Linux

Hi all, we are hiring a remote worker and will be supplying a laptop to them. The laptop will be running a Debian variant of Linux on it.

We are a small shop and this is the first time we have entrusted somebody outside of our small pool of trusted employees.

We have sensitive client data on the laptop that they need to access for their day-to-day work.

However, if something goes wrong, and they do the wrong thing, we want to be able to send out some kind of command or similar, that will completely lock, block, or wipe the sensitive data.

We don't want any form of spying or tracking. We are not interested in seeing how they use the computer, or any of the logs. We just want to be able to delete that data, or block access, if they don't return the laptop when they leave, or if they steal the laptop, or if they do the wrong thing.

What systems are in place in the world of Linux that could do this?

Any advice or suggestions are greatly appreciated? Thank you.

Wayland and audio is fixed, but only on the canary branch for the moment, this isnt lazy either, they changed the whole screenshare flow to suit linux's permission prompts

Right now is the best period of time yet for Firefox-based browser, especially when most alternative browsers are Chrome-based.

While there are a bunch of forks like Librewolf and Palemoon, they provide features mainly for power users like hardened privacy and tweaked user-prefs. A year ago the only fork I knew of, based on recent stable versions of Firefox and added productivity features on top was Floorp. I was very surprised at the hype and sudden popularity of Zen Browser in the past few months and have been curious why it grew so much faster than Floorp which has been around for much longer, look at the Github star graph: https://star-history.com/#zen-browser%2Fdesktop=&Date=. Zen Browser currently has 19.3K stars while Floorp has 6.1K.

Reasons I can think of are the following: heavy promotion of the browser by the devs and community on places like Reddit along with emphasizing its 'zen' philosophy, really fast development (it now has way more features than Floorp), and the Zen mods store, where you can install CSS mods.

What are your thoughts and reasons for Zen Browser becoming so popular so fast? (while its not mainstream, it did grow fast in among Firefox and power users)

Not sure if this is also true for KDE.

back in the ubuntu days I used radiotray, but it seems not to be maintained anymore.

my next question is: is https://github.com/ebruck/radiotray-ng/releases/tag/v0.2.9 being maintained? it was last updated nov 10, but the page doesn't list the year.

I've also found some flatpak radio packages. Should I disregard radiotray and try any flatpak radio application?

What I liked of radiotray is that it was minimalist, simply click on it, choose a radio station and that was it, I didn't need to open a whole suite just to listen to radio online. Adding station was also very easy, just pasting a url.

If I'm interpreting this correctly, many MP4 patents are going to expire next year. 🎉

I used i3 for years on Ubuntu then discovered Regolith Desktop and haven't gone back. The thing is, I've never encountered anyone else who uses it.

I'm proud to share a major development status update of XPipe, a new connection hub that allows you to access your entire server infrastructure from your local desktop. It works on top of your installed command-line programs and does not require any setup on your remote systems. XPipe integrates with your tools such as your favourite text/code editors, terminals, shells, command-line tools and more.

Here is how it looks like if you haven't seen it before:

VMs

• There is now support for KVM/QEMU virtual machines that can be accessed via the libvirt CLI tools virsh. This includes support for other driver URLs as well aside from KVM and QEMU. This integration is available starting from the homelab plan and can be used for free for two weeks after this release using the new release preview
• You can now override a VM IP if you're using an advanced networking setup where the default IP detection is not suitable. For example, if you are using a firewall like opnsense on your hypervisor
• Fix remote VM SSH connections not being able to use the keys and identities from the local system
• There is now a new restart button for containers and VMs

File browser

• There is now a new option in the context menu of a tab to pin it, allowing for having a split view with two different file systems
• The previous system history tab is now always shown
• You can now change the default download location for the move to downloads button

Other

• The application style has been reworked
• Improve license requirement handling for systems. You can now add all systems without a license and also search for available subconnections. Only establishing the actual connection in a terminal or in the file browser will show any license requirement notice. This allows you to check whether all systems and installed tools are correctly recognized before considering purchasing a license.
• Add download context menu action in file browser as an alternative to dragging files to the download box
• Fix proxmox detection not working when not using the PVE distro and not logging in as root
• The settings menu now shows a restart button when a setting has been changed that requires a restart to apply
• There is now an intro to scripts to provide some more information before using scripts
• Add ability to enable agent forwarding when using the SSH-Agent for identities
• Closing a terminal tab/window while the session is loading will now cancel the loading process in XPipe as well
• The .rpm releases are now signed

Shell sessions

Many improvements have been implemented for the reusability of shell sessions running in the background. Whenever you access a system or a parent system, XPipe will connect to it just as before but keep this session open in the background for some time. It does so under the assumption that you will typically perform multiple actions shortly afterward. This will improve the speed of many actions and also results in less authentication prompts when you are using something like 2FA.

Security updates

There's now a new mechanism in place for checking for security updates separately from the normal update check. This is important going forward, to be able to act quickly when any security patch is published. The goal is that all users have the possibility to get notified even if they don't follow announcements on the GitHub repo or on Discord. You can also disable this functionality in the settings if you want.

Fixes

• Fix Proxmox detection not working when not logging in as root
• Fix tunnels not closing properly when having to be closed forcefully
• Fix vmware integration failing when files other than .vmx were in the VM directories
• Fix SSH and docker issues with home assistant systems
• Fix git readme not showing connections in nested children categories

A note on the open-source model

Since it has come up a few times, in addition to the note in the git repository, I would like to clarify that XPipe is not fully FOSS software. The core that you can find on GitHub is Apache 2.0 licensed, but the distribution you download ships with closed-source extensions. There's also a licensing system in place as I am trying to make a living out of this. I understand that this is a deal-breaker for some, so I wanted to give a heads-up.

Outlook

If this project sounds interesting to you, you can check it out on GitHub or visit the Website for more information.

Enjoy!

Five years ago, I bought a Supernote A5. It was (and mostly still is) a great device for reading and writing on an eInk display, and it runs plain old linux.

The deciding reason I went for this device instead of the competition is that I was "under the impression" that they were about to enable full SSH access to the device! Awesome!

"Why were you under that impression?", I hear the skeptics ask. Well, their spokesperson has stated that they would do so. Via mail, and on reddit, publicly, multiple times. I was still torn, so sent them a DM, asking if this was ineed factual. "Yes", they said, "the next quarterly update will enable SSH access!".

Great!

Well, it's been 5 years. They did not follow through. A couple updates were published, none contained the promised functionality, the spokesperson stopped answering questions about SSH. The last software update I received is from 2.5yrs ago. Mentions of the original Supernote A5 have largely been scrubbed from their website.

Let me be clear, the device still functions perfectly. But it is in danger of becoming e-waste because it is so needlessly complicated to get stuff on the device. I'm currently in need of an ebook reader with (ideally) OPDS capability, and I am pretty confident I'd be able to get something like koreader running on this, or at least just run a script to sync files over SSH. Also, I frankly feel wounded in my pride having a Linux device in my possession which refuses to do my bidding (I'm joking of course, but also I am 100% serious).

Here's all I know:

• plugging it in via USB, the device reads as an MTP device, with access only to the documents/books/... stored on it
• you can place an update.zip file (obtained from the SN website) into the root of that MTP directory, and upon reboot, the device will update. To me, this appears to be the most promising route of gaining access.
• unfortunately, the zip file is encrypted. The decryption key clearly has to be known to the device, but since I have no access to it,...

I'm a software engineer, but I have zero knowledge of the "dark arts", so to speak. If anyone could help me (or point me into the right direction!), I would really be grateful. I don't want this (generally nice) product to turn into a paperweight instead of a paper replacement :(

The dark system theme I have set seems to make some applications look funny, with dark boxes where they should be light. Is there any way I can manually set a theme on a per-application basis?

that would be fun and easy to use but that would mean no neofetch no terminal games no ls no vim no flatpak sadly would that be a good distro? i know about chromeos and android and i know linux users don't usually recognize those as linux distros but i do honestly

I've been using prime run for years, optimus manager before that. Has the nvidia open source stuff lead to anything on this front?

Geforce GTX 1060

Hey! I've been wanting to make the switch to Linux for a while now, and I've dual booted Mint for a while. I realize that most games work well with Linux, but I can't seem to get my Elgato HD60 Pro to work. (Pci-e capture card)

I just want to be able to grab gameplay with HDMI passthrough on Linux, and right now, this is my biggest hurdle (along with Adobe not working well, but I'm gonna switch to davinci resolve for that)

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Hi all

I've been a touchpad user for a long time with Linux, I love the gestures and I think the 3-finger GNOME ones are even better than the ones on my MacOS work computer (which have a weird delay when switching workspaces, but thats besides the point). Thats to say, I use Firefox and GTK4 apps when I can because they implement kinetic scrolling in a very smooth and satisfying way.

Now comes the problems, applications using Chromium/Electron all have a very janky kinetic scroll implementation. They are all way too fast, and thats when the kinetic scroll is enabled manually in the settings. Does anyone know of a way to reduce that speed? Or even better, if someone has links to issues that I can track that aim to improve the kinetic scrolling implementation, and its default setting status (when its going to be enabled as default), I would appreciate it a lot!

BTW, if some of you are interested, I made this small website some time ago to track the status touchpads on Linux: https://arewescrollingyet.com/. If someone has issues for chromium I will gladly add it to the site

Fedora KDE, Wayland, Nvidia, proprietary drivers. Everything worked fine until suddenly plasmashell started crashing every time I interact with with the plasma panel. On x11 this doesn't happen, but instead the the whole video freezes while audio continues, and after a while it comes back. The plasma panel may or may not be frozen after this.

Is this an Nvidia problem again?

Logs coming in a couple minutes

So with the recent drama it looks like bcachefs isn't going to stay in the kernel for too long. What do I do now? I have my root filesystem as bcachefs on multiple devices. Is it possible to migrate to btrfs or ext4?

Hi,

I need to setup a Rsync server to backup a 😡 NAS.

So I want to run it under SSH.

but when I do rsync --config=/etc/rsyncd.conf --rsh=ssh --dry-run
I get:

rsync: --rsh=ssh: unknown option (in daemon mode) So there no way to specify that rsync daemon should run under ssh ?

Also is this following A.I statement is correct ?

The rsyncd.conf file is only used when the rsync daemon is running on the remote host and the client connects to the daemon directly, without using an SSH connection.

So there is no way with Rsync (under ssh) to set settings (config file or other) that will apply to all clients !!??
So it's the client that configure rsync and the server !? there is no way around ?!

i've instaled opensuse tumbleweed a bunch of times in the last few years, but i always used ext4 instead of btrfs because of previous bad experiences with it nearly a decade ago. every time, with no exceptions, the partition would crap itself into an irrecoverable state

this time around i figured that, since so many years had passed since i last tried btrfs, the filesystem would be in a more reliable state, so i decided to try it again on a new opensuse installation. already, right after installation, os-prober failed to setup opensuse's entry in grub, but maybe that's on me, since my main system is debian (turns out the problem was due to btrfs snapshots)

anyway, after a little more than a week, the partition turned read-only in the middle of a large compilation and then, after i rebooted, the partition died and was irrecoverable. could be due to some bad block or read failure from the hdd (it is supposedly brand new, but i guess it could be busted), but shit like this never happens to me on extfs, even if the hdd is literally dying. also, i have an ext4 and an ufs partition in the same hdd without any issues.

even if we suppose this is the hardware's fault and not btrfs's, should a file system be a little bit more resilient than that? at this rate, i feel like a cosmic ray could set off a btrfs corruption. i hear people claim all the time how mature btrfs is and that it no longer makes sense to create new ext4 partitions, but either i'm extremely unlucky with btrfs or the system is in fucking perpetual beta state and it will never change because it is just good enough for companies who can just, in the case of a partition failure, can just quickly switch the old hdd for a new one and copy the nightly backup over to it

in any case, i am never going to touch btrfs ever again and i'm always going to advise people to choose ext4 instead of btrfs