The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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Tigren: Oct 3, 2003

We swear though, Linux is totally ready for the desktop. Just have to extract your wifi driver from the Windows binary, setup third party repos, make sure client side decorations are disabled, ensure SELinix isn't messing with your torrents, and then configure your Aptitude to install security updates.

Easy!

# ? Mar 1, 2016 05:56

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# ? May 23, 2024 11:29

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

You don't need ndiswrapper. Accelerated compositing works. Most distros don't need 3rd party repos anymore. selinux is mostly fine (or just run in permissive and generate policies).

Also, yes, yum/dnf distro-sync works great. As does preupgrade.

# ? Mar 1, 2016 06:07

RFC2324: Jun 7, 2012; http 418

I was gonna mention that selinux should probably not be active on a desktop anyway, its more of a server/workstation tool. I put it in the same category as encrypting your whole drive.

# ? Mar 1, 2016 06:20

HPL: Aug 28, 2002; Worst case scenario.

Kind of a crazy brainstorm idea that somehow got into my head: You know how you have multiple consoles in Linux (Ctrl-Alt1,2,3,4...)? Would it be possible to have a different graphical desktop on each one? Can you do multiple X11 servers on one host?

Also, LXDE rules, XFCE drools.

# ? Mar 1, 2016 06:43

RFC2324: Jun 7, 2012; http 418

HPL posted:

Kind of a crazy brainstorm idea that somehow got into my head: You know how you have multiple consoles in Linux (Ctrl-Alt1,2,3,4...)? Would it be possible to have a different graphical desktop on each one? Can you do multiple X11 servers on one host?

Also, LXDE rules, XFCE drools.

I always thought no, but apparently, yes.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/85383/how-to-start-a-second-x-session

# ? Mar 1, 2016 06:44

Varkk: Apr 17, 2004

Yeah, I used to do this on Fedora about 5-10 years ago playing with different users and DEs. I had the primary one on 7 and a second one would spawn on 8.

# ? Mar 1, 2016 07:00

HPL: Aug 28, 2002; Worst case scenario.

RFC2324 posted:

I always thought no, but apparently, yes.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/85383/how-to-start-a-second-x-session

Huh. That was simpler than I expected.

Now if only desktop environment makers would stop bundling fifty million variants of the usual programs in with the desktop itself.

"Hey, I've already got terminal."

"BUT YOU HAVEN'T GOT THIS TERMINAL!"

# ? Mar 1, 2016 07:15

syntaxfunction: Oct 27, 2010

What's the general consensus on elementary OS? I installed it on my soon to be old laptop because screw it and I'm liking it so far. I've installed a couple things but have otherwise left it stock. I installed Synapse because man is it great to search with, along with Firefox, Spotify, Skype and Dropbox. Dropbox works fine and dandy, no issues there, but Spotify and Skype both do this weird thing where they'll work great but if you try and close them the icons stay in the tray and can't be removed unless you restart. Which isn't a problem as I'm not really using it for Spotify or Skype (I still have a Win10 install on it for that sort of thing).

I like the design and it is certainly one of the better looking distros I've used, which actually matters to me because I like looking at pretty things, not stuff that looks at home in the early 90s. Sue me. It's also super fast to boot and shut down which is great as I lack an SSD.

I have a question though. I have Xournal and a Wacom tablet which is great for PDF annotations, but what's a good standard writing program? Something like Word but a bit more light weight would be good. Most of the ones I've found lean towards too barebones (Basically just Notepad) or on the programmer side of things. Thanks.

# ? Mar 1, 2016 08:51

Experto Crede: Aug 19, 2008; Keep on Truckin'

So, to follow up on my adventure, I got freeIPA up and running fine, can access the interface and successfully setup a user which I was able to ssh in with on the ipa server itself (Not figured out sudo yet, but baby steps).

However I've now discovered a problem: Seems that the guests running on this host can't communicate with each other. They can ping the host absolutely fine, but trying any sort of communication between them doesn't work. Pinging just gets 100% packet loss, as does trying just to use telnet to connect to ports that I know are open.

Each device has a dedicated MAC address and IP and get their connection via br0 on the host (Which runs KVM for what it's worth). The network adaptor on the guests are all set to virtio with the network source being br0 from the host.

The host's ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-br0 files respectively are:

code:

DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
BRIDGE=br0

code:

DEVICE=br0
TYPE=Bridge
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=x.x.x.x
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
ONBOOT=yes
GATEWAY=x.x.x.x
IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6_AUTOCONF=no
IPV6ADDR=x:x:x:x

And ifcfg-eth0 on one of the guests (They all largely match this):

code:

TYPE="Ethernet"
BOOTPROTO="none"
DEFROUTE="yes"
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL="no"
IPV6INIT="yes"
IPV6_AUTOCONF="yes"
IPV6_DEFROUTE="yes"
IPV6_FAILURE_FATAL="no"
NAME="eth0"
UUID="5199e818-bf21-41c7-8dbc-f2028ed8d410"
DEVICE="eth0"
ONBOOT="yes"
IPADDR="x.x.x.x"
PREFIX="28"
GATEWAY="x.x.x.x"
DNS1="x.x.x.x"
IPV6_PEERDNS="yes"
IPV6_PEERROUTES="yes"
IPV6_PRIVACY="no"

Anyone know what I'm missing?

EDIT: Also when I try to traceroute, it does one hop to the host's IP and then doesn't get any further. So am I right in assuming the issue is config on the host?

Experto Crede fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Mar 1, 2016

# ? Mar 1, 2016 13:12

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Ensure:

code:

iptables -I FORWARD -m physdev --physdev-is-bridged -j ACCEPT
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables = 0

# ? Mar 1, 2016 15:03

Experto Crede: Aug 19, 2008; Keep on Truckin'

evol262 posted:

Ensure:

code:

iptables -I FORWARD -m physdev --physdev-is-bridged -j ACCEPT
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables = 0

I assume that needs to be done on the host? Just added the rule and the changes then rebooted to be safe but still no joy unfortunately.

# ? Mar 1, 2016 15:28

Necronomicon: Jan 18, 2004

So I've got the backup script I mentioned earlier up and running, and it's working quite well. Now I need to set up cron jobs on three VMs so it backs everything up at midnight on a daily basis. I invoke crontab -e and put in the following:

code:

00 00 * * * /path/to/script.sh

...and that should work, right?

Also, if I want to output the log files from this to a specific folder, the line in my crontab file would be closer to:

code:

00 00 * * * /path/to/script.sh > /path/to/log.txt 2>$1

Would this overwrite the log.txt file each time the command runs? If I wanted to have a new log file for each entry, would I put it down as /path/to/log${date}.txt instead? Not quite sure how I would call the date variable in this instance.

# ? Mar 1, 2016 17:11

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Experto Crede posted:

I assume that needs to be done on the host? Just added the rule and the changes then rebooted to be safe but still no joy unfortunately.

On the host, yeah.

Is ip forwarding enabled?

Can you post sysctl and iptables?

# ? Mar 1, 2016 17:24

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

Once a month I scrub my large 20TB ZFS pool. Once a month I end up with a nearly unusable server:

First few lines of top:

http://pastebin.com/Du7M8yDn

Look at that load average!

This is on a i5-750 with 12GB ram.

The pool is basically not in use at all during this time.

I don't really want to slow down the scrub because it already takes a couple of days, but I wish there was a way to keep it from having such an impact on the usability of the system...

# ? Mar 1, 2016 21:14

YouTuber: Jul 31, 2004; by FactsAreUseless

syntaxfunction posted:

The Pantheon desktop environment is just replicating the look and feel of OSX. There are quite a few new DE out there now that are replicating the look of other software. Papyros is going for the Android material design just to name one.

I'd love to try them out but I don't have a box capable of running them. My Chromebox struggles with Gnome 3 and I'm inclined to give it up for something that is a tad bit lighter.

# ? Mar 1, 2016 22:46

Docjowles: Apr 9, 2009

Necronomicon posted:

So I've got the backup script I mentioned earlier up and running, and it's working quite well. Now I need to set up cron jobs on three VMs so it backs everything up at midnight on a daily basis. I invoke crontab -e and put in the following:
code:
00 00 * * * /path/to/script.sh
...and that should work, right?

Also, if I want to output the log files from this to a specific folder, the line in my crontab file would be closer to:
code:
00 00 * * * /path/to/script.sh > /path/to/log.txt 2>$1
Would this overwrite the log.txt file each time the command runs? If I wanted to have a new log file for each entry, would I put it down as /path/to/log${date}.txt instead? Not quite sure how I would call the date variable in this instance.

You're close. In order to embed the current date in the filename, you'd use something like this:

code:

00 00 * * * /path/to/script.sh > /path/to/log`date +%Y%m%d`.txt 2>&1

Enclosing a command in backticks like that will execute it and stick the output inline. Those options to date will give you log20160302.txt. You can look at date's manpage for all the various format options; that's just a sampling.

I changed 2>$1 to 2>&1. That's the proper syntax to redirect stderr to stdout.

# ? Mar 2, 2016 15:26

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

From the crontab man:

quote:

The ``sixth'' field (the rest of the line) specifies the command to be run. The entire command portion of the line, up to a newline or % character, will be executed by /bin/sh or by the shell specified in the SHELL variable of the crontab file. Percent-signs (%) in the command, unless escaped with backslash (\), will be changed into newline characters, and all data after the first % will be sent to the command as standard input. There is no way to split a single command line onto multiple lines, like the shell's trailing "\".

I consider such a complicated crontab command too risky, I would put a single script without any parameters or redirections as the crontab command and do the more complicated stuff inside that script.

# ? Mar 2, 2016 18:59

astral: Apr 26, 2004

syntaxfunction posted:

I have a question though. I have Xournal and a Wacom tablet which is great for PDF annotations, but what's a good standard writing program? Something like Word but a bit more light weight would be good. Most of the ones I've found lean towards too barebones (Basically just Notepad) or on the programmer side of things. Thanks.

Have you tried LibreOffice?

# ? Mar 3, 2016 00:59

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

astral posted:

Have you tried LibreOffice?

Libreoffice is many things, but lightweight it isn't.

I'm guessing the goal is something that occupies more or less the same niche as Wordpad on windows? I.e. some support for page layout and RTF, but not a full power document editor/word processor?

# ? Mar 3, 2016 02:05

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

So gedit or kate?

# ? Mar 3, 2016 02:09

pmchem: Jan 22, 2010

Large volumes of academic writing have been created in emacs.

# ? Mar 3, 2016 02:25

JayKay: Sep 11, 2001; And you thought they were cute and cuddly.

If I wanted to get a laptop for just Linux, is the answer still "Whatever is cheap and has a ton of replacement parts available?"

My current Linux laptop is an old Lenovo 3000 V200 with a bum battery and I'm seriously considering getting a T420 to replace it.

JayKay fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Mar 3, 2016

# ? Mar 3, 2016 02:42

gourdcaptain: Nov 16, 2012

JayKay posted:

If I wanted to get a laptop for just Linux, is the answer still "Whatever is cheap and has a ton of replacement parts available?"

My current Linux laptop is an old Lenovo 3000 V200 with a bum battery and I'm seriously considering getting a T420 to replace it.

I'm at a similar position right now - my old netbook I run Linux on on the go has finally gotten too slow for comfortable regular use with web browsing on some sites or using Discord (which my friends are understandably switching to from Skype). Problem is, I'm having trouble looking for an 10-to-12-ish inch laptop with a decent processor (Skylake i3, i5?), 8-ish GB of RAM (I'd ideally like to be able to run a Windows VM on it occasionally), 128-256 GB SSD, Intel graphics, and a fairly rugged design, along with Linux compatible without much fuss parts (so basically, I'd never like to deal with another Broadcom wireless card in my life). (And in my ideal world, a pointer stick. I like pointer sticks so much, but they're really hard to find anymore.) So far the best bet I've found is the Thinkpad X260, but Lenovo's been kind of awful to me on service requests so I'm trying to find anyone else.

gourdcaptain fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Mar 3, 2016

# ? Mar 3, 2016 04:56

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Thinkpad yoga. Dell XPS

# ? Mar 3, 2016 05:21

Experto Crede: Aug 19, 2008; Keep on Truckin'

evol262 posted:

On the host, yeah.

Is ip forwarding enabled?

Can you post sysctl and iptables?

~~Here's the iptables~~ with a load of ovh included rules, though it doesn't look like they should be affecting anything?

And sysctl.conf

Experto Crede fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Mar 9, 2016

# ? Mar 3, 2016 09:31

Computer viking: May 30, 2011; Now with less breakage.

evol262 posted:

Thinkpad yoga. Dell XPS

You can even buy an XPS preloaded with Ubuntu, I think. Even if you plan to reinstall it with something else that's a good sign of sorts.

# ? Mar 3, 2016 12:20

thebigcow: Jan 3, 2001; Bully!

ToxicFrog posted:

Libreoffice is many things, but lightweight it isn't.

I'm guessing the goal is something that occupies more or less the same niche as Wordpad on windows? I.e. some support for page layout and RTF, but not a full power document editor/word processor?

I remember liking abiword, but its been a long time.

# ? Mar 3, 2016 18:25

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Experto Crede posted:

Here's the iptables with a load of ovh included rules, though it doesn't look like they should be affecting anything?

And sysctl.conf

Ah, OVH doesn't like this. Lemme go read back a bit and I'll get back to you.

# ? Mar 3, 2016 19:06

Tigren: Oct 3, 2003

evol262 posted:

Thinkpad yoga. Dell XPS

I just bought an XPS yesterday and installed Fedora 23 on it. Everything except the wireless (broadcom) worked right out of the box. Touchscreen, suspend, sound, webcam, it just worked. Now, in order to get the wireless to work, I did have to plug in a known working usb wireless adapter, setup a third party repo (rpmfusion), install the broadcom proprietary driver, turn off secureboot, and then wireless works. Other than that, I'm very happy so far.

I believe there are versions of the XPS that come with Intel wireless chips which would be much easier to get working.

# ? Mar 3, 2016 19:44

Lum: Aug 13, 2003

Any idea why running lspci, as root or a user, more than once hard locks the system if you're in X.

I'm running Mint KDE 17.3 on a Clevo N150RD laptop which is an Optimus setup with an nVidia 960M and Intel HD530 graphics on the Skylake platform.

It's been a pain in the arse to set it up, currently running the kernel 4.5-rc3 drm-intel-next-queued tree, though it's been no different on vanilla 4.5-rc5/6 or 4.5-rc6 drm-intel-fixes. Kernel <= 4.5-rc4 and also 4.4 and earlier have graphical corruption when compositing. Official 3.x kernel doesn't support my Intel AC-8260 wireless or Bluetooth.

Kernel is self compiled with everything monolithic except the nVidia binary driver, bbswitch, tuxedo-wmi and modules for all the random USB devices and filesystems I might enounter when plugging poo poo in, but those don't get loaded.

# ? Mar 3, 2016 19:55

syntaxfunction: Oct 27, 2010

ToxicFrog posted:

Libreoffice is many things, but lightweight it isn't.

I'm guessing the goal is something that occupies more or less the same niche as Wordpad on windows? I.e. some support for page layout and RTF, but not a full power document editor/word processor?

Libreoffice could work. Yeah, I was hoping for something that has spellcheck and a bit more formatting but not Word-level, but apparently that doesn't happen. So I guess it's Libreoffice! Thanks Astral and ToxicFrog.

I've run into a weird issue too, which is if I alt-tab to change windows sometimes, sometimes, it has a weird black artefact sort of thing going on and I can't scroll in the window (Or rather it scrolls but doesn't show). If I manually switch windows and go back it's fixed. Weird graphics bug? I don't know how to troubleshoot Linux stuff.

So far though I've found elementary OS quick well suited for what I need.

# ? Mar 4, 2016 09:06

Experto Crede: Aug 19, 2008; Keep on Truckin'

syntaxfunction posted:

Libreoffice could work. Yeah, I was hoping for something that has spellcheck and a bit more formatting but not Word-level, but apparently that doesn't happen. So I guess it's Libreoffice! Thanks Astral and ToxicFrog.

I've run into a weird issue too, which is if I alt-tab to change windows sometimes, sometimes, it has a weird black artefact sort of thing going on and I can't scroll in the window (Or rather it scrolls but doesn't show). If I manually switch windows and go back it's fixed. Weird graphics bug? I don't know how to troubleshoot Linux stuff.

So far though I've found elementary OS quick well suited for what I need.

/var/log is your friend. Do you know an exact time it happened? The two main ones you'd want to check are /var/log/xorg.log and /var/log/syslog and check for what was happening in them during the time the corruption occurred.

# ? Mar 4, 2016 09:20

syntaxfunction: Oct 27, 2010

Experto Crede posted:

/var/log is your friend. Do you know an exact time it happened? The two main ones you'd want to check are /var/log/xorg.log and /var/log/syslog and check for what was happening in them during the time the corruption occurred.

I have no idea what that means. It's a logfile? Nothing crashes and it happens pretty regularly with multiple windows open. Usually when I've got Firefox and a PDF open. Sometimes just having multiple Files windows open does it. Would non-crashes or errors be recorded in that case?

# ? Mar 4, 2016 10:39

Lum: Aug 13, 2003

Tracked my problem down to Bumblebee, though oddly having bbswitch.ko loaded doesn't cause a problem, so using that along with nvidia-prime to turn off the nVidia card and only use Intel. I reboot to Windows for gaming anyway.

# ? Mar 4, 2016 15:09

DizzyBum: Apr 16, 2007

I've been having issues with NRPE timeouts from a Nagios check we have running. Apparently netstat is being called in the check script and taking almost 30 seconds to finish, while NRPE is configured to timeout in 20. So I did some reading and learned about ss. Tested the script with ss in place of netstat... :stare:

Holy poo poo, it does in 1 second what netstat did in 30.

Is there some downside to using ss over netstat that I should know about? Have I just been living in the stone age all this time? This feels too good to be true.

# ? Mar 4, 2016 19:51

other people: Jun 27, 2004; Associate Christ

DizzyBum posted:

I've been having issues with NRPE timeouts from a Nagios check we have running. Apparently netstat is being called in the check script and taking almost 30 seconds to finish, while NRPE is configured to timeout in 20. So I did some reading and learned about ss. Tested the script with ss in place of netstat... Holy poo poo, it does in 1 second what netstat did in 30.

Is there some downside to using ss over netstat that I should know about? Have I just been living in the stone age all this time? This feels too good to be true.

netstat is to ss what ifconfig is to ip.

If you are using any tool from the net-tools suite, there is very likely a better/newer alternative in the iproute2 suite.

# ? Mar 4, 2016 19:56

mystes: May 31, 2006

syntaxfunction posted:

I have a question though. I have Xournal and a Wacom tablet which is great for PDF annotations, but what's a good standard writing program? Something like Word but a bit more light weight would be good. Most of the ones I've found lean towards too barebones (Basically just Notepad) or on the programmer side of things. Thanks.

There's Abiword, I guess, if that still exists.

# ? Mar 4, 2016 22:04

gourdcaptain: Nov 16, 2012

evol262 posted:

Thinkpad yoga. Dell XPS

Thanks for the recommendation, I'm now looking at getting the Yoga. While doing my usual search around when buying a system I intend for Linux use to make sure there won't be any unpleasant driver-related suprises, I noted that there's apparently some issues with Skylake CPUs and crashing unless you disable some power management features with a kernel command line argument? Can someone confirm or deny this? (If there's an issue, I'm going to wait to pick one up until it's resolved. Still burned from the TSX issues my Broadwell laptop had at purchase where it crashed on everything but Fedora 22 (since they had glibc built without the suspect CPU function, could still crash it with VMs using the instructions) for a month until there was a microcode update... that people had to extract from MSI BIOS updates to generally apply for a while.)

# ? Mar 5, 2016 19:52

mystes: May 31, 2006

Last night my computer suddenly went crazy and whenever I tried to run any commands I got an io error on my hard drive. Luckily when I rebooted everything was normal. Obviously I have backed the drive up now, but that was scary. Unfortunately syslog doesn't have anything, because whatever happened prevented it from writing the log to the disk until I rebooted, so I have no idea what the cause could be (my computer has been stable from when I built it a year or two ago until now).

# ? Mar 5, 2016 20:29

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# ? May 23, 2024 11:29

Mr Shiny Pants: Nov 12, 2012

mystes posted:

Last night my computer suddenly went crazy and whenever I tried to run any commands I got an io error on my hard drive. Luckily when I rebooted everything was normal. Obviously I have backed the drive up now, but that was scary. Unfortunately syslog doesn't have anything, because whatever happened prevented it from writing the log to the disk until I rebooted, so I have no idea what the cause could be (my computer has been stable from when I built it a year or two ago until now).

Crucial SSD? I had a M4 128GB in my server and due to crappy firmware it would "drop out" of the system at regular intervals. Latest firmware seems to fix it. ( 070 )

# ? Mar 5, 2016 21:14

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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