/fglt/ - Friendly GNU/Linux Thread

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Users of all levels are welcome to ask questions about GNU/Linux and share their experiences.

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

Before asking for help, please check our list of resources.

If you would like to try out GNU/Linux you can do one of the following:
0) Install a GNU/Linux distribution of your choice in a Virtual Machine.
1) Use a live image and to boot directly into the GNU/Linux distribution without installing anything.
2) Dual boot the GNU/Linux distribution of your choice along with Windows or macOS.
3) Go balls deep and replace everything with GNU/Linux.

Resources:
Your friendly neighborhood search engine.

$ man %command%
$ info %command%
$ help %command%
$ %command% -h
$ %command% --help

Don't know what to look for?
$ apropos %something%

Check the Wikis (most troubleshoots work for all distros):
wiki.archlinux.org
wiki.gentoo.org

Sup Forums's Wiki on GNU/Linux:
wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Category:GNU/Linux

>What distro should I choose?
wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Babbies_First_Linux

>What are some cool programs?
wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/list_of_applications
directory.fsf.org/wiki/Main_Page

>What are some cool terminal commands?
commandlinefu.com/
bropages.org/

>Where can I learn the command line?
mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide
grymoire.com/Unix/

>Where can I learn more about Free Software?
gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html

>How to break out of the botnet?
prism-break.org/en/categories/gnu-linux

/t/'s GNU/Linux Games:
&& /fglt/'s website and copypasta collection:
fglt.nl && p.teknik.io/wJ9Zy

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems
maketecheasier.com/what-is-btrfs/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

First for metadata is evil because reasons.

Don't install GuixSD.

recently my trackpad on my t450 is not smooth, especially when launching/loading something. it stutters, and in general i feel like system is getting slower. I've never done any maintainance or optimizatino after installation, are there any things I should do?

arch btw

I am sick of people saying "GNU/Linux". Please include all major projects from your distribution to properly attribute the hard working free software developers.

I proudly use Xorg/Firefox/Gnome/Gnu/Linux/Systemd/Grub. It's only slightly harder to write and helps pollute the brand name of the largest FOSS OS.

BTW you can't make an argument for why "GNU/Linux" makes sense and the above does not. Historical claims mean you are desperate.

Can some one pls help me

I was trying to install GIMP and ended up accidentally installing GNOME and it removed my network manger and xubuntu desktop environment now I can't connect to my wifi and I hve no internet cable either

I installed Ubuntu 17.10 and removed my Windows 10 install completely. I have an assignment due in on Monday and my files are now 'read only' I can't even edit my work.

Thanks in advance bois

GNOME and GRUB are parts of GNU.

What we say is that you ought to give the system's principal developer a share of the credit. The principal developer is the GNU Project, and the system is basically GNU.

If you feel even more strongly about giving credit where it is due, you might feel that some secondary contributors also deserve credit in the system's name. If so, far be it from us to argue against it. If you feel that X11 deserves credit in the system's name, and you want to call the system GNU/X11/Linux, please do. If you feel that Perl simply cries out for mention, and you want to write GNU/Linux/Perl, go ahead.

Since a long name such as GNU/X11/Apache/Linux/TeX/Perl/Python/FreeCiv becomes absurd, at some point you will have to set a threshold and omit the names of the many other secondary contributions. There is no one obvious right place to set the threshold, so wherever you set it, we won't argue against it.

Different threshold levels would lead to different choices of name for the system. But one name that cannot result from concerns of fairness and giving credit, not for any possible threshold level, is “Linux”. It can't be fair to give all the credit to one secondary contribution (Linux) while omitting the principal contribution (GNU).

>Can some one pls help me
No, we can't. Go ask reddit.

Friendly thread.

I would rather not go there but thanks for the tip anyway

go fuck yourself arch fag

Guys, which CAD are you using on Linux? Is there a good alternative to AutoCAD?

LiGNUx*

install gentoo

>Is there a good alternative to AutoCAD?
Unfortunately not yet, at least not one that is readily familiar anyway. I've just been running it in virtualbox. That said I'm trying to switch over to qemu/kvm because the performance is supposedly better. I just can't figure out how to share folders with the guest...

sudo apt-get autoremove --purge

This maybe? I'm on lubuntu but idkwtf a pre removal script is.

Start the service?

Didn't work, nor did it in any incarnation with apt-get or dpkg --purge --force-all .

I did however figure the scripting is in /var/lib/dpkg/info/.prerm and deleted the retarded init code there, then it worked.

No, it was already removed, plus really not *every* sub-package of a main package can stop that removed service.

Just call it Linux for the whole family of operating systems based on the kernel, or the particular distro name. FSF's opinion is irrelevant since they never produced a complete system (hint: there was a lot more missing than just the kernel).

I'm confused about this bumblee bbswitch nvidia shit
I simply don't want my gpu to be on, I don't need to use it when I'm on arch
I followed the wiki and everything but optirun --status still tells me
bumblee status: ready. X inactive. Discrete video card is on
anyone knows how I can simply get my gpu turned off

PS: Thanks regardless!

Still surprised there's no obvious builtin way on apt / apt-get / dpkg to skip an error in the scripted phases, or that Ubuntu's maintainers would make removal depend on the respective package's service being stopped.

I just tried to format new hard drive as ext4 with gparted and got a message that i HAVE TO create partition table first. WTF i though i could just make a partitionless drive?

Guys I think I've made a huge mistake.

I burned a Fedora Linux ISO onto my USB drive and booted from it into the GNOME 3 desktop environment, I thought that if I install Fedora like it says on the desktop it would install it to the USB drive that it is running from.

I went trough the installer and wiped everything and then installed the OS thinking that it would install on the USB but i wiped my SSD and now all of my documents and pictures are gone. Is there any way for me to reverse what I did? I don't want to fail my Masters because of a silly mistake like this

What file system is on the ssd or is it just blank?

You could try photorec (restore to ANOTHER drive, or else you'll just overwrite more).

Not that I have much hope you recover much. Better just continue from your last backup.

Probably no and you deserve it for being retarded.
The installer makes you select exactly which disk to install to, and details the partitioning steps and asks for confirmation before committing.
Also where the fuck are your backups? How come you have important data and no backups?

It's all your fault and you should feel bad.

Doesn't bother you guys we always have distro threads all over Sup Forums but when someone recommends a distro just mentions the freaking name and nothing else? I mean, c'mon, at least say what niche it covers.
By the way, I like one particular distro but won't say which, but, I'll give you details for a couple:

Devuan: Awesome support, huge repository, the community overlaps with debian (as its support). Recommended for beginners, intermediate and even advanced users.
PCLinux: Is oriented to be the least bothersome and most newbie friendly of the list. Support is great, ootb comes with all drivers available and non-free packages winfags need. Came to know this late so didn't use much because I already don't need hand-holding.
Slackware: Much is misunderstood about slacky, is it binary or source based? Well, the installation provides binary packages, but if you want more you must install packages from source yourself by compiling, or install a package manager like slackpg or sbotools. From intermediate to advanced users only.
Source Mage/GNU Linux: Source based, minimalistic, do-it-yourself distro. I put it i the list instead of Gentoo because although I respect Gentoo and its developers, SMGL is such a great idea we ought to know more about it. First of all, the package manager is all written in bash, I don't know of any project in bash as advanced as this, you can tweak anything if you know sufficient bash and even collaborate with the development of the distro itself. Obviously not for the faint of hear, this is for advanced users only is often mentioned as the Linux From Scratch with a package manager. The community contract and the development guidelines is the best I've seen so at least check it out.

By the way all of these are free from "he who shall not be named" init, if that is wroth something for you.

>I was trying to install GIMP and ended up accidentally installing GNOME and it removed my network manger and xubuntu desktop environment now I can't connect to my wifi and I hve no internet cable either
KEK WTF

Does anybody here have qemu experience with windows guests?
Do I need some kind of drivers for it like virtualbox does?

noob question but whats wrong with s*stemd init?

>First of all, the package manager is all written in bash
How can you see this as a good idea?

I don't remember needing specific drivers but it could just be that I forgot that I installed some.

What is wrong with people not using it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Can we, like, not have this bait?

Does VirtIO ring any bells?

>>First of all, the package manager is all written in bash
>How can you see this as a good idea?
Remember this is a source based distro and that most of its users want a LFS environment with automated tools, a package manager dealing with compilation is not supposed to be filled with exotic functions.

But wasn't that to increase performance? I think windows can run in qemu without specific drivers, just like any other OS.

It was Ext4 but now it's blank with no partition table

I do feel bad I'm sorry I don't hve back ups, I'm very new to computing in general, we grew up quite poor and I haven't had a computer until recently

How are your files read only?

Thanks for the recommendation, I wil need to find a way to install photorec because wifi doesn't work on the Fedora Live USB because it's very out of date (Fedora 22) and I have no other computer to install photorec software. I also don't have an Ethernet cable or access to the router.

I know I've goofed prettt bad

I'm unsure how it happened, but when I go into properties it says they are now read only for my user, did the GIMP software ruin my system for good?

Bump.

I don't think I used virtio with windows, sorry.

Unless the package manager is just cd $dir && make && make install && cd .. using bash is a really stupid idea. Any kind of software that needs more than 20 lines of code should be written in a sane programming language.

Is it safe to use ext4 for the boot partition?
I am trying o set up LVM for ubuntu 16.04.
Also if sda is the physical drive and it has two children
-sda1
-sda2
then i place the boot on sda1 which is 512 mb right?

Right click over the files, see their permissions. Check if you are indeed its owner, if you are just proceed to mark write permissions for you.

...

You can but then your computer won't know how it should use your disk and will do weird things.

It is safe but BTRFS is the recommended filesystem now.
Yes you can put boot on sda1 but you don't have to.

>but you don't have to.
Are you telling me it will work without any boot partition?

No, I'm telling you that you can have a single partition and put everything on it. Or that you can put your home in sda1 and boot on sda2. You can do whatever you want.
But yeah, you need a /boot.

I agree the packager manager need not be over complex, but lets agree unnecessary dependencies breaks all goal with a minimal system. I do think bash is a sane programing language designed for scripting, if designed with minimal complexity of course.

Phew. Are you posting this from an Android smartphone where you have root? If you have a suitable USB cable, you can possibly use DriveDroid to make your smartphone itself "simulate" a newer Fedora Live USB (well, I'd personally use systemrescuecd, ymmv).

>BTRFS is the recommended filesystem now.
what is the advantage compared to ext2?

Should i align my new hard drive partition to Cylinder or MiB in gparted? It is just for file storage.

>Is it safe to use ext4 for the boot partition?
Yes.
>then i place the boot on sda1 which is 512 mb right?
Right.
[Citation Needed]

It will not. If you want your root on LVM you need a separate /boot that is a plain Linux partition.

(I think there is an way to boot directly from LVM but it's new and experimental.)

You can do it with mkfs.ext4, yes. But it'll be marginally safer to just make a gpt with a single partition across the whole drive because then nothing will think it's an empty drive, not even non-Linux OS'.

How can I mount partitions without having to put in a password every time? What group should my user be in? I'm on Gentoo

ext2:
Maximum file size: 16 GiB to 2 TiB
Maximum volume size: 2 TiB to 32 TiB
Creation timestamps: No
Last archive timestamps: No
Checksums/ecc: No
Block journaling: No
Metadata-only journaling: No
Filechange log: No
Snapshotting: No
Data-deduplication: No
Online grow: No
Offline grow: Yes
Online shrink: No
Offline shrink: Yes
Transparent compression: No
Copy on write: No

btrfs:
Maximum file size: 16 EiB
Maximum volume size: 16 EiB
Creation timestamps: Yes
Last archive timestamps: Yes
Checksums/ecc: Yes
Block journaling: Yes
Metadata-only journaling: Yes
Filechange log: Yes
Snapshotting: Yes
Data-deduplication: Yes
Online grow: Yes
Offline grow: No
Online shrink: Yes
Offline shrink: No
Transparent compression: Yes
Copy on write: Yes

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems

So there is really no point in making it partitionless, right?

Gentoo isn't for you if you can't figure out something that simple.

disk?

Align to sector size (fdisk should by default suggest the correct thing, IDK about gparted).

If you do it wrong, it's not necessarily horrible either, your drive will just read a bunch of sectors extra at times.

I'm in disk, but it still asks for a password.

Why do you NOT want partitions? What's it to you if there's a single partition on your drive?
I don't know anything about hard drives and file systems, but I'm pretty sure you can't have a filesystem without a partition to hold it.

The tutorial said to not boot from lvm because if something shits itself you won't know if it's the lvm fault or something in the boot loader, but if the boot partition is separate then fucking up lvm won't prevent your from doing boot things

You need a partition table to store where each partition begins, ends, block size and stuff. Even if you will have only one partition.

Go to Device>Create Partition Table.

If you don't want any partition or partition table you can fill the device with zeros.

I just got my first job as a full time GNU/Linux sysadmin. While I can do my job pretty handily and learn a lot every day, I still feel like I don't have a deep mastery of it. This isn't helped by my coworkers being several years older and more experienced than me, so they can usually fix something before I get a chance to work it out myself.

What are some resources to learn more than the basics for GNU/Linux administration? Open to physical books or web resources.

Depends.

Legacy/BIOS boot:
ext4 is fine and it doesn't matter where you put the partition - it just needs to have the bootable flag set.

(U)EFI:
/boot can be formatted as ext4 but the EFI partition (usually /boot/efi) has to be FAT32 formatted. No bootable flag is needed, nor it is ever considered.

>It is safe but BTRFS is the recommended filesystem now.
Hahaha, No.

1. We are talking about ext4, not ext2.
2. Where does it say that "BTRFS is the recommended file system now"?

Thanks. Got one more question, what is the best way to take a snapshot of the entire / so that i can save it as a file and then restore it later if needed? (Like if i break the system i can just delete it and replace it with the snapshot completely)

The other post I was replying to was talking about ext2. Some of the differences are still true between ext4 and btrfs.

>Theodore Ts’o, a maintainer for Ext3 and later, Ext4, has stated that he sees Btrfs as a better way forward than continuing to rely on the ext* technology.
Source: maketecheasier.com/what-is-btrfs/

Yes. It's better to keep it separate.

Suggestion: Leave an empty ~5GB partition in the same Volume Group as your root partition. LVM supports snapshots and they are quite useful even for desktops. You might want to revert an upgrade for example.

Not in general. The partition table takes up such a trivial amount of space, you might as well have it even JUST so you GPT IDs just in case you ever need them to understand what drive you're looking at in another OS or diagnostic tool.

> install gentoo

That is what the 30GB system back up partition is for, they say it can be small but i made it same size as system partition to make sure the snapshot never runs out of space

>>Theodore Ts’o, a maintainer for Ext3 and later, Ext4, has stated that he sees Btrfs as a better way forward than continuing to rely on the ext* technology.
>Source: maketecheasier.com/what-is-btrfs/
That was years ago when BTRFS was relatively new and no one dared to think it would suffer from elementary failures after EIGHT YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT.

>Some of the differences are still true between ext4 and btrfs.
Most of are not.

>Source: maketecheasier.com/what-is-btrfs/
Did he say that, as of BTRFS is *now*, it's recommended to use it for general cases?
It seems that he only said that Btrfs has a better future.

Shut it, Arch user. You probably don't even know the answer.

You most likely need to add your user to the disk group.

XFS is what will supercede ext4. Our Red Hat overlords have made it the default file system in RHEL7.

what happens if i have two computers with linux and both computers have user named user and i take hdd from one computer and put it into the other, will the user user on that second computer be able to edit files on the hdd from the first computer where the firt computer's user is marked as owner?

LVM can do snapshots but I've never used this so I can't comment on it.

30GB is a big waste of space and doesn't make sense for a desktop. The snapshot only keeps track of the things that changed, not of the entire partition.
If you upgrade your system, only the bits of the disk that were to be changed in the process will be kept in the snapshot.

BTRFS doesn't suffer from elementary failures. The only persons spreading this meme are the idiots who tried it when it was marked as experimental. I've been running BTRFS for five years and never suffered from data loss. Suse considers BTRFS stable enough to be the default filesystem on all new OpenSuse installations.

Now, do any of you have proof that current BTRFS isn't stable enough for data storage?

>You don't even know the answer.
I do. FUSE or nopasswd mnt in the sudoers file. I wasn't trying to be mean to you, only pointing out that this is a really simple thing and that if you can't figure it out by yourself you should probably use something more user-friendly.

That's not how LVM snapshots work.
See:

Yes, but what happens when i want to make a snapshot of a clean install and then use that snapshot 10 years later? In 10 years terabytes of data were written and deleted from the system partition

There is no single best way. LVM or btrfs' builtin snapshotting is one way.

I personally prefer bup. Others have recommended borgbackup. Both of these are useful for ITERATIVE repeated backups because they deduplicate.

And of course you could just rsync -a clone it, or ddrescue it. Or use a filesystem specific dumping tool, if that exists.

>BTRFS doesn't suffer from elementary failures.
I didn't say that.

>Now, do any of you have proof that current BTRFS isn't stable enough for data storage?
I didn't say it isn't.

*You* said it was the recommended. I asked for a citation. You didn't provide it.

>*You* said it was the recommended. I asked for a citation. You didn't provide it.
I did provide it by pointing out that both Theodore T'so and SUSE both recommend BTRFS.

You would need storage to keep those terabytes. If you simply want a copy of the system you can use the dd utility. You will want to save the boot loader too.

Theodore doesn't recommend it. He only said he thinks BTRFS has a better future. He didn't say it's better right now.
The fact that he thinks it has a better future doesn't mean it will turn out to have a better future.

I can point that basically no other major distro uses btrfs as default. Red Hat for example uses XFS, Ubuntu Server and Debian use ext4.

>You would need storage to keep those terabytes
This is completely wrong. Snapshot only saves changes, so at maximum, a complete copy of the system can be held at the time of the created partition and not a bit more.

>BTRFS doesn't suffer from elementary failures.
I've lost a notebook to it recently. It was worth it, but still.

>The only persons spreading this meme are the idiots who tried it when it was marked as experimental.
You're projecting too hard.

>I've been running BTRFS for five years and never suffered from data loss.
Well, my experience is different. Fight me.

>Suse considers BTRFS stable enough to be the default filesystem on all new OpenSuse installations.
That's a half-lie. They only ship and support a stable subset of the functionality.
That means no RAID and greatly emasculated volume management.

>Now, do any of you have proof that current BTRFS isn't stable enough for data storage?
I work at enterprise. We use XFS and ext4 on Linux boxes.

Nothing will happen, you have whatever of the 10TB of data remained uniquely in the end, plus the initial snapshot's data.

It's NOT logging ALL data from then onwards as a revision history unless you make snapshots at every change.

Wouldn't it save the fact that an initially empty region of 4GB is now a video file? And if you deleted this file, wouldn't it also save this change?

>SUSE considers BTRFS stable enough to be the default filesystem on all new OpenSuse installations.

That doesn't mean much. OpenSUSE is the testbed for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop/Server, so it's not farfetched that they'd be trying to work out potential kinks by shipping Btrfs in OpenSUSE.

Never mind. I just got it. You were correct, thanks.

He said it had a better future in 2013. We're in 2017 now and BTRFS usage has increased, meanwhile ext4 usage has decreased a lot. I think we can infer that he was right and that he would now recommend using BTRFS instead of EXT4.

>I've lost a notebook to it recently.
How? Why are you certain it is BTRFS's fault?
>They only ship and support a stable subset of the functionality.
I wasn't aware of that. Are you sure that's what they're doing now? BTRFS RAID is now seen as production-ready (it got fixed a few months ago).

You're both presenting convincing arguments, hence I'm retracting my claim in .

>You're both presenting convincing arguments, hence I'm retracting my claim in .
I would like to congratulate you for your intellectual honesty. I'm glad we had a civilized debate.

My partition table is gpt. I'm trying to create an ext4 partition and there is two available fields: "partition name" and "LABEL". What's the difference? Should I leave partition name blank and just set the label? Thank you very much anime.

Use ftables to mount on boot or look into udev rules if you want something dynamic.