/fglt/ - Friendly GNU/Linux Thread

Previously on: Welcome to /fglt/. We are always open to users of all levels, including absolute beginners.

There are four ways to try GNU/Linux, you can:

0) Install a GNU/Linux OS on a VM (Virtual Machine/VirtualBox) for "safety purposes"
1) Use the Live ISO directly without installing anything, that way, you can get a "full GNU/Linux experience".
2) Dual-boot GNU/Linux with Windows/Mac (recommended if you want to learn more about GNU/Linux)
3) Go balls deep and overwrite everything with GNU/Linux

Before asking, please search for answers to your questions in resources.

Please be civil, notice the "Friendly" in every Friendly GNU/Linux Thread.

Understand that much of your software from Windows will be unavailable, although maybe WINE can make up for it.

IRC connection details:
Server: chat.freenode.net:6667 (no SSL, 6697 for SSL) - Channel: #flt
If you don't have an IRC client (which you should), go to kiwiirc.com/client/irc.freenode.net/flt to use IRC on a web client.

Visit the Friendly GNU/Linux Thread/Website:
fglt.nl/

Resources:
man
Your friendly neighborhood search engine (searx.me, ixquick, whatever)
wiki.archlinux.org/ (Most of the configurations and troubleshoots will work on various distros, including Debian)
wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Category:GNU/Linux
wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Babbies_First_Linux
prism-break.org/en/categories/gnu-linux/
linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php
gnu.org/

Other urls found in this thread:

techrepublic.com/article/why-the-linux-mint-hack-is-an-indicator-of-a-larger-problem/
parabola.n
wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFlavors
github.com/linuxmint/mintupdate/blob/master/usr/lib/linuxmint/mintUpdate/rules
stallman.org/to-Sup
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Does GNU York City have free speech or free beer?

yes

Debian, Fedora or mint?

Debian and Fedora yes, Mint no
techrepublic.com/article/why-the-linux-mint-hack-is-an-indicator-of-a-larger-problem/

You won't install neither of those. Even if you are, you'll be installing it in a virtual machine or alongside your Windows. You won't be using it for longer than 10 minutes. Asking such a trivial, meaningless question implies that you're not serious about using it.
If you were, you'd just install them and see for yourself. Explaining the worthwhile differences between them is lost on you, since it won't affect you in any way and for the reasons mentioned above.

Mint is retards that want to look like GNU/Linux pros but actually are beginners that have a hard time installing wine from a guide because the guide has Ubuntu in its name

gtfo with this elitism, everyone is a bloody noob sometime. It's in the community's best interest to help everyone regardless of their previous experience or knowledge.
(even though we get this question a hundred times each day)

What did he mean by this?
Did he mean free speech or free beer
maybe both

Free beer doesn't exist there
You need to compile the beer first for maximum safety and security

There's nothing elitist about that.That has nothing to do with being a "noob". It's people having false intentions and asking hit-and-run questions.

I don't get it. What's the point of Fedora? Why people recommend it? It get's alpha software from Red Hat, making Fedora basically a testbed for RHEL software and the "copr" is literally a ghost town, which makes installing alternative software difficult for new users.

Then there are the Freedom guidelines, I'd consider harmful: While the rules are called "strict", proprietary drivers and modules are allowed. Why? One can only guess, it's because making Fedora a distro that "just werks", but if convenience is the goal, what's the point of strict package rules?

It all makes no sense to me, wake me up?

but you don't know anything about his intentions. You are guessing what kind of person this user is and making assumptions based on that.
My point is that it could be a somewhat clueless IT teacher in a school somewhere, and a friendly answer will lead to 30 students learning with Debian or Fedora instead of Mint, which is very much in our interest.
Even if the majority of people who ask these questions really have false intentions and have wrong expectations of how GNU/Linux distros work, we cannot scare away the minority with a rough attitude.
And I'm all for giving people a rough attitude when it's necessary.

If you use RHEL/CentOS then Fedora is pretty useful to see what is coming down the pipeline.

As for normal home users, Red Hat often makes dubious decisions but they do get a lot of stuff right. For example, enforcing SELinux out of the box is a good idea, and its had most of its kinks worked out by this point. And if you like bleeding edge software, then Fedora Rawhide is about as bleeding edge as it gets.

What's the fastest way to get the external IP?

Fedora cloud, server or workstation?

or

# curl inetconfig.com

hey what do you think of Thinkpad 11e? Is it worth to install a GNU/linux distro in it?

gummon

>speed
dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com

>short
curl curlmyip.org

Do you run a workstation, a server or a cloud?

I went with server

>curl curlmyip.org
wget -qO- wgetip
.com

>Our system thinks [...] please reformat.
Fuck this shit.

devs are retards, I reported

parabola.n
u/

months ago, still blocked.
>ftw Sup Forums can't into regex

Total Linux ignoramus here. Can I install a dual boot version if I already have a system partition with Win 10 and another separate partition? I'm also lost when it comes to different distribution. I was recommended Mint, since it's supposed to be most newbie-friendly but I have no idea it that's true.

>I was recommended Mint
Stick with standard Ubuntu. It's by far the most popular distro and easiest to get support for. Mint also has a stigma about security lately.

But to answer your question, yes. Ubuntu will give you an option to install alongside Windows in the installer.

I have a usb drive that reads fine on windows, and I store anime/pdfs on it, and it will load fine on my Arch Linux machine too. However when I put it in my windows machine from my arch linux machine windows explorer crashes while trying to open the usb drive. Does anyone know how I can fix this and preventative steps to stop it from doing this in the future?

This is a repeatable problem, it does it every single time.

Mint is not something i would recommend.
you can shrink whatever partition on your windows is the biggest by the amount you need and leave it empty. most installers will pick it up and offer you to install whatever distro alongside windows.
if you have a bit of time to read the guide, debian is a good choice, fedora is alright too.

Do you have any strange characters in your filenames? Specifically, things like colons or slashes and stuff like that. Windows really doesn't like some of those characters and can't deal with it.

They shouldn't I named all the files on the windows machine. If I let it sit for a while it seems to scan and repair the drive with no data loss. But I have a feeling it really shouldn't be doing this.

Thanks to both. I was told that Ubuntu used to be good but then they sold out or something and now Mint is basically what Ubuntu used to be. I'm not contradicting you, just saying what I heard. Will definitely look into the options you recommended.

What you heard is probably about the Amazon Shopping Lens that was added a while back. It's disabled by default in 16.04, so it's not much to be concerned about anymore.

You're right though. Mint was a fantastic alternative to Ubuntu at one point. That was a while back at this point. Now it's pretty much just a showpiece for the Cinnamon desktop environment, and it's not really worth picking a distro over the default desktop environment.

All modern distros ship with a live environment, so you can try them out before you install. Ubuntu has a bunch of flavors you can try out if you're so inclined.

wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFlavors

Can I use FUSE to create a file that when read will return different data depending on the time of day?

what's a good audio ripper on GNU/Linux? it would be great if it would find the correct tags by itself.

>Mint also has a stigma about security lately.
Well meme'd. Not a huge fan of Mint, but a cracked website doesn't affect a distro's security. Reminds me of the Manjaro SSL meme.

Since this is a friendly thread, we shouldn't feed newfriends with half or disinformations.

dd

I'll just paste what I posted yesterday because I don't feel like typing it again.

Yes, that's obviously a problem. They can't even secure their own servers, let alone your desktop. But there are other reasons. They also don't issue security advisories, because they don't know anything about security. They delay security updates because they're too incompetent to push them out immediately without breakages. They actually have a package blacklist[1], where they specify that some packages are never updated. Anything with a 4 or a 5 on that list will not receive updates by default. Like your display server. And the Linux kernel.

All of this so you can get a pretty theme for Cinnamon out of the box. It's disgusting that you would actually recommend Mint to a new user.

[1] github.com/linuxmint/mintupdate/blob/master/usr/lib/linuxmint/mintUpdate/rules

the relevant information as to how Mint is insecure is right here in this thread. I don't expect anyone to read the whole thread, but come on!
here:

apart from muh freedoms

From a practical perspective, what's the benefit of dual booting ubuntu with windows 10 when the anniversary update hits and we get the ubuntu enviroment within windows?

Cheers

Thanks, will read into it. Didn't know about the other problems.

What's the benefit of not wiping windows and only booting in to linux?

you're right, there is no benefit.
Better to remove Windows 10 and use the real deal. Or will you miss telemetry, metro and cortana?

Thanks Canoncial.

Is there a difference between dzen and dzen2? What are the differences. Google gives no results.

I'm thinking of switching to dzen or dzen2 from xmobar.

Aint risking a full port in the middle of my masters/ some of my potential workplaces won't allow free software (fucking dumb i know)

Is there any disto we can recommend to newfriends that just werks and doesn't suck like Ubuntu or Mint?

What is wrong with Ubuntu? It's as close to Just Werks as you're going to get.

Fedora maybe.

+ works out of the box
+ cares mostly about freedom

OpenSUSE for KDE
Manjaro for Xfce
Fedora for GNOME and some freedom
Ubuntu MATE for MATE

What distro does Sup Forums think stallman uses
Protip: It's not gentoo

He's using Trisquel. Check stallman.org -> how I do computing.

stallman.org/to-Sup Forums.html

>What is wrong with Ubuntu?
IMHO Ubuntu isn't GNU/Linux anymore. It's just "Ubuntu". Canonical is trying to avoid "GNU" or "Linux" as far as it gets. Their goal is market share on the costs of freedom (the opposite of what GNU/Linux is intended to be). They lie to the users (mark proprietary software as "free"), teach them to value convenience over freedom and they clearly crossed the line by shipping Unity with Amazon spyware. I know it's turned off now by default, but is that a valid excuse for even shipping such things? Reminds me a bit of Windows users excusing themselfes: "You can turn it off". It may not be completly the same, but at the end, when a user wants to switch to GNU/Linux, he shouldn't be faced with all this crap.

But that's all just nitpicking compared to what Canonical currently does: Don't tell me the Microsoft-Canonical partnership doesn't hurt the whole community.

Is there a way to have notifications dismiss themselves in >GNOME?

kek

So basically, just install Ubuntu and do:

apt-get install cinnamon; sed -i '/security/d'

and you get Linux Mint.

+ /etc/apt/sources.list

Don't they already do that?

morituri

thoughts?

Why is the telegram desktop icon not themed?
Using Antergos with GNOME 3.20

maybe your icon theme doesn't have an icon for it?

Numix does

>zsh
>echo "$((int(rint(10.5))))"
>10

zsh hipsters

I'm having trouble using tint2 with openbox. I have it in autostart in .config/openbox/autostart but I still have to turn it on via terminal and it doesn't stay. I'm not quite sure what I did wrong.
# Programs that will run after Openbox has opened

#Set Wallpaper

#LXPANEL
lxpanel &
tint2 &

Also using Debian if that means anything.

lxpanel and tint2 are both panels, and by default they place themselves at the bottom of the screen

i image tint2 is being hidden behind lxpanel

>he fell for the numix meme

What other icon packs look nice

Really? The whole reason I got tint2 was because I needed a battery indicator + taskbar but didn't see how to do it with lxpanel. Thanks for the help.

This happens with all icon packs

I'm using fail2ban on my vps, and it keeps blocking my desktop when I try to log in to my email with thunderbird. I added a rule to accept connections from my home IP, but it always gets bumped down when it decides to block it. How do I force it to not do that?

Sorry but these lines were triggering my autism.

Hello!
I am trying to install gentoo on my machine. However upon reading the architectures that gentoo supports I became stuck.
It says x86 is supported. So I am guessing my i5 3320m will also be supported.
Am I correct? I have googled "Does gentoo support i5 processor" however I have seen no answers.
My i5 3320m is also x86 and 64bit. And i think the gentoo is only 32 bit. So there is some confusion regarding that as well.
Thanks in advance.

use the amd64 release

>inb4 "i don't have an AMD cpu!"

If you have a 64bit processor you should use the AMD64 release
If you have a 32bit processor you should use x86

if you're looking for "x64", that's a windows-specific term
microsoft fucked up a bit with releasing their first 64bit OS, windows xp 64bit edition, because they were anticipating intel itanium would be the defacto 64bit architecture, but then amd made amd64, which won because it was backward compatible with 32bit x86, so intel started using it as well
so the 64bit x86 in use today is all amd64, intel cpu's included
microsoft made an amd64 version of XP as well, but they couldn't call it "64bit edition" as well, since it's a different architecture, so they came up with x64

sometimes amd64 is also called x86-64 or intel64
not to be confused with IA-64, which is Itanium

What if i use the x86 release?
Wait, I can really use amd64 release for an intel 64 bit cpu? Please provide a reference to documentation that allows this.

just use ubuntu

>What if i use the x86 release?
you can, but it's 32bit, which has the usual limitations
there's almost never a reason to use a 32bit os on a 64bit cpu

>I can really use amd64 release for an intel 64 bit cpu?
yes, intel licensed the amd64 technology from amd

>intel licensed the amd64 technology from amd
Thanks for the help, I will be installing Gentoo today. I am also a total noob, fyi.

good luck, you will certainly need it

>total noob
>gentoo
Good luck

You'll probably die of old age before you finish
t. Gentoo user

The Gentoo minimal installation CD is a self-stustained Gentoo environment.
Stage3 tarball is an archive containing a minimal Gentoo environment.
So does this mean that the installation CD is stage 3 tarball(i dont know what tarball means).
If so, does installation from stage 1 offer better performance, in any way?

If you are done and can post from it in 10 hours i will make a shitty gentoo related wallpaper. Nobody likes namefags though.

Ok

I know I can change the font urxvt uses via a ~/.Xresources, but how should I format the font name to put in "urxvt*font:"? I've been trying to do this for literally 2 days help me i just want to try other fonts

Don't use *. Use URxvt.font

Please don't try Gentoo before using another sane distro and getting used to stuff like tars.
Also, is opensuse a good idea Sup Forums?

Just stop guy. Gentoo isn't THAT hard. It's as easy as Arch is; you just follow the guide. It's pretty much possible for a clever human being to install Gentoo.

Also, why do people still prefer Gentoo over Funtoo?

>opensuse: at least we got YAST
It's interesting. Wouldn't want to advertize it though.

Guys, I have some serious shit. I have arch with Gnome and i3. And I can't set the acceleration by xset. But I can configure cursor speed by Gnome apps. When I was using debian everything worked. What did I do wrong? Maybe I should reconfigure xorg.conf somehow? Google stays quiet.

Too late for that.
What are tars?

how to verify .sig files?

xset

Are there any music players on Linux that support DSPs like foobar?

What do you mean?