Linux

I've been using volumeicon for a long time, to enable the audio hotkeys on my laptop. But the problem is that if you plug in a USB or bluetooth headset, it doesn't automatically switch to it as the default. You'd have to kill the service and restart it.

So I wrote a script that can offer me all the same functionality, and just mapped my audio hotkeys in my WM.

Thought someone might find the source useful.

Can I use it fully offline?

How do I back it up to USB drive?

What does the day-to-day operation of Pass compared to Keepass look like?

I am trying to learn it as I want to use it, as I think that keepass is bloated for my use case, and I would appreciate any help here.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.kde.social/post/2098933

Hi folks,

I have Alpine Linux installed in an encrypted LUKS partition. I came across this tutorial which shows how to setup a key in a USB drive and when the drive is inserted and the computer booted, the LUKS partition auto-unlocks with the key on the USB drive.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1414617/configure-ubuntu-22-04-zfs-for-automatic-luks-unlock-on-boot-via-usb-drive

I would like to setup the same thing but I do not have Alpine linux installed on ZFS, so I'm looking for ways to adapt the instructions.

So far, what I've done is:

1. I've setup the key on the usb stick and I can unlock the LUKS partition with that key.
2. create a /etc/mkinitfs/features.d/usb-unlock.sh script with the following content:

(the echo to /dev/kmesg was to check whether the script did indeed run at boot by trying to print to the kernel messages but I can't find anything in the kernel messages).

#!/bin/sh

echo "usb-unlock script starting..." > /dev/kmsg

USB_MOUNT="/mnt/my-usb-key" # The USB stick mounting point
LUKS_KEY_FILE="awesome.key"  # The name of your keyfile on the USB stick

# Search for the USB stick with the key
for device in $(ls /dev/disk/by-uuid/*); do
    mount $device $USB_MOUNT 2>/dev/null
    if [ -f "$USB_MOUNT/$LUKS_KEY_FILE" ]; then
        # Unlock the LUKS partition
        cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda3 cryptroot \
            --key-file "$USB_MOUNT/$LUKS_KEY_FILE" && exit 0
    fi
    umount $USB_MOUNT
done
echo "No USB key found, falling back to password prompt." # this message never appears, despite not having found the key on the usb stick

echo "usb-unlock script ending." > /dev/kmsg

3. I added usb-unlock to the features in mkinitfs.conf:

mytestalpine:~# cat /etc/mkinitfs/mkinitfs.conf 
features="ata base ide scsi usb virtio ext4 cryptsetup keymap usb-unlock"

4. run mkinitfs to rebuild the initramfs. Then reboot to test the implementation, which was unsuccessful.

What am I missing / doing wrong? Thank you for your help!

Edit: forgot to add step 4

I wanted a podcast player that looks great and could be used in my region, with Fedora. So I found Musicpod as flatpack and downloaded it. But when I open it, and want to add podcast it says "It looks like your computer isn't connected to the internet" so I can't search. My internet is connected, I use other apps, without problem. Its on Fedora 40, with VPN on. Anything I have to change,or do you recognize this issue?

This is Cage, a Wayland kiosk. A kiosk runs a single, maximized application.

This README is only relevant for development resources and instructions. For a description of Cage and installation instructions for end-users, please see its project page and the Wiki.

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.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been a happy user of Fedora Workstation since Fedora 36 on my Surface Go 1.

I really enjoy Gnome and everything is set up the way I want to.

Since I was really happy with my setup I just wanted to be able to replicate it easily through Clonezilla so that I could port it on any future computer I’d get.

Sadly, even with the help of really helpful and knowledgeable users on Lemmy, it hasn’t worked (https://sh.itjust.works/post/25963065).

So now I’m left wondering if there could be a distribution that I’d enjoy and which would be easy to deploy on another computer as I’d hate to have to configure everything on every computer I’d get.

I love Gnome but I wouldn’t be against trying something else if necessary.

What distribution could meet my needs?

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?

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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).

TLDR: perfctl is a crypto mining and proxy jacking malware that exploits about 20’000 common missconfigurations to install itself on Linux servers. Mostly using a 10/10 CVE on Apache RocketMQ.

It is very persistent and can reinstall itself even when you have deleted all the perfctl and perfcc files. It hides itself by removing logs, network packets, and stopping all activity once you login to the machine.

Monitoring cpu usage using tools (I use net data on my server) can help identify infections (100% cpu usage when « idle »).

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.