Linux

Via Andy Miller (2007), an amusing metaphor for Linux memory overcommit. Originally posted by Andries Brouwer to the linux-kernel mailing list, 2004-09-24, in the thread titled “oom_pardon, aka don’t kill my xlock”:

An aircraft company discovered that it was cheaper to fly its planes with less fuel on board. The planes would be lighter and use less fuel and money was saved. On rare occasions however the amount of fuel was insufficient, and the plane would crash. This problem was solved by the engineers of the company by the development of a special OOF (out-of-fuel) mechanism. In emergency cases a passenger was selected and thrown out of the plane. (When necessary, the procedure was repeated.) A large body of theory was developed and many publications were devoted to the problem of properly selecting the victim to be ejected. Should the victim be chosen at random? Or should one choose the heaviest person? Or the oldest? Should passengers pay in order not to be ejected, so that the victim would be the poorest on board? And if for example the heaviest person was chosen, should there be a special exception in case that was the pilot? Should first class passengers be exempted? Now that the OOF mechanism existed, it would be activated every now and then, and eject passengers even when there was no fuel shortage. The engineers are still studying precisely how this malfunction is caused.

Twenty years later, as far as I know, the OOM killer is still going strong. In fact, if you don’t like the airline’s policy on what counts as an “emergency” (for example, that it might exhaust your swap partition too before killing any bad actor at all), you can hire your own hit man, in the form of the userspace daemon earlyoom.

Explanation of the OOM-Killer: Understanding Out of Memory Killer (OOM Killer) in Linux

I want try to install arch(artix) linux for my future t480, but I don't know if it needs linux-firmware package? for good work?

TLDR: I recently found out there is "deprecated" XFA format that acrobat still uses in their programs, and government forms have those for dynamic contents in the form that we cannot fill using other softwares. Looking for solutions.

This has been a problem since a long time. Back in 2020 I had dual boot because I needed acrobat to fill PDF forms, but after finding xournal++ program I nuked windows partition. Windows update messing up grub was one of the reason I decided to nuke windows and looking at the posts recently it's still a huge issue.

So the problem I recently encountered is that even the government issued PDF forms need acrobat reader (which is free software for PDF, but only available in windows and mac). Which I didn't think would be an issue and just filled the form in Firefox.

Turns out that was problematic as the PDF forms has fields that are automatically filled, calculated from other fields, only made available when certain checkboxes are checked, etc. and Firefox doesn't support that. Even trying to install the acrobat reader snap (which uses wine) in a VM and opening the PDF on it didn't work. The UI makes me think it's a really old version of the reader.

So without searching for other devices (and filling a PDF with my sensitive information) what solution is there? Installing windows is a hassle even in a VM, and it will use up precious SSD memory. But that's the only solution I can think of.

I also found masterpdf or something like that which the Arch wiki says has support for that, but it didn't work. It says XFA forms are converted to acro forms, and the dynamic part doesn't work. There are websites that promise to work for such forms, but I'm not going to be putting sensitive info on web apps.

Hi all,

Simple question. Does anybody know a (not to expensive) sportswatch that is supported by Linux / FOSS software?

(Yes, I know 'FOSS software' is two times the word software) 😀

I finally have the budget to build my first NAS and upgrade my desktop PC. I have used Linux for quite some time, but am far from an expert.

One of the steps is to move my M.2 NVME system drive (1TB) from my desktop to my NAS. I want to replace it with a bigger NVME drive (2TB). My current motherboard only has a single M.2 slot, that's why I bought a M.2 enclosure.

My goal is to put my new drive into the enclosure, clone my whole system disk onto it and then replace the old drive. At first I found several posts about using clonezilla to clone the whole drive, but some posts mentioned it not working well with btrfs (/ and /home subvolume), which is the bulk of my drive.

I have some ideas how I might to pull it off. My preliminary idea is:

1. clone my boot partition with clonezilla
2. use btrfs-clone or moving my butter to transfer the btrfs partition
3. resize the partitions with gparted (and add swap?)

The two aspects I'm uncertain about are:

1. UUIDs
2. fstab

I plan to replace the old drive, so the system will not have two drives with the same UUID. If the method results in a new UUID I need to edit fstab.

As you can see I'm not sure how to proceed. Maybe I can just use clonezilla or dd to clone my whole drive? If someone has experience with such a switch or is just a lot for familiar with the procedures, I would love some tips and insight.

Thanks for reading.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

EDIT: Thinking about how to do it, might have actually taken longer than the procedure itself. For anyone in a similar situation, I was able to replace the drive with these steps:

1. clone the whole drive (new drive has a bigger capacity) with clonezilla
2. physically switch the drives
3. boot into a live medium and resized the btrfs partition on the new drive with gparted
4. boot into the main system and adjust the filesystem size with sudo btrfs filesystem resize max /

With two NVME drives (even though one was in a USB M.2 enclosure) everything took about 30 minutes. About 300 gigs of data were transferred. I haven't found any problems with the btrfs partition thus far. Using dd like others recommended might work as well, but I didn't try that option.

Hello! I'm a small time vtuber who moved to MX Linux a while back. I use a 3d model, and while I was able to get my model working, with the help of my husband (even better than windows actually,) we cannot get my hand tracking to work.

I've used the ultra leap on Windows with no issues. On the same PC, I tried to get it working on Linux. I use MX Linux (xfce), and the system is up to date. I know that the "Gemini" software only officially supports Ubuntu 22.04, but Ubuntu is Debian based and so is MX. So, I gave it a try. The program installed fine, and it seems to work normally. The device seems to be connected, and I can view its output through the web cam viewer.

However, the ultra leap Gemini program can't find the device. I'm far from a Linux expert, but I tried all the program's terminal commands that I could. I think what I need is to point the program to the device ID or something, maybe. Does anybody have any experience with something like this?

We also tried the older version of the program and that didn't work either. But I remember less about that. It was all terminal based I think.

I use OpenSeeFace and VSeeFace as my tracking software.

Any tips or trick I could try? If all else fails, I could migrate to Ubuntu, but I really enjoy my MX setup.

P.S. If this isnt the place to ask these sorts of questions, could someone direct me to where I might be able to get help?

I wanna thank everyone who helped and offered advice! My husband came up with a solution to use Xubuntu, as its very similar visually to my current OS, and most, if not all console commands I use will work properly. We attempted getting it to work in MX Linux, using the rather limited documentation available, but in the end, I am no Linux expert and changing to a new OS is not a big deal. Anyway, again, thank you everyone.

Follow up to: “Something has gone seriously wrong,” dual-boot systems warn after Microsoft update

SBAT was developed collaboratively between the Linux community and Microsoft, and Microsoft chose to push a Windows update that told systems not to trust versions of grub with a security generation below a certain level. This was because those versions of grub had genuine security vulnerabilities that would allow an attacker to compromise the Windows secure boot chain, and we've seen real world examples of malware wanting to do that (Black Lotus did so using a vulnerability in the Windows bootloader, but a vulnerability in grub would be just as viable for this). Viewed purely from a security perspective, this was a legitimate thing to want to do.

...

The problem we've ended up in is that several Linux distributions had not shipped versions of grub with a newer security generation, and so those versions of grub are assumed to be insecure (it's worth noting that grub is signed by individual distributions, not Microsoft, so there's no externally introduced lag here). Microsoft's stated intention was that Windows Update would only apply the SBAT update to systems that were Windows-only, and any dual-boot setups would instead be left vulnerable to attack until the installed distro updated its grub and shipped an SBAT update itself. Unfortunately, as is now obvious, that didn't work as intended and at least some dual-boot setups applied the update and that distribution's Shim refused to boot that distribution's grub.

...

The outcome is that some people can't boot their systems. I think there's plenty of blame here. Microsoft should have done more testing to ensure that dual-boot setups could be identified accurately. But also distributions shipping signed bootloaders should make sure that they're updating those and updating the security generation to match, because otherwise they're shipping a vector that can be used to attack other operating systems and that's kind of a violation of the social contract around all of this.

Hello!

I am pleased to announce a new version of my Vim Reference Guide ebook.

This is intended as a concise learning resource for beginner to intermediate level Vim users. It has more in common with cheatsheets than a typical text book. Topics like Regular Expressions and Macros have more detailed explanations and examples due to their complexity. I hope this guide would make it much easier for you to discover Vim features and learning resources.

Links:

• Web version: https://learnbyexample.github.io/vim_reference/
• PDF/EPUB versions: https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/vim_reference_guide (FREE till 31-Aug-2024)
• Markdown source: https://github.com/learnbyexample/vim_reference
• Video demos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTv2U3HnAL4NN2tK-59ZiNBm-o64-Yvos

Did you know that Vim has an easy mode, which is actually very hard to use for those already familiar with Vim? See my blog post for more details!

I would highly appreciate it if you'd let me know how you felt about this book. It could be anything from a simple thank you, pointing out a typo, mistakes in code snippets, which aspects of the book worked for you (or didn't!) and so on. Reader feedback is essential and especially so for self-published authors.

Happy learning :)

I use 2 different computers in 2 different locations both running Universal Blue.

I was wondering if there is any way to create a backup system where i could backup Computer1 over the internet to Computer2 and continue work like nothing happened with all the user data and installed applications being there. The goal is to only need to transfer the user data/applications and no system data (that should be the same for both because of Ublue, right?), to keep the backup size small.

To be clear, i need help figuring out the backup part, not the transfering over the internet part.

If I were to backup the directories on Computer1, which store user data, with for example borgbackup, could I restore them on Computer2 and have a working system? Or would there be conflicts because of more low level stuff missing like applications and configs? Which directories would I need and which could be excluded?

Is there a better option? Any advice is appreciated!

I also came across btrfs snapshot capabilities and thought they could possibly used for this. But as far as I understand it, that would mean transferring the whole system and not only the data and applications. Am i missing something?

From what I saw Cosmic has a lot of potential and looks pretty sleek too, right now I'm using KDE it's a great desktop, but now that I have a second monitor it randomly crashes on me, I think I'll switch to Cosmic when it reaches beta.

I'm looking for a cheap and portable tablet that I can use for writing. Microsoft Surface Pro tablets, at least around the gen 4 models, are rather cheap to buy used, and they seem decently well made. Naturally, were I to buy one, I would have to install Linux onto it.

I've been peripherally aware of the Linux Surface project for some time now. I looked at it recently, after having not for some time, and it seems that they have really made good progress compared to what I remember, and it's making me much more interested in trying to install Linux on a Surface Pro.

Having never owned a Surface Pro, I'm not sure which models are the most reliable and sturdy. I'm not looking for something that's the flashiest; I want something that works well. I want something pragmatic — something akin to the idea of an older era of Thinkpad (eg T460). I want a pen with low input delay and good accuracy, reliable and responsive touch controls, and a decent display. I was thinking the Surface Pro 4 might be a good choice, but it's hard to know as there aren't many videos out there of people installing Linux on them, so I'm wondering what your experience has been with Microsoft Surface Pro's and installing Linux on one.

Cross-posts:

• https://sh.itjust.works/post/23997573

The Linux operating system has reached a notable milestone in desktop market share, according to the latest data from StatCounter. As of July 2024, Linux has achieved a 4.45% market share for desktop operating systems worldwide.

While this percentage might seem small to those unfamiliar with the operating system landscape, it represents a significant milestone for Linux and its dedicated community. What makes this achievement even more thrilling is the upward trajectory of Linux's adoption rate.

...

According to the statistics from the past ten years, It took eight years for Linux to go from a 1% to 2% market share (April 2021), 2.2 years to climb from 2% to 3% (June 2023), and a mere 0.7 years to reach 4% from 3% (February 2024). This exponential growth pattern suggests that 2024 might be the year Linux reaches a 5% market share.

tell me the most ass over backward shit you do to keep your system chugging?
here's mine:
sway struggles with my dual monitors, when my screen powers off and back on it causes sway to crash.
system service 'switch-to-tty1.service'

[Unit]
Description=Switch to tty1 on resume
After=suspend.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/switch-to-tty1.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=suspend.target

'switch-to-tty1.service' executes '/usr/local/bin/switch-to-tty1.sh' and send user to tty1

#!/bin/bash
# Switch to tty1
chvt 1

.bashrc login from tty1 then kicks user to tty2 and logs out tty1.

if [[ "$(tty)" == "/dev/tty1" ]]; then
    chvt 2
    logout
fi

also tty2 is blocked from keyboard inputs (Alt+Ctrl+F2) so its a somewhat secure lock-screen which on sway lock-screen aren't great.

I have a few different Linksys WRT54G routers and I've installed DD-WRT - build number 44715 - on them. However, this build appears to have been made in 2020. So, I was wondering if there's a more modern version of dd-wrt for this router. If not, is it possible for me to compile the latest version of OpenWRT for these routers which have 4 MB of flash and 16 MB of RAM?

Happy Birthday to the LVFS

9 years ago today I wrote 4 little PHP scripts and pushed it to OpenShift which was the beginning of the LVFS. We've since rewritten it in Python, switched the deployment from "sudo git pull" on the server under my stairs at home (literally) to deploying onto AWS with Terraform.

In 9 years we've onboarded over 140 vendors, shipped ~110 million firmware files and added support for ~85 firmware update protocols for ~1600 different devices. I'm pretty happy with that.

Any Linux Sysadmins here use Timeshift on Linux servers in production environments?

Having reliable snapshots to roll back bad updates is really awesome, but I want to know if Timeshift is stable enough to use outside of a basic home lab environment.

Disclaimer: Yes I know Timeshift isn't a backup solution, I understand its purpose and scope.

I'd like some recommendations as a beginner in the virtualization space for good GUI software for running vms for both experimentation and server use.

I've used virtualbox on Windows before but are there any better alternatives on Linux? I hear a lot of praise of QEMU but this seems to be only terminal based like what you do with containers.

VMware workstation is free but again, I'd like to know your thoughts on other good beginner options.

Thank you advance and have a good day/afternoon/night