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#1 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Removing/purging Network Manager » Today 11:06:44

What are the inconveniences if I remove/purge Network Manager?

Uhh, needing to configure networking yourself? Fairly obvious, no?
Aside from that, likely a lack of GUI network configuration / tray widgets / whatever... Unless you install something else that provides those, of which there are several. None of them have the extensive feature set creep networkmanager does though.

NM is useful for systems that use a variety of transient networks, e.g. wifi, cell modem, bridges, tunnels, vpns etc. where the user wants a unified GUI that can configure and switch between those on-the-fly. Essentially, It's designed for coffee-shop-warriors with laptops.

NM is downright aggravating if manual network configuration is common, or a single, fixed, reliable connection is required at boot. e.g. the system has NFS mounts or the user regularly does 'ip whatever' or 'ifconfig whatever' to connect with static addresses or manual routing.

NM is completely pointless for servers or workstations that have fixed wired networking or rarely change connections.

Vague question -> vague answers.

#2 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » [SOLVED] ext4 write slow on small 120gb sata SSD » 2026-03-07 03:40:51

kapqa wrote:

maybe bit "solved" too-early,
it seem the two SSD same/brand/ same denomination/size SA400S3 behave differently;

the earlier tested still show very slow performance with ext4 and "normal" speeds with ntfs.
the other SA400S3 show good write/speed with both ext4 AND ntfs -- on same computer, with same cables, on ssame sata sloet (sata3 speed capable).

so am wondering if the SSD is not somewat bit-defective or some other mystery involved.

The other elephant in the room is firmware behaviour.
Consumer SSDs have a minimum erase-block size and can suffer from free-space fragmentation issues. They usually don't have uniform write performance in general, relying on cache/host memory and a dedicated "fast" area to buffer writes until they can do a more efficient block allocation.

The upshot of all that is that SSDs do quite a lot of sneaky things in the background to appear faster than the flash memory actually is, they need regular "trimming" to release blocks and power-on-idle downtime so the firmware can do garbage collection, wear-leveling, and free-space defragmentation.
If any of that goes sideways (IME usually due to firmware bugs), performance will fall off a proverbial cliff.
Check both drives are running the same firmware revision (and update if any are available), check the wear-leveling counters in SMART, and try a full zero-fill wipe followed by a trim on the problematic drive.

onedevone wrote:

Its a magnitute faster on nand-flash

Benchmarks or GTFO.

onedevone wrote:

spinning drives are ancient history

How strange they're still being manufactured in volume, and the technology (e.g. HAMR) is still under active development. roll

onedevone wrote:

I was forced to use ext4

You were forced to think for yourself. Devuan can run any root filesystem supported by the kernel (as can most distros), the limitation is only in the installer. As for /home... That's utterly trivial to set up after install, with any filesystem you like.

#3 Re: Installation » Post installation annoyances » 2026-03-07 02:59:28

Isn't KDE going Wayland only?

Yes, with 6.8. That's still a ways off for Debian/Devuan, but one should be aware that X11 support has been in feature-freeze for some time and anything but critical bugs are very unlikely to be fixed.

#4 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Fail With DOT » 2026-03-07 02:45:11

ralph.ronnquist wrote:

what is PFS

man wget wrote:

       --secure-protocol=protocol
           Choose the secure protocol to be used.  Legal values are auto,
           SSLv2, SSLv3, TLSv1, TLSv1_1, TLSv1_2, TLSv1_3 and PFS.  If
           auto is used, the SSL library is given the liberty of choosing
           the appropriate protocol automatically, which is achieved by
           sending a TLSv1 greeting. This is the default.

           Specifying SSLv2, SSLv3, TLSv1, TLSv1_1, TLSv1_2 or TLSv1_3
           forces the use of the corresponding protocol.  This is useful
           when talking to old and buggy SSL server implementations that
           make it hard for the underlying SSL library to choose the
           correct protocol version.  Fortunately, such servers are quite
           rare.

           Specifying PFS enforces the use of the so-called Perfect
           Forward Security cipher suites. In short, PFS adds security by
           creating a one-time key for each SSL connection. It has a bit
           more CPU impact on client and server.  We use known to be
           secure ciphers (e.g. no MD4) and the TLS protocol. This mode
           also explicitly excludes non-PFS key exchange methods, such as
           RSA.

i.e. more paranoia BS, from someone with likely little idea what it actually does or what attacks it might defend against, since they apparently need "step by step" instructions to write a trivial init script.

Next will be out-of-repo "privacy" browsers, VPNs, and whatever go-fast shiny-new-shit is popular on Arch/Artix right now.

onedevone wrote:

Toxic answeres.

"Toxic" OP, complete with entitlement, shouting, and misguided assertions that your personal preference regarding DNS should be a distro-wide default.

onedevone wrote:

DOT is not something to be laughed at

I'm not laughing at DoT, I'm laughing at people who consider it not being enabled by default and integrated into some random GUI a "complete showstopper".
Devuan, like Debian, comes with a standard DNS configuration by default. If you want something else, it's on you to read the documentation and set it up.
Likewise init systems - sysv is the default and best supported. If you want something else, all the parts are available but you get to assemble them.

#5 Re: Other Issues » New Wifi Vulnerability » 2026-02-27 13:23:07

DNS spoofing is a very old attack, as are most of the others mentioned. There are undoubtedly more which were not, and calling a fix for one a "defence" is like plugging one hole in a colander and calling it "sealed".
What's new here is breaking client-isolation so those old attacks all work again. It's basically ARP spoofing, and that was a gold-mine in terms of what you could do once you had control of the stream. DNS fuckery is a problem, but it's really just the tip of the iceberg.

If you use "coffee shop" style public wifi (which I personally think is a terrible idea), use a VPN or tunnel (preferrably with a pinned host cert).
If you administer the same, use separate access points and segregate them from your main network.

Ed. Ahh, I see I have reached the perfect post count. big_smile

#6 Re: Other Issues » New Wifi Vulnerability » 2026-02-27 05:17:34

Or just use separate AP(s) for your untrusted/guest network, and put them on an isolated VLAN... Like sensible people have been doing for about as long as wifi has been a thing - because wifi has been subject to a variety of security issues since day one, and untrusted devices or networks cannot, by definition, be trusted.

I'm now wondering if Stubby actually works in Devuan 6 yet? Or is it still in 'development'? That's one possible useful defense.

Assuming you are talking about this stubby, now I'm wondering if you even understand the article you linked... What does a DNS stub-resolver have to do with anything, and how is it supposed to be a "defence" against a layer-2 port-spoofing attack?

#7 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » [SOLVED] Inability to install printer » 2026-02-27 00:35:04

There's so much wrong here I'm not even sure where to start.

1) epsonscan2-6.7.87.0-1.src.tar.gz is the source code, unless you feel like building the scanner tool from source yourself, you almost certainly want epsonscan2-bundle-6.7.87.0.x86_64.deb.tar.gz (from the "drivers" section of the download page) instead.

2) You can't just stuff a 'cd' command, a directory name, a file name, and a script with relative path into one line and expect it to work.
'cd' takes exactly one argument (the target directory), you provided three.

3) Adding more random stuff to a syntactically incorrect command-line won't make it more right.

4) Nor will changing the order of said random stuff.

* Get the right file.
* Unpack the archive

tar zxf epsonscan2-bundle-6.7.87.0.x86_64.deb.tar.gz

* Change into the directory created above (use tab-complete if you value your sanity)

cd epsonscan2-bundle-6.7.87.0.x86_64.deb/

* Run the installer script

./install.sh

#9 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » [SOLVED] Inability to install printer » 2026-02-22 09:13:15

Firefox fooling you

If you inspect the stream, you'll see that the webserver incorrectly sets "content-type: text/plain" in the response header. Firefox is believing what it's told, as it should.
This is a disturbingly common misconfiguration in javascript-infested eula-gated corporate "download portal"s, and the javascript nonsense they use to make mirroring painful and ensure you agreed to all the things and clicked all the boxes tends to interfere with client-side mime-sniffing that might otherwise work around it.
It's not a browser bug.

#10 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Is there a Devuan derivative targeting old hardware/laptops? » 2026-02-22 08:54:18

waiting to happen?

Breaking news: It happened some time ago, and the majority of distributions and desktop environments are using it.
Personally I don't think wayland is ready to replace X, but many seem to like it and that's a perfectly valid choice.

As for the OP: Sandybridge with 8GB of RAM will run pretty much any current distro acceptably well. The biggest problem will be, as always, the demands of a modern standards-compliant web browser.
If it only has 4GB installed, look into upgrading it. Most machines of that generation can take at least 8GB, usually up to 16. AI insanity notwithstanding, used DDR3 DIMMs are dirt cheap.

#11 Re: Devuan » Devuan without elogind » 2026-02-22 08:47:02

better to have a piece of systemd as a dependency then the whole damn thing

Or, ya know, maybe admit that systemd does actually have some good points, and take inspiration and/or code from the things it does well.

Elogind works, it solves real-world problems, and it arrived at a time when the only alternative (consolekit) was an unmaintained mess nobody wanted to rely on if there was any other choice.

Now, we have more options. Turnstile and seatd are things, consolekit2 is actively maintained again. The situation might warrant reevaluation, for a number of valid technical reasons... Which "it's part of systemd, ick, kill it" is decidedly not.

BSD and Illumos can use a desktop environment without elogind and this is tremendous.

BSD and other unixes had no choice, because removing all the linux-isms in [e]logind was arguably more work than fixing consolekit or implementing your own solution.

#12 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » [SOLVED] Inability to install printer » 2026-02-22 01:23:56

ARM binaries simply will not work on an AMD64 architecture, trying them is pointless.
The driver linked in post #5 is the correct architecture and already in the correct format (so no mucking around with xarchiver or alien required), just install with apt or dpkg, e.g.:

apt install ./epson-inkjet-printer-escpr_1.8.7-1_amd64.deb

Whether it works is another question, I don't have applicable hardware.

ideographic characters from another alphabet appear

Are you sure that's not just Epson's website setting x-content-type incorrectly, causing your browser to render the binary file as text rather than downloading it?
Try wget or curl on the URI you get, e.g.:

wget https://download-center.epson.com/f/module/e81c57ab-d783-435d-bd64-e74bac7c72b4/epson-inkjet-printer-escpr_1.8.7-1_amd64.deb

#13 Re: Off-topic » Opinions about keypassXC » 2026-02-22 00:58:58

You could get the same point across by being a bit more personal with the person you disagree with.

Touche, diplomacy is not my forte. My intent was was not personal disparagement but a technical disagreement on the measurement criteria. If I came across otherwise, my apologies.

My confrontational wording was largely due to ongoing frustration (here and elsewhere) with use of code or overall package size as a proxy for quality or usefulness. Obsessing over memory or disk space and perceived "bloat" does, as they say, "pull my chain", and doubly so when the numbers presented are potentially misleading.
None of that has anything to do with greenjeans personally of course, if it sounded like a personal attack, again, my apologies.

#14 Re: Off-topic » Opinions about keypassXC » 2026-02-21 22:20:29

Again, no there is no putdown toward greenjeans nor his fine contributions, what I take issue with is the size comparison - the argument, not the person.
If you want to take "your comparison is disingenuous" to be some kind of general personal attack... Whatever dude. vOv

#15 Re: Off-topic » Opinions about keypassXC » 2026-02-21 18:57:01

I wasn't poking fun at anyone

"Lol, in 29 mb" sure sounds like throwing shade at keepassxc on account of installed size, and that's a reflection on the developers, no?

the cruft you mentioned out (which my app doesn't have or need)

Right, so documentation is bloat, and everyone speaks English. Got it.

What I made does the basic main task such things should do, it's tiny so there's a lot less to go wrong and it's easy to audit, and a good solid base if someone wanted to expand on it.

Sure, I never said your program wasn't good. It's not your code or your contribution I took issue with, rather the misleading comparisons you keep making.

here I am trying to do something about it and you're giving me misery too?

No, I'm giving you misery for making obviously skewed comparisons. Including translations isn't "bloat", it's basic accessibility.
Focusing on code size and/or memory footprint above all else is also rarely the whole picture, and frankly I'm tired of constantly hearing about it.

Same goes for the hair-shirt minimalism shtick in general, as popular as it appears around here. 4MiB or whatever is nothing, and translations are only loaded when needed.
Trading away features to be able to brag about how small something is is dumb, and not everyone needs or wants to compute on a turnip.
Debian/Devuan is a general-purpose distribution, running on 20 year old hardware is not and should not be the priority. There are whole distros dedicated to minimising memory and disk use.

#16 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] how start ntp? » 2026-02-21 07:00:25

21 days later, ntp is not started yet

NTP has been working just fine since day one.

An NTP daemon being started or not wasn't the problem to begin with, this was all over a misleading warning from a long-abandoned GNOME applet the OP insisted was some kind of authority on the matter... For all the usual "click the GUI thing and make comparisons to Windows rather than read the manual" reasons.

#17 Re: Off-topic » Favorite Games » 2026-02-21 05:25:17

How you find time for Gentoo and impressive playing experience?

Like I said, Gentoo isn't really a time-sink once you have it set up the way you want it.

what you can say about Galactic Civilization 4 and Endless Space 2

Endless Space 2 is on my GoG wishlist awaiting a decent discount, and Galactic Civilization 4 appears to be steam-only, DLC-everything, and kinda expensive... so I haven't paid it much attention.
Time is finite and games that are both steam-free and GNU/Linux native take priority. Stellaris is both, so that's the 4X I've been playing most recently. vOv

MoO2

Is a classic for sure, and I did play it way-back-when (didn't everyone?). But it's also a 4X/grand strategy, so a comparison to Stellaris might be apt but one to Starsector is not.
Starsector is not a 4X (though there is a mod to add 4X elements), nor is it really a strategy game. The real-time arcade(ish) fleet combat is the core, and while you can play that a bit like an RTS it's at its best when you're piloting a ship directly.
My comparison to Star Control might not have been ideal, I was thinking specifically of the top-down combat in SC 1 & 2, or SC2 gameplay overall - which is more action-adventure than strategy.

#18 Re: Off-topic » Opinions about keypassXC » 2026-02-21 05:00:58

in 29 mb

The application is 4.1MiB, the rest is non-code assets such as icons, translations and documentation.

in 40 kb

Plus libsodium to do most of the difficult things a password manager needs (i.e. robust encryption), which is more than 10x that size on it's own. Not to mention whatever GUI toolkit you're using, (which I can't be arsed looking into because it's probably GTbarf) and all the translations and documentation you haven't written.

If you want to poke fun at other developers and brag about how much smaller your stuff is, at least try not to be gratuitously disingenuous.

#19 Re: Freedom Hacks » About installers » 2026-02-17 02:42:57

greenjeans wrote:

In the end it sounds like you're making an argument that Refracta-Installer needs a better GUI? While at the same time eschewing GUI's in general

My argument is (and always has been) that refracta-installer needs a consistent UI, with a real workflow that supports such elementary principles as going back a step or cleanly aborting an install.
Whether it's GUI, TUI, or CLI isn't the point, the point is that as it stands it's an incoherent mess of random dialogs and terminal windows with completely inconsistent behaviour and no mechanism for maintaining coherent state or running steps in anything but one narrow linear order.

For example: Most of the process is random yad dialogs, then suddenly up pops a terminal window with a TUI debconf prompt. If I abort that prompt, I expect an option to do it again, go back a step, or abort the install... But instead we're back to yad and the script continues with missing configuration as if nothing happened.

GUI or TUI, scripts and yad or debian tooling... Pick one and stick with it for the whole process.

#20 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » [SOLVED] ext4 write slow on small 120gb sata SSD » 2026-02-16 07:18:31

SSDs for general use, HDDs for infrequently accessed bulk storage where capacity>performance...
And hybrid ZFS pools for both at the same time. Nothing quite beats an array of large mechanical drives with a TB or so of high-IOPS SSD as cache and 100GB ish of RAM dedicated to caching the cache. tongue

#21 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » [SOLVED] ext4 write slow on small 120gb sata SSD » 2026-02-16 06:37:11

Lol, if we're playing the "oldest working drive" game... Conner CP-210 (1984) no issues, no bad sectors. Not much use nowadays being 42MB, but still occasionally boots DOS in one of my vintage boxes.
Most of this is really just survivorship bias of course. To get any real idea of HDD vs SSD reliability you need a much bigger sample size than any of us have.

IMO trying to gauge how many SSDs last 14 years is a bit silly at this point in time anyway, since most SSDs available back then have long been retired... Not because they failed, but because they were miserably small. A HDD from 2012 is probably a size that's still useful today, but an SSD from the same period is eclipsed by commodity SD cards and USB flash drives at a fraction of the cost.

i dont think hdd's come in that size anymore do they?

375GB(ish) platters were state-of-the art in 2010, and 2 platters is about all you can do in a 2.5x3/8" laptop drive. These days areal density is a fair bit higher, so the multiples are different.

#22 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » [SOLVED] ext4 write slow on small 120gb sata SSD » 2026-02-16 04:42:46

how many SSD's last 14 years?

IME, most of them. I still have the first SSD I bought (OCZ Agility 3), also from 2011, and it still works perfectly.
I have a couple of earlier models (2010 IIRC) I bought used, and they work perfectly as well. In fact, I've never actually had an SSD "wear out", the vast majority of failures are sudden and just outside the warranty period, much as with spinning-rust.

#23 Re: Freedom Hacks » About installers » 2026-02-16 04:35:11

provided you wanted to waste a couple of hours doing an install

If you're installing on a toaster perhaps. I'll take answering more questions to have more control any day, and the actual install process is the difference between invoking dpkg repeatedly to install .debs and just doing a straight copy from the squashfs / live media. On any competent machine the overhead of using the packaging tools as intended is minimal.

running gparted before doing an install should be mandatory

Gparted is bloat, like any other GUI. I use parted, fdisk, or sfdisk if I want to pipe in a saved layout.
Chuck Norris edits the partition table in binary, with ed, which is also a valid approach. IMO.

brevity of code

Doesn't count when the "brief" code is a script and all the heavy-lifting is being done by external applications though. The same quantity of code spread out is... Still the same quantity of code, and probably slower due to all the forking and context-switching going on.

#24 Re: Freedom Hacks » UDisks2: Security Considerations » 2026-02-14 15:54:20

someone else’s posts

s/someone/something/g

Obvious wall of LLM-generated copy-pasta is obvious, and the arguments it makes are all either inane or inapplicable. Do you really think anyone here cares about the threat of "shadow IT", "unknown assets" or the rest of the corporate-drone buzzword-soup padding? We are shadow IT.

Many other boards have policies regarding AI generated content (usually "go away"), perhaps it's time for the same here?

#25 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » [SOLVED] ext4 write slow on small 120gb sata SSD » 2026-02-14 15:03:51

I see all you need is to drop promotions for your "best" thing for no reason, just because you like to promote.

This thread had nothing to do with i/o schedulers, nobody asked which one is the best.
When told out of left-field that something is "The best" (without an "in my opinion"), asking for some proof isn't unreasonable.

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