Linux

I am not bad with computers and have a beginner+, maybe intermediate level knowledge of Linux and I kept running into some problems here and there with different distros. Most claimed to work out of the box (which may be the case for some users, but I have a shit ass Nvidia 1060 and that was not at all the case, until I installed Nobara KDE/Nvidia.

Just came here to potentially save someone time, this shit is actually working out of the box, closest experience to this was with Arch, but that's definitely not out of the box.

Sadly, DNF5 and the new Anaconda installer didn't make it to the party, in case you were wondering.

I, like many others, have been getting worn down by Microsoft's awful changes to Windows over the years, and I finally said enough is enough and moved to Linux.

I had a little linux experience beforehand due to my work, but this is my first time using it as my main OS. I am still very much a noob when it comes to linux.

So far it's been great though. I am running Linux mint.

I am having 2 issues I can't seem to solve, though. The taskbar (or I guess as Linux is calling it, the Panel) was only on one monitor rather than both. I managed to put a second one on my other monitor, and I enabled the "show windows from all workspaces" option on both panels. But it isn't behaving like I have come to expect using the Windows one.

For example, both panels have the icon for Firefox. If I have Firefox open on my main monitor, and click the firefox icon on my second monitor's panel, it just opens a new window instead of bringing the existing firefox window into focus.

An example of why this annoys me that sometimes I am playing a game that is full screen, and the flow i have over a decade of experience with is that i could click that firefox logo on the second monitor to bring up the window i already have open.

Is it possible to just have 2 identical panels that function the way the taskbar does on windows?

I am willing to switch from cinnamon to a different DE if thats what it takes. I tried installing xfce, but it seems like the issue is exactly the same there too. Not sure if switching to a different DE will help.

Or is the solution to just use a different applet than the default one in the panel?

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this, this is the only linux forum I am aware of.

EDIT: Strangely, it seems like this issue is only occurring on the second monitor. If an application is open on the second monitor, but I click the icon on the first monitor's panel, the behavior I want happens, it just puts the existing window in focus. Not sure why that is, the applets on both panels are identical as far as I can tell.

Dear @linux and @academicchatter folks:

Please suggest libre/open source tools that allow for the extraction of text and images from scientific pdf documents?

P.S: I'm on a linux machine. Would like something terminal friendly, if possible!

I've gathered that a lot of people in the nix space seem to dislike snaps but otherwise like Flatpaks, what seems to be the difference here?

Are Snaps just a lot slower than flatpaks or something? They're both a bit bloaty as far as I know but makes Canonicals attempt worse?

Personally I think for home users or niche there should be a snap less variant of this distribution with all the bells and whistles.

Sure it might be pointless, but you could argue that for dozens of other distros that take Debian, Fedora or Arch stuff and make it as their own variant, I.e MX Linux or Manjaro.

What are your thoughts?

https://codeberg.org/cyber-luna/lunas

Archlinux: yay -S lunas

i made a versatile syncing cli program, lunas, that's capable of syncing local to local, local to remote, remote to local and remote to remote at the same time with many input directories, with their file attributes if enabled and more. It syncs both ways but it has src/dest options that can be assigned to individual input directories

it runs locally, unless remote syncing is used then it runs peer-to-peer using libssh/sftp

It can do sync removal between different input directories, meaning if u want to remove a file/directory that you don't want to sync back to other directories, you can "lunas -rm file" for local or "lunas -rrm user@ip:/path/to/dir" for remote and then use the option "-cr Y" while syncing to remove it from every other directories, or simply don't use this option and it should be ignored without removal, or "-cr S" and it should be synced back to the directory it was removed from, IF it was found in one of the other directories

it has an optional config file for defining presets for easier syncing instead of writing them each time in the cli

there are more options to it which can be found in the --help or in the man page for more details

a simple usage of lunas can be like this

lunas -p dir1 -p dir2 --dry-run

lunas -s dir1 -d dir2 -d dir3 -rd user@ip:dir4

lunas -r user@ip:dir1 -d dir2 -dr

lunas -rs user@ip:dir1 -d dir2 -cr Y

lunas -rd user@ip:dir1 -s dir2

lunas -p dir1 -p dir2 -p dir3 -p user@ip:dir4 -p user@ip:dir5

p: local path r: remote path , both of them are source and destination

s: source local path d: destination local path

rs: source remote path rd: destination remote path

-dr/--dry-run: outputs what would be synced without actually syncing them

-cr/--confirm-remove Y: confirms the sync removal as explained previously

I hate spending money on hardware when there's a software solution. like, I've got a subwoofer from a 2.1 system (without satellites) for free. instead of sourcing speakers for it, however cheap they might be, I'll just utilize the speakers from my monitor. pipewire to the rescue, it creates a combined sink that outputs sound to both DP and analog audio, et voila - a 2.1 sound system. people are like "your monitor sounds like that!?" and usually I play dumb: "yeah, yours doesn't? well that's linux for ya".

so, I have a desktop and a laptop and I'd like to share the same monitor, keyboard, and mouse. modern monitors have a KVM switch integrated, you connect your keyboard/mouse/etc. to it, one USB Type-C cable to the laptop, a couple to the desktop and you have a seamless switch; it even charges the laptop, how cool is that!

however, my monitor works just fine and I don't replace my hardware unless I really have to. USB KVMs with similar functions aren't cheap. also, the monitor already has multiple display inputs so I got to thinking, how do I re-create this with no money, or as little as possible, with DIY tech?

first, switching the display; this one took me no time at all. I have a USB Type-C to DP cable (with DP-Alt) and with the power of udev (detect a connection then trigger stuff) and ddcutil (sends commands to the monitor) I got it working as seamless as possible - I connect the laptop and it automagically switches the monitor over. when I disconnect it, the monitor falls back to an active connection, which is the desktop. awesome!

now how about switching the keyboard and mouse over? I'd like to do it in software, like barrier/inputleap does it but without having to move the cursor to the adjacent monitor. also, both machines are on wayland which isn't supported. eventual input lag to the laptop is unimportant, I game on the desktop. no idea if that can be accomplished or if that's even a thing...

that is a thing - it's called USB/IP, i.e. sharing your USB device over TCP/IP; it's a kernel module included by default for a long time now and that thing rocks! not only does the USB keyboard work without any perceivable lag on the laptop, it get's "disconnected" from the host, so your keypresses aren't disturbing the host. since it's a kernel module, no need to convince wayland to play ball! this also works for webcams, scanners, readers, etc., the client system thinks this is a local device and it just works.

so all we have to do is expand the shell script to bring over the keyboard and mouse along with switching over the monitor once the USB-C connection is detected annnd... success!

well, sorta. my wireless mouse is second-hand and I haven't got the USB receiver for it, so it connects over bluetooth. tried sharing with usbip and it works, but the radio connection gets interrupted or something and the mouse doesn't work there. maybe there's a workaround but I don't want to dig further.

also, how do I switch back to the desktop to shoot some peggies? I don't want to disconnect the laptop manually so I could come up with a slew of shell scripts and udev triggers and I'd also need a ssh tunnel, I don't want my keyboard input to travel over the LAN in cleartext, etc... kinda cumbersome. also, once the novelty wears off, the automagicallity gets tired, I'd prefer manually switching between devices with a keyboard combo.

enter rkvm. it's written in rust and as everybody knows that's super awesome. unlike usbip, comms are encrypted, so no sniffing possible, and hotkey switching is a default function, and it also handles the mouse!

now, rkvm currently doesn't support triggers, like "do X when hotkey combo pressed", but Plasma can handle running the monitor switch script on each device separately by listening to the same hotkey combo.

both solutions have their advantages and disadvantages, usbip requires more legwork but is more powerful whereas rkvm is simpler and easier to set up.

the final step, powering the laptop over the same cable. sadly, can't handle that in software, but there are power delivery injectors out there, some as cheap as $7. also, there's this cool project, looks easy enough to source and implement. not sure if I'm going that way or just go with a used dock station, as those can be had for a song for popular business ex-flagships, like the Thinkpad T-series, HP Elitebooks, Dell Latitudes, etc..

are there downsides? sure there are. numero uno, the host (desktop, in my case) has to be on all the time. not a big deal for me, it gets woken in the morning and suspended late at night. there are edge cases when rkvm geeks out, but for a thing that's in its 0.x version, this is more than usable.

so, I've been using this setup for the past week or so and haven't yet found it to break or have any negative side-effects. gaming on the desktop is as snappy (or shitty) as ever and using my mech keyboard and giant screen on the laptop allows me to easily compartmentalize my business and private stuff.

thanks for reading!

edit: edited title to clarify I'm talking about a Keyboard-Video-Mouse switch, not a Kernel-Virtual-Machine.

I recently found out about a Linux Distro named Q4OS and I wanted to test out their claim that it only requires 256 MB of ram when using the trinity desktop environment. However, when I used the live cd in virt-manager with 256 MB or ram, it just kernel panicked at boot. So I then tried it with 512 MB of ram. In addition to some issues that are not present when you are using at least 1 GB of ram, such as "sudo apt update" causing the entire VM to become unresponsive, I noticed that it seemed to actually use anywhere between 290 MB to 370 MB of ram when the only thing running was the process viewer (which is htop).

Obviously, this is still very low for a modern Linux distro but I was wondering how accurate VMs are for testing ram usage.

And, yes I know that it would be pretty much useless on a PC that only had 256 MB of ram even if it did work. I'm actually checking the ram usage because there is a possibility that I may be using a very old computer of mine that only has 1 GB of ram at some point in the future. So I'm just testing it and eventually other distros out to to see which one I'm going to end up using (assuming I do actually end up even using that computer).

Edit: I just tried the 32-bit version in virt-manager and htop stated it was only using 232 MB of ram, which means that their claim was right and that I might have been using the wrong version.

Edit 2: I just tried installing the 64-bit version in virt-manager and htop stated that it was using about 350 MB of ram, so I don't know if installing it actually made a difference.

I have been messing with my raspberry pi 400 and stumbled across box86. This program converts x86 calls to arm. And it works pretty well, i got the orginal pvz (disk verison) running through wine and box 86! The game is slow on cutscenes but gameplay is suprisingly playable and was more playable then my first pc lmao!

Its crazy that a fanless 15watt arm chip can run old games this well! Compared to a pentium 4 thats is taking off.

While I was writing a shell script (doing this the past several days) just a few minutes ago my PC fans spinned up without any seemingly reason. I thought it might be the baloo process, but looking at the running processes I see it's names block-rate-estim . It takes 6.2% CPU time and is running since minutes, on my modern 8 core CPU. And uses up 252 KiB. The command is shown as block-rate-estim --help, which when I run on the commandline myself will just run the program without output and blocking until I end the process. Sounds alarming to me first. Is something mining going on?

I looked up where the command is coming from:

$ ls -l /usr/bin/block-rate-estim
.rwxr-xr-x 14k root 20 Dez  2023 /usr/bin/block-rate-estim

$ yay -F block-rate-estim
extra/libde265 1.0.12-1 [installed: 1.0.15-1]
usr/bin/block-rate-estim

$ yay -Si libde265
Repository      : extra
Name            : libde265
Version         : 1.0.15-1
Description     : Open h.265 video codec implementation
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : https://github.com/strukturag/libde265
Licenses        : LGPL3
Groups          : None
Provides        : None
Depends On      : gcc-libs  glibc
Optional Deps   : ffmpeg: for sherlock265
qt5-base: for sherlock265
sdl: dec265 YUV overlay output
Conflicts With  : None
Replaces        : None
Download Size   : 270,31 KiB
Installed Size  : 783,53 KiB
Packager        : Antonio Rojas 
Build Date      : Mi 20 Dez 2023 20:06:16 CET
Validated By    : MD5 Sum  SHA-256 Sum  Signature

It's still going on the background, I have no idea what this is. The thing is, I didn't start any process that is related to video codec. Other than FreeTube being in the background with video in Pause mode since 2 hours or so. I use FreeTube since months and this never happened before, I see this block-rate-estim process the first time.

What should I do? I'm on an up-to-date EndeavourOS installation.

Every time I wake up PC from sleep I have to go to bluetooth settings -> select device -> enable connection to get sound on bluetooth speakers (Anker Soundcore). Bluetooth came with MBO and drivers were working out of the box after PopOS install.

I hope there is a command I can use instead of clicking in the GUI. Anyone know a command I could use?

[SOLUTION]

Using this command (with bluetooth speaker MAC address):

bluetoothctl connect A4:77:58:0A:DF:F1

[SOLUTION]

Bonus question: I was thinking I could map that command to a keyboard shortcut (like CTRL+ALT+B). What is the best way (or app) to accomplish this? I believe I could google this part quickly, but happy to hear suggestions anyway

[SOLUTION]

It's possible with PopOS: Settings -> Keyboard -> Keaboard Shortcuts -> Custom Shortcuts

[SOLUTION]

<3

Is anyone free to help the developer of sway notification center out? I have opened an issue about sway notification center's accessibility regressions in the notification list, and I have also suggested that when the notification appears, the accessible event is fired. The dev doesn't know how to do this however, so any input or PR's that mention this issue would be greatly appreciated! https://github.com/ErikReider/SwayNotificationCenter/issues/404 If we get this sorted, we will have a fully accessible notification daemon for all wlroots based compositors, which will soon include XFCE. This could be the Wayland equivalent of notification-daemon for X11, but even better if the GTK notification centre list can be fixed up too. #Linux #accessibility #a11y

Does anyone know if it's possible to have events from the Keybow keyboard cause effects on the Pi Zero W running the keyboard instead of outputting to another machine? Or do I need to go with a different OS and figure out the handling of the keys myself?

publication croisée depuis : https://lemmy.world/post/14573897

I'm asking this because I'm very new to the Yocto project. I'm going through the documentation but it's a bit overwhelming to me, looking at what Fishwaldo has achieved (link embedded in the title). I would like to learn how he did it and how I could create my own image based on a supported kernel with necessary drivers and boot the Star64 board.

From what I understand, he:

1. Forked the kernel tree and created his own branch.
2. Put in the necessary drivers (including OEM drivers) - I'm not really sure how he did it since I'm new to Linux (any tips would be appreciated!).
3. I can't quite make out the layers he used to build the minimal image (I will study the guide more to figure this out).
4. Finally, he compiled it, alongside compiling U-boot, partitioned the SD-card and booted the device.

Am I right? I'm missing a lot of steps in the middle, would really appreciate any help in understanding this. Thanks!

I have created a network namespace to separate connections through a VPN, and it runs as the same user account as I use for everything else; however, it is not able to play music/use microphone

inside the namespace:

aplay -l  
card 2: Generic_1 [HD-Audio Generic], device 0: ALCS1200A Analog [ALCS1200A Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: Generic_1 [HD-Audio Generic], device 1: ALCS1200A Digital [ALCS1200A Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0  

arecord -l

card 2: Generic_1 [HD-Audio Generic], device 0: ALCS1200A Analog [ALCS1200A Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: Generic_1 [HD-Audio Generic], device 2: ALCS1200A Alt Analog [ALCS1200A Alt Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 

I also tried running as another user, but the effect is the same, which is why for simplicity I resorted to using the same user that can play/record normally

what should I look for in configuring it ?