Posts by Duke Nukem

Duke Nukem · Desktop and Multimedia

Thanks for the responses. So it may or may not require IMEI (which I had not heard of) that only a phone can give (without some serious hacking) depending on what the server is set up to require. I shall give it a try, but I had not expected that hurdle when I put the question. My first concern though is to choose an Android emulator (to run in VirtualBox) . It seems like Android x86 could be a good choice, Distrowatch counts it as a distro.

Duke Nukem · Desktop and Multimedia

I've been looking for an Android emulator to run in a VM.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid using a smartphone - I do have one but hate it. For example my doctors' practice no longer takes appointment requests via a website, you must use their app, and there are certain things my bank will not let you do on their website but only with their app. In fact there is an increasing general attitude that anyone still using a PC must be a bit shady, possibly a teenage gamer or a black hat hacker, and phone apps are becoming inescapable.

I've looked around and there seem to be quite a few emulators, but most seem oriented towards developing Android apps. I just want one to use as a smartphone, and I want it to run in a VM because I don't want Google (and their thousand "partners") getting their fingers into my main PC.

So any recommendations for an Android emulator?

Duke Nukem · Other Issues

I had this same problem when I went from Chimera to Daedalus, but with Suspend rather than Hibernate. I don't know what the latter kernel version was but it would have been recent. For reasons, I then installed PeppermintOS (2023 version - the latest) which is (optionally) a Devuan derivative, with xfce, and Suspend works fine on it from the desktop icon. I have never tried Hibernate.

Your post prompted me to check my kernel version and it is also 6.1.0-37-amd64, so it is a mystery.

Duke Nukem · Desktop and Multimedia

That has happened to me three or four times too, but with 12Gb of RAM, 26Gb of swap, and uBlockOrigin. It has always happened when in YouTube, either playing a video or just scrolling down the comments. Ctrl-Alt-F1 (or any other F key) did nothing, and I have had to switch off the PC and reboot. Must admit, I have not tried waiting for an hour.

My theory is that it is YouTube, which seems to do all sorts of weird stuff. Sometimes it is extremely slow, like taking 5 seconds per character when I am typing a comment, but closing and re-opening the window speeds it up again. A few months ago it would keep freezing the video then resume after you jump forward a few seconds ("L" key"), but that behaviour has gone. YouTube are known to be waging a war on adblockers so maybe they are trying to stuff dog-knows-what into your PC, which they assume is on Windows of course, and they keep trying new angles : that's my theory anyway.

BTW, shouldn't you swap area be larger than your RAM?

Duke Nukem · Hardware & System Configuration

I have used a Logitech Trackman Wheel for years. They stopped making them long ago and I hate to think of not being able to use one any more, so I have snapped up some used ones from Ebay and have about 8 of them (but I do have 4 PCs). Even used ones are not cheap to buy. I have had microswitches fail so I cannibalise others for spare ones - I can solder. On the later version you can push the ball out from a hole below with the blunt end of a pencil to clean behind it.

I prefer the wired ones because of less to go wrong, and I can't see the point of a wireless trackball unless you are using it from the other side of the room, because unlike a mouse where the wire drags, you don't move a trackball around in use. I can use a trackball in the narrow space between my keyboard and the edge of my desk, and you can spin the ball indefinitely, while a mouse would have run out of space without lifting and replacing. I have used a trackball for so long that I can send the cursor to anywhere on the screen with a flick of my thumb with an accuracy of about 1/4", obviously followed by the final adjustment.

The Logitech Trackman Wheel is right-handed though, I've never seen a left-hand version.

Duke Nukem · Desktop and Multimedia

Trawling though my hard drives to delete old installations and files, I found a colossal (22Gb) file named .xsession-errors in my Daedalus home directory. Some research told me this was an accumulation log of X window session errors, and that some applications are chattering to it all the time.

This https://www.daniloaz.com/en/how-to-prev … huge-size/ website explains it, although it says the file is emptied each time the GUI starts up, of which I am doubtful about because I have been rebooting in and out of Daedalus frequently lately while in the process of installing Peppermint OS (Devuan derivative) - unless this file grows at light speed.

Normally I suspend the PC between use and don't reboot, which the above link says can be the problem. It also says it can crash the PC when the partition fills, in which case it is a bit like the old WIndows 95 bug which we used to laugh about because it crashed Win95 after 49.7 days when some counter filled up - but no-one noticed because it invariably crashed for some other reason first.

Anyway, not being interested in reports about real or imaginary errors that I don't notice, I have followed a suggestion in that website by editing the /etc/X11/Xsession file, replacing the line

ERRFILE=$HOME/.xsession-errors

by

ERRFILE=/dev/null

This sends the error log into a black hole.

Duke Nukem · Devuan Derivatives

Peppermint OS
Devuan based option.
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distr … peppermint

As I was unable to get system suspend to work with Daedalus (either with kde or xfce) despite several re-installations and it having worked under Chimaera I looked around and found that Peppermint is a distro which is based on either Debian or Devuan - your choice at installation. This seems a relatively recent development of Peppermint which was originally based on Ubuntu. This is called the 2023-07-01 version, which is obvioulsy its date.

It was a fairly smooth installation with a minimal set of packages, not even a browser, which suits me so I can choose things myself, but not beginner friendly. On the first try it stuffed everything except swap into a single partition despite my defining separate root and home, but I wiped and re-installed and realised I'd missed a step the first time, one that was easy to miss.

It was also a bit annoying that it does not allow you to set up a root account during installation, expecting you to do the "sudo says" nonsense. I set it up post installation. I have never understood the point of the sudo method as it has little security and is a real nuisance if you need a long admin session, like I have been setting up my 15 disk partitions and other stuff. I suppose it is to remind you that you are doing something at admin level, but my root has a red bash prompt for that.

Duke Nukem · Hardware & System Configuration

It goes to "Sleep" but won't wake. Desktop PC using Daedalus, image 6.1.0-27-amd64, on a ASUS M5A97 R2.0 Mobo, with AMI BIOS 2603, XFX Radeon RX 480 graphics, PS/2 keyboard.

From the web, this seems a common problem across many distros, with numerous "solutions" which work for some but not others. "Solutions" have included increasing the swap file size, keeping USB ports open to signals, and waggling the mouse around. Frustratingly, the problem is often declared "Solved" and a thread closed when it is only solved for the one OP user, or when someone points to a "solution" given years ago.

When I try to wake by pressing a key or the power button, the system unit fans restart but the monitor screen stays black and its indicating lights show no signal being received. As an experiment I have sent it to sleep with a terminal session open, "woken" it by pressing a key, and then blindly typed in a command to make an audible beep - and get no beep. I can only do a full power off and restart.

Maybe related, when I go to a full screen text session (Ctrl-Alt-F1) and then return to GUI session (Ctrl-Alt-F7), I am placed at the GUI log-in screen and find nothing has been saved.

Things that don't work for me, some being those suggested solutions :

Trying to wake by pressing a key, waggling the mouse, pressing the power button, or pressing the reboot button
Trying to wake after sending to sleep by the menu in the GUI
Trying to wake after installing pm-utils and sending to sleep with "pm-suspend" from a su command line
Ensuring swap partition/file is larger than RAM (surely this would only affect Hybernate and not Sleep?)
Not sharing the swap partition/file with another distro
Ensuring swap partition in fstab has same UUID as in cfdisk as "Filesystem UUID"
Ensuring /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume file points to same UUID as swap in fsstab
.. followed by update-initramfs -u and reboot
Fresh install of Daedalus on a dedicated drive with three partitions - root, home and unshared swap. (My data is on another drive)

There have been suggestions that it is a kernel bug, also a plot between Microsoft and the BIOS makers. My money is on the kernel bug, or some oversight in the installation scripting.

Anyway, I 'm not prepared to work without the sleep mode so I wiped that Daedalus drive and intalled Chimaera, image 5.10.0-9-amd64, in the same way, adding pm-utils. Sleep from "pm-suspend" and waking with the power button works in Chimaera.

Any better ideas, or future bug fix, would be welcome.

Duke Nukem · Installation

Thanks for that.

Duke Nukem · Installation

During Daedalus installation (and previous Devuan versions) from an ISO image there is a point at which I am asked to choose between :

linux-image-6.1.0-27-amd64
linux-image-amd64

(There is also an option of no kernel). What is the difference and which should you choose? AFAIR the latter was already highlighted as the default. This might not be the latest kernel version as I downloaded this image a while ago, but the question stands.

Duke Nukem · Installation

GlennW wrote:

... a selection box near the bottom left corner, really hard to see...

Yes, white screen, and found it. Thanks for that. It is invisible until you roll the mouse over it whereupon it shows a thin rectangular outline. Clicking in it brings up a choice between Wayland and X11. Did they intend that only the cognoscenti are aware of the option? Simple Screen Recorder now works, so it must have made a difference

Duke Nukem · Installation

The login manager is sddm.

Duke Nukem · Installation

Having installed Daedalus with KDE, I am finding some stuff does not work, for example Simple Screen Recorder. This is because Daedalus installed with Wayland rather than the X window system (I don't recall being offered a choice) and eg Simple Screen Recorder does not support Wayland (or vice-versa). My package manager Synaptic tells me that x11 is installed, but it seems that Daedalus is not using it. What do I need to do to tell Daedalus to boot using x11 and not Wayland? To comment or uncomment some lines in /etc perhaps?

Googling for help found some discussion on how to do this for Gnome, but it involved some files that do not exist in my Deadalus/KDE installation.

Duke Nukem · Off-topic

boughtonp wrote:

Duke Nukem wrote:
I will stop using YT is this goes on.
Statements like that are meaningless. Even if YouTube saw it, they don't care.

It is just a statement of fact, and means no more and no less than that. Yes, I'm sure YT won't care.

Duke Nukem · Off-topic

In the last couple of days I have had ads showing up at the start of YouTube videos (I use YT quite a lot). By using uBlock Origin on Firefox I have not seen ads for a long time, so I guess YT have recently upped their anti-adblocking game. There are usually two ads and can last up to a minute. In fact I hear the ad but the screen is black so I guess uBlock is half-working.

Anyone else found this? Perhaps there is a uBlock Origin update to counter it? I will stop using YT is this goes on.

Duke Nukem · Installation

I did a fresh install after re-formatting the partition (I could not upgrade from Ascii) and the sources.list is whatever it defaulted to. I first tried to install Chimaera (that was just before Daedalus was released) and found the same problem. Here are the lines with "non-free" in the sources.list that the Daedalus installation gave me :-

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

Duke Nukem · Installation

I have a GeForce GTX460 card which worked under Ascii with driver version 390.116 (as nvidia-detect tells me)

I have now installed Daedalus, apparently successfully, until I try to boot it - when the screen goes blank during the boot messages just after the "populating /dev" message and a couple of lines after it changes font (going into a graphical mode?). The disk drive seems to stop shortly after that. Thinking I could go into a text screen (ie Ctrl-Alt-F1) to try installing drivers from a command prompt like it says on the Nvidia web page https://www.nvidia.co.uk/download/drive … 6226/en-uk, I found that was completely blank too. I guess the boot process had not just vanished from the screen, it had stopped completely. This happens in the advanced recovery boot mode too.

Fortunately I still have Ascii on a different partition (I'm using it now) and that does work with the GTX460. I have also tried an older GeForce GT430 and found that works with both Ascii and Daedalus, and the Nvidia website says both cards use the same drivers (the latest version of which is 390.157).

I would prefer to use the newer and faster GTX460 card (for games). Can anyone tell me what is going on?

Duke Nukem · Desktop and Multimedia

My workaround has been to create a bash script with the above full command and save it as ~/bin/gpg_script. That allowed me to create a kde menu entry using that script name without needing the filename, options or pipes. Obviously I ticked the "Run in Terminal" box in the Advanced tab. It is a nuisance that the kde menu seems less powerful than it was before, unless I have missed something.

Duke Nukem · Desktop and Multimedia

I have just installed Daedalus which came with kde v5.27.5. The menu editor is not allowing me to add an item such as this :

gpg -d /home/dukenukem/secrets.gpg |less

I was previously using Devuan Ascii with whatever its default kde version was, and it allowed me to specify a complete command line such as the one above. Now however the menu editor splits the command into a "Program" field and a "Command-Line Arguments" field. I have tried putting "gpg" in the "Program" field and the rest in the the "Command-Line Arguments" field, and also tried putting it all in the "Program" field. I have also tried omiting the "|less". But the best I get is a brief flash of a terminal window.

The above command works fine in a terminal. In the "Advanced" tab of the menu editor I have the "Run in Terminal" tab ticked.

Is there a way around this? What was the idea of splitting up the command - an attempt to dumb things down? It is very frustrating if you can no longer put a staightforward bash command into the menu editor.

Duke Nukem · Desktop and Multimedia

I can't help you, but I'm posting to confirm I found exactly the same. Not only does it claim I have no internet connection, but it reckons I have nothing installed either - crazy.

I don't even know what Discover is, partly because its developers must have thought it was cool not to enable (at least by default) a menu bar, so I cannot do a Help/About, and I can't be bothered to dig deeper. I'm guessing it is yet another front end for apt, but aptitude works fine for me. On the same subject I notice that Synaptic is not installed by default.

Duke Nukem · Installation

Thanks for that, now solved. Assumptions confirmed BTW.

As I had been using Ascii day-to-day until now (I had only installed Chimaera experimentally) I had not previously encountered the new need to add a dash suffix to the su command to get root's environment settings, and hence get the system apps in the path. I fail to see the point of this change, but still ...

I also needed to enable os-prober in grub (for the benefit of other readers, the file /etc/default/grub), by uncommenting the existing "false" line :

# If your computer has multiple operating systems installed, then you
# probably want to run os-prober. However, if your computer is a host
# for guest OSes installed via LVM or raw disk devices, running
# os-prober can cause damage to those guest OSes as it mounts
# filesystems to look for things.
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false

Shame that update-grub interpreted my DOS FAT partition as a Windows7 installation, but I guess you can't have everything, and I suppose I could change the name if I edited /boot/grub/grub.cfg, despite the dire warning at the top not to do so.

Duke Nukem · Installation

I updated Chimaera to Daedalus with the "apt-get upgrade" and "apt-get dist-upgrade" commands. I also have an Ascii installation on a different partition on the same HDD, and Windows and DOS on two further different HDDs. With Chimera I had the ability to boot into all those and I want to keep that ability.

For safety during the Daedalus upgrade I unmounted the Ascii partition, my data partitions, and physically disconnected the Windows HDD. I left the DOS HDD connected because it was too hard to reach.

As expected after the installation the Grub menu did not show Ascii or Windows, nor (surprisingly) DOS. So after reconnecting everything and mounting the Ascii partition I tried to run "update-grub" and it said "Command not found". So I tried "apt-get install update-grub" and it said "Unable to locate package update-grub". I'm using root of course. I then tried "grub-mkconfig" with the same result. Yet I can see the man pages of these commands. My sources.list is as recommended by Devuan's upgrade-to-daedalus page.

So is "update-grub" no longer avaiable and if so is there a replacement? According to aptitude I have grub-common, grub-pc, grub-pc-bin and grub2-common installed. How do I get out of this fix other than wiping the Daedalus partition and doing a fresh installation of it?

Duke Nukem · Desktop and Multimedia

Kye ( www.kye.me.uk ) A puzzle game with hundreds of levels (+ design your own). There is a Python version for Linux. This website explains it, but for the Python Kye download, follow link from its Links page.

PRBoom ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/prboom/ ) A port of Doom, with a Linux version

Soma ( https://www.somagame.com/ ) Available for Linux, Mac and Windows

Duke Nukem · Installation

ralph.ronnquist wrote:

In order to deal with exfat file systems, you need to have the exfat-fuse and exfat-utils packages installed.

I had never heard of exfat and Wikipedia says it is a file system for flash drives etc. Surely my hard drives formated under Windows as NTFS would not be exfat? I understood that the "Type" shown eg by cfstab (Type 7 in this case and described as "HPFS/NTFS/exFAT") is purely nominal and is not used functionally by modern Linux - you could call it what type you like and it would make no difference, or so I thought.

Duke Nukem · Installation

PedroReina wrote:

Could we see the exact command you tried and the error you got? I mean, from the command line.

OK :-

[root@mesh-devuan:~] # mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb2 /mnt/windows/
ntfs-3g: Failed to access volume '/dev/sdb2': No such file or directory

ntfs-3g 2014.2.15AR.2 integrated FUSE 28 - Third Generation NTFS Driver
                Configuration type 7, XATTRS are on, POSIX ACLS are on

Copyright (C) 2005-2007 Yura Pakhuchiy
Copyright (C) 2006-2009 Szabolcs Szakacsits
Copyright (C) 2007-2014 Jean-Pierre Andre
Copyright (C) 2009 Erik Larsson

Usage:    ntfs-3g [-o option[,...]] <device|image_file> <mount_point>

Options:  ro (read-only mount), windows_names, uid=, gid=,
          umask=, fmask=, dmask=, streams_interface=.
          Please see the details in the manual (type: man ntfs-3g).

Example: ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows

News, support and information:  http://tuxera.com

FWIW I get exactly the same result with mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb2 /mnt/windows/ and ntfs-3g /dev/sdb2 /mnt/windows/

blkid shows info about the other drives but sdb does not appear at all.

This is ASCII and ntfs-3g is installed. It would seem the problem is with non-recognition of the partitions' existence and it does not even get as far as trying to read the file system. I'm wondering if partitions created in Windows have a different indexing or header or something, which is why Linux does not recognise them. It is an older mother board without UEFI.

sdd1 and sdd2 are vfat partitions and they can be mounted with no problem in Linux.

The officially official Devuan Forum!

#1 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » Android in a VM - recommendations? » 2025-06-14 13:08:57

#2 Desktop and Multimedia » Android in a VM - recommendations? » 2025-06-13 11:33:44

#3 Re: Other Issues » Daedalus kernel upgrade from 6.1.0-35 to 6.1.0.37 breaks hibernate » 2025-06-06 19:32:31

#4 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » Desktop locking up / temp freezes » 2025-06-02 12:24:47

#5 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Which Trackball device? » 2025-05-27 10:20:33

#6 Desktop and Multimedia » [SOLVED] .xsession-errors file » 2025-05-27 09:46:18

#7 Re: Devuan Derivatives » List of Devuan derivatives » 2025-05-07 12:49:36

#8 Hardware & System Configuration » Desktop won't wake from sleep [again] » 2025-02-09 21:12:41

#9 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] Kernel choice during installation » 2025-02-08 22:14:39

#10 Installation » [SOLVED] Kernel choice during installation » 2025-02-08 20:45:16

#11 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] How to Choose X11 and not Wayland at Boot » 2023-10-14 18:28:48

#12 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] How to Choose X11 and not Wayland at Boot » 2023-10-12 19:19:40

#13 Installation » [SOLVED] How to Choose X11 and not Wayland at Boot » 2023-10-12 16:34:21

#14 Re: Off-topic » Ads on YouTube » 2023-09-25 15:57:13

#15 Off-topic » Ads on YouTube » 2023-09-25 09:29:49

#16 Re: Installation » Nvidia Problem (again) » 2023-09-25 09:09:32

#17 Installation » Nvidia Problem (again) » 2023-09-24 19:40:53

#18 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » [SOLVED] kde Menu Editor - Command Lines Not Allowed? » 2023-09-13 18:35:15

#19 Desktop and Multimedia » [SOLVED] kde Menu Editor - Command Lines Not Allowed? » 2023-09-12 10:00:48

#20 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » KDE Desktop - Discover says I'm offline » 2023-08-27 11:48:09

#21 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] update-grub not working » 2023-08-26 15:47:01

#22 Installation » [SOLVED] update-grub not working » 2023-08-26 09:29:41

#23 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » What games do you play on Devuan?? » 2019-04-27 19:49:52

#24 Re: Installation » NTFS Partitions not recognised » 2019-02-04 20:45:13

#25 Re: Installation » NTFS Partitions not recognised » 2019-02-04 20:33:47

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