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A Linux Evening

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Re: A Linux Evening

#191

Post by jodrellblank »

arghwhat wrote: post #185
jodrellblank wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are free to comment on the question raised, instead of a dismissive empty ad-hom.

While tongue in cheek, the answer is accurate: open source does not mean "free service contract", it means that you can take the code and modify yourself (and preferably upstream the fix). Patches come both from vendors and users experiencing an issue. Vendors take care of most things, but for esoteric problems you might only have a handful of people experiencing it. The vendor is unlikely to care, so if you do not w…

You're doing the same thing, dragging the original conversation off into berating the commentor for not fixing it themselves because you owe them nothing and they shouldn't be so entitled.

> "Still better than the competition, where such problems will never be fixed unless it generates sufficient bad PR..."

The competition comes under "pay someone else to do it".

Re: A Linux Evening

#192

Post by jakesgates »

I really appreciate the write-up, as I have had many 'linux evenings' myself, and it always gets on my nerves when some members of the community act as if linux 'just works' for almost all users. Worth noting I love linux, and am a happy user, but I have had quite a few instances of relying on a more-experienced person previously running into the issue, or else I would still be stuck with those previous problems..

Re: A Linux Evening

#193

Post by LoganDark »

dspillett wrote: post #8
artemonster wrote: post #3

I hate linux for this. How the hell a modern OS can be frozen completely shut by some runaway python script running in a VS code debugger, to a point that you have to kill your PC with a button. And then non-obvious issues that just "appear" out of nowhere and steal your perfectly fine evening where you have planned to work on your favorite side project.

> How the hell a modern OS can be frozen completely shut by some runaway python script running in a VS code That isn't a just Linux thing. You can easily fork-bomb (or equivalent) Windows/iOS/other and so forth, especially (though not only) if running as a privileged user. > And then non-obvious issues that just "appear" out of nowhere That is definitely not something that I've never seen when using Windows! Where it…

> That isn't a just Linux thing. You can easily fork-bomb (or equivalent) Windows/iOS/other and so forth, especially (though not only) if running as a privileged user.

I've crashed DWM with WSL before, by doing something completely unrelated to Windows.

What happens is you start getting the solitaire effect because suddenly no windows have graphics buffers anymore

Re: A Linux Evening

#194

Post by LoganDark »

sampa wrote: post #60

it is strange not to know to run dmesg first-thing when you have a HW problem for a guy who rants about "I spent several hours fixing a problem and I learned next to nothing in the process" if you wanna learn, you should've known at least about dmesg

> if you wanna learn, you should've known

This is a catch-22

Re: A Linux Evening

#195

Post by LoganDark »

kingboss wrote: post #129
quijoteuniv wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 - I wonder what OS do you use. 2 - Have you actually tried Linux?

I have. It's still inferior to Windows and it's trying to be a discount version of MacOS. And it's doing a bad job at it.

I hate to admit it but GNOME is legitimately a macOS ripoff. I love it, and it's great, but it's basically trying to be macOS.

Re: A Linux Evening

#196

Post by tmtvl »

reshie wrote: post #187
diego_sandoval wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say "Arch makes you learn how Linux really works", but I don't think that's a good way to put it. Arch teaches you about the most boring parts of how linux works: the specific idiosyncrasies and configuration minutiae of a ton of libraries and programs (GNU coreutils, systemd, udev, mesa, glib, X11, Xlib, xdg, dbus, etc.) Arch will usually not teach you the really interesting "low level" things about Linux: Ho…

gentoo gets pretty close for a full OS system.

No it doesn't. But that's fine, it's not the point of a distro to teach you about interrupts and syscalls and all that nonsense, the point of a distro is to give you software to install. That said, Gentoo does do a good job of teaching you how annoying it is to try and figure out exactly which kernel options you need to activate to get a working system. I always run out of patience before I get it working, though (yes, I know about make localmodconfig).

Re: A Linux Evening

#197

Post by ronjouch »

freeplay wrote: post #180
ronjouch wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but chiming in nevertheless, as I do also "set up Linux for computer-illiterate old ladies" . They all roll Debian stable with unattended_upgrades and it's an absolute joy of stability. Not that I would use Debian stable for my personal machines: I want the latest shiniest and I want to be close to upstream to report bugs when they're fresh and easy to fix by the maintainer (yes, "I use arch btw" indeed), but…

Nice. What is your go to desktop environment for them?

- Generally, GNOME with the dash-to-panel/dash-to-dock extension-du-jour to have a left-side panel with app buttons (so, a "Ubuntu/Unity"-like look). It baffles me how stock GNOME still insists not to provide a left/bottom "dock" / task switcher as a built-in option, and force you to go to the menu every time you want to access / switch to an app, but here we are with extensions oÔ.

- That being said, a well-configured/simplified Plasma these would certainly be all well (or not, see my final paragraph below about locking things down; GNOME is less infinitely configurable than KDE/Plasma, so there's less room for user fuckup). Also I'm certainly biased towards GNOME because that's what I choose to use for my machines. Also also, I go where there are the most eyeballs (again, for stability & maximal guarantee that bugs are seen), and for now it's GNOME.

- Exception: one grandma has a particularly old laptop (x86-32 old :D) with meager RAM, so for her setup I went with MATE. I hesitated between LxQt and MATE, tried both, and MATE (at the time) seemed a tad more polished.

Finally, since I have your interest and GUIs are a subject I love ranting about, one more thing you need to do when setting up an old ladies machine, is to LOCK DOWN ALL THE THINGS YOU CAN:

- LibreOffice toolbars that can be accidentally dragged, then maybe dragged offscreen or closed? LOCK THEM.

- Thunderbird folder column titles that will change email ordering if accidentally clicked? HIDE THEM with userChrome.css until https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237051 is fixed.

- Etc etc, when I'm done provisioning such a machine, I spend an hour playing with it and wondering "How could someone haphazardly clicking and dragging everywhere break/mismanage this?" , and I disable/lock/hide everything I can. There is a million configurable / breakable things that we power users don't imagine being confusing to a user, because we know the features and we're precise at clicking on stuff. But to non-computerists, these things are veeeeery confusing! They'll email you with a gibberish issue description when invoked accidentally, and when it happens too often they get scared. There's potential to build a whole distribution aimed at such users, with everything properly locked down.

Re: A Linux Evening

#198

Post by bitwize »

gbin wrote: post #29

The thing is.... You found a solution and if you wanted to understand you can always look at the kernel doc. When a similar thing happens in Windows, you are just done... Not only you have a very slim chance of not having to reinstall everything but even less understanding what is happening (ie. Probably an intern that committed something in some close source driver than will be silently fixed some day).

Similar things rarely happen in Windows because Windows has a stable kernel ABI and developers can, do, and are incentivized to supply drivers for their hardware.

Re: A Linux Evening

#199

Post by trynewideas »

hackeraccount wrote: post #181
vid wrote: post #22

Someone should tell the author about the great lshw, it lists full details of the system board (and everything else) without having to go to a GUI display. azalp description: Desktop Computer product: B660M AORUS PRO AX DDR4 (Default string) vendor: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. version: -CF serial: Default string width: 64 bits capabilities: smbios-3.4.0 dmi-3.4.0 smp vsyscall32 configuration: boot=normal chassis=de…

This. I generally have few problems with the people I work with one exception is when they start posting screenshots on Slack. If it's some gui and you can't get a good export then I understand the frustration - but this will be a screen shot of terminal. Why? I mean do you hate the future? Did a month from the present beat you up as a child? Perhaps when you were 10 years old 2 years from now kicked sand in your fac…

In tech support, I'd frequently get screenshots of a few lines of a terminal window pasted into PowerPoint slides and Word docs — usually via some heavily compressed remote desktop-running-on-another-remote-desktop — with the information I actually needed invariably a few lines higher. My favorite was flash photos of a monitor taken with a non-smartphone from fully airgapped sites, where the turnaround for running a command and getting the output would be at least 5 minutes because the on-site user had to leave the server closet and go down a few halls to get back to a network-connected system, copy the photo off the camera to the computer, and attach it to the ticket.

Eventually I rigged up a tool to automatically pull screenshots from tickets via the ticket system's API, then raise contrast on them with imagemagick and run them through OCR. Some red error text on a black background screencapped through multiple layers of compression might as well not exist, even if it's perfectly readable to the end user, so I'd even done comparisons (that I've since unfortunately lost) of how different command-line OCR tools fared with low-contrast color text, because Tesseract wasn't always the most functional option.

Re: A Linux Evening

#200

Post by cryptonector »

> > Out of curiosity, how did you come up with this solution?

> The author, dkozel, never came back to answer. I imagine they typed the solution on a 40% keyboard featuring unmarked keys and then rolled into the sunset on a Segway for which they had compiled the kernel themselves. Completely oblivious of their awesomeness and of how many people would later find solace in their prose.

Here's how I would have started to find the answer:

  1. Open https://lxr.linux.no/, search for
     "No bus number available for hot-added bridge"
  2. Open the three files it finds.
  3. ^F that same string in each file, then notice
     that
     https://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v6.0.9/drivers/pci/probe.c#L3336
     is it.
  4. Chase down `dev->bus->busn_ref->end`.
     Er, well, this step is hard because `end` is
     so generic.
  5. git clone linux and use cscope to index it.
  6. Search for assignments to `end`, filtering with
     egrep for bus and pci.
  7. Weed through it all until I find
     https://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v6.0.9/drivers/pci/probe.c#L2964
  8. Search for assignments to `pci_hotplug_bus_size`, find
     https://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v6.0.9/drivers/pci/pci.c#L6882
  9. Search for `pci_hotplug_bus_size` and also find
     https://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v6.0.9/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt#L4267
     which says:

  hpbussize=nn    The minimum amount of additional bus numbers
                  reserved for buses below a hotplug bridge.
                  Default is 1.
But @dkozel probably just knew the answer.

I do find it hard to believe that the default for this setting is 1 though!

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