All things Linux

[Jolene Benoir]

I started moving back to using Linux full time but at this point the Windows Terminal is good enough that I am not really seeing the point.

If I really need to do something Pure Linux, I can SSH to my project machine, which is just an old desktop sitting under a desk. I do need to update it though. It's running 32bit hardware and that occasionally becomes a dead stopping point on projects.

I am somewhat leery of Microsoft's WSL. Embrace, extend, extinguish is something that I'm still not quite sure they aren't working toward.

 

[Lance Corrimal]

You had me at NetworkManager.

When I was supporting a RH network we always disabled Network Mangler unless on a laptop because it was kind of needed for Wifi. But that was several years ago and I hear it's harder to do that now.

PS: #^&*@^ cmake

oh (at least on openSUSE) you can easily make do without network manager, but the computer I'm talking about is in fact a laptop - and you gotta love what the combination of network manager, firewalld and openvpn can do by now. but i remember telling my class "turn off networkmanager before you start anything else" from when I was still teaching red hat classes based on RHEL6... XD

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

oh (at least on openSUSE) you can easily make do without network manager, but the computer I'm talking about is in fact a laptop - and you gotta love what the combination of network manager, firewalld and openvpn can do by now. but i remember telling my class "turn off networkmanager before you start anything else" from when I was still teaching red hat classes based on RHEL6... XD

Reminds me of my earlier days of using Ubuntu (I got started with Feisty). It didn't take me long to learn to get rid of Network-Manager and use wicd instead. Fast-forward to today, and none of the issues I've had with earlier Network-Manager seem to plague me now. I've had absolutely no issue with it these days. It's kinda like PulseAudio - a pain in the ass in its early days, but has greatly matured and come of age today.

 

[Essence Lumin]

It's kinda like PulseAudio - a pain in the ass in its early days, but has greatly matured and come of age today.

I had nightmares with that. I don't need it right now. It works now does it? Good to know.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

I had nightmares with that. I don't need it right now. It works now does it? Good to know.

It works quite well these days. I haven't had to muck about with it at all over the past few years, except recently to add a Bluetooth module to it so I could use my laptop's Bluetooth with my headset.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

I had nightmares with that. I don't need it right now. It works now does it? Good to know.

It works well enough since Lennart Poettering handed over the project leadership to somebody else years ago who do know how to do their job, before it was a major PITA and clusterfuck. Like with most projects started by Poettering by the way. That's why most people who know him are not really comfortable with him being in charge of the development of an init system replacement.

 

[Free]

I remember trying to set up PulseAudio so I could DJ/stream with it in Second Life back around 2011.



It was easier to get WinAmp up and running in Wine - and it worked!

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

I remember trying to set up PulseAudio so I could DJ/stream with it in Second Life back around 2011.



It was easier to get WinAmp up and running in Wine - and it worked!

Mixxx, while I find the UI annoying and ugly, it does work. It can even do that beatmatching thing.

Mixxx - Free DJ Mixing Software App

Download the most advanced FREE DJ software available, featuring iTunes integration, MIDI controller support, internet broadcasting, and integrated music library.

www.mixxx.org

If you're willing to use JACK and get it working with Pulseaudio, then IDJC is easier to use and I prefer the UI.

Internet DJ Console Homepage

Internet DJ Console (IDJC) is a Shoutcast/Icecast internet radio client incorporating features for live radio show production.

idjc.sourceforge.net

 

[Free]

I use Windows these days. Solved all my problems...

(A note for follow-up repliers: I didn't request help. I noted I had problems with PulseAudio 9 YEARS AGO.)

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

I remember trying to set up PulseAudio so I could DJ/stream with it in Second Life back around 2011.



It was easier to get WinAmp up and running in Wine - and it worked!

I remember trying to get PulseAudio to behave itself while running Second Life back around 2009, especially with SLVoice running! I think at one point I gave up, ripped out PulseAudio, and just ran straight ALSA for a while.

"When (it) was good, (it) was very, very good, When (it) was bad, (it) was horrid."

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

You know ALSA was the reason in 2005 why Jamie Zawinski was so frustrated over Linux, because he could not get his sound card running at all, that he gladly switched over to a Mac.

Remember last week, when I tried to buy exactly the same audio card that 99.99% of the world owns and convince Linux to be able to play two sounds at once? Yeah, turns out, that was the last straw. I bought an iMac, and now I play my music with iTunes.
This took... let me see... just about zero effort. Well, I still have to go buy some longer audio cables, but that's it.

I plugged a mouse with three buttons and a wheel into the Mac, and it just worked without me having to read the man page on xorg.conf or anything. Oh frabjous day.

Go ahead and say "I told you so" if it makes you feel better.

And here's his rant about ALSA:

Ok, so having acquired an 1/8"-to-RCA, it turns out that yes, the SB0410 will provide S/PDIF out. However, it has the same problem that the CMI8738 had, which is, I can't play two sounds at once.
This may be related to the fact that the only XMMS setting that will produce audio is the OSS driver; all other options produce "please check your sound card settings."

Even when XMMS is not running, Flash applets still can't make noise.

I can't believe I even have to think about this shit. What year is it again?

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

I remember trying to get PulseAudio to behave itself while running Second Life back around 2009, especially with SLVoice running!

That was easy! What you had to do was disable fmod by commenting out a single line in the script that starts up SL!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I kill me. Grid knows where I found out about the fmod issue, might have been in the old LINUX.readme included with the tarballs. It eventually got fixed, then you had to stop disabling fmod because you would have issues THEN.

"When (it) was good, (it) was very, very good, When (it) was bad, (it) was horrid."

Oh yes. I stopped having to manually edit pulse files in 2012 with Fedora 17.

You know ALSA was the reason in 2005 why Jamie Zawinski was so frustrated over Linux, because he could not get his sound card running at all, that he gladly switched over to a Mac.

Ok, so having acquired an 1/8"-to-RCA, it turns out that yes, the SB0410 will provide S/PDIF out. However, it has the same problem that the CMI8738 had, which is, I can't play two sounds at once.

Yeah, ALSA was originally designed when only a single application tended to be using audio at a time. I think I once got it working with multiple sounds, but it sounded horrible and had distortion.

This may be related to the fact that the only XMMS setting that will produce audio is the OSS driver; all other options produce "please check your sound card settings."

IIRC you had to have the alsa-libs installed to enable ALSA support in XMMS when you compiled it. By default it used OSS. Even today you have to install the xmms-pulse package to get it to be able to use pulseaudio properly. If you don't it uses ALSA, which works because pulse has an ALSA compatibility layer, but not optimally.

Even when XMMS is not running, Flash applets still can't make noise.

Yeah, you had to go into flash-settings and set the audio output, for some reason flash didn't use the system default.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Desktop environment lovers got a nice gift shortly before christmas: at 22/12/2020 the new 4.16 version of the Xfce desktop environment was being officially released after only around 1 1/2 years of development, which for the project is lightning fast compared to other release cycles.

Xfce always followed a more steady, but slow release cycle. Some releases took up to 4 years before they were being finished. Since Xfce though moved away from cgit/gitolite to their own hosted Gitlab source code repository this really improved developer engagement a lot.

The change log this time therefore shows tons of entries: Xfce 4.16 Changelog – Xfce

The most significant changes are though getting rid of the last bits of GTK2 support code, improved power management, streamlining the icon scheme, improved window manager and much, much more.

News – Xfce 4.16 released – Xfce

www.xfce.org

And here's an online tour showing the most significant changes: Xfce 4.16 tour – Xfce

 

[bubblesort]

Some kids just broke the Linux Mint Cinnamon screensaver lock, by typing really, really fast. From github:

I tried to recreate the crash on my own with no success, maybe because it required more than 4 little hands typing and using the mouse on the virtual keyboard.

Those kids should apply for a job hacking at NCIS.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Some kids just broke the Linux Mint Cinnamon screensaver lock, by typing really, really fast.

JWZ was wonderfully sarcastic about this.

I told you so, 2021 edition

Cinnamon-screensaver got popped, again. If you are not running XScreenSaver on Linux, then it is safe to assume that your screen does not lock. The latest: 2021: Mash keys on the virtual keyboard to unlock Cinnamon-screensaver. Previously: CVE-2019-3010, Privilege escalation in Oracle Solaris...

www.jwz.org

 

[Essence Lumin]

JWZ was wonderfully sarcastic about this.

I told you so, 2021 edition

Cinnamon-screensaver got popped, again. If you are not running XScreenSaver on Linux, then it is safe to assume that your screen does not lock. The latest: 2021: Mash keys on the virtual keyboard to unlock Cinnamon-screensaver. Previously: CVE-2019-3010, Privilege escalation in Oracle Solaris...

www.jwz.org

If this post is any indication, the jwz.org post should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Screensaver lock by-pass via the virtual keyboard · Issue #354 · linuxmint/cinnamon-screensaver

* Cinnamon version: Cinnamon 4.6.7 * Distribution: Fedora 32 * Graphics hardware *and* driver used: 03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Ellesmere [Radeon RX 47...

github.com

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Isn't JWZ out of the Linux programming camp since he wrote "Fuck the skull of ALSA" in 2005, and a devout Mac lover since then?

that was, in fact, the final straw.

Remember last week, when I tried to buy exactly the same audio card that 99.99% of the world owns and convince Linux to be able to play two sounds at once? Yeah, turns out, that was the last straw. I bought an iMac, and now I play my music with iTunes. This took... let me see... just about zero...

www.jwz.org

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

He's still the primary maintainer of xscreensaver.

Also:

You can't ask people to not do what they want to do and what they expect to be able to do.

Sure you can. Want isn't need.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Okay, so, there was a minor Linux dustup in the last couple of days that you may have heard of. Linus, of Tech Tips (no relation to the guy who invented Linux) renown, tried to install Linux on his home computer and....it did not go well.

The backstory: Linus Sebastian and WAN Show partner Luke Lafreniere have decided to "celebrate" the release of Windows 11 by...switching to Linux. They came up with a "challenge", where each of them has to run a Linux flavor of their own choosing on their personal home "daily driver" desktop computers for at least one whole month, doing everything they normally do on their home machines which, as Linus points out in the introduction, mostly means gaming. They must use Linux exclusively for the entire month; if either of them gives up and goes back to Windows before the set time period, that person has to....well, suffer a penalty, described in the video. While the LTT channel already has some Linux enthusiasts on staff, and Linus would certainly be able to get willing and eager assistance from specialists if he wanted it, he decided to approach the project from the perspective of just a typical non-specialist coming from Windows who knows little to nothing about Linux. The point, then, is to showcase what kind of experience a person who is brand-new to Linux can expect, specifically the GUI experience.

Linus does some light internet research and finds that there appears to be a general consensus that Pop!_OS, a Debian-based distribution, seems to be a good choice for beginners. This was kind of exciting for me to see, because I use Pop for my (non-exclusive) Linux test-driving. Luke, on the other hand, chose Linux Mint, which is also a Debian-based distribution but which uses a different desktop program, called Cinnamon, as opposed to Pop!_OS which by default uses a ubiquitous desktop environment called GNOME.

I'm not going to bore you with all the details; but what matters is that Linus installed Pop!_OS successfully, and then tried to install Steam via Pop's desktop app-store, which in Linux parlance is called a "package manager". The Steam install failed. So Linus tried to install via the terminal, which told him that a bunch of files had been redundantly installed and were "no longer needed", along with instructions for removing them. On following the instructions in the terminal, Linus got a warning that the files he had just been told in the same console session were no longer needed are "essential" and to only go ahead and remove them if he "knows what he's doing". He went ahead with the removal and, oops, Pop then proceeded to just permanently uninstall its entire desktop environment, leaving him with a beautiful black screen. Guess those files were needed after all.

Linus installed a different distribution, called Manjaro, on which he proceeded to install Steam with few issues, and got a game installed and launched.

Luke had a couple of minor issues of his own setting up Mint, but nothing as awful as his entire GUI being deleted.

Needless to say, this looked really bad for Pop!_OS - and it was. That turn of events is absolutely ridiculous. How on earth does a failed install lead to a recommendation to delete your freaking desktop? How does it even happen? How does Pop!_OS even allow you to do something that catastrophic, during a program installation routine, with nothing but a caution about "knowing what you're doing"? I did not have that experience when I installed Steam, so it has to have been the fault of some update that took place later. If it had happened to me, I probably wouldn't be using Pop!_OS right now. It's worth noting that the particular bug that caused the program install to delete the Pop! desktop has been fixed, as Linus points out in a pinned comment on the video. Even so, the fact that it happened at all is still so absurd.

At any rate, one of the Pop!_OS devs was highly upset about Linus's video and started criticizing the actions he took to try and fix the problem on social media, insisting among other things that Linus - in his very first hour on Linux desktop in general and Pop specifically - should've gone to Github and made a bug report and then waited for the situation to be fixed and a patch to be released - a (I must say) kind of typical hardcore-Linuxer "HONK USER ERROR STOOPID NOOBS" kind of comment. The toxic element of the Linux user community then did what it does, and started strangling each other over their differences of opinion on the matter, leading said dev to temporarily withdraw from his social media due to the abuse and death threats(!) he was getting. Linus did not mention getting similar abuse, but I assume that he probably did because he always gets similar abuse whenever he recommends something that some people don't like (or says something negative about something that some people DO like), and he was likely especially prepared to ignore it on this particular topic, because Luke foreshadowed the controversy in his part of the introduction.

Here's Linus's video. I think it's worth a watch:


Right before his desktop goes back to its home planet, Linus says "What is the point of having a...", a sentence he never finishes because of the aforementioned OS-death. He doesn't revisit the comment later in the video either. But I know exactly what he was going to say, because as a newbie playing with Linux I thought the exact same thing; so if you're curious, what he was going to say was some derivation of "What is the point of having a GUI if you still have to use the console for simple tasks", and it is a GOOD DAMN QUESTION.

Anyways, so there's three takeaways from this experience

1) The current state of the Linux Desktop is "kind of janky", and the new user onboarding experience in particular is poor enough that it could discourage people from switching to Linux from Windows if they're not pre-motivated by a fanatical hatred of Microsoft enough to muscle through the problems and learning curve
2) There is little information that is actually useful and intelligible to the new user when it comes to the differences between distributions and why one might choose one over another. The differences are often downplayed as purely cosmetic but that's clearly not true in at least some very important ways.
3) There is a lot of unhelpfulness, reactionism, and general toxicity in the Linux user community, which is discouraging or off-putting to new users who try to ask for help.

 

[Essence Lumin]

1) The current state of the Linux Desktop is "kind of janky", and the new user onboarding experience in particular is poor enough that it could discourage people from switching to Linux from Windows if they're not pre-motivated by a fanatical hatred of Microsoft enough to muscle through the problems and learning curve
2) There is little information that is actually useful and intelligible to the new user when it comes to the differences between distributions and why one might choose one over another. The differences are often downplayed as purely cosmetic but that's clearly not true in at least some very important ways.
3) There is a lot of unhelpfulness, reactionism, and general toxicity in the Linux user community, which is discouraging or off-putting to new users who try to ask for help.

It seems like this has always been the state of things more or less. I haven't installed linux from scratch for quite a while. My last install was Mint. The install was without problems. I've never had a program installation in Linux take out part of the operating system. But always, always there comes a time with linux where I want to do something and have to spend hours researching the problem and hoping I find the right web page showing how to fix my problem. Then there are often terrible UI problems. I attribute this to most people contributing to linux wanting to make something work and not very many UI professionals contributing their expertise. For instance, the last time I checked the Gimp I read that the UI is so much better than it used to be, it's fine. Well no, it was still garbage. I use paint.net on Windows for image manipulation. It is a free and closed source program. It might not be as powerful as the gimp but it sure has a great UI. Linux is great for what it is. That includes technically inclined people who want to use it for their desktop. It also is great as a server for many things. I loathe MS in some ways, but I would not recommend Linux as an alternative to Windows for someone who doesn't want to tinker with things. I don't see that ever changing.