subject:"new install"


On 6/7/24 20:38, Tom Dial wrote:



On 6/6/24 23:14, gene heskett wrote:

On 6/6/24 19:00, Tom Dial wrote:



On 6/5/24 19:53, gene heskett wrote:

On 6/5/24 17:25, Tom Dial wrote:



On 6/5/24 08:58, gene heskett wrote:

On 6/5/24 02:05, Tom Dial wrote:



On 6/4/24 04:26, gene heskett wrote:

On 2/19/22 06:31, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

Hi Gene,

If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they 
had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a 
mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down 
/ reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder 
cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to 
a baseline

of known working conditions and eliminating causes.

My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get 
you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known 
initial state.


Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. 
Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if 
it did, I'd

have brltty with every install on this laptop.

Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using 
tar.gz and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that 
includes firmware - the unofficial one.


Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. 
Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, 
since we don't

run trinity.

Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. 
Then re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system 
you want. Document it - write down

the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.

That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever 
caused by

individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.

That's the counsel of perfection: alternatively:

apt rdepends brltty gives me:

me@mymachine:~$ apt rdepends brltty
brltty
Reverse Depends:
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)

You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those 
packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get 
out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember 
where you got

to will be very helpful.


Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I 
assume with a text only system by the time gnome takes all its 
dependency's with it.  Thanks Tom.


Have you actually tried uninstalling brltty only, as a separate 
action from all others?


I have a number of gnome installations, unfortunately for this 
discussion all bookworm. None of them has brltty.


I have a few installations of bullseye and an older stretch 
installation, but none with gnome installed. On all of them, 
though, "apt-rdepends -r gnome" fails to list brltty as a gnome 
dependency. And on the bookworm systems, simulated installation of 
gnome ("apt install -s gnome") shows brltty as a suggested package 
only and would not install it along with gnome; on the stretch 
system, gnome installation makes no reference at all to brltty.


While I have both with only the radio buttons for keyboard and 
rodent plugged into usb at install time. I have only one wired 
keyboard and no wired mice as I've had a lightning strike on the 
pole that serves this house reach up and tap me by way of my fingers 
on the keyboard. Wasn't that much of a tap, I've been tapped a lot 
harder that that, hard enough to trigger a 6 month round of shingles 
and the burns were months healing. And in this case did not damage 
the keyboard or computer, but I did get the message. I've had many 
strikes on that pole since I built a garage on the end of the house, 
which caused me to install a 200 amp service and bring my grounding 
specs up to NEC. Zero problems since then (2008)


Is it possible you have apt settings that automatically pull in 
suggested packages, and that is interfering with attempts to remove 
brltty? I am not expert enough wrt apt and its relatives to know 
whether that even makes sense, and it seems a bit far fetched if 
maybe barely possible.


Maybe if you post the output from "apt-rdepends -r brltty" and "apt 
purge --simulate brltty" it will be informative.


Neither of those utils are installed. Should they be?


apt should be installed. As far as I know it has been included by 
default in the Debian base system as the preferred command line 
package management program since buster or earlier. I have never had 
to install it. You probably should if it is missing.


apt-rdepends is at least partly redundant with apt.
The command "apt-rdepends -r ", and "apt rdepends 
" both show reverse dependencies of ; the 
latter also shows suggestions (packages that suggest think).

If you have apt installed, you

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-07 Thread Tom Dial

On 6/6/24 23:14, gene heskett wrote:

On 6/6/24 19:00, Tom Dial wrote:

On 6/5/24 19:53, gene heskett wrote:

On 6/5/24 17:25, Tom Dial wrote:

On 6/5/24 08:58, gene heskett wrote:

On 6/5/24 02:05, Tom Dial wrote:

On 6/4/24 04:26, gene heskett wrote:

On 2/19/22 06:31, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

Hi Gene,

My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.

Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz and
preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes firmware - the
unofficial one.

Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.

That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.

That's the counsel of perfection: alternatively:

apt rdepends brltty gives me:

Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I assume with a
text only system by the time gnome takes all its dependency's with it. Thanks
Tom.

Have you actually tried uninstalling brltty only, as a separate action from all
others?

I have a number of gnome installations, unfortunately for this discussion all
bookworm. None of them has brltty.

Maybe if you post the output from "apt-rdepends -r brltty" and "apt purge --simulate
brltty" it will be informative.

Neither of those utils are installed. Should they be?

apt-rdepends is at least partly redundant with apt.
The command "apt-rdepends -r ", and "apt rdepends " both
show reverse dependencies of ; the latter also shows suggestions (packages that suggest

Regards,
Tom Dial

If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye


On 6/7/24 18:12, David Christensen wrote:

On 6/6/24 22:14, gene heskett wrote:
In experimenting I've found a name clash, there are appprently two 
orca's. one is a speech synth, one is a slicer for 3d printers I don't 
use. Typing orca in a shell locks the shell wo any output, for several 
minutes but comes back to a prompt with a ctl-c, so I've NDC which was 
being executed. Whatevver, the installation is quite voluminous:

gene@coyote:~/AppImages$ locate orca |wc -l
1560

So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies 
will put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove. So one more time 
this broken damned bookworm install has bit me in a rear.


No Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.



Here are my installation notes from when I migrated my daily driver from 
Debian 9 to Debian 11.  It has orca, and orca has never bothered me:


January 9, 2022

1.  Wipe Intel SSD 520 Series 60 GB drive in Intel DQ67SW.  Insert
     debian-11.2.0-amd64-netinst USB flash drive into USB 3.0 port
     adjacent Gigabit port. Boot:

 Debian GNU/Linux installer menu (BIOS mode)
     install
 Language    C
 Continent or region    North America
 Country, territory or area    United States
 Keymap to use    American English
 Hostname    laalaa
 Domain name    tracy.holgerdanske.com
 Root password    
 Re-enter password    
 Full name for new user    debian
 Username for your account    debian
 Choose a password    
 Re-enter password    
 Select your time zone    Pacific
 Partitioning method    Manual
   Select a partition...    SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) - 60.0 GB ATA INTEL 
SSDSC2CW06

     Create partition table    Yes
   Select a partition...    pri/log 60.0 GB FREE SPACE
     Create a new partition
   New partition size    1 GB
   Type    Primary
   Location    Beginning
   Partition settings
     Use as    Ext4 journaling file system
     Mount point    /boot
     Mount options    defaults
     Label    laalaa_boot
     Reserved blocks    5%
     Typical usage    standard
     Bootable flag    on
     Done setting up the partition
   Select a partition...    pri/log 59.0 GB FREE SPACE
     Create a new partition
   New partition size    1 GB
   Type    Primary
   Location    Beginning
   Partition settings
     Use as    physical volume for encryption
     Encryption method    Device-mapper (dm-crypt)
     Encryption    aes
     Key size    256
     IV algorithm    xts-plain64
     Encryption key    Random key
     Erase data    no
     Bootable flag    off
     Done setting up the partition
   Select a partition...    pri/log 58.0 GB FREE SPACE
     Create a new partition
   New partition size    13 GB
   Type    Primary
   Location    Beginning
   Partition settings
     Use as    physical volume for encryption
     Encryption method    Device-mapper (dm-crypt)
     Encryption    aes
     Key size    256
     IV algorithm    xts-plain64
     Encryption key    Passphrase
     Erase data    no
     Bootable flag    off
     Done setting up the partition
   Configure encrypted volumes
     Write the changes to disk    Yes
     Encryption configuration    Create encrypted volumes
     Devices to encrypt
   [*] /dev/sda2 (1000MB; crypto)
   [*] /dev/sda3 (13000MB; crypt)
     Continue
     Encryption configuration    Finish
     Encryption passphrase    
     Re-enter passphrase    
   Select a partition...    #1 13.0 GB f ext4
     Partition settings
   Use as    Ext4 journaling file system
   Mount point    /
   Mount options    defaults
   Label    laalaa_root
   Reserved blocks    5%
   Typical usage    standard
   Done setting up the partition
   Finish partitioning and write changes to disk
     Write the changes to disks    Yes
 Debian archive mirror country    United States
 Debian archive mirror    deb.debian.org
 HTTP proxy information    
 Package usage survey    No
 Choose software    Debian desktop environment
     Xfce
     SSH server
     standard system utiilties
 Device for boot loader installation
     /dev/sdb (ata-INTEL_SSDSC2CW060A3_)
 Installation complete    Continue

     Push and hold power button at POST; release when computer turns

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-07 Thread David Christensen


On 6/6/24 22:14, gene heskett wrote:
In experimenting I've found a name clash, there are appprently two 
orca's. one is a speech synth, one is a slicer for 3d printers I don't 
use. Typing orca in a shell locks the shell wo any output, for several 
minutes but comes back to a prompt with a ctl-c, so I've NDC which was 
being executed. Whatevver, the installation is quite voluminous:

gene@coyote:~/AppImages$ locate orca |wc -l
1560

So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies 
will put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove. So one more time 
this broken damned bookworm install has bit me in a rear.


No Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.



Here are my installation notes from when I migrated my daily driver from 
Debian 9 to Debian 11.  It has orca, and orca has never bothered me:


January 9, 2022

1.  Wipe Intel SSD 520 Series 60 GB drive in Intel DQ67SW.  Insert
debian-11.2.0-amd64-netinst USB flash drive into USB 3.0 port
adjacent Gigabit port. Boot:

Debian GNU/Linux installer menu (BIOS mode)
install
LanguageC
Continent or region North America
Country, territory or area  United States
Keymap to use   American English
Hostnamelaalaa
Domain name tracy.holgerdanske.com
Root password   
Re-enter password   
Full name for new user  debian
Username for your account   debian
Choose a password   
Re-enter password   
Select your time zone   Pacific
Partitioning method Manual
  Select a partition... SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) - 60.0 GB ATA INTEL 
SSDSC2CW06
Create partition table  Yes
  Select a partition... pri/log 60.0 GB FREE SPACE
Create a new partition
  New partition size1 GB
  Type  Primary
  Location  Beginning
  Partition settings
Use as  Ext4 journaling file system
Mount point /boot
Mount options   defaults
Label   laalaa_boot
Reserved blocks 5%
Typical usage   standard
Bootable flag   on
Done setting up the partition
  Select a partition... pri/log 59.0 GB FREE SPACE
Create a new partition
  New partition size1 GB
  Type  Primary
  Location  Beginning
  Partition settings
Use as  physical volume for encryption
Encryption method   Device-mapper (dm-crypt)
Encryption  aes
Key size256
IV algorithmxts-plain64
Encryption key  Random key
Erase data  no
Bootable flag   off
Done setting up the partition
  Select a partition... pri/log 58.0 GB FREE SPACE
Create a new partition
  New partition size13 GB
  Type  Primary
  Location  Beginning
  Partition settings
Use as  physical volume for encryption
Encryption method   Device-mapper (dm-crypt)
Encryption  aes
Key size256
IV algorithmxts-plain64
Encryption key  Passphrase
Erase data  no
Bootable flag   off
Done setting up the partition
  Configure encrypted volumes
Write the changes to disk   Yes
Encryption configurationCreate encrypted volumes
Devices to encrypt  
  [*] /dev/sda2 (1000MB; crypto)
  [*] /dev/sda3 (13000MB; crypt)
Continue
Encryption configurationFinish
Encryption passphrase   
Re-enter passphrase 
  Select a partition... #1 13.0 GB f ext4
Partition settings
  Use asExt4 journaling file system
  Mount point   /
  Mount options defaults
  Label laalaa_root
  Reserved blocks   5%
  Typical usage standard
  Done setting up the partition
  Finish partitioning and

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye


On 6/7/24 14:15, mick.crane wrote:

On 2024-06-07 12:32, gene heskett wrote:


Where did you get that beta trixie installer? bookworm does not allow
that removal of orca without also removing gnome. brltty yes, but not
orca.


I don't think I've got any gnome stuff.
here probably.
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-dvd/
mick

.

Got it, thanks mick.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-07 Thread mick.crane


On 2024-06-07 12:32, gene heskett wrote:


Where did you get that beta trixie installer? bookworm does not allow
that removal of orca without also removing gnome. brltty yes, but not
orca.


I don't think I've got any gnome stuff.
here probably.
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-dvd/
mick

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye


On 6/7/24 07:16, Greg Wooledge wrote:

On Fri, Jun 07, 2024 at 01:14:16AM -0400, gene heskett wrote:

In experimenting I've found a name clash, there are appprently two orca's.
one is a speech synth, one is a slicer for 3d printers I don't use.


Oh!  That sounds super relevant.


I forgot to mention the speech synth is "orca", the slicer is "Orca"


If you're not using the second one, where did it come from?  If it's
interfering with your desktop environment, but you're not using it,
maybe you can get rid of it.


An AppImage, rm it.


That would be one solution path to explore.  The other... you're already
exploring, so see below.


Typing
orca in a shell locks the shell wo any output, for several minutes but comes
back to a prompt with a ctl-c, so I've NDC which was being executed.


"type orca" will tell you what the shell has chosen.

"type -a orca" will tell you all the places the shell sees it, in order.


So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies will
put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove.


Install "equivs".  Read its documentation.  Read it a second time,
because it's probably too subtle to get all at once.

Pick one of the example templates (mail-transport-agent is the smallest,
so I'd use that one), make a copy of it, and modify the copy.  Get rid of
the Provides and Conflicts, and replace them with a Depends: line that's
identical to the one from "gnome", except get rid of orca.  Change the
Package name and the Description to be something meaningful to you.

I'd suggest the name gene-gnome because it's a fun pun.

Build your new .deb which depends on all the parts of GNOME except for
orca.  Install it with dpkg -i.

Since the gnome Depends: line has versioned dependencies, your custom
replacement probably won't survive a dist-upgrade, so be prepared to
undo and redo this hack when you upgrade to a new version of Debian.

.


Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye


On 6/7/24 07:16, Greg Wooledge wrote:

On Fri, Jun 07, 2024 at 01:14:16AM -0400, gene heskett wrote:

In experimenting I've found a name clash, there are appprently two orca's.
one is a speech synth, one is a slicer for 3d printers I don't use.


Oh!  That sounds super relevant.

If you're not using the second one, where did it come from?  If it's
interfering with your desktop environment, but you're not using it,
maybe you can get rid of it.

That would be one solution path to explore.  The other... you're already
exploring, so see below.


Typing
orca in a shell locks the shell wo any output, for several minutes but comes
back to a prompt with a ctl-c, so I've NDC which was being executed.


"type orca" will tell you what the shell has chosen.

"type -a orca" will tell you all the places the shell sees it, in order.


So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies will
put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove.


Install "equivs".  Read its documentation.  Read it a second time,
because it's probably too subtle to get all at once.


Where are the docs, it doesn't come with a manpage? Buried someplace in 
/usr/share/docs? Found it, instructs are in the README-Debian file but 
quite sparse.  Looks like it could work however. Needs more 
coffee...Lots more.


Thanks.


Pick one of the example templates (mail-transport-agent is the smallest,
so I'd use that one), make a copy of it, and modify the copy.  Get rid of
the Provides and Conflicts, and replace them with a Depends: line that's
identical to the one from "gnome", except get rid of orca.  Change the
Package name and the Description to be something meaningful to you.

I'd suggest the name gene-gnome because it's a fun pun.


Interesting. and something I've not tried on x86-64 machines. I do build 
stuff on the arm64, but this looks different from making a buildbot or 
rt kernel.


Build your new .deb which depends on all the parts of GNOME except for
orca.  Install it with dpkg -i.

Since the gnome Depends: line has versioned dependencies, your custom
replacement probably won't survive a dist-upgrade, so be prepared to
undo and redo this hack when you upgrade to a new version of Debian.


Noted but short term memory will probably fail.

Thank you Greg.

.


Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye


On 6/7/24 04:33, mick.crane wrote:

On 2024-06-07 06:14, gene heskett wrote:


So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies
will put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove. So one more time
this broken damned bookworm install has bit me in a rear.

I delayed logging in after starting the PC some time ago when a voice 
boomed out the keys I was typing.

"What the.."
Reading this thread I purged orca and brltty on trixie and everything 
still seems to be working.

mick

.
Where did you get that beta trixie installer? bookworm does not allow 
that removal of orca without also removing gnome. brltty yes, but not orca.


Thanks mick.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-07 Thread Greg Wooledge

On Fri, Jun 07, 2024 at 01:14:16AM -0400, gene heskett wrote:
> In experimenting I've found a name clash, there are appprently two orca's.
> one is a speech synth, one is a slicer for 3d printers I don't use.

Oh!  That sounds super relevant.

If you're not using the second one, where did it come from?  If it's
interfering with your desktop environment, but you're not using it,
maybe you can get rid of it.

That would be one solution path to explore.  The other... you're already
exploring, so see below.

> Typing
> orca in a shell locks the shell wo any output, for several minutes but comes
> back to a prompt with a ctl-c, so I've NDC which was being executed.

"type orca" will tell you what the shell has chosen.

"type -a orca" will tell you all the places the shell sees it, in order.

> So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies will
> put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove.

Install "equivs".  Read its documentation.  Read it a second time,
because it's probably too subtle to get all at once.

Pick one of the example templates (mail-transport-agent is the smallest,
so I'd use that one), make a copy of it, and modify the copy.  Get rid of
the Provides and Conflicts, and replace them with a Depends: line that's
identical to the one from "gnome", except get rid of orca.  Change the
Package name and the Description to be something meaningful to you.

I'd suggest the name gene-gnome because it's a fun pun.

Build your new .deb which depends on all the parts of GNOME except for
orca.  Install it with dpkg -i.

Since the gnome Depends: line has versioned dependencies, your custom
replacement probably won't survive a dist-upgrade, so be prepared to
undo and redo this hack when you upgrade to a new version of Debian.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-07 Thread mick.crane


On 2024-06-07 06:14, gene heskett wrote:


So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies
will put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove. So one more time
this broken damned bookworm install has bit me in a rear.

I delayed logging in after starting the PC some time ago when a voice 
boomed out the keys I was typing.

"What the.."
Reading this thread I purged orca and brltty on trixie and everything 
still seems to be working.

mick

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-06 Thread gene heskett


On 6/6/24 19:00, Tom Dial wrote:



On 6/5/24 19:53, gene heskett wrote:

On 6/5/24 17:25, Tom Dial wrote:



On 6/5/24 08:58, gene heskett wrote:

On 6/5/24 02:05, Tom Dial wrote:



On 6/4/24 04:26, gene heskett wrote:

On 2/19/22 06:31, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

Hi Gene,

If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had 
a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a 
mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / 
reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder 
cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a 
baseline

of known working conditions and eliminating causes.

My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you 
out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial 
state.


Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. 
Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if 
it did, I'd

have brltty with every install on this laptop.

Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using 
tar.gz and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that 
includes firmware - the unofficial one.


Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. 
Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, 
since we don't

run trinity.

Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. 
Then re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you 
want. Document it - write down

the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.

That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever 
caused by

individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.

That's the counsel of perfection: alternatively:

apt rdepends brltty gives me:

me@mymachine:~$ apt rdepends brltty
brltty
Reverse Depends:
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)

You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those 
packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get 
out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where 
you got

to will be very helpful.


Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I 
assume with a text only system by the time gnome takes all its 
dependency's with it.  Thanks Tom.


Have you actually tried uninstalling brltty only, as a separate 
action from all others?


I have a number of gnome installations, unfortunately for this 
discussion all bookworm. None of them has brltty.


I have a few installations of bullseye and an older stretch 
installation, but none with gnome installed. On all of them, though, 
"apt-rdepends -r gnome" fails to list brltty as a gnome dependency. 
And on the bookworm systems, simulated installation of gnome ("apt 
install -s gnome") shows brltty as a suggested package only and would 
not install it along with gnome; on the stretch system, gnome 
installation makes no reference at all to brltty.


While I have both with only the radio buttons for keyboard and rodent 
plugged into usb at install time. I have only one wired keyboard and 
no wired mice as I've had a lightning strike on the pole that serves 
this house reach up and tap me by way of my fingers on the keyboard. 
Wasn't that much of a tap, I've been tapped a lot harder that that, 
hard enough to trigger a 6 month round of shingles and the burns were 
months healing. And in this case did not damage the keyboard or 
computer, but I did get the message. I've had many strikes on that 
pole since I built a garage on the end of the house, which caused me 
to install a 200 amp service and bring my grounding specs up to NEC. 
Zero problems since then (2008)


Is it possible you have apt settings that automatically pull in 
suggested packages, and that is interfering with attempts to remove 
brltty? I am not expert enough wrt apt and its relatives to know 
whether that even makes sense, and it seems a bit far fetched if 
maybe barely possible.


Maybe if you post the output from "apt-rdepends -r brltty" and "apt 
purge --simulate brltty" it will be informative.


Neither of those utils are installed. Should they be?


apt should be installed. As far as I know it has been included by 
default in the Debian base system as the preferred command line package 
management program since buster or earlier. I have never had to install 
it. You probably should if it is missing.


apt-rdepends is at least partly redundant with apt.
The command "apt-rdepends -r ", and "apt rdepends 
" both show reverse dependencies of ; the 
latter also shows suggestions (packages that suggest think).

If you have apt installed, you probably do not need apt-rdepends.

Regards,
Tom Dial




Regards,
Tom Dial

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-06 Thread gene heskett


On 6/6/24 17:57, Tom Dial wrote:



On 6/5/24 19:53, gene heskett wrote:

On 6/5/24 17:25, Tom Dial wrote:



On 6/5/24 08:58, gene heskett wrote:

On 6/5/24 02:05, Tom Dial wrote:



On 6/4/24 04:26, gene heskett wrote:

On 2/19/22 06:31, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

Hi Gene,

If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had 
a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a 
mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / 
reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder 
cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a 
baseline

of known working conditions and eliminating causes.

My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you 
out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial 
state.


Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. 
Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if 
it did, I'd

have brltty with every install on this laptop.

Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using 
tar.gz and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that 
includes firmware - the unofficial one.


Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. 
Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, 
since we don't

run trinity.

Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. 
Then re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you 
want. Document it - write down

the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.

That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever 
caused by

individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.

That's the counsel of perfection: alternatively:

apt rdepends brltty gives me:

me@mymachine:~$ apt rdepends brltty
brltty
Reverse Depends:
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)

You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those 
packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get 
out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where 
you got

to will be very helpful.


Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I 
assume with a text only system by the time gnome takes all its 
dependency's with it.  Thanks Tom.


Have you actually tried uninstalling brltty only, as a separate 
action from all others?


I have a number of gnome installations, unfortunately for this 
discussion all bookworm. None of them has brltty.


I have a few installations of bullseye and an older stretch 
installation, but none with gnome installed. On all of them, though, 
"apt-rdepends -r gnome" fails to list brltty as a gnome dependency. 
And on the bookworm systems, simulated installation of gnome ("apt 
install -s gnome") shows brltty as a suggested package only and would 
not install it along with gnome; on the stretch system, gnome 
installation makes no reference at all to brltty.


While I have both with only the radio buttons for keyboard and rodent 
plugged into usb at install time. I have only one wired keyboard and 
no wired mice as I've had a lightning strike on the pole that serves 
this house reach up and tap me by way of my fingers on the keyboard. 
Wasn't that much of a tap, I've been tapped a lot harder that that, 
hard enough to trigger a 6 month round of shingles and the burns were 
months healing. And in this case did not damage the keyboard or 
computer, but I did get the message. I've had many strikes on that 
pole since I built a garage on the end of the house, which caused me 
to install a 200 amp service and bring my grounding specs up to NEC. 
Zero problems since then (2008)


Is it possible you have apt settings that automatically pull in 
suggested packages, and that is interfering with attempts to remove 
brltty? I am not expert enough wrt apt and its relatives to know 
whether that even makes sense, and it seems a bit far fetched if 
maybe barely possible.


Maybe if you post the output from "apt-rdepends -r brltty" and "apt 
purge --simulate brltty" it will be informative.


Neither of those utils are installed. Should they be?


apt should be installed. As far as I know it has been included by 
default in the Debian base system as the preferred command line package 
management program since buster or earlier. I have never had to install 
it. You probably should if it is missing.


apt-rdepends is at least partly redundant with apt.
The command "apt-rdepends -r ", and "apt rdepends 
" both show reverse dependencies of ; the 
latter also shows suggestions (packages that suggest think).

If you have apt installed, you probably do not need apt-rdepends.


I was not aware that apt had that

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-06 Thread Tom Dial

On 6/5/24 19:53, gene heskett wrote:

On 6/5/24 17:25, Tom Dial wrote:

On 6/5/24 08:58, gene heskett wrote:

On 6/5/24 02:05, Tom Dial wrote:

On 6/4/24 04:26, gene heskett wrote:

On 2/19/22 06:31, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

Hi Gene,

My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.

Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz and
preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes firmware - the
unofficial one.

Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.

That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.

That's the counsel of perfection: alternatively:

apt rdepends brltty gives me:

Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I assume with a
text only system by the time gnome takes all its dependency's with it. Thanks
Tom.

Have you actually tried uninstalling brltty only, as a separate action from all
others?

I have a number of gnome installations, unfortunately for this discussion all
bookworm. None of them has brltty.

Maybe if you post the output from "apt-rdepends -r brltty" and "apt purge --simulate
brltty" it will be informative.

Neither of those utils are installed. Should they be?

apt-rdepends is at least partly redundant with apt.
The command "apt-rdepends -r ", and "apt rdepends " both
show reverse dependencies of ; the latter also shows suggestions (packages that suggest

Regards,
Tom Dial

If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-06 Thread Anssi Saari

gene heskett  writes:

> But that still doesn't answer the question, How much longer till
> trixie is official? I even put a ? mark on it.

About a year since bookworm is now about a year old and Debian releases
are about two years apart.

Which reminds me, I've only updated two of my six Buster systems to
Bookworm.

Re: about 10th new install of bookworm!

2024-06-05 Thread Felix Miata

gene heskett composed on 2024-06-05 22:08 (UTC-0400):

> Felix Miata wrote:

>> ...or disabling the motherboard's
>> sound device in BIOS setup, whichever is applicable, before beginning
>> installation, as a possible thwart to the Gnome must have everything 
>> paradigm, if
>> blocking Gnome entirely is unacceptable.

> That might be useful advice, but the sound card is not readily 
> removable, its built into this asus motherboard

Hence, removing its functionality by disabling sound device in UEFI BIOS setup.
-- 
Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion,
based on faith, not based on science.

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata

Re: about 10th new install of bookworm!


On 6/5/24 21:05, Felix Miata wrote:

gene heskett composed on 2024-06-05 11:21 (UTC-0400):


I always get re-install instructions.  Frustrating.


Should you choose to accept any fresh installation suggestion by doing another,
consider removing the sound card from its slot, or disabling the motherboard's
sound device in BIOS setup, whichever is applicable, before beginning
installation, as a possible thwart to the Gnome must have everything paradigm, 
if
blocking Gnome entirely is unacceptable.


That might be useful advice, but the sound card is not readily 
removable, its built into this asus motherboard. An Asus PRIME Z370-A II.


As a side note to installation: as soon as a fresh installation seems suitably
complete, but before adding any additional software, create a compressed /
filesystem partition backup image to facilitate any need for a consequent 
do-over.

gene heskett composed on 2024-06-05 17:08 (UTC-0400):


So this is the umptieth time I've asked how to fix it, and got recipes
for re-installing the basic system as an answer. Mike gave me instructs
to run a couple commands, once normally, once while it was hung but the
2nd comnnand I fed to wc -l and got almost 300k lines. Difficult to do
in real time because the command itself is subject to the lockout lag.


Answering a help request like this one is a toughie. It's commonly necessary to
reproduce both hardware configuration and software configuration in order to try
to address the problem. That can be quite complicated, and time consumptive. 
Here
it seems we may have a shortage from both helper and helpee, not necessarily a
fault of either, but a puzzle with missing pieces, in addition to some pieces 
that
don't belong to the puzzle (history tomes; not being concise). Could it also be
that we have too many cooks in the kitchen here too?


Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye


On 6/5/24 17:25, Tom Dial wrote:



On 6/5/24 08:58, gene heskett wrote:

On 6/5/24 02:05, Tom Dial wrote:



On 6/4/24 04:26, gene heskett wrote:

On 2/19/22 06:31, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

Hi Gene,

If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental 
checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / 
reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder 
cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a 
baseline

of known working conditions and eliminating causes.

My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you 
out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial 
state.


Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. 
Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it 
did, I'd

have brltty with every install on this laptop.

Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz 
and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes 
firmware - the unofficial one.


Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then 
add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since 
we don't

run trinity.

Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. Then 
re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you want. 
Document it - write down

the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.

That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.

That's the counsel of perfection: alternatively:

apt rdepends brltty gives me:

me@mymachine:~$ apt rdepends brltty
brltty
Reverse Depends:
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)

You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those 
packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out 
for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where 
you got

to will be very helpful.


Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I 
assume with a text only system by the time gnome takes all its 
dependency's with it.  Thanks Tom.


Have you actually tried uninstalling brltty only, as a separate action 
from all others?


I have a number of gnome installations, unfortunately for this 
discussion all bookworm. None of them has brltty.


I have a few installations of bullseye and an older stretch 
installation, but none with gnome installed. On all of them, though, 
"apt-rdepends -r gnome" fails to list brltty as a gnome dependency. And 
on the bookworm systems, simulated installation of gnome ("apt install 
-s gnome") shows brltty as a suggested package only and would not 
install it along with gnome; on the stretch system, gnome installation 
makes no reference at all to brltty.


While I have both with only the radio buttons for keyboard and rodent 
plugged into usb at install time. I have only one wired keyboard and no 
wired mice as I've had a lightning strike on the pole that serves this 
house reach up and tap me by way of my fingers on the keyboard. Wasn't 
that much of a tap, I've been tapped a lot harder that that, hard enough 
to trigger a 6 month round of shingles and the burns were months 
healing. And in this case did not damage the keyboard or computer, but I 
did get the message. I've had many strikes on that pole since I built a 
garage on the end of the house, which caused me to install a 200 amp 
service and bring my grounding specs up to NEC. Zero problems since then 
(2008)


Is it possible you have apt settings that automatically pull in 
suggested packages, and that is interfering with attempts to remove 
brltty? I am not expert enough wrt apt and its relatives to know whether 
that even makes sense, and it seems a bit far fetched if maybe barely 
possible.


Maybe if you post the output from "apt-rdepends -r brltty" and "apt 
purge --simulate brltty" it will be informative.


Neither of those utils are installed. Should they be?



Regards,
Tom Dial



If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I 
got to

step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.

All the very best, as ever,

Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are 
proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in 
the fire. This release has been such a disaster for me because the 
install insists on installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o 
asking. I've

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye BUT its not Bullseye, its bookworm!

2024-06-05 Thread David Christensen


On 6/5/24 08:21, gene heskett wrote:> 
But in asking how to get rid of [orca], the subject 
is always changed and I always get re-install instructions.  



Because that is the most practical and correct answer for your 
situation; especially given the disk access issues.



AIUI assistive technologies have been standard on FOSS graphical 
workstations for years.  It should be possible to turn assistance off, 
but it might not be possible to eliminate the machine code throughout 
the entire software stack.



I install Debian with the Xfce desktop, SSH server, and standard system 
utilities onto minimal hardware.  It takes a known amount of time and 
usually works.  I have successfully ignored assistive technologies for 
years (decades?).  Yes, the assistive technologies are wasting storage, 
memory, and cycles, and they create a larger threat surface, but those 
risks and costs are cheaper than me trying to understand and control all 
of the details.



Succeeding with software requires that you devise strategies to work 
within the limitations of the software.  Alternatively with FOSS, you 
can change the software.



David

Re: about 10th new install of bookworm!

2024-06-05 Thread Felix Miata

gene heskett composed on 2024-06-05 11:21 (UTC-0400):

> I always get re-install instructions.  Frustrating.

Should you choose to accept any fresh installation suggestion by doing another,
consider removing the sound card from its slot, or disabling the motherboard's
sound device in BIOS setup, whichever is applicable, before beginning
installation, as a possible thwart to the Gnome must have everything paradigm, 
if
blocking Gnome entirely is unacceptable.

As a side note to installation: as soon as a fresh installation seems suitably
complete, but before adding any additional software, create a compressed /
filesystem partition backup image to facilitate any need for a consequent 
do-over.

gene heskett composed on 2024-06-05 17:08 (UTC-0400):

> So this is the umptieth time I've asked how to fix it, and got recipes
> for re-installing the basic system as an answer. Mike gave me instructs
> to run a couple commands, once normally, once while it was hung but the
> 2nd comnnand I fed to wc -l and got almost 300k lines. Difficult to do
> in real time because the command itself is subject to the lockout lag.

Answering a help request like this one is a toughie. It's commonly necessary to
reproduce both hardware configuration and software configuration in order to try
to address the problem. That can be quite complicated, and time consumptive. 
Here
it seems we may have a shortage from both helper and helpee, not necessarily a
fault of either, but a puzzle with missing pieces, in addition to some pieces 
that
don't belong to the puzzle (history tomes; not being concise). Could it also be
that we have too many cooks in the kitchen here too?
-- 
Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion,
based on faith, not based on science.

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-05 Thread Tom Dial

On 6/5/24 08:58, gene heskett wrote:

On 6/5/24 02:05, Tom Dial wrote:

On 6/4/24 04:26, gene heskett wrote:

On 2/19/22 06:31, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

Hi Gene,

My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.

Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz and
preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes firmware - the
unofficial one.

Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.

That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.

That's the counsel of perfection: alternatively:

apt rdepends brltty gives me:

Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I assume with a
text only system by the time gnome takes all its dependency's with it. Thanks
Tom.

Have you actually tried uninstalling brltty only, as a separate action from all
others?

I have a number of gnome installations, unfortunately for this discussion all
bookworm. None of them has brltty.

Maybe if you post the output from "apt-rdepends -r brltty" and "apt purge --simulate
brltty" it will be informative.

Regards,
Tom Dial

If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.

All the very best, as ever,

Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out?? What you are proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors. The first 23 installs never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go through all that again. Until the
installer ASKS me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the suggestion that I do yet another install, is

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye


On 6/5/24 13:12, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

On Tue, Jun 04, 2024 at 06:26:31AM -0400, gene heskett wrote:

On 2/19/22 06:31, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

Hi Gene,

You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.

If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.

All the very best, as ever,

Andy Cater


How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are proposing
sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This
release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on
installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some
installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its
yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally have
orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in the a$$
but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% of a 6 core
I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every keystroke or
mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors.  The first 23 installs
never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked the orca executable
it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it
usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go
through all that again. Until the installer ASKS me if I want it because it
thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the suggestion that I
do yet another install, is standing on it. Trying to remove it now, it
insists on removing gnome and every dependency. I just checked again with
synaptic, removing either orca or brltty still wants to destroy the system,
Yet all I get when I fuss about the broken installer is "won't fix, not
broken'.



How long until trixie is out?  Could be 12-15 months.

Are you still running Bullseye there? if so, you should probably upgrade
to Bookworm sometime soon.

Given that I wrote this to you two years ago: you didn't actually take
the suggestion and reinstall. That's OK - but nobody has ever been able
to get to the root cause of brokenness here. Is it a Gene problem or a
problem that hits other people more widely? We don't have details.


They have been given quite a few times, Andy.  Simplified, I had just a 
week before, installed 2 more 2T seagate's, one for amanda, one for 
boot. I already had /home on a raid10 of 1T samsungs. About 10 days 
later both of the 2T segates dropped off the bus, never to be heard from 
again. Research disclosed that they were helium filled drives of 
shingled architecture, so seagate was using me, at $150 a pop, for a lab 
rat. At that point it was bullseye. The only other machine that had an 
optical drive was an old dell in the garage running my original milling 
machine, so I went to it, and downloaded the bookworm full installer and 
put it on a dvd. The installer found a couple usb-serial adaptors, 
ASSUMED they were driving an audio tty, automatically installing and 
configuring both brltty and orca to start very early in the boot. BUT if 
they are there but disabled it waits forever for orca to start, which 
caused the first 23 re-installs. A year+ later I don't recall what i did 
but they are installed but out of the loop, so with reservations, the 
machine is usable. The reservations are that its not very stable, x is 
crashing about halfway thru a workspace change at about 2 week 
intervals, and anything that opens a path to storage, is frozen for 30 
seconds or more if it will wait, or if it won't wait, disables that 
function but like digiKam, goes thru the motions of downloading from my 
camera without actually doing it. Fortunately, shotwell works but hangs 
at startup for 30 secs or more, and does gimp, GpenSCAD and anything 
else that opens a path to storage. All w/o logging a single error msg,

In gimps case, each cd to a new path invokes the freeze all over again.

I've been a linux only house since 1998 when I put redhat 5.0 on a 400 
mhz K6, this "bookworm" is the worst experience I've had in the last 26 
years.


So this is the umptieth time I've asked how to fix it, and got recipes 
for re-installing the basic system as an answer. Mike gave me instructs 
to run a couple commands, once normally, once while it was hung but the 
2nd comnnand I fed to wc -l and got almost 300k lines. Difficult to do 
in real time because the command itself is subject to the lockout lag.


I see someone else has suggested strip a machine down to nothing and
do a clean install with Debian 12.5. Honestly, that's what I'd do.
If you can't/don't want to take

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye BUT its not Bullseye, its bookworm!

2024-06-05 Thread David Wright

On Wed 05 Jun 2024 at 11:21:04 (-0400), gene heskett wrote:
> 
> I have removed orca by removing its exec bits. But the system then
> will not reboot, waiting forever for orca to start.  The only recovery
> possible is a re-install, which accounts for about the first 23
> installs. But just like now, no one has told me how to REMOVE THEM
> ONCE INSTALLED BY THE BROKEN INSTALLER. Finally i was instructed to
> remove ALL usb stuff. Which did not remove them, but did not configure
> them to run like I was blind. Some macular degeneration due to my age
> but not blind yet at 89. And I still have both orca and brltty but
> unconfigured.  That I can tolerate. But in asking how to get rid of
> it, the subject is always changed and I always get re-install
> instructions.  Frustrating.

Can we assume that you have turned off autostarting orca in
its configuration file?

Can we assume that you've disabled/masked the brltty service?

Cheers,
David.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-05 Thread Andrew M.A. Cater

On Tue, Jun 04, 2024 at 06:26:31AM -0400, gene heskett wrote:
> On 2/19/22 06:31, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> > Hi Gene,
> > 
> > You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
> > see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
> > but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
> > to will be very helpful.
> > 
> > If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
> > step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
> > have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
> > details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
> > hang out here.
> > 
> > All the very best, as ever,
> > 
> > Andy Cater
> > 
> How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are proposing
> sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This
> release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on
> installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some
> installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its
> yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally have
> orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in the a$$
> but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% of a 6 core
> I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every keystroke or
> mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors.  The first 23 installs
> never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked the orca executable
> it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it
> usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go
> through all that again. Until the installer ASKS me if I want it because it
> thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the suggestion that I
> do yet another install, is standing on it. Trying to remove it now, it
> insists on removing gnome and every dependency. I just checked again with
> synaptic, removing either orca or brltty still wants to destroy the system,
> Yet all I get when I fuss about the broken installer is "won't fix, not
> broken'.
> 

How long until trixie is out?  Could be 12-15 months.

Are you still running Bullseye there? if so, you should probably upgrade
to Bookworm sometime soon.

Given that I wrote this to you two years ago: you didn't actually take
the suggestion and reinstall. That's OK - but nobody has ever been able
to get to the root cause of brokenness here. Is it a Gene problem or a 
problem that hits other people more widely? We don't have details.

I see someone else has suggested strip a machine down to nothing and
do a clean install with Debian 12.5. Honestly, that's what I'd do.
If you can't/don't want to take this machine apart - find a spare
machine and do a Debian text mode install then install TDE.

At that point, you'll have a control - a counterpart that you can
check and you'll have done a complete install.

The suggestion that you can remove things and get it to work the 
way you want is only valid if you can tell us *exactly* what you've
done so one of us can reproduce the problem. At this distance, that's 
unlikely. It's not a complete cop-out but it would be easier if you could
do some sort of clean install. I'd help walk you through the steps: at
this rate, it might have been quicker for me to just airfreight you a 
working machine :)

All the very best, as ever,

Andy
(amaca...@debian.org)

> 
> > 
> > .
> 
> Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
> -- 
> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
>  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> -Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
> If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
>  - Louis D. Brandeis
>

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-05 Thread Greg Wooledge

On Wed, Jun 05, 2024 at 11:47:02AM -0400, gene heskett wrote:
> > As long as you don't do an "apt-get autoremove" afterward, nothing else
> > will be deleted, other than what apt-get told you it was going to delete.
> > 
> autoremove is the first command of my update script. Designed to get rid of
> old kernels.

Well.  If that's how you want to play it, then you may need to build
a metapackage of your own using "equivs".  Figure out the dependency
relationship that you want to maintain, write the control file, run
the equivs command, install the resulting .deb file.

Life is a bit simpler if you don't use autoremove.  (I purge the old
kernels by hand.)

I'm still confused by your insistence on keeping GNOME installed, though.
I thought you weren't using GNOME.  I thought you were using TDE.

And as far as orca goes, "gnome" depends on orca, and orca merely
suggests brltty.  So, removing brltty shouldn't remove orca, and orca
should be able to function without brltty.

> But that still doesn't answer the question, How much longer till trixie is
> official? I even put a ? mark on it.

Sorry, my time machine is at the mechanic.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye


On 6/5/24 11:18, Greg Wooledge wrote:

On Wed, Jun 05, 2024 at 10:58:22AM -0400, gene heskett wrote:

Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I assume with
a text only system by the time gnome takes all its dependency's with it.


"assume"

This is your fundamental problem here.  Do you know what the "gnome"
package actually contains?

hobbit:~$ apt-cache show gnome
Package: gnome
Source: meta-gnome3
Version: 1:43+1
Installed-Size: 14
[...]

Installed size is 14.  I'm pretty sure that's kilobytes.

"gnome" is a meta-package.  Its purpose is to depend on a whole bunch
of other packages.  That's all.  It doesn't actually do anything by
itself.

Removing "gnome" will not remove any functionality, because "gnome" does
not *have* any functionality.

As long as you don't do an "apt-get autoremove" afterward, nothing else
will be deleted, other than what apt-get told you it was going to delete.

.
autoremove is the first command of my update script. Designed to get rid 
of old kernels.


But that still doesn't answer the question, How much longer till trixie 
is official? I even put a ? mark on it.


Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye BUT its not Bullseye, its bookworm!


On 6/5/24 02:30, Tom Dial wrote:



On 6/4/24 04:26, gene heskett wrote:

On 2/19/22 06:31, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

Hi Gene,

If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental 
checklist.

You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, 
hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a 
baseline

of known working conditions and eliminating causes.

My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out 
of this

"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.

Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. Wireless 
keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it 
did, I'd

have brltty with every install on this laptop.

Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz 
and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes 
firmware - the unofficial one.


Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then 
add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since 
we don't

run trinity.

Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. Then 
re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you want. 
Document it - write down

the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.

That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.

That's the counsel of perfection: alternatively:

apt rdepends brltty gives me:

me@mymachine:~$ apt rdepends brltty
brltty
Reverse Depends:
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)

You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those 
packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out 
for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you 
got

to will be very helpful.

If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.

All the very best, as ever,

Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are 
proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the 
fire. This release has been such a disaster for me because the install 
insists on installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've 
done 40 some installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a 
second while its yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm 
blind. I finally have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The 
delays are a pain in the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful 
when orca is using 90% of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to 
announce and pronounce every keystroke or mouse motion/click loud 
enough to wake the neighbors.  The first 23 installs never asked me if 
I wanted that crap. And if you nuked the orca executable it would not 
reboot but hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it usable, 
the installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go through 
all that again. Until the installer ASKS me if I want it because it 
thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the suggestion 
that I do yet another install, is standing on it. Trying to remove it 
now, it insists on removing gnome and every dependency. I just checked 
again with synaptic, removing either orca or brltty still wants to 
destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss about the broken 
installer is "won't fix, not broken'.



Hi Gene,

I, too, am not in need of the services that  brltty or orca provide, and 
have noticed them hanging about from time to time, although I have not 
encountered any difficulties like you describe.


On a bullseye system, apt-rdepends -r brltty informs me:

# apt-rdepends -r brltty
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
brltty
   Reverse Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
brltty-espeak
brltty-flite
brltty-speechd
brltty-x11

If I understand apt-rdepends correctly, you should be able to 
remove/purge brltty ("apt purge brltty") without removing any installed 
packages other than the four listed above.


I have removed orca by removing its exec bits. But the system then will 
not reboot, waiting forever for orca to start.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-05 Thread Greg Wooledge

On Wed, Jun 05, 2024 at 10:58:22AM -0400, gene heskett wrote:
> Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I assume with
> a text only system by the time gnome takes all its dependency's with it.

"assume"

This is your fundamental problem here.  Do you know what the "gnome"
package actually contains?

hobbit:~$ apt-cache show gnome
Package: gnome
Source: meta-gnome3
Version: 1:43+1
Installed-Size: 14
[...]

Installed size is 14.  I'm pretty sure that's kilobytes.

"gnome" is a meta-package.  Its purpose is to depend on a whole bunch
of other packages.  That's all.  It doesn't actually do anything by
itself.

Removing "gnome" will not remove any functionality, because "gnome" does
not *have* any functionality.

As long as you don't do an "apt-get autoremove" afterward, nothing else
will be deleted, other than what apt-get told you it was going to delete.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye


On 6/5/24 02:05, Tom Dial wrote:



On 6/4/24 04:26, gene heskett wrote:

On 2/19/22 06:31, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

Hi Gene,

If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental 
checklist.

You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, 
hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a 
baseline

of known working conditions and eliminating causes.

My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out 
of this

"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.

Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. Wireless 
keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it 
did, I'd

have brltty with every install on this laptop.

Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz 
and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes 
firmware - the unofficial one.


Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then 
add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since 
we don't

run trinity.

Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. Then 
re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you want. 
Document it - write down

the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.

That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.

That's the counsel of perfection: alternatively:

apt rdepends brltty gives me:

me@mymachine:~$ apt rdepends brltty
brltty
Reverse Depends:
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)

You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those 
packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out 
for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you 
got

to will be very helpful.


Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I assume 
with a text only system by the time gnome takes all its dependency's 
with it.  Thanks Tom.


If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.

All the very best, as ever,

Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are 
proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the 
fire. This release has been such a disaster for me because the install 
insists on installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've 
done 40 some installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a 
second while its yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm 
blind. I finally have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The 
delays are a pain in the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful 
when orca is using 90% of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to 
announce and pronounce every keystroke or mouse motion/click loud 
enough to wake the neighbors.  The first 23 installs never asked me if 
I wanted that crap. And if you nuked the orca executable it would not 
reboot but hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it usable, 
the installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go through 
all that again. Until the installer ASKS me if I want it because it 
thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the suggestion 
that I do yet another install, is standing on it. Trying to remove it 
now, it insists on removing gnome and every dependency. I just checked 
again with synaptic, removing either orca or brltty still wants to 
destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss about the broken 
installer is "won't fix, not broken'.



Hi Gene,

I, too, am not in need of the services that  brltty or orca provide, and 
have noticed them hanging about from time to time, although I have not 
encountered any difficulties like you describe.


On a bullseye system, apt-rdepends -r brltty informs me:

# apt-rdepends -r brltty
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
brltty
   Reverse Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
brltty-espeak
brltty-flite
brltty-speechd
brltty-x11

If I understand apt-rdepends correctly, you should be able to 
remove/purge brltty ("apt purge brltty") without removing any installed

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-05 Thread Felix Miata

Tom Dial composed on 2024-06-05 00:05 (UTC-0600):

> gene heskett wrote:

>> How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are proposing 
>> sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This 
>> release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on 
>> installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some 
>> installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its 
>> yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally have 
>> orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in the a$$ 
>> but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% of a 6 core 
>> I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every keystroke or 
>> mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors.  The first 23 installs 
>> never asked me if I wanted that crap.

Did the first 23 include Gnome? Did you want Gnome? Do you still use or prefer
using TDE? If the latter, then you should have no need of Gnome, or its depends 
on
brltty or orca.

> And if you nuked the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever 
> waiting for orca to start. I have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken 
> and I don't want to have to go through all that again. Until the 
>> installer ASKS me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have only one 
>> nerve left and and the suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing 
>> on it. Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and every 
>> dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing either orca or 
>> brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss about 
>> the broken installer is "won't fix, not broken'.

If by "destroy" you mean remove Gnome, and you'd rather be using TDE, then let 
it
be "destroyed".

...

> So removing orca would also take gnome, and that probably is unacceptable to 
> you.  

I have bunches of Debian installations, all using TDE, none with brltty, orca or
gnome. I can't remember whether Gene is trying to use TDE, but it really ought 
to
be an answer to his trouble, unless Gnome is kept, and brltty and orca are not
neutered.
-- 
Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion,
based on faith, not based on science.

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-05 Thread Tom Dial

On 6/4/24 04:26, gene heskett wrote:

On 2/19/22 06:31, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

Hi Gene,

My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.

Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz and
preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes firmware - the
unofficial one.

Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.

That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.

That's the counsel of perfection: alternatively:

apt rdepends brltty gives me:

All the very best, as ever,

Andy Cater

Hi Gene,

I, too, am not in need of the services that brltty or orca provide, and have
noticed them hanging about from time to time, although I have not encountered
any difficulties like you describe.

On a bullseye system, apt-rdepends -r brltty informs me:

# apt-rdepends -r brltty
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
brltty
Reverse Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
Reverse Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
Reverse Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
Reverse Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
brltty-espeak
brltty-flite
brltty-speechd
brltty-x11

If I understand apt-rdepends correctly, you should be able to remove/purge brltty
("apt purge brltty") without removing any installed packages other than the
four listed above.

apt-rdepends -r orca tells me:

# apt-rdepends -r orca
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
orca
Reverse Depends: gnome (>= 1:3.38+3)

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-04 Thread David Christensen


https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-user%40lists.debian.org/msg779582.html

Gene Heskett Fri, 18 Feb 2022 09:14:03 -0800



> On 2/19/22 06:31, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:



On 6/4/24 03:26, gene heskett wrote:
How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are proposing 
sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This 
release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on 
installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some 
installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its 
yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally 
have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in 
the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% 
of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every 
keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors.  The 
first 23 installs never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked 
the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for 
orca to start. I have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I 
don't want to have to go through all that again. Until the installer 
ASKS me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve 
left and and the suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing 
on it. Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and every 
dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing either orca or 
brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss 
about the broken installer is "won't fix, not broken'.



I suggest:

1.  Back up the system configuration and data.

2.  Disconnect everything internal to the chassis except for the 
motherboard, power supply, front panel, fans, processor, memory, and one 
disk drive for the OS connected to the first IDE, SATA, or NVMe port.


3.  Disconnect everything external to the chassis except AC power, wired 
keyboard, wired mouse, wired monitor, and Ethernet.


4.  Boot into Setup and reset settings to factory defaults.  Choose 
between BIOS/Legacy and UEFI, if there is a choice.  Set the disk 
controller mode to AHCI.  Set the clock to UTC.


5.  Boot the disk manufacturer toolkit and wipe the OS drive -- secure 
erase for SSD's and zero-fill for HDD's.


I seem to recall that you have a 1 TB WD Black.  WD does not appear to 
offer a bootable disk drive toolkit (?):


https://support-en.wd.com/app/products/downloads/softwaredownloads

If you can find a FOSS toolkit to do a secure erase, that would be best. 
 Alternatively, find the non-zero blocks and zero them (a good job for 
a script).


6.  Boot debian-12.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso and install Debian onto the OS 
disk.  I partition manually with 1 GB EFI system partition, 1 GB boot 
partition, 1 GB random encrypted swap partition, and a small passphrase 
encrypted root partition (twice your current root partition usage?). 
Save the remaining free space for CAD, CNC, 3-D, etc., working/ scratch 
files and over-provisioning, to be configured after installation.  If 
your desktop environment of choice is not offered by d-i, do not install 
a desktop environment.


7.  At the end of installation, reboot.  Remove d-i media during POST. 
Verify the system boots from the OS disk.  Login and check vitals, but 
do not change anything.  Power off.


8.  Boot your FOSS toolkit of choice, or d-i rescue shell, and take a 
compressed image of the OS disk to a file on a USB HDD.



I use a version control system (CVS over SSH) for software development, 
but also find it to be very useful for system administration.



David

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-04 Thread Felix Miata

gene heskett composed on 2024-06-04 06:26 (UTC-0400):

> This release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on 
> installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some 
> installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its 
> yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally 
> have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in 
> the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% 
> of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every 
> keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors.  The 
> first 23 installs never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked 
> the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for 
> orca to start. I have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I 
> don't want to have to go through all that again. Until the installer 
> ASKS me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve 
> left and and the suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing 
> on it. Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and every 
> dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing either orca or 
> brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss 
> about the broken installer is "won't fix, not broken'.
 
You did try simply disabling brltty & speech-dispatcher, right? Their enabler
appears not controlled by systemd, but by sysvinit:
/etc/init.d/brltty
/etc/init.d/speech-dispatcher

Deleting bits of what makes brltty & orca work, or removing their execute bits,
might save cpu cycles, e.g. for orca:
/etc/xdg/autostart/orca-autostart.desktop
/usr/bin/orca
/usr/bin/orca-dm-wrapper
/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages-orca/orca

Maybe having the following at hand would be useful:
# apt install -d orca
Reading package lists... Done
...
After this operation, 83.0 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Get:1 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 
gsettings-desktop-schemas all 43.0-1 [643 kB]
Get:2 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 at-spi2-core amd64 
2.46.0-5 [57.3 kB]
Get:3 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-atk-1.0 amd64 
2.46.0-5 [23.7 kB]
Get:4 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-freedesktop amd64 
1.74.0-3 [37.2 kB]
Get:5 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-atspi-2.0 amd64 
2.46.0-5 [20.7 kB]
Get:6 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-gdkpixbuf-2.0 
amd64 2.42.10+dfsg-1+b1 [13.5 kB]
Get:7 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-gstreamer-1.0 
amd64 1.22.0-2 [105 kB]
Get:8 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-harfbuzz-0.0 
amd64 6.0.0+dfsg-3 [1,579 kB]
Get:9 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libpangoxft-1.0-0 amd64 
1.50.12+ds-1 [26.7 kB]
Get:10 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-pango-1.0 amd64 
1.50.12+ds-1 [37.4 kB]
Get:11 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-gtk-3.0 amd64 
3.24.38-2~deb12u1 [220 kB]
Get:12 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libxcb-util1 amd64 
0.4.0-1+b1 [23.2 kB]
Get:13 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 
libstartup-notification0 amd64 0.12-6+b1 [23.1 kB]
Get:14 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libxres1 amd64 
2:1.2.1-1 [19.2 kB]
Get:15 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libwnck-3-common all 
43.0-3 [229 kB]
Get:16 http://www.deb-multimedia.org bookworm/main amd64 
gstreamer1.0-plugins-base amd64 1.22.3-dmo1+deb12u3 [731 kB]
Get:17 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libwnck-3-0 amd64 
43.0-3 [112 kB]
Get:18 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-wnck-3.0 amd64 
43.0-3 [28.6 kB]
Get:19 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libproxy1v5 amd64 
0.4.18-1.2 [56.2 kB]
Get:20 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 glib-networking-common 
all 2.74.0-4 [80.3 kB]
Get:21 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 
glib-networking-services amd64 2.74.0-4 [12.0 kB]
Get:22 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 glib-networking amd64 
2.74.0-4 [68.4 kB]
Get:23 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libvisual-0.4-0 amd64 
0.4.0-19 [132 kB]
Get:24 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libvorbisidec1 amd64 
1.2.1+git20180316-7 [72.3 kB]
Get:25 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libaa1 amd64 1.4p5-50 
[55.7 kB]
Get:26 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libdv4 amd64 1.0.0-15 
[74.4 kB]
Get:27 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libshout3 amd64 
2.4.6-1+b1 [56.4 kB]
Get:28 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libtag1v5-vanilla amd64 
1.13-2 [298 kB]
Get:29 http://www.deb-multimedia.org bookworm/main amd64 
gstreamer1.0-plugins-good amd64 1.22.3-dmo1+deb12u1 [2,193 kB]
Get:30 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libtag1v5 amd64

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2024-06-04 Thread gene heskett


On 2/19/22 06:31, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

Hi Gene,

If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a baseline
of known working conditions and eliminating causes.

My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.

Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it did, I'd
have brltty with every install on this laptop.

Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz and 
preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes firmware - the 
unofficial one.

Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.

Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. Then re-add 
thingsgradually until you have the working system you want. Document it - write 
down
the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.

That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.

That's the counsel of perfection: alternatively:

apt rdepends brltty gives me:

me@mymachine:~$ apt rdepends brltty
brltty
Reverse Depends:
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)

You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.

If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.

All the very best, as ever,

Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are proposing 
sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This 
release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on 
installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some 
installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its 
yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally 
have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in 
the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% 
of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every 
keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors.  The 
first 23 installs never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked 
the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for 
orca to start. I have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I 
don't want to have to go through all that again. Until the installer 
ASKS me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve 
left and and the suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing 
on it. Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and every 
dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing either orca or 
brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss 
about the broken installer is "won't fix, not broken'.





.


Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis

Re: new install: configuring ethernet strangeness

2022-06-18 Thread Felix Miata

John Covici composed on 2022-06-18 04:21 (UTC-0400):

> Hi.  I just installed Debian Bullseye on a refurbished computer which
> I am going to use as a voip server.  Now, due to my ignorance, at the
> very end of the install, I selected to use #12 which said standard
> system items.

> Well, to my horror, I got gnome with all its dependencies.  I ran
> apt-get and purged all the gnome items.  However, my outgoing
> connection instead of being in /etc/network/interfaces is now managed
> by network-manager.  I don't want to use the gui, but there seems to
> be no good way to configure the connection, should I need to do so.
> /etc/systemd/network is  empty.

I think nmcli handles anything the GUI could, but I never have NetworkMangler
installed to test it.

> So, how can I either get back to /etc/network/interfaces or somehow
> manage the existing connection which is buried in
> /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/  and is readable, but I could
> never change it.

Configure the interface in (e.g., for eth0) /etc/systemd/network/eth0.network.
Disable "managed" resolver; populate /etc/resolv.conf.
# systemctl enable systemd-networkd.service
# systemctl disable systemd-networkd-wait-online.service

The above is the short version of how I've been converting all my static
networking installations, which is all of them, minus the laptops. In addition,
your old networking config/system needs to be fully disabled and/or purged.
-- 
Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion,
based on faith, not based on science.

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata

Re: new install: configuring ethernet strangeness

2022-06-18 Thread John Covici

Thanks everyone, this is what I think I will do, just use
network/interfaces.

On Sat, 18 Jun 2022 08:00:27 -0400,
Anssi Saari wrote:
> 
> John Covici  writes:
> 
> > So, how can I either get back to /etc/network/interfaces
> 
> This should be simple enough. Uninstall NetworkManager, package
> network-manager, edit /etc/network/interfaces as you like. The
> networking.service is used to run ifup and ifdown to configure and
> reconfigure the network with what's in /etc/network/interfaces.
> 

-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

 John Covici wb2una
 cov...@ccs.covici.com

Re: new install: configuring ethernet strangeness

2022-06-18 Thread Anssi Saari

John Covici  writes:

> So, how can I either get back to /etc/network/interfaces

This should be simple enough. Uninstall NetworkManager, package
network-manager, edit /etc/network/interfaces as you like. The
networking.service is used to run ifup and ifdown to configure and
reconfigure the network with what's in /etc/network/interfaces.

Re: new install: configuring ethernet strangeness

2022-06-18 Thread John Covici

I did not get that tasksel at all, at the end of the install I had 12
choices, 11 was ssh server and 12 was standard system components and
by mistake I chose 12.  I cannot use the gui, I need speech to read
the screen and I don't want all that bloat running on a voip server.
What if I just put a stanza in /etc/network/interfaces and get rid of
network manager?

On Sat, 18 Jun 2022 07:04:47 -0400,
Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Jun 18, 2022 at 04:21:35AM -0400, John Covici wrote:
> > Hi.  I just installed Debian Bullseye on a refurbished computer which
> > I am going to use as a voip server.  Now, due to my ignorance, at the
> > very end of the install, I selected to use #12 which said standard
> > system items.
> > 
> > Well, to my horror, I got gnome with all its dependencies.  I ran
> > apt-get and purged all the gnome items.  However, my outgoing
> > connection instead of being in /etc/network/interfaces is now managed
> > by network-manager.  I don't want to use the gui, but there seems to
> > be no good way to configure the connection, should I need to do so.
> > /etc/systemd/network is  empty.
> > 
> > So, how can I either get back to /etc/network/interfaces or somehow
> > manage the existing connection which is buried in
> > /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/  and is readable, but I could
> > never change it.
> > 
> > Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
> > 
> > -- 
> > Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
> > How do
> > you spend it?
> > 
> >  John Covici wb2una
> >  cov...@ccs.covici.com
> >
> 
> Hi John,
> 
> I find that nmtui - the text interface is quite useful. It is persistent - 
> configuration will stick around. 
> 
> For anybody else: if you really don't want a GUI at all: if you deselect
> both GNOME and Debian desktop components in the tasksel step of the Debian
> installer then you should get no GUI components. If you then explicitly
> select standard install components lower down in tasksel, you will get
> some X Windows libraries but you will end up with no GUI and no desktop
> environment as far as I recollect. It's necessary to uncheck both the 
> Debian desktop environment AND the default of GNOME which is selected.
> 
> All the very best, as ever,
> 
> Andy Cater 
> 

-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

 John Covici wb2una
 cov...@ccs.covici.com

Re: new install: configuring ethernet strangeness

2022-06-18 Thread Andrew M.A. Cater

On Sat, Jun 18, 2022 at 04:21:35AM -0400, John Covici wrote:
> Hi.  I just installed Debian Bullseye on a refurbished computer which
> I am going to use as a voip server.  Now, due to my ignorance, at the
> very end of the install, I selected to use #12 which said standard
> system items.
> 
> Well, to my horror, I got gnome with all its dependencies.  I ran
> apt-get and purged all the gnome items.  However, my outgoing
> connection instead of being in /etc/network/interfaces is now managed
> by network-manager.  I don't want to use the gui, but there seems to
> be no good way to configure the connection, should I need to do so.
> /etc/systemd/network is  empty.
> 
> So, how can I either get back to /etc/network/interfaces or somehow
> manage the existing connection which is buried in
> /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/  and is readable, but I could
> never change it.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
> 
> -- 
> Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
> How do
> you spend it?
> 
>  John Covici wb2una
>  cov...@ccs.covici.com
>

Hi John,

I find that nmtui - the text interface is quite useful. It is persistent - 
configuration will stick around. 

For anybody else: if you really don't want a GUI at all: if you deselect
both GNOME and Debian desktop components in the tasksel step of the Debian
installer then you should get no GUI components. If you then explicitly
select standard install components lower down in tasksel, you will get
some X Windows libraries but you will end up with no GUI and no desktop
environment as far as I recollect. It's necessary to uncheck both the 
Debian desktop environment AND the default of GNOME which is selected.

All the very best, as ever,

Andy Cater

Re: new install: configuring ethernet strangeness

2022-06-18 Thread john doe


On 6/18/2022 10:21 AM, John Covici wrote:

Hi.  I just installed Debian Bullseye on a refurbished computer which
I am going to use as a voip server.  Now, due to my ignorance, at the
very end of the install, I selected to use #12 which said standard
system items.

Well, to my horror, I got gnome with all its dependencies.  I ran
apt-get and purged all the gnome items.  However, my outgoing
connection instead of being in /etc/network/interfaces is now managed
by network-manager.  I don't want to use the gui, but there seems to
be no good way to configure the connection, should I need to do so.
/etc/systemd/network is  empty.

So, how can I either get back to /etc/network/interfaces or somehow
manage the existing connection which is buried in
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/  and is readable, but I could
never change it.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.



If I may, redo the install from scratch and use '11' to only install
'standard system items' ! :)

To answer your question specifically, you can 'purge' networkmanager
with something like:

$ apt-get --autoremove purge 

--
John Doe

new install: configuring ethernet strangeness

2022-06-18 Thread John Covici

Hi.  I just installed Debian Bullseye on a refurbished computer which
I am going to use as a voip server.  Now, due to my ignorance, at the
very end of the install, I selected to use #12 which said standard
system items.

Well, to my horror, I got gnome with all its dependencies.  I ran
apt-get and purged all the gnome items.  However, my outgoing
connection instead of being in /etc/network/interfaces is now managed
by network-manager.  I don't want to use the gui, but there seems to
be no good way to configure the connection, should I need to do so.
/etc/systemd/network is  empty.

So, how can I either get back to /etc/network/interfaces or somehow
manage the existing connection which is buried in
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/  and is readable, but I could
never change it.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

 John Covici wb2una
 cov...@ccs.covici.com

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-22 Thread Charles Kroeger

replace the GPU card Gene it's kaput.

C

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-20 Thread David Wright

On Sun 20 Feb 2022 at 07:47:57 (+0100), john doe wrote:
> On 2/19/2022 9:03 PM, David Wright wrote:
> > On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 20:46:03 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:
> > > Since last post, I found the install logs, and BRLTTY is listed in the 
> > > hardware file, as if its a mobo feature. And reading the DIY Guid from 
> > > Asus, there is a tools menu where some stiff that is not list, can be 
> > > controlled so the next time it forces me to reboot I will check that 
> > > menu. There is not any mention of brltty in the whole 100+ pages of the 
> > > book.  But its listed like this in the hardware-resources file:
> > > /proc/bus/input/devices: I: Bus= Vendor= Product= Version=
> > > /proc/bus/input/devices: N: Name="BRLTTY 6.3 Linux Screen Driver Keyboard"
> > > /proc/bus/input/devices: P: Phys=pid-221/brltty/11
> > > /proc/bus/input/devices: S: Sysfs=/devices/virtual/input/input14
> > > /proc/bus/input/devices: U: Uniq=
> > > /proc/bus/input/devices: H: Handlers=sysrq kbd event9
> > > /proc/bus/input/devices: B: PROP=0
> > > /proc/bus/input/devices: B: EV=13
> > > /proc/bus/input/devices: B: KEY=40207 ffc03078f800d2a9 
> > > f2beffdfffef fffe
> > > 
> > > Does that look like its part of the mobo, and might be disable-able in 
> > > the bios->tools menu, which is otherwise ignored in the users DIY 
> > > manual???  In which case it might solve my problem, but would involve yet 
> > > another install just to get the installer to get rid of it. IDK.
> 
> Given that you have access to the installer log and are able to
> reinstall, you should open a ticket with your issue.
> Having an issue fixed will help you and the community.

According to https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2022/02/msg00684.html
the installer log isn't available. I don't know why.

"[Me:] If you're talking about the syslog that ends up in
/var/log/installer/, big deal. For verbosity, [ … ]

"[Gene:] Not THAT syslog, which isn't there, but its with /var/log/syslog, the 
main deal."

Cheers,
David.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-19 Thread john doe


On 2/19/2022 9:03 PM, David Wright wrote:

On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 20:46:03 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:

Since last post, I found the install logs, and BRLTTY is listed in the hardware 
file, as if its a mobo feature. And reading the DIY Guid from Asus, there is a 
tools menu where some stiff that is not list, can be controlled so the next 
time it forces me to reboot I will check that menu. There is not any mention of 
brltty in the whole 100+ pages of the book.  But its listed like this in the 
hardware-resources file:
/proc/bus/input/devices: I: Bus= Vendor= Product= Version=
/proc/bus/input/devices: N: Name="BRLTTY 6.3 Linux Screen Driver Keyboard"
/proc/bus/input/devices: P: Phys=pid-221/brltty/11
/proc/bus/input/devices: S: Sysfs=/devices/virtual/input/input14
/proc/bus/input/devices: U: Uniq=
/proc/bus/input/devices: H: Handlers=sysrq kbd event9
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: PROP=0
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: EV=13
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: KEY=40207 ffc03078f800d2a9 f2beffdfffef 
fffe

Does that look like its part of the mobo, and might be disable-able in the 
bios->tools menu, which is otherwise ignored in the users DIY manual???  In 
which case it might solve my problem, but would involve yet another install just 
to get the installer to get rid of it. IDK.




Given that you have access to the installer log and are able to
reinstall, you should open a ticket with your issue.
Having an issue fixed will help you and the community.

--
John Doe

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-19 Thread gene heskett

On Saturday, February 19, 2022 6:59:52 PM EST David Christensen wrote:
> On 2/18/22 22:15, Felix Miata wrote:
> > David Christensen composed on 2022-02-18 21:38 (UTC-0800):
> >> 4.  Do the simplest install of the OS of choice onto the SSD, using
> >> BIOS, MBR, and partitioning the OS drive such that the system image
> >> fits onto "16 GB" devices with room to spare -- 1 GB ext4 boot, 1
> >> GB encrypted swap, 12 GB encrypted ext4 root.
> > 
> > 1 + 1 + 12 = 14. Does the remaining 2 remain unallocated?
> 
> Yes -- to allow for "16 GB" devices with differing block counts.
> 
> 
> David
> 
> .
Precisely.

Cheers, Gene Heskett.
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-19 Thread gene heskett

On Friday, February 18, 2022 3:19:43 PM EST David Wright wrote:
> On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 09:15:50 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:
> > Two problems:
> > 
> > terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot,
> > would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the
> > net installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T
> > raid10 to a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back,
> > but kmail refuses to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to
> > post this.
> No idea what funkity means, nor what is significant about 15 seconds
> when booting. I have systems that boot in <3.5 seconds and other that
> take nearly a minute. Nor am I sure what's special about /home with
> respect to booting — it should have no role.
> 
> > I also need to get totally, absolutely rid of brltty, its driving me
> > berzerk with its incessant muttering in a voice as bandwidth
> > limited, or worse, than a cell phone. Understandable maybe 5% of the
> > time. I purposely did NOT even visit those pieces of the installer
> > for fear it would be enabled, because even though killed by removing
> > brltty in the previous install, 90% of the syslog was errors because
> > it couldn't use brltty. But I got it anyway.  So how do it get rid
> > of it without it tearing down the system with its copius error
> > screaming?
> Um, perhaps https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2019/05/msg01001.html
> 

At 87 yo, you're expecting me to remember a post I made, what, 3 years 
ago? But its pretty close to exactly it. But I still don't recall if I 
unplugged the adapter that time, and by now there is probably at least 
one more, maybe two in my usb tree.

> Cheers,
> David.
> 
> .


Cheers, Gene Heskett.
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-19 Thread David Christensen


On 2/18/22 22:15, Felix Miata wrote:

David Christensen composed on 2022-02-18 21:38 (UTC-0800):


4.  Do the simplest install of the OS of choice onto the SSD, using
BIOS, MBR, and partitioning the OS drive such that the system image fits
onto "16 GB" devices with room to spare -- 1 GB ext4 boot, 1 GB
encrypted swap, 12 GB encrypted ext4 root.


1 + 1 + 12 = 14. Does the remaining 2 remain unallocated?



Yes -- to allow for "16 GB" devices with differing block counts.


David

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-19 Thread David Wright

On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 20:46:03 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:
> Since last post, I found the install logs, and BRLTTY is listed in the 
> hardware file, as if its a mobo feature. And reading the DIY Guid from Asus, 
> there is a tools menu where some stiff that is not list, can be controlled so 
> the next time it forces me to reboot I will check that menu. There is not any 
> mention of brltty in the whole 100+ pages of the book.  But its listed like 
> this in the hardware-resources file:
> /proc/bus/input/devices: I: Bus= Vendor= Product= Version= 
> /proc/bus/input/devices: N: Name="BRLTTY 6.3 Linux Screen Driver Keyboard" 
> /proc/bus/input/devices: P: Phys=pid-221/brltty/11 
> /proc/bus/input/devices: S: Sysfs=/devices/virtual/input/input14 
> /proc/bus/input/devices: U: Uniq= 
> /proc/bus/input/devices: H: Handlers=sysrq kbd event9  
> /proc/bus/input/devices: B: PROP=0 
> /proc/bus/input/devices: B: EV=13 
> /proc/bus/input/devices: B: KEY=40207 ffc03078f800d2a9 f2beffdfffef 
> fffe
> 
> Does that look like its part of the mobo, and might be disable-able in the 
> bios->tools menu, which is otherwise ignored in the users DIY manual???  In 
> which case it might solve my problem, but would involve yet another install 
> just to get the installer to get rid of it. IDK.

I have no idea. You might try running hwinfo repeatedly with different
plugs pulled out. I don't have access to your USB tree to see what's
there, but I assume something is describing itself as a BRLTTY.

I don't see anything here that has P: Phys=pid-221. I do know
that PID Controllers are used to run motors, which might help.
You run motors, and I've read that some braille machines use
motors to drive the bumps, so that might be a source of
confusion when probing the hardware. I guess that's something
you tackle with modules.alias, or udev rules, or whatever,
depending on how your system configures its devices.

Cheers,
David.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-19 Thread Curt

On 2022-02-18, Andy Smith  wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 07:41:01PM +, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
>> In something of 150 or more installs of bullseye - we do a bunch with
>> each release of images with a point release - I don't think I've ever
>> seen brltty installed "by accident" so I'd love to know exactly what you
>> do do each time.
>
> It is really bizarre that this keeps happening to Gene and I can
> only think it is, as you say, something to do with the serial
> devices he has connected at install time.

In a long-ago thread we speculated Gene had an ft232 connected to his
machine, which was mistaken for a refreshable braille display and so
brought in brltty as a consequence. 

> Will the installer logs give any hint as to why brltty gets
> installed? If so perhaps he could try saving those before letting
> the installer reboot, and put them somewhere for us to see.
>
> Cheers,
> Andy
>


--

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-19 Thread Andrew M.A. Cater

Hi Gene,

If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a baseline
of known working conditions and eliminating causes.

My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.

Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it did, I'd
have brltty with every install on this laptop.

Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz and 
preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes firmware - the 
unofficial one.

Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.

Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. Then re-add 
thingsgradually until you have the working system you want. Document it - write 
down
the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.

That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by 
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.

That's the counsel of perfection: alternatively:

apt rdepends brltty gives me:

me@mymachine:~$ apt rdepends brltty
brltty
Reverse Depends:
  Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
  Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
  Suggests: orca
  Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
  Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
  Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)

You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.

If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll 
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that 
hang out here.

All the very best, as ever,

Andy Cater

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-18 Thread Felix Miata

David Christensen composed on 2022-02-18 21:38 (UTC-0800):

> 4.  Do the simplest install of the OS of choice onto the SSD, using 
> BIOS, MBR, and partitioning the OS drive such that the system image fits 
> onto "16 GB" devices with room to spare -- 1 GB ext4 boot, 1 GB 
> encrypted swap, 12 GB encrypted ext4 root.

1 + 1 + 12 = 14. Does the remaining 2 remain unallocated?
-- 
Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion,
based on faith, not based on science.

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-18 Thread David Christensen

On 2/18/22 09:15, Gene Heskett wrote:

Two problems:

terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would not 
go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer in rescue 
mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different drive and 
reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the copied back data 
so I'm using FF to post this.

I also need to get totally, absolutely rid of brltty, its driving me berzerk 
with its incessant muttering in a voice as bandwidth limited, or worse, than a 
cell phone. Understandable maybe 5% of the time. I purposely did NOT even visit 
those pieces of the installer for fear it would be enabled, because even though 
killed by removing brltty in the previous install, 90% of the syslog was errors 
because it couldn't use brltty. But I got it anyway.  So how do it get rid of 
it without it tearing down the system with its copius error screaming?

Thanks for any advice on these two fronts.

Cheers, Gene

On 2/18/22 15:38, Gene Heskett wrote:
> I'm on web mail using FF, which does not quote worth a damn. My "usb 
tree" looks like a weeping willow and contains several devices that 
answer to serial protocols. Both this keyboard and this mouse are 
wireless, and speak serial.  So how am I supposed to install with no 
keyboard?

>
>
> Interesting question that.
>
>
> Thanks, Cheers Gene

On 2/18/22 18:13, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Feb, 2022 at 7:41 PM, Greg Wooledge  wrote:

>> But what are the *actual* symptoms?  What did Gene see?  What did he
>> try, to troubleshoot, and what results did he get?
>
>
>
> Exactly what I wrote Greg, the boot stops at the 15 second mark, 
forever. I let it set there once for several hours while I caught some 
shuteye.

>
>
> Repeated at least 20 times.
>
>
>
> Putting the install dvd in that drive, and selecting rescue mode, 
works and I was able to make a backup of /home. Then I reinstalled. And 
on the reboot after the install this PITA of a blast of unintelligible 
noise per keystroke was back and I did not go anywhere near those menu 
item for this install.

>
>
>
>> These are basic questions that someone with Gene's level of experience
>> shouldn't need to be asked.
>
>
>
> Maybe so but I also getting upset with the feigned ignorance of what 
I type you won't believe. I said it stopped at about 15 seconds and I 
don't understand your lack of comprehension of the word "stopped". At 
that point, the only thing that worked was the front panel of this 30" 
towers reset button, or after a delay, the power button.

>
>
> Right now I've removed brltty and its api library which stops he 
racket of unintelligible sound, but my syslog is growing by abut 6 lines 
of errors per keystroke because brltty can't be found, or about every 4 
or 5 seconds even if the keyboard isn't in use.

>
> I need to find a way to remove this stuff w/o eviscerating half the 
system with its dependencies. Respin the installer for 11-4 if needed 
but this needs fixed.

>
>
>
> I'd also bet you a six pack of suds it won't reboot right now because 
I have removed brltty, and that IS the 15 second showstopper. But if my 
theory is correct, it will also add to the reinstall count which is 
already annoyingly high. Which with this system means at least a day to 
do it.

>
>
> Give us back stretch, once the install was fixed so it had 
networking, it just worked, till hell froze over.

>
>
> Oh, since we're on the subject, how do I put an option on the kernel 
load line,(in grub.cfg) to make very noisy debugging so the next time I 
have to reboot, I can see exactly what stopped it.  That would be a 
great help.

>
>
>
> Thanks Greg, take care and stay well.
>
>
> Cheers Gene

I recall that you have several computers, that your hobby is using Linux 
for CNC woodworking, and that you modify the OS's significantly and/or 
install specialized, non-Debian software.

I have found that when I install too much software, when I put 
non-Debian software on a Debian computer, and/or when I make too many 
changes to the OS and/or software, that the computer becomes unstable.

I have found it useful to spread storage and functionality across 
several computers, to limit the scope of disasters and to facilitate 
recovery.  These are the three key computers at my site:

1.  Primary workstation.

2.  Live server (Samba and SSH/CVS).

3.  Backup/ archive/ image/ replication server.

For Debian and FreeBSD machines, including the above, I install the OS 
as follows:

1.  Disconnect all hard disk drives, solid-state drives, USB flash 
drives, SDHC cards, etc..

2.  Disconnect all external devices from the computer except a keyboard, 
a mouse, a monitor, and the network connection (servers and desktops), 
or the network connection (laptops).

3.  Install a blank SSD.  Ensure that it is the first device node when 
the installer runs (e.g. /dev/sda).

4.  Do the simplest install of the OS of choice onto the SSD,

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

On Fri, 18 Feb, 2022 at 10:55 PM, David Wright  wrote:

To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 18:37:01 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Feb, 2022 at 9:11 PM, David Wright 
> mailto:deb...@lionunicorn.co.uk>> wrote:
> On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 19:48:40 (-0500), Cindy Sue Causey wrote:

> > That presents a detail that's not clear on Gene's case. Is the
> > computer just stopping and standing at that screen,
> 
> Exactly — and if it does, what's printed, and are you aware of
> anything that might be missing. Or does it reboot. Or is it still
> running, but writing to one of the many serial connections?
> 
> > or is it shutting
> > off? Mine shuts off.
> 
> And mine stops, period.

Adding "period" is no help. "Stop", on its own, is just so ambiguous.
What exactly stops, the process — or the computer.

In real life, we use the circumstances to decide on the meaning.
If I reported that I "stopped the car" because I saw a ball rolling
into the road, you'd assume I didn't cut the engine. If I said it
was because I saw a dust-devil barrelling down the road, you'd
assume I stopped both the car and engine.

> keyboard dead after reporting its there if I touch a key. once.

Again, I have no idea what this means. None of my keyboards has
ever reported anything, to my knowledge.

> No further response to anything but the reset button on the front of this 
> huge tower.
> 
> Theory is its looking for brltty and will not proceed without it. So until 
> that linkage is found and removed, I can't reboot w/o doing yet another 
> install right now.
> 
> It has to be removed entirely before I can reboot again.

Ah, is this because you nuked it (whatever we understand by
the term "nuked")?

If your machine is utterly unable to avoid installing it, perhaps
you'll have to read its documentation in a little more depth and
learn how to prevent it from finding a device to talk to.

Or can you blacklist the snd modules? What do you use sound for
on this computer? Is it essential for its task, which I assume
is something to do with a lathe? Or are you still playing videos,
logging in to your bank, and machining stuff, all on the same
computer? (I realise that's a loaded question.)

Cheers,
David.

yes. Just not all at the same time.

Since last post, I found the install logs, and BRLTTY is listed in the hardware 
file, as if its a mobo feature. And reading the DIY Guid from Asus, there is a 
tools menu where some stiff that is not list, can be controlled so the next 
time it forces me to reboot I will check that menu. There is not any mention of 
brltty in the whole 100+ pages of the book.  But its listed like this in the 
hardware-resources file:
/proc/bus/input/devices: I: Bus= Vendor= Product= Version= 
/proc/bus/input/devices: N: Name="BRLTTY 6.3 Linux Screen Driver Keyboard" 
/proc/bus/input/devices: P: Phys=pid-221/brltty/11 
/proc/bus/input/devices: S: Sysfs=/devices/virtual/input/input14 
/proc/bus/input/devices: U: Uniq= 
/proc/bus/input/devices: H: Handlers=sysrq kbd event9  
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: PROP=0 
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: EV=13 
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: KEY=40207 ffc03078f800d2a9 f2beffdfffef 
fffe

Does that look like its part of the mobo, and might be disable-able in the 
bios->tools menu, which is otherwise ignored in the users DIY manual???  In 
which case it might solve my problem, but would involve yet another install 
just to get the installer to get rid of it. IDK.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-18 Thread rhkramer

On Friday, February 18, 2022 09:14:00 PM Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 08:08:21PM -0600, David Wright wrote:
> > I'm not sure what's eyebrow-raising about 122GB under /home.
> 
> unicorn:~$ df -h /home
> Filesystem  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda823G   17G  5.0G  78% /home

I want to play to:

rhk@s19:/usr/share/man$ df -h /home
Filesystem  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb12  1.9G  1.3G  489M  73% /home

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 18:37:01 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Feb, 2022 at 9:11 PM, David Wright  
> wrote:
> On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 19:48:40 (-0500), Cindy Sue Causey wrote:

> > That presents a detail that's not clear on Gene's case. Is the
> > computer just stopping and standing at that screen,
> 
> Exactly — and if it does, what's printed, and are you aware of
> anything that might be missing. Or does it reboot. Or is it still
> running, but writing to one of the many serial connections?
> 
> > or is it shutting
> > off? Mine shuts off.
> 
> And mine stops, period.

Adding "period" is no help. "Stop", on its own, is just so ambiguous.
What exactly stops, the process — or the computer.

In real life, we use the circumstances to decide on the meaning.
If I reported that I "stopped the car" because I saw a ball rolling
into the road, you'd assume I didn't cut the engine. If I said it
was because I saw a dust-devil barrelling down the road, you'd
assume I stopped both the car and engine.

> keyboard dead after reporting its there if I touch a key. once.

Again, I have no idea what this means. None of my keyboards has
ever reported anything, to my knowledge.

> No further response to anything but the reset button on the front of this 
> huge tower.
> 
> Theory is its looking for brltty and will not proceed without it. So until 
> that linkage is found and removed, I can't reboot w/o doing yet another 
> install right now.
> 
> It has to be removed entirely before I can reboot again.

Ah, is this because you nuked it (whatever we understand by
the term "nuked")?

If your machine is utterly unable to avoid installing it, perhaps
you'll have to read its documentation in a little more depth and
learn how to prevent it from finding a device to talk to.

Or can you blacklist the snd modules? What do you use sound for
on this computer? Is it essential for its task, which I assume
is something to do with a lathe? Or are you still playing videos,
logging in to your bank, and machining stuff, all on the same
computer? (I realise that's a loaded question.)

Cheers,
David.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 21:18:32 (-0500), The Wanderer wrote:
> On 2022-02-18 at 21:14, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 08:08:21PM -0600, David Wright wrote:
> >
> >> I'm not sure what's eyebrow-raising about 122GB under /home.
> > 
> > unicorn:~$ df -h /home
> > Filesystem  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> > /dev/sda823G   17G  5.0G  78% /home
> 
> aorta:~$ df -h /home/
> Filesystem   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/mapper/vg_data_aorta-lv_home_aorta   11T  5.6T  4.4T  57% /home
> 
> Though to be fair that's (part of) an... 8-drive?... RAID-6 array, and
> this system's storage capacities are *utterly ridiculous* for most
> consumer purposes.

# ssh -X wren
Linux wren 5.10.0-11-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.92-1 (2022-01-18) x86_64

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
Last login: Fri Feb 18 14:20:22 2022 from 192.168.1.14
wren 20:54:02 ~# ls -GRagl /home/
/home/:
total 12
drwxr-xr-x  3 4096 Jan 31 19:30 .
drwxr-xr-x 20 4096 Feb 14 22:53 ..
-rw-r--r--  10 Jan 31 19:30 0
drwxr-xr-x  2 4096 Jan 31 19:30 admin

/home/admin:
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 4096 Jan 31 19:30 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 4096 Jan 31 19:30 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1  680 Jan 28 12:38 .bashrc
-rw-r--r-- 1  807 Jan  1 11:29 .profile
wren 20:54:11 ~# 

by way of contrast!

Cheers,
David.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

On Fri, 18 Feb, 2022 at 9:30 PM, David Wright  wrote:
 

To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 18:13:02 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Feb, 2022 at 7:41 PM, Greg Wooledge 
> mailto:g...@wooledge.org>> wrote:
>  
> 
> To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
> On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 07:21:19PM -0500, Felix Miata wrote:
> > David Wright composed on 2022-02-18 14:19 (UTC-0600):
> > 
> > > On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 09:15:50 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:
> > 
> > >> Two problems:
> > 
> > >> terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, 
> > >> would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net 
> > >> installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to 
> > >> a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail 
> > >> refuses to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.
> > 
> > > No idea what funkity means,
> > 
> > nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal
> 
> But what are the *actual* symptoms?  What did Gene see?  What did he
> try, to troubleshoot, and what results did he get?
> 
> 
> 
> Exactly what I wrote Greg, the boot stops at the 15 second mark, forever. I 
> let it set there once for several hours while I caught some shuteye.

Typing /stop in my MUA shows that the line immediately above this one
contains the first occurrence of the word "stop" in this post.

> Oh, since we're on the subject, how do I put an option on the kernel load 
> line,(in grub.cfg) to make very noisy debugging so the next time I have to 
> reboot, I can see exactly what stopped it.  That would be a great help.

Add the string   systemd.show_status=true



Added to the default grub.cfg profile, thank you


Removing   quiet   might get just too verbose, because I believe
you can no longer scroll back like in the olden days.



What I have reported was without the quiet argument, which I should have noted.

Cheers,
David.

Cheers Gene.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

On Fri, 18 Feb, 2022 at 9:11 PM, David Wright  wrote:

To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 19:48:40 (-0500), Cindy Sue Causey wrote:
> On 2/18/22, Felix Miata mailto:mrma...@earthlink.net>> 
> wrote:
> > David Wright composed on 2022-02-18 14:19 (UTC-0600):
> >> On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 09:15:50 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:
> >
> >>> Two problems:
> >
> >>> terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot,
> >>> would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net
> >>> installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to
> >>> a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses
> >>> to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.
> >
> >> No idea what funkity means,
> >
> > nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal
> >
> >> nor what is significant about 15 seconds
> >> when booting.
> >
> > Boot messages scroll on vtty 1 normally for about 15 seconds, then quit.
> 
> That's what I understood, too. Mine's occasionally doing something
> like that. It seems to be tied to CPU temperatures (overheating).
> 
> It's really kind of weird. It's for that first few seconds of booting
> where it's running through a checkup before those boot messages begin
> appearing.

What I call the POST? Yes, well in the olden days, when we had real
CRTs, and "everything" ran at VGA resolution, you could sit back for
a minute and watch the whole light show: Graphics card, BIOS, POST,
Lilo, Kernel, and all the dmesg stuff, with the odd screen clearance
but no noticeable change in mode. (I used to scroll back and cut and
paste everything post-POST into an archived file.)

Nowadays, with these fancy flatscreens, each change in mode can lead
to a significant blank period (seconds) while it sorts itself out.

> When mine keeps flicking off like that, fanning it with a
> piece of paper gets it past that hump then it doesn't do it again.
> It's like something in the first stage is pushing the CPUs hard then
> it backs off once those messages start scrolling.

Do you mean that you hear the fan going at full speed? Yes, that's
quite normal AIUI, and seems very sensible: if nothing is monitoring
the temperature of the system, then running the fan is the failsafe state.

> That presents a detail that's not clear on Gene's case. Is the
> computer just stopping and standing at that screen,

Exactly — and if it does, what's printed, and are you aware of
anything that might be missing. Or does it reboot. Or is it still
running, but writing to one of the many serial connections?

> or is it shutting
> off? Mine shuts off.

Cheers,
David.

And mine stops, period. keyboard dead after reporting its there if I touch a 
key. once. No further response to anything but the reset button on the front of 
this huge tower.

Theory is its looking for brltty and will not proceed without it. So until that 
linkage is found and removed, I can't reboot w/o doing yet another install 
right now.

It has to be removed entirely before I can reboot again.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 18:13:02 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Feb, 2022 at 7:41 PM, Greg Wooledge  wrote:
>  
> 
> To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
> On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 07:21:19PM -0500, Felix Miata wrote:
> > David Wright composed on 2022-02-18 14:19 (UTC-0600):
> > 
> > > On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 09:15:50 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:
> > 
> > >> Two problems:
> > 
> > >> terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, 
> > >> would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net 
> > >> installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to 
> > >> a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail 
> > >> refuses to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.
> > 
> > > No idea what funkity means,
> > 
> > nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal
> 
> But what are the *actual* symptoms?  What did Gene see?  What did he
> try, to troubleshoot, and what results did he get?
> 
> 
> 
> Exactly what I wrote Greg, the boot stops at the 15 second mark, forever. I 
> let it set there once for several hours while I caught some shuteye.

Typing /stop in my MUA shows that the line immediately above this one
contains the first occurrence of the word "stop" in this post.

> Oh, since we're on the subject, how do I put an option on the kernel load 
> line,(in grub.cfg) to make very noisy debugging so the next time I have to 
> reboot, I can see exactly what stopped it.  That would be a great help.

Add the string   systemd.show_status=true

Removing   quiet   might get just too verbose, because I believe
you can no longer scroll back like in the olden days.

Cheers,
David.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-18 Thread The Wanderer

On 2022-02-18 at 21:14, Greg Wooledge wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 08:08:21PM -0600, David Wright wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure what's eyebrow-raising about 122GB under /home.
> 
> unicorn:~$ df -h /home
> Filesystem  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda823G   17G  5.0G  78% /home

aorta:~$ df -h /home/
Filesystem   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_data_aorta-lv_home_aorta   11T  5.6T  4.4T  57% /home

Though to be fair that's (part of) an... 8-drive?... RAID-6 array, and
this system's storage capacities are *utterly ridiculous* for most
consumer purposes.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw

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Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-18 Thread Greg Wooledge

On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 08:08:21PM -0600, David Wright wrote:
> I'm not sure what's eyebrow-raising about 122GB under /home.

unicorn:~$ df -h /home
Filesystem  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda823G   17G  5.0G  78% /home

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 19:48:40 (-0500), Cindy Sue Causey wrote:
> On 2/18/22, Felix Miata  wrote:
> > David Wright composed on 2022-02-18 14:19 (UTC-0600):
> >> On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 09:15:50 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:
> >
> >>> Two problems:
> >
> >>> terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot,
> >>> would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net
> >>> installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to
> >>> a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses
> >>> to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.
> >
> >> No idea what funkity means,
> >
> > nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal
> >
> >> nor what is significant about 15 seconds
> >> when booting.
> >
> > Boot messages scroll on vtty 1 normally for about 15 seconds, then quit.
> 
> That's what I understood, too. Mine's occasionally doing something
> like that. It seems to be tied to CPU temperatures (overheating).
> 
> It's really kind of weird. It's for that first few seconds of booting
> where it's running through a checkup before those boot messages begin
> appearing.

What I call the POST? Yes, well in the olden days, when we had real
CRTs, and "everything" ran at VGA resolution, you could sit back for
a minute and watch the whole light show: Graphics card, BIOS, POST,
Lilo, Kernel, and all the dmesg stuff, with the odd screen clearance
but no noticeable change in mode. (I used to scroll back and cut and
paste everything post-POST into an archived file.)

Nowadays, with these fancy flatscreens, each change in mode can lead
to a significant blank period (seconds) while it sorts itself out.

> When mine keeps flicking off like that, fanning it with a
> piece of paper gets it past that hump then it doesn't do it again.
> It's like something in the first stage is pushing the CPUs hard then
> it backs off once those messages start scrolling.

Do you mean that you hear the fan going at full speed? Yes, that's
quite normal AIUI, and seems very sensible: if nothing is monitoring
the temperature of the system, then running the fan is the failsafe state.

> That presents a detail that's not clear on Gene's case. Is the
> computer just stopping and standing at that screen,

Exactly — and if it does, what's printed, and are you aware of
anything that might be missing. Or does it reboot. Or is it still
running, but writing to one of the many serial connections?

> or is it shutting
> off? Mine shuts off.

Cheers,
David.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

On Fri, 18 Feb, 2022 at 7:41 PM, Greg Wooledge  wrote:

To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 07:21:19PM -0500, Felix Miata wrote:
> David Wright composed on 2022-02-18 14:19 (UTC-0600):
> 
> > On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 09:15:50 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:
> 
> >> Two problems:
> 
> >> terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would 
> >> not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer 
> >> in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different 
> >> drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the 
> >> copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.
> 
> > No idea what funkity means,
> 
> nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal

But what are the *actual* symptoms?  What did Gene see?  What did he
try, to troubleshoot, and what results did he get?

Exactly what I wrote Greg, the boot stops at the 15 second mark, forever. I let 
it set there once for several hours while I caught some shuteye.

Repeated at least 20 times.

Putting the install dvd in that drive, and selecting rescue mode, works and I 
was able to make a backup of /home. Then I reinstalled. And on the reboot after 
the install this PITA of a blast of unintelligible noise per keystroke was back 
and I did not go anywhere near those menu item for this install.

These are basic questions that someone with Gene's level of experience
shouldn't need to be asked.

Maybe so but I also getting upset with the feigned ignorance of what I type you 
won't believe. I said it stopped at about 15 seconds and I don't understand 
your lack of comprehension of the word "stopped". At that point, the only thing 
that worked was the front panel of this 30" towers reset button, or after a 
delay, the power button.

Right now I've removed brltty and its api library which stops he racket of 
unintelligible sound, but my syslog is growing by abut 6 lines of errors per 
keystroke because brltty can't be found, or about every 4 or 5 seconds even if 
the keyboard isn't in use.

I need to find a way to remove this stuff w/o eviscerating half the system with 
its dependencies. Respin the installer for 11-4 if needed but this needs fixed.

I'd also bet you a six pack of suds it won't reboot right now because I have 
removed brltty, and that IS the 15 second showstopper. But if my theory is 
correct, it will also add to the reinstall count which is already annoyingly 
high. Which with this system means at least a day to do it.

Give us back stretch, once the install was fixed so it had networking, it just 
worked, till hell froze over.

Oh, since we're on the subject, how do I put an option on the kernel load 
line,(in grub.cfg) to make very noisy debugging so the next time I have to 
reboot, I can see exactly what stopped it.  That would be a great help.

Thanks Greg, take care and stay well.

Cheers Gene

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 19:41:01 (+), Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 09:15:50AM -0800, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > Two problems:
> > 
> > terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would 
> > not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer 
> > in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different 
> > drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the 
> > copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.
> 
> Check permissions on spools etc - how did you copy your data out?
> A tar ball preserving permissions is also quite useful for this.
> Goodness, what do you keep to make your /home directory 122G?

I'm not sure what's eyebrow-raising about 122GB under /home.

$ dfree
Filesystem  IUse%  Type  1MB-blocksUsed  Avail  Use%  Mounted  on
/dev/sda4 19%  ext4   30830   26224¹   3016   90%  /
/dev/sda2   -  vfat 520   75142%  /boot/efi
/dev/dm-1  2%  ext4  428208  382990  23396   95%  /home
$ 

A large /home seems sufficient reason to mount it from a separate
partition. Then all you have to worry about when you reinstall is
which of your dotfiles do you let the fresh system get to see, and
which do you hide (in case they're causing problems).

¹ /var/cache/apt-cacher-ng/<2½ versions> occupies ~13GB.

Cheers,
David.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-18 Thread Cindy Sue Causey

On 2/18/22, Felix Miata  wrote:
> David Wright composed on 2022-02-18 14:19 (UTC-0600):
>
>> On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 09:15:50 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:
>
>>> Two problems:
>
>>> terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot,
>>> would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net
>>> installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to
>>> a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses
>>> to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.
>
>> No idea what funkity means,
>
> nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal
>
>> nor what is significant about 15 seconds
>> when booting.
>
> Boot messages scroll on vtty 1 normally for about 15 seconds, then quit.

That's what I understood, too. Mine's occasionally doing something
like that. It seems to be tied to CPU temperatures (overheating).

It's really kind of weird. It's for that first few seconds of booting
where it's running through a checkup before those boot messages begin
appearing. When mine keeps flicking off like that, fanning it with a
piece of paper gets it past that hump then it doesn't do it again.
It's like something in the first stage is pushing the CPUs hard then
it backs off once those messages start scrolling.

That presents a detail that's not clear on Gene's case. Is the
computer just stopping and standing at that screen, or is it shutting
off? Mine shuts off. This might be an apples and oranges thing where I
typed a bunch of noise. :)

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

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-18 Thread Greg Wooledge

On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 07:21:19PM -0500, Felix Miata wrote:
> David Wright composed on 2022-02-18 14:19 (UTC-0600):
> 
> > On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 09:15:50 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:
> 
> >> Two problems:
> 
> >> terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would 
> >> not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer 
> >> in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different 
> >> drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the 
> >> copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.
> 
> > No idea what funkity means,
> 
> nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal

But what are the *actual* symptoms?  What did Gene see?  What did he
try, to troubleshoot, and what results did he get?

These are basic questions that someone with Gene's level of experience
shouldn't need to be asked.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-18 Thread Felix Miata

David Wright composed on 2022-02-18 14:19 (UTC-0600):

> On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 09:15:50 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:

>> Two problems:

>> terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would 
>> not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer in 
>> rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different 
>> drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the 
>> copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.

> No idea what funkity means,

nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal

> nor what is significant about 15 seconds
> when booting.

Boot messages scroll on vtty 1 normally for about 15 seconds, then quit.

> I have systems that boot in <3.5 seconds and other that
> take nearly a minute. Nor am I sure what's special about /home with
> respect to booting — it should have no role.

It's about protecting user data against unexpected installation results.
-- 
Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion,
based on faith, not based on science.

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

On Fri 18 Feb 2022 at 09:15:50 (-0800), Gene Heskett wrote:
> Two problems:
> 
> terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would 
> not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer in 
> rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different drive 
> and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the copied 
> back data so I'm using FF to post this.

No idea what funkity means, nor what is significant about 15 seconds
when booting. I have systems that boot in <3.5 seconds and other that
take nearly a minute. Nor am I sure what's special about /home with
respect to booting — it should have no role.

> I also need to get totally, absolutely rid of brltty, its driving me berzerk 
> with its incessant muttering in a voice as bandwidth limited, or worse, than 
> a cell phone. Understandable maybe 5% of the time. I purposely did NOT even 
> visit those pieces of the installer for fear it would be enabled, because 
> even though killed by removing brltty in the previous install, 90% of the 
> syslog was errors because it couldn't use brltty. But I got it anyway.  So 
> how do it get rid of it without it tearing down the system with its copius 
> error screaming?

Um, perhaps https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2019/05/msg01001.html

Cheers,
David.

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-18 Thread Andy Smith

Hello,

On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 07:41:01PM +, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> In something of 150 or more installs of bullseye - we do a bunch with
> each release of images with a point release - I don't think I've ever
> seen brltty installed "by accident" so I'd love to know exactly what you
> do do each time.

It is really bizarre that this keeps happening to Gene and I can
only think it is, as you say, something to do with the serial
devices he has connected at install time.

Will the installer logs give any hint as to why brltty gets
installed? If so perhaps he could try saving those before letting
the installer reboot, and put them somewhere for us to see.

Cheers,
Andy

-- 
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

Re: about 10th new install of bullseye

2022-02-18 Thread Andrew M.A. Cater

On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 09:15:50AM -0800, Gene Heskett wrote:
> Two problems:
> 
> 
> terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would 
> not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer in 
> rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different drive 
> and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the copied 
> back data so I'm using FF to post this.
> 
> 

Hi Gene 

Check permissions on spools etc - how did you copy your data out?
A tar ball preserving permissions is also quite useful for this.
Goodness, what do you keep to make your /home directory 122G?

> I also need to get totally, absolutely rid of brltty, its driving me berzerk 
> with its incessant muttering in a voice as bandwidth limited, or worse, than 
> a cell phone. Understandable maybe 5% of the time. I purposely did NOT even 
> visit those pieces of the installer for fear it would be enabled, because 
> even though killed by removing brltty in the previous install, 90% of the 
> syslog was errors because it couldn't use brltty. But I got it anyway.  So 
> how do it get rid of it without it tearing down the system with its copius 
> error screaming?
> 

Just a thought: apt rdepends brltty reveals a small number of things
that depend on it. Use apt-get / aptitude or whatever to remove these in
order.

I don't know _why_ you keep getting brltty installed - disconnect any
serial leads from this machine as a start. If you can't get brltty 
removed as above - copy your home directory off again and do a reinstall
with the minimum connected to your machine.

[The serial idea is because I seem to recall that if brltty finds a serial
connection active at install, it may assume there's a brltty installed.

In something of 150 or more installs of bullseye - we do a bunch with
each release of images with a point release - I don't think I've ever
seen brltty installed "by accident" so I'd love to know exactly what you
do do each time.

All the very best, as ever,

Andy Cater

> 
> Thanks for any advice on these two fronts.
> 
> 
> Cheers, Gene

about 10th new install of bullseye