I'm thinking of getting a new laptop which uses Coreboot. The reason is that I'm into FOSS and would also like to not have IME installed. Currently I'm looking at Starlabs' Starbook, which can optionally be bought with Coreboot.

Can anyone help me evaluate it? I would likely use Debian 12 as my OS.

Many thanks

I was interested in trying out openSUSe and tried to install it on my third drive:

on my first and second attempt the install failed with an error that the creation of the efi Boot partition failed
something along the lines of:

execution of command /usr/sbin/shim-install failed no space left on device
(i tried both manual and automatic partitioning)

i then tried to install fedora on that disk, just to see if something is wrong with the disk (or my skill) and it worked without a hinch.

after that i tried it again with tumbleweed and it seemed to install just fine.
but when i tried to boot it didn't work,
it just showed a black screen with a blinking - for about a minute before rebooting.

i gave up after that.

is there something that i might have missed during my install,
i thought that openSUSE has a great reputation.

system is a ryzen 7 with an rtx 2060,
on an ASRock mainboard with secure boot deactivated.
disk is my old 250gb samsung 840 evo

KDE Plasma is a fantastic desktop environment. It is popular for its feature set that allows a user to customize the experience, add widgets, and multiply the usefulness of the desktop with various elements.

When you get started, you already have certain widgets in place to access things. You can customize/remove them or add some more pre-installed ones. In either case, you can also download widgets from the KDE store and try them out.

Here, I mention some of my favorite picks among the default, pre-installed, and downloadable widgets.

Don't get me wrong, the average X-interface looks great. Some are absolutely stunning. But, in my opinion usability has gone down the toilet. Almost everything that should be a clear distinction is displayed in shades of the same color, including icons.

I'm now running an XP-inspired theme on cinnamon so I at least have some functionality (e.g. title bar in a different color, buttons with clear borders, etc). I wish I wouldn't need to, to have a productive interface. I wish for something beautiful and productive.

Seeing screenshots of someones Aero-inspired Steam-mockup inspired me to make this post. I found it attractive while I hated Aero when it came out and never used it (it was around the time I switched to Linux). Is there any theme/window manager/setup I should be looking at that I obviously haven't?

I want to learn more about file systems from the practical point of view so I know what to expect, how to approach them and what experience positive or negative you had / have.

I found this wikipedia's comparison but I want your hands-on views.

For now my mental list is

• NTFS - for some reason TVs on USB love these and also Windows + Linux can read and write this
• Ext4 - solid fs with journaling but Linux specific
• Btrfs - some modern fs with snapshot capability, Linux specific
• xfs - servers really like these as they are performant, Linux specific
• FAT32 - limited but recognizable everywhere
• exFAT - like FAT32 but less recognizable and less limited

I don't usually update, but today I opened Xubuntu and the update manager popped up, so I clicked to install - it was just a 13 MB update. After updating, I opened Floorp and started seeing that all my icons at the taskbar, everything, started disappearing. It's like I did "sudo rm -rf"! I'm not even mad. I always wanted to try EndeavourOS, and now Xubuntu has given me the opportunity to install it. Now downloading the EndeavourOS ISO and will install KDE on it. Enough rant/vent for now - REAL QUESTION: can anyone tell me how to theme GTK-based GNOME apps on KDE?

The isos with Cosmic alpha are now downloadable from system76's site!

While Cinnamon is great for many users, KDE Plasma provides a flexible and powerful alternative, particularly for those who desire a more dynamic and configurable desktop environment.

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know to successfully install KDE Plasma on your Linux Mint 22 system.

I use Kubuntu 24.04. My keyboard has working media playback keys. When I listen to music and a video starts playing, I want to pause the music. It usually pauses the video which i could also pause easily in other ways. Is it possible to write a script that toggles through the other media playing processes in terms of coupling them to the media keys?

Blog post alert

Let me start off by saying: If you just want to have a working system to do your thing with minimal effort, Slackware isn't for you (anymore).

Running Slackware today is like being gifted a Ford Model T by a weird, bearded museum curator, and then finding out that after some minor modifications and learning how to drive it, you can keep up with any modern car on the road. Only it has no ABS, AC, power steering, starter motor, crumple zones, airbags or seatbelts.

Most people who still run it (by any realistic estimate, fewer than 10000 people in the world now) have been running it since the 90's and follow the advice not to change a running system to the letter. So why should anyone who hasn't studied CompSci in Berkeley in the 90's try it today?

First of all, the most widely known criticism (it has no dependency resolution) is a bit of a misunderstanding. Slackware is different. The recommended installation method is a full installation, which means you install everything in the repository up front. That way, all dependencies are already resolved. And you have a system you can use equally well on a desktop or server. It uses 20GB but disk space is essentially free now.

What if you need something that isn't in the repo? Well, do whatever the fuck you want. Use Slackbuilds, which aren't officially supported but endorsed by Slackware's dev. Use Sbopkg, a helper script with dependency resolution very much like Arch's AUR helpers. Use the repos of sister distros like SalixOS that include dependency resolution. Install RPM packages. Install Flatpaks. Unpack tarballs wherever you want them. Go the old school way of compiling from source and administering your own system yourself. Slackware doesn't get in the way of whatever you want to do, cause there's nothing there to get in the way.

It's the most KISS distro that exists. It's the most stable one, too. Any distro-specific knowledge you acquire will stay valid for decades cause the distro hardly ever changes. It's also the closest to "Vanilla Linux" you can get. Cause there really isn't anything there except for patched, stable upstream software and a couple of bash scripts.

Just be mindful of the fact that Slackware is different (because the Linux ecosystem as a whole has moved on from its roots).
One example:
Up-to-date Slackware documentation isn't on Google, it's in text files written by the guy who maintained the distro for 31 years, which come preinstalled with your system. Or on linuxquestions.org, where the same guy posts, asks for input from users, and answers questions regularly.

It's still a competent system, if you have the time and inclination to make it work. And it's a blast from the past, where computing was about collaborating with like-minded freaks on a personal level. And I love that.

Is anyone aware of a guide or step by step process for this? I have been searching but am lowkey Linux stupid with a lot of things and can’t seem to find a guide for cachy. I imagine any old arch guide will do also?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18878746

The AMD Ryzen 9000 series starting with the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X launching tomorrow are some truly great desktop processors. The generational uplift is very compelling, even in single-threaded Linux workloads shooting ahead of Intel's 14th Gen Core competition, across nearly 400 benchmarks these new Zen 5 desktop CPUs impress, and these new Zen 5 desktop processors are priced competitively. I was already loving the Ryzen 7000 series performance on Linux with its AVX-512 implementation and performing so well across hundreds of different Linux workloads but now with the AMD Ryzen 9000 series, AMD is hitting it out of the ball park. That paired with the issues Intel is currently experiencing for the Intel Core 13th/14th Gen CPUs and the ~400 benchmark results makes this a home run for AMD on the desktop side with only some minor Linux caveats.

(not really pipewire itself but an interaction with wireplumber/libcamera/the kernel, but pipewire is what triggers the problem)

As seen in https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/2669 and https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/4115

The camera's /dev/video file is kept open (without streaming), sadly causing the camera to be powered on what looks to be most devices. For some reason, this completely nullifies the soc power management on modern laptops and can result in increases from 3W to 8W at idle!

On Intel laptops it's a bit easier to debug because you can see the Cstates in powertop not going low but it also wrecks AMD ones. Some laptops can reach lower cstates, but the camera module wastes a few W anyway.

I can't believe this shipped in Ubuntu, Fedora etc without anyone noticing, and for so long. This bug is quite literally wasting GWh of power and destroys the user experience of distros in laptops.

If you have a laptop with a switch that detaches the camera from the usb bus you are probably out of the water, just plug it when you use it and the problem is sidestepped. Removing uvcvideo and modprobing it on demand can also work. Disabling the camera in Lenovo's UEFI is what I did for a year until I finally found the issue on the tracker. Some laptops also seem to not be affected, but for me it happens to every machine I've tested.

Thanks to this comment for another workaround that tells wireplumber to ignore cameras. ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/10-disable-camera.conf

wireplumber.profiles = { main = { monitor.libcamera = disabled } }

Software that only captures cameras using pipewire is rare and this hasn't given me any problem. This should probably be shipped by distros while the problem is sorted out.

Note that most laptops will have other problems stopping them from reaching deep cstates, borked pcie sd card readers, ancient ethernet nics that don't support pcie sleep properly, outdated nvme firwmare... those are separate issues that most of the time can also be tackled with some dose of tlp, but it's all for nothing if the usb camera is keeping the soc awake!

Dear Linux-Wizards,

I have some USB flash drive that outputs the following errors, when i plug it in:

VGscsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access     SMI01    USB DISK01       1100 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] 491520000 512-byte logical blocks: (252 GB/234 GiB)
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_OK cmd_age=0s
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 Sense Key : Not Ready [current] 
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 Add. Sense: Medium not present
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
VGI/O error, dev sdc, sector 0 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x0 phys_seg 1 prio class 2
VGBuffer I/O error on dev sdc, logical block 0, async page read
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_OK cmd_age=0s
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 Sense Key : Not Ready [current] 
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 Add. Sense: Medium not present
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
VGI/O error, dev sdc, sector 0 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x0 phys_seg 1 prio class 2
VGBuffer I/O error on dev sdc, logical block 0, async page read
VGldm_validate_partition_table(): Disk read failed.
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_OK cmd_age=0s
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 Sense Key : Not Ready [current] 
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 Add. Sense: Medium not present
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
VGI/O error, dev sdc, sector 0 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x0 phys_seg 1 prio class 2
VGBuffer I/O error on dev sdc, logical block 0, async page read
VG sdc: unable to read partition table
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_OK cmd_age=0s
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 Sense Key : Not Ready [current] 
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 Add. Sense: Medium not present
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 1d 4b ff 80 00 00 08 00
VGI/O error, dev sdc, sector 491519872 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x80700 phys_seg 1 prio class 2
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_OK cmd_age=0s
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 Sense Key : Not Ready [current] 
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 Add. Sense: Medium not present
VGsd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 1d 4b ff 80 00 00 08 00
VGI/O error, dev sdc, sector 491519872 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x0 phys_seg 1 prio class 2
VGBuffer I/O error on dev sdc, logical block 61439984, async page read

lsblk output looks okayish, disk size is reported correctly.

sdc      8:32   1 234,4G  0 disk

When i first noticed, i hoped maybe only the first Sectors are broken, but now i'm trying with ddrescue and ddrescue -d and see the similar messages:

I/O error, dev sdc, sector 237172352 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x800 phys_seg 15 prio class 2
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_OK cmd_age=0s
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 Sense Key : Not Ready [current] 
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 Add. Sense: Medium not present
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 0e 22 f7 00 00 00 80 00

It's a USB-3 flash drive, so i also tried an USB-2 port hoping that maybe its some connection thing, but it did not help, I see the same error messages.

Normally USB flash drives warm a bit when reading/writing data, this one ist still cold after 25 minutes of ddrecue

Is there anything else i can do?

Backstory is: I was helping someone with their Windows PC and unplugged the stick without ejecting it, then Windows complained and i pressed to "scan and repair drive" which took a while. At 80% a error message appeared similar to: "insert medium into drive" When clicking OK the message reappeared after one or two seconds. It only stopped after unplugging the flash drive.

The user already said something about folders appearing at wrong locations at the drive, so i hope i did not kill the drive but it was already dying. But still feeling bad about this, so i want to try everything and even reach out to you :-)

I couldn't find much information on this online, so I was wondering if anyone has any similar experience.

I have a machine with Void Linux installed, which uses Runit. I have installed greetd which works with agreety, but I'm trying to test out gtkgreet. Setting up greetd to run gtkgreet in cage gives me errors. Fair enough, I am certain I misconfigured something.

The issue is when I try to switch to a different terminal. Seems like the greetd from XBPS on runit wants to refresh every second once it fails. So until the config is rewritten to launch a command that works, it will constantly spam the same error messages.

Again, this would be okay, but when I switch to a different terminal, it seems to pull me back every time there's a new error message, which is every second, making it very difficult to login or do anything on those other terminals.

This is pretty disastrous and borderline locks me out of my computer, so I wanted to hear if this situation sounded familiar to anyone.

Edit: Seems there are two configurations for greeter sessions, the default_session and the initial_session. Putting the cage gtkgreet in the initial session, and not the default session, prevents the issue, because the initial_session only gets attempted once. This is still weird to me especially since the resources I was using suggested using cage gtkgreet under the default session.

Fixed a bug that caused widespread crashing with Xwayland games.
Fixed a race condition involving modeset ownership which could lead to flip event timeout errors when enabling the 'fbdev' kernel module parameter in nvidia-drm.
Fixed a regression that caused nvidia-powerd to exit when nvidia-dbus.conf was not present in the /etc/dbus-1/system.d/ directory.
Fixed a bug that could cause memory corruption while handling ACPI events on some notebooks.
Fixed a bug that could cause external displays to become frozen until the next modeset when using PRIME Display Offloading with the NVIDIA dGPU acting as the display offload sink.

I want to copy (not move) my Timeshift Snapshots (Rsync) from my existing drive to another drive. Both drives are ext4. As far as I searched I am not able to find any viable results.

If not possible, just why?

Solved

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-apple-osx-bsd-rsync-copy-hard-links/

TLDR

sudo rsync -az -H --delete --numeric-ids /path/to/timeshift path/to/destination/

Where,

-a : Archive mode (i.e. recurse into directories, and preserve symlinks, file permissions, file modification times, file group, file owner, device files & special files)

-z : Compress file data during the transfer

H : Preserve hard links (i.e. copy hard links as hard links)

--delete : Delete extraneous files from the receiving side (ones that aren't on the sending side), but only for the directories that are being synchronized i.e. keep exact replica of your /path/to/timeshift directory.

--numeric-ids : Transfer numeric group and user IDs rather than using user and group names and mapping them at both ends.

--progress : Show progress during transfer.

--log-file="/var/log/my-rsync-script.log" : Log what rsync command is doing to the /var/log/my-rsync-script.log file.

Thanks to @skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl

Original Comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/11611743

I installed Pipewire a while ago to fix some audio problems. Now it's time for the 22 upgrade. Can I just run the upgrade or will the existing Pipewire installation cause problems? Has anyone done that already?

Help me understand this better.

From what I have read online, since arm just licenses their ISA and each vendor's CPU design can differ vastly from one another unlike x86 which is standard and only between amd and Intel. So the Linux support is hit or miss for arm CPUs and is dependent on vendor.

How is RISC-V better at this?. Now since it is open source, there may not be even some standard ISA like arm-v8. Isn't it even fragmented and harder to support all different type CPUs?

I know, I know. I really shouldn't use NTFS with Linux if I plan to write to it, especially not my only backup drive, which is my external media drive for libreELEC as well.

So I was moving/copying/renaming stuff through SMB on my libreELEC machine. And then suddenly I noticed 50 episodes of old-school Sonic animated series just... disappeared. Strange, but I continued renaming files, and those too poof nonexistent anymore.

Okay, maybe a Dolphin bug - I thought, since I was using Dolphin for SMB. But same from Android (I'm using Solid Explorer)

Then, Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex too disappeared. Then some episode of Serial Experiments Lain.

Star Trek Discovery? Fucking gone, tho I didn't mind that one. All of the files are 0B. Then Regular Show.

Now, this was the point where I needed to step in. Linux just didn't see the files.

Oh well, I have a Windows 10 PC I use for work so it was a time for bringing the drive "home" and give it some chkdsk, in the meantime I was really hoping it wouldn't just destroy my 4TB backup drive. Wasn't sure it would work, but that was pretty much my only hope and idea. Trying to access those folders and files from Windows gave me error messages before the check.

The check and fix dialog of chkdsk was also kinda fucked, the progressbar jumped around, didn't make any sense BUT it restored my files. Hooray!

Except SAC, it was still unreadable from Windows, but! Linux does see all the episodes so I guess it's a win... of some sort. It sill bothers me there is some - from Windows's point of view - invalid files and folders on my BACKUP disk, but this will be another story.

It turned out, libreELEC is using ntfs-3 (and not 3g), which is famous for this kind of errors - files disappearing and the filesystem becoming funky.

So, I ordered a drive just for my media and media PC, tho no idea how to format it (to be readable from anywhere else - maybe exFAT?)

But this scared me like hell 😅

Just wanted to share this with you guys, there's no moral of the story, except do not use ntfs heavily under Linux, or at least do not write it a lot, which is a known thing since forever, I was just a lazy ass, don't be like me, please, unless you have a Windows machine around and some luck. But relying on these two, well...

Cheers!

Update: I formatted my new media drive to ext4. In the end, it'll be a fixed disk under my TV in a linux box, this seemed to be the best choice. I don't think I'll pick it out and use it elsewhere that much or at all.