Re: Circumventing keyboard problem on Lenovo R64
i Ricard, > It has a keyboard failure - the "h" key is intermittent and my primary > account is "Richard" ;/ [ I presume you know tat tis kind of failure can often (sadly not always) be fixed by cleaning. ] > I have no problem logging in as root. > > Two primary questions: > 1. is there someway that I can use a USB connected keyboard >as workaround while root? I can't tink of any reason wy tat wouldn't "just work". ave you tried? > 2. is there some way to switch from "root" to "Richard" without >having to type to the pop-up that shows when using >System->Logout... ? Probably, and tat probably depends on wat you mean by "switc" and on te kind of "display manager" you're using (many of tem give you a list of users from wic you can select by clicking). You can also (as root) cange your user's name to remove tat pesky `` letter. Stefan
Printer recommendations for Debian (was: Just a simple question)
> I am great friend of "Brother" printers. They are cheap and reliable and they > are well supported by linux. Brother is offering deb packages for installing > or a linu script, which is downloading and installing these packages > automatically. Of course, that means you're at the mercy of Brother providing the drivers which work for your printer&computer and those deb packages typically aren't as nicely integrated into your Debian system as if they'd been packaged by Debian. E.g. do they provide armhf builds? Are they for Ubuntu? Debian? Stable? Testing? Sid? Oldstable? Do they risk messing up other parts of your config? Can you determine that they can't send confidential info back to Brother or act as puppets after they've been hacked because of an undisclosed security hole somewhere? If the drivers (print&scan) are not distributed in Debian's main archive, I can't recommend it. > Before you buy: Be sure, the manufacturer is sopporting linux. Where "supporting" means that it provides code as Free Software, so it can be adapted to any other OS and architecture you like. Luckily, nowadays most printers support the standard APIs for "driverless" printing and scanning, so the nasty proprietary code is confined to the actual printer, but you might still prefer to put that printer on a separate non-routed subnetwork so *you* control it rather than the manufacturer. Stefan
Re: hibernate area
> I have an NVME drive as well as a spinning-rust drive. I've got swap on the > spinning drive, but I'd like to put the hibernate area on the NVME. Is that > possible, to have swap on one and hibernate on another? Of course. Just tell your hibernation about the partition you want to use for it (it usually defaults to using the swap partition). IIRC the relevant file is `/etc/suspend.conf`. You may also need to rebuild your `/boot/initrd.img` file since it usually contains a copy of that information. Stefan
Re: Why are module parameters under /etc/modprobe.d not respected?
>> > options snd_hda_intel id=[HDMI,PCH] index=1,0 >> Might be you need to write with dashes, as the module files is named >> with dashes. > Thank you for the reply. However, dashes and underscores can be > interchanged in these files. FWIW: That's been my experience for the `modprobe` command argument, but *not* for the `modprobe.d` config files. Stefan
Re: MAC filter
> And if you're interested in only the interface name and MAC address, pipe
> that result to awk, so...
>
> ip -br l | awk '{print $1,$3}'
Note that the $3 won't always be a MAC address:
% ip --brief link
lo UNKNOWN00:00:00:00:00:00
[...]
tun0 UNKNOWN
%
- Stefan
Re: Laptop screen dim on battery power
> Lenovo R61 ThinkPad [...] > The screen automatically dims when AC removed. > System->Hardware->Power Management->OnBatteryPower->Display > "Reduce backlight brightness" & "Dim display when idle" unchecked > Any where else to look? I'd look at the BIOS settings. Stefan
Re: DEBIAN documentation: which 64 bit processors run current release?
> Will the OS linked to by https://www.debian.org/ run on all three? Yes, on all three, both using the i386 (which is being phased out) or the amd64 ports. Stefan
Re: Debian hardware: coping with Windows
> a flash drive or CD-ROM are suddenly nontrivial: I need > to get Debian's netinst using Windows, with whatever > browser is there, then write it with Windows tools. So: In the past I've successfully used https://www.goodbye-microsoft.com/ tho I'm not sure if it's still working (it doesn't look well-maintained), or if there's a better replacement. Stefan
Re: need help killing screen blanker
> - most of the desktop environments incorporate some element of screen > blanking for security (or power saving). There's also "burn in" for some monitor technologies. Stefan
Re: need help killing screen blanker
> S, what do I remove to absolutely, permanently disable the screen > blanker? And I mean no chance it can ever do that to me again. IME, this is a bit of an uphill battle, sadly. Basically, lots of tools can request/cause some kind of "screen blanking" so you can never be sure you've disabled all of them. Assuming you have a very vanilla installation, I'd look at the XFCE power manager settings where you can turn off the "display power management". Another option might be to set the "presentation mode" when the lathe is in use. You can do that manually by right-clicking on the power icon in the tray (assuming you have enabled "System tray icon" in the XFCE power manager settings) but that can be done programatically as well (I hope someone here can tell us how). Stefan
Re: tbird hot keys.
> Well, i'll be typing along, have most assuredly not done a ctl+a, but all > the text will high light, and the next keystroke deletes it all. Sometimes In Emacs we have the `view-lossage` command to see what keys have been received recently so you can find out which funny key sequence you accidentally typed. I'd hope other environments provide something similar. Stefan
Re: wait until swapoff is *actually* finished (it returns too early)?
> Not the right condition though… it’s absent there but still in use. > I am looking for the right thing to check… How 'bout checking the success of `cryptdisks_stop`? Stefan
Re: What tool(s) reports OS buss width, which processor present?
> cross-graded to amd64 only as far as running the amd64 kernel while > leaving all of the user land and the primary dpkg architecture as > i386. This is a supported configuration. It's not just "supported": it's basically the recommended setup for an i386 install, since the support for the i386 kernels is being EOL'd. Stefan
Re: edu-debian net-install autopartition /boot to 500MB
Ruslanas Gžibovskis [2024-08-21 16:16:54] wrote: > Just wondering if you have a problem when doing automated partitioning > during the debian deployment using edu-net-install iso? > > the problem I face is too small partition size, which is 500 MB, when a > simple kernel now has the size of 234 MB, each time it needs to regenerate 234MB? On this here machine it's more like 8MB for the kernel and 12MB for the initrd: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11557440 Dec 10 2023 initrd.img-6.1.0-13-amd64 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11668751 Jul 17 01:04 initrd.img-6.1.0-23-amd64 [...] -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8135584 Sep 29 2023 vmlinuz-6.1.0-13-amd64 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8173504 Jul 15 03:42 vmlinuz-6.1.0-23-amd64 FWIW, I have MODULES=dep COMPRESS=lzma in `/etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf`, which helps keep the size of the initrd in check. Stefan
Re: wait until swapoff is *actually* finished (it returns too early)?
> Just adding a “sleep” is no proper fix anyway, so the question > is, how to wait in a shell script until the swap device is > *really* swapoff’d when the syscall returns too early, and > (someone from the Linux kernel maintainers reading this?) should > I report the latter as a bug against the kernel? I'd file a bug report against the `mount` package (the one that provides `swapoff`). Stefan
Re: Firefox doesn't want to see Pulseaudio
>> I do have it installed. I also tried to install `libavcodec-extra` at >> some point (when I saw that `mp4a-latm` 🙂), but it made no difference >> of course. > You do not have AAC in the list of supported codecs and I am unsure if it is > due to alsa backend or due to a missed package (libfdk-aac2, > gstreamer1.0-fdkaac?). I'm not too worried about that for now. The lack of audio device was the more pressing concern 🙂 >>> Firefox exposes some codec info in about:support#media >> Thanks. When I "disable sandboxing" (by setting the three vars >> I mentioned in my answer to Tomas) it says: > I would revert these settings to defaults unless you have confirmed that > they are really necessary. Of course. >> Audio Backend: alsa > I have pulse-rust here. Same for me when things work 🙂 > If you still have motivation to debug i386 vs. amd64 issue, have you > tried to start firefox with a clean profile (--profile /some/dir)? Yup, no difference. > I would check if there are earlier messages related to audio backend, maybe > during firefox startup. Perhaps verbosity of some component should be > increased > > https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/xpcom/logging.html Thanks for the pointer! Stefan
Re: Cross-platform contacts program/app recommendations?
> You can use davical[1]. While it focuses on caldav, it also supports carddav. AFAIU there's also `radicale` (which, contrary to `davical` is also supported by FreedomBox). Stefan
Re: Firefox doesn't want to see Pulseaudio
I have not found the real source of the problem, but I have found out
why it worked on other machines and not on this one: some months
(years?) ago I made this i386 machine use `firefox-esr:amd64` because
Firefox tabs kept crashing (even for fairly simple pages).
[ I've been using the i386 version of `firefox-esr` without problem on
other machines, so I don't know why it crashed on this one, but
switching to the amd64 version did "solve" the problem back then.
My crystal ball told me that it was probably due to the relatively
large about of RAM (24G) available in this machine confusing Firefox
into the illusion that it can allocate a lot more memory than the i386
architecture really allows, and thus getting memory allocation
failure. ]
I had completely forgotten about this detail.
I have now switched back to `firefox-esr:i386` and the audio works again
(and it looks like the old problem I had with it has disappeared in the
mean time). I guess it's time I switch this machine to an amd64-only install.
Thank you all for your help.
Stefan
Stefan Monnier [2024-08-14 15:32:31] wrote:
> I have a machine here running a freshly updated and rebooted Debian
> testing where I can't get Firefox (more specifically `firefox-esr`) to
> use audio. E.g. I go to
>
> https://tekeye.uk/html/html5-video-test-page
>
> and none of the videos give me any audio output.
>
> I'm using pipewire and it generally works fine with other applications.
> E.g. `paplay` successfully plays my music files, and `chromium` on the
> same web page gives me audio output just fine.
>
> When I have `pavucontrol` open, I can "see" that Firefox does not appear
> in the "Playback" tab, contrary to `paplay` and `chromium`.
>
> When I try `firefox -P` and use a fresh new profile, the same
> problem occurs. Also I can see errors in the output such as:
>
> [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe182f6a100
> Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder
> found for audio/mp4a-latm: file
> ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164
> [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe182875800
> Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder
> found for audio/mp4a-latm: file
> ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164
> [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181797300
> Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder
> found for audio/mp4a-latm: file
> ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164
> [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181797300
> Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder
> found for video/avc: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164
> [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181797c00
> Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder
> found for audio/mp4a-latm: file
> ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164
> [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181796a00
> Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder
> found for audio/mp4a-latm: file
> ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164
> [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181797c00
> Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder
> found for video/avc: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164
> [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181796a00
> Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder
> found for video/avc: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164
> [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181797f00
> Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder
> found for audio/mp4a-latm: file
> ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164
> [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181797f00
> Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder
> found for video/avc: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164
> [Child 13905, BackgroundThreadPool #1] WARNING: 7fe1838484c0 OpenCubeb()
> failed to init cubeb: file ./dom/media/AudioStream.cpp:281
> [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe17c60cd00
> [OnMediaSinkAudioError]: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachine.cpp:4604
>
> The last two lines occur when I click on the "unmute" button in the
> video (on the above web page) which is muted by default.
>
> Any idea what might be going on and/or how to track it down further?
>
>
> Stefan
Re: Firefox doesn't want to see Pulseaudio
> If you have libavcodec installed (from "Recommends") then it might be some > testing issue. There is no problem in bookworm. I do have it installed. I also tried to install `libavcodec-extra` at some point (when I saw that `mp4a-latm` 🙂), but it made no difference of course. > Firefox exposes some codec info in about:support#media Thanks. When I "disable sandboxing" (by setting the three vars I mentioned in my answer to Tomas) it says: Audio Backend: alsa Max Channels: 0 Preferred Sample Rate: 44100 Roundtrip latency (standard deviation): ... Codec Support Information: VP8 SW VP9 SW AV1 SW Theora SW FLAC SW MP3 SW Opus SW Vorbis SW Wave SW with no input nor output devices. So it looks like the codecs are found in that case, but the audio backend is wrong (it should be Pulse, AFAIK) and the max channels shows that there's really no output. If I leave the sandboxing options at their default setting, then I get a similar result except that the list of codecs is empty. Stefan
Re: Firefox doesn't want to see Pulseaudio
>> I have no idea what sandbox settings you're referring to. >> How/where can I find those to "tinker" with? > [1a] also: about:config -> security.sandbox.* Hmm... I set both `security.sandbox.socket.process.level` and `security.sandbox.content.level` to 0 as well as `media.cubeb.sandbox` to false (and restarted Firefox) but it didn't help. My current test is to open firefox file:///my/music/storage/ and click on an Ogg file. [Child 17314, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: 7f92bdd47ee0 OpenCubeb() failed to init cubeb: file ./dom/media/AudioStream.cpp:281 [Child 17314, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7f92beb9cf00 [OnMediaSinkAudioError]: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachine.cpp:4604 [Child 17314, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7f92beb9cf00 Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_MEDIASINK_ERR (0x806e000b) - OnMediaSinkAudioError: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164 - Stefan
Re: Firefox doesn't want to see Pulseaudio
>> Error no decoder found for audio/mp4a-latm > It relies on non-free AAC codec that you likely do not have installed. That's a side-issue: the web page I pointed to has various videos in various formats and none of them work (hence the error messages mentioning other "decoder not found" mime types). Stefan
Re: Firefox doesn't want to see Pulseaudio
> Aha -- so you are using pipewire's pulseaudio emulation? Yes. > Search engineering (hah) turns up some noises like this [1] which at > least suggest to tinker with sandbox settings. They might have painted > themselves again into a corner by not allowing some processes to see > some paths in the file system. Granted, this is just a thin thing to > go by, sorry. I have no idea what sandbox settings you're referring to. How/where can I find those to "tinker" with? Stefan
Re: Firefox doesn't want to see Pulseaudio
>> I have a machine here running a freshly updated and rebooted Debian >> testing where I can't get Firefox (more specifically `firefox-esr`) to >> use audio. > > Check if installing apulse helps. It's supposed to make obstinate apps like > Firefox act as though pulseaudio is installed, dead technology, which is not > needed when pipewire and wireplumber are working. Hmm... let's see. Hmm... no, didn't make a difference: after installing `apulse` the same `firefox -P` still behaves identically (with the same error messages), and so does `apulse firefox -P`. Stefan
Firefox doesn't want to see Pulseaudio
I have a machine here running a freshly updated and rebooted Debian testing where I can't get Firefox (more specifically `firefox-esr`) to use audio. E.g. I go to https://tekeye.uk/html/html5-video-test-page and none of the videos give me any audio output. I'm using pipewire and it generally works fine with other applications. E.g. `paplay` successfully plays my music files, and `chromium` on the same web page gives me audio output just fine. When I have `pavucontrol` open, I can "see" that Firefox does not appear in the "Playback" tab, contrary to `paplay` and `chromium`. When I try `firefox -P` and use a fresh new profile, the same problem occurs. Also I can see errors in the output such as: [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe182f6a100 Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder found for audio/mp4a-latm: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164 [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe182875800 Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder found for audio/mp4a-latm: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164 [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181797300 Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder found for audio/mp4a-latm: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164 [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181797300 Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder found for video/avc: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164 [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181797c00 Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder found for audio/mp4a-latm: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164 [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181796a00 Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder found for audio/mp4a-latm: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164 [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181797c00 Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder found for video/avc: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164 [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181796a00 Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder found for video/avc: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164 [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181797f00 Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder found for audio/mp4a-latm: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164 [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe181797f00 Decode error: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_FATAL_ERR (0x806e0005) - Error no decoder found for video/avc: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachineBase.cpp:164 [Child 13905, BackgroundThreadPool #1] WARNING: 7fe1838484c0 OpenCubeb() failed to init cubeb: file ./dom/media/AudioStream.cpp:281 [Child 13905, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7fe17c60cd00 [OnMediaSinkAudioError]: file ./dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachine.cpp:4604 The last two lines occur when I click on the "unmute" button in the video (on the above web page) which is muted by default. Any idea what might be going on and/or how to track it down further? Stefan
Re: stop using APT!
> Stop using apt, apt support for mysql is so poor! What does that mean? Stefan
Re: CrowdStrike and drivers (was Re: why reliable linux hasn't gained more market share?)
> - software updates that run as root (including Debian updates) > can run anything else as root So, maybe a more relevant discussion is: what will happen when a Debian stable security update comes with a "big blunder" that crashes the most machines in early boot? Admittedly, the wider variety of Debian installs might make the "most" above much less likely, but it's still something that can definitely happen. What does Debian do to try and avoid that, and what do *we* (Debian users) do to try and mitigate that? Stefan
Re: small font
> Compression reduces the size but it's proportionnal so don't negate the > extra html size. The global size will always be 4-10x. No, the compression is not proportional. HTML is naturally very redundant, and machine-generated HTML like the one seen in Richard's email tends to be excruciatingly redundant, so it compresses even much better than plain text. Plus the part of the plain/text that's in common with the text/html (i.e. the actual useful part) would usually be recognized as a redundancy, so all in all you'll typically get a much smaller size difference after compression. Of course, that's if compression takes place, which is not necessarily the case. In practice, for most emails like the ones exchanged on this mailing-list, the precise size of the message is largely irrelevant: even if multiplied by 10x, the cost of the actual content is lost in the noise of the rest of the protocol. Stefan
Re: Creating PDF/A from LaTeX source and from existing PDF
Hi Richard, I don't see any problem because I'm reading this mailing-list from a MUA that's mostly text-only and doesn't try to use variable-size fonts, but looking at the HTML you send I see: > style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"> repeated several times. I have no idea why your MUA puts it there, but I suspect that's the reason some of the readers here find your email's messages to be hard to read: your mail specifically asks for `font-size:small`. This might qualify as a bug in your MUA (it can make sense to require a small font for some parts of the message, but it seems this style applies to the whole message, which makes no sense), tho maybe it's due to some particularity of your configuration, or of the way you use your MUA's editor. Stefan
Re: how2 format a flash drive
> In the more general case, telemetry is not in itself > considered 'evil'. I consider it evil if it's opt-out rather than opt-in. Stefan
Re: How to use Wine, How to get Gecko to install and work
> As a general rule I am willing to accept RPMs, pacman ?? packages, and > .debs, when they are from the Distribution's own package libraries, or > hardware vendor supported, as otherwise I don't know the people providing > the package. I have this strange belief that when a developer supplies > a package to the Distribution owner for inclusion in their libraries, the > Distribution owner does some level of verification/validation that the > package plays nicely with the distribution and other applications. Maybe > even some security checking? I'm with you, here. AFAIK Debian packaging does not in and of itself come with any sort of "security checking", tho. So, if there are security benefits (personally, I do believe there are) they are mostly indirect result of the packaging process, e.g. in the presence of extra eyes, or in the need to investigate the details of the licensing, or the need to follow the rules about where files are placed, or in the avoidance of vendoring, or in the "slow" pace of stable releases, ... For that same reason, I try to stay away from things like Snap/Flatpak which seem to be a way to skip all that "process" and run effectively black-boxes, thereby preventing you access to the usual transparency benefits of Free Software. It's been a long time since I last used Wine (FWIW, it was to run the Windows version of Emacs, to try and reproduce a bug locally 🙂), but IIUC the software you intend to run via Wine will probably be what I'd usually describe as "proprietary crap" a.k.a black boxes, so it seems to be one of the cases where the use of Snap/Flatpak should not make things much worse. Stefan
Re: balenaEtcher
> I’ve been tryed to boot a flash usb of 4Gb with > balenaEtcher-1.19.-21-x64.AppImage and Parrot-home-4.4_i386.iso and gives > me the Error:(0, h.requestMetadata) is not a function Who/what gives you this error? When does it give you this error? Have you tried to ask your favorite search engine about "Error:(0, h.requestMetadata) is not a function"? Stefan
Re: How to use /etc/adjtime
>> Notice I wrote "sleep". I'm concerned about the suspend+wakeup case, >> not the case when you're booting up. >> [ I thought I'd made it abundantly clear. ] > I'm not a laptop person. I don't know how to fix laptop-specific issues. FWIW, the offending machine is a desktop. I `suspend` most of my machines, whether desktops or laptops. Only servers never sleep. > 1) You are using a laptop. It's not the case, but it shouldn't make any difference anyway. Feel free to assume it's the case. > 2) Your laptop's hardware clock drifts quite notably. Right. Tho, AFAICT the same holds (to a lesser extent) of most machines. > 3) At times, you perform a "sleep" or "suspend" or whatever it's called. > This period of not-running-but-not-shut-down-either lasts for long > enough that your clock drift becomes severe. At least severe enough that I'd like to reduce it. > 4) Apparently, the system clock does not advance while in this state. While suspended, the machine's CPU is completely off. Only the DRAM is still powered. [ BTW, I suspect the same problem shows up for "suspend to disk" a.k.a hibernate where the machine might be 100% turned off while sleeping, but it might go through slightly different routes in the code. ] > 5) After going from the not-running state to the running state, your > system clock is reinitialized from the hardware clock. Which is > not accurate enough for your purposes. Apparently, yes. I don't actually know how/who reads the RTC to set the system clock upon wakeup. Maybe `hwclock` is not involved at all, and maybe part of this happens directly in the kernel. > 6) After going from the not-running state to the running state, your > NTP daemon does not perform a clock synchronization soon enough for > your purposes. User programs have already begun to run. Or continue > to run? I have absolutely no idea what goes on here. Yes they just continue running "as if" the machine had never been turned off (to them, it's mostly as if the scheduler had given priority to other tasks for a *long* time). > Now, for some reason, you have become fixated on the /etc/adjtime file, Not at all. I only mention that file because that's the way this problem used to be handled during shutdown+reboot back in the SysV-init days using `/etc/init.d/hwclock.sh`. > It sounds like whatever least-bad solution you end up using is going to > depend on which NTP daemon you use, and will involve configuration > thereof. Actually, I think The Right Solution™ should be independent from any NTP daemon, since in order to avoid time warps you'd like to drift-adjust the RTC time before user-level processes (like the NTP daemon) are woken up. > It will not be something generic to adjtime_config(5) or > hwclock(8) or util-linux. It also won't be something generic to Debian > systems as a whole, because neither servers nor traditional desktop > computers have this issue. It's a laptop issue. Nowadays, there's not much difference between a desktop and a laptop (they all use the same power-saving tricks, they all support suspending the system, ...). The problem does not affect servers, admittedly. > David has said that chrony can do fancy things involving the hardware > clock. Maybe you should investigate that solution path. I'm trying to find out how to fix it Right, rather than how to work around the problem (I already know how to work around the problem). Fixing it right requires changing the code that reads the RTC time upon wakeup. In any case, thank you all for your help. Apparently none of you have the answer I'm looking for, but you did help me narrow down the scope and make more precise what I'm after. Indeed I see now that the time is read from RTC to set system time directly by the kernel in `kernel/time/timekeeping.c` and `drivers/rtc/class.c`. So The Right Solution™ apparently involves changes to the kernel. Stefan
Re: balenaEtcher
> I’ve been tryed to boot a flash usb with Parrot and balenaEtcher but gives > error is there another app for to boot a flash usb but not the rufus app? Despite some rumors, people here aren't any more clairvoyant than elsewhere. So you'll probably get better answers if you provide more details, such as the actual errors you see, the specific way you "flashed" the USB key, precisely what it is you flashed onto that key, what machine you're trying to boot, and/or how exactly you tried to boot with that flashed USB key. Stefan
Re: How to use /etc/adjtime
> Yeah, except... you're assuming a workflow that is not real or reliable. [...] >> It is if /etc/adjtime is set properly when you go to sleep. > You cannot assume that adjtime was updated the last time your system > stopped running, because your system might have stopped running due to > a crash, instead of a controlled shutdown. Notice I wrote "sleep". I'm concerned about the suspend+wakeup case, not the case when you're booting up. [ I thought I'd made it abundantly clear. ] Stefan
Re: How to use /etc/adjtime
John Hasler [2024-06-28 09:41:06] wrote: > Stefan writes: >> The question remains: how to make use of that info upon wakeup to >> adjust the "initial" time before NTP takes over. > hwclock -a can do this. Indeed, and my question can be thought of as asking how to run `hwclock -a` when we wake up (as well, as how to run `hwclock --systohc` just before suspend). But note that when we wake up ntpsec is already running, so I'm not sure `hwclock -a` could prove problematic. BTW, I noticed another instance of my original problem: in my original problem, after sleeping for many days, the time is off by many seconds and it stays that way for several minutes before ntpsec to decide to "step" the clock. But after sleeping a smaller amount of time, the time can be off by a small enough offset that ntpsec doesn't step the clock but slews it instead, so the clock stays off for an even longer period. Ideally, we'd like to avoid stepping the system clock at all: when waking up, the system clock should be (re)initialized right away to the drift-adjusted RTC clock time, so the user processes only see "a long sleep" rather than "a long sleep followed by a time warp". While my machine's RTC drift is particularly bad, I since then noticed that `journalctl| grep stepped` returns many entries on all my machines (save those that never sleep), so it's a really widespread problem. Stefan
Re: How to use /etc/adjtime
> The hardware clock has a time, which is loaded into the system clock > to initialize it. That's it. The only variable factor here is whether > the hardware clock's time is in UTC or some local time zone. > > You can't do anything with drift at this point, because you don't actually > know how long you were asleep. All you know is the current HW clock time. /etc/adjtime complements that info with the expected drift and the last time the RTC was adjusted to the presumably correct time (which you'd want to do every once in a while). So by comparing the RTC time to the last-adjustment time you get to know how much drift happened and you can correct this initial time estimate. > It's not like you can say "Oh, I was asleep for 7.5234 hours, so I need > to adjust the HW clock time forward by X seconds because I know it runs > a bit slow." That information is not available to you. It is if /etc/adjtime is set properly when you go to sleep. See `hwclock(8)` or `adjtime_config(5)`. Stefan
Re: How to use /etc/adjtime
> Do you really run ntp? You might already be running ntpsec, > its replacement. I call it ntp but yes, it's ntpsec. >> The /etc/adjtime is supposed to be there for such purposes but it seems >> to be mostly unused: I assume its "UTC" setting is respected but the >> first and second lines indicate it has not been updated since 2015 >> (i.e. when that Debian install was used in another machine). > You might find your clock drift in /var/lib/ntpsec/ntp.drift > or wherever /etc/ntpsec/ntp.conf specifies it. Oh, indeed, thanks. I had computed it manually from `journalctl | grep stepped` and it gave close enough results. The question remains: how to make use of that info upon wakeup to adjust the "initial" time before NTP takes over. > I don't know how to speed up correcting the clock as I use chrony, > but ntpsec may have similar directives available. Indeed, I could try and shorten the time before the NTP info takes precedence over the RTC-derived initial approximation (I haven't found any way to tell ntpsec to do that, short of limiting the maximum interval between pollings or maybe killing&restarting the deamon, both of which seem too crude for my sense of aesthetics), but I'm more interested in improving the initial approximation. Stefan
Re: How to use /etc/adjtime
> I think hwclock(8) has the info you need. On my system (yes, one of > those) there is an /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh which seems to take care > of that. No idea how the young'uns do it, though :-) AFAICT this `hwclock.sh` (which I do have) is not used (I'm using systemd) and even less so upon suspend/wakeup: it seems targeted at boot/shutdown. The hwclock(8) tells me how to use the `hwclock` command but not how to make other parts of the system run the `hwclock` command at the right time (or how to get a similar result without running that command, of course). Stefan
How to use /etc/adjtime
I have a machine whose RTC clock is drifting significantly and it is often suspended for several days. I run NTP so the drift I see when I wake the machine up gets fixed by "stepping" the clock after a while, but that can take a while and I'd like to improve this intermediate situation. The /etc/adjtime is supposed to be there for such purposes but it seems to be mostly unused: I assume its "UTC" setting is respected but the first and second lines indicate it has not been updated since 2015 (i.e. when that Debian install was used in another machine). I have two questions: - How can I get Debian to use this file when waking up the machine from suspend (which would presumably change the file by updating the first line's "last adjust time")? - How can I get `ntpd` to adjust the first line's "drift factor" when it steps the clock? The second question is less important (I can write the drift factor by hand, e.g. in case `ntpd` is not being told when the clock is (re)set based on the RTC, making it impossible for it to compute a drift factor). Stefan
Re: mounting external hard drive from rescue mode shell?
>> - Boot using the Grub on the X30's own HDD, and then ask Grub to boot >>the kernel+initrd found on the USB key (this is my favorite solution). > I think this is the path I should follow. It explicitly handles my immediate > problem and most likely satisfactorily handles issue(s) on other machine(s). > Where would I find relevant GRUB documentation? IIRC the main question is whether your Grub comes with support for USB storage. If it doesn't you're out of luck. If it does, it should be a small matter of typing set root=, linux / initrd / where those things can be completed with the help of TAB completion. But it may depend on what exactly you're booting from that disk, which may require specific arguments to be passed to the kernel. >> - Copy the USB key's kernel+initrd to the /boot partition on the X30's >>HDD and boot from that. > Can I copy the USB key's kernel+initrd to a currently empty partition and > then treat it in manner similar to USB key above? [goal being not to mess > with a currently functioning system ;] Yes. Stefan
[OFFTOPIC] Re: About dash as sh
> Do shells suffer UB? I always thought that was a C thing. UB is a standard concept when defining programming languages. Most if not all programming languages have some form of UB or another in some part of the spec. C is special w.r.t to UB in two ways: - UB is not relegated to corner cases that virtually never happen (like the UB recommended by Jeffrey for sh), as is usually the case. Instead almost all programs in actual use rely on UB during their normal execution and in many cases it's somewhere between hard and impossible to avoid. - Modern C compilers like to optimize code based on the assumption that UB never happens. The combination of the two makes it particularly entertaining. Stefan
Re: OT - list mail claimed to be "known" spam!
[ Sent directly to debian-user@lists. ] > FWIW, this reply goes to list because I expect high probability Stefan would > not > see it otherwise. Most mailing list posts flow through to me unimpeded. Not so > with Stefan's. AFAICT, every one of his is captured by Earthlink.net's "known > spam" folder. The only ways I can see them are via the web archive, and by > opening > webmail, so that I can extract them from "known spam". My crystal ball suggests it's because I [read and] send them via Gmane, and of course Gmane can't DKIM-sign my messages (and neither can my NNTP client). Stefan
Re: mounting external hard drive from rescue mode shell?
> Relevant laptop is so old I don't know if it can boot from a physical USB > device. I was suspecting that simplest thing would be copying suitable image > to hard drive and let GRUB earn its keep ;} Indeed my trusty old Thinkpad X30 doesn't boot from USB keys (tho in theory it can boot from a USB floppy reader), so I use one of two alternative options: - Boot using the Grub on the X30's own HDD, and then ask Grub to boot the kernel+initrd found on the USB key (this is my favorite solution). - Copy the USB key's kernel+initrd to the /boot partition on the X30's HDD and boot from that. - Take the HDD out of the X30 and connect it to my desktop via some HDD<->USB adapter. Then do what I need to do to it from the comfort of my desktop computer, typically using `chroot` along the way (this is the second best). Stefan
Re: mounting external hard drive from rescue mode shell?
> Rather than creating a customized Debian Live image, I install Debian onto > a USB flash drive or onto a 2.5" SATA SSD connected via a USB-SATA adapter > cable: +1 It's pretty easy to make a simple Debian install on some old USB key you have lying around and it comes really handy. Stefan
Re: System time/timezone, was Re: Maximum size .bash_aliases file
> Yes, I realise that. The times are being displayed by the gettys, > controlled by the /etc/issue format string. Jobs are being run > by cron, logs written by rsyslogd, and so on. And the term is … ? Maybe there simply isn't such a term. The subject is sufficiently complex/delicate that there can't be a term for every single situation. Stefan
Re: About dash as sh
> When the shell is using standard input and it invokes a command that > also uses standard input, the shell shall ensure that the standard > input file pointer points directly after the command it has read when > the command begins execution. > > But I consider this clause is misguided, it should apply only when the > input is a tty. And if it's not a tty, you get some kind of Undefined Behavior? I don't think I'd like that because I don't think the benefit would be worth the UB troubles. > Relying on it is a terrible idea. I'd tend to agree. Stefan
Re: RTC, was Re: System time/timezone
> If your system only boots one operating system, and never changes its > default time zone, then it makes no difference whether the RTC is set > to UTC or local time. The OS will use the same assumptions when reading > and writing to the RTC, so everything will remain correct. Of course, the famous exception is if your machine is OFF during the switch to/from DST. IIUC there are hacks in Windows to try and handle it "correctly", but I believe they can also misfire in some cases. Don't know if GNU/Linux bothers with it: it's just a lot simpler and more sane to use UTC so you never need to worry about it. And of course, NTP is your friend: several of my machines don't even have an RTC and I haven't really felt like they are missing something. Stefan
Re: System time/timezone, was Re: Maximum size .bash_aliases file
>> It's *theoretically* possible for some daemons to be configured to use >> a different time zone, or to be hard-coded to use UTC. I've never seen >> this, but it could be done. > In view of that, I think it's reasonable to drop the "default", > and go with "system time zone", ie the time zone that the system > clock it set to. Funny, because I think on the contrary that the word "default" is key: it conveys the information that this is just the time zone used by default when converting a time to a human readable form. You can drop "system" on the other hand, AFAIC. 🙂 Stefan
Re: CD/DVD is obsolete or deprecate at 2025?
> And some of the BIOSes of old PCs are not able to boot from USB... Indeed, tho I suspect those machines are 20 years old or more (at least, all my machines that are <20 years old support booting from a USB key drive, while of the two older machines I have (both 21 years old), one of them doesn't support booting from a USB key (tho it supposedly can boot from USB floppy)). Stefan
Re: CD/DVD is obsolete or deprecate at 2025?
>>> Is there a chance to change in next versions i.e. Debain 13 or other >>> versions an assembly specifically for a USB flash drive as primary >>> download? Do you think the time has come? When do you think this moment >>> will happen? >> AFAIK, all the so-called CD/DVD images work just fine when "burned" on >> a USB flash drive. So I think the question is whether it's time to >> change the doc to stop suggesting that those images should be burned >> onto optical media. > Just a question : why should we ditch the cd or dvd just because some guys > said that's it was obsolete or inferior to the usb keys et al ? AFAICT nobody in this thread suggested to ditch CD or DVD. Can we stick to the actual discussion, please? Stefan
Re: CD/DVD is obsolete or deprecate at 2025?
> No! Some of us want to keep using DVD and not be pushed away In which sense would it push you away. I'm not suggesting any change to the ISO files themselves. Only changes to the doc to clarify that these are images that are expected to be used on USB flash dirves (and they also work on CD/DVD, including virtual ones for VMs). The intention is to avoid confusing those users who intuitively skip the parts talking about CD/DVD images because they don't have a CD/DVD reader/writer (or don't want to use it). Stefan
Re: CD/DVD is obsolete or deprecate at 2025?
> Is there a chance to change in next versions i.e. Debain 13 or other > versions an assembly specifically for a USB flash drive as primary > download? Do you think the time has come? When do you think this moment > will happen? AFAIK, all the so-called CD/DVD images work just fine when "burned" on a USB flash drive. So I think the question is whether it's time to change the doc to stop suggesting that those images should be burned onto optical media. Stefan
Re: can't connect to eduroam due to SSL3 unsupported protocol
> Under Debian/unstable, I can't connect to eduroam due to the following > reason: AFAIK, while "the eduroam" looks like one thing it's just a bunch of local wifi networks, each one administered&managed mostly independently and with different configurations. By and large, if you can connect to eduroam at one place it's likely it'll also work elsewhere but it's not always the case. Stefan
Re: NVidia 340 video driver in Bookworm?
> In real life no one wants to care of it! Nvidia not, because this > costs money and the developers not, because this is Nvidia and > proprietrary (what is not quite correct, because the kernel-module, > which is the part, that can not be build, is open-source). Since you say it's "open source", then "anyone" should be allowed to update the code to adapt to the new kernel code. IOW *you* can fix it, or if you don't have the time/energy you may be able to find someone else to fix it (potentially paying them for it). Stefan
Re: Thinkpad T14 Gen 5, touchpad not detected
> I just installed Debian Testing on my new Thinkpad T14 Gen 5 and I found out > that the touchpad is not actually detected by the system. Maybe it's the same issue as the one posted very recently under the subject: Touchpad not detected by kernel on ThinkPad X13 Gen5 - Stefan
Re: What DE to replace GNOME with?
> while being on old-old-stable still (buster) and preparing for an > upgrade to bookworm, i noticed, that GNOME once again lost compatibility > to my preferred extensions, giving me a hard choice to either go on with > my outdated system as long as possible, or find a replacement and change > my ways of working. Not really an answer, just a side note: AFAIK, the concept of "DE" doesn't exist at a technical level. You *can* mix and match things from various "DE"s. There are occasional dependencies between components of "DE"s, but each one of them is a PITA which I think should be treated as a bug. Stefan
Re: "Repeaters", etc.
> I'd like to shop for such a device, but I don't know what it's called. I think it's called a "wireless bridge". Any device with a wifi card and (at least) an ethernet port can do that. So "any" wifi router will do the trick, as long as you can get it to run a firmware that's not hopelessly restricted. I'd recommend you look at the routers supported by OpenWRT. Of course, if you can do it with cables (ethernet/powerline/younameit) it's probably going to work better, but I guess you know that already. Stefan
Re: Solution for KVM via a cat 5 connection
> Has anyone had experience using a KVM setup (at least one HDMI and two USB > ports) and using cat 5/6/7 between user and the computer? I don’t need to > handle multiple computers or high-def video movies, just programming and > office work. I need a bit more distance from my computer which must stay in > a closet, and conventional KVM equipment won’t work. You can do it without KVM, but using another computer connected to your screen/keyboard/etc... E.g. use some cheap/small/silent local machine (e.g. Banana Pi) which you connect to your local devices (screen etc...), connect that machine to your "real" machine in the closet via ethernet, and then use either a remote X session or some other such "remote desktop" protocol to connect to the real machine in the closet. This setup can be described as a [thin client](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client) The advantage is that it's all standard components, can work over any network config, ... Stefan
Re: moving some packages back to bookworm stable
>> > # apt install -t=bookworm db-util db5.3-util libc-bin libc-dev-bin >> >> I can never remember exactly what `-t` really does, but I suspect you'll >> need things like >> >> apt install libc-bin/bookworm > > To install a single backported (or other release) package, > apt-get install packagename/releasename > > and to install a backported package plus dependencies which > are also from that specific release, use > apt-get -t releasename packagename But that's not the whole story of what `-t` does since the above does not explain why his attempt to use `-t` to downgrade some packages resulted in `apt` saying " is already the newest version". Stefan
Re: moving some packages back to bookworm stable
> I needed to install a version of sendmail from testing a while back to > test it. Downgrading Debian packages is not well supported, by and large. So installing `testing` packages into a `stable` install is manageable (tho it itself can bring trouble) but going back to `stable` afterwards tends to be a lot more complicated. Transitions like the t64 transition going on right now in `testing` make it yet more troublesome. I recommend the use of snapshots when you want to try such a thing with the intention of "going back" later. > # apt install -t=bookworm db-util db5.3-util libc-bin libc-dev-bin I can never remember exactly what `-t` really does, but I suspect you'll need things like apt install libc-bin/bookworm to state more explicitly what you want. Maybe you can do something like apt install $(apt-show-versions | sed -n 's|/testing.*|/stable|p') - Stefan
Re: Continuous integration with Debian virtual machines
> Anyone know a hosting service, like GitHub or GitLab, offering recent Debian > virtual machines to run tests ? I'd expect most of them do, but at least SourceHut does according to https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/compatibility.md#debian Stefan
Re: Debian bookwork / grub2 / LVM / RAID / dm-integrity fails to boot
> I found this [1], quoting: "I'd also like to share an issue I've > discovered: if /boot's partition is a LV, then there must not be a > raidintegrity LV anywhere before that LV inside the same VG. Otherwise, > update-grub will show an error (disk `lvmid/.../...' not found) and GRUB > cannot boot. So it's best if you put /boot into its own VG. (PS: Errors > like unknown node '..._rimage_0 can be ignored.)" Hmm... I've been using a "plain old partition" for /boot (with everything else in LVM) for "ever", originally because the boot loader was not able to read LVM, and later out of habit. I was thinking of finally moving /boot into an LV to make things simpler, but I see that it'd still be playing with fire (AFAICT booting off of LVM was still not supported by U-Boot either last time I checked). 🙁 Stefan
Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs
> If you have read permission on a directory but *not* execute permissions, > then the only thing you can do is read the contents of that directory -- > the filenames and their inode numbers. You cannot stat() the files, > so you can't see who owns them or even what kind of files they are. > Just their names. Never found a situation where this as useful. > If you have execute permission but *not* read permission on a directory, > then you can access the files within the directory, but only if you > already know their names. You can't read the directory to get their > names. This OTOH is very handy, making the filename into a kind of "passwd" to access the file's content. Stefan
Re: Markup in mail messages
>> Actually I've been tempted to teach my mail reader to transform HTML >> into some lightweight markup (yeah, you need a bit of heuristics for >> that ;-) -- say Org, but why not its poor sister Markdown. > Please don't settle for markdown. I would love a org filter! > org-mode just handles tabular data admirably :) Just beware that Org's code is generally written under the implicit assumption that the Org document is trusted, so if you try to reuse parts of Org's code to do the rendering be extra mindful of the potential for security holes. [ This applies to many other ELisp packages, of course; it's not exclusive to Org. ] Stefan
Re: Markup in mail messages
> When this sort of subject comes up (as it does, every so often), I wonder > why `text/markdown` isn't offered as a mime type for sending emails. FWIW, last time I tried to send `text/(x-)markdown` messages, I discovered that many "popular" MUAs do not display those at all (they treat them as attachments, for example), contrary to what the RFCs say they SHOULD do. 🙁 So, yes, I encourage you to send more of those, and if your recipients don't like the result, try and get them to complain to their MUA's authors (most of those MUAs are of course proprietary and are not very ... responsive, but that's all we can do). The stupidest case I bumped into is Github where replying by `plain/text` email lets you add comments to an issue, but `text/markdown` replies are simply sent to `/dev/null` even though Markdown is the standard format they use in the web interface. Stefan
Re: sudo echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward [was: How to run automatically a script as soon root login]
> $ su - > Password: > # echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward > # ^D > logout > $ > > I don't need no stinkin' sudo :-) And if you only have `sudo`, but not the root password, of course: % sudo zsh -l # echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward # ^D logout % 🙂 Stefan
Re: How to run automatically a script as soon root login
> You don't need to, but I definitely think he does. 🙂 ^^ [ Oh, bias, when will you leave me alone? ] Stefan
Re: How to run automatically a script as soon root login
>> > echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward >> This doesn't sound right. Maybe you should investigate why you're > No need to “investigate”, the answer is obvious: in You don't need to, but I definitely think he does. 🙂 Stefan
Re: How to run automatically a script as soon root login
> echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward > > work only if I'm root. It does not work using sudo. This doesn't sound right. Maybe you should investigate why you're seeing this behavior, rather than work around the problem. `sudo` *is* root. Stefan
Re: Lightweight Emacs for container?
> Is there some package, or a simple workaround, that will allow me to use > a basic Emacs without all the cruft? I think the usual answers look like: - Use Zile (or some other small Emacs-inspired editor). - Use Tramp (i.e. run Emacs outside the container and access the container's files as a kind of remote host). Stefan
Re: Zoom in the official repo is outdated
Jeffrey Walton [2024-04-24 20:13:57] wrote: > On Wed, Apr 24, 2024 at 7:13 PM Van Snyder wrote: > >> On Wed, 2024-04-24 at 16:42 -0300, Luiz Romário Santana Rios wrote: >> >> Hello, >> >> >> (Please cc me when replying as I'm not subscribed to the list) >> >> >> Earlier this month, I noticed I was no longer able to login to Zoom >> >> meetings using the client installed from the Debian repos. In order to >> >> join meetings, I had to uninstall it then install the flatpack Zoom package. >> >> >> I think it should either be updated or outright removed in favor of the >> >> flatpack version. What do you think? Should I report a bug? >> >> >> I was expected to use zoom for a meeting. The zoom app didn't work at all >> in Debian 10, completely refusing even to open a window. I at first started >> with the zoom support in Firefox, but it didn't have a button to select >> high resolution for the camera, so the meeting host asked me to run in the >> app. >> >> I re-opened the session on a different computer that is running Debian 12. >> The app worked OK on that computer. >> > > Related, if you control the venue, then you might consider using Jitsi. > Jitsi is open source, and it does not have the obscene terms of service > that companies like Google, Microsoft and Zoom push onto people using their > service. With Jitsi, your meeting data is yours. It is not used internally > for other products, and it is not shared with partners like the Big Tech > companies do. There's also BigBlueButton (more featureful than Jitsi, but apparently harder to install/setup/maintain) and I also heard good things about Galène https://galene.org/ (which is apparently the simplest to install/setup/maintain and the least demanding on the server). Stefan
Re: [OFFTOPIC] youtube-dl blocked?
> The site https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html > is blocked? Now that you got answers, a question: what made you post this here? AFAICT this has nothing to do with Debian (if you use Debian, you'd more naturally install that tool from `apt` which won't fetch it from Github). Stefan
Re: Subject: Glitchy sound in Steam games after hard drive upgrade
> I doubt the new drive is slower than the old drive: Overall, agreed. Tho AFAICT the new drive spins slower (5400rpm vs 7200rpm), so it has a slightly higher rotational latency. This means that in *some* cases it can be slower. Now, I have no idea whether that's the cause of the glitches. Stefan
Re: Debian non-free-firmware policy making OS misleading and Free Software unfriendly
>> > Do you have any suggestion as to which list would be better to contact? >> > Original: https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2024/04/msg00324.html >> Maybe `reportbug debian-installer`? > but perhaps without all the deception crap, unless you really mean > to impugn the developers' motives. Yup, better try to make the developers/maintainers your friends, so you may get them to do something with which they disagree just to make you happy, rather than refuse to do something out of spite, even tho they know it's right. Stefan
Re: Subject: Glitchy sound in Steam games after hard drive upgrade
> Recently I decided to upgrade its storage capacity, and replaced > its 500GB hard drive (which was pretty large at the time I bought > it) with a 4TB drive. I did an install from scratch using a > network install CD, then copied my /home partition (using rsync) > from the old drive. [...] > (Side question: is this an acceptable way to upgrade a hard drive?) It's acceptable enough that we'll keep talking to you. 🙂 Personally, assuming the 500GB drive was basically full, I suspect I'd have just done a `dd` copy of the 500GB drive to the new drive, followed by a quick `gparted` run to resize on-the-fly the partitions (in order to get access to the extra 3.5GB). > Everything works great with one exception: > when I fire up Portal the sound gets glitches about once a second. > This only happens with Steam games; I can play MP3s and videos > with mpv and the sound is perfect, as it is when watching YouTube > videos. If I swap the old drive back in everything is fine. I suspect the difference is that the Steam games keep your machine very busy whereas playing a video isn't nearly as demanding, so the machine ends up too busy to refill the sound buffer before its empty. As for why this happens with the new disk&install and not with the old disk&install, ... AFAICT it can be either due to the new install such as a difference in the configuration and/or installed software (e.g. one using pulseaudio and the other pipewire), or due to the new hardware, presumably because some operations are slower. Can you boot with both disks connected? If so, can you try to boot off of the 500GB and then use the /home from the 4TB drive (and vice versa)? I think you should be able to do that by booting to "rescue" where (after entering the root password) you'd do something like umount /home mount /dev/the/other/home/partition /home exit I'd tend to think that a modern 4TB drive should be no slower than a 500GB drive, no matter the operation, but maybe the new drive has a particularly small cache, or maybe it's shingled and the Steam game makes a fair amount of writes to the disk which ends up affecting the reads needed to fetch the next chunk of sound? Stefan
Re: Debian non-free-firmware policy making OS misleading and Free Software unfriendly
> Do you have any suggestion as to which list would be better to contact? > Original: https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2024/04/msg00324.html Maybe `reportbug debian-installer`? Stefan
Re: Debian non-free-firmware policy making OS misleading and Free Software unfriendly
> If Debian is going to continue promoting itself with those "Our Philosophy" > and "Why Debian" pages, there should at least be opt-ins during the > installation process of every Debian download, as well as prominent warnings > of the new policy on the download pages. Agreed. It should be easy to adjust the installation process with an extra step whether to include/install non-free-firmware or not. It's also an opportunity to raise awareness of the problem. Stefan
Re: LibreOffice removed from Debian
> Actually, if I understand correctly, LibreOffice will really be > removed on some architectures (armhf ppc64el s390x mips64el riscv64). 🙁 Stefan
Re: e1000e driver Network Card Detected Hardware Unit Hang
> It has been known to happen that drivers implement workarounds for issues > in the hardware itself, so that hardware bugs do not get tripped (or are > tripped less often). 🙂 You make it sound like it's a rare occurrence, but it's actually quite common. Most of it is discrete so you'll rarely be exposed to it, but `grep bugs /proc/cpuinfo` is one of the places where you can see it being somewhat documented. Stefan
Re: removed foreign architecture
> In any case, I wouldn't recommend using precompiled code from > a for-profit company: if they don't distribute the source code, it > clearly means they're not proud of their code and have something > to hide. And of course, the same applies for a non-for-profit company, tho somehow it seems that lust for money is a strong motivator to try and take advantage of such situations. Stefan
Re: removed foreign architecture
>> ...printer manufacturer(s) only provided Linux drivers for 32bit. >> The one I'm using that does or did so is Brother. I haven't checked >> lately to see if it has changed its policy. > I just got a Brother printer two days ago and everything they provide > is 32-bit. In any case, I wouldn't recommend using precompiled code from a for-profit company: if they don't distribute the source code, it clearly means they're not proud of their code and have something to hide. Stefan
Re: Why LVM
> If I have a hot-pluggable device (SD card, USB drive, hot-plug SATA/SAS > drive and rack, etc.), can I put LVM on it such that when the device is > connected to a Debian system with a graphical desktop (I use Xfce) an icon > is displayed on the desktop that I can interact with to display the file > systems in my file manager (Thunar)? In the past: definitely not. Currently: no idea. I suspect not, because I think the behavior on disconnection is still poor (you want to be extra careful to deactivate all the volumes on the drive *before* removing it, otherwise they tend to linger "for ever"). I guess that's one area where partitions are still significantly better than LVM. Stefan "who doesn't use much hot-plugging of mass storage"
Why LVM (was: HDD long-term data storage with ensured integrity)
David Christensen [2024-04-08 11:28:04] wrote: > Why LVM? Personally, I've been using LVM everywhere I can (i.e. everywhere except on my OpenWRT router, tho I've also used LVM there back when my router had an HDD. I also use LVM on my 2GB USB rescue image). To me the question is rather the reverse: why not? I basically see it as a more flexible form of partitioning. Even in the worst cases where I have a single LV volume, I appreciate the fact that it forces me to name things, isolating me from issue linked to predicting the name of the device and the issues that plague UUIDs (the fact they're hard to remember, and that they're a bit too magical/hidden for my taste, so they sometimes change when I don't want them to and vice versa). Stefan
Re: readonly installer, (SOLVED)
> I have a 128 MB USB flash drive from back in the day that includes a write > protect switch. There are few products today that offer that feature. Side note: AFAIK this "write protect switch" doesn't prevent writing. It just tells your card reader that you'd like to avoid writing to it. Whether it ends up doing what you want depends on the hardware exposing that info to the driver and the driver paying attention to it. Stefan
Re: HDD long-term data storage with ensured integrity
> The most obvious alternative to ZFS on Debian would be Btrfs. Does anyone > have any comments or suggestions regarding Btrfs and data corruption bugs, > concurrency, CMM level, PSP, etc.? If you're worried about such things, I'd think "the most obvious alternative" is LVM+ext4. Both Btrfs and ZFS share the same underlying problem: more features => more code => more bugs. Stefan
Re: making Debian secure by default
> Yes, it does. I was hoping for something simple but it's becoming > clear to me that there's no simple "make Debian secure for dummies" > checklist to follow. I think to a significant extent, Debian maintainers do aim to make Debian "secure by default", to the extent possible (i.e. based on what is expected to be a "normal/typical" use of the system). Admittedly, "dummies" is not really the target audience for Debian, so maybe the defaults aren't quite up to *that* task. Stefan
Re: Bookworm Networking Issues
> Can anybody suggest how to get the networking running? Have you searched the web for answered? I suspect searching for "get the networking running" or "fix my problems" will get you up and running in no time. Stefan
Re: Ethernet not working on a Dell notebook
> advantage. Plugged in cable is detected immediately. With dhclient running > by ifupdown, it may take some minutes till next DHCP request is sent. [ It can take *many* minutes. ] You can use `ifplugd` to make it react to plugging/unplugging the cable, in case you don't want to use NetworkManager. Stefan
Re: Possible to feed a scan from HPLIP Toolbox to ocrmypdf?
> pdf. Also the quality of the scan with xsane is as poor as gscan2pdf. There > must be something in HPLIP that makes better scans. IIUC the scanning is done by the same library in the end, so it *should* be possible to get the same quality with any tool. Maybe instead of the resolution you need to change the color range? Stefan
Re: indi Debian Astro
> I'm using debiain on a rock64 for astrophotography and noticed all the indi > packages except indi-eqmod are from 2022. > I was hoping for some updates to the drivers and some new drivers added like > the svbony drivers and zwo am5 driver. > How does one go about moving this forward? I suggest you start by looking at https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/indi and asking the maintainers mentioned there. Stefan
Re: ARMv7 problematic?
> Building binaries when you have a 32-bit system and using a 64-bit kernel > will never work. And yet I do it every day, Stefan
ARMv7 problematic? (was: How to upgrade the GLIBCXX and GLIBC to the specific version)
> He is most likely using armv7 and that comes with its own issues, ie > cpu type and floating point (hard/soft, neon and simd). aarch64 much > easier to build on. I'm using Debian armhf here on various machines (most of them with ARMv7 CPUs but some one of them with an ARMv8 CPU (and kernel)). I haven't encountered any particular problem (both in terms of using and installing Debian and in terms of "manually" building software from source) that seems related to ARMv7 vs ARMv8. Stefan
Re: SOLVED Re: Disk corruption and performance issue.
>>> You should not be running trim in a container/virtual machine >> Why not? That's, in my case, basically saying "you should not be running >> trim on a drive exported via iscsi" Perhaps I shouldn't be but I'd like >> to understand why. Enabling thin_provisioning and fstrim works and gets >> mapped to the underlying layers all the way down to the SSD. > > I guest you didn't understand the systemd timer that runs fstrim on > the host. How can the host properly run `fstrim` if it only sees a disk image and may not know how that image is divided into partitions/filesystems? Stefan
Re: medically smart watches
>> Well, I was merely hoping that someone might finally have come up >> with a working solution ... > Stop smoking, lose weight, have a healthy diet and exercise. And most importantly: be lucky! Stefan
Re: medically smart watches
> So the question I'm getting to is: Do we have a utility that can be paired > with whatever wifi/bluetooth this thing uses and would allow it to work? With a bit of luck it can be "paired" with your "2TB" SSDs? Stefan "sorry, couldn't resist"
Re: Journald's qualities
but what are the advantages of journald's representation compared to a naive one? >>> >>> in short: querability without text parsing. That's about it. >> >> They have to parse the binary format, so that's not in and of itself >> an upside compared to parsing CSV. >> >> I've made my share of bad design decisions that don't pan out. But >> there's always an upside to my decision (even when it turns out it >> speeds up only those cases which can never occur, because of some >> other aspect of the system). >> >> AFAICT the format is *not* just a plain sequence of log entries, so >> there's some additional structure which is intended to speed up some >> operations. >> >> IOW, even if contrived, there should be *some* use case where it >> does better than CSV, no? > > I can think of two possibilities, just offhand, in no particular order: > > * No need to parse the timestamps, et cetera, and take the risk that > someone put in one that's in a format you don't expect; the times are > stored internally in a consistent guaranteed format, so you can just use > internal reader functions (paired with, and updated alongside, the > internal writer functions) and be done with it. Can't think of any reason why the same wouldn't apply to CSV: if someone messes up the timestamps by hand, they're on their own. > * No need to worry about handling log entries that *contain* commas, or > whatever other element was chosen as the separator. That's just a very minor convenience issue and it does not require a structure any more complex than a plain sequence of log entries. Same for FSS, it doesn't seem to require the more complex structure used by journald. There must have been some other use-case they had in mind where they thought they could avoid the linear-time scan or something in a way that they expected would be algorithmically beneficial. I just can't see what it is they had in mind. Stefan
Re: Journald's qualities
> systemd's design philosophy, observed from the outside, goes > like this: Let's try and stick to the subject of the log representation in `journald`, because we all know about the varied opinions about SystemD. Being an "old-hand", I'm not in love of SystemD, but the thing does have its upsides. In the case of the format of `journald` logs, I don't see them. Stefan
Re: Journald's qualities
>> Oh, that bug report is quite interesting, thanks. >> Makes one wonder why they don't use naive append-only "plain text" >> logs (tho with appropriate delimiters (maybe some kind of CSV) to make >> searches more reliable than with old-style plain text logs)? >> >> What are the advantages of journald's representation? >> I mean, to justify the slow search and large disk space usage, there >> is presumably some upside for some use cases. > > The advantage of binary format is that you have separate fields for > program, level etc and it is easier to filter by exactly what you want. > So "systemctl status servicename" just asks log subsystem for exactly > what it needs. That's why I said "with appropriate delimiters (maybe some kind of CSV)". Really plain text is what we had before, but it's not rocket science to have a "plain text" format with a reliably delimited set of fields, which is what I'd assume as the obvious naive choice. >> argument against Sqlite based on the size of Sqlite, > I'd argue that's not really technically relevant I did say "weak" 🙂 >> but what are the advantages of journald's representation compared to >> a naive one? > in short: querability without text parsing. That's about it. They have to parse the binary format, so that's not in and of itself an upside compared to parsing CSV. I've made my share of bad design decisions that don't pan out. But there's always an upside to my decision (even when it turns out it speeds up only those cases which can never occur, because of some other aspect of the system). AFAICT the format is *not* just a plain sequence of log entries, so there's some additional structure which is intended to speed up some operations. IOW, even if contrived, there should be *some* use case where it does better than CSV, no? > It does have some features around FSS (signing logs) so for folks that > need it there isn't many alternatives as it would be hard to make > similar feature on database. That should be just as easy to add to a CSV-style representation, tho. > But on flipside inability to separate log into log rotation groups is > *nasty*. You basically can't have verbose service in the system as that > will rotate away any old logs of other services away. And looking for > those logs is also the worst case: It shouldn't be difficult to add a filtering step to the log rotation (just extract all the log entries, filter out the unwanted ones, and create a new log file with the result). Beside the obvious usual issues of atomicity, the only real problem I can imagine there is FSS for which you'd need to seal separately the groups that share differently filtering rules. > I guess another one being appendable log is that in case of crash it's > easier to recover than embedded database... AFAICT, CSV shares this property just as well. > One-service-per-file approach is honestly good enough for most stuff. > PITA to get chronological order though, every approach really have > some drawbacks and benefits. If you use a reasonable format with precise enough timestamps, you should be able to "weave" entries from separate files back into a coherent single chronology (assuming all those entries got their timestamps from the same journald in the first place). Stefan
Journald's qualities (was: Selective rotation of journald logs)
> [13:37:48]cthulhu:/var/log/journal☠ journalctl |dd of=/dev/zero bs=1M > 0+15442 records in > 0+15442 records out > 63643115 bytes (64 MB, 61 MiB) copied, 5,47791 s, 11,6 MB/s > du -h /var/log/journal/ > 337M /var/log/journal/44cf6f547971fc33309d1e9e02e7 > 337M /var/log/journal/ > > (I've raised a bug 8 years ago about it > https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2460 ) Oh, that bug report is quite interesting, thanks. Makes one wonder why they don't use naive append-only "plain text" logs (tho with appropriate delimiters (maybe some kind of CSV) to make searches more reliable than with old-style plain text logs)? What are the advantages of journald's representation? I mean, to justify the slow search and large disk space usage, there is presumably some upside for some use cases. I can see some weak argument against Sqlite based on the size of Sqlite, but what are the advantages of journald's representation compared to a naive one? Stefan PS: FWIW, the only time I thought about the design of a log format, I was thinking along the lines of reducing redundancy, i.e. keeping a kind of "suffix tree" of past messages so as to replace the many repeated chunks of text with references to past log entries. Then I realized that I could get the same result much more simply by gzipping the files, which would naturally be done as part of log rotation 🙂
Re: partition reporting full, but not
> So the apparently missing space is perhaps taken up by btrfs snapshots. Another possibility is a (few) large file(s) that is/are still open for some process(es) but have been `rm` (`unlink`) so they don't have a name any more. Stefan
