Linux

Welcome to a new issue of “This Week in KDE Apps”! In case you missed it, we announced this series a few weeks ago, and our goal is to cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps and supplement Nate's This Week in Plasma published yesterday.

This week we had new releases of Tellico and Krita. We are also covering news regarding KDE Connect, the link between all your devices; Kate, the KDE advanced text editor; Itinerary, the travel assistant that helps you plan all your trips; Marble, KDE's map application; and more.

Solution:
hd-idle is the way to go (if you read their README, they explain that most drives don't support idle timers)

I've been looking into spinning down the drives of my NAS, as I use it infrequently and that brings power drain down from ~30W to ~17W.

Problem is, hdparm -S doesn't seem to do anything for these particular drives: if I set it and wait for the appropriate amount of time (eg. 5 seconds if set to 1) the drives are still reported as "active/idle" and power drain doesn't go down.

Both hdparm -y and hdparm -Y work fine, but I don't seem to be able to find settings for them in tlp (probably because they are commands rather than settings?).

Besides the caveats about disks living longer if they are kept spinning, are there reasons why I shouldn't setup a cron job (well, a systemd timer) that runs hdparm -Y every 10 minutes? (for example, could hdparm -y cause errors if run while the drive is being backed up?)

PS: According to hdparm's manpage, -y puts the drive standby mode while -Y puts it into sleep mode. Considering that in my case power drain seems the same either way, should I prefer one or the other?

So I have this weird deja vu situation where I distinctly remember an EXIF viewer tool called exiv4(with a 4) but the only "exiv" tool I can find is exiv2. I can't get over this feeling that I used an EXIF viewer called exiv4, however. I can only find an old Stack Exchange post mentioning it. Does anyone know about an exiv4 tool, or am I just crazy?

The problem (for those who are unaware of it)

Moved it to the end, to keep the focus on the solution.

Solution

GNU is a desktop OS that was never completed. Linux is a desktop OS that was never completed.

GNU/Linux is a hybrid OS.

Musl, etc. are libraries that were never OSes.

• So Alpine would be a Community/Linux OS.
• Debian would be a Community/GNU/Linux OS.
• FreeBSD would be a Community/BSD OS.
• Ubuntu would be an Enterprise Community/GNU/Linux OS.

I was thinking ontologically to resolve this problem. It is often confusing to explain to ordinary people why Linux has so and so differences and so and so commonalities, and then the community gets toxic once you get to whether it's GNU or Linux.

So I think this is a good solution that solves the argument of calling it systemd/Freedesktop/KDE/LightDM/GNU/Linux or the other party that says it's either GNU or Linux alone.

Why can't you include GNU in the Community?

Because GNU was an independent OS, and the project did a lot for software freedom, and it was even pivotal to the success of Linux, yet the community does not honour their wish to mention their names, because of aesthetic problems. GNU has never self-identified as a component collection like Freedesktop.

The problem (for those who are unaware of it)

Not everyone may be aware of this, but from the time GNU and Linux based hybrid operating systems became a thing, there was a debate about what they should be called. An OS has a kernel and the userland. Both GNU and Linux were independent operating systems, both of which were never completed.

GNU was a project by FSF under Richard M. Stallman to replace the proprietary UNIX OS. Linux was a hobbyist project by Linux Torvalds to make an OS that would run on the Intel 80386 CPU, while BSD/386 was facing a lawsuit from AT&T for releasing proprietary UNIX source code. GNU was planning to make a microkernel based OS, and it was planning to develop the kernel slowly, while Linus started Linux from the kernel side, with a monolithic architecture.

Since Linux was free software and could run directly on the new hardware, it gained the support of the hacker community, who added patches to the GNU userland to make it work with Linux. But when Linux finally became an OS with the help of GNU, the hacker community said they only care about Linux, not the GNU programs, and gave no recognition to GNU.

Because of this, Stallman asked the distributions to be called GNU/Linux, and that sparked flame wars because of how it is bad to pronounce, and how a distribution has many components beyond just GNU, and that therefore the kernel that runs on the hardware is what should describe the OS, and further several ad-hominem attacks on the personal life and behaviour of Richard Stallman.

Eventually, the name Linux caught on, but sympathizers of GNU are requested to call it GNU/Linux. This continues to be an unresolved, but sidelined dispute that seems unfair to GNU, especially considering most "Linux programs" are actually dependent on GNU GLIBC, and won't run on the other Musl LIBC based systems. Anytime someone mentions it, because there is no easy solution to it, it turns into a flame war.

ZLUDA is a compatibility layer for Nividia’s CUDA on other processors

Yesterday I tried to install the latest NVIDIA drivers on my Linux Mint laptop (version 21.3, Cinnamon Edition) and my Driver Manager said that, since i have Secure Boot enabled, I had to create a Mok key for my drivers so I could use them with Secure Boot. So I created a password and restarted my PC. However, I didn't know what to do in the MokManagement screen, so i turned off my PC and then turned it on again to be able to start over. After turning my PC on and off a few times to try a few different buttons thqt I ended up not understanding, I looked up a tutorial and tried to follow it. But when i clicked "Enroll MOK" this time, instead of showing "View Keys", it asked if I wanted to delete my existing keys.

What should I do to get this to work? I turned off my PC after this and switched back to the open source drivers because, again, I had no idea what to do. Did I fuck up my drivers? Can I try to redo the process to make it work? What about the extra keys I created? I'm really confused. Thanks in advance.

I was setting up my laptop for traveling and adding Wireguard VPN configuration.

The Wireguard config generated by router only contains IPv4 address (10.0.5.x), and while testing the VPN to my surprise "what is my ip" websites can find my IPv6 address (I USB tethered mobile connection to my laptop).

It looks like NetworkManager does nothing about IPv6 connection if VPN doesn't have IPv6 settings, which is bad for road warrior type of VPN configuration.

Is there an easy toggle to turn of IPv6 if VPN is connected and otherwise? Or is only option to disable all IPv6 no matter what?

Plasma 6.2 will be released in just three days! In the end we did revert the notification changes, so users of Plasma 6.2 won’t experience any new issues with notifications. The list of verified 6.2 regressions is extremely small, with most being low importance. We will of course eventually get them fixed anyway! But they aren’t release blockers.

What software have you found particularly frustrating or difficult to configure on Linux?

Visit about:compat in your firefox. I find it insane that these exist.

Edit: I've learned that this is part of the webcompat system addon developed by Mozilla and other contributors. I see why this is beneficial default behavior, since FF has no chance of getting enough market share to matter more if things are broken.

However, this behavior is too intrusive for my taste. For example this injection: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/8a4afb4d34f8/browser/extensions/webcompat/injections/js/bug1472075-bankofamerica.com-ua-change.js is basically just to silence annoying user reports.

Also, Every site FF pretends to be a different UA on is artificially reducing FF market share data.

I'm curious what the difference is between Balenca etcher and Ventoy for writing isos to a live USB for distro hopping purposes. I see both recommended in fourms. Is there any advantage to using one over the other? Are they both equally safe/secure?

I'm also curious about trying out new distros. I've been using LMDE for about a year now and it's been fine, but I want to expand my knowledge and see whether LMDE is my favorite distro or not. I'm not the most well versed in Linux and don't have any prior programming experience so a beginner/mid level distro is what I'm looking for. I want something I can test out without connecting to WiFi (so not arch).

Zrythm is an interesting open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software package. It's been making use of the GTK toolkit but now the developers have decided to switch to Qt6 instead.

Ok I know this sounds crazy but it's all about Linux and iptables all the way

I'm using a rooted android phone as a VPN router to keep confidential traffic separated between networks

A and B are in the same network, B provides a separate network for C

Device A: Linux ip 192.168.15.32 wlan0 Device B: rooted Android phone with Termux and VPN Hotspot wlan0 ip 192.168.15.21 wlan1 ip 192.168.38.173

Device C: Windows 10 with RDP wlan1 ip 192.168.15.176

I've tried the following

A: sudo ip route add 192.168.38.0/24 via 192.168.15.21 dev enp1s0

B: Termux, su: sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.38.0/24 -o wlan0 -j MASQUERADE

iptables -A FORWARD -i wlan0 -o wlan1 -s 192.168.15.0/24 -d 192.168.38.0/24 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i wlan1 -o wlan0 -s 192.168.38.0/24 -d 192.168.15.0/24 -j ACCEPT

C: default route via 192.168.38.173 metric 1

C is solely seeing the internet from B's VPN, and can even access wlan0's router, meaning it has access to its internal network. C can ping B, B can ping C

B can ping A and C

A can ping B, but not C, which also means no RDP access

What am I missing ?

Someone gave me a Hisense C11 Chromebook and I'm wondering if there's absolutely anything I can do with it. It seems like a piece of junk and the Linux stuff I've seen for Chromebooks specify that they don't work with the ARM processor. Is there any distro that would work on it? Any other ideas about how to repurpose it?

Note: I don't have direct access to an Ethernet cable/router for setup. Also don't have the most technical knowhow.

What do you think of wakib? https://github.com/darkstego/wakib-keys

It's like emacs keybindings but keep today's default/ standard keybindings and adds other layers to it.

In the past months, I tried over and over to use emacs or vim. I dislike having to switch between the "modern" way and vim or emacs inside the editor. With wakib all common shortcut are the same and it adds shortcuts for movements.

I did not yet spend too much time with it but I really like that it simply extends on what I use anyway.

For those unaware, about umu-launcher

This is a unified launcher for Windows games on Linux. It is essentially a copy of the Steam Runtime Tools and Steam Linux Runtime that Valve uses for Proton, with some modifications made so that it can be used outside of Steam.

Hi, I'm trying to get SCALE to work but I'm so confused by what they mean by PATH and I'm stuck.

https://github.com/spectral-compute/scale-docs/blob/master/docs/manual/how-to-use.md

I'm at the CMAKE step.

This is the official guide I'm following. I do understand what they mean by SCALE_PATH though as that is clearly explained but PATH is just very vague to me or I'm just misunderstanding it completely.

Hello Linux community,

I need some help with shutting down my laptop when the battery reaches a low percentage.

I am using Debian 12 with the GNOME desktop. WARNING: Minimal installation with self selected packages.

What I want to achieve is, that the laptop just does a 'halt -p' or shuts itself down when the battery is below 20%.

What I did so far:

• Look into GNOME settings in the power settings area and I found nothing helpful
• I edited /etc/Upower/UPower.conf with my settings and changed the CriticalPowerAction to PowerOff, ensured the upower daemon is running via systemctl status and rebooted. The result was that I get a warning popup message in GNOME when the battery load reaches 21%, but it does not shutdown the laptop at 20% or under 20%, although I get another pop up announcing that the laptop would be shutdown
• I ensured laptop-mode-tools and gnome-power-manager settings are installed

Any help/pointers for further help would be highly appreciated.