Re: glob path question

[Cindy Sue Causey]

Please forgive any formatting glitches. I'm still a brand newbie at
sending emails out of Evolution. :)

On Wed, Aug 21, 2024 at 8:08AM Michael Kjörling
 wrote:
> > But this file is not listed by 'ls' command.
> >
> > # ls /etc/policyd-spf.conf
> > ls: cannot access '/etc/policyd-spf.conf': No such file or directory
>
> The glob matches the directory. This causes `ls` to get the directory
> name on its command line, which makes `ls` list the contents of that
> directory.
>
> For the behavior you want, try using `ls -d`. That will list the
> matching directory entries (if any) without descending into
> directories to list their contents.
>
> Filename globbing is done by the shell, not by the invoked application
> (such as `ls`).


All these years of using ls and locate myself, just had an ah-ha moment
triggered by the above. Tried my favored (cognitively friendly) grep:

$ ls /etc/*|grep wi -i
/etc/nsswitch.conf
/etc/usb_modeswitch.conf
type-windows.xml
x-window-manager
x-window-manager.1.gz
wicd
wicd
K01wicd
K01wicd
S01wicd
S01wicd
S01wicd
S01wicd
K01wicd
/etc/usb_modeswitch.d:
/etc/wicd:
wired-settings.conf
wireless-settings.conf

Next further tested "/etc/*/*" which returned yet more results,
including several complaints about "permission denied" as ls reached
deeper into each parent directory.

Pretty cool. Thanks for triggering that thought! I could have used it to
save brain pain many dozens of times over the last few years.

PS Yeah, I know, some directories go very deep. I'm pretending those
don't exist just this second. Searches I've performed are much specific
than just "wi" so the results list would remain small for deeper
queries. Works for my humble single user needs. :)
 
Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Evolution & ThunderBird

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On Wed, 2024-06-19 at 15:16 -0400, Jerry Mellon wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> New user having trouble with evolution. I think that I have it setup
> correctly, but it will not login
> 
> to my email accounts. At the bottom of screen it is scanning the email
> server from my login but then 
>  
> a box pops up indicating that there was an error trying to login and
> asks for the password, which I supply and box closes only to return
> shortly with the same response.
> I have used the account on my other system and no problem so the
> account is OK.
>   
> I tried to download Thunderbird to give it a try but it is missing
> some dependencies an will not
> load.

Hi.. I started using Evolution several months ago. Am still working out
some kinks myself. I just test drove adding a second mail account for a
same user, and it started walking me through that process. What about
trying that for the same account that's failing right now?

What I'm thinking is maybe there was a quiet typo, a missed field, or
something. I say that because I'm having an awful time seeing the
characters I'm typing here on mine. I've had typos galore in two emails.

You could give your favorite email a new (second) account name, see if
it works, delete the first account if the second one works, and then
rename the second to the first account name that is presumed memorable.

If a second account ends up working, make sure to click through that
"hamburger" or whatever official method exists to delete the first
account. In other words, don't just delete the name in the folder
hierarchy wherever you're seeing it (mine's a directory tree on the
left).

My brain keeps wanting to note that e.g. Gmail used to make us jump
through painful hoops to use desktop programs like Evolution. That
didn't happen for me this time, but maybe other email providers still
have the detail that needs addressed on their online end and that isn't
seen while setting up an Evolution account (versus other email
programs).

That inspires me to then say, if I was stuck in this situation, I'd do a
quick Internet search for my specific email provider along with keywords
like Linux AND Evolution to cut down on false positive returns. Maybe
someone has already presented a detailed step-by-step how-to after their
own fails at this.

Just thinking out loud. I'll say this, Evolution email has real-l-l-ly
worked out for me _this time_ after I had not had a good experience with
it multiple times in the past.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with backups of Evolution just in case (click that hamburger 
to find backup and restore under "File") *

Re: OT: Top Posting

[Cindy Sue Causey]

-Original Message-
From: Greg Wooledge 
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: OT: Top Posting
Date: 05/14/24 13:41:17

On Tue, May 14, 2024 at 05:01:31PM +, fxkl4...@protonmail.com wrote:
> how many times has this top post crap been dug up
> don't y'all have any thing better to do

It's never going to stop.  We have a clash of two cultures here.

The first culture are Unix users who grew up with Internet email and
Usenet news.  For people in this culture, there is a well-defined set
of "netiquette" rules -- plain text messages, inline quoting with "> "
citation characters, lines limited to ~72 characters, etc.



Too funny for words! Make that twice now that I've seen line length
mentioned here on Debian in over a decade++. I also referenced the
inline quoting method since my new chosen email software appears to be
failing with its default on that feature. Will try AGAIN to fix that as
soon as I hit "Send" here BECAUSE tech reply emails are difficult to
follow without those stacked ">" over ">>" pointers attached showing who
said what when.

And, yeah, netiquette, that's the word echoed across the Internet. I
totally forgot that in my own response. It's not users picking on each
other. It's a respectful "virtual handshake approved" set of standards
with the straightforward purpose of putting everyone on as close to the
same page as is humanly possible.

PS Afterthought is that email signatures are another of that widely
accepted netiquette set of standards. I consciously altered mine many
years ago after reading about that, most likely also here on Debian-
User. Might have been over on W3C, too, now that I think about it.
That's where I first heard of Linux circa 1999.

W3C's Linux reference was about installing HTML validators locally, and
the rest is terminal command line history. Thank you, Developers! What
you all do and that works so near flawlessly in nanoseconds still..
blows my mind to this.. second. Watching daily upgrades methodically
unfold as each package successfully coordinates its place in line with
the others is pure magic. :)

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, North Georgia
* runs with birdseed! *

Re: OT: Top Posting

[Cindy Sue Causey]

-Original Message-
From: gene heskett 
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: OT: Top Posting
Date: 05/14/24 10:54:50

On 5/14/24 10:09, Richard wrote:
Just because something isn't an official ISO standard doesn't mean
it's 
not standard behavior. And how it relates to this mailing list? It's 
called a setting.

No its not, its your refusal to use the down arrow in your reply editor 
to put your reply after the question. It really is that simple. If your 
choice of email agents cannot do that, its time to switch to an agent 
that can. There are dozens of them.


DISCLAIMER: I just realized above portion might not quote properly. My
apologies in advance if it does not. That's one glitch I haven't located
a fix for, yet.

The rest of the email: I think Evolution has finally fixed my own latest
issues with tech reply emails just since Gmail forced all users onto its
more dynamic release. My biggest issue is, hopefully "was," line length.
This email is only my second reply sent in maybe 2 months so am about to
find out how things are progressing.

Accidentally just this second was reminded there's a setting for
avoiding top posting by lunging to bottom of reply emails. That setting
is found by going through the now classic 3-line settings "hamburger"
then:

Edit > Preferences > Composer Preferences > General (tab)

There's a simple toggle on/off checkbox that says, "Start typing at the
bottom." The setting for word wrapping is just a few lines above that.

Regarding line length (word wrapping), that's an even less spoken
"standard" that has merit at its base. I think I've seen it mentioned
maybe one time in more than a decade++ on Debian. That "standard" is
about usability.. readability.. aka conscious consideration for fellow
list members.

Best as I was able to discern from the Net [0], 72 characters is the
magic number for line length because 4 extra characters are added to
both ends when e.g. git processes submissions. Makes good common sense
to me.

PS I thought it was 80. Guess it was about those extra 8 characters.
Or.. Maybe whoever I saw write that over ten years ago almost understood
that "handshake standard" but not quite. That's one scary part of
trusting strangers on the WWW. :)

Again back to the concept of tech listserv standards, the source I'm
referencing after randomly finding it via search this morning says, "The
50/72 Rule is a set of standards that are pretty well agreed upon in the
industry to standardize the format of commit messages."

"Pretty well agreed upon..." That's implying that unspoken list
standards are really not users "picking on each other." Listserv
standards is a concept that has evolved over decades for rational
reasons as Developer and User communications evolved.

Am not embarrassed to say Evolution has kicked my backside k/t its
learning curve versus a user's level of cognitive ability. This
experience ended up touching on "frightening" a couple times, e.g. I
sent 2,000 online emails to (online) trash when that was not intended.
It's easy to mess up badly while moving emails around between desktop
folders because that activity directly affects the linked online email
provider if a user approves those access permissions. 

For what it's worth as a huge selling point for me, I have a massive
online email account. There are hundreds of thousands of emails from the
last 20 years. Evolution said whatever, bring it on.

Evolution appears to do some form of maybe symlinking instead of
downloading so everything is available almost immediately seconds after
the first time Evolution is ever fired up. Other email software I've
used only seems to work by downloading. That difference is huge for
anyone using a data download limiting Internet provider. NOTE: Evolution
appears to possibly offer related tweaking if one prefers working
offline.

In the other email software cases I attempted, the software could only
reach back a limited time span into history before I a-sume Gmail cut
off access to touching older emails. If there's a work-around for that,
I never found it. I simply (and immediately) purged the email software,
instead.

With Evolution, I'm instantly looking at emails I haven't seen in ~20
years. I was having a horrible time accessing those same emails in Gmail
itself online. Talk about mind blowing nostalgia overload...

Cindy :)

[0]
https://dev.to/noelworden/improving-your-commit-message-with-the-50-72-rule-3g79
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, North Georgia
* runs with birdseed! *

Re: can not find repo

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On Sun, Apr 14, 2024 at 12:03 PM  wrote:
>
> i don't see an armel repo on any of the mirrors i checked
> it was there a week ago
> has it been deleted or am i just old and blind
>

Hi.. I just took a quick poke at this by using the following k/t debootstrap:

http://deb.debian.org/debian

By clicking through on dists/Debian12.5/, the following possibilities appeared:

http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian12.5/main/installer-armel/

http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian12.5/main/binary-armel/

Those are directly via Debian instead of mirrors. To help Debian
servers over the years,
I've had success by e.g. snipping from "dists/" on then searching on
that part plus
the name of whatever mirror I was favoring at the time. That worked about 95%
of the time and helps spread the server download wear-and-tear across the Net..

Hope that somehow helps.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

NextGov: Linux XZ Utils Backdoor Was Long Con, Possibly With Support

[Cindy Sue Causey]

Hi, All..

This just hit my emails seconds ago. It's the most info that I've
personally read about the XZ backdoor exploit. I've been following
NextGov as a friendly, plain language resource about government:

Linux backdoor was a long con, possibly with nation-state support, experts say;
By David DiMolfetta; 2024.04.05 12:59pm EDT

https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2024/04/linux-backdoor-was-long-con-possibly-nation-state-support-experts-say/395511/

Continues to sound like one single perp is destroying the TRUST factor that an
untold number of future programmers must meet. That's heartbreaking.

Cindy.

PS Another apology for however this email might display. Still haven't found the
switch to set the line length to circa 80 characters.
-- 
Cindy-Sue Causey
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Debian 12.5 up-to-date Xfce, Firefox clings to USB stick

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On Sat, Mar 30, 2024 at 1:19 PM gene heskett  wrote:
>
> On 3/30/24 11:36, Antti-Pekka Känsälä wrote:
> > What could be the deal, when Firefox tries to stop me from unmounting a
> > stick, after I've accessed files on it through Firefox?  I worry about
> > my stick security.  Thanks.
>
> Since this is normally a root operation, I'm confused. Likely what it
> means is that you have an open write path from firefox to the stick that
> has not been properly closed. I get into a similar state working with
> u-sd's using mc to edit something I have used mc to cd to, and forget to
> cd back out of the u-sd before I eject the card to take it to its proper
> home in a pi clone. Possibly fixed by stopping firefox first?


The other thing I try with this is to run something like:

$ mount|grep sda2

The "sda2" can be replaced with whatever else is involved. That filters out a
hopefully small(er) list to show if something is unusually mounted. Running
"mount" alone opens up the whole list.

Going that route helped me in chroot a couple days ago. An unbelievable number
of /proc, /sys, /dev, and /dev/pts mount points appeared. I only manually
mounted them once each. Manually umount'ing each point until none were left
fixed whatever trouble that seemed to inflict on apt-get.

Cindy :)
-- 
Cindy-Sue Causey
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Debian 11 PHP 7.4 – Mysql 8 - Can’t get Mysqli_connect to work

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2024 at 6:04 AM Bernard  wrote:
>
> I have progressed a little in my trials.
>
> mysqli.so still shows the previously described problems, and I thought that 
> this was responsible of the fact that mysqli functions were apparently 
> discarded in the test programs I wrote.
>
> I discovered that this was due to errors I made in the php program. The 
> errors in the script being corrected, mysqli_connect, mysqli_select_db, 
> mysqli_query... now do operate... despite the errors concerning mysqli.so 
> that I discovered when running the tests which are proposed by 'baeldung.com'
>
> "
>
> $ php -m | grep mysqli
>
> "If the MySQLi extension is enabled, we’ll see mysqli in the output. 
> Otherwise, the output will be empty."
>
> php -m grep mysqli
>
> PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library 
> '//usr/lib/php/20190902/mysqli.so' (tried: //usr/lib/php/20190902/mysqli.so 
> (//usr/lib/php/20190902/mysqli.so: undefined symbol: mysqlnd_global_stats), 
> /usr/lib/php/20190902///usr/lib/php/20190902/mysqli.so.so 
> (/usr/lib/php/20190902///usr/lib/php/20190902/mysqli.so.so: cannot open 
> shared object file: No such file or directory)) in Unknown on line 0
> PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library 'mysqli' (tried: 
> /usr/lib/php/20190902/mysqli (/usr/lib/php/20190902/mysqli: cannot open 
> shared object file: No such file or directory), 
> /usr/lib/php/20190902/mysqli.so (/usr/lib/php/20190902/mysqli.so: undefined 
> symbol: mysqlnd_global_stats)) in Unknown on line 0
> mysqli

Just observing out loud: What's generating that double slash, i.e. "//usr,"
in the start of the message? That seems like a possible show stopper.

Cindy :)

-- 
Cindy-Sue Causey
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: filesystem info

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On Sun, Mar 24, 2024 at 11:42 PM Sirius  wrote:
>
> In days of yore (Sun, 24 Mar 2024), fxkl4...@protonmail.com thus quoth:
> > when i type mount i see many different filesystem names
> >
> > sysfs, proc, udev, devpts, tmpfs, securityfs, cgroup2, pstore, none,
> > systemd-1, hugetlbfs, mqueue, debugfs, tracefs, sunrpc, fusectl, configfs
> > binfmt_misc, portal
> >
> > is there "simple" documentation to explain what these are
> >
>
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/tree/Documentation/filesystems?h=v6.8.1
>
> The Linux Kernel sources have a Documentation tree that documents many
> aspects and features of the kernel. There may be a kernel-doc package you
> can install that should put that documentation right onto your system in
> /usr/share/doc/kernel/.
>
> Do note: reading the docs about /proc and /sys (procfs and sysfs
> respectively) may give ideas - write those ideas down if you decide to try
> them out so you have a record of what you might have done on the system.
> It can be relatively easy to unintentionally cause bad performance by
> poking around with those settings.

That suggestion inspired an apt-cache search:

apt-cache search kernel filesystem doc

Which brought up two docs appropriate for my own Trixie setup: linux-doc-6.5
and linux-doc-6.6. The description for 6.6 is:

Description-en: Linux kernel specific documentation for version 6.6
 This package provides the various README files and HTML documentation for
 the Linux kernel version 6.6.  Plenty of information, including the
 descriptions of various kernel subsystems, filesystems, driver-specific
 notes and the like.  An index to the documentation is installed as
 /usr/share/doc/linux-doc-6.6/html/index.html.

Sounds pretty good, in fact just downloaded for myself. For those who
haven't found them yet, you can also install various Debian centric handbooks
using similar searches, e.g. for "admin". Empowered users, yada-yada!

Cindy :)

PS Apologies for potential email formatting glitches. Boogeyman Gmail
finally forced its dynamic'y version on us text folks. Standard line
length options are
"indisposed". I had to manually hack them down to size. FAIL.
-
Cindy-Sue Causey
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: partition reporting full, but not

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 2/17/24, Greg Wooledge  wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 17, 2024 at 04:00:14PM -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> > So the apparently missing space is perhaps taken up by btrfs snapshots.
>>
>> Another possibility is a (few) large file(s) that is/are still open for
>> some process(es) but have been `rm` (`unlink`) so they don't have a name
>> any more.
>
> In the original post, they said they rebooted, in order to rule this out.


I only know to say this because it just happened a few days ago. Rsync
left some semi-permanent remnants when I was having problems with the
wireless capable hard drive docking station repeatedly cutting out. I
was offloading videos and images from a camera during many of those
times.

There were 3 to 5 instances of discarded remnant files in several
directories while the problem was ongoing (MANY times over a couple
weeks). The residual files were only visible when in CTRL+H view in
Thunar. Sizes ranged from a few MB to almost a GB. All had to be
manually removed.

PS That hardware problem, which I think I mentioned in another thread,
is semi-solved... and appears to be a possible case of [WIFI] jamming,
of all things. If it starts up again, there will possibly be a new
thread asking about potential tracking packages. Current instant fix?
Tweet very loudly about the issue and its potential source

Cindy :)

NB See Also: Minnesota burglaries via suspected WIFI jamming (e.g. on reddit).
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Package Identification Assistance

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 2/16/24, Charles Curley  wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Feb 2024 20:33:16 -0500
> Neal Heinecke  wrote:
>
>> I need to identify the package responsible for creating the software
>> sources window. There is a minor bug/typo where the first tab reads
>> "Ubuntu Software"
>
> I have no idea what a "software sources window" is. Do you know the
> name of the program? Often the name of the program is also the name of
> the package.
>
> Apt-file is a useful tool here.


I a-sumed it was about something like maybe aptitude.. which just
generated approximately 1,320 "apt-file find" results. Kind of a nice
little "the more you know" treasure hunt for the curious, actually..

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: hexchat being discontinued?

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 2/11/24, Michael Kjörling <2695bd53d...@ewoof.net> wrote:
> On 10 Feb 2024 19:54 -0500, from hunguponcont...@gmail.com (Default User):
>> Any recommendations for a GOOD alternative [IRC client]?
>
> If you describe what you like about hexchat and dislike about other
> alternatives, that would make it easier to suggest something you might
> find "good".


That information might also inspire the Developers of the remaining
chat clients, too.

Which then reminds that there's also "reportbug" with its wishlist bug
reports "--severity" option. Wishlist could be used to let programs
know there are features that could be added to what's already awesome
about their current offerings.

Pointing Developers at existing open source code would help. Seeing
this as a sign to start poking around at Debian programming oneself
would be fabulous. I'm actually about to point "generative AI" at
deprecated code myself because *some* folks are having luck with that
newfangled option making their lives easier.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: counting commas

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 1/19/24, David Wright  wrote:
> On Fri 19 Jan 2024 at 17:25:10 (+), debian-u...@howorth.org.uk wrote:
>> Greg Wooledge  wrote:
>>
>> > I won, and you lost
>>
>> There shouldn't be a comma in that sentence, in English. There is in
>> the closely related expression "I won, you lost."
>
> That's rather proscriptive. "I won and you lost."


I won and you lost, but we can still be friends.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with memories of a North Georgia English teacher saying to me,
"You didn't go to school around here, did you." He'd been standing up
against my desk as I was taking a third or fourth test at the time. He
was apparently trying to figure out if I was cheating on his tests.
Nope. *

Re: /mnt usage

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 1/16/24, to...@tuxteam.de  wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 15, 2024 at 09:41:15PM -0800, David Christensen wrote:
>> On 1/15/24 20:05, David Wright wrote:
>> > And I've never created any mount point under /mnt. For a one time
>> > copy, /mnt is handy; always there, I don't have to mkdir at all.
>>
>>
>> What about when you need multiple temporary mount points?
>
> I have /mnt1, /mnt2.
>
>> What about when you have an portable backup drive that you connect once a
>> week?  And the drive is encrypted?  And your backup system wants to know
>> where?
>
> Ah, for specific mounts I have specific points. Encrypted backup goes
> to /media/backup (yes, I "inherited" that from somewhere) and the decrypted
> device gets named backup (thus /dev/mapper/backup).


I zipped on past this talking point yesterday, but since you all gave
it its own thread, grin. I have multiple fstab entries for /mnt, too:
/home, /var/cache/apt/archives, browsers, and just data backup in
general. I do so because those have their own partitions.

The first two, /home and /var/cache/apt/archives, are a two-part mount
in fstab where /mnt/MOUNTPOINT mounts a partition first then a second
mount point points at a usually release-specific child directory as a
"mount -B" kind of thing.

Because of serious PTSD-related cognitive issues where I forget
experiences 10 seconds after they happen, those mount points are all
capitalized so I don't bleep up those /mnt directories by using them
for anything else (e.g. /mnt/HOME, /mnt/APT, etc).

Using /mnt via fstab has been working flawlessly *for me* for probably
3 or 4 years now, so much so that I guess I take its time saving
beauty for granted.

Exiting now while thinking out loud: Proofreading this email before
sending invoked a thought of how installers ask if we have directories
like /var on separate partitions. What are the installers' method of
operations for those instances?

Or do they just presume that the only thing on e.g. /var's dedicated
partition is /var and nothing else (where my personal M/O is to be
filtering through a bunch of [junk] to hit my target child
directories)? My uneducated guess is installers likely a-sume
dedicated partitions. That makes good, much less messy common
sense...

Another proofreading triggered afterthought: I have /mnt/BROWSER, too,
which then secondarily "mount -B" binds to specific browsers' child
directories. I've been having some VERY ODD USB/bus/dbus simultaneous
crashes the last few days (on two different laptops now so it feels
software or outside interference'y).

Having Firefox on its own partition has amazingly been keeping that
part of the USB crashes sane because the mount point partition for
that is deliberately on the same hard drive as the primary Debian
installation. That way, when e.g. an external hard drive crashes, the
browsers remain attached and thus don't lose any irreplaceable recent
browsing history. Thank you for that capability, Developers!

PPS What's mind blowing *to me* about those USB-triggered crashes the
last few days is that /home is part of what crashes, yet that browser
mount bind keeps right on flawlessly ticking until it eventually does
not. I'm most often then able to ALT+CTRL+F3 and make a fast browser
history backup via a root login before rebooting to reconnect
everything again. No complaints, just very grateful it even works long
enough to perp those sanity preserving backups

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with good intentions *

Re: xfce screen detachment

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 1/8/24, mick.crane  wrote:
> On 2024-01-07 04:00, Russell L. Harris wrote:
>> system:  amd64 desktop, debian 12, xfce, NEC MultiSync EA192M monitor
>>
>> I don't know precisely how to describe the problem, other than
>> "detachment".  About every week or so, when using the rodent, the
>> entire screen -- borders and all -- moves with respect to the monitor
>> screen as I move the mouse.
>>
>> The only recovery method I have discovered is to reboot.
>>
>> My hands and finders no longer are working well, so I likely clicked
>> on something or pressed a key to cause the problem.
>
> I get this effect if pressing Alt and moving the mouse wheel.


Me, too, in LXQt. It's HARD finding the fix until you can finally
remember it. It's easy to hit a wall of misses when searching the
Internet.

As Mick says, hold down the ALT key and scroll the mouse rodent's
wheel back and forth. I just blew up my desktop background to where it
was basically one rendition of the small gif file that's normally
tiled.

It seems to be for commendable visual accessibility purposes, but it's
sure a grouch maker until you figure out its activation/deactivation
secret, lol.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Vmware Workstation help opens abiword

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 1/10/24, Valerio Vanni  wrote:
> The issue began after update from debian 10 to 11. And it persists in 12.
>
> Before, Vmware Workstation help was shown in default browser (it's an
> html guide).
> After, guide was not showing anymore. Calling it (click on "help" on
> Vmware application) began opening Abiword.
>
> Vmware Workstation has no option "open guide with...".
>
> In kde control panel -> app -> default, Firefox is set as default browser.
>
> If I uninstall abiword, logoff and login to kde, guide is shown in
> Firefox. If I reinstall abiword, issue comes back.
>
> Where should I look?


Hi.. Am taking a stab at this while you're waiting for others here.
What kinds of options are you offered if you try accessing this same
via your favorite file manager?

I just test drove any old file, coincidentally
(.)xsession-errors(.)old, by right clicking it and choosing Properties
via Thunar. In Trixie and I'm sure in others, Thunar's primary General
tab has an "Open With" option with a drop-down menu. I was able to
change my own long time existing file association issue just now.

If that option exists and seems like it might help but keeps reverting
back to useless, it might take root permissions to perform that
change, depending on the package involved.

DISCLAIMER for new Users: PLEASE BE CAREFUL if you get curious and go
poking around with something like this. I have been there, done that,
many years ago. Ended up rendering my entire computer system useless
while in Dolphin via Knoppix, I think it was. *oops*

File managers can be pretty darn powerful. They're one of my favorite
multi-times daily tools. Thank you, Developers!

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with rain drenched birdseed *

Re: Firefox Warning [SOLVED]

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 12/27/23, Cindy Sue Causey  wrote:
> On 12/27/23, Mike McClain  wrote:
>> Mr. Martinez,
>> I tried every thing I could think of with little success:
>> apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
>> apt update && apt -y full-upgrade
>> apt-get reinstall firefox
>> None of these restores firefox's black menus
>
> If they haven't already had other reports, maybe the similarities and
> differences in what triggered that system wide fail and how it looked
> visually for just the two of us will still help somehow.


Had a thought while getting ready for evening chores. There IS a
potential starting point for Mozilla bug folks to ponder:

What program actions occur (backup saving, etc) and what files are
touched when Firefox is safely restarted like yours, and what program
actions occur (backup saving, etc) and what files are touched when
Firefox hardcore crashes on its own the way it did for me?

Kind of seems like there's a fruitful intersection point to be found there

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with Happy New Year's noise makers *

Re: Firefox Warning [SOLVED]

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 12/27/23, Cindy Sue Causey  wrote:
>
> Logging out as my normal user and then logging back in as same user
> didn't fix anything visually so I rebooted. The desktop environment
> immediately returned to normal and has stayed that way so I flat out
> forgot this happened.


Amending that to say: You know what, I might not have been able to log
my user out now that I think about that reasonable [debug] step yet
again. It's possible that the only way to do anything was to exit the
affected session by punching this laptop's hardware power on/off
button.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with Happy New Year's noise makers *

Re: Firefox Warning [SOLVED]

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 12/27/23, Mike McClain  wrote:
> Mr. Martinez,
> I tried every thing I could think of with little success:
> apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
> apt update && apt -y full-upgrade
> apt-get reinstall firefox
> None of these restores firefox's black menus


Just out of curiosity, did you reboot at any point early on? That was
the second thing I tried because simply logging out and then back in
didn't correct this... when something very similar happened to me
about 4 days ago..


> Mr. Walton,
> I'm quite sure that FF
> updated itself without asking. When it restarted the top three lines,
> menu, tabs and address plus associated buttons were black with grey
> text and bacically unreadable/unusable. Faced with that I'd suggest
> you might get a bit dramatic too.


I saw you say this before, and it just flew right past my brain. I
think it was the word, "black," that threw me. My toolbars completely
vanished for everything. There was nothing there to pick its own new
theme color. :)

The title bars stayed but were 100% useless. I couldn't click that
"X"to close and "_" to minimize and arrow for window rollup
(positioned on top right for my LXQt windows). I can't remember if
"CTRL+Q" and that range of keyboard shortcuts worked or not. I surely
tried them (that beauty of more than one way to do tasks), but I don't
remember what happened.

Logging out as my normal user and then logging back in as same user
didn't fix anything visually so I rebooted. The desktop environment
immediately returned to normal and has stayed that way so I flat out
forgot this happened.

As I'm proofreading this before sending, I can't remember how I
rebooted. I can't remember if I was able to drop the main Application
Menu down, or if I had to hit this laptop's physical hardware button
because the menu had stopped working (too).

I do remember that I somehow was able to access two windows, but once
I got the second one on the desktop, the first one, my xfce4-terminal,
would no longer respond to the cursor touching it to bring it back to
the surface. That's telling me I likely tried to open another terminal
instance but was not able to do so due to the primary panel likely
suddenly becoming unworkable (at top for me).


> The good news is that kerry_s on the Raspberry Pi forum showed me
> where to change the screen theme.
> >From the taskbar popup menu/Preferences/Appearance Settings/Defaults
> choose: For medium screens: Set Defaults
> kerry_s also said there was a theme selector  there that I didn't see.
> He's under wayland while I'm running X11 and that caused some confusion.
>
> I can't imagine why FF would choose to change desktop theme with their
> update but that theme change also made LibreOffice, Draw, Calc and
> Writer unusable. I hope you don't have this problem but at least if
> you do get stung you may remember the fix.


I really don't think Firefox is changing our themes on purpose. There
would be a worldwide revolt if any package ever tried that. I believe
this is a weird glitch that needs fixed QUICKLY because the changes we
both experienced are unacceptable. Now that there is a party of two of
us affected, I do hope that it's an accidental coding error and not
something deliberately malicious.

By the way, my instance has only occurred once so far. That was about
four days ago.

My Firefox was massively overloaded and crashed. Low memory due to
that session's combined activity likely played a part. New sessions
start out at 16GB RAM and 9 or 10GB swap.

The "theme looking" change across entire Debian session (all
programs) "snapped" in my face, like maybe there was nanosecond long
visual light(?) flash or something.

You're welcome (aka begged) to be the one to bug report this straight
to Firefox/Mozilla. If you do report it, PLEASE, yes, do feel free to
include my instance with your report, maybe by both copying this
thread's text of what my machine experienced compared to yours and by
also pointing to this Debian thread via e.g.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/.

If they haven't already had other reports, maybe the similarities and
differences in what triggered that system wide fail and how it looked
visually for just the two of us will still help somehow.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with Happy New Year's noise makers *

Re: Firefox Warning [SOLVED]

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 12/27/23, Tixy  wrote:
> On Wed, 2023-12-27 at 11:05 -0600, Mike McClain wrote:
>> If I recall correctly, Firefox used to have a checkbox in the
>> preferences to permit or deny auto updates. In this version 121.0 for
>> the Raspberry PI, that's no longer so and I'm quite sure that FF
>> updated itself without asking.
>
> Debian's Firefox is the latest ESR version, i.e. 115, not 121, so it
> seems like you've not been talking about a Debian package but something
> you originally download and installed from somewhere else e.g. from
> Mozilla's site or installed some flatpack or something. That might
> explain why it didn't play nicely with your Debian desktop and wants to
> update itself to new versions. (Non-ESR versions don't get security
> updates so I assume whoever built the software you installed wanted
> users to keep up-to-date and included a mechanism to ensure that.)


Something still doesn't sound right. I've got that 121 off the Mozilla
website. It has to wait for my intervention. It complains that it does
not have permission to install each progressive update. In my beady
little brain, that's how it should be for safety's sake.

That said, I know that there are circumstances where the User can only
untar/install that outside package under something like
/home/user/(.)local. Number One reason would be the User does not have
any admin/root permissions.

If that was the case, Mozilla would probably be able to silently run
all the updates it wants in the background. If that tar file was
untarred as root instead, Mozilla... can't touch this.

The only other thing I can think of, and that I hate to have to type,
is virus so I hope it's "just" something about the permissions level
when the package is installed. Permissions would explain one part of
what happened. I'm going to respond to the other part in a few.. That
toolbar thing is a party of two

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: how to clone apt repository to newest only?

[Cindy Sue Causey]

As Andrew did, I also CC'd.. :)


On 12/25/23, 이 강우  wrote:
> how to clone apt repository to newest only?
> Fedora/Red Hat will organize the repository by copying only the most recent
> packages from that distribution if you give it the "reposync --newest-only"
> option, but Debian doesn't seem to be able to do that.
>
> What can I do?

Hi.. This is Draft Email #2 for me for this thread. The first email is
very long. I chopped off all of the tips and am only focusing on the
following questions for now.

Am starting this time with an apt query:

$ apt-cache search reposync

Got a potential hit! The package is called dnf-plugins-core. It looks
interesting (to me). Its description is:

Description-en: Core plugins for DNF, the Dandified Yum package manager
 This package enhances DNF with builddep, config-manager, copr, debug,
 debuginfo-install, download, needs-restarting, groups-manager, repoclosure,
 repograph, repomanage, reposync, changelog and repodiff commands.

It's the only package that references reposync. I'll be downloading
and poking at it as a personal Debian development learning adventure
by comparing it to wget and rsync as referenced further below.

If dnf-plugins-core does not work for some reason, here are some
questions that might help Debian Users help you

What are you actually trying to do? Might also be asked as.. what were
you doing in the past? What exact command(s) were you using?

Internet searching on "reposync" alone makes it look like you're
trying to do what I have found that wget does. It worked for an LS
(Linux From Scratch) short webpage of only links today. Wget also
worked on a Debian repository related webpage that included child
directories.

Running "man rsync" references "URL" a few times, too, but I've not
been successful with it in the past. This thread is a reminder of that
feature so I'll be playing with it again later. It's always good to
know more than one way to accomplish all Linux tasks. :)

My other questions that will help Debian Users help you are.

Which Debian directory are you asking about? Or is it even tied to
debian(dot)org? If you're [pinging] a webpage that is not Debian and
it's not too personal, what webpage are you trying to sync?

A #1 question I have is...

Where are the files you are trying to duplicate (the source files),
and where are you duplicating those to (the intended target
directory/destination)?

Another way to ask that is: Are you duplicating from one personal
computer to another, or are you trying to pull from an online Internet
server's repository to download onto a personal computer?

Or are you maybe even trying to do yet something else that is not
mentioned above?

Your answer(s) might make a difference in the command and flags you
could use. As an example, that massively long Draft Email #1 I wrote
earlier included this useful tip I just learned for my own usage
today:

$ wget -c --recursive --no-parent
https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/downloads/development/

That lead came from StackOverflow:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/273743/using-wget-to-recursively-fetch-a-directory-with-arbitrary-files-in-it

Just test drove it, and it did work as hoped. That "--no-parent" is
telling wget to focus only on the current directory, e.g. for me the
LFS "development" download webpage along with any possible child
directories found there. Be aware that there can still be some extra
junk come in, depending on what webpage is being tapped. The more text
content and less HTML, the better.

Wget does work as expected, does keep digging into child directories,
too, because I just tested a Debian repository related webpage under
/debian/dists.

That's all I have for now. Just let us know...

An aside to wget and rsync Developers: Thank you for your work!
Between the two of your packages, it's a multi-times daily thing going
on between us.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with a jingle-jingle *

Re: Mouse single click handling?

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 12/19/23, local10  wrote:
> Dec 19, 2023, 15:30 by hfollm...@itcfollmann.com:
>
>> I have to ask: are you currently located at a remote location like the
>> ISS
>> station or similar?
>
> No, nothing like that.
>
>> Why would you go down this rabbit hole when the right
>> thing is to replace faulty hardware especially when it is cheap hardware?
>
> I've been replacing them, I have 4-5 mice like that, they all fail with the
> same defect after 6-12 months or so. So I thought perhaps there was a way to
> fix them instead of buying a new one every 6-12 months.

Same has been my experience for over two decades. I used to feel
blessed if they would last six months. I finally switched tactics last
year and tried gaming mice. I thought about the way they're used. It's
comparable to how much I click for emails and research related to
ongoing Life.. shtuff.

If I can help it, I'll never buy a "regular" mouse again. I'm still
poverty level so I buy bottom dollar electronics, used and otherwise.
If you can find "cheap" new gaming mice, the price kind of evens out
with buying multiple regular mice during a specific time period. That
means it's longer in between those times of frustration when they fizz
out always at just the wrong time.

In thinking more on it, I've tripped into a couple sales where the
alleged "gaming" mouse was the price of regular ones. Yeah, in that
case it might be purely about the appearance of gaming and not the
mechanics, but those mice still lasted longer so something was
thankfully also tougher under the hood, maybe just enough to satisfy
average (novice) consumers' expectations. :)

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Problem with /var/cache/apt/archives/

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 12/16/23, Pocket  wrote:
>
> On 12/16/23 08:45, Stephen P. Molnar wrote:
>> I am running Bookworm on my Debian computer. When I installed the OS I
>> selected the option for separate /var etc, and selected the default
>> sizes of the partitions.
>>
>> When I ran sudo apt update this morning I received the error message:
>>
>> E: You don't have enough free space in /var/cache/apt/archives/
>>
>> Can I increase the size of the /var partition on the ssd without
>> having to reinstall the system?
>>
>> Thanks in advance.
>>
> You can bind mount more space from another partition or create a directory
> on another file system and sylmink it to /var/cache/apt/archives/
>
> Maybe something like this
>
> On a volume that has sufficient space
>
> where  is some where on your filesystem
>
> mkdir /archives
>
> cp -var /var/cache/apt/archives/ /archives/
>
> or
>
> mv -v  /var/cache/apt/archives/ /archives/
>
> then clean up /var/cache/apt/archives
> rm -rf /var/cache/apt/archives
>
> ln -vs /archives /var/cache/apt/archives
>
> or
> |mount --bind |/archives /var/cache/apt/archives
>
> Add the bind mount to the end of /etc/fstab
>
> /var/cache/apt/archives||/archives|none bind,nofail|

tl;dr I've stuck with this a couple hours now purely k/t less than
optimal brain functioning. I've been comparing symlink versus "mount
-B" on apt/archives during debootstraps because I've had bad fails in
the past. Ultimately, it finally boiled down to debootstrap(dot)log
documenting:

dpkg-deb: error: failed to read archive
'/var/cache/apt/archives/dpkg_1.22.1_amd64.deb': Too many levels of
symbolic links
dpkg: error: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 2 package 'dpkg':
 'Version' field value '': version string is empty

Too many levels of symbolic links... I've seen that over the years
while breaking my system. So I visually inspected the apt/archives
directory. Whatever debootstrap is seeing as too many symlinks is not
visually apparent.

In the past, I've seen directories present an infinitum linear path if
you keep clicking that same named directory each time you open the
next one. That is not the case today.

I've debootstrapped a few times today. The various failed logs changed
slightly. Diff showed that several /bin packages are missing (see
further below if bored). Cpio is one. One log but not all show a weird
problem that looks like something inserted an extra "/" in front of
debootstrap's /var directory during download (which implies a symlink
tie-in):

2023-12-17 18:02:24
URL:http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/c/cpio/cpio_2.13+dfsg-7.1_amd64.deb
[245036/245036] ->
"/home/candycane/deboot-apt-symlink//var/cache/apt/archives/partial/cpio_2.13+dfsg-7.1_amd64.deb"
[1]

That same (error or no?) reference does not occur in all
debootstrap(dot)log files across the multiple debootstraps that were
run using symlink instead of "mount -B" today.

All of that now melds in with the rest of my original email which is

Apologies, I didn't know where to cull above, grin. A couple years
ago, I posted on Debian-User that I tripped over a BAD problem when
only symlinking apt/archives for my debootstraps. I just super quick
ran two comparative debootstraps, and the same issue still stands.

$ sudo LANG=C.UTF-8 chroot deboot-apt-symlink /bin/bash
I have no name!@northpole:/#

$ sudo LANG=C.UTF-8 chroot deboot-apt-mount-bind /bin/bash
root@northpole:/#

The "mount -B" debootstrap ends short and sweet with:

I: Base system installed successfully.

Go, Team!

The symlink version lost its mind this time. It used to say something
very different and much shorter. The previous concluding message was
so short that I missed it multiple times over and just assumed the
debootstraps were successfully completing as expected. Nope.

Today's (terminal CLI) message popped big time:

W: Failure trying to run: chroot "/home/candycane/deboot-apt-symlink"
dpkg-deb -f /var/cache/apt/archives/dpkg_1.22.1_amd64.deb Version
W: See /home/candycane/deboot-apt-symlink/debootstrap/debootstrap.log
for details
I: Installing core packages...
W: Failure trying to run: chroot "/home/candycane/deboot-apt-symlink"
dpkg --force-depends --install
/var/cache/apt/archives/base-passwd_3.6.3_amd64.deb
W: See /home/candycane/deboot-apt-symlink/debootstrap/debootstrap.log
for details

DISCLAIMER: Yes, that's referencing chroot, but that is NOT me
chrooting in. That's debootstrap running through the last lines of its
to-do list. When I chroot in afterward, I only see the first lines I
typed further above (e.g. "I have no name!").

With respect to deciphering what happens, I just thought to run "diff"
on the two different debootstrap directories from today. Nothing's
been done to those directories. It's only the initial download and
install step. A LOT of feedback came back for that diff command.

Top of the diff query results showed a sizable list of "only in" the
"mount -B" debootstrap's /bin. So I compared total sizes: 239.3MB for
deboot-apt-mount-bind

Finding i386 After Support Ends (Was: differences among amd64 and i386)

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 12/17/23, Andy Smith  wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 17, 2023 at 06:10:49AM -0500, Timothy M Butterworth wrote:
>> On Sat, Dec 16, 2023 at 7:45 PM Tixy  wrote:
>> > Just announced today [1] it looks like Debian will drop i386 installs
>> > for the next release.
>> >
>> > [1]
>> > https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/12/msg3.html
>> >
>> Goodbye i386, you had a good run.
>
> I expect it to be decades before it's gone! 32-bit binaries will
> keep on being run under amd64.

There's always some place like Linux Collections out there, too. This
isn't an ad, it's a happy customer gush. My CDs and DVDs from them are
4 years old, and all still work great when emergency access is needed.
Wasn't a random purchase. I test drove LC because they're listed here:

https://www.debian.org/CD/vendors/#us

That points you to an amazingly long list of Debian releases:

https://linuxcollections.com/products/debian/debian.htm

Some poking around finds this which moves away from being solely Debian:

https://linuxcollections.com/products/buildcollection.htm

DISCLAIMER: My very old i386 CDs used to work on everything. The ones
I purchased from them did not. It's possible that the difference is
that I'm using much more modern hardware these many years later, but I
won't swear to that being the only difference in that equation.

That "build collection" option is how I picked out my stack of about
15 CDs and DVDs for maybe $35 four years ago. Prices are still within
my range with some looking like they haven't changed any from before.

Yeah, you can still SOMETIMES find similar archive files to download
and burn your own.. but not always, especially if you're seeking an
operating system's entire history while waxing nostalgic.

For example, Linux Collections lists ArtistX whose online presence is
disappearing. ArtistX has a PHENOMENAL number of visual and audio
creator type programs. A lot of them may not exist anymore. I LOVED
that DVD literally to its death so a heartfelt thank you to the
diehard fans who keep very old projects accessible today.

Wandering off now remembering that stack of 31 Debian CDs I bought
from that guy who also used to be referenced on Debian dotORG but who
closed his business a few years ago. Never even got CD #1 to work
because I was so brand new to Linux at the time.

That thought caused me to roll down the page to the bottom of Linux
Collections' Debian offerings. There is a "donate" option that I
forgot they have. I fully trust their promise to pay it forward...
because I can still find them listed on that Debian dotORG webpage.
Beyond that, they sure are not gouging on those prices... $2.39
still.. wow.

PS No, I didn't find specifics about them shipping international.
While test driving their "Add To Order" button, I ended up at their
shopping cart. That page does reference international orders so that's
hopeful.

PPS When playing with old distros, don't forget their security support
shut down sometimes decades ago.

PPPS They got DSL, Damn Small Linux. That's the distribution that
triggered my addiction to minimalist debootstrap.

When I encountered those 3 years or so of permanent GPT-induced GRUB
boot fails recently, I tried to find a replacement operating system
because others were still booting just fine from LiveDVDs. Never
stumbled on anything as cognitively friendly as debootstrap.. and so
here we still are. Thank you, Developers!

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with her Happy New Year's Linux wishlist champing at the bit *

Re: Debian 12.4.0

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 12/14/23, Charles Curley  wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Dec 2023 17:01:19 -0500
> David Sawyer  wrote:
>
>> This may seem to be a simple problem. I set up Debian with a password
>> that I wrote down to be sure.
>
> Password for what? Your user account? A root password? Disk encryption?
>
> (This is why, when setting up passwords, I will type them in [both
> times, if necessary] in clear test when possible.)
>
> If the former, did you type your user account name incorrectly?


Is this via GUI interface or via a console/terminal?

Does the system show dots or asterisks that make it so much easier to
tell how many characters were typed in?

I abhor having to type into the console. Apparently I "slur" my
keystrokes while the system has a pretty fast keystroke repeat going.
I thought I poked the key quick two days ago.. and saw six of the same
letter staring back. SIX of them in a split second.

Regressing to beginner keyboarding by using ONE FINGER to hen peck
passwords in is the only way I can ever successfully log in with
consoles. Why it's not nearly as bad for the GUI, I don't know. I use
slick-greeter there. I've always a-sumed it's about what stage of the
operating system is loaded at the time of keyboard use.

The "passwd" command exists out there, but I'm pretty sure that root
already needs its password set first. It seems like someone here on
Debian-User went through giving root a password afterward, but I don't
remember any details. Am saying that because it feels like that might
be part of the situation in this thread.

DISCLAIMER: I don't know how safe the following is so warnings from
others are welcome. A creative search about resetting root's unknown
password found this:

https://phoenixnap.com/kb/how-to-change-root-password-linux

It's down where it says, "Resetting a Root Password in Ubuntu." That's
2018 so it's possible something has changed to make it harder to do
that.

It talks about going into recovery mode, dropping out to shell,
remounting as read/write. It's pretty hefty. Reminds me of a long time
ago where I said something about how easy access can be if the wrong
person simply picks up our computer hardware and takes the whole thing
home with them...

Back on track, I just tested passwd on a random extra user. I gave my
user, snowball, the same password as before. The command was processed
without it complaining that a password was reused. I got the feeling
that was a nice extra tidbit to know in this instance. For others, new
passwords can be forced as needed. Just need to track down the tips on
how to set that up.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Boot Problem

[Cindy Sue Causey]

Please forgive me if I somehow messed up the quote attribution. There
was a lot of stuff I was able to cull. :)

On 12/5/23, David Christensen  wrote:
> On 12/5/23 10:33, Stephen P. Molnar wrote:
>  > I decided to try something. I logged in to the rescue  mode as root and
>  > entered startx at the prompt. This generated the error:
>  >
>  > Unable to contact settings server
>  > failed to execute child process "dbus-launch" (No such file or
> directory)
>
>
> That looks like a meaningful clue.


I run into that message occasionally after brand new installs via
debootstrap. I can't remember what triggers it. It's something like
trying to right click then open a file via mousepad or use that "Open
Terminal Here" option from within Thunar (for both).

At some point in my own experience, I tried "apt-cache search
dbus-launch" because the "No such file or directory" told me the
system thought there should be a file by that name. Search returned
"dbus-x11" as the only potential option. It wasn't installed so I
attempted installing it. It works immediately every time for my
situation.

As an aside, if "apt-cache search" doesn't find anything for a not
found file, maybe something like apt-file will show a package that
might be missing.

A second thing that could be tried is to rename
"/home//.Xauthority"  to something else. If this was me, I'd
rename it singularly definitive as e.g. .Xauthority20231205-1626 (time
and date). I'll often also add on a couple words that describe the
problem I was having when renaming the file. Makes it easy to decide
whether to delete it if the system starts working properly with the
new replacement.

Then try logging in. I haven't had to do this in a LONG time, but it
seems like the system will simply generate a new file. For some
reason, the old one just gets corrupted and starts failing.

Getting kicked back to the login GUI is exactly what happens to me
when this file is corrupted. When I haven't properly installed that
GUI and am having to login from the console screen, startx will just
keep kicking me back to the command line in this same situation.

As a matter of fact, I think that may also be where I learned about
.Xauthority. Seems like it gets a head nod during that type of login
fail.

You shouldn't have to do anything like create a new empty file or
anything because /etc/skel does not include .Xauthority as one of the
default files for all new adduser creations. That was my hint to
attempt this option years ago when it felt like I had tried every
other option at the time.

That's all I've got. Best wishes fixing this soon...

By the way, the dbus-launch error has happened for me on both xfce4
and lxqt desktop environments.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Systemd timer and sleeping laptop

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 11/20/23, Greg Wooledge  wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 12:48:24PM +0100, Erwan David wrote:
>> What happens when a timer should have been triggered at a time the
>> computer
>> was sleeping ?
>
> systemd.timer(5):
>
>OnCalendar=
>[...]
>When a system is temporarily put to sleep (i.e. system suspend
> or
>hibernation) the realtime clock does not pause. When a calendar
>timer elapses while the system is sleeping it will not be acted
> on
>immediately, but once the system is later resumed it will catch
> up
>and process all timers that triggered while the system was
>sleeping. Note that if a calendar timer elapsed more than once
>while the system was continously sleeping the timer will only
>result in a single service activation.


Speaking as a user who has been "bitten" by this many times, finding a
way to have alarms wake the laptop back up is on my own to-do list. It
just seems like that I played with that type of feature a very long
time ago.

In my usage case, the affected program is alarm-clock-applet. My
experience is that any and all alarms will start going off audibly as
soon as the laptop's lid is lifted post [hibernation]. Since this has
only ever involved bidding on auctions (aka spending money), finding a
work-around has never had high priority on that to-do list, lol.

As an afterthought, it came to mind that one of the video players at
least used to let users toggle an option to keep a laptop from going
to sleep until after a video, e.g. a long movie, stopped playing. That
inspired an "apt-cache search wake from" search for some reason.

That highly generic query only received 10 results for Trixie. Maybe
there's still something in there that's useful. Two of those results,
etherwake and nvram-wakeup, look interesting. Since they already exist
as packages, they must be being used somewhere... which might help
short track figuring out how to apply them to one's own computing
needs.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Part II dd copy destroyed DVD

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 11/18/23, Marco Moock  wrote:
> Am 18.11.2023 um 15:42:57 Uhr schrieb Schwibinger Michael:
>
>> I put in a "good" DVD.
>> dd if=/dev/dvd of=/path/to/dvdcopy.iso
>> is working and I can convert the ISO
>> But I put in the damaged DVD
>> dd cannot start.
>
> What is the error message?
>
> Are you sure the DVD is broken or is it maybe a stupid DRM?


I've been thinking DRM, too, the last couple times this came up. Just
tried a search with an odd option coming back in answer. Some users
have success opening a seemingly broken DVD in VLC and THEN e.g.dd
copying while the DVD is still busy with VLC. They're scratching their
heads wondering why it works. All they can figure out is that it just
does.. sometimes.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/32564/why-cant-i-copy-my-dvd-with-dd

Handbrake was high up in the search engine results for my "will drm
block dd from copying dvd" query. I've seen Handbrake mentioned here a
couple times already, but there it is again.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Panic again

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 10/26/23, Schwibinger Michael  wrote:
>
> Good afternoon
> Thank You for help.
>
> I ll answer into Your email
> with
> +++
>
>
> Von: Andrew M.A. Cater 
> Gesendet: Mittwoch, 25. Oktober 2023 12:04
> An: Schwibinger Michael 
> Betreff: Re: AW: AW: Panic again any idea IV
>
> On Wed, Oct 25, 2023 at 10:59:09AM +, Schwibinger Michael wrote:
>> Good morning
>>
>> Thank You.
>>
>> I do booting.
>> Crash.
>> Bug report I did send.
>>
>
> Hi Sophie,
>
> Thank you. You didn't really send a bug report
>
>
> +++
> I know.
> But how can I produce a bug report
> when the PC is frozen?


An afterthought up top here: Is there a program that will snag and
retain boot messages specifically geared toward systems that never
fully boot? It seems like I've seen that topic come up and be answered
one single time in the last ~25 years. I actually tried to find some
form of that type of program the other day when I saw an earlier
portion of this thread then. I was thinking, hoping maybe such a
program could possibly be installed via chroot if it does exist.

Now my original thought..

Has chroot been suggested and/or attempted? I'm imagining that it was
possibly yes, suggested.

If not, what about attempting a chroot to then next attempt apt or
apt-get update then upgrade?

As a user who has occasionally battled issues, I know that, ideally,
it would be nice, i.e. satisfying, to find the cause of bigger issues
like this. At some point, I also know firsthand that outing the cause
becomes less important when weighed against moving on in Life. :)

Apt/apt-get upgrade via chroot would potentially help preserve a
particular setup rather than going with a new install if that is why
this continues to be a topic.

If anyone can think of a reason why running apt/apt-get in chroot
would only stand to cause data harm in this particular situation, that
would be great to know.

My firsthand experience has been that tinkering via chroot has
eventually gotten me back up and running maybe 99% of the time,
including against multiple kernel panic-ish fails a few years ago.

Biggest reason my chroot repair attempts ever failed was due to not
properly mounting maybe 4 or 5 basic necessities that apt/apt-get use
to properly install programs. /dev and /proc come first to mind as
examples there. That knowledge came from working through the manual
steps necessary during debootstrap installs, in case that ever helps
anyone else.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with a retirement state of mind *

Re: cli_ how to find_ firefox versions available in all suites

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 10/21/23, జిందం వాఐి  wrote:
> On 2023-10-21 18:00, Dan Ritter wrote:
>> జిందం వాఐి wrote:
>>> * i want to check package versions
>>> available in various suites [ stable, testing,
>>> experimental, etc.. ] using cli
>>> * for example_ firefox
>>
>>
>> apt can look for versions available in the repositories that you
>> have retrieved (by specifying the repos in /etc/apt/sources.list or
>> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/* ).
>
> * this is my sources.list
> deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main contrib non-free
> non-free-firmware
> deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main contrib non-free
> non-free-firmware
> deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main
> contrib non-free non-free-firmware
> deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-backports main contrib
> non-free non-free-firmware
> deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing main
> deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ unstable main
> deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ experimental main
> deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-debug bookworm-debug main
> deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-debug testing-debug main
> deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-debug/ unstable-debug main


>From a terminal command line:

$ apt-cache policy firefox

That should help, but it will only provide query results that are
relative to your sources.list lines above. To show suites not
represented in sources.list, the already recommended packages webpage
covers those.

And, actually, that "policy" command tells me there's nothing
specifically by that name in my own setup. The following helps to show
if there are any packages that include "firefox" as part of their
name:

$ apt-cache search --names-only firefox

In my case, that query brought up firefox-esr (which I just flat out
couldn't remember, lol).


>> To search for versions available in repositories that you have
>> *not* enabled, you need to do a network search of
>> packages.debian.org.
>>
>> For example:
>>
>> https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=firefox


Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Emacsclient bug in sid

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 8/31/23, Wang Yizhen  wrote:
>
> I recently noticed a bug for the emacs package in sid. I have not
> reported a bug before, so I wrote this email to seek for help.
>
> After upgraded to emacs 29.1+1-5, I found that the emacsclient command
> is not working. More specifically, the following command hangs emacs in
> daemon forever and no emacs frame pops up:
>
> ```
>
> emacsclient -c -a "" -n
>
> ```
>
> However, `emacsclient -c -a ""` summons the emacs frame properly
> although it occupies the terminal.


Hi, Yizhen. I don't have experience with emacs, am just chiming in to
rule out a long shot causative. Do you type that command by hand or
maybe arrow up and down through existing terminal history to find that
same line to reuse it all the time?

Or do you copy that line off of something that might not be using plain text?

The reason I ask is that on rare occasions, copy-and-pasting from
something like an Internet webpage or an advanced features text editor
can unintentionally introduce funky (fancy "curly") quotation marks
and parentheses [0]. Those curly things can break scripts because a
terminal can and will interpret curlies as a separate character from
the "straight" ones.

How a terminal can interpret those differently, I don't know. I just
know firsthand that it can and does. I once spent MANY HOURS fighting
a compiling failure or similar over this very thing. I finally
stumbled upon the difference in those marks' appearances when two
lines were visually different lengths in my terminal window.

The difference in my case was that I had copied a command off the
Internet and then manually retyped it later while trying to
personalize the affected command to fit my setup.

Note: The additional reason I stepped out here to ask is because those
quotation marks are in front of that "-n" [flag]. It comes to mind to
think that curly quotes could possibly mangle a flag following them,
but a terminal command could simply ignore curlies when nothing comes
after them. Hope that rationale makes at least a little sense. It does
"BKAC" (between keyboard and chair).

Afterthought: The reason something like curly quotes might suddenly
become an issue after years of no problems is that our operating
systems' code is getting "tighter" every year, i.e. less forgiving of
things that really shouldn't have ever worked in the first place.
That's a good thing that reflects on how Developers are perennially
honing their combined skills while presenting the most dependable
software packages possible... at any given nanosecond in Time.

Cindy :)

[0] https://chrisbracco.com/curly-quotes/
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: door bell like sound effect

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 8/28/23, songbird  wrote:
> gene heskett wrote:
>> Greetings;
>>
>> odd request:
>>
>> Somewhere, for some unk reason, there is a sound file file that plays at
>> max volume, usually around 2 AM or slightly later, that is very similar
>> to the 40 yo doorbell in this house. A bing-bong sound that differs from
>> the real doorbell by maybe 5hz in pitch. Wakes me up, spoiling a good
>> nights sleep, maybe a dozen times a year an apparently random dates.


>   perhaps a desktop sound?  i hate noises so i turn them
> off.
>
>   see if you have any enabled and if so check them all to see
> what they sound like.

That's a good one. It triggered the thought that pavucontrol(-qt)
sometimes will rat out what is playing any given sound. I see it most
often with browser tabs. Pavucontrol will name the title of the tab
that's presenting sound.

Just tried pavucontrol-qt for alarm-clock-applet, too. It says,"Alarm
Clock : Playback Stream."


>   if a file does not have an extension you can still use the
> file command to see if it can figure out what it is.


I just tried a "locate" search for "bell" and "door" on my setup.
There were "a few" files returned, but they were visibly searchable
fairly quickly.

That triggered yet another thought: What about some kind of a file
search that narrows down "Last Accessed" data for all the various
sound file types?

Personal experience is that manually viewing e.g. /usr/share isn't
100% perfect. It's been a couple years, but I've also seen sound files
stored more locally within some given package's own parent/child file
hierarchy. That helps make our favorite file search programs
priceless.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Konsole is not bash

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 8/20/23, gene heskett  wrote:
> I cannot make bashes redirection (cmd 2>&1 >tmp/cmd.log) work in
> Konsole. What terminal actually uses bash for the heavy lifting?


Well, I started out attempting to play along in xfce4-terminal and received:

bash: tmp/cmd.log: No such file or directory

Next I tried konsole which surprised me when it was already installed.
That's when I noticed there's no "/" in front of tmp so I added it.
Was then advised that "cmd" is not installed. I took that as a sign of
progress.

That makes me now ask: What error message are you receiving IF you are
receiving error feedback? Mine's now acting like it would perform
properly if "cmd" was installed.

Cindy :)

N.B. Now remember why konsole is installed. It's still majorly doing
all kinds of hinky BAD things with text input. It's still throwing in
extra spacing and lunging text all over the place. YUCK.
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Looking for a good "default" font (small 'L' vs. capital 'i' problem)

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 8/19/23, Andreas Rönnquist  wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Aug 2023 21:19:48 +0200,
> Christoph K. wrote:
>>
>>I'm unsatisfied with the default sans font in debian for use in the
>>graphical user interface (in my case XFCE).
>>
>>My main concern with the default sans font (I guess it's Bitsream Vera,
>>but that doesn't really matter) is the the small 'L' and the capital 'i'
>>look the same (mostly).
>>
>>Everyone who has tried to read unknown characters (e.g. a password
>>generated automatically oder base64 encoded data) knows what pain it is to
>>distinguish these characters.
>>
>>Could you please recommend a "suitable" sans-serif font that
>>a) has "proper" 'l' and 'I' characters
>>
>
> I'm probably not the right person to answer, but doesn't the
> _sans_-serif requirement pretty much make this impossible? It means
> _without_ serifs, which are (according to wikipedia) "small line or
> stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or
> symbol within a particular font or family of fonts."
>
> Which to me seems like pretty much only way to separate a small 'l'
> from a big 'i',
>
> To me, without the serifs, both those characters are simply a line from
> top to bottom.


My own mind went to the place of thinking sans serif was about those
very lines. I just didn't make it to thinking that would make it hard
to find any alternate in that family.

My long time preference is developer-weary-eye-friendly
fonts-anonymous-pro for whatever applications will accept it. Found it
accidentally a few years ago. Its differences are noticeable enough
that I instantly miss it on new operating system installs.

The "apt-cache show" description for fonts-anonymous-pro specifically
references both 0 v. O and I v. l v. 1:

"Description-en: fixed width font designed for coders
 This package contains two Font Families.
  - Anonymous Pro
  - Anonomous Pro Minus
 .
 'Anonymous Pro' is a family of four fixed-width fonts designed
 especially with coding in mind. Characters that could be mistaken for
 one another (O, 0, I, l, 1, etc.) have distinct shapes to make them
 easier to tell apart in the context of source code.

Apparently my Firefox is using sans serif because I just typed that "l
v. I", and I can't tell them apart!

Found a new toy because of this thread. It's a presumably massive
online database that shows how fonts display in elaborate use cases. I
used their search feature to (hopefully) focus on sans serif:

https://fontsinuse.com/search/advanced?v=2&match0=all&keyword0=sans%20serif

Disclaimer: I dropped their categories down to perform CTRL+F for
"sans serif" and came up empty so maybe their search is focusing on
only sans.

That reminded me to reinstall font-manager before also mentioning it
(needed to make sure it was the right program). It's developed for
GNOME/Gtk+ but/and is working well on the LXQt desktop environment.

Font-manager is not just a font viewer. It presents a lot of
information that can make it a little overwhelming for a first time
visit into a program like it.

There's an option to install fonts through font-manager's GUI. I don't
have a test case to try first, but I do remember using it successfully
in the past, most likely while focused on typeface in GIMP.

An afterthought just came to mind. Fonts are being created to
specifically aid persons with dyslexia. Maybe a search on that will
land a desired user-friendly font..

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: AMD GPU hard lockups

[Cindy Sue Causey]

debian-user@lists.debian.org
On 8/2/23, piorunz  wrote:
> On 02/08/2023 22:29, Celejar wrote:
>> The Z440 officially supports up to an NVIDIA Quadro K6000 12GB, which
>> draws 234 watts, so it ought to be able to handle my Red Devil RX-570.
>> The Red Devil specifies a minimum system power of 450 watts, and my
>> Z440's PSU is 700 watts:
>
> More detailed info:
> https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/powercolor-red-devil-rx-570-oc.b4455
>
> Your GPU max TDP is 150W, meaning it will draw 75W from PCI-E slot and
> 75W from 8-pin cable.
> Your 8-pin adapter must have been very poor quality. I don't know what
> kind of adapter it was, but adapters which make 8-pin from 6-pin, are
> dangerous. Better to use 2x 6-pin -> 1x 8-pin adapter to correctly
> assign wires to each corresponding pin.


Was coming in on this to say something similar. Just read this in last
week or so while having problems with booting my setup again.

Whatever I read had nothing to do with rebooting so I've forgotten
where I saw it. I just looked at the Cable Matters product, and that
was the very piece of hardware being chatted up.

What I'm remembering is that if the power of possibly just one of
those pins is not matched up properly, you can kill an entire
motherboard, not just burn through a wire. Seems like it was
semi-proprietary to a single product line. What I don't understand is
the company didn't care enough about consumers to make a proprietary
*shaped" pin setup so that consumers NEVER fry their systems. Make
that single, volatile hole/port star-shaped or something, anything.

This isn't what I read, but it seems to paint a similar picture of
what might happen:

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/is-it-possible-i-destroyed-my-psu-by-using-a-wrong-cpu-cable.3721595/

Wishing you the best of luck on this.. :)

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with.. a system that boots when it gets a mind to.. *

Re: The Application Konsole weired behaviour

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 7/21/23, Hans  wrote:
> I have an issue with the application "konsole" of KDE. The problem looks
> weired:
>
> When opening konsole. i get the usual window with the prompt (black
> background, white
> letters).
>
> But it looks like there are invisible tabs set, as after the prompt there is
> a big space, then comes
> the first letter of my command. And my spaces are not shown. So, if I want
> to set a command
> like
>
> /etc/init.d/networking restart
>
> it looks like so:
>
> *root@hostname*:#  /etc/init.d/networkingrestart
>
> big space after the prompt, and my space after the "networking" not
> recognized.
>
> I suppose, some stiing is wrong, however deinstalling and reinstalling
> "konsole" did not change
> anything.
>
> Also deleting ~/.config/konsolerc and ~/.kde/share/config/konsolerc as well
> as deleting
> ~/.config/session/konsole_* did not succeed.
>
> Creating a new profile in konsole also did not change this issue.
>
> Anywhere else I should look? Other shells like xterm or uxterm are working
> well.


Duplicated! I just played along as a momentary "displacement activity." :)

It's not *us*, it's Konsole. Mine's big space is before the prompt.
There appears to be two spaces instead of one on the right side of the
"$" sign.

It's visual on my end  because it's not copy-and-pasting to here. It
looks normal when pasted into this email form.

Mine's a brand new install just  now. No personalizations have been
made before test driving it.

Mine's additionally weird in that it's very hinky when I try to copy
and paste. It bounces the words around under the highlight color. It's
giving the effect that it's built using some base program that's
interactive along the lines of the way that something like
autocomplete works on the fly for Internet keyword searches in web
browsers..

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with.. a downed, live power line that's waiting on Georgia
Power to put it back in bowl *

Re: file server

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 7/12/23, Stanislav Vlasov  wrote:
> ср, 12 июл. 2023 г. в 14:45, lina :
>> I want to have 100 TB capacity to store/analyze data.
>> I am thinking of adding 5 hard drives, each is 18TB,
>
> Some primitive calcs: 5*18T = 90T, not 100T. Maybe you need 6 hdd?
>
>> and then merge them into one volume?
>
> If your hardware supports 6 hard drives (5*18T + your 2T), you can use
> lvm for merging 5 of them to one volume, or create raid0 by mdadm.
> Some risks with plain disk merging - if one of your drives die, entire
> volume dies.
> It may be mitigated by use raid5 with 1 additional drive or raid6 with
> 2 (see
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAIDhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID)


Almost typed something similar, just without as much technical
knowledge to back it up. I like 5 separate, too. If one 18TB dies, the
other 4 can keep on clicking depending on how one's system is set up.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Synaptic Problem

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 7/7/23, Felix Miata  wrote:
> Stephen P. Molnar composed on 2023-07-07 15:17 (UTC-0400):
>
>> I have just installed Bookworm without any problems.
>
>> However, synaptic has developed a problem:
>
> 1920x1080 is working now???
>
>> Google has not found a solution that works.
>
>> I would appreciate suggstions.
>
> It's for a Brother printer, came from Brother's web site. I find my brscan4
> installed to /opt/brother/scanner/. Hopefully this can help you find the
> archive
> you downloaded on your Bullseye disk instead of needing to hunt for it on
> Brother's website.


Am having a can-do kind of day so I took a poke at it, too. Searched
for brscan4 alone:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/brscan4

Gives some insight into package interoperability. It became instantly
clear this was about printers.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with glee at Retirement, Day the First *

Re: Out of Range Monitor Problim

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 6/29/23, Felix Miata  wrote:
> Stephen P. Molnar composed on 2023-06-29 11:50 (UTC-0400):
>
>> First of all, I don't have a cat, so let's forego any further cattiness.
>
> It really wasn't meant to be humorous. Horizontal configurations with top
> vents
> are attractive to cats napping, leading to hair buildup collecting on
> components,
> overheating, and strange behavior over time.


Not only that, but there is also the possibility of an exterior
monitor hardware button being accidentally pushed thus triggering a
different setting to become priority. I started a draft response that
I left hanging earlier. Animal related interference was my own first
suggestion, but my mindset was that the culprit might be an energetic
dog.

The other is: What is the screen showing when rescue mode hits "that
stage"? I just had to go through this yesterday k/t something related
to maybe GRUB EFI. Several rescue mode options were almost
understandable, but I opted to just wing it by entering root's
password, instead. That worked, and I'm still typing in that same
session 24 hours later.

Disclaimer is that my issue was not monitor settings so my success is
an apples to orange [anecdote].

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Want to report a bug, don't know which package

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 6/27/23, Stefan Monnier  wrote:
>> I recently updated from Bullseye to Bookworm and noticed that font hinting
>> settings in
>> `~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf` are ignored. This was not the case on
>> Bullseye and I'd like to
>> report this as a bug. When I run reportbug it asks for a package name, but
>> I have no idea which
>> package this bug should belong to. Help appreciated.
>
> `fontconfig`?


For some reason, that reminded me to think you could also try:

apt-file find fonts.conf

That returns:

fontconfig-config: /etc/fonts/fonts.conf

The first part is the associated package name. I can't swear that will
help, but it's a neat little trick learned here on Debian-User a few
years back.

The original fuller path didn't generate anything. I can only a-sume
that's because it's individually generated per each user's needs...

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Strange message

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 6/15/23, Maureen L Thomas  wrote:
> I was checking my logs and this came up:
>
> Security Failed to receive portal pid: org.freedesktop.DBus, error,
> NameHasNoOwner:
>
> Sender:  pipewire
>
> Time: 12:12:39 AM
>
> Message: Failed to receive portal pid: org.freedesktop.DBus, error,
> NameHasNoOwner:
>
> Session:3
>
> Priority:3
>
> I have absolutely no idea what this means.  I did google this and came
> up with many confusing items in regard to this but no one had a fix for
> it.  I am using Debian 11, new installation, with Gnome and have added
> the VPN from Nord.   I appreciate your help.
>
> Moe


No answer, only adding in hopes that it helps trigger an ah-ha moment
for someone. I've been seeing a FAILED alert on every reboot.
Ultimately, it points at multiple lines such as:

/var/log/user.log:2023-06-13T21:43:42.789226-04:00 northpole
lightdm[1881]: Error getting user list from org.freedesktop.Accounts:
GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name
org.freedesktop.Accounts was not provided by any .service files

Same results here in trying to fix it. Mine can be found online, but
any suggestions I tried didn't work yet. Those primarily involved
starts/restarts with systemctl.

Reason for fixing is because seeing a FAILED on each reboot is a
negative annoyance. You can't help wondering what it might be
affecting during each session.

Note: My message was found by grep'ing dmesg with Moe's
"org.freedesktop.DBus" because that and the reference to "name"
sounded familiar. I'm still with Bookworm in its testing release.
Haven't upgraded to Trixie yet (no hard drive room, lol).

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: os-prober Just a Rant

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 5/25/23, Andrea Borgia  wrote:
>> updates cause my edits to be overwritten... that sucks
>>
>>
> Ah, ok, I wasn't seeing ghosts, then!


Last time you all chatted this up, I went in and poked around. Now
that GRUB is FINALLY working again, it's only registering one
operating system. That's after changing GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER to
false here, too.

We do have the /etc/grub.d/40_custom and friends route, but my brain
hasn't been in a place to make use of that helpful feature again. My
old copies that would short track remembering how to do that are
trapped on a hard drive. It suffered a hopefully correctable
hibernation fail k/t Microsoft on a newly arrived secondhand desktop.

In the meantime of fixing that, LILO's config keeps coming back to
mind to further confuse the issue. Although.. glass half full on LILO
is that it was my first experience with changing the appearance of a
bootloader's welcoming screen. Just yesterday I almost started poking
around in GRUB's [dependencies] to attempt altering its appearance,
too. GRUB's latest update reminded that it was a to-do item
to-attempt.

Today is the first time I comprehended this part: "[R]unning os-prober
can cause damage to those guest (e.g. LVM) OSes as it mounts
filesystems to look for things."

Now I understand why that change occurred. I've noticed blips
indicating other programs were triggering partitions to mount but
never thought about the possibility of that action inflicting damage.
Good to know for programs beyond GRUB

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: After upgrade to bookworm: Keyboard layout

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 5/24/23, Hans  wrote:
> Dear list,
>
> there is a little problem, I am trying to fix.
>
> After upgrade to bookworm the keyboard layout has changed from German to US
>
> (de to us).
>
< snipped for relevance >
>
> Some thing I noticed at bootup: When the kernel is started (or before kernel
>
> starts), I get a message like "/etc/console-setup/cached-utf8.tmp not
> correct", however, this message was seen before on bullseye, where
> everything
> was ok.


Hi, Hans.. Have you tried renaming cached-utf8.tmp to move it out of
the way to see if the system creates a new one? I rename the "." to
"DOT" when I do that. Other times I'll move my problem files to a
completely new, relatively "safe" directory, e.g. ~/Documents.

The problem with changing that name is it might make the keyboard
instantly useless. If you have the option to do so, maybe playing in
either chroot or a virtual machine is best just in case that file does
a lot despite its harmless looking "tmp" name there.

My setup doesn't have that cached-utf8.tmp file. Does it contain
anything that would be worth sharing in your thread here?

If this was happening to me, I'd go the full reboot after the file
name change just to be confident the kernel was basically in full
control.

Hoping there's an easy solve. You all have already touched on my
favorites, those two "dpkg-reconfigure" ones.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: debían fans

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 5/23/23, Aleix Piulachs  wrote:
> Couldn’t turn on laptop fans but fixed with pwmconfig


Cool. I have no experience nor knowledge with that program. Didn't
locate it with an "apt-cache search" run, but also didn't give up.
Tried one more time with "apt-file find pwmconfig". That landed the
fancontrol package name:


fancontrol: /usr/sbin/pwmconfig
fancontrol: /usr/share/man/man8/pwmconfig.8.gz


Sharing in case newer users were likewise curious and also couldn't
locate the same.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: PANIC Debian 11 LXDE After update no booting is possible

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 5/19/23, Cindy Sue Causey  wrote:
> On 5/19/23, Schwibinger Michael  wrote:
>> Good afternoon
>>
>> I did the update and
>> when doing new start:
>> Crash
>
< snipped for relevance >
>
>
> And they're perping it in a different way. Adobe had gone straight
> down the line and changed everything directly under "/" to a third
> party username. No root, no 1001 for that one back then.


After thinking about it again, I take that back. I THINK Adobe
affected only the directories it touched, not all "/" directories,
which would partially match how whatever changed mine didn't change
all the child directories.

It still doesn't explain how e.g. /root became "root 1001" instead of
"root root" permissions. My impression as someone who reported this
years ago is that someone has figured out how to take the damage to a
new level.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: PANIC Debian 11 LXDE After update no booting is possible

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 5/19/23, Schwibinger Michael  wrote:
> Good afternoon
>
> I did the update and
> when doing new start:
> Crash


Hi, Sophie.. While you're waiting for others to respond, am typing to
say I just went through this a couple days ago. Our situations are all
so different so this is a recap of what happened for me.

In *my* case, something unknown changed a BUNCH of (but not all) top
level root directory permissions. I found out by accident while trying
to mitigate the first errors I encountered.

At some point, systemd was referenced and was freaking out that it had
lost permissions. That's when I ran "ls -ld /*" and received e.g.:

lrwxrwxrwx   1 root  root  7 Feb 11 14:26 /bin -> usr/bin
drwxr-xr-x   4 1001 1001  4096 May 17 05:47 /boot
drwxr-xr-x  11 root  root  36864 Feb 12 14:17 /dev
drwxr-xr-x 125 1001 1001 12288 May 16 22:12 /etc
drwxr-xr-x   5 1001 1001  4096 Apr 14 02:39 /home
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root  root  7 Feb 11 14:26 /lib -> usr/lib
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root  root  9 Feb 11 14:26 /lib32 -> usr/lib32
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root  root  9 Feb 11 14:26 /lib64 -> usr/lib64
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root  root 10 Feb 11 14:26 /libx32 -> usr/libx32
drwx--   2 1001 1001 16384 Feb  9 20:57 /lost+found
drwxr-xr-x   4 1001 1001  4096 Apr 21 20:52 /media
drwxr-xr-x  10 1001 1001  4096 May 16 16:27 /mnt
drwxr-xr-x   3 1001 1001  4096 Feb 26 16:44 /opt
drwxr-xr-x   2 root  root   4096 Oct  3  2022 /proc
drwx--   8 root  1001  4096 May 16 22:19 /root

1001 is the username I was on when the incident occurred. That /root
change is odd because it only changed one of them. Even odder is how
whatever did this made only partial permission changes instead of
altering all child directories under the top level parent "/"
directory.

First sign something was wrong was that I suddenly couldn't log onto
the Internet. Prior to that, everything else worked as expected.

Then I rebooted and landed at an "sh" prompt. A second or third reboot
landed at that dreaded kernel panic screen that only shuts down for me
by punching the hardware ON/OFF button.

I had also done an update/upgrade a few hours before. Newest program
added was Einstein after a different Debian-User thread reminded me it
exists.

In case it helps narrow down a culprit, the last four apt-get actions
I performed between 2023.05.15 and 2023.05.16 are:


 START SNIPPETS FROM /var/log/apt/history.log 

Upgrade: libgsl27:amd64 (2.7.1+dfsg-3+b1, 2.7.1+dfsg-4),
libgslcblas0:amd64 (2.7.1+dfsg-3+b1, 2.7.1+dfsg-4)

Install: libsdl-mixer1.2:amd64 (1.2.12-17+b3, automatic),
libsdl-ttf2.0-0:amd64 (2.0.11-6, automatic), einstein:amd64
(2.0.dfsg.2-10+b1), libmikmod3:amd64 (3.3.11.1-7, automatic)

Upgrade: libcap2-bin:amd64 (1:2.66-3, 1:2.66-4), grub-pc-bin:amd64
(2.06-12, 2.06-13), libcap2:amd64 (1:2.66-3, 1:2.66-4),
grub-efi-amd64-bin:amd64 (2.06-12, 2.06-13), grub2-common:amd64
(2.06-12, 2.06-13), grub-common:amd64 (2.06-12, 2.06-13),
grub-pc:amd64 (2.06-12, 2.06-13)

Upgrade: google-chrome-stable:amd64 (113.0.5672.92-1,
113.0.5672.126-1), libtbbbind-2-5:amd64 (2021.8.0-1, 2021.8.0-2),
libtbbmalloc2:amd64 (2021.8.0-1, 2021.8.0-2), libtbb12:amd64
(2021.8.0-1, 2021.8.0-2)

 END SNIPPETS FROM /var/log/apt/history.log 

The affected partition is still here, but I didn't have time for
fighting with it. I debootstrap'ed onto another partition, installed a
ton of favorite programs (not Einstein), ran "ls -ld /*" on the new
partition, and all has been well...

So far.

PS I reported this exact kind of thing to Debian Security a number of
years ago. I was "blown off", shown the cyber door. The PRIVATE email
I sent them had explained the situation two different ways to help
expedite their receiving end's grasp of the repeatedly reproducible
direness of what happened.

In last year or so, someone else got credit for reporting a part of
the same thing I reported years ago. I don't remember what was left
out, but whatever it was, someone else has possibly figured it out...
so that it's not just Adobe perping it this time.

And they're perping it in a different way. Adobe had gone straight
down the line and changed everything directly under "/" to a third
party username. No root, no 1001 for that one back then.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Email bodies not show anymore in Evolution Email

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 5/4/23, Christoph Pleger  wrote:
>>
> Hello,
>
>> I have had just the same problem. I think it is caused by the last
>> security upgrade by unattended-upgrades of these packages:
>> gir1.2-javascriptcoregtk-4.0
>> gir1.2-webkit2-4.0
>> libjavascriptcoregtk-4.0-18
>> libwebkit2gtk-4.0-37
>
> Ah, thank you very much for that information. In the meanwhile, I found
> that there is already a bug report available at Debian about that.


Am almost simultaneously reading this thread AND the
Debian-Security-Announce post about the same:

In part, it says:

"Package: evolution
Debian Bug : 1035469

The webkit2gtk update released as 5396-1 introduced a compatibility
problem that caused Evolution to display e-mail incorrectly. Evolution
has been updated to solve this issue."

https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2023/msg00088.html

The bug:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1035469

The security involvement appears to be that one current fix is to
downgrade which "leaves the user with an unpatched version of WebKit".

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: questions about cron.daily

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 4/7/23, Anssi Saari  wrote:
> Greg Wooledge  writes:
>
>> On Thu, Apr 06, 2023 at 05:45:08PM -0500, David Wright wrote:
>>> Users (including root) write their crontabs anywhere they like,
>>> typically in a directory like ~/.cron/.
>>
>> Is that... normal?  I can't say I've ever seen anyone keep a private
>> copy of their crontab in their home directory like that.
>
> I don't know if it's normal but sounds like a good practice, to have a
> backup of your crontab. I've been bitten by this sometime when my old
> shell provider retired a system and I had no copy of my crontab. My home
> dir was not affected by that retirement since those were all NFS mounted
> from a different server.


I like mine there. I haven't tried crontab yet, but I've put other
things at that location. It's more easily transferable without having
to look for or remember any personalizations. I think it was building
via npm that made it a comfortable, memorable CHOICE.

The .local directory is coming to mind quicker for me these days.
/opt, too, thanks to [upstream?] Chrome educating me that it's a nice,
empty, less trafficked location to quickly peek at specifically
installed packages.

There's also /usr/local that makes it easier to more quickly remember
packages that are specifically installed favorites for whatever
reason. Among /usr/local's potential plusses is that it's about root
permissions whereas putting its same contents in .local means mixing
root and user.

Mixing directories of varying permissions is no biggie for seasoned
users but can quickly mangle things for newer ones. I mangled mine a
long time ago when I got the bright idea to "chown" my user's entire
~/. We.. try not to do that anymore. What a mess. :)

It's all about available cognitive abilities while computing for my usage case..

Cindy :)

N.B. because it might catch the eye of a curious newbie: I don't do
npm these days. I had fun while the experience lasted. There were some
scary security issues a couple years back because it's such a wide
open space out there. NPM's security was serious enough that it was a
US-CERT advisement. The original is still sitting in my inbox:

https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2021/10/22/malware-discovered-popular-npm-package-ua-parser-js

-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Where has the Gnome hot corner setting gone?

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/29/23, Richmond  wrote:
> I thought I had disabled hot corners, but occasionally, if I select and
> swipe in the location bar of my browser, it activates hot corner. When I
> went back to check the setting which was in "multitasking" before, that
> tab has gone. Where is the hot corner setting now?


Hi.. I've taken a poke at this via an Internet search. I originally
missed you declaring GNOME in the subject line. That brings up this:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-hot-corners false

That's a tweak on where they're telling the user on this webpage to
enter "true":

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1259451/how-to-enable-to-hot-corners-function-on-lubuntu20-04

Maybe once you set that, gsettings can be used to adjust it from
there? I tried that command on my setup. It didn't complain since I do
have one or more GNOME packages installed. Mine's currently set to
"true" with no obvious GUI to set up what actions go with the 4
corners.

Because you mentioned this was affecting your browser usage, maybe
this explains what happened there:

https://haydenjames.io/ubuntu-22-04-install-gnome-extensions-manager-workaround/

It's saying that Firefox, for one, is no longer compatible in that
operating system.

With some more searching, I encountered gnome-shell-extensions and
gnome-shell-extension-manager. Those may or may not help, but they do
exist and are specifically mentioned with respect to toggling hot
corners.

Searching for those two and Debian as keywords keeps trying to point
users to outside websites. I don't know why it would since it looks
like the same packages are available through Debian's own apt package
manager.

WARNING: I was going to test drive the extension manager, but
gnome-shell-extensions by itself wants to install 201 new packages at
125MB download, 488MB of additional space used. Maybe next time.

If anyone gets curious about hot corners, apparently not all desktops
offer them and/or they store hot corners access in varying settings
locations. Best bet might be to specify the desktop environment in
searches.

"apt-get search" pulls up an applet for Budgie. Anything else with hot
corners apparently has them included as one piece of an inclusive
"goodies" type package.

Me? I tried it, maybe when I was trapped using Mint's LiveDVD. The
experience lasted about 90 seconds. My mouse usage is too erratic,
moves around the screen too much so the otherwise helpful effect got
old really quick.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: gradle wants openjdk-11 even if a newer version is installed? ...

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/28/23, Albretch Mueller  wrote:
> On 3/28/23, Nicolas George  wrote:
>> I suggest you show the contents of this file instead ...
>
>  Did you mean you would rather have me post both 348 line files
> instead of showing that they are the same? (I had eyeballed them, BTW)


Has "diff" come up in this thread yet? That might catch a show stopper
that appears visually normal otherwise..

Just thinking out loud. :)

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Potentially OT. Videos lagging & buffering in any browser but Google Chrome.

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/26/23, Juan R.D. Silva  wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> Debian Bullseye here up to date. Browsers installed: Firefox, Opera,
> Vivaldi, and Google Chrome.
>
> I'm having a weird problem streaming movies from archive.org. The movies
> are lagging & keep buffering in all browsers but Google Chrome. Google
> Chrome streams same movies at the same time without any stuttering.
>
> So far I've notices it using on archive.org only, so I'm not sure if the
> problem is on my side or on archive.org. The problem is rather recent
> but persistent and in last days get really bad.


At first, I just came in to say, "Yeah, me, too." It's with CSI (Las
Vegas style) on pluto(dot)tv. Since I background that as a mood
enhancer, I pretty much don't notice. When viewed, it seems to somehow
aesthetically fit that series.

Pinterest website has been doing weird things, too. Last few days I'm
lucky if a fifth of each of their webpages loads. If I want to view
the videos they're pushing, I have to copy and paste over to Google
Chrome. Pinterest then pretty much runs seamlessly on that, too.

Since you've tested several other web browsers, I wonder if they're
all using something similar, thus similarly buggy, as a building block
in their projects. Important to note is mine is straight from
Mozilla's website. I can't remember what was buggy, but that's always
the reason I go straight to them out of exasperation.

Next it came to mind to think maybe there's a setting buried within
each browser's preferences. And so I checked Firefox. There's a
picture-in-picture option that I just toggled OFF.

Just rebooted because something was odd with RAM (2.5GB still in use)
after all program were closed. That step-by-step download buffering
effect isn't showing on Firefox now, at least in my case, I suppose it
could be about multiple copies somehow conflicting.. or something
along those lines, anyway. Time will tell if it's about something else
should the buffering effect start up again.

Instead of wading through installing Opera and Vivaldi, I hit up a
search engine. Both browsers can be found offering tips on how to set
their own picture-in-picture offerings.

Google Chrome has it, too, but it was hard to find. Mine's under
chrome://flags (per the Internet) then search for picture-in-picture.
It's set at default then also offers enabled and disabled. I can't
tell which mine is set at, and I'm not up for experimenting.
Experiments is coincidentally a word you'll see if you visit that
address.

One last thought is I read somewhere that ISPs, especially smaller
ones, have been caught throttling users based on type of usage even
though the same ISPs label their services as unlimited. Conspiracy
theories tossed aside, that's still a rational possibility that needs
pursued on my end here.

BUT THEN... Google Chrome does work properly. That's why I haven't
wasted any time nor brain storage on actively investigating local ISP
throttling as a most likely answer. :)

For whatever it's worth in their parts as players, I'm using:

* Sid identifying itself to hardinfo as Debian 12 Bookworm
* Kernel 6.1.20-1 (2023-03-19) x86_64
* AMD A10-5750M APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics
* pavucontrol to toggle sounds on LXQt desktop
* 16GB RAM that Firefox REGULARLY eats alive thus triggering ongoing restarts
* Zero SWAP in use with 8GB unmounted on standby if needed
* 2.56 GHz quad core that seems to never change from 2500 according to
hardinfo. In the past, other laptops have fluctuated all over their
respective ranges.

Probably overkill in sharing, but you never know what ultimately might
be a causative.

Cindy :)

Update: Pinterest is still not working. PlutoTV's CSI is still running
much more smoothly a couple of hours after toggling picture-in-picture
off, BUT I think I'm starting to see a small hint of buffering coming
back. "free -m" shows RAM at 7.4GB available. It will be a couple
hours before that gets eaten up. When it does, that will help show how
much of an effect memory has in my instance of this.

Notable: Back over at Firefox again: Under its Settings > Privacy &
Security, I accidentally found the following likewise toggled ON:

Firefox Data Collection and Use
* Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla
* Allow Firefox to make personalized extension recommendations
* Allow Firefox to install and run studies
* Allow Firefox to send backlogged crash reports on your behalf

Included for whatever it's worth since the topic of browsers' negative
effect on computer memory seems to come up enough to be considered a
thing... that would help make it a suspect in this buffering question.

-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Buster => Bullseye: packages kept back

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/26/23, Jesper Dybdal  wrote:
> Yesterday, I upgraded Buster => Bullseye.
>
> This morning, I got a mail from unattended-upgrades, which said:
>
>> Packages with upgradable origin but kept back:
>>   Debian stable:
>>guile-2.2-libs w3m
>
> and
>> Package guile-2.2-libs is kept back because a related package is kept back
>> or due to local apt_preferences(5).
>> Package w3m is kept back because a related package is kept back or due to
>> local apt_preferences(5).
> What does this mean?  I have what I believe to be a clean install, I
> have never used apt_preferences, and until now, I had never heard of
> guile or w3m.  And I don't quite understand why I have them installed at
> all.  My sources.list contains only bullseye and bullseye-backports.
>
> What do I do?
>
> apt list says:
>> guile-2.2-libs/stable 2.2.7+1-6 amd64 [upgradable from:
>> 2.2.4+1-2+deb10u1]
>> guile-2.2-libs/now 2.2.4+1-2+deb10u1 amd64 [installed,upgradable to:
>> 2.2.7+1-6]
>>
>> w3m/stable 0.5.3+git20210102-6 amd64 [upgradable from: 0.5.3-37]
>> w3m/now 0.5.3-37 amd64 [installed,upgradable to: 0.5.3+git20210102-6]

DISCLAIMER: The subject line indicates a distribution upgrade, but it
looks like your sources.list is only Bullseye. My response is based on
a stabilized single

Hi.. There's a long response attached below, but first I'm wondering
if this is an appropriate instance for using:

apt-get dist-upgrade

I just searched the standing emails and didn't see it mentioned yet.
It comes to mind to ask because of the subject line here.

The rest of what I wrote.

If this had been my upgrade, my now several years long method of
attack is to try:

apt-get upgrade guile-2.2-libs

I changed to that method after seeing it mentioned on Debian-User.
Prior to that, I *used to* do "apt-get install ".
Don't do that. That messes with how apt labels packages as "manual"
and "auto" with respect to how they came to be installed.

The following might work if one is nervous about the outcome, but I
don't have a way to test it to prove as fact right now:

apt-get upgrade -s guile-2.2-libs

That's a simulated upgrade that theoretically shows most of what will
occur if the user decides to follow through.

Every time I've ever chosen to upgrade a package that's been held, the
situation has been one or more of the following:

1) A package's numbering sequence has been raised a significant step
2) One or more new packages will be installed as part of the newest upgrade
3) One or more old packages will be removed as part of the newest upgrade.

Step 1 usually runs in tandem with Step 3. Not always, though. Python2
and Python3 come to mind as an exception. They can both be installed
together in cases of dire necessity. I'm not totally comfortable
highlighting Python as an example, but I am seeing them called
"different versions of" instead of "different programs based on"
Python out on the Net.

The kernel is an example of where holds occur on regular occasion. The
kernel affects almost everything else. Developers keeping it on hold
helps system administrators manually address its upgrade. That gives
sysadmins the opportunity to review the kernel's changelog and verify
that their production machines will continue to work as flawlessly as
possible after each upgrade.

For my usage of Sid, I would look at:

https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/l/linux-signed-amd64/linux-signed-amd64_6.1.20+1_changelog

That was found by following a path starting at:

https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=linux-image-amd64

Cindy :)

Side Note: I say "kernel affects _almost_ everything else" because
installation of the kernel is not the first step in the debootstrap
process. The kernel's installation occurs a few steps in after e.g.
the time settings, HOSTNAME, keyboard configuration, apt's
personalized repositories, limited sysadmin type package
installations, and /dev's base ("generic") devices have been
established. The steps to perform those actions operate successfully
with no kernel on board yet.

-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: differences between hwclock <-> date due to time zone issues? ...

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/23/23, Cindy Sue Causey  wrote:
> On 3/23/23, Albretch Mueller  wrote:
>>  I am using this (yes, visually cr@ppy ;-)) code snippet to set back
>> the time 5 hours. hwclock tells me it worked fine but the terminal
>> windows opened before and after running hwclock still give me the
>> "old" time setting?
>>
>> _HRS_PM=-5
>>
< snipped for brevity >
>
> just battled this topic a couple months ago but can't remember which
> operating system. It was fixed INSTANTLY by creating /etc/adjtime (if
> it doesn't already exist) then entering the following:
>
> 0.0 0 0.0
> 0
> UTC
>
> Once saved, it takes just a few seconds then, BAM, there it is!
> Everything matches.. IF the hardware clock is set to universal time.
>
< snipped for brevity >

Not quite. I forgot to say you also need to issue the following
command afterward:

# dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

That's where you get to pick your timezone which is the other thing I
forgot to mention. I saw Stefan referenced the topic so I wasn't going
to create any more noise until I realized I'd left off tzdata. The
good news there is the Debian debootstrap link covers that, too:

https://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/amd64/apds03.html.en#idp7856176

Next time I'll try to remember to fully read my own offered resource
before hitting "Send".

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: differences between hwclock <-> date due to time zone issues? ...

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/23/23, Albretch Mueller  wrote:
>  I am using this (yes, visually cr@ppy ;-)) code snippet to set back
> the time 5 hours. hwclock tells me it worked fine but the terminal
> windows opened before and after running hwclock still give me the
> "old" time setting?
>
> _HRS_PM=-5
>
> ###
> #
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1092631/get-current-time-in-seconds-since-the-epoch-on-linux-bash
> _DTS=$(date +%s)
> echo "// __ \$_DTS: |${_DTS}|";
> _DTF=$(date --date @${_DTS})
> echo "// __ \$_DTF: |${_DTF}|";
>
> _NEW_DTS=$((_DTS+3600*_HRS_PM))
> echo "// __ \$_NEW_DTS: |${_NEW_DTS}|";
>
> # Convert the number of seconds back to date
> _NEW_DTF=$(date --date @${_NEW_DTS})
> echo "// __ \$_NEW_DTF: |${_NEW_DTF}|";
>
> which hwclock
>
> sudo hwclock --show
> sudo hwclock --debug --set --date "${_NEW_DTF}"
> sudo hwclock --show
>
> date
>
> // __ $_DTS: |1679606975|
> // __ $_DTF: |Thu 23 Mar 2023 09:29:35 PM UTC|
> // __ $_NEW_DTS: |1679588975|
> // __ $_NEW_DTF: |Thu 23 Mar 2023 04:29:35 PM UTC|
> hwclock from util-linux 2.36.1
> Thu 23 Mar 2023 09:29:35 PM UTC
> $ sudo hwclock --show
> 2023-03-23 16:30:23.685781+00:00
> $ date
> Thu 23 Mar 2023 09:31:40 PM UTC


I left all the above because I didn't know where to safely snip. I
just battled this topic a couple months ago but can't remember which
operating system. It was fixed INSTANTLY by creating /etc/adjtime (if
it doesn't already exist) then entering the following:

0.0 0 0.0
0
UTC

Once saved, it takes just a few seconds then, BAM, there it is!
Everything matches.. IF the hardware clock is set to universal time.

Knowing to do that comes from an uncountable number of debootstrap'ed
Debian releases. The step can be found here under the "D.3.4.3.
Setting Timezone" heading:

https://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/amd64/apds03.html.en#idp7856176

If your hardware clock is not UTC, I've never gone there so I don't
know. My CHOICE is UTC because a tip many years ago advised that doing
so helps our computers stay in sync more seamlessly with the rest of
the World. Whether that's true or not, I don't know that, either, but
going this route sure has taken the pain out of the local time keeping
end of all of this *for me*. :)

Cindy :)

Notable: If /etc/adjtime exists and has data that is anything other
than the 0.0s in there, my experience has been that occurs when I
don't have my hardware clock set up properly. When I go the UTC/0.0
route, my file never changes. That data, those numbers, is/are the
computer doing its own thing trying to keep things aligned based on
.e.g our correct and incorrect date commands issued via programs like
hwclock.
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: real debian or true debian?

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/13/23, Stefan Monnier  wrote:
>> No. I meant, some people pre-installed some packages on debian and
>> release
>> it, which is declared as xxx-debian.
>
> What does "it" refers to?
>
> "some packages" meaning "some Debian packages" or "some non-Debian
> packages"?
>
>> I am just not sure about the two words "true" and "real". which is
>> suitable
>> for description of the "official" debian?
>
> If you mean "a system whose packages are all taken directly from
> Debian", I might describe it as "unadulterated" or "vanilla".
> Or maybe you're thinking of https://wiki.debian.org/DebianPureBlends,
> like FreedomBox?


"Pure" has been referenced on lists a few times, too. I'm finding
"Pure Debian," "Debian Pure," and "Debian Pure Blends" still lurking
in my emails. The "Pure Blends" instance sounds like it might be the
ultimate fit here.. maybe.

Freedombox and Distro Watch: Good News for Debian Pure Blends; 2019.09.06
https://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/2019/09/msg2.html

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with determination*

Re: Trying to find the source iso's for debian buster and bookworm

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/4/23, davidson  wrote:
> On Sat, 4 Mar 2023 Keith Christian wrote:
>> Several versions back, we could download the source code
>> on various iso files for previous and current releases.
>
>Debian CDs/DVDs archive
>https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/archive/

I like to get mine from packages dot Debian. Am using wicd as an
example because I needed to look it up anyway:

https://packages.debian.org/experimental/wicd

The right-hand column has a "Download Source Package" heading with
several files under it.

Source files can (at least sometimes) be found under Debian's own
repository location, too. An example there is:

http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/w/wicd/

That location can be overwhelming to wade through depending on one's
level of experience. The reason is because anything available for
active releases will be found lumped together in a single directory
instead of filed under their respective release code names the way
packages dot Debian does.

Out of curiosity, I just checked ibiblio for source files:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/debian/pool/main/w/wicd/

No source files were present. It's just an executive decision each
volunteer repository makes depending on how much extra space they
might have available to share.

As a P.S. to Debian's own repository, poking around in there years ago
is how I finally started grasping how our package managers do their
amazing job. P.P.S. Reading text files under /var/lib/apt/lists was
another fun place to play back then, too. Was one of my favorite ah-ha
moments in figuring out how Debian performs with such consistent
accuracy.

Hope that helps someone.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Debugging what is deleting/recreating /etc/resolv.conf with wrong configuration, on debian stable

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 2/22/23, daven...@tuxfamily.org  wrote:
>
> There is an unidentified process that decides it's ok to delete and
> recreate /etc/resolv.conf without asking user/admin,
> The problem is, the problematic process is not work's VPN related and
> creates the file with wrong resolver's IP. The IP corresponds to my home
> router IP, which does has a DNS resolver and it works as it should. BUT
> my home's router DNS obviously don't know jack about work internal
> servers, on which I work… and work's proxy as well, which when it cannot
> be resolved… breaks everything using HTTP.


Hi.. I didn't know where to jump into this so am responding to that
paragraph in its original post. Having just debootstrap'ed again, one
thing I do is verify /etc/resolv.conf's content. The following,
slightly lengthy blurb has begun showing up where I'd never seen it
before. I'm sharing it with hopes maybe it hints at what might be a
trigger for the reset:

 BEGIN CONTENT FROM NEW, UNALTERED /etc/resolv.conf FILE +
# This is /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf managed by
man:systemd-resolved(8).
# Do not edit.
#
# This file might be symlinked as /etc/resolv.conf. If you're looking at
# /etc/resolv.conf and seeing this text, you have followed the symlink.
#
# This is a dynamic resolv.conf file for connecting local clients to the
# internal DNS stub resolver of systemd-resolved. This file lists all
# configured search domains.
#
# Run "resolvectl status" to see details about the uplink DNS servers
# currently in use.
#
# Third party programs should typically not access this file directly, but only
# through the symlink at /etc/resolv.conf. To manage man:resolv.conf(5) in a
# different way, replace this symlink by a static file or a different symlink.
#
# See man:systemd-resolved.service(8) for details about the supported modes of
# operation for /etc/resolv.conf.

nameserver 127.0.0.53
options edns0 trust-ad
search .
 END CONTENT FROM NEW, UNALTERED /etc/resolv.conf FILE +

Those last three lines worked for Mint, but they did not work for
Debian. So I defiantly altered that file. I commented those three
lines out, tracked down my ISP's nameserver values,** and plugged them
in. I was able to connect immediately after that.

When I tried to do that with some other distribution, possibly Mint
again, it would reset as is being described in this thread and as is
seemingly implied in resolv.conf's "do not edit" line. I have no clue
why Debian is not resetting now, but I'm VERY grateful it's remaining
stable.

Having now actually read more of that blurb, I didn't follow any
symlinks. Thanks to issues over the years, /etc/resolv.conf is the
first place I go if an Internet connection is not working as expected.

Lastly, I just tried "ls -ld" on that long /run line to
stub-resolv.conf. It's "no such file" so that would explain why it's
not resetting on my end. Resolvectl is also pulling up as not found.

Those all definitely explain why I'm able to type online right now. If
I was feeling brave right now, I would try messing around with doing
what it takes to get resolvectl in control, but I'm not (feeling
brave). :)

Cindy :)

** My ISP's nameserver values were found in connman's GUI, of all
things. Connman has NEVER worked for me. I have no idea why it's
working now. I didn't manually install it. Connman came in
automatically somehow related to the LXQt desktop environment. Just
leaving this here in case it somehow is playing a part in why my
resolv.conf is not resetting. You never know..

-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* GRUB IS WORKING! Just put ^ in front of metadata_csum_seed in mke2fs.conf! *

Re: FYI: LFS Thread On GRUB non-boots, e2fsprogs, & mke2fs

[Cindy Sue Causey]

Found a brand new 2023.02.15 Debian bugs reference for this..


On 2/19/23, Cindy Sue Causey  wrote:
> Hi.. This is just regurgitating something related to my coincidentally
> referencing several years of GRUB non-boots yesterday. The latest on
> this Linux From Scratch thread came into my inbox this morning, and it
> just sounds like it might help some Users having booting problems
> similar to what I've experienced.
>
> The Linux From Scratch thread is here:
>
> https://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/sympa/arc/lfs-dev/2023-02/msg00018.html
>
> Today's entry referenced this from Launchpad from 2019:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1844012


Also from Debian on 2023.02.15.

https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.org/msg1895219.html

Playing with this has been.. fun.. I guess. I found a
"metadata_csum_seed" culprit in /etc/mke2fs(.)conf. It's in the line
for ext4 which is what I use.

Saw a mention of a patch online. While trying to track that down so
that this is approached in a Linux-defined methodical way, I found
Debian's bugs entry there. Their expressed knowledge of this situation
is why the installer's installation booted on my end a few days ago.
Their mention of debootstrap installs NOT booting for some of us is
exactly what I'm personally experiencing right now.

However this works out, thank you, Developers!

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* gettin' giddy about the next new unstable! *

FYI: LFS Thread On GRUB non-boots, e2fsprogs, & mke2fs

[Cindy Sue Causey]

Hi.. This is just regurgitating something related to my coincidentally
referencing several years of GRUB non-boots yesterday. The latest on
this Linux From Scratch thread came into my inbox this morning, and it
just sounds like it might help some Users having booting problems
similar to what I've experienced.

The Linux From Scratch thread is here:

https://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/sympa/arc/lfs-dev/2023-02/msg00018.html

Today's entry referenced this from Launchpad from 2019:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1844012

The first response says three years. That's about how long I've had
horrific issues in attempting to boot via GRUB/GRUB2. My time today
will be spent reading what they're saying AGAIN to then try to match
it up with my Debian debootstrap. If it eventually makes sense, I'm
going to check the same variable, etc, for the various other operating
systems' LiveDVDs that have successfully booted up the last few
months.

An issue like this makes sense with respect to how I duplicated all of
Mint's installed GRUB files via Debian's own counterparts a couple
days ago... and it still did NOT boot on Debian. I HOPE it turns out
to be that one or more of Debian's various GRUB files have a feature
toggled on that the successfully booting operating systems have
toggled off.

That would include that one Debian installer I tried recently, by the
way. A lot has happened since then so I've forgotten the minor
details. That instance of Debian obviously had to have booted because
I encountered some other showstopper issue once it got loaded up. I
was working with it off of the partition, not a DVD at the time. I'm
back into debootstrap, and I'm not touching installers again... well,
unless it somehow ultimately benefits Testing/Unstable's developers.
:)

See you all out here..

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* gettin' giddy about the next new unstable! *

Re: xscreensaver fails to activate via "Preview" button or via "Blank after" setting

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 2/17/23, Mike Kupfer  wrote:
> Celejar wrote:
>
>> The logs show regular deactivate events like the following every 20
>> seconds:
>>
>> ClientMessage DEACTIVATE: already inactive, resetting activity time
>>
>> I saw this:
>>
>> https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/faq.html#no-blank
>>
>> I guess I have to figure out what application is sending these messages?
>> Firefox? I do tend to keep a lot of tabs open.
>
> I recall seeing something several months ago about the Xfce power
> manager fighting with xscreensaver, though I'm not able to find it right
> now.  If you have the Xfce power manager configured to manage the
> display, you could try disabling that.


Was it maybe a comment here? As in.. a comment I made? A year ago,
apparently. It looks like I ultimately threw in the towel and opted
for only power managing.

My memory recall is that the conflict kept locking my Debian install
up to the point of requiring a hardware button reboot. That obviously
kills anything you have open and are working on at that moment.

If I get my newest debootstrap booting, I'll play with it, too. I do
like those screensavers as well as the artistic talent it takes to
create them. :)

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* N.B. elbrus 5 minutes after I posted yesterday: "bookworm freeze"
(as in.. not trixie). CHECK! *

Re: Partitioning an SSD?

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 2/16/23, Joe  wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Feb 2023 08:59:58 +0100
> Nicolas George  wrote:
>
>> pa...@quillandmouse.com (12023-02-15):
>> > Here's why you would partition a drive. Reinstalling (which I end up
>> > having to do every time Debian comes out with a new version
>>
>> Debian is not Ubuntu, major upgrade do not break the system.
>>
>
> That's the way it used to be, back in the days of sarge, etch, lenny...
>
> Stretch installed perfectly dual-boot with Win 10 on an EFI Acer
> netbook, but upgrading to Buster broke booting to grub. It actually
> broke EFI booting completely, but I've been able to restore booting at
> least to Windows. And yes, I've tried everything the Net can suggest.
>
> On another machine, upgrading Buster to Bullseye broke it beyond my
> ability to fix, so I installed Bullseye from scratch.
>
> Upgrades are definitely a lot more trouble now, and yes, I do realise
> that each release is bigger and more complicated than the last.


Ditto. I can still remember saying (on Debian-User) that if someone
wanted to destroy an operating system, all they had to do was break
its ability to boot. A few weeks later was the last time I was able to
install a Debian release with GRUB that booted.

LILO was the only thing that worked for me after that. Something went
wrong with mine a few months ago, and I've ended up in all kinds of
other operating systems' LiveDVDs ever since.

Even LiveDVD didn't work *for me* with Debian. There was some kind of
a showstopping library issue. Was something like libunistring.
Couldn't keep it up and running long enough to attempt a partition
install. Other systems like Mint have somehow broken the EFI/UEFI
roadblock when installed so I was taking a chance that maybe Debian
could do the same thing.

A partition is currently set up with Sid (Trixie?). It broke my heart
when it didn't boot with GRUB, either. I've tried everything I can
with it with the primary assault being to attempt to duplicate all
GRUB packages that Mint uses to boot from a thumb drive.

Sid with GRUB is getting one next to the last try before the last one
is LILO. An email about EFI flew by me via Linux From Scratch the
other day. I'm going to go poke around over there. Maybe there are
some tips there that will finally push it over the edge to success.
Doing exactly that helped me a couple years ago for something
unrelated so I'm laying hope on it based on prior experience. :)

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: partition appears to be mounted, but not according to umount or lsblk

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 1/20/23, Anssi Saari  wrote:
> Jude DaShiell  writes:
>
>> I wonder if blkid might be a bit more informative.
>
> I don't know, I usually run mount without arguments to see what's
> mounted or look in the file /proc/mounts.


A super simple grep, e.g. "mount|grep sdc", works on it, too. I do it
all the time because it filters out the (visual) noise.

Every since I realized that, my chroot dismounts never fail. Prior to
that, I was having to mostly reboot to dislodge a chroot that had some
or another too "busy" to umount mount point that I couldn't ferret
out.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Xfce desktop problem

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 1/1/23, David Wright  wrote:
> On Sun 01 Jan 2023 at 15:31:04 (-0600), William Torrez Corea wrote:
>> How to can restore my last configuration?
>
> So I assume your "last configuration" is in ~/.config/xfce4-session/
> and ~/.config/xfce4/ .
>
>> Try resetting to defaults
>
> I assume that by this you mean "move my configuration out the way
> and left a new set of defaults be created by running xfce", ie move:
>
>> mv ~/.config/xfce4-session/ ~/.config/xfce4-session-bak
>> mv ~/.config/xfce4/ ~/.config/xfce4-bak
>
> and then run xfce.
>
>> When i want to restore the old configuration, i remove the -bak that's
>> been appended to the old directories; but i don't get any result.


David might have hit on something here with that, "[A]nd then run
xfce." What about.. some form of logging completely out to a [console]
or root user's GUI, moving those files/directories aside, and then try
logging back in again? I've experienced similar circular pains and
have fixed them using both methods of accessing those stubborn
"Whack-A-Mole" types of files.

The glitch that *might* be occurring is that maybe XFCE4 is instantly
throwing up new but same config files as soon as the old are deleted,
else crash and burn if it is in current use. It would end up being an
endless battle because those instantly returning config files will
reflect whatever personal choices are still showing on the screen...

Unless one logs an affected user out completely first...

Or not. :)

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* Merry Happies! *

Re: Topic: Problems with USB Sticks

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 12/30/22, Joe  wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Dec 2022 21:16:31 +
> debian-u...@howorth.org.uk wrote:
>> >
>> > 1
>> > How can I repair USB stick which is readable but not writable?
>> >
>> > question 2
>> > What did I do wrong to create this problem?
>>
>> You didn't tell us what you actually did, and especially which bits
>> you think might be a mistake, so it's very difficult for us to answer
>> this question.
>>
>> For example, you might have hit them with a hammer, or connected them
>> to the wrong voltages, or washed them in a bath, or who knows what? Or
>> you might have plugged them in correctly but used some sequence of
>> commands that has caused a problem. But until you tell us what you
>> did, we can't know which bit was wrong!
>>
>
> I mentioned probably the simplest thing: failing to unmount before
> removal on a Windows machine. This sometimes causes problems which
> cause Linux to refuse to mount the device read/write. Windows can
> usually fix it, though I suppose there may be data loss. It's entirely
> possible that doing the same thing on Linux would sometimes cause
> similar problems.


Been there a couple times on a new secondhand hard drive this year.
Following tips regarding hiberfil.sys fixed it both times for me, but
the method comes with a harsh "this is your last ditch option" warning
about things like that data loss.

That's on a non-Linux system, by the way. Linux triggered the second
episode while while the affected partition was mounted only as a
resource for backing up images. It wasn't mounted as an operating
system.

There's a recovery partition that keeps getting mounted even though
I'm not touching it this week. I can't help wondering if that plays
some part in how that partition ended up locked down when it wasn't
used as the primary operating system..

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Killing bluetooth dead

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 12/5/22, Brad Rogers  wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Dec 2022 08:42:14 -0600
> d...@sherohman.org wrote:
>
> Hello d...@sherohman.org,
>
>>  mentioning "blue", "tooth", or "bt" - there aren't any, so the obvious
>
> what about 'blue*'?
>
> Found bluedevil, bluez and bluezobexd here, where 'blue' alone found
> nothing.


While looking for something else not too long ago, I tripped over
"apt-mark showinstall". LOVE IT! Very handy when other searches aren't
working because you're not sure of the package name. If you do know a
piece of the package name, you can...

$ apt-mark showinstall | grep 

That's done with no asterisk (wild card).

Be forewarned, I just sent mine to a text file that ended up being
1,787 lines. Each line represents a single, separate package ready to
be pondered individually.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Logout at apt upgrade

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 11/30/22, to...@tuxteam.de  wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 12:36:43AM -0500, Felix Miata wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> What I have noticed in Debian that I do not at all like, is when I boot
>> to
>> multi-user.target for the specific purpose of apt or apt-get upgrading,
>> even when
>> systemctl get-default returns multi-user.target, that if the DM is
>> upgraded, X
>> gets started shortly following. :(
>
> Oh, something I forgot: besides no DM, my init system is still
> SysV. This might or might not contribute to stability through
> simplicity.

I'm on SystemD and bounce between XFCE4 and LXQt. Mine has never done
anything like this in many years of playing with anything Linux.

At this second, I have bits of GNOME installed for themes. In the
past, I've had more than that, but I must have moved away from those
packages. A quick "apt-mark showinstall" says pinentry-gnome3 is the
only GNOME3 named package currently installed.

> My important apps (Emacs, then Emacs, then dunno ;-) don't lose
> data "just because the system goes down", so I'm pretty relaxed.

Once in a very rare while, upgrade will stall until I say yes or no
when it asks if I want to restart exim and a second program that I
can't remember.

> Still, it never happened to me, and I dist-upgrade roughly once
> a week.

I run "apt-get upgrade". It will take me a few days to remember to do
so, but I'll try both "apt upgrade" and dist-upgrade. Dist-upgrade was
already a to-do item. Will be my first use of that one so who knows
what else might possibly go wrong... or not.

Wondering out loud as I exit Stage Right: Is there any kind of
trace/strace or whatever that fancy deal is to see if that outputs
anything?

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: FIREFOX is killing the whole PC PART II

[Cindy Sue Causey]

> Von: Gareth Evans 
> Gesendet: Montag, 21. November 2022 06:56
> An: debian-user@lists.debian.org 
> Betreff: Re: FIREFOX is killing the whole PC PART II
>
> So there seem to be two ways to clear cookies and site data when closing
> Firefox, but I'm not sure if the options under History > Settings include
> all the "site data" removed by the other setting.
>
> Best wishes,
> Gareth


What about creating a regularly running script to clear those out?
I've thought about that myself for the very reason of browser slowdown
but never followed through on the idea. Anacron is coming to mind
because it just suffered a glitch where the scripts silently didn't
run after a recent upgrade. That's how I know what it does to then
offer it as a suggestion. :D

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: FIREFOX is killing the whole PC PART II

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 11/21/22, Gareth Evans  wrote:
> On Sun 20 Nov 2022, at 10:53, Schwibinger Michael  wrote:
>
>> How can I find by terminal all dirt which is produced by browsers (Chrome,
>> Firefox, Midori ...)?
>> I did try something like cache, but there were no new files.
>
> I think it would be easier to clear the cache and other data (possibly
> including history if you wish) automatically when the browsers close.  There
> are usually settings available to do that.


Speaking of settings and previous mentions of possible concerns about
what tabs appear on startup, there's also a setting
(about:preferences) for declaring what appears upon startup. These
days, it's fairly normal to see something similar to "Open previous
windows and tabs", open with a blank page, and open with a personal
favorite webpage.

That said, I'm only seeing the "Open previous windows" selection. That
makes a user feel like the browser is maybe getting paid to
alternatively provide potentially sponsored content with no
immediately visible "Off" button..

Maybe.

Or not.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: About /etc/apt/sources.list | Warehouse for users of the stable version

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 11/23/22, 谢 运生  wrote:
> Dear  Debian,
>
> I have a question about stabilizing the warehouse:
>
> https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-handbook/apt.zh-cn.html#sect.apt-sources.list.stable
>
> Four bullseye are mentioned in this link, Would it make any difference if
> only bullseye and bullsey-updates were added to /etc/apt/sources.list and he
> added all four bullseys to /etc/apt/sources.list at the same time?
>
> Please give me some of your professional advice.


Hi.. This is my second attempt to help answer, LOL. After looking at
your link there AND if I'm understanding your question correctly, you
want to have at least 3 lines that include debian-security, too. I
didn't know nor do that for many years. It came up here on Debian-User
one day. Some number of security updates do NOT upgrade if that's not
in your sources.list. I experienced that firsthand as a fact but could
never figure out why until someone asked on this list (Thank you!)..

The debian-backports one is for situations where your favorite package
is not included in the others but can be found there after you've
researched availability. I happen to use the debian-backports one
after finally understanding its concept. At some point, I installed
something from there so it was a necessary inclusion to stay
up-to-date. These days I just keep it in the lineup to always remember
that it's an option. :)

The "Debian mirror" references is a nice reminder that you can
reference other repositories in addition to those housed at
debian(dot)org. You can addend those mirrors to that same single
sources.list file, or you can research how to add additional files
under sources.list.d. That dot D directory is a handy trick that
taught me the purpose of other similar directories found throughout
our systems if we're using the systemd setup.

These two links share mirror examples. The second one is getting a
mention because it takes another step up and explicitly states useful
specifics e.g. ibiblio:

https://www.debian.org/mirror/list

https://people.debian.org/~koster/www/mirror/list

It doesn't hurt to have those in mind in case a favored first choice
repository happens to be down when a user is in a hurry to update for
whatever reason.

As an aside, that "bullseye-proposed-updates" looks interesting. Never
saw that before. Will be checking it out. Thank you!

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: MacOS VM on Debian: is it reasonably possible?

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 11/22/22, Miles Fidelman  wrote:
> Well... that would basically be MacOS, or a GUI that looks like MacOS
> running on another BSD.

Apologies, am not totally following this thread, but this post popped
up just now. What about...

apt-cache search bsd emulator

That was a very short query. It brought up basilisk2..

Description:

"Basilisk II is an Open Source 68k Macintosh emulator. That is, it enables
 you to run 68k MacOS software on you computer, even if you are using a
 different operating system. However, you still need a copy of MacOS and
 a Macintosh ROM image to use Basilisk II."

Only knew to try that because I tripped over similar for Android. You
still have to have some of "their" software to work on top of that,
but maybe it at least points toward something else similar with better
possibilities.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: failing HDD, ddrescue says remaning time is 7104d

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 8/31/22, to...@tuxteam.de  wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 03:25:36PM +0200, ppr wrote:
>> I would appreciate advice from the community about a failing hard drive.
>>
>
> [...]
>
>> I did not try to mount the HDD. I plugged an external HDD (ext4) and
>> launched ddrescue. After two days it has recovered 33GB of 1TB but the
>> speed
>> are now so slow it will take 7104 days to complete.
>
> External means an USB enclosure? Depending on the USB this might be the
> bottleneck.


My experience is that a session's reboot freshness affects transfer
statistics, too. In addition to starting with a new reboot, I will
also rsync single directories. Doing so means the system is will be
churning away at, choking on less data while it grapples with copying
that data over to other media.

Since that method of attack leaves room for the human error of
accidentally skipping over directories, I'll run the entire setup one
last time at the end. Doing so does on occasion catch something I've
missed.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Debian 11 - KDE and NumLock

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 8/26/22, Cindy Sue Causey  wrote:
> On 8/26/22, Amn  wrote:
>> Hi there!!
>> Every time I restart my Acer Aspire E5-771G running Debian 11 I find
>> that NumLock is off, is there a way to set up Deb11 to automatically
>> turn on the NumLock?
>
>
> Hi.. You didn't name which desktop environment you're using so I'm
> sharing what I found in LXQt. For this one, I can go to:
>
> * Applications dropdown menu
> * Preferences
> * LXQt Settings
> * Keyboard and Mouse
> * Keyboard (lefthand column in window that pops up)
> * Checkbox that says "Turn on NumLock after login
>
> The main desktop environments *try* to follow a similar pattern for
> very basic User features like that. Hopefully you'll be able to find a
> similar path to success in whatever setup you're using.


Ha, just saw that this did say which desktop environment. It was only
stated in the subject line, LOL. You could always search the Internet
for KDE specifically to see what pops, too.

Happy hacking!

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Debian 11 - KDE and NumLock

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 8/26/22, Amn  wrote:
> Hi there!!
> Every time I restart my Acer Aspire E5-771G running Debian 11 I find
> that NumLock is off, is there a way to set up Deb11 to automatically
> turn on the NumLock?


Hi.. You didn't name which desktop environment you're using so I'm
sharing what I found in LXQt. For this one, I can go to:

* Applications dropdown menu
* Preferences
* LXQt Settings
* Keyboard and Mouse
* Keyboard (lefthand column in window that pops up)
* Checkbox that says "Turn on NumLock after login

The main desktop environments *try* to follow a similar pattern for
very basic User features like that. Hopefully you'll be able to find a
similar path to success in whatever setup you're using.

As an aside that I've only recently tripped over myself: Searching the
Internet for tips like this sometimes leads to a way to add a line to
"dot" rc files that reside in our User /home directories. When we do
that, that's a handy feature that would carry across if we bind that
same home directory to different versions of Linux. As an example, I
once added terminal color tweaks that carry across.

The downside would go back to that same thing. Maybe we don't want to
carry that tweak across the various Linux flavors we use. Sometimes
doing so causes irritating glitches. I've experienced it with favorite
background images being blocked, just as a very simple example.

Glitches happen to me solely within Debian if my home directory is
used across e.g. both Bullseye and Bookworm. It's no big thing. It's
just about them being ever progressively different, period. Yay,
Developers!

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: how to change device number in RAID array

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 8/22/22, Gary Dale  wrote:
> I'm running Debian/Bookworm on an AMD64 system. I recently added a
> second drive to it for use in a RAID1 array. However I'm now getting
> regular messages about "SparesMissing event on...".
>
> cat /proc/mdstat shows the problem: active raid1 sda1[0] sdb1[2] - the
> newly added drive is showing up as [2] instead of [1]. Apparently mdadm
> thinks there should be another drive sitting around as a spare.
>
> Is there a simple way to fix this?


Disclaimer: I've never done this, but I found the following while
playing along via Internet search:

https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Mdstat

They show multiple different scenarios reaching out to e.g. [5] where
different numbers are missing in theirs, too.

You know what.. this section:

https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Mdstat#md_device_line

You're seeing my second email on this. In the first one, I referenced
my experience with Thunar occasionally doing odd things with renaming.
My original email had asked if there was a chance that the device in
question had been dropped then automatically (or even manually)
reattached. That seems to be what they're saying there ("Notice that
there is no device 3.")...

Maybe. :)

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Raising volume past 100%

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 8/19/22, David Griffith  wrote:
>
> I don't want to go through multiple clicks and the open/close of a dialog
> box.  Sometimes I get files/streams that are so quiet that even the max
> provided by that method of 153% is not enough.  I don't want a dialog
> popping over what I'm doing.  I was previously able to do exactly what I
> wanted, so I know that it's possible.  Also, I have come across repeated
> requests on how to do what I'm trying to rediscover, so I'd like to get
> the answer put out there for them.


Hi.. This thread caught my eye because I'd been having trouble for a
couple weeks. Have you always had this trouble, or is this something
that just started happening in the last few weeks?

Am asking because I started having a problem. I just assumed "Not
Gonna Take It Anymore" blew out the speakers on my newest secondhand
laptop. Might still be what happened, but it's that part about how low
it is that makes me wonder.

Mine's so low, I have to lean completely against the laptop to hear
anything. Again, it's likely the hardware, but it's sure a funny
coincidence to see that very thing stated on here, too.

pavucontrol is my weapon of choice to get anything resembling sound.
Didn't used to work for me. Had been using aumix for years then it
stopped working. Now pavucontrol(-qt) works mostly dependably,
although I have to log out and back in a couple times a week when it
doesn't make its connection(s) for currently unknown reasons.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Adduser only one or. two users

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 8/4/22, Ishaan Mahajan  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This is the line I have got - RUN sudo adduser --shell $USERSHELLPATH
> --disabled-password --gecos "" $USERNAME && \
> echo "$USERNAME ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" > /etc/sudoers.d/$USERNAME && \
> chmod 0440 /etc/sudoers.d/USERNAME
> However, I keep getting the error,
> adduser: Only one or two names allowed.--
> How do I get around this?
> Have a great day ahead!


Does this line:

chmod 0440 /etc/sudoers.d/USERNAME

Need to continue using "$" as part of its variable?

That stood out as different. If that's not it, I'm totally out on a
very thin limb (beyond my payscale) here. :)

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: OT, Recommendation for low cost laptop

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 7/18/22, James H. H. Lampert  wrote:
>>> Another place to look is your local laptop store.  My current laptop,
>>> as well as its predecessor, are refurbished ThinkPads I bought there
>>> for about $300.  They run Linux just fine.
>
> "Local laptop store?"
>
> Not quite sure I've heard of such a thing, at least not recently. My
> Chromebook came from BestBuy.


Maybe it's a small town thing. I actually worked in one and bought
from another in my relatively small county. Both were family owned. I
didn't receive money for working but instead paid off a portion of a
P/C I bought from them ~15 years ago.

There weren't any tech-centric big box stores in any counties nearby
at the time. These days the Internet's ever increasing access has
probably closed more than a few of those quaint little businesses that
are/were competitively priced in spite of their size.

Local Yellow Pages, if you can even find those for free these days,
were where I first learned of the businesses I used.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Getting rid of backuppc password protection.

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 7/17/22, David Wright  wrote:
> On Sat 16 Jul 2022 at 19:13:25 (-0700), Gary L. Roach wrote:
>> I used apt install to install the standard debian package and used apt
>> purge to uninstall. Further, I used rm -r to clean up the directories
>> that were left. If it helps:
>>
>
> Were I to install backuppc, 21 other packages would arrive with it
> (including Recommends). Did you purge all those too?


Another route I might try if I'd been purging some and "rm -r" others
is to maybe reinstall then "apt get autoremove backuppc". That very
nicely picks out everything that came along with and is no longer
needed if backuppc is removed. I check autoremove's proposed list
carefully each time because some packages will try to remove the
desktop environment, for example.

Using autoremove comes from actually reading my terminal's entire
output when apt-get shows off a list of packages that are no longer
needed after upgrades make them obsolete. :)

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: How can I find out why apt-get is keeping a package back?

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 7/10/22, David Wright  wrote:
> On Sun 10 Jul 2022 at 15:24:11 (-0700), L L wrote:
>> How can I find out why apt-get is keeping a package back?
>
> I usually look at the output of  apt-cache show .

I accidentally stumbled upon that I can "apt-get upgrade "
and see what is likely the trigger for held packages. For me, it
always hesitates and waits for approval. Most often, packages I've
seen are being held back because of an upgrade to the next versioning
plateau or because completely brand new packages are being installed
along with.

Being able to "-s" simulate with apt-get is something I always forget
exists. I just test drove it, and it worked for upgrade in general:

apt-get upgrade -s

There wasn't anything held back this time so I can only assume that
simulate would additionally work for:

apt-get upgrade  -s

That can be run just like that, as regular User instead of root.

Simulation doesn't give the 100% full picture. It might not generate
enough focus on the held package to answer why it's being held. May be
why I don't remember to use it. I played with simulation a couple
times, and it's a cute trick. At the end of the day, though, I just go
straight for the real upgrade. For me so far, that route has been
informative and has worked safely #1 because it doesn't continue until
I hit the ENTER key again. :)

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Stop XFCE saving the state?

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 7/5/22, Ash Joubert  wrote:
> On 06/07/2022 10:53, John Conover wrote:
>> How to stop XFCE saving the state when logging out of Bullseye XFCE?
>
> Uncheck the box "Applications (XFCE X with mouse icon) / Setting /
> Session and Startup / Logout Settings / Automatically save session on
> logout". You can also adjust your session autostart programs.


There's also a place to toggle something on and off if you get a GUI
window when you click logout in the Applications menu. I'm using LXQt
right now so I logged out and went into XFCE4 to verify what I'd seen
in the past.

There's a checkbox and something very close to "Save session for
future logins" at the bottom of mine. I accidentally clicked it and
triggered it on a long time ago so I know it can be easily overlooked
when we're focused on things we've done a thousand times.

As a related aside since autostart programs were mentioned. This may
be something for people to research for slow logins. That makes this
thread a total win.

Things were popping up all over the place when I logged into XFCE4. It
doesn't do that in LXQt. I'd say XFCE4 is doing the right thing by
opening everything it finds in a recently altered autostart menu while
LXQt is instead just getting bogged down slowly cherry picking at
login. I've already seen it with something forgotten that wasn't being
found so I blocked it and things started working faster just with that
single change.

Seriously, this thread for the win! I'll bet you all help a lot of
people when we figure out why those two desktop environments are
having these two different reactions at startup. A dedicated partition
for each is a quick fix that many Users don't have the resources to
do.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Is there an easy way to get the latest version number of a source package that is available?

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 6/27/22, Roberto C. Sánchez  wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 27, 2022 at 03:31:01PM +0100, Tim Woodall wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> apt-get --only-source --download-only source 
>>
>> will download the latest version of the source package.
>>
>> Is there a one liner that will give me the version of the package
>> (including the epoch) without downloading the package and parsing the
>> dsc?
>>
> If you are not opposed to installing the devscripts package, then you
> can do this:
>
> $ rmadison -u debian -a source -s unstable firefox-esr
> firefox-esr | 91.10.0esr-1  | unstable   | source


DISCLAIMER: I do understand this is about the source packages. I've
never thought about whether or not they ever differentiate from our
debs. Having just run "apt-cache policy", I do see the difference that
can arise.

My search into this went off into a tangent that ended up at..

/usr/share/bash-completion/completions/apt-cache

That has a line that includes:

if [[ ${words[ispecial]} ==
@(add|depends|dotty|madison|policy|rdepends|show?(pkg|src|)) ]]; then

So next I hit up "man apt-cache" to see if man showed how to choose
src over pkg. I didn't get there because "apt-cache showsrc" popped up
first. Ran it to see its output then ended up with...

$ apt-cache showsrc firefox-esr|grep Vers
Version: 91.10.0esr-1
Standards-Version: 3.9.8.0

For the package policy based on last time a system ran "apt-get
update", it could be:

$ apt-cache policy firefox-esr|grep C
  Candidate: 91.10.0esr-1

Those just happened to match. My original sample was einstein. Version
and Candidate outputs are different for him. At this second, they are
Version 2.0.dfsg.2-10 versus Candidate 2.0.dfsg.2-10+b1.

That just shows it is capable of plucking out the difference in those.
I usually miss something obvious that negates anything I typed so my
apologies in advance if and when I did here. :)

Hope that helps somehow. Maybe the output from showsrc might be fun to
look at for distraction or something

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: debian-user message size limit

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 6/17/22, Gareth Evans  wrote:
> Is there a limit for message size on debian-user?
>
> I can't find any such info on
>
> https://lists.debian.org/
>
> https://www.debian.org/MailingLists/
>
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/
>
> but a couple of recent large-ish messages (one ~270K with two screenshots,
> one 70K with log output) have neither got through nor bounced back.
>
> It would be helpful to know what it is if there is one.


I don't know if there's a list size limit or not, but maybe your
submission is sitting in moderation because it's not the norm?

As an alternative, list members have previously hosted their images on
trustworthy image hosts. I'm out of touch with what might qualify as
that these days, though.

Similar has been done for large text files, too. Pastebin type hosts
fit that need. In fact, Debian had a version of it for its own
packages not too long ago.

The caveat for either of the above is that there's often a
self-destruct mode that is based on either time length or click views.
That's understandably about wear and tear on the host's server(s).

Best wishes on what you're trying to fix.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Debian desktop environment

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 5/28/22, Thomas Schmitt  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Brian wrote:
>> > Careful! If you go on like this you will end up installing bullseye :).
>
> Keith Bainbridge wrote:
>> Bookworm?
>> SID?
>
> In any case: Not Testing !
>
> Currently a zillion of packages get marked for autoremovial from Testing
> because of
>   https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1011268


Yeehaw to that! About 3 mornings ago, I woke up to 71 emails
containing the "marked for autoremoval" advisement. All appear to be
tied to accessibility (A11Y). Have mercy, it's all the bigger chat
topics: edbrowse, espeakup, fenrir, *orca*. I've NEVER seen that
quantity before and especially not those packages, but that's likely
just because of which lists I follow.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Disable connections to Internet without user's consent

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 5/17/22, Dan Ritter  wrote:
> Andrea Monaco wrote:
>>
>> I wonder all the ways a standard installation and configuration connects
>> to the Internet without the user's consent, and how to disable it.
>>
>> I can think of the automatic check for updates and the automatic
>> security updates.  Any other?  Is there a manual page that lists all of
>> them?
>
> Neither one of those is automatic. Someone with root privileges
> needs to install a package like apticron to get that.
>
> I believe, but have not confirmed: if you install a base Debian
> stable system, no extra packages, it will not initiate any
> connection without user action.
>
> An interface configured to use DHCP would ask for a new one on
> lease expiration.


What about popularity-contest? Regardless of whether it fits in here,
am hoping it maybe triggers thoughts of other packages that quietly
phone home.

As fast as I typed that, I remembered something I experienced a number
of years ago. Certain screensavers used to pull from websites without
my initial knowledge. I don't know how I eventually tripped over the
fact that they did, but it was a momentarily frightening discovery. It
was one of those times that TRUST in Debian Developers' thorough
testing of packages came consciously to mind.

Upon still more reflection, I was on dialup at the time. Maybe I was
offline, and the screensaver some error message that it couldn't
connect to the website.. or it just flat out failed.. or something.
Very odd, scary moment in all this. That TRUST kept things
copacetic... :)

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: no update possible

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 5/3/22, Peter Ehlert  wrote:
>
> On 5/3/22 06:29, Schwibinger Michael wrote:
>> Good afternoon
>>
>> Thank You
>>
>> Terminal
>> and root terminal do say
>>
>> command not found.
>
> please post Exactly what the command is that you entered
>
>
> and Exactly what the error message is
>
>
> *copy and paste please


Once in a while.. and this is one of those times.. I think it would be
nice to see a screen capture (screencast) done. Unfortunately, finding
a safe, universally trustworthy place to post it for all to view is
likely a deal breaker for some users relative to their geographical
location.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Debian 9 Xfce intermittent keyboard and mouse erratic behavior or lockup

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 4/20/22, Dieter Rohlfing  wrote:
> Am Wed, 20 Apr 2022 00:43:35 -0700
> schrieb David Christensen :
>
>>I have been experiencing intermittent storms of random keyboard and
>>mouse GUI events over the past year or more:
>
> Same for me.
>
> System is Debian 9.13 (kernel 4.19.0-0.bpo.19-amd64, XFCE desktop) running
> on an ASRock DeskMini H110M.
>
> I'm running this combination with several hosts, but the storm only
> appears with the ASRock PC. Even with another mouse and keyboard the
> symptoms remain. So I think the storm mainly depends on the bare host and
> not on the peripheral components.


"Sticky keys", an accessibility feature, come to mind as needing to be
ruled out. I've accidentally triggered mine multiple times over the
last couple of years. To this day, I have no idea what combination of
keys I'm hitting that does it. I'll just see a 2-second flash of an
onscreen notification that they've been triggered on... again.


> At the moment I'm tinkering with the C-states. I disabled C6 and C7 in the
> BIOS and added the following options to the kernel command line:
>
>> processor.max_cstate=3 intel_idle.max_cstate=3
>
> Because the symptoms appear randomly, I can't say anything about a
> possible solution. I'll continue watching and will report, when I have any
> news.


I've also occasionally experienced erratic behavior that's hardware
caused by two different, unrelated instances. One has been that my
laptop keys are, for example, worn out and/or overheating and
"sticking" as though permanently depressed (being physically held
down).

The erratic appearance of this particular behavior will occur when I'm
typing out posts or whatever and incidentally hit a declared hotkey
that becomes triggered because e.g. the likewise declared CTRL key is
physically stuck in the ON position. This scenario occurs because I
have to buy old equipment that eventually overheats and causes things
like the onboard keyboard to inevitably have a limited lifetime
expectancy based meltdown.

The secondary cause for seemingly erratic behavior is easier to fix.
It's when the dogs or I are somehow leaning on any of my mouse's
buttons. That will occur sometimes when I've set the mouse down to the
side and am using a laptop's touchpad, instead. The mouse and the
touchpad will end up conflicting with each other over which one has
control of the situation.

XFCE4 just coincidentally happens to be what I'm using for the above.
My guess is that, since my situations are hardware based, they would
likely occur regardless of what desktop environment happens to be in
use at the time.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Libreoffice: printing "dirties" the file being printed

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 4/7/22, Gareth Evans  wrote:
> On Thu  7 Apr 2022, at 09:58, Jonathan Dowland 
> wrote:
>> On Sat, Apr 02, 2022 at 07:08:11PM +0100, Brad Rogers wrote:
>>>Tools menu/Options - General; 'Printing sets "document modified" status'
>>
>
>> Does anyone have any insight into why this is an option? More
>> specifically, what reason would anyone want to have their document
>> marked as modified because they printed it?
>
> I wondered about that too and looked into it.  I now can't find the
> references I found, either in my browser history or by re-searching, but
> iirc, Apple[-related] and LibreOffice forum posts suggested it's to do
> with:
>
> LO:  MS Word does it, so LO does it / because fields in the document may be
> automatically updated prior to printing


Just poking my nose in to say that syslog might be an example of that.
That's speaking from the annoying firsthand experience of having
something like /var/log/syslog loaded in the Mousepad text editor. It
will keep announcing that the content changed behind the scenes so do
I want to refresh to view that newest addition (or some similar
advisement).

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Problem downloading "Installation Guide for 64-bit PC (amd64)"

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 4/7/22, Cindy Sue Causey  wrote:
> On 4/7/22, Richard Owlett  wrote:
>> I need a *HTML* copy of "Installation Guide for 64-bit PC (amd64)" for
>> *OFFLINE* use.
>>
>> The HTML links on [https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual]
>> lead *ONLY* to Page 1.
>>
>> Is the complete document downloadable as a single HTML file?
>
>
> Have you seen the "installation-guide-amd64" package in Debian's
> repositories? I'd never seen it before. Stumbled upon it about a month
> ago. I just launched it, and it looks similar to what's on your page
> there, just for Bookworm instead of Bullseye for me. Mine doesn't have
> that opening "Welcome" chapter, but there are all kinds of references
> to how to install throughout the rest of it.

I went back and looked at my copy some more. It also doesn't (?)
present that handy part about prerequisites. If that's something
that's also needed, I took a hint from wayback-machine-downloader [0]
and tried searching apt-get's repositories for similar. Ended up with
"webhttrack" which says:

"Description-en: Copy websites to your computer, httrack with a Web interface
 WebHTTrack is an offline browser utility, allowing you to download a World
 Wide website from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively
 all directories, getting html, images, and other files from the server to
 your computer, using a step-by-step web interface.
 .
 WebHTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply
 open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can
 browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online.
 HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume
 interrupted downloads. WebHTTrack is fully configurable, and has an
 integrated help system."

One issue would be for those websites that use hard (full, long) links
instead of the relative ones. I just viewed your online link's source
code, and the links, thankfully, appear to be relative. Thank you,
Debian Developers!

PS Looking one more time at WebHTTrack's self-description, fingers
crossed that maybe it creates relative links as it works its magic,
regardless of what the original website's webmaster did. THAT would
nice!

Cindy :)

[0] https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader

-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Problem downloading "Installation Guide for 64-bit PC (amd64)"

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 4/7/22, Richard Owlett  wrote:
> I need a *HTML* copy of "Installation Guide for 64-bit PC (amd64)" for
> *OFFLINE* use.
>
> The HTML links on [https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual]
> lead *ONLY* to Page 1.
>
> Is the complete document downloadable as a single HTML file?


Have you seen the "installation-guide-amd64" package in Debian's
repositories? I'd never seen it before. Stumbled upon it about a month
ago. I just launched it, and it looks similar to what's on your page
there, just for Bookworm instead of Bullseye for me. Mine doesn't have
that opening "Welcome" chapter, but there are all kinds of references
to how to install throughout the rest of it.

Hope that helps someone, anyway.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: fluxbox partial installation (SOLVED)

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 4/2/22, Haines Brown  wrote:
>
> Thank you. The problem turned out to be that my hostname somehow
> changed. It was originally  but then it became
> -10.  The only way I can account for this is my senility
> (87).


This is my third email attempt at this. I started to say that sounds
odd. I initially wandered off on a tangent about partition labels
doing that to me within Thunar file manager.

THEN I remembered that Puppy Linux CDs revolve the hostname's value.
Maybe that's what is going on here? My searches for a how-to aren't
fruitful and are only being shown how to create a dynamic DNS server
and IP address.

As an unrelated aside, I think I just figured out one way that
people's emails don't always show up in the archives nor on the list.
I had deleted this thread's "reply to" email addresses so I didn't
accidentally send too early. Then I saved my response and walked away.

When I came back, I wanted to see if anyone else had an answer before
I tweaked mine and sent it. At that point, Gmail has your draft
sitting in a little box underneath the email you're targeting.

I finished my original response sitting in that box and sent it. When
I next deleted Haines' original email, my leftover suddenly didn't
have a filing label on it. That's because it only went to me and not
to Debian-User. When I hit "reply to all" to test it, the fields were
blank. That was the ah-ha moment.

Hope that made sense such that the next time someone's email
disappears, maybe that scenario can be checked off their list, too.
Just try hitting "reply to all" on the one that disappeared and see
what happens.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Predictable Network Interface Names

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/30/22, Dan Ritter  wrote:
> Greg Wooledge wrote:
>> On Wed, Mar 30, 2022 at 07:18:07PM +0100, Brian wrote:
>> > That's good advice, but are MAC addresses memorable?
>>
>> Doesn't matter.  You can choose a memorable name.  The MAC address is
>> simply the data point you place in the config file, so the system knows
>> this is the interface you're talking about.
>>
>> unicorn:~$ cat /etc/systemd/network/10-lan0.link
>> [Match]
>> MACAddress=18:60:24:77:5c:ec
>>
>> [Link]
>> Name=lan0
>>
>> That's what I'm using.  Of course, this relies on the MAC address being
>> consistent across boots.  I've heard of some cases where this isn't
>> true, but I believe those cases involved removable devices (USB network
>> interfaces or similar).
>
> Some NICs can have their MAC addresses changed permanently.
>
> There were at least a few terrible NICs in history where an
> entire production run got the same MAC address assigned.
>
> Most NICs can have their MAC addresses reassigned after boot,
> which will almost always be reset on next power cycle.
>
> lan0 is a good name. I like names like "internal" and "dmz" and  "internet"
> or "cogent" and "level3" -- either functional descriptors or
> where their other ends are connected.


macchanger.. I tried it a couple years ago for some forgotten reason.
I think it was when the names first started changing on us, and I was
trying to take control of the situation. I remember it working and
then not working. Can't remember now why I gave up on it. Thankfully
things have ironed out some since so it hasn't been needed in my usage
case.

>From "apt-cache show," it seems to reference the same vendor MAC
duplication instances (Point #4):

Features:
 .
   * set specific MAC address of a network interface
   * set the MAC randomly
   * set a MAC of another vendor
   * set another MAC of the same vendor
   * set a MAC of the same kind (eg: wireless card)
   * display a vendor MAC list (today, 6200 items) to choose from

Afterthought, my problems eased up after I figured out I could grep
dmesg for "renamed from" and plug that result into where I needed the
name. Tripped over that by accident. Might have started out grepping
for eth0, maybe.

Have fun!

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: update, reboot required?

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/19/22, Greg Wooledge  wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 19, 2022 at 10:55:03AM +0100, Toni Mas Soler wrote:
>> I restart Dbus from time to time. Actually, I stop Dbus if i don't
>> need, that is when I do not use X (almost allways).
>> Do you mean my action is not effective?
>
> The fact that you're "almost always" not using X is probably relevant
> here.
>
> See
> 
> for some discussion.  Or just google "cannot restart dbus" as I did
> to find many more such discussions.
>
> My own knowledge of the topic came mainly from reading the output
> of apt-get as it was upgrading dbus, and telling me that I would have
> to reboot, because it can't restart dbus by itself.
>
> I don't know why other people aren't reading that output.


I've wondered that same thing as I watch messages scroll by (when I
happen to have not looked away from the terminal). Some upgrades have
all kinds of advisories tucked into that scrolling that rips by.

Unattended upgrades always come to mind as a place for where those
messages would go unseen. It has also come to mind that users have
admin emails sent to them as a potential remedy. It's on my to-do to
play around with those emails to see if that catches those upgrade
messages..

PS I've seen those dbus ones rip by. Seems like I played with
restarting something related in just the last couple weeks. I don't
remember the experience feeling very successful. :D

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Debian DSA-5095-1 : linux - security update

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/17/22, Peter Wienemann  wrote:
>
> You can check its status using
>
> dpkg -l linux-headers-amd64


That has interesting feedback. I've been using the following for a
slightly different trek toward a similar end (includes what mine says
right now):

$ apt-cache policy linux-headers-amd64
linux-headers-amd64:
  Installed: 5.16.12-1
  Candidate: 5.16.12-1
  Version table:
 5.17~rc8-1~exp1 1
  1 http://deb.debian.org/debian experimental/main amd64 Packages
 *** 5.16.12-1 500
500 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Being able to compare the Installed versus Candidate fields has been
cognitively friendly as a checkpoint for my style of user generated...
issues. :D

For newer users, the various versions under "Version table" reflect
that I use "bookworm bookworm-updates experimental" as the "Suites" in
my debian.sources** file. Version table's nice to see because that
data is a constant reminder to think ahead about developing toward the
Future.

IMPORTANT: It's highly recommended that we avoid experimental. It's
just that that's the only place I can find wicd-curses. Thank you for
wicd-curses still being there, Developers! That's a priceless package.
:)

** debian-sources goes under sources.list.d as an alternative to
sources.list. It was a momentarily seen talking point under something
like "man sources.list" at some point in my own personal Debian
adventures.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: recommend music player?

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/16/22, Alexander V. Makartsev  wrote:
> On 16.03.2022 22:54, kaye n wrote:
>> Hello Friends!
>>
>> I am currently using Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
>>
>> Can anyone recommend a good music player with an equalizer where I can
>> choose Pop, Rock, etc.
>>
>> Thank you!
> That could be "Qmmp". It looks and function like an old-school WinAmp.


That's what I was going to say.. along with qmmp-plugin-projectm
thrown in for fun.

With respect to pop v. rock, etc, I remember using something that
distinguished the equalizer in that way. QMMP's does not have that
look outright. BUT I just quick clicked and can see words like "Load",
"Save", and "Import" under "Presets" so there may be a way to find a
friendly setting then keep and recall it for use over time.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: packages built with golang

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/15/22, Dan Ritter  wrote:
> Cousin Stanley wrote:
>> Cousin Stanley wrote :
>> > The data is already on your system, so
>> > there's no transmission happening.
>>
>>   I do  not  understand this.
> ...
>
>>   Does the Debian package manager
>>   really download package information
>>   for  all  ~59,000  avaiilabel packages
>>   in anticipation that users will need it
>>   at sometime in the future ?
>>
>>   That would be suprising to me.
>
> Now you are surprised, and informed.


My linux-image-amd64 upgrade got mangled the other day so I was in
"man apt-get" and apt-cache looking for ways to coerce success (beyond
apt's recommended "dpkg --configure -a"). Found this and had intended
to eventually post here anyway:

apt-cache stats

Thought it might prove of interest for others, too, with respect to
seeing real numbers about the amazing volume of packages all
interacting together under Debian's hood. Concerning this thread, the
multi-megabyte sizes of the files under /var/lib/apt/lists reflect the
package numbers found via "apt-cache stats". I can still remember my
first ah-ha moment upon opening up one of those files and peeking in
out of curiosity years ago..

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Claws-mail Address Book Bug?

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/12/22, Brad Rogers  wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Mar 2022 09:19:52 +1100
> Charlie  wrote:
>
>>  Discovered that when I looked for the mailing list on the net.
>>  I dare not say googled because there is some controversy about
>
> IKWYM, but in most circles that word is still the 'go to' one as the verb
> for "use a search engine"


I remember very early on where there was at least one headline that
said Google was considering court action over the use of its name as a
verb (copyright, trademark, etc):

https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/589

That never made sense because being repetitively used as a common verb
meant they had arrived, were mainstream at least with tech folks, and
received free publicity every time it occurred.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: evince has died a horrible death. Sob...

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/11/22, gene heskett  wrote:
> Thats been the most complete pdf viewer I've ever used. But I just tried
> to look at a doc I have looked at hundreds of times over he last years,
> and it got all upset all over itself, while I was logged into that
> machine with an ssh -Y login.
>
> What its its feature complete replacement in a buster install? This
> machine is bullseye, the logged into machine is buster.


Thinking out loud.. Did you try a different PDF file to make sure it's
not just one suddenly corrupt file instead of being evince?

Personally, I use Atril on XFCE4, but all I've ever done is read
files. I follow Atril's Github that was active in the last few weeks:

https://github.com/mate-desktop/atril/

Important to note for some users is that I occasionally see requests
for useful features that apparently Atril might not do while other
packages do.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: apt-key deprecation.

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/5/22, Erwan David  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> When I update my packages I get the warning :
>
> W:
> https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/dists/buster/InRelease:
> Key is stored in legacy trusted.gpg keyring (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg), see
> the DEPRECATION section in apt-key(8) for details.
>
> I looked at section DEPRECATION in apt-key, but did not find how I can
> extract those keys from /etc/apt/trusted.gpg and put them in trusted.gpg.d
>
> What would be the easier way ?


My apologies if you personally already know what I'm about to write.
Am still posting for potential newbies visiting the archives.

While you're waiting on the answer that corrects this, I needed to fix
two of mine, too. I took your query as my sign to follow through.
First up is this explanation that might easily play into what's going
on:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1286545/what-commands-exactly-should-replace-the-deprecated-apt-key

Even if it's not directly related to the change that occurred in that
very recent Debian package upgrade, it's still important to always
have in mind. It's relevant because, however you and I and all others
affected correct this warning, we need to know that one factor is our
CHOICE as to how far we trust each affected repository. I hadn't
really thought that far ahead about it until seeing that in writing.

For me, I trust the two repositories involved and would grant them
wide open access. Someone else might be pulling from a repository that
allows all kinds of different Developers to add their packages into a
pool. That scenario should cause an admin to cherry pick each
package-specific key added after researching each single key for its
safety as new keys continue to appear over time.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: Monitor (screen) move without human action

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 3/4/22, Marcelo Laia  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Monitor (screen) of my Notebook Inspiron 15 I15-5547-A20 move and click
> randomly without an human action.
>
> Here is a video https://youtu.be/y2RIZnx_4HY
>
> What could be?


Hi.. I don't have an answer, it's a question, instead. To help others
who will look at this, are you moving your cursor (pointer) around, or
is that moving by itself, too? I'm just wondering if what's happening
is somehow triggered by the mouse (or touchpad) action.

For a few seconds there, it felt like the resolution was bouncing around...

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

Re: strange boot messages

[Cindy Sue Causey]

On 2/27/22, Michael Grant  wrote:
> I'm running Debian 11.2 stable on a Linode (a popular VPS).  After a recent
> update, I think from
> around 25th of January, I'm starting to see some strange messages in
> my logs:
>
> systemd[1]: First Boot Complete was skipped because of a failed condition
> check (ConditionFirstBoot=yes).
>
> systemd[1]: getty on tty2-tty6 if dbus and logind are not available was
> skipped because of a failed condition check
> (ConditionPathExists=!/usr/bin/dbus-daemon).
>
> systemd[1]: Platform Persistent Storage Archival was skipped because of a
> failed condition check (ConditionDirectoryNotEmpty=/sys/fs/pstore).
>
> systemd[1]: Set Up Additional Binary Formats was skipped because all trigger
> condition checks failed.
>
> systemd[1]: Store a System Token in an EFI Variable was skipped because of a
> failed condition check
> (ConditionPathExists=/sys/firmware/efi/efivars/LoaderFeatures-4a67b082-0a4c-41cf-b6c7-440b29bb8c4f).
>
> systemd-udevd[277]: Network interface NamePolicy= disabled on kernel command
> line, ignoring.
>
> systemd[1]: fast remote file copy program daemon was skipped because of a
> failed condition check (ConditionPathExists=/etc/rsyncd.conf).
>
>
> Are these just informational or are these problems I need to fix?  I
> did some searching but couldn't find much.
>
> Please CC me, I'm not currently on the list.


I can't answer that, but I can share in this curiosity from within
Bookworm. Goes back to 2022.02.20 for one partition and 2022.02.14 for
the other Bookworm partition.

The /var/log/sys* variants date back further than that which is
notable since yours starting appearing even earlier. Our date
difference could somehow be about the releases that we're each using.
The date differences for mine stand out since both partitions are
updated basically daily per each with minimal difference in the
packages affected each day, mostly just libreoffice as the difference.

Grepping dmesg for "skipped" found these:

systemd[1]: File System Check on Root Device was skipped because of a
failed condition check
(ConditionPathExists=!/run/initramfs/fsck-root).
systemd[1]: Repartition Root Disk was skipped because all trigger
condition checks failed.

Grepping /var/log/sys* for "skipped" shows that I likely received
most, if not all, of the other ones you shared here.

System is running, but it makes one wonder what might run even
smoother if those weren't appearing. I'm not seeing a glaring "E" or
"error" so there's that comfort. That word "failed" is interesting,
but maybe it just means we have defaults set that are intended to
speed up booting or something?

Or not.

Cindy :)
-- 
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *