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#301 Re: Off-topic » What do you think about electric cars? » 2024-03-06 11:14:18

sun to produce H2

Ahh the old hydrgen drum...
* Extremely low energy density.
* Requires exotic tankage or cryogenics for any attempt to overcome (1)
* Is very, very energy inefficient to produce by any current "green" process (which is why most industrial hydrogen is produced through reforming natural gas).
* Is a complete bastard to work with, as it's low molecular weight means it leaks through just about everything.
* Is arguably more dangerous than either petrol or lithium-based batteries, due to its broad explosive range.

If you want to use solar to run a car, frankly you're better off with batteries for most use cases.

one-person-plus-one-child cars

bicycle... bicycle... bicycle... ad nauseum

Tell that to people who need to move a couple hundred Kg of tools and equipment for their job... Or travel from outside of urban centres... Or have more than one child... Or a disability...  Or point-to-point freight in general for that matter... Or any number of other situations where tiny vehicles or bicycles are completely inappropriate.

"Pedal power" is part of the solution. It's a long way from the whole story. Likewise rail and electrified public transport.
Just continuing to shout "everyone needs to get on a bike" is exactly as effective as "everyone needs to get an EV", all it does is make transport of everything too heavy or distant to put on a bicycle somebody else's problem.

Driving a 2-ton SUV to get milk is patently ridiculous... But so is insisting that everyone should ditch their private vehicles and "just get a bike".

has been around since 1879 on the railway with now only 20% of the energy consumption of the trucking industry.

Indeed. Even leaving out the electric part and comparing diesel trains to diesel trucks it's no contest.
What trains can't do however is roll up outside your house with whatever tat you ordered on amazon 2 days ago. The current lazy online shopper generation is fuelling road transport pretty hard right now.

As ever, what people really want is a "Buy now and fix climate change"/"Spend and feel morally superior" button. Big corporate (and EV manufacturers) are of course all too happy to oblige, and governments to turn a blind-eye to how ineffectual all that is so long as they can be seen to be promoting something with a nice thick coat of green paint on it.

Meanwhile the real elephants in the room (of which private transport is decidedly small-fry) go conspicuously unnoticed, and the solutions we do have go unimplemented, largely due to being expensive or inconvenient - either personally or politically.

#302 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] Beowulf to Chimaera - precautions » 2024-03-06 07:16:23

To use Clonezilla, you would need to boot to a live CD/DVD/USB system that (preferably) comes with Clonezilla.

Or just use clonezilla live, which is lightweight, Debian-based (though that also means systemd, unfortunately), and allows for things like easy creation of bare-metal recovery media.

On the OP... The only way to be sure is to send it. Personally I have machines that have been dist-upgraded all the way from Lenny, and while there are always things to attend to they are usually pretty minor and far less trouble than a fresh install - especially if you avoid leaving it until you are multiple releases behind stable.

Either way, if you don't like the result you just restore your backup (or swap drives if you go for a live clone). No harm, no foul.

#303 Re: Off-topic » What do you think about electric cars? » 2024-03-06 06:44:58

Electric traction? Sure. We've had that in various forms for ages, and advances in battery technology have now made it viable (if still a mite explodey) for the private automobile.
Electric traction as the solution to anthropomorphic climate change on the other hand... That's just another episode of the same old consumerist "magic pill" bullshit... See quickfur's excellent coverage above.

Now, that's not to say I wouldn't want to own an electric vehicle. They do have some advantages, particularly where relatively clean electricity is cheap and charging infrastructure isn't woefully inadequate.

However... As far as I can see, it's next to impossible to really own any modern vehicle, regardless of powerplant. So if someone would like to point out an EV that isn't a rolling spyware platform full of obnoxious "safety" features designed explicitly to piss me off and prevent my vehicle from doing what I tell it to, I'm listening...
Otherwise I'll stick to my simple, obedient '70s and '80s tech. No cameras, no GPS, no manufacturer phone-home or remote killswitches, no feature subscriptions, no touchscreens, no driver attention monitoring, and most important of all, no goddamn incessant beeping about every trivial thing.

As for fission vs (fossil fuel) combustion, "clean"ness and timescales... Sure. The only missing component there is that we have some viable solutions for processing and containing spent fission fuel on the table. Carbon capture and storage on the other hand is a complete joke if you take even a cursory look at the numbers (and volume) involved.

#304 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Daedalus 5.0.0 desktop-live shutdown problem » 2024-03-02 12:23:47

Whether the blacklist completely disables it, I don’t know.

I doubt it.

“CONFIG_TCG_TPM=y”

Indicates TPM support is compiled in, so blacklisting modules will not disable it unless an additional driver (compiled as a module) is also required for this hardware.
Easy enought to test though, just recompile the kernel with that option unset.

#305 Re: Installation » Installing from src and apt » 2024-02-11 01:28:22

Altoid wrote:

It has already made it to Debian trixie and as a result, to Devuan ceres.

If it's already in unstable, 99% of the work is done and the best option is probably a simple backport.

Altoid wrote:

gdebi says there is a dependency problem - version of libc6 needs to be higher than the one installed.

That's only because the binary was built against that version, a problem which will go away by itself if you recompile it as above.

#306 Re: Installation » Installing from src and apt » 2024-02-10 17:22:44

Suggestion 1: Build a proper Debian package, based on the version available in the repos. If it's just a version bump (i.e. no new dependencies), the 'uupdate' utility from devscripts makes this very easy.
Quick version (details in relevant manuals or here):
Get the source tree for the existing package with your choice of apt-src, apt-get source, dget, or manual download and unpack, and the new upstream tarball.
Run 'uupdate' from the source tree top level (i.e. beside "debian"), giving it the new upstream archive.
Fix any patches, where applicable.
Update the changelog with 'dch'.
Build the new (unsigned) package with 'dpkg-buildpackage -b -us -uc'.

Suggestion 2: If all you want is a .deb and you don't care how nice it is (or intend to redistribute it), just use checkinstall. Does much as boughtonp described above, but with more magic and less manually finding all the files 'make install' drops.

#307 Re: Other Issues » [SOLVED] Devuan 5 Installation without Grub » 2024-02-01 10:34:59

aluma wrote:

All the user needs to do is point the mouse.
Envy, honestly.

Yeah, nah. Why?
First you need a mouse and a GUI, both of which make it a non-starter for serial console or SSH on headless machines. Then you've got the not-uncommon gpu-driver/KMS shenanigans, and on top of that you're dependent on a particular tool on a particular live disc that you will sooner or later not have handy.

That's without even starting on all the fun to be had with "automatic" repair tools if the system has an unusual bootloader, custom boot configuration or chainloading, RAID, root-on-ZFS, netboot, the list of things such tools will probably either not handle properly or completely louse up goes on.

OTOH, pretty much every bootable GNU/Linux media in existence has mount and chroot, and once you're in that way you have all the tools and existing configuration of the installed OS right there.
You also have the opportunity to fix the problem properly the first time and verify that the installed tools (i.e. update-grub, update-initramfs, dpkg configuration etc.) can reliably update the bootloader for next time.

Why reinvent a perfectly good (and not particularly oft-used) wheel just to make your mouse pointer feel useful?

aluma wrote:

Maybe there is a way to run refractainstaller only to install the bootloader?

Or you could just chroot in and do 'dpkg-reconfigure grub-[insert platform]', which is pretty much how d-i installs the bootloader anyways and should suffice for most scenarios.
Personally I have no use whatsoever for refractainstaller, but if I were a betting man I'd say that's what it calls for the bootloader step too.

#308 Re: Other Issues » [SOLVED] Devuan 5 Installation without Grub » 2024-02-01 04:02:08

Short version for general fixing of bootloaders or otherwise unbootable installs: Boot a livecd with a similar-ish kernel version (e.g. matching install media), chroot into your install, install/fix/reconfigure bootloader.

Generic UEFI version here, or many other places on the 'net. Anything more specific would require more information on your install partition layout etc. etc.

#309 Re: Devuan » Praise for the security updates » 2024-01-26 12:12:21

if a window is hijacked, X11 also leaks the data from the other windows to the attacker.

That's not a bug, it's a design decision.
X was not developed for personal computers, it's fundamentally a graphical mainframe technology. In that scenario the trust model is inverted WRT a PC - i.e. the network is secure, applications are served from the mainframe and implicitly trusted, the terminal running the xserver is not.

X is as secure as it has ever been and (at least for now) it's still getting patches for any newly discovered issues, but the core design concepts don't transfer particularly well to the age of software-as-an-enemy... Then again, as long as you don't run untrusted applications that might want to screenscrape or keylog you, you're fine.

#310 Re: Documentation » How to: Devuan 5 Daedalus an pipewire » 2024-01-23 18:09:33

I kinda did, a few posts earlier in this thread:

steve_v wrote:

using daemon to manage pipewire (and cdemu, which has the same problems). Binding to the user session requires [e]logind and backporting daemon from unstable

daemon has very few dependencies, so a backport is trivial.

#311 Re: Documentation » How to: Devuan 5 Daedalus an pipewire » 2024-01-23 09:20:30

mirrortokyo wrote:

This seems to be a bit of a rough hack.

It is, and writing custom shell hacks for every user-session "daemon" that doesn't bother to behave like a daemon because systemd user units exist isn't a particularly elegant or sustainable solution.

If Devuan is going to transition to pipewire following upstream Debian, we're going to need a better answer than "user finds random script / autostart / .xinitrc hints on the 'net" for starting and stopping its services.
IMO some kind of process supervisor (be it part of an init system or standalone) is the only realistic (and reliable) option, and I already mentioned one possibility. Another might be adapting supervise-daemon or runits runsvdir, or running dinit in a user-session context.

This BS is only going to become more common, pipewirwe is just the thin end of this particular freedesktop/redhat/ibm wedge.

FWIW (in case I haven't mentioned it already elsewhere, which I probably have) my current solution is daemon, and these three lines:

/usr/bin/daemon --bind --respawn --pidfiles=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR --name=pipewire /usr/bin/pipewire
/usr/bin/daemon --bind --respawn --pidfiles=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR --name=pipewire-pulse /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse
/usr/bin/daemon --bind --respawn --pidfiles=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR --name=pipewire-wireplumber /usr/bin/wireplumber

In 3 autostart files (or wherever else you might want them).

Order no longer matters and sleep / while loop hacks are eliminated, because --respawn.
Pipewire not exiting with the user session is fixed (without pkill hacks), because --bind.
Pipewire not doing any of the other things a daemon should do (like writing a pid file or detaching from stdout and forking into the background) is also fixed, and --name and --pidfiles allow for e.g.

$ daemon --list --verbose
cdemu is running (pid 4577) (client pid 4578)
pipewire is running (pid 4573) (client pid 4574)
pipewire-pulse is running (pid 4568) (client pid 4572)
pipewire-wireplumber is running (pid 4547) (client pid 4549)
systembus-notify is running (pid 4583) (client pid 4587)

If you don't want pipewire noise in your xsession log (or want it in it's own logfile), daemon can fix that too with the --output, --stdout, and --stderr switches.

The cost for all this convenience is ~170KB of memory per managed process (on-par with supervise-daemon). Make of it what you will. As much as I like shell, IMO this is a much cleaner solution.

#312 Re: Installation » DropBox App Install » 2024-01-18 04:05:20

alexkemp wrote:

Sorry if my request that someone else consider connecting with DropBox & asking that they consider Devuan as another OS to align their Apps to was so outrageous.

More amusing than outrageous IMO. Nobody is going to contact commercial software vendors for you, least of all Devuan developers, maintainers or forum admins.
Frankly I doubt anyone cares very much at all, since there are supported FOSS alternatives already in the repos.

Devuan "supports" software that devuan packages. If you want to install some random proprietary package you downloaded from the 'net, deciding whether it's "safe" or not is your gig and nobody else's.

Posts along the lines of "Can someone do $thing for me, I don't have time" don't tend to win many friends in FOSS circles unless you are otherwise productively contributing to a project, and you run a real risk of coming across as "My time is more valuable than yours".

#313 Re: Forum Feedback » Forum Login Security » 2024-01-17 10:45:53

Nietz wrote:

Do any other users have concerns about logging in through an insecure portal?

No. I don't reuse passwords, the probability of somebody running a MITM attack on my login to a random forum is miniscule, and even if they did and managed to impersonate me here, who the hell would care?

Nietz wrote:

should our forum login page be over a secure connection?

It is. If you do somehow get redirected to the login form over HTTP (which I haven't seen myself), that's easy to prevent on the browser end with the likes of the HTTPS-everywhere extension.

This ubiquitous bleating about HTTPS with complete disregard for attack surface, user responsibility and basic password hygiene, or even relevance is quite tiring.
Security is a process, not "if [[ ${URL bar} =~ "padlock icon"  ]]; then sleep; else panic; fi".

#314 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] Can't install linux-image-amd64 » 2024-01-14 12:49:58

More usr-merge borkage (esp. post #32). To be expected running unstable right now.
Merge your usr directories, or manually symlink the missing binaries (and expect to have to keep doing that until an official word on this comes down).

#315 Re: Documentation » How to: Devuan 5 Daedalus an pipewire » 2024-01-07 16:20:32

GlennW wrote:

Somewhere I read the starting order was important... but mine looks different.

mirrortokyo wrote:

This appears to work better than stopAI's simpler script.

Just reporting back that GlennW's script seems to work well.

That script is a simplified version of what Gentoo and Slackware (and likely other non-systemd distros) are using to start pipewire.

PW doesn't daemonise properly, exit with the user's session, or manage it's own instances and ordering, instead relying on systemd user units for all that.
The 1 second sleep is required for reliability, and killing pipewire processes avoids not having sound after a logout -> login (unless you have elogind and KillUserProcesses=yes, which kills everything).

Personally I got rid of all that hacky mess, and am using daemon to manage pipewire (and cdemu, which has the same problems). Binding to the user session requires [e]logind and backporting daemon from unstable, but also neatly solves the "pipewire doesn't exit with session" problem.

#316 Re: Devuan » [SOLVED] Stop LXDE from being automatically started » 2024-01-06 05:47:53

aluma wrote:

Runlevel 1 boots without a network.

Well, yeah. That's kinda the point - "single user mode", no network, no services, just a single local console login for maintenance or troubleshooting. Sysv came from unix mainframes and all that.

Mike wrote:

Steve_v you mention adding to the kernel command line. Would that be editing /boot/config-6.1.69 and the param: CONFIG_CMDLINE?
A line at the top of that fle says: # Automatically generated file; DO NOT EDIT.

That's the saved kernel configuration (i.e. a copy of /usr/src/linux/.config) for the installed linux-image package, and that parameter records the default command line (if one was) specified when the kernel was compiled.

While you could recompile the kernel to change the command line, that's work, and not how most sane people do it.
Try your bootloader configuration instead tongue
Assuming you're using GRUB, permanent changes can be made by editing /etc/default/grub (GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX variable), and running 'update-grub'.
For a one-off, you can just edit the command line (starts with 'linux=<image name>') directly from the bootloader screen by hitting 'e' on a boot entry.

The display above is sysv-rc-conf. Convenient perhaps, but not really necessary as it's just a TUI frontend for update-rc.d.

#317 Re: Devuan » [SOLVED] Stop LXDE from being automatically started » 2024-01-05 19:15:07

TBH the first thing I'd do is see if the system will boot to single user mode (pass "single" or "1" on the kernel command line)... But again, boot issues are difficult to diagnose remotely, so more options more better.
I mention sysrq because when getting a working shell to see what's going on or fix something is the goal, sometimes a large hammer (e.g. "Kernel, kindly kill with fire everything except init") is the most effective tool.

#319 Re: Devuan » [SOLVED] Stop LXDE from being automatically started » 2024-01-05 17:20:54

Magic sysrq is a kernel facility, docs here.
SAK (ctrl-alt-sysrq-k) is Secure Attention (or Access) Key and kills everything on the current tty except login.
Unraw (ctrl-alt-sysrq-r) switches the keyboard to xlate mode, which can be useful to wrest keyboard control from a misbehaving or crashed X process.
The term and kill commands might also be useful, in the case some init script or daemon has gone rampant tongue

#320 Re: Devuan » [SOLVED] Stop LXDE from being automatically started » 2024-01-05 11:57:39

Default Debian installation does not make any difference between runlevels 2-5. You may customize them to your liking. Runlevels S (single) and 1 are used for maintenance.

The common xdm only in runlevel 5 convention comes from somewhere else, I forget exactly where.

#321 Re: Devuan » [SOLVED] Stop LXDE from being automatically started » 2024-01-05 03:26:22

You might try the usual tricks, like issuing a sysrq unraw or sak at an unresponsive login prompt, booting into runlevel 1 or S from the kernel command line, or at a pinch just passing sulogin (or even just sh) as init to boot direct to a shell and bypass normal startup altogether.

The "recovery shell" you mention is probably either runlevel 1 (or the synonymous "single") as above, or an initrd shell you'll be dropped into if the root fs is unavailable. Pretty sure Devuan has those and always has.

The apparmor stuff is probably harmless, for some unfathomable reason it keeps getting pulled in unless you pin it, then complains because it's not configured properly. In all it's kind of difficult to diagnose something like this from here without seeing the boot process.

#322 Re: Installation » Howto install dual-boot Windows Linux best method » 2024-01-05 01:36:53

Dude, shuddup (or sober up). Your posts are barely coherent at best, and swearing at the admins isn't going to win you any popularity contests.

#323 Re: Devuan » [SOLVED] Stop LXDE from being automatically started » 2024-01-05 01:19:51

Personally I think Devuan should move to openrc as default, and pool init documentation (and service scripts) with Gentoo, Artix, Alpine and Nitrux (and maybe even GhostBSD, which is pretty cool as far as BSD desktops go wink).
But that's just me. While it does still do what it should, I have no particular love of sysv, insserv or LSB.

#324 Re: Devuan » [SOLVED] Stop LXDE from being automatically started » 2024-01-05 00:43:20

Mike wrote:

Itś been so long since I ran a sysV init system that I had forgotten to look in /etc/init.d/

To add insult, it's pretty difficult to find information on sysv on the 'net at large these days, as most distros have replaced the content of their online manuals and wikis with systemd stuff (as opposed to keeping both).
The debian manual for example lists sysvinit-core and insserv under "List of boot utilities", then goes on to talk about systemd and only systemd. So much for init diversity roll

OTOH, that does incentivise the local use of 'man' and 'apropos' rather than looking for lazy howtos online, which can't be a bad thing tongue

#325 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » Upcoming browser changes » 2024-01-04 22:48:52

zapper wrote:

If you not having problems, with discourse, then no need to worry.

Browsers aside, I prefer "If you not having problems with discourse, then you need to worry.", or simply "If you're using discourse, you have a problem." tongue
That thing is the most obnoxious "forum" software I have ever had the misfortune to encounter.

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