So, what's your Linux week been like?

[vinylninja]

As I found all I need is just music from a media center I replaced LibreELEC with Volumio for now on my Raspberry Pi. Not bad. I do not need a monitor or a connection to my TV, just speakers or I can connect it to my stereo. It uses MPD. So I can control the server from my laptop or phone using the browser or any MPD client.
Now I also solved the internet radio project because I have tons of stations to choose from.

It feels less like a media center and more like playing music for real without a glowing screen.

Anyway it is a lot of fun playing with the Pi. I need more.

[minyaen]

16FEB2020 – 22FEB2020

• Nuked and paved the G5, again.

  • Started with ArcoLinuxD and AwesomeWM, quite the experience
  • Ended up with ArcoLinuxB with i3wm and polybar
    • Looking forward to learning tiling window management
    • p.s. polybar is awesome
  • Started working with Rofi, theming and the such, great utility

• Something that I, and many others, is the lock screen which toggles automatically when the system suspends

  • This is probably trivial for many of you, but I’ve never not had a lock screen work in the way I’ve expected it to… until now, haha
    • After a while and a hunch of really what the system needed to make this happen, it ended up being quite a simple fix with a system service for the lock screen to start on suspend, but great little learning experience!

• Working with tiling window managers (i3 in my case) has been great

  • I love the efficiency of it, and honestly, learning a completely new paradigm of a desktop experience has been somewhat challenging - the challenge is what is making it so intriguing and fun
  • I thought the customization was great before with a DE like Plasma, but after moving to a tiling window manager, it introduced a new sense of granularity which allowed for even more learning including customizing things which I thought weren’t “customizeable”

[TerryL]

Catching up with software and security updates on my weirdly setup Thinkpad X230.

What’s weird about it? Well, it has a 1TB SSD, with 6 partitions with 6 distros, 3 Debian based, (MX-19, Debian/Bullseye and Sparky (6) - also based on Debian/Bullseye), and 3 Arch based distros, (ArcoLinux, EndeavourOS and Manjaro).

The original idea was to do do side by side comparisons on the same hardware and all have Xfce (my DE of choice). At the end of the comparison I liked them all about the same and couldn’t decide which to keep and which to remove, so I kept them all. It had been a few weeks since I used anything but MX-19 so I decided to get them all up to date (some big changes had happened so it took longer than I thought).

Following that I decided to concentrate on using something other than MX-19 for a bit of a change and have been exercising Manjaro - I’ve had a lot of fun.

On the computer in the other room (the one that only has a 120GB SSD with Peppermint 9 on it which I installed when Pepp 9 was released) I’ve had fun noodled around on my Minetest world having a mindless time building settlements, it’s not Minecraft, it’s much simpler and I just enjoy the building things. It’s mindless fun what I’m feeling lazy or, like now, I have a cold and don’t want to think.

On the desktop the BU_Drive entry is a 64GB USB3.0 memory stick that I use with Joe Collins of Ezeelinux’s BU (Backup Utility) that I’ve slightly modified so it works on Arch based distros as well as Debian based one (I call it BUT - Backup Utility: Terry’s) to backup the /etc and /home directories in case I need to recover from deleting something in error. It’s a small, low profile USB memory and is permanently plugged in but only mounted when needed.

I have these on my 3 Thinkpads that I use most frequently. The other laptops share a 240GB external USB3.0 SSD drive when needed.

I have tried a couple of live USB distros for the heck of it, all rejected as I didn’t like them, even if they are popular with others - I won’t name them as likes and dislikes are personal and my reasons for disliking are probably pure bias and irrational - but I will say I hate Gnome, and KDE Plasma drives me up the wall, MATE is OK’ish but I’m sticking with Xfce.

[esbeeb]

This week, I refrained from drooling at the sight of this NAS:

Raspberry Pi NAS, 2.5" SATA disks

Here’s a Raspberry Pi 4 in a NAS kit with 4 x 2.5" disks, in a RAID5, with EXT4. He got a speed of 90-100 MB/sec, which I consider impressive. [Full Setup Quad Sata Hat for Raspberry Pi 4 NAS Review] Edit: there’s no distributor in North America yet for this NAS kit. Only Asia and Europe. Also, I’m not convinced yet that the drivers are mature enough to handle heavy loads, and other torturous real-world NAS usage. The disk controllers are J Microns, that’s good, but I have no s…

The OLED status display on the top was a nice touch. The unit would be top-heavy, but as long as pets and children don’t knock it over, I think it’s a decent design.

[BertN45]

I’ve detected rclone and used it to connect Google-drive and One-drive to Nautilus using a /media folder. I also shared those “drives” through Virtualbox Shared Folders to some of my VMs.

This week I also started to move to 20.04 for my main Virtual Machines.

• My Office VM has been upgraded from Xubuntu 18.04 to 20.04. I noticed some small improvements:
  • Browsing my phone with KDE Connect now works I directly defined a bookmark in Thunar for the phone and I updated the music on my phone with grsync!
  • Clicking “read more” in evolution emails, only starts one firefox windows instead of two
• My banking VM Ubuntu 16.04 will remain unchanged for another year out of respect for my good times with Unity
• My music VM has been moved from Windows XP to Ubuntu Mate 20.04, mainly because:
  • Lollypop is really the first of a complete new generation of music players. GREAT!!
  • I’ve detected a great audio file converter ‘soundKonverter’ and that one is lightning fast, because it use all threads of my CPU instead of one thread in a loop. Together with Lollypop (Web LookUp), Ex-Falso (tag changes also in “batch”), I have three great tools to clean up my ancient music collection started with WMP in 2004.
  • Windows Media Player 11 did not support m4a and its tag editor disappeared
• My VM for experiments has been updated from Ubuntu Mate 19.10 to Ubuntu 20.04. I tried DOSBOX and I love it. It now starts-up in DOSSHELL and it plays my two ancient DOS games Winter and Wolfenstein
• My VM with Windows 10 remains the same.

My Host OS, booting and using ZFS, is still a minimal install of Ubuntu 19.10, I’m on the fence looking at the frequent ZFS changes. Probably I’ll wait till the Beta date to upgrade. I have installed Ubuntu 20.04 on ZFS on a 1st gen i5 laptop and it works without any problems.

See my screenshot of Lollypop.

[esbeeb]

This week I edited a 150-page document in Libreoffice, generating a large Table of Contents. Then I exported this to .pdf, and uploaded the PDF into Nextcloud, sharing a link to some family and friends. The pdf displays with a nice web-based pdf viewer framing it, plus it can be downloaded. And it could easily show the large Table of Contents properly, from the controls in the top left (which could be tapped on, to proceed to a desired chapter)! I didn’t know Nextcloud had that feature, which I really appreciated.

This whole workflow was buttery smooth, never a bug or a crash.

[BertN45]

On top of the changes of last week, I have updated the Host OS from Ubuntu 19.10 to Ubuntu 20.04. A nice side effect has been that almost all my problems with 3D acceleration in Virtualbox disappeared. Probably a better AMD video driver. I also enabled the LivePatch update facility.

Only Xubuntu has a new problem, that did not exists in 18.04. The panel and conky display is flickering strongly when using 3D acceleration in Virtualbox. None of the other 6 Ubuntu family members has that problem. As a consequence, I wrote a bug-report, I switched 3D acceleration off and I moved all video stuff from my Xubuntu VM to my Ubuntu Mate VM. So all multimedia stuff will be handled by Ubuntu Mate now, sounds like a better and more logical division of work.

See the screenshot of the Host-OS:

[Baltimore]

Sadly today, I finished the work project of migrating our developers off of linux machines. The decision was out of my hands and forced down from management.

Split right down the middle: half of the devs when to mac, the other went to Windows. The Win10 users are using a mix of WSL and Ubuntu VM’s.

[leoman]

Switch from Linux to Unix-type (MacOS) and WSL… good job management! What insight and wisdom! Truly superb business sense…

[Mr_McBride]

Just finished moving all of my desktops over to Solus, so my week has been flawless !!!

[Baltimore]

A little more context.

We are in the process of getting ISO certified. Because we cannot remote encrypt, remote lock or remote wipe Linux devices with our chosen MDM solutions (Workspace One) it was determined that the linux desktops had to go.

To solve this I setup a trial puppet server on-site and configured it to do all these things. Management still didn’t want to bother wit the linux desktops even after I proved it could be done.

Oh well. I tried. And building out the puppet stuff did impress my management chain so there’s that/

[Mr_McBride]

Did you show them the money that would have been saved if Puppet were leveraged as a replacement for the MDM solution?

In the end, in the corporate space, there are always two points that must be driven home. 1) budget. 2) Blame. Corporate likes to have someone (else) to blame when things don’t go according to plan.

[Baltimore]

I totally did. Even showed them a full cost-benefit analysis. They decided against it and pushed everyone to to the OS’s. Mgmt doesn’t want multiple systems to manage just for these linux users. They want everything to be in one place.

[esbeeb]

This week, I tried out Nextcloud 18, and came up with a way to use Wireguard to firewall-punch my way from a cloud VPS to a remote NAT’ted host (by using the “keepalive” option on the remote host).

[BertN45]

Ubuntu “apt upgrade” completely fails for all VMs of all its 20.04 family members. I restored my weekly zfs snapshot from last Saturday by copying the vdi file from the .zfs directory. Tried the other ones too, but they all fail with dependency problems around libc6. The other times I used Virtualbox to take a snapshot before running the update for the VM.

After the upgrade the system is completely unusable, it rejects all sudo commands and even the recovery mode is completely f**ked up, I can’t get into root. Only snapshots saved me. I blocked all updates and I’m trying the upgrade again every 2-3 hours using the Ubuntu Budgie 20.04 VM as guinea pig.

[esbeeb]

A friend of mind completely ruined his Pop_OS 19.10 install, fairly recently, by running “apt update && apt upgrade”. It sent him back to Linux Mint, which he used previously, where he was accustomed to using those commands safely.

[esbeeb]

One glorious day, maybe you’ll be able to strike out on your own and become a consultant (or some such) where you get to use linux primarily, if not exclusively.

[BertN45]

Well my case is a confirmed bug report, which has been reported by others too.

[esbeeb]

The Pop_OS issue I mentioned gets mentioned in the Pop_OS subreddit, but there is little or no response from anyone at System76 to fix it (tantamount to “won’t fix”). Somebody, please correct me if I’m wrong here.

AFAIK, System76 does some deeper package management voodoo in order to give the very latest drivers for their hardware in Pop_OS, and I suspect it’s this voodoo which breaks “apt upgrade”. In other words, to get those very latest drivers with your shiny new System76 hardware, it comes at the cost of “apt upgrade” not working (or downright ruining your packaging system), and you would do well to just stick to their GUI method of installing software (the “Pop Shop” software store), which doesn’t violate the voodoo magic.

[vinylninja]

You should use

apt dist-upgrade

instead after the update command. That is what is recommended on Debian sid and I am sure it applies to a developer version of Ubuntu. That way you will replace older packages with new ones and solve dependency issues.

It is not recommended to use apt upgrade on a ‘rolling release’ because it might hold older packages back and you will have a mess.

On a purely LTS system it makes no difference though.