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#1 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » EXT4 BUG? Data loss when I have launched sigil :s » 2023-05-28 05:21:39

Standardpoodle wrote:

That particular bug is never going anywhere and might as well be closed with worksforme or something like that.

Many projects automate this with a "janitor" bot, e.g.

This bug has been in NEEDSINFO status with no change for at least
30 days. The bug is now closed as RESOLVED > WORKSFORME
due to lack of needed information.

Might not be a terrible idea to implement something similar for the Devuan bugtracker.

#2 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » EXT4 BUG? Data loss when I have launched sigil :s » 2023-05-27 15:41:53

zero wrote:

This is not the customers who do the work, but developers

Ahh, I see. You think you are a "customer" for the operating system you received for free.
That explains everything... Or at least everything prior to the unhinged drivel in your last post anyway.
Perhaps read up on how FOSS development works, and how to file actionable bug reports?

Anyhow, bye now, have fun.

#3 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » EXT4 BUG? Data loss when I have launched sigil :s » 2023-05-27 07:27:39

zero wrote:

there should be some investigations done... there is no investigation... because there is no resource available.

The most available resource for initial investigation of a bug only you have encountered is... You.

You appear to want want somebody else to take responsibility for this, yet you have so far:
* Reported it to a team that is not directly responsible for the component in question, with minimal information, no reproduction steps, and no logs or debug output.
* Tried to divert discussion and tracking away from the official channels (bugtracker & mailing lists) to a user forum (which few developers frequent).
* Failed to follow up when asked to reproduce the problem with an untainted kernel (taint disables kernel debugging), or engage on the bugtracker at all beyond the initial report. (hint: replies to the bugtracker mail people who might care, forum posts do not)
* Continually stated a "suspicion" that this is a software problem that "somebody" should investigate, yet focused your own cursory "investigation" entirely on hardware.

Why exactly do you expect the Devuan developers, of all people, to work on reproducing a "bug" you "suspect" you have found, when you yourself are apparently unwilling to do the same? Do you want them to feed and burp you as well?

It is not at all uncommon, regardless of the size of a project, for a bug report to remain that - just a report - until either the reporter or somebody else with the same problem provides enough information to reproduce the issue. Developers are not psychic, and what cannot be seen cannot be fixed.
Only then can it move to [confirmed] and work on finding the cause begin.

#4 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » EXT4 BUG? Data loss when I have launched sigil :s » 2023-05-26 15:52:02

Standardpoodle wrote:

Can a report be in a moreinfo state for years?

A bug can be in [moreinfo] for as long as it takes for the submitter to provide more info as requested... Or until people get tired of waiting.
The last comment was "Did you reproduce it on an untainted kernel?", to which the response so far has been *crickets*.

zero wrote:

I still suspect EXT4, but cannot prove this.

Isolated report from a single user (vs. the uncounted thousands running EXT4 daily), and no proposed mechanism or reliable reproduction: highly likely to remain an unproven suspicion.

zero wrote:

Unfortunately, Devuan team seems to be too small to handle this kind of issue.

If this is a bug in EXT4 (and frankly I very much doubt that) it should be punted upstream to the kernel mailing list. Investigating esoteric kernel bugs is not Devuan's responsibility.

#5 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » obscure and destructive bug involving avahi-daemon and GRUB » 2023-05-20 04:31:31

* OS-prober and avahi have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
* If something as benign as mdns service discovery (avahi) "crashes" a network, that's the network admins problem. Likewise if their printers are discoverable on public wifi when they shouldn't be.
* Don't claim "bug" in a piece of software (or OS) unless you come with enough information and reproduction steps to identify it as such. One anecdote (and probably completely coincidental) is not even remotely that.

#6 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » [SOLVED] Remote X session - what works? » 2023-04-29 23:01:15

Also NoMachine, both the open-sourced NX v3 (used by X2go) and the proprietary (free for single connection) v4 protocol.
Personally I quite like X2go / NX3, It's pretty much X11 fowarding, but faster over high-latency links.

#7 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » How do I get USB to RCA connection to work? » 2023-04-29 13:28:12

amc252 wrote:

I would like to connect my laptop to a digital TV using the video and audio output from the laptop's USB port to the RCA video and audio entrey on the TV, and do so by mean of a connecting cable which has a USB plug on one side and 3 RCA video plugs on the other.

Again, there is no "cable" that will convert USB to analog video + audio. They are completely different signals, and would require a non-trivial interface device, the equivalent of an external video card + video converter (as modern video cards no longer have analog out), and sound card. Such devices do exist, but they're a long way from "a connecting cable".

Converting HDMI, displayport or either of those running over USB-C "alternate mode" to analog video is easier, as you only need the analog encoder. A cursory search search indicates such devices are readily available and relatively cheap... But until one falls out of the sky for me to play with, I have no Idea WRT to compatibility or configuration.
You'd also need an HDMI, displayport or modern USB-C port to use with it, obviously.

FWIW, video out from a USB-C port isn't really USB at all, it's effectively just repurposing the USB connector for HDMI digital video (one of the reasons USB-C has 24 pins, vs 4 for USB A & B). Getting analog video from that is still not a simple "connecting cable", but it's closer.
Have a look at the Alternate Mode protocol support matrix table here, you want "Component video". Note that all those entries specify "construction" as "active"... Anything labeled as an "active" cable is far more than just a cable, and implies a converter of some kind.

amc252 wrote:

The laptop has a TV-out connection, I just wanted to know if I could use the USB port instead.

Then I suggest you use it, that's exactly what it's for. Why bugger about with any of this when you already have the right electrical signal, the right video format, and the right connector already present?

#8 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » How do I get USB to RCA connection to work? » 2023-04-29 06:22:08

Step one: Ship me a crystal ball, so I have some idea what this "USB to RCA" device you intend to use actually is, and what video and audio chipsets it uses.
USB and composite video + analog audio (which I assume is what you mean by "RCA") are about as completely different as one can get, and anything connecting the two will effectively be a whole video card and sound card, with all the usual faffing around mirroring your screen to two video cards and configuring two audio outputs entails.

This is exactly why laptops used to include "TV out" composite or s-video from the onboard video card, for connecting to TVs and projectors. Maufacturers love to remove useful features for more "thinness" though, so good luck finding that on anything made in the last decade.

#9 Re: Off-topic » SSH tunnel from PC's VNC client to a VM's desktop on separate VM Host » 2023-04-12 05:22:19

entropyagent wrote:

1) Am I benefitting from the magical protection of "SSH tunneling" in my interactions all the way between my PC VNC client and the VM desktop?

or

2) Does this protection only extend to the connection between the PC VNC client and the VM Host, leaving communication between the VM Host and the VM itself protected only by VNC security? Perhaps I need to create another SSH tunnel on the VM host?

There is no "magic protection" here, security is both an ongoing process and a matter of understanding what it is you are doing. SSH encryption extends between SSH client and SSH server, nothing more and nothing less. Likewise SSH authentication.

An SSH tunnel is exactly what the name implies, encapsulating and tunnelling other arbitrary TCP traffic through an SSH connection, where it benefits from whatever encryption your SSH session is using.
This is very useful for protecting unencrypted traffic over the open 'net (or as an ad-hoc "VPN"), but of questionable benefit on a trusted LAN. Operative word there is of course "trusted". If your LAN is not secure, you likely have bigger fish to fry... Such as isolating (or better, disposing of) internet-of-trash devices, and putting guest wireless connections on a restricted VLAN and/or dedicated access point.

In your scenario, the VNC client (remmina or whatever) makes an unencrypted VNC connection to port 5901 on localhost, where your SSH client is listening. SSH tunnels the connection inside it's encrypted channel to the remote machine, where the SSH server forwards it (unencrypted) to whatever is listening on the remote machine's port 5901 - in this case qemu's built-in VNC server.
Anything relating to the security of qemu (and it's VNC server) or the VM it is running is out of SSH's influence. It's simply passing network traffic from one machine to another.

Bear in mind that if the SSH server on the VM host can make a VNC connection to qemu, so can other processes or users on that machine.
You will still need to ensure the VNC server is configured to listen only on localhost and/or firewalled, and it has some kind of authentication enabled.
Local connections between processes (i.e. VNC client -> SSH client, SSH server -> qemu) are generally safe without any encryption, as they never leave the machine anyway. That said, if someone else has root on the server (i.e. it's not yours), all bets are off.

#10 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » What are my options to install latest version of Gnome DE? » 2023-04-05 13:18:10

Run unstable (Ceres) (with the usual "you are now a tester" caveats), or run a rolling-release distro.

#11 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » What are my options to install latest version of Gnome DE? » 2023-04-05 12:48:58

Welcome to Debian Stable (or more accurately, a distro with almost 1:1 tracking of the same).
Not having the latest SNS in the stable repos is not a bug, it's a feature. If a rolling-release with rapid updates is what you want, run a rolling release.

#12 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » how to easily copy a windows partition? » 2023-04-03 10:32:23

Camtaf wrote:

OP should really have just copied them to an external drive!

Or, ya know, answered the question I posed in the very first reply WRT what kind of backup they wanted. Vague questions beget suboptimal answers, what else is new. roll

@OP: "Restoring" a dd disk image is simply reversing the dd command, and will return the disk to the exact state it was in when you imaged it (broken windows install included). However this is likely not what you want.
To restore files from the image you will first need to mount it as a loopback filesystem.

Assuming it's a raw disk image (i.e the ".qcow" extension is irrelevant and qemu is not involved), you want something like 'mount -o loop,offset=[offset of the partition you want] [image file] [mountpoint]', or 'losetup --partscan --find [image file]' to find the partitions for you and create device nodes you can mount like any other filesystem.
Examples of several approaches here, among other places easily found with a web search.

If you want accurate advice, please be accurate WRT to partitions, disks, filesystems, and most importantly, your end-goal. As Camtaf said, this would have been easier if we had known you wanted to restore your files rather than the entire disk.

#13 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » how to easily copy a windows partition? » 2023-04-02 12:41:26

zapper wrote:

dd if=/dev/sdX of=/media/sdY/your.qcow2 bs=10M status=progress

GlennW wrote:

I suggest the same as zapper says above. Well worth the time.

dd is simple, but it's also pretty slow as it'll copy everything, including empty blocks.

zapper wrote:

load a linux live distro

Camtaf wrote:

use a 'live' Linux pendrive

There's no need for a live distro here, regardless of the method used.
Just make the windows partition is not mounted and you can do it from Devuan (as the OP requested). dd is of course available by default, and partimage and clonezilla (which includes partimage) are in the repos.

#14 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » how to easily copy a windows partition? » 2023-04-01 18:15:42

How long is a piece of string?
There are about 50 bazillion ways to copy a partition, starting with a dead simple 'cp' of the files or 'dd' to an image file...
Personally I quite like the flexibility and features of clonezilla, but it all depends what kind of backup you want - just the files, a full disk image with the boot sectors and all that jazz, or a bitwise clone to another disk?

#15 Re: Devuan » Increasing need for RAM » 2023-03-31 08:14:34

$ cat /etc/devuan_version ; free -m
chimaera
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          128887      102819       21226          61        4841       24548
Swap:          16383         179       16204

And this box doesn't even run a GUI tongue

I will never understand this constant obsessing over memory, it's like some kind of religion here.

#16 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] mail filtering in console » 2023-03-31 06:40:09

The traditional unixy solution (and likely the lightest on resources) is probably the old (fetchmail / getmail) -> procmail (+formail) -> (maildir / mda) construct. Assemble parts as needed smile

I was running fetchmail + procmail via cron as my mail filtering / delivery system for many years, though I have since moved to getmail for retrieval and  sieve within dovecot for filtering, as the box also acts as an IMAP server these days anyway.

The 'net at large should provide plenty of fetchmail/procmail/formail info, it's a system as old as the hills. Procmail filter syntax is a mite arcane, but it's very powerful once you get your head around it. Also here.

Alternatively (or if you're discouraged by the length of procmail's beard), you might just want to set up a real mailserver and use sieve scripts. As mentioned I use dovecot, but there are several other options.

As for alpine... I'm not sure why one would want to use a mail reader for automated retrieval and filtering, but if it can do it it can do it I guess. I'd consider fetchmail / getmail and a filter and/or mda of choice the more appropriate hammer though.

Any more detailed suggestions dependent on more detailed explanation of your setup (e.g. "mail dirs" meant in the traditional *nix maildir sense or folders within a maildir / mbox, where these boxes are and how your end-user readers access them, where your IMAP server is, etc.).

All the above assumes primarily syncing to and working with mail in local mailboxes or on your own mailserver (since that's how I do it), If you're more into manipulating a remote IMAP server you don't control I'll be of little use to you, and maybe something like alpine is the way to do it...
Or perhaps imapfilter. That one looks pretty promising for such a task, and could be combined with e.g. getmail or imapsync if you want a local backup as well.

#17 Re: Other Issues » Where do I report bugs in devuan-backports packages? » 2023-03-28 13:30:12

Altoid wrote:

please file a report so it gets fixed.

I have, and it has been. My question, i.e. are bugs in backports handled separately as they are in debian, appears to be answered by stint of said bug report being accepted.
It would still be nice if this was clearly explained on the bug reporting section of the devuan site.

That it was fixed so quickly is great. Logging being screwed up on multiple machines for multiple months before I noticed this, and me (who is not a package maintainer) being the only one who did... That isn't great at all.

Altoid wrote:

Unfortunately, as systemd and other assorted crap (eg.: zeigeist) advance and dig their tentacles into the workings of Debian, that task becomes more and more difficult.

It is something most people are not aware of.

                    -----------------------------------> You seem to be one of them. <-----------------------------------

I am well aware of it. Awareness does not make it any less of a problem when such borkage continues to slip through.

Altoid wrote:

it seldom happens in Devuan.

It happens in Devuan far more often than it does in Debian, and in far sillier ways.

steve_v wrote:

if I take you to your word, you will most probably leave the ever growing Devuan user base.
Which is a real pity as Devuan could use another 'somebody', more so if it is one with your bug-tracking skills.

You can take my word as: I am getting ever closer to migrating systems that I need to work reliably, without the intrusion of random "oops" class bugs in critical packages, over to Slackware or FreeBSD.

Apparently, Devuan derives from Debian and Veteran Unix Administrators... I took this to mean that the distro would cater to administrators (who, ya know, administer things, like production servers), and inherit the stability and reliabilty of Debian... Rather than turn into another hobby distro for anti-conformist tinkerers with old laptops.
I appear to be mistaken, if the apparent focus on desktop customisation and the attitude I see from many people here have any bearing on things.

As for my bug-tracking skills... That's kinda my point. If my relatively meagre expertise and attention are all that stands between Devuan and undetected broken packages in the repos, we have problems. How am I the only one to have noticed this, in rsyslog of all things?

Altoid wrote:

If you need the type of trust and assurances that Debian has given/gives you, you may want to consider going back to Debian.

I need some level of confidence that I can run headless servers, with unattended upgrades, and not have them break unexpectedly because somebody forgot to change the distro name in a default config or misplaced a patch in a shipping package version.
I especially need them not to stay broken through multiple updates - as happened here until I pointed out the borked script.

Hell, I don't have something as important as system logging go tits-up with a routine upgrade even on my bleeding-edge Gentoo desktop. If Devuan can't match the rollingist of roll-your-own rolling-release distros in terms of core package QA, I really don't know what purpose it serves.

What are we trying to achieve here anyway, Debian without the init upheaval or Debian without the stability and reliability?
Maybe FreeBSD is the answer after all.

rolfie wrote:

Just looked into the Daedalus version, that looks not literally the same but as far as I can tell shows the desired two options.

Yeah, it's just the chimaera-backports package. Dog knows how that happened considering the backports are from daedalus to begin with.

#18 Other Issues » Where do I report bugs in devuan-backports packages? » 2023-03-28 05:48:14

steve_v
Replies: 7

Debian asks that bugs in backports be reported to the debian-backports mailing list, however there appears to be no corresponding information on the Devuan bugtracker page... Do bugs in e.g. chimaera-backports go to the main bugs.devuan.org address or what? Who exactly maintains these packages anyway?

Owing to the above lack of information, I'll post this here for web-search purposes: rsyslog from chimera-backports is currently broken WRT logrotate, due to (the usual) unpatched systemd bullshit. Do I assume this package is pulled direct from debian?

Specifically, the file '/usr/lib/rsyslog/rsyslog-rotate' installed by rsyslog-8.2302.0-1~bpo11+1devuan1 (and 8.2208.0-1~bpo11+1devuan1 before it) contains:

#!/bin/sh

if [ -d /run/systemd/system ]; then
    systemctl kill -s HUP rsyslog.service
fi

Where it should be (and is in rsyslog-8.2102.0-2+devuan3):

#!/bin/sh

if [ -d /run/systemd/system ]; then
    systemctl kill -s HUP rsyslog.service
else
    invoke-rc.d rsyslog rotate > /dev/null
fi

Thus, logrotate fails to HUP rsyslogd if rsyslog is installed from backports, thoroughly borking log rotation (and things that read those logs).

Please, please tell me somebody is actually checking packages (and their config files) for systemd-isms before allowing them into Devuan (-backports), this is not the first time this kind of thing has happened and it is seriously eroding my trust in the distribution.
Syslog is a critical service, breaking it during routine updates is an extremely bad look. Installing backports on debian, by contrast, has caused me no grief at all in the last ~20 years.

#19 Re: Other Issues » [SOLVED] /.config and /.cache with Daedalus » 2023-03-06 04:23:19

Altoid wrote:
# apt purge pulseaudio && apt autoclean && apt autoremove

Much as I too dislike pulseaudio, if one wants such niceties as on-the-fly switching of bluetooth sinks and whatnot, pure ALSA is a PITA.
While it is still far too complicated IMO, pipewire does at least solve some of the more glaring deficiencies of pulseaudio. Anyone wanting modern convenience features on a laptop or such will probably need one or the other.

User479 wrote:

Edit 1: Except the phone and tablet have systemd, of course, and setting up pipewire without that is a bit more complicated.

Edit 2: Actually, the "Alpine solution" turned out to be pretty simple.  pipewire-launcher.sh worked without modifications.

FWIW, I have been playing with pipewire on my (openrc) Gentoo desktop too. Gentoo uses exactly the same pipewire-launcher.sh (anybody's guess who nicked it from who), and while it should work on any distro it does come with one problem - it has no facility for terminating pipewire / wireplumber when the user logs out.
That's not a big deal on a single-user system, nor is it a problem if one has logind set to kill user processes (which in turn breaks the old-school ability to background a task and leave it running after logout though).
If neither of those are true however, it results in stale pipewire processes left running and blocking the sound device when one user logs out and another logs in.

To solve this, I lifted a solution from slackware, namely using daemon to manage the equivalent of systemd "user-units".

The result is 3 autostart files (pipewire, pipewire-pulse, wireplumber), like e.g.:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Pipewire
Comment=PipeWire media server
Exec=/usr/bin/daemon --bind --respawn --pidfiles=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR --name=pipewire /usr/bin/pipewire
Terminal=false
Type=Application
X-GNOME-Autostart-Phase=Initialization
X-KDE-autostart-phase=1
X-GNOME-HiddenUnderSystemd=true
X-KDE-HiddenUnderSystemd=true
X-systemd-skip=true

Zero launcher shell scripts or hacky anti-race sleeps, and the ability to do things like:

$ daemon --list
cdemu
pipewire
pipewire-pulse
pipewire-wireplumber
systembus-notify

As well as stopping, starting, and restarting these user daemons without resorting to pkill and co, giving them pid files, retrying failed starts, and binding to the user's logind session so they exit when they should.

Fractionally more effort (IIRC daemon is in the devuan repos already), but cleaner and more flexible IMO.
Just something to consider, FWIW I strongly suspect we're going to need something like daemon for more than just pipewire in future (I'm also using it for cdemu-daemon and the dbus-notifier part of earlyoom here), as systemd user-units become more popular.

To return to the OT, yes, this /.config and /.cache garbage is created on chimera (default desktop-live/refracta install) as well, and AFAICT the culprit is pulseaudio. Removing pulse will prevent their creation but not remove them if they exist, as they are not tracked by dpkg (for extra nastiness).

Whatever ones opinion of pulseaudio, it shouldn't be creating XDG configuration directories in the system root and so long as devuan is shipping it in the default desktop, I absolutely consider this a bug to be fixed.
I don't have a debian install to compare right now, but my suspicion is that this has to do with pulse assuming systemd and doing broken things when started as root by traditional init (i.e. when XDG_FOO isn't set).

#20 Re: Other Issues » [SOLVED] /.config and /.cache with Daedalus » 2023-03-05 18:44:21

boughtonp wrote:

home directory

If you read the OP, you'll notice that there are no home directories involved at all, so XDG_HOME_WHATEVER has nothing to do with anything.
The directories in question are /.config and /.cache - i.e. hidden directories in the system root.

I don't have the machine with me ATM (I'll check later), but IIRC I've seen the same with a chimaera install, and only where pulseaudio is involved.
Whether this is a bug or just expected janky behaviour for potteringware, it is, at the least, extremely ugly.

#21 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Dying machine? » 2023-02-01 06:36:39

TCH wrote:

how can i debug if the hardware is erroneous?

I'd start by passing 'debug' on the kernel command line and seeing if it spits out anything more useful, then proceed to booting a different operating system to eliminate software entirely.
Most anything will likely do for that, but since the hardware was almost certainly designed to run Windows, as distasteful as it may be that's not a completely terrible option for testing.

As for isolating a hardware fault, the obvious answer would be to try to reproduce the problem in as minimal a configuration as you can. Remove expansion cards and extraneous peripherals, swap or replace PSU, memory modules, that kind of thing.
I don't see a smoking gun in your logs (though I do wonder what exactly pppd is up to at the end there), so a process of elimination would be the next logical step.

Aside, what Altoid said. I have plenty of old hardware, some of it going back to the mid '90s, and it still works just fine.
Assuming something is no good simply because it's old is kinda silly (as is insisting on DOS filename extensions when we have perfectly good magic for that matter).

#22 Re: Other Issues » Scrolling Output in the Console Window » 2023-01-24 20:43:38

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

It's been enabled by default since stretch, at least for the GNOME desktop.

I was unaware that it's enabled by default now, but then I would be, because "expert" mode netinstalls with --no-recommends, and, well, GNOME *shudder*.

#23 Re: Other Issues » Scrolling Output in the Console Window » 2023-01-24 20:33:23

blackhole wrote:

What could possibly go wrong?

IME, very little. unattended-upgrades has been available (as opposed to mandatory, ala microsoft) in debian and derivatives for as long as I can remember, and I have several machines that have been running it for well over a decade without any drama (with one notable recent exception, but that was a "devuan shipped nonfunctional configs", not "unattended-upgrades ate my lunch").

I probably wouldn't bother with it on a desktop pc, but for headless boxes, especially if you have many headless boxes you can't be arsed updating manually one at a time (or remembering they exist for that matter), it's pretty dang handy.

bai4Iej2need wrote:

Scrolled up and down on the local console and it works again.

Wait, what? Are you telling me that this stupid "nobody uses TTYs any more" regression has actually been fixed?

#24 Re: Devuan » My fears about the /usr merge » 2023-01-24 19:40:31

blackhole wrote:

may or may not be in line with a users best interests.

Oh don't be silly, redhat knows your best interests, and they're working hard to turn that nasty open-source "bazaar" of disorganised, quarrelsome nerds and their toys into a shiny, polished, corporate friendly product you can be proud to use. Trust me, you're going to absolutely love it (or else...) tongue

*begins countdown for this "warning" becoming a hard-nope, complete with another asinine "Gentoo folks, this is your wakeup call." from some droid over at freedesktop.org*

#25 Re: Devuan » My fears about the /usr merge » 2023-01-24 07:26:01

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

for people like me it just gives *many* more opportunities to fuck things up.

Stick to the profile defaults then, and it's just Arch with more waste heat and fewer linking problems. @preserved-rebuild goes "Brrr" tongue

As for broken compilers... Well, if you want to break your compiler that's optional as well.

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