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#151 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » [SOLVED] Nvidia error at boot » 2021-03-15 02:03:48
After installing the proprietary driver in beowulf 3.1 I've got this same thing again. But once again the actual video performance seems to be fine. It still seems to me like something involved in the install process is not being removed properly.
#152 Re: Installation » I just installed Devuan 3.1.0 Beowulf and it's cool » 2021-03-13 03:12:30
Hey, I just installed 3.1 yesterday from the devuan_beowulf_3.1.0_amd64-desktop.iso rather than a net install. Since it's so new, there isn't much to download to be up-to-date. 
But since this has kicked off a discussion of new install issues, I'll post here.
Over-all the install was very smooth, which is indeed 'cool'... Most things 'just work', but there were some glitches. Current gripes:
* multiple desktops on the same system:
Since I have been avoiding KDE and Gnome like the plague since their respective 4.x bloat disasters, I wanted to see what MATE and Cinnamon were like. XFCE is my favorite desktop right now, so I like that it is default in Devuan. But if KDE and Gnome can go insane, who knows if XFCE might also? Though I haven't had time to experiment with them yet, I'm still configuring XFCE to my preferred state, I noticed something odd after installing all three. Some of the component accessories, like gnome terminal and the Pluma editor, have 'bled through' into my XFCE install, popping up by default instead of the XFCE equivalents. Shouldn't the elements of the different desktop systems be kept together, and separate from each other, by default? Seems kinda sloppy to have these parts appearing in XFCE.
* Network manager and WICD and Bluetooth?
This is a desktop with no bluetooth or Wifi devices attached. Why would I get WICD and Bluetooth just automatically added to my system? I'm considering uninstalling them, but am a bit concerned that there might be some sort of tangled dependency that pulled them in. So these do more than just service external devices that I do not have?
* sensors and gkrellm
This is always a problem with every new install. Some of the hardware sensors work, some do not. Even after running sensors-detect. I've got all the temp sensors working, even the HD with the hddtemp daemon. But the fan sensors do not work, and they did work in ascii. But it's now been so long that I don't recall what I did, if anything special, to get the fan sensors working. Weirdly, the entries for both the cpu and gpu fan are there in the fan sector, but if I check them there is no readout. So something is 'partially' working in that it thinks there are sensors but can't read them.
* gkrellweather
This is not fixed in beowulf. The script now works, so they have at least updated that for the new location of the NOAA weather data. But the default location of that script in the config file is still wrong. I had to edit and change "/usr/local/share/gkrellm/GrabWeather" to "/usr/share/gkrellm/GrabWeather" and will have to do that again if I ever change the config because it will still write that wrong location when it re-writes the file. Why couldn't someone fix this very simple thing?
* stubby
One of my major motivations for upgrading to beowulf was that stubby was finally available by default and I could just install DNS-over-TLS cleanly and quickly. It seems to work, but I don't know how to verify that. How do you test that your system is using TLS to connect to the DNS providers?
Since I'm just getting started, there will probably be more discoveries. But these are the current outstanding issues.
#153 Re: ARM Builds » Is a Devuan build for the new Apple M1 chip possible? » 2021-02-19 18:54:16
Such intense Apple hate... Are they really any worse than Intel? It was sheer accident that IBM created a generic enough machine in their first PC that it could be cloned and actual competition became possible in the computer market. Apple has been much more careful, but still has not been able to totally control their hardware. We've had 'Boot Camp' for the Intel-based MACs since about a year after they appeared. I would hope and expect that something similar will be available for their ARM-based machines soon. It might be Android and Linux rather than Windows, but there will be fully functional OSes for these machines other than Apple's proprietary walled-garden.
#154 Re: News & Announcements » Devuan Beowulf 3.1.0 point release » 2021-02-19 18:47:32
Where is the torrent for this? When I try to find a torrent for Devuan Beowulf I can only find the old one for 3.0, not this current one.
#155 ARM Builds » Is a Devuan build for the new Apple M1 chip possible? » 2020-11-19 00:31:03
- Micronaut
- Replies: 28
All reports are that the performance of the hardware is great. And there are many advantages to finally getting away from the x86 instruction set. But... Apple is just like Microsoft and Google, or maybe worse, in trying to control and watch everything that users of their OS do. So, I'm wondering if this "proprietary" architecture poses some kind of legal or technical obstacles to a Linux distro? Or will someone be compiling Devuan for the M1 architecture soon?
#156 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » How can VLC media player download only the audio of a video stream? » 2020-06-19 01:45:45
OK, I listened to another video from twitch successfully, meaning it download only the audio. But then I tried a different video on a different day and it downloaded the video, too. I can't find why it works like I want at some times and not at others! There has got to be a setting somewhere....
#157 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Backlight control problem » 2020-06-12 20:07:31
I just recently had this same struggle on a couple of older laptops. They use the Intel CPU video driver, not a third-party GPU, so this may not apply to your system. But here's the thread that I started:
#158 Desktop and Multimedia » How can VLC media player download only the audio of a video stream? » 2020-06-11 20:04:21
- Micronaut
- Replies: 2
Last week I used VLC to listen to a stream from Twitch. I did not download the video portion, and this is important to note: did not download the video portion. Only the audio. I could see that because I use GKrellm on my systems and I could see that this stream was very low bandwidth. There was no fancy tinkering involved. I got the URL of the stream with a browser and copied it into the stream prompt on VLC.
When I tried to do the same thing a few days later, it insisted on downloading the video as well. I couldn't find any setting to prevent this. I could disable displaying the video, but it was still downloaded. Now I am annoyed. I don't have a very fast connection and I want only the audio part of the stream. Why would it work fine once, and then not work anymore? There are no settings I can find, but VLC has so many settings I suppose something could be there and I don't even see it.
Does anyone know what the setting might be to only download the audio of a stream? Or is this possibly an abstruse thing that I would have to sign up on the VLC forums to get help with?
#159 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Fan control on laptops » 2020-05-06 21:56:55
Installing hwinfo, I got a complete dump of detectable characteristics for this laptop. There is one thing that has the characters "fan" associated with it:
02: None 00.0: 10107 System
[Created at sys.63]
Unique ID: rdCR.n_7QNeEnh23
Hardware Class: system
Model: "System"
Formfactor: "laptop"
Driver Info #0:
Driver Status: thermal,fan are not active
Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe thermal; modprobe fan"
Config Status: cfg=new, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknownIs this hardware info that might be useful for determining how to actually detect and control the fan? It is it just a status report on the kernel module that would manage the fan if it could be found?
#160 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Backlight control on laptops » 2020-05-04 19:27:16
Hrm, both of these laptops are much newer than 2007. They date from 2011-2012 or so. By that standard, they should work with the DDX driver. But they don't. It still sounds like there is a config problem at a very deep level. They have not accounted for laptops properly.
#161 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Fan control on laptops » 2020-05-04 19:24:47
Yeah, I found that very quickly. If you can't detect the sensors and controls, it just barfs when you try to run it. Things have to be identified before Fancontrol can manage them.
#162 Re: Off-topic » More systemd-struction » 2020-05-04 19:23:32
Yeah, the comments on Slashdot raise some of these strange issues. Groups are part of the whole system config, so how do you move group settings around between systems? It looks like what they are trying to do is duplicate Windows-style domain logins. If that's what they want to do it's much more complex than Poettering has realized. There is a reason the trillion-dollar Microsoft has done this and no one else has...
#163 Off-topic » More systemd-struction » 2020-05-04 03:00:26
- Micronaut
- Replies: 3
W. T. A. F..... Is this yet another "improvement" that the developers of other distros who have not fallen in line with Red hat will have to work around?
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/05/ … management
Camel Pilot (Slashdot reader #78,781) writes:
Leannart Poettering is proposing homed to alter the way Linux systems handle user management. All user information will be placed in a cryptographically signed JSON record, such as username, group membership, and password hashes. The venerable /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow will be a thing of the past. One of the claimed advantages will be home directory portability."Because the /home directory will no longer depend on the trifecta of systemd, /etc/passwd, and /etc/shadow, users and admins will then be able to easily migrate directories within /home," writes Jack Wallen at TechRepublic. "Imagine being able to move your /home/USER (where USER is your username) directory to a portable flash drive and use it on any system that works with systemd-homed. You could easily transport your /home/USER directory between home and work, or between systems within your company."
What is not clear is that for portability, systems would have to have identical user_id, group names, group_id, etc. And what mechanism is going to provide user authorization to login to a system?
"At the moment, systemd 245 is still in RC2 status," the article notes, adding "The good news, however, is that systemd 245 should be released sometime this year (2020).
"When that happens, prepare to change the way you manage users and their home directories."
Why can't we just cut Red Hat loose to manage their very own Red Hat OS under Poettering?
#164 Hardware & System Configuration » Fan control on laptops » 2020-05-04 02:48:39
- Micronaut
- Replies: 3
In addition to the backlight problem, I have found that fan sensors are just not detected on my laptops. One is an Acer Aspire 5733Z, the other is a Gateway NV57H63. Yes, both are pretty old. This is the great thing about Linux, ancient hardware is still usable! Of the two, the one that this is really a concern for is the Acer. The BIOS control of the CPU fan is really stupid. Instead of gradually adjusting the fan speed to find a constant level that keeps the cores at a decent temperature, it ramps up to what sounds like full speed, then cuts back to a slow idle, then ramps quickly up again when the core temp rises, resulting in constantly changing noise that gets very annoying after a while. The Gateway BIOS is much smarter and adjusts slowly, or maybe the fan is a better design and makes much less noise.
Is there possibly some special utility I haven't heard of to find those fan sensors and controls? It seems odd that so many other obscure things, like proprietary cameras, are found and have drivers, but the CPU fans cannot be found.
#165 Hardware & System Configuration » Backlight control on laptops » 2020-05-04 02:34:38
- Micronaut
- Replies: 5
After installing and using Devuan Ascii on two different (pretty old) laptops, I discovered that I had not quite gotten everything working. The install process had caught nearly everything, like the touchpad, the internal camera, etc. But when I thought to try to adjust the screen brightness, if just did not work. This is not the 'power saving' option where the screen is dimmed automatically when the machine is idle. This is the deliberate manual change of screen brightness when using the machine, in a low light situation where you want a less bright screen for example.
Searching around, I found that something called 'xbacklight' had to be installed, and then when it complained 'No outputs have backlight property' I set out to solve that problem. The recommended solutions such as adding command options to GRUB did not work until I ran across the page: 'https://shreve.io/posts/fixing-xbacklight' which recommends adding a config file inside the X11 directory tree. '/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-backlight.conf' Placing the recommended file with the recommended contents in the recommended place finally made the manual backlight/brightness controls work on my laptops.
Now, here are the questions:
He got the info on how to do this from a 'bug report' -- does this mean that the Ascii installer (and therefore the Debian install it was based on) does not recognize certain hardware correctly and installs the wrong X11 drivers? Or does this mean that the default system configuration was botched when designing this version of the Debian/Devuan distro, not taking laptops properly into account? In either case, is this fixed, or will it be fixed, in Beowulf -- or will I have to remember to make manual adjustments to my systems when I upgrade?
#166 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » Using redshift » 2020-04-14 14:02:54
Oops, I didn't phrase that right. I was expecting it to remove non-red, or at least blue, from the display. Color 'temperature' is a broad effect that only slightly changes the actual colors on the screen. As I said further along in the paragraph, "submarine-style night mode" is what I was really looking for.
#167 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » How do you stop chromium asking for 'keyring password'? » 2020-04-10 18:34:08
Gentoo? I'd expect Gentoo to recommend you recompile chromium with different flags. 
When I was experimenting with it, I found that chromium also cannot connect to audio on Discord. It just sits there "waiting to connect" -- forever. Dunno if that's a reflecting of how bad Discord is, or chromium. I've heard that Discord is a pretty hairy mess written entirely in Javascript and run via Electron even on tablets or desktops. Ergh... so I switched back to Firefox. Which at least does work.
But you never know when Mozilla will do something annoying with Firefox. So I would like to have alternatives to Firefox, and I guess I'll go back and struggle with chromium some more soon.
#168 Desktop and Multimedia » How do you stop chromium asking for 'keyring password'? » 2020-04-08 01:19:10
- Micronaut
- Replies: 8
Every time I start chromium I get a useless prompt for a keyring password that has to be canceled multiple times to get rid of it. There is no such thing as a keyring password on my system, as there is no keyring. Unless chromium creates it, in which case I want to stop it from even creating it. So far, all solutions found by google search have no effect.
Copying /usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop to ~/.local/share/applications and adding the '--password-store=basic' option to the Exec line does nothing. Creating a file called chromium-flags.conf file under .config/chromium and adding the option that that does nothing.
What does it take to tell the current version of chromium to not bother with encrypted keyrings?
#169 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » Using redshift » 2020-04-04 02:09:50
OK, I think I see what is going on. It works, but I didn't understand what it does. I thought it was actually supposed to turn down the 'red' part of all colors in the display. It's just dimming the display slightly. So what I want to do is really eliminate the blue light from anything I run on my desktop. Submarine-style "rig for night running" mode. Is there a way to do that? Or will each program have to be individually configured to only use red colors? I suppose there is an all-red theme for XFCE, or one can be created. But the other programs might be more of a challenge.
#170 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » Using redshift » 2020-04-04 00:40:55
Running Redshift with those "one time" switches will change the screen color for about 15-20 seconds. Then it reverts. So far, nothing seems to make Redshift-gtk actually effective. Hmm.....
#171 Desktop and Multimedia » Using redshift » 2020-04-01 20:23:01
- Micronaut
- Replies: 8
Not sure if this is a "desktop" or a "system configuration" issue. Installing redshift and redshift-gtk, I ran it and then clicked the icon to get at the config option to have it start with the system. But as far as I can see, it does nothing. There was no change in the color of my screen as the evening wore on, even though it reported that it knew the time was 'night'. Is there some other option that needs to be tweaked somewhere to get it to actually affect the screen color?
This was on a laptop using the default XFCE desktop, so there is no complex issue with ATI or nVidia drivers. Its the standard Intel video driver, and it's the desktop environment the whole system was designed around.
#172 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » TWO kernels in one update? » 2020-02-17 22:25:06
This is only getting weirder every time I try something else. A complete purge and re-install has resulted in no resolv.conf at all in the /etc directory. It's now a symbolic link to /var/run/NetworkManager/resolv.conf but is still controlled by dnssec-triggerd. I don't know if it has the immutable attribute. It gives an error message when I try to check it. At least this time the DNS does work. Maybe the re-install forced it to update to the current master sig/key?
Meanwhile, another system that I hadn't gotten to still has /etc/resolv.conf and it has the immutable attribute. But this one is still successfully producing DNS lookups. Since it works, I won't mess with it for now. If I can ever get a handle on some sort of consistent behavior I'll see about a new thread.
#173 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Ascii does not respect /etc/adjtime settings » 2020-02-17 22:20:04
Well, yes, I thought ntp was a good thing for any system to have. How much could it adjust the system time? Only a minute or two, I'd think. And I would have thought it would adjust the hardware clock when it did so.
Still, it might be a good idea to use the known Windows registry tweak to make it use UTC. I've been making other changes to align Wind'ohs with real OSes, such as running my own account as a normal user and having a separate admin account.
#174 Hardware & System Configuration » Ascii does not respect /etc/adjtime settings » 2020-02-17 04:15:23
- Micronaut
- Replies: 3
According to all of the documentation I can find, setting line 3 of /etc/adjtime to LOCAL tells the system that your BIOS time is local rather than GMT/UTC. But every time I reboot it during a single day, I get that complaint from fsck about the file system superblock being ahead of the real time. Yes, this is a dual boot system with Windows on the other side. Windows system time works properly. You might think that Windows is 'fscking' with something, but this happens even when Windows has not been booted even once that day. It looks like the Linux system is not reading the config file it is supposed to be reading. Has something changed recently in how system time is tracked and/or set?
#175 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » TWO kernels in one update? » 2020-02-17 04:04:52
Well, on my systems (all of them now) is locks resolv.conf and fails to provide the DNS lookups that it has forced the system to ask it for. I've now removed it from all of my systems. It worked for a few days and then went haywire. Frustrating. Hasn't there been a recent update of the "master" signing key? Could that have broken it?
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