Linux OS stuff Thread

What Linux distribution do you use @ HOME ?

  • Slackware

    Votes: 1 1.4%
  • Ubuntu

    Votes: 33 45.8%
  • Mint

    Votes: 16 22.2%
  • Fedora

    Votes: 10 13.9%
  • Debian

    Votes: 10 13.9%
  • SUSE

    Votes: 5 6.9%
  • Arch

    Votes: 4 5.6%
  • Gentoo

    Votes: 1 1.4%
  • Puppy

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Mandriva

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Other

    Votes: 21 29.2%

  • Total voters
    72

Kharzette

Watcher of Overs
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I'm dual booting the loonix! Ubuntu. It's not too terrible.

Grub wouldn't install, but I found a boot fixer that worked. The little cheesy app store is nice. You can see screenies of the various apps, but nothing you install from there actually works. But it does get you the name so you can apt-get them! (and that mostly works)

It automagically sets up samba for you, but none of your windows boxes can connect to it sadly, but at least I didn't have to edit config files for an hour just to discover it wasn't going to work.

Right now I'm just trying to get a synergy type thing going. There's a fork called Barrier that seems to cut down a bit on the assgoblinry associated with synergy, but my craptop is 32 bit so I gotta build it. Once I get that and a decent git / mercurial client I'll be set. VS Code worked straight away.

I was kind of surprised there's no sourcetree for linux. It's already using one of those shitty cross platform uis and they have mac builds. Seems like it would be easy for them.
 

Kharzette

Watcher of Overs
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209102


This has been kinda fun. Got GL working and debugging going. I streamed the monaco grand prix earlier without a hitch. Steam works and surprisingly a crapton of my games listed in the library.

I also grabbed an mkv and it played full blast (with only a little bit of sync tearing) and surround sound even works!

It was not easy though. Took many many hours to get dotnet installed and working, and once I did I realized / remembered I was using a preview build of core 3. That wouldn't coexist properly with the usual dotnet stuff so it took alot of digging in git bugs to get it all scrubbed away.

Once I got my environment pointed to the preview stuff (which is distributed kind of raw as a tgz, no packaging), code worked but the debugger was flipping out. Many many many hours of digging later I found that the extension within vs code somehow wasn't getting the environment stuff I set up in bashrc. VS code was, the terminal within vs code was, but the extension wasn't. Really odd.

Turned out to be snap's fault, which is sort of a ghetto ubuntu app store kind of thing. When I blasted vscode from there and installed it via debs it all started working.
 

Jovec

?
730
282
It automagically sets up samba for you, but none of your windows boxes can connect to it sadly, but at least I didn't have to edit config files for an hour just to discover it wasn't going to work.

Later versions of Windows (10 IIRC) disable samba browsing (forgot what it is actually called Windows side) but you can still connect directly. My NAS is just Ubuntu server with ZFS and Samba shares. I pinned the NAS IP in Windows Explorer for easy access. Linux needs avahi-daemon to be able to browse the share list, but you should still be able to connect directly via IP without it. Of course, you need to properly setup the samba shares.
 

Kharzette

Watcher of Overs
4,906
3,549
If any of you play steam games, I ran into something that cost me a few hours:

ini tweaks are often needed. Like kotor2 defaults to full screen and you have no way to set which monitor it pops up on. So I opened up the ini and tried changing a few things around and nothing would ever happen. I googed around and people seemed to be merrily editing away with no troubles.

Eventually after wording the search a little differently I found a place with similar problems, and discovered that the ini in the steam game directory isn't even used. It sticks a copy in home/.local/share/aspyr-media/kotor2 and of course .local is hidden.

I had actually done a full machine search for copies of the ini earlier but the file browser (not sure what it is called) seems fond of turning off the see hidden files setting.
 

Kharzette

Watcher of Overs
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3,549
Had something new and odd happen last night. I was playing some stellaris and stupidly picked the wrong ascension perk. I needed to edit my save to fix it so I dragged the save over from nautilis to vs code.

The cursor changed to a little grab thing with a plus like you'd expect, but it just stuck there, and the drop never dropped. After that I could move the mouse but not interact with anything. I went into a terminal via alt tab and could type but space wouldn't work unless I held shift.

I figured shift was stuck. That happens all the time in windows. You can hold ctrl-alt-shift and both mouse buttons to clear it. It's an ancient bug in GetAsyncKeyState() that everything uses. Anyway that didn't work with this.

I saw someone post something like ctrl-alt-F2 and check if it works there, if it does do this link. So I did that which dumps you to a fullscreen term window and keyboard was fine. I exited back to the desktop and now the keyboard and mouse were completely dead. Tried plug/unplug etc, and eventually just smashing lots of keys hoping to hit a magic combo I guess I hit ctrl-alt-del and it rebooted.

Any idea what that was?
 

Asshat wormie

2023 Asshat Award Winner
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28 years today.

"just a hobby, won't be big"
 
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Goatface

Avatar of War Slayer
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don't game much on this pc, mainly surf. youtube and run a small plex server. been using Mint Cin for about the last year, still don't know shit and pretty sure i have fubar'd wine and some other stuff. so figured would move on.

i just want a minimal interface, small icons and lists. with old window style all in one taskbar.
installed Ubuntu, don't like how gnome is set up, like the top and side bars. can all that stuff be combined and simplified?
should i try Debian?
 

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
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You can use other desktop manager s if you don't like gnome. Can't really recommend any though.

Debian isn't bad but I almost always prefer an Ubuntu variant.

You can put a live disc on a USB stick and just boot it to see if you like it
 
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chaos

Buzzfeed Editor
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Some issue with my kernel yesterday preented me from booting. I briefly shit my pants and then looked around, that's never happened to me, but usually before I've used VMs and just rebuilt them as needed, first time using it as a host os on this laptop for long term use. Turns out this is a common issue with nvidia driver. Was able to boot into an older kernel at the grub menu and get in. Not really sure what to do about it from here. Maybe just uninstall the nvidia driver and reinstall, then try rebooting again. Right now I'm just tar'ing up my critical files and sending them off somewhere and leaving it powered on.
 

Denjoy

Molten Core Raider
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installed Ubuntu, don't like how gnome is set up, like the top and side bars. can all that stuff be combined and simplified?
I only know Gnome so not sure about other solutions but you could install Gnome Tweaks then install the extension Dash to Panel and it'll pretty much look like Windows 10. You can then go into the Dash to Panel settings and change the icon size of the taskbar among other things.
 
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Reactions: 1 user

Goatface

Avatar of War Slayer
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i am trying KDE Plasma desktop with Ubuntu. seems like it has the appearance i wanted, now to figure out how to make stuff work
 

Kharzette

Watcher of Overs
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I'm looking for some kind of gnome replacement. Mine completely shat itself. Got that stupid login loop where you login and it just takes you right back to the login screen. None of the goog'd suggestions worked so I just blasted it and reinstalled.