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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Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

BV posted:

I apologize in advance if this question has been asked a billion times. I've used Windows my entire life, and I'm looking to try out a Linux based OS for home use. I'm not scared of a learning curve, but I would definitely want a GUI. I'd prefer stability over user-friendliness, unless it's something like command line only. I've been thinking about Ubuntu, but I've also read that this sometimes has issues with stability. Does anyone have any suggestions for me?

Xik posted:

Have you seen DistroWatch? The "top ranking" distros tend to always be the user friendly ones. Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora. Most of them tend to be as newbie friendly as each other, but have key differences like desktop environment, package manager etc. Normally you would just pick one that suits personal preference, but being new you probably don't know what you prefer yet.

Personally, if all other things being equal, I rank a distro based on it's documentation and access to a community that can help troubleshoot issues. Ubuntu probably fits that best I would say. It's also going to make sorting out device drivers for your hardware and other proprietary stuff like Adobe Flash nice and easy.

I guess it comes down to much would you prefer stability over user-friendliness? Whenever I want a "set and forget" stable distro it's always Debian. Perhaps you could try it and if you keep running into road blocks and it seems too difficult to setup, give Ubuntu a try. Ubuntu is based on Debian, so some of the knowledge (using the package manager for instance) you gain messing around with Ubuntu will help you in the future if you decide to switch to Debian.

I always think openSUSE is worth having a look at. Unlike Ubuntu (and its derivatives) it uses pretty much all of the standard or soon-to-be-standard things (like systemd). More importantly, however, openSUSE treats KDE, Gnome, XFCE, LXDE and a number of other desktop environments as absolutely equal. They all ship properly, you can choose between them during installation, and from what I can tell, everything happily coexists. I think this is a nice opportunity for new users to explore the different environments and decide for themselves what they like best. I used to be a heavy KDE user (and didn't mind KDE 4.x, to be honest), but I've since switched, without ever changing anything fundamental. It also uses RPM and I find zypper to better than apt-get/aptitude, so that's a bonus!

You also get to choose between stable (standard), long-term (evergreen), semi-rolling release (tumbleweed) or rolling release aka development (factory → this is like fedora rawhide and will break every now and then), so there should be something for every taste.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2014 17:24

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 16:03

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Bhodi posted:

A guy who is learning / using linux for the first time doesn't give a poo poo about systemd. There is zero reason to try openSUSE over the most popular distros like fedora or mint. They all use GNOME 3 and all have a KDE alternate, and fedora has about three times as many available packages and about 100x the install base to find/fix bugs and code in compatibility.

YaST is absolutely fantastic especially for new users, since it helps you with a lot of common things, from user/group setup and security, to firewall, common servers, NFS/Samba etc. If somebody wants to try Fedora or Mint then by all means, please do. But so far, my personal Fedora experiences and tries have been largely underwhelming. On top of that, One-Click-Install is nice for new users, and OBS has pretty much any package you can imagine, easily installed via repository, which gives you a valid update path.

It's a distribution that is often overlooked in more US-centric circles (because RH definitely has a bigger presence), but I do think it has some things going for it that are really rather nice, and that's why I bring it up.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2014 18:58

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Suspicious Dish posted:

Also, I should probably point out that I work on Fedora and upstream GNOME on a day to day basis, and several other people browsing this thread are Red Hat employees, so if you're having trouble, I can try to help.

I genuinely forgot about SUSE and Mint, but from what I hear they're good distros too. I've never used them, though.

The tens of thousands of OSes based on Linux is kind of an annoying one, and it can be hard to choose. I'd just pick one with a coin toss and not give too much thought to it.

Now, that makes for a good reason to choose Fedora, because this thread then becomes a very good first port of call!

# ¿ Feb 4, 2014 19:36

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Riso posted:

The only annoying thing about OpenSUSE is that you need a third party repo to add the good font smoothing.

As far as I know, the recent version of freetype used in 13.1 essentially means you don't need the infinality patchset anymore. This mailing-list thread links to an improvement in freetype commited by Adobe, which should make the patches unnecessary: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2013-08/msg00103.html

# ¿ Feb 4, 2014 20:20

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

jkyuusai posted:

Bummer. It doesn't feel like a super crazy thing, so I figured my not finding any obvious/easy solutions so far meant that there were probably some hard problems involved that I wasn't aware of. Guess I'll dig back into Xmonad and see what I can come up with.

If you are looking at tiling window managers, have a look at i3wm. The config files are really easy to parse (and write), no Haskell is required, and I think it works really well. It works with XFCE Panel, but I'm not sure whether it works with the GNOME Panel as well. Now I'm not sure I understood your stack question completely, but you can, for each workspace, on each monitor, have independent stacks, stacks within stacks, tiling or tabs, or a mixture of them.

http://i3wm.org/

# ¿ Feb 16, 2014 04:15

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

jkyuusai posted:

So within 5 minutes of installing i3 - I managed to do exactly what I wanted. The workspaces stack on the monitor they're created on, and scrolling your mousewheel in the workspace manager area flips you between the active workspaces for that monitor. All default behavior, no config needed. Awesome.

Prince John posted:

Echoing the i3 love. I tried a few tiling windrow managers for my laptop and it's the only one that just clicked with default settings and a couple of minutes looking at the docs. It's surprisingly intuitive.

That was my impression as well, that's why I recommended it! I had a look at awesomewm and xmonad before, and I never got the hang of either. i3 seems to be pretty straightforward, the config files and syntax make actual sense and I like the simplicity of dmenu for program starting.

Another recommendation I'd like to add is http://www.j4tools.org/, which can be used as drop-in replacements for some of the standard i3wm components (i3bar, dmenu) and fix some annoyances, like dmenu's rather slow starting time.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2014 16:01

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Xik posted:

I use multiple monitors without issues. Two monitors via DVI for general desktop use and a HDTV hooked up via HDMI that I enable for HD video content. I have all three hooked up at the same time, but can only drive 2 displays at once due to a limitation with the GPU.

I'm not really up to date with hardware at the moment and don't really know anything about triple-head, so I'm not sure what's involved in driving 3+ displays at once.

To manage the monitors I just use a series of very small bash scripts that call xrandr. For example, if I want both monitors via DVI at their native resolution in landscape I call a script that looks like this (i3wm calls this at startup):

I started to do some of this as bash scripts, but have been using iw3m directly for this more recently, by defining a mode akin to the resize mechanism that is included by default, though only for a 2-monitor setup (laptop + external), yet this should be easily extendible. I have the following in my i3 config:

code:

# switch output displays between internal-only, external-only or dual-head
mode "monitor" {
     bindsym i exec xrandr --output LVDS-0 --auto --output VGA-0 --off ; mode "default"
     bindsym e exec xrandr --output LVDS-0 --off --output VGA-0 --auto ; mode "default"
     bindsym d exec xrandr --output LVDS-0 --auto --output VGA-0 --right-of LVDS-0 --auto ; mode "default"

     # back to normal: Enter or Escape
     bindsym Return mode "default"
     bindsym Escape mode "default"
}

bindsym $mod+m mode "monitor"

This means I press $mod+m (I use CapsLock as Hyper, which is my $mod key) and then simply either hit i, e, or d and it calls the specific line directly. I found this to be more straightforward than a bash script, though you can of course also write a bash script that gets the different configuration options as an argument and call that instead.

Hollow Talk fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Feb 19, 2014

# ¿ Feb 19, 2014 18:06

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Xik posted:

That's pretty neat Hollow Talk, thanks! So you can define your own modes like the resize one? Is it documented somewhere? I'm pretty sure I've read the entire i3 user guide by now and didn't know about it.

And yeah, I've been meaning to merge all my little monitor scripts (I have like 7 of them) into one and just use arguments but . When things work, I tend not to bother going back to consider different solutions. If not a mode, I can always just setup key bindings to call the commands. I have no idea why it never occurred to me to do that. I've done that exact thing for other commonly used functions like binding keys to amixer commands to manage sound.

Modes aren't made explicit in the user guide, though they give you their own resize mode as an example. Modes essentially follow this template:

code:


mode "name" {
        # The following bindings or commands only work once you've entered mode
        bindsym <key> <command>
        [...]

        # back to normal: Enter or Escape &#8594; This exits the mode be calling the "default" mode
        bindsym Return mode "default"
        bindsym Escape mode "default"
}

# This key binding is the only external one (i.e. outside the mode) that simply enters the mode
bindsym <key> mode "name"

This essentially works like vi's modes, so your mode can be something abitrary, and you can use everything within a mode that works for i3 in general.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2014 18:34

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

evol262 posted:

You and I both know CapsLock should be rebound to <ESC> if you use vi

I don't, that is why I need all the CTRL META ALT SHIFT keys I can get! :smug:

edit: I'm surprised there is no Emacs-smiley or something. Also: :can:

Hollow Talk fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Feb 19, 2014

# ¿ Feb 19, 2014 19:17

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

evol262 posted:

Joke's on you. I use ed, the standard text editor

Do you write press releases for Intel for a living? :haw:

# ¿ Feb 19, 2014 19:38

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

evol262 posted:

This is

But, but, that specific one isn't even on that page! :eng99:

(I was thinking of this link, not the assorted page: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.hup)

# ¿ Feb 19, 2014 19:58

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Xik posted:

What do you mean? It's not like there are a huge array of choices. Flash has been abandoned on the platform unless you want to get locked into Chrome.

Before I got html5 working I relied solely on youtube-dl, but is a little inconvient when you just want to quickly play something that is embedded.

Have you tried ViewTube? → https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/87011

It's a greasemonkey script which lets you pick how to open files, and you can use it in Firefox and Chrome, though you need to install it manually on the latter. You also get to choose which format you'd like to play (flv, MP4, webm or whatever else YT might offer), and it works with some other sites like Vimeo as well!

edit: It also conveniently gets rid of in-video advertisements.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2014 16:13

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Xik posted:

Oh right, I suppose. I don't have an account and don't "browse" it or anything like that so I don't really see the community side of it. It's just the de-facto video hosting site and it's frequently embedded in posts here so it sucks not to have it.

That's pretty cool. I'll have to try it out. I'll probably still use HTML5 for stuff that is embedded but if I want to download a long IT related talk or something that would probably be a little more convenient then using youtube-dl.

It can do HTML5 as well! :science:

I use it really as my day-to-day youtube player, and I have yet to look back.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2014 00:58

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Elias_Maluco posted:

So I boot into my Mint 15 (KDE edition) and for some reason KDE messed my monitor settings (again) and my second monitor is disabled.

Now I cant open the settings to enable it because KDE is apparently opening the settings window on the disabled monitor.

What can I do?

Why is KDE still so stupid about multiple monitors

Alternatively, fire up a console window, and type:

code:

xrandr --query

That will give you your monitor names, the first thing of "<NAME> connected <RESOLUTION> ...". Then do:

code:

xrandr --output <FIRST MONITOR NAME> --auto --output <SECOND MONITOR NAME> --auto

code:

xrandr --output <FIRST MONITOR NAME> --auto --output <SECOND MONITOR NAME> --off

The former sets both to their automatic best mode, the latter disables the second monitor entirely, after which you should be able to set things up as you are used to.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2014 15:18

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Bob Morales posted:

I have a couple nested directories full of PDF files that need to be TIFF files to be sent somewhere.

SomeClient -
2011
commercial
residential
2012
commercial
residential
...

I know I can just use the 'convert' command on a single file:
code:
convert document001.pdf document001.tiff
What's the best way to loop through these, and rename them all?

A quick bash script with a for loop?

I started doing something like
code:
find * -name "*.pdf" -exec convert $1 xxxxxxxx {} \;
but I wasn't sure how to get just the filename without the extension, to append .tiff to

If you have zsh, you can also use that, because I find its substitution syntax really intuitive (it uses sed syntax). That way you could do something like this:

code:

for file (**/*.pdf) convert $file $file:s/pdf/tiff/

That's just making use of zsh's abbreviated for function, and is equivalent to for file in **/*.pdf ; do convert $file $file:s/pdf/tiff/ ; done.

edit: The latter should work in bash as well, when changed to bash substitution syntax you'll get: for file in **/*.pdf ; do convert $file ${file/pdf/tiff} ; done

Hollow Talk fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Mar 20, 2014

# ¿ Mar 20, 2014 15:08

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

YouTuber posted:

Can anyone explain why I have to compile ffmpeg from source if I want, you know, ffmpeg? Avconv loving sucks compared to ffmpeg but installs when you apt-get ffmpeg. Is there a reason why this inferior program is camping on the ffmpeg name in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories?

I presume this has to do with licenses and the lawsuit potential of some codecs that are patent-encumbered. Debian is notoriously special when it comes to licenses. I know that openSUSE does something similar, where you are not allowed to build the full ffmpeg (as well as some other software) on the official SuSE buildservice servers (OBS), which is why there is a packman repository that usually goes alongside each openSUSE version and that holds many of the media stuff, as well as proprietary things like flash-player.

For a list of blacklisted applications for openSUSE for legal reasons: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Build_Service_application_blacklist

Debian probably has a similar list, though I do not know where you might be able to find that.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2014 00:52

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

YouTuber posted:

Avconv is literally forked directly from ffmpeg though and uses mostly all of the same patents. Just that ffmpeg patches more frequently, has compatibility for avconv and all around runs better than avconv. Avconv on the other hand doesn't have compatability for new ffmpeg functions and runs like a pig in poo poo. I highly doubt that avconv literally rewrote the entire codebase from scratch in 2 years.

Longinus00 posted:

It's because the maintainer for the debian packages is on libav's side of the whole ffmpeg/libav debacle. To be fair, before the ffmpeg/libav bifurcation you more or less had to compile ffmpeg from source to get features like multithreaded h264 handling.

I learned something today! I wasn't aware of this split. I guess my version would have been much more sympathetic...

# ¿ Mar 22, 2014 01:29

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Is there a way to force nm-applet to use kwallet instead of the gnome-keyring? I've been a long-time KDE user but switched to i3wm quite a while ago, which meant I couldn't use the NM plasma widget anymore. The reason I prefer kwallet is that it can be set to lock the wallet automatically after a given time, while the gnome-keyring seems to stay open indefinitely.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2014 15:24

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Suspicious Dish posted:

This was done last year:

https://git.gnome.org/browse/network-manager-applet/commit/?id=37cc714c9f21f302b302d6214233a7d2ae6b1fec

So the latest version of network-manager-applet should work with anything that supports the Secret Service, which kwallet and gnome-keyring both implement.

That sounds promising, thanks! I'll see what happens when I remove gnome-keyring, hopefully it'll simply fall back to kwallet.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2014 23:44

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

GreenBuckanneer posted:

So I have previous experience in linux and mucking around with a gui (gasp) text editors and stuff but only basic levels.

I want to kind of, reduce my dependence on windows, but I want it as easy as possible to deal with.

Things I want to be able to do:

Run a local server friends or roommate can ftp into so we can share music/movies/etc easily.

Servers are pretty much Linux's bread and butter, so this won't be a problem.

GreenBuckanneer posted:

Run foobar, or an equivalent program that can have a servicable gui that doesn't take up lots of resources, auto syncs to last.fm, doesn't have replaygain, little to no slowdown with large (450gb+ music collections), etc

Have a look at DeaDBeeF (http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/), it's relatively close to foobar2000, it's pretty quick and comes with a lot of plugins, among them a last.fm-plugin, though I haven't tried it. Not sure about the 450GB, but give it a try!

GreenBuckanneer posted:

potentially multiple monitor support with nvidia or amd drivers

This should work better than it does on Windows, actually.

GreenBuckanneer posted:

Streaming or recording video from some linux compatible games, potentially

No idea about recording, sorry.

GreenBuckanneer posted:

I will still have windows installed on the same system but the goal is to only really go into windows when I have to for videogames and stuff.

Is this feasible in 2014?

Have you considered running Linux first in something like VirtualBox from within Windows? That way you could see what works for you and what doesn't.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2014 00:07

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Misogynist posted:

Quit trolling.

Thermopyle posted:

I want do do a one-word response of "lol", but...

This has definitely not been the case with many configurations I've tried, and AFAICT, is a widely-known issue with Linux.

I'm not even kidding, though. :saddowns:

The proprietary Nvidia driver and XRandR work a lot better for me than the Nvidia Control Panel in Windows. Then again, I don't know what the state of HDMI etc are (since my laptop is really rather old), but I never had any problems on a laptop with an external monitor.

Hollow Talk fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Mar 31, 2014

# ¿ Mar 31, 2014 02:36

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Misogynist posted:

The particular hypothetical I gave before about having two monitors and rotating only one of them is an actual problem for the proprietary driver that I've hit before. It is, as far as I know, entirely impossible to have two monitors and rotate only one of them unless you run two completely separate X screens. It's a well-documented problem, which is why I thought you brought up nouveau earlier as though it's a solution. I mean, it is, for a lot of people, but the performance problems keep it from being a reasonable option for many.

Except, the reason I made my earlier statement is that I have never had a problem rotating one of my monitors while leaving the other in landscape using the proprietary drivers, so it's not like this is completely impossible for everybody. This has been a feature I've been using for years to do my work.

code:

sh-4.2$ xrandr --query
Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 2490 x 1400, maximum 8192 x 8192
VGA-0 connected 1050x1400+1440+0 right (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 408mm x 306mm
   1400x1050      60.0*+   60.0  
   1280x1024      75.0     60.0  
   1152x864       75.0  
   1024x768       75.0     60.0  
   800x600        75.0     60.3  
   640x480        75.0     72.8     60.0     59.9  
LVDS-0 connected primary 1440x900+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 331mm x 207mm
   1440x900       59.9*+

code:

sh-4.2$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version
NVRM version: NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module  331.38  Wed Jan  8 19:32:30 PST 2014
GCC version:  gcc version 4.8.1 20130909 [gcc-4_8-branch revision 202388] (SUSE Linux)

# ¿ Mar 31, 2014 13:29

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Experto Crede posted:

I'm trying to generate a single digit random number in bash and assign it to a variable.

I'm using this command:
code:
cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc '0-9' | fold -w 1 | head -n 1
and putting the output in a variable.

That command on its own runs fine in terminal, but seems to fall over with scripting as it's never a single digit, but usually four or five.

Any idea what's up?

Did you have a look at using $RANDOM inside the script? This will allow you to simply give it a lower and upper bound, in your case probably 0 and 10, and bash then generates a random number between $FLOOR and $RANGE. You can find a basic overview here: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/randomvar.html

e;fb :argh:

# ¿ Apr 7, 2014 19:11

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

General_Failure posted:

2: Similar sort of situation but with my music. Except I know there's a Linux program that can rename music based off the metatags but I haven't used it since I demangled my music filenames years ago. Surely someone must use it. What is it?

I find puddletag (http://puddletag.sourceforge.net/) quite pleasant to use. It gives you a nice UI and you can simply define new (or make use of the standard) "actions", which allow you to do things like tag->filename, filename->tag etc automatically, alongside more complex options. It also has a track number assistant and you can generally tag things in bulk.

# ¿ May 3, 2014 12:55

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Experto Crede posted:

I want to be able to change my wallpaper in cinnamon automatically at scheduled times.

It seems this isn't possible via the ui, but apparently you can use gsettings to set org.cinnamon.desktop.background as needed.

What would be the correct syntax to do this? I'm not having much joy.

You could try something like nitrogen (http://projects.l3ib.org/nitrogen/) which lets you change wallpapers from console. This means you could just stick the appropriate commands into cron and it will set your wallpapers appropriately.

# ¿ May 10, 2014 01:56

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

fletcher posted:

Is there a command I can run in Linux Mint 16 MATE that can disable/enable a second monitor?

If you are looking for a way to do this from console, you will need xrandr. I'm not on Linux right now, but the syntax should be something like this:

code:

xrandr --output LVDS-0 --auto --output VGA-0 --right-of LVDS-0 --auto

Use --off instead of --auto to turn the given display off, and use xrandr --query to find out your displays' names.

e;fb :argh:

# ¿ May 15, 2014 19:22

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Does anybody run Linux (any flavour, really) on a 2013/2014 Macbook Air? From what it seems, I can choose between the backlight being buggy after resume from suspend to RAM (https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62881 and https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67454) and using a specific driver (mba6x_bl) where the backlight controlling buttons do not work. Does anybody happen to have this working?

Running openSUSE Tumbleweed, but the problem is a driver/ACPI problem, which is distribution-independent.

Hollow Talk fucked around with this message at 14:31 on May 25, 2014

# ¿ May 25, 2014 14:27

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

ToxicFrog posted:

Gotta say, I like zypper a lot more than yum or apt, too. And the installer is top notch.

My only real complaint is that the main repositories (or even main + packman) don't have as much stuff as the Ubuntu repos. software.opensuse.org makes it easy to find the ones that have the packages you need and add them, but it kind of bugs me ending up with a dozen extra repos.

I actually quite like the split nature of most of the projects, because it allows for a more finely grained control of which repositories are necessary in case something were to go sour or for distribution upgrades. You can essentially start with a solid core of only two repositories (oss + update) and then layer on whatever you might need for your specific use case, specific updates or extra packages.

Having a couple of other repositories isn't that bad, I think, and at least they are nicer to administer than they are with apt...

code:

sh-4.2$ zypper lr -p
#  | Alias                   | Name                    | Enabled | Refresh | Priority
---+-------------------------+-------------------------+---------+---------+---------
 1 | chromium                | chromium                | Yes     | Yes     |   98    
 2 | games-tools             | games-tools             | Yes     | Yes     |   99    
 3 | google-chrome           | google-chrome           | No      | No      |   98    
 4 | google-talkplugin       | google-talkplugin       | Yes     | Yes     |   98    
 5 | haskell                 | haskell                 | Yes     | Yes     |   99    
 6 | languages-misc          | languages-misc          | No      | No      |   99    
 7 | multimedia-apps         | multimedia-apps         | No      | No      |   99    
 8 | multimedia-libs         | multimedia-libs         | No      | No      |   99    
 9 | opensuse-non-oss        | opensuse-non-oss        | Yes     | Yes     |   99    
10 | opensuse-non-oss-update | opensuse-non-oss-update | Yes     | Yes     |   99    
11 | opensuse-oss            | opensuse-oss            | Yes     | Yes     |   99    
12 | opensuse-source         | opensuse-source         | No      | No      |   99    
13 | opensuse-update         | opensuse-update         | Yes     | Yes     |   99    
14 | openvpn                 | openvpn                 | Yes     | Yes     |   98    
15 | packman-tumbleweed      | packman-tumbleweed      | Yes     | Yes     |   99    
16 | personal                | personal                | Yes     | Yes     |   98    
17 | tumbleweed              | tumbleweed              | Yes     | Yes     |   98    
18 | tumbleweed-testing      | tumbleweed-testing      | No      | No      |   98

# ¿ May 25, 2014 21:04

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Suspicious Dish posted:

MP3 is patented, but that doesn't mean it's proprietary software to ship. Just patent-encumbered. Shipping MP3 codecs really isn't a legal risk, and since it's all free software, it doesn't infringe on your freedoms.

Given that most of the people who use and install Fedora also use rpmfusion, I don't see why we can't ship them by default.

openSUSE does the same thing. I presume (not a lawyer etc.) the point is that if the user decides to install these codecs, that's their decision and in many cases and depending on jurisdiction perfectly fine for personal use. Additionally, even if this is a legal grey area, going after individual users is a pain. If the company chooses to bundle them, however, they make for a better target for a lawsuit, especially if it's somebody like RH or SuSE. It's probably just a case of better safe than sorry.

# ¿ May 26, 2014 01:39

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

wooger posted:

RPM Fusion does a reasonable job for the most important proprietary / patented stuff on Fedora, but the much more worrisome bit for me is that the packaged version of Chromium is wwwaaayyy outdated, and the only popular, recent repo is much less reputable than RPMfusion. It has *Russian* in the name FFS.

There seems no good excuse to simply not keep the 2nd most popular open source browser updated in the main repo. Please don't tell me to use Chrome - it's not open source.

If you would like to have a look at how openSUSE builds chromium, have a look at this project: https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/network:chromium

The project essentially creates a "cleaned" chromium version that compiles without some of the proprietary parts. The chromium-ffmpegsumo package is a thinned out ffmpeg version that only includes free/opensource codecs, with the "full" chromium-ffmpeg coming from the external RPM Fusion equivalent (Packman) if the user so chooses. The builds also offer stable, beta, alpha, and dev channels for chromium, as is the case with chrome.

I don't know how Fedora is set up for these kind of splits, but this seems to be the best compromise that people have found so far, even after a short period of building chromium entirely on Packman, i.e. externally.

edit: I think this build additionally also excludes NaCl on the OBS and only pulls those in and builds them on Packman.

Hollow Talk fucked around with this message at 15:01 on May 26, 2014

# ¿ May 26, 2014 14:58

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

fuf posted:

Say I'm working half the time on my PC and half the time on my laptop - what's the best way to keep things organised?

It seems like I can either use all my devices to ssh into a single development server and do all my work on there, or I can recreate the same development environment on each device and work on them directly, then sync files between them. Is there a more standard approach?

How feasible is it to sync my entire Home directory between my PC and laptop and VPS? Is that a thing people do? Basically I want the same .bashrc, .vimrc and .screenrc wherever I'm working.

If by "entire home directory" you mean configuration files, you could just use git (or another dvcs). Stick the relevant files in, push them to a central location (the VPS would be good, but you can simply set up multiple remote repositories), pull from that location on the systems. Done. The advantage of using something like git is that it doesn't really matter on which system you change something, since the next pull on another system will grab all of the changes since your pull there.

The advantage is that this scales to an arbitrary number of systems. If you were to get another laptop, another VPS, work on somebody else's computer etc., simply fetch everything from your remote repository and off you go. If you need access beyond that, you could also use bitbucket (https://bitbucket.org/) which offers an unlimited amount of free private repositories that are only limited insofar as the number of colaborators is limited, which isn't really an issue if you are the only person using the repository.

If you need to push around binary files as well, something like loose-fish's answer probably works (I don't know that program), or you could just use rsync, which diffs everything you send, only sends what actually changed and works over ssh.

edit: I just saw Unison actually seems to use rsync or at least rsync-like behaviour, so that's pretty much the same thing just with a gui.

Hollow Talk fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Jun 5, 2014

# ¿ Jun 5, 2014 19:15

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

fuf posted:

Thanks for these responses. By home directory I mean config files, but also source files for projects I'm working on. I think my best option will be to use rsync and run it with cron or incrond when something changes.

If you need source files as in programming, using version control would be a good thing to do in general!

ToxicFrog posted:

For things I want a bit more control over, like my dotfiles, I keep them in git; I init my entire home directory as a git repo and then create a .gitignore containing "/*" so that it only tracks things I explicitly tell it to. There's a master branch that has all my common configuration (editor configs, common bash aliases, etc), and then some machines have computer-specific branches containing changes specific to that machine, e.g. work-specific aliases on my work desktop.

I think this is the right way to go. You can replicate that as often as you want. You can work on it on different machines etc. I use one git repository for my main config files (zsh/bash/emacs/i3wm) and then one git repository per specific use case, namely one for my writing (~/Documents/XYZ), one for my scripts (~/bin) etc.

You can of course start copying things around, which will only cause problems once you change different things on different computers without syncing them first, at which point things like rsync's diffing-algorithm will spontaneously combust. Git was made for exactly these use cases, and I don't think there will be any better option and especially nothing that will be more resilient.

For a bit of a walkthrough for everyday git usage: https://schacon.github.io/git/everyday.html

# ¿ Jun 7, 2014 02:28

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

ToxicFrog posted:

I should clarify that all the stuff in ~/devel/ etc is itself in git, I just use btsync to sync the whole directory and all the repos in it rather than pushing/pulling individual projects.

Ah, that makes sense as well, I didn't catch that! My further reply was more directed towards fof (other than agreeing with you), which I probably should have said! :downs:

Could this also be a solution for fuf, though?

fuf posted:

Any way I could automate / streamline this a bit? (gitwatch?)

If you look at ToxicFrog's comment, there is always the option of using git locally and then simply syncing over the whole git directory via something like rsync. Another option would be to automatically run a git pull via a shell script upon login, via ~/.profile or some such. This should be pretty easy either via simply cd'ing into the appropriate folders or using $GIT_DIR and $GIT_WORK_TREE, and could be a simple as using an array that you simply loop through for every major project.

There is little that can be done about the git add && git commit stage other than using something like gitwatch (which you know more about than I do) I suppose, though you could use a post-commit hook to push it to your remote, or you can use a script to push it to multiple servers at once. My usual process is to commit and then run a shell script that deals with pushing everything to three or four different servers.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2014 17:06

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

spankmeister posted:

Use openvpn

Seconding using OpenVPN. You can simply use it to run all your traffic through the vpn and thus through your European system, including DNS requests etc (you might have to push dns servers via the vpn server). Otherwise you might be "leaking" traffic, since the SOCKS proxy only works for applications you specifically instructed to make use of it.

OpenVPN is also surprisingly light on hardware utilisation if only a handful of people are using it, and it gives you the added bonus of decent key management. I use a VPS in a similar way (though not with DO) and I really like it.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2014 01:32

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

the posted:

Good program to rip audio CDs?

I always liked Grip (http://sourceforge.net/projects/grip/), though I'm not sure whether it's actively developed anymore. It's quite nice since you can essentially set up the encoding stage with all the commandline parameters you might want, add a nice naming scheme and still get CDDB lookups and a GUI to work with.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2014 10:09

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

fuf posted:

Is there a way to make bash immediately list the possibilities when autocomplete matches more than one thing? Right now I press tab once and get a beep, then I have to press it again to show the list. I want to skip the beeping part.

Have you tried the options mentioned in this SO post yet? https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/73672/how-to-turn-off-the-beep-only-in-bash-tab-complete

# ¿ Jul 15, 2014 10:29

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

fuf posted:

uh, no, I didn't, and the first one works (putting "set show-all-if-ambiguous" in .inputrc). Sorry, that was obviously a searchable solution that didn't need a post. Sometimes I get lazy and slip into the habit of just asking questions as they occur to me!

especially when you are all such helpful fellows

Oh, I didn't mean to be passive aggressive, sorry if it came across like that! Glad it worked!

Also:

# ¿ Jul 15, 2014 10:45

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Suspicious Dish posted:

I am back from France bearing a gift.

http://funny.computer/linux/

How long until plymouth supports this as the mandatory bootsplash for Fedora?

xtal posted:

Wait for Postfix to die and OpenSMTPD to be ready. Postfix is like the baby boomer generation of SMTP daemons.

I run exim4 (on Debian) at the moment, and it has given me significantly less grief than postfix ever has, for whatever that is worth.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2014 13:03

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

gggiiimmmppp posted:

I suspect that f.lux was the culprit so I nuked it and so far so good. F.lux made sense when I first set things up and was dicking around with it alongside my windows machine with synergy but now I only turn on the monitor every few weeks when I want to poke at something in virtualbox so whatever. Maybe I'll install lxde and free up some memory

If you still want something like f.lux but suspect that it caused problems, have a look at redshift which does something similar and which has been working flawlessly for me for years: http://jonls.dk/redshift/

# ¿ Aug 5, 2014 03:32

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 16:03

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

kiwid posted:

Something weird is going on with my SSH config. I setup a brand new Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS on the weekend. I quickly setup SSH public key authentication and disabled password auth. The only two things I've changed are "PermitRootLogin no" and "PasswordAuthentication no". Here is my config:

<snip>

My public key is in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and everything works. I try to login via PuTTY without my private key and it fails. I try to login with my private key and it works. However, the problem is that when I use an SSH tunnel, for example, SQLyog allows MySQL connections through an SSH tunnel, the connection seems to work with password auth and it doesn't actually require my private key at all. Is there some fuckery I'm missing for SSH tunnel connections?

This might be silly, but do you have it set up that PuTTY unlocks your key for you and keeps it unlocked, essentially like ssh-agent? That way you'd only have to input your password once and every subsequent ssh attempt would still use your key credentials. Have you tried running the SQLyog commands before ever doing anything else with ssh? Does it still not ask you for your password to unlock your private key in that instance?

Your sshd_config looks fine to me, by the way.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2014 13:48

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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