get the right information about a "crash"

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 17 Jul 2017 20:33:29 +0200, Willem Hobers wrote:
>I assume that my error is sent to someone, somewhere.

If you are using some tool to report issues, e.g. Apport, carefully
learn how to use this tool and how to avoid privacy risks.

"Apport collects potentially sensitive data, such as core dumps, stack
traces, and log files. They can contain passwords, credit card numbers,
serial numbers, and other private material. -
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport


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Re: [xubuntu-users] The Devil's Advocate

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2017 19:51:46 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>On Wed, 12 Jul 2017 10:33:09 +0100, Joao Monteiro wrote:  
>>- CAD wise, linux is still useless
>
>I can't speak about the software, but at least some people are
>satisfied with Linux for CAT.  
  ^^^ *lol*
Not a joke, just a typo.

> The real-time patches seem to work. Much
>likely it's the same as for pro-audio, which is my domain. How much
>MIDI jitter I get depends less on a patched real-time kernel, but
>much more on the hardware


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Re: [xubuntu-users] The Devil's Advocate

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2017 10:33:09 +0100, Joao Monteiro wrote:
>- CAD wise, linux is still useless

I can't speak about the software, but at least some people are
satisfied with Linux for CAT. The real-time patches seem to work. Much
likely it's the same as for pro-audio, which is my domain. How much
MIDI jitter I get depends less on a patched real-time kernel, but
much more on the hardware.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] The Devil's Advocate

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

while it's a good idea to open a new thread, instead of becoming
off-topic for another thread, I guess it's not useful to continue this
discussion. At least I've said what I wanted to contribute to this
discussion.

Regards,
Ralf

PS:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/xubuntu-users/2017-July/010231.html


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Rookie question on backups

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2017 06:16:19 +0100, Joao Monteiro wrote:
>True. And yet, in my personal experience, when there is a really
>urgent cry for help, it usually gets answered pretty quicker than I'd
>expect. You don't get that in microsoft land.

In the context of this discussion "operating system" is for the
operating system including all kinds off user space software. "Linux"
is not only for the kernel and "Windows, Apple, Microsoft" not only for
those vendors and this product. We use the terms in place of everything
that is used on e.g. a Windows or e.g. a Linux platform. How good the
help you get is depends on the domain, used software, chosen forum or
(paid) support. Linux doesn't come per se with good gratis support and
proprietary software for proprietary operating systems doesn't come per
se with less good, expensive support. Those generalizations are
nonsense. All those comparisons of pros and cons fail because of wrong
assumptions.


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Re: [xubuntu-users] Rookie question on backups

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2017 06:58:34 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>If it takes too much time to learn how to use forks and knives, how to
>drive a car, you need to eat without using forks and knives, without
 you need to live^
>driving a car.

OTOH you shouldn't eat while driving :D.

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Re: [xubuntu-users] Linux & Usability (was: Re: Update failure / disk full error)

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 7 Jul 2017 07:26:27 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>If taking a look at Ubuntu Wiki and help pages is too much, to get rid
>of a stuffed boot partition and release upgrades should be to
>complicated, than at least the latter is an argument not to make the
>distro more user-friendly, but for the user, to chose another distro...

...or better to buy computers with pre-installed proprietary operating
systems. I'm not aware of a distro that fits to the needs of such users.


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