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Users of all levels are welcome to ask questions about GNU/Linux and share their experiences.
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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%
Post cool .bashrc settings you've found. Reposting from last thread, some really awesome ones:
shopt -s autocd Automatically cd into directories by just typing their name
shopt -s extglob Allows extended globbing like echo +(*jpg|*png).
shopt -s globstar Allows recursive globbing like echo **/*.c
bind '"\e[a":history-search-backward' bind '"\e[b":history-search-forward' Autocompletes what's already on the command with history via shift+arrow up
Nicholas Williams
pacman -Sf didn't work. How do I decide where to move the conflicting files? There are a lot of them.
Daniel Harris
I'd do a mirror of the folder structure in /root/pacman_collisions or such, just so I could easily restore if I busted anything.
Whether there is a pacman function to do this for you, I'd not know... not familiar enough with pacman.
Colton Gray
Is it worth switching to TCMalloc?
The wiki says it offers performance *gains* but if it's so great then why does arch not use it in its base system?
Hudson Bell
GF wants me to install Linux since Windows 10 is killing her vibe.
Basically, I need a distro that comes with shit already set, preferably, arch-based. Any suggestions?
Blake Bell
Why Arch-based? If you don't even know enough about GNU/Linux to know what distros come "with shit already set", why do you have a preference for Arch? That's absurd. Beggars can't be choosers.
Benjamin Gutierrez
Why the fuck is it showing 'loop device'? One just goes to my home folder and the other to root. Sorry, I'm brand new and decided to be a huge baby and get an Ubuntu-based distro but found I disliked gnome. (I'm on KDE Neon).
Thomas White
Brainlet here, I wanted to clone my GNU/Linux system to a larger SSD but I have troubles with UUIDs I think, the new drive doesn't boot properly unless I do "fallback" in GRUB. I don't understand what went wrong.
It says "waiting for device..." then nothing.
Andrew Butler
>arch-based >shit already >gf
yeah ok just install macOS
Jaxson Bell
I'd just like to interject for moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
Nathaniel Phillips
This is just filled with disinformation. I know you must be excited to in your first year of college, but you are not ready to shitpost just yet.
Landon Rogers
If a usb device isn't working in linux because it has no linux drivers and i install wine, will the wine see the device and allow me install windows drivers?
Josiah Powell
What is the best way to work your way backwards from a deb file? I want to install a package but they only provided a deb file, so maybe I could install it anyway by compiling it myself or do the steps they do in the deb file
Elijah Anderson
Just install your operating system on the other SSD and tarball your home directory.
Sebastian Ortiz
Why are you responding to pasta? The same pasta that gets posted a thousand times, only to be responded to with more pasta, "I'd like to redact my previous claim," "Actually, it's just Linux," only to be contradicted once again, "I was previously mistaken," only to be contradicted once, twice again.
Sebastian Miller
So if the system has old packages for something and i want to use the official repo which i added as ppa:, do i need to uinstall the existing packages first?
Aiden Butler
Get the source, package it yourself.
Connor Myers
Do you mean that you have old packages installed on you Ubuntu instance, and the packages in this PPA require newer dependencies?
Liam Long
They will conflict with each other if the new package is packaged properly. It should ask you if you want to remove the old one. If not, it will just abort and you'll have to remove it yourself.
Connor Cruz
No, i don't really understand what ppa is. To my understanding is it just a package repo like apt-get repo?
Basically this is my situation:
>installed Ubuntu >the Ubuntu has driver for my printer BUT it is too outdated and doesn't work properly >google says stuff like this: >sudo add-apt-repository ppa:blah/blah
So if i undestand it correclt that adds a new source for packages which contains updated drivers for my priner, so after doing that command all i need to do is run sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade
To update the old drivers to new drivers?
Ian Cox
thread about ransomware on gentoo.
when they say he ran firefox as root that means he was logged into as sudo instead a user account? if he had a password and ran firefox from a user account it wouldn't have happened right?
Bentley Jackson
And yet there will still be idiots in this thread coming out of the woodwork claiming that there's nothing wrong with running everything as root, for some stupid, arbitrary reason, just for the sake of contrarianism at the expense of new users.
Leo Lewis
That sounds okay. As long as there aren't conflicting dependencies, which there probably shouldn't be.
Ian Sanders
when they say running it as root they mean they log into root at the beginning instead of a user account? i changed my sudoer so i can type sudo and run commands. should i log into a user without that privilege even when i'm browsing the web? i'm confused by that thread. if he had been a user who could use sudo and type the password would it have avoided those issues?
Dylan Ward
Well that is the problem, it doesn't work. Well it does, but it breaks stuff. I did what i said, i followed the tutorial which said nothing about uninstalling old packages and such and the stuff installed and printer is working fine, but when i try to connect to ubuntu via remote desktop now, the the remote desktop gui shows error saying one of the driver packages crashed and then the computer starts slowly slowing down over the next 10 minutes untill it grinds to a halt, while the hdd become 100% used at all times and i have to reboot, and then all works fine until i try to use the remote dektop
Alexander White
>Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2017 That's old news.
>logged into as sudo Sudo is a program that temporarily runs something as root (or another user). I don't know anything about his situation, but I assume it would not have been as easy if he had run it as his normal user.
Noah Ross
Now that Canonical is going public and will likely be bought by Microsoft, what will happen to Ubuntu?
Hudson Baker
Well, for that specific thread on Gentooforums, the guy was running Firefox specifically as root because he was too lazy to solve some random problem with Firefox the right way. An account with sudo permissions is different. If you're really worried about it, just modify sudoers so that you have to enter a password to use sudo.
Jacob White
transmission-cli - obvious transmission-daemon - obvious transmission-common - what the fuck does this one do? Can't find any info on it
Dylan Hughes
that's how i've got it setup right now, but should just run a user without any of those privilege and then specifically log into another user for dealing with updates or editing config?
Jaxson Cruz
Looks like it didn't work then. Sorry. Try asking Ubuntu forums, and make sure to be specific about what repo and packages you were trying to install.
Matthew Gray
What?
Ryan Jones
I already did, but nobody replies in several days, which is understandable since not many people knows or cares about specific model printer driver issues for ubuntu
Anthony Nguyen
i've got root and another user account that uses sudo command + password so i can get root access as the user to do updates/terminal stuff. should i be logged in as a regular user who can't even use sudo command when i'm browsing the web on firefox?
i'm wondering if having sudo will allow them to fuck me over
Brody Cooper
Is it an executable binary? Might just be a meta-package, or a library. If the former-most, try running it, or check the man pages. :(
Colton Gomez
Use your package manager to list all the files that package has and see what they are. That's a common sense thing to do. Also, hint: packages with such names usually contain things that are common, hence the name, that the other related packages of that package use. If you don't like it, blame excessive package splitting of Debian/Ubuntu.
Nolan Collins
The whole point of sudo is that it doesn't fuck you over. But if you're really that paranoid, use a chroot environment or snaps. Actually, snaps isn't a bad idea, regardless.
Xavier Sanders
Oh, yeah. It might just be documentation. It looks like an exclusively Debian thing, so that might be it.
Xavier Smith
Why would Microsoft by Canonical when they have Azure?
Noah Richardson
How is it going to do that? I don't know much about this, but how will an exploit in your browser run something with the sudo program in front and type in your password if they don't know it?
The current Ubuntu guys will likely set up shop somewhere else and start again, or everyone will just move to Mint (Debian version)
Benjamin Jones
Hello friends, I have a question.
I created a local repo for deb files in my computer, so that I can download very few .deb's there that I need for programs that use certain packages no longer included in Debian Sid (for example, Spotify relies on the ancient libssl1.0.0, found in oldstable packages.debian.org/jessie/libssl1.0.0) and have aptitude install them and manage them (and hopefully uninstall them once they are no longer required). I know this is not necessary and I can simply dpkg -i the .deb, but this is my autism intervening and requiring the outcast .deb's relegated to a directory called /usr/local/myrepo, which gets called in my sources.list as
deb [allow-insecure=yes] file:/usr/local/myrepo ./
Now, my question is relatively simple: how do I make it so that when I do aptitude update, I don't get this horrible mess of notifications and warnings related to that local repo?
Meaning, I'd like it maybe just one line marks a 'hit' on the localrepo to remind me it's there, but no more than 1, and get rid of the non-secure warning entirely but ONLY for that one repo.
Lucas Scott
Neat.
Adrian Roberts
They likely want to remove Linux from the desktop market completely and Canonical is pretty big in IoT production and cloud services. If Microsoft owned Canonical there would be no more competition for them.
Jace Jenkins
Microsoft would then have their own Linux distribution. The majority of the Ubuntu user base wouldn't even know that Microsoft has taken over.
Brody Ross
no idea. the poster from that thread said even if firefox wasn't running as root he could've fucked the user. i don't know what level a user can even run different programs at so i'm clueless to answer it that's why i wanted to know
Samuel Long
I solved one part of my question by looking at the man page, it can be done by substituting allow-insecure with Trusted. However, I still have the doubts about minimizing the output of the 'Get's in the pastebin there.
Hudson Adams
Again, I don't know much, but: Of course Firefox can fuck your files over if Firefox runs a program, let's say "rm" to delete files. But how is Firefox going to do that? I'm pretty sure there's no way for Firefox to do that, except for an exploit somewhere, if such an exploit even shows up. Therefore, stop worrying about unlikely hypothetical scenarios, keep Firefox updated and such things shouldn't happen.
Nicholas Lewis
I will try again. I want to switch my distro. I've been using Fedora with Gnome for half a year, I like how minimalistic it looks and how to navigate between workspaces. I only had a few small crashes and resources aren't an issue here. However all the Gnome shittalking made me wonder which other DE I could use that would be clean and simple (single bar with option to merge open windows into it, as few icons as possible, possible super button shortcuts). tl;dr which DE works and looks similar to Gnome or should I just stick to it?
Joseph Mitchell
How does domination on the server market equate to domination on the desktop. Plus, isn't that the whole point of Azure?
Cameron Parker
>switching distributions because of a desktop environment >none of his complaints are distribution specific
You are an idiot. Reconsider your choice.
Nathan King
I'm changing distro because of different reason. I still haven't decided of DE on it.
Carter Thompson
Is it possible to have every dotfile in a single directory? Right now I have a dotfile directory that contains subdirectories (like, zsh, x, config) with the real dotfiles, from which I use stow to symlink under $HOME. Would it be possible to just have a directory with every .dotfile instead of cluttering $HOME?
Juan Mitchell
Is there a way I can set a global rule for windows to open on a particular display? I'm using XFCE with the default window manager, and I have a dual-monitor setup. My secondary monitor is to the left of my primary monitor, and although most applications open on the correct monitor, a lot of system dialog/settings menus tend to open on the leftmost secondary monitor, and it's really annoying. I've stumbled across devilspie, but as far as I'm aware (maybe I'm wrong, so if I am, please let me know), it only allows you to set rules on a window-by-window basis, which would be a bit of a pain to set up and is sort of a janky work around. Is there a better way to go about doing this?
Grayson James
That logo looks like Vampire Tux feasting on poor GNU. Much like the Linux community is leeching off the achievements of the GNU project.
Kayden Torres
For which reasons?
Oliver Morales
Because reasons. How is it related to DE functionality?
Connor Price
>advanced enoug for that he warrants a "non-standard" shell (zsh) >doesn't understand something as simple as this
No, you can't. It depends on the program. Some can change the location where they look for config files and some respect the XDG user directories standard. Every other program will still look at a specific location for it and the only way to change it is to modify the source. Using symlinks doesn't solve it, because you still have the symlinks where the configuration file would be.
Samuel Cooper
If I was to install Gentoo, would it work with opera and windows games?
Henry Mitchell
It's not, but you didn't mention any reasons and something is telling me you don't really have valid reasons to switch distributions, apart from not liking its looks.
Julian Reed
Look up what Linux distributions are and from that point on all your stupid questions will be answered. There is no point in answering you directly, because you won't use whatever you install anyway based on the way you ask questions.
Noah Gray
What is that pic of a penguin biting a human skull actually trying to show?
Angel Torres
I see, thanks
Michael Hernandez
Thank you for saying what needs to be said.
Luke Bell
For fucks sake, the main problem is I like how Gnome looks and how it works and when I look at xfce or kde screenshots they are loaded with bars, widgets and other crap I would like to get rid of when using them (xfce).
Matthew Powell
what fonts do you guys use for your whole system. does anyone have their terminal/ applications using the same fonts (bash/vim and firefox for ex). if so, what do you use
Jason Cooper
Then install those environments on Fedora and adjust them to your liking.
Jaxon Foster
pic related is inspo but i never knew how to make terminus work in firefox like he did
Bentley Jones
It doesn't matter which font. You can make any font consistent across your whole environment. The only problem would be websites in your browser, because they can use embedded fonts. I think you can even tell your browser to stop doing that, or force the usage of fonts with a specific fontconfig option.
Jackson Baker
You are retarded. I've already told you I'm switching from Fedora.
Henry Brooks
>calls me retarded >doesn't know how to install something with his package manager >doesn't know how to test software himself and make a decision on a subjective matter >still asks retarded questions and wastes time he could have spent trying out different environments
Sure, I am the retarded one here.
Josiah Roberts
>spending several hours on ricing 2-3 DE when you can just ask about functionality >not retarded okay mr Certified Linux Pro
Grayson Smith
>friendly
Matthew Perez
You could absolutely set up XFCE (and probably some other DEs, but I'm most familiar with XFCE) to be mostly similar to Gnome (or some otherwise minimalist fashion) if you wanted. It's very extensible and customizable, you can set up panels and docks and all other sorts of things up to your liking. There's some panel applets out there that allow for some titlebar/window button integration with your top dock ala Unity, if that's what you're talking about (I'm not really familiar with how Gnome works, sorry).
Anyway, if you're happy with Gnome, I don't see much reason for you to switch away from it unless you just want to try something new out. For what it's worth, there's not really any other DE that really functions out of the box similarly to Gnome. You could maybe consider trying out the new Ubuntu release which uses Gnome made to look kind of like Unity, I dunno. If Unity weren't dead I'd recommend that.
William Howard
>linux has been around for 26 years >still isn't advanced enough to do "sudo cd" linuxfags are you even trying?
Ayden Hall
why do you need root permission to change the directory youre in
Gavin Wood
>windows been around for 200 years >still can't rm -rf / pathetic
Luis Carter
I deactivated my dGPU using acpi_call and tmpfiles rules as described in the Archwiki, but I still see nouveau being loaded while booting, and before using startx I see some messages about it I cannot decipher. With lsmod I also see it using some modules. I don't have any nouveau package installed, nor nvidia (except libvdpau). How can I remove it/block the dGPU and only use intel stuff?
Ethan Bell
how do i do that thing where instead of saving shit into a file a program only writes is into terminal?
like sudo wget google.com but no file will be created, it will instead dump it as text into the terminal
Jace Parker
Disable it in your BIOS/EFI.
Blake Bell
First of all, why are you running wget as root? Secondly, keywords to look up in your search engine of choice "linux shell redirection stdout"
Samuel Jackson
>retard
Alexander Walker
Unfortunately I don't have the option, I blacklisted nouveau, but I have an inkling the GPU still isn't deactivated - at boot even if I don't see the nouveau messages it looks like it hangs trying to do something with the GPU
Aiden Perry
Thanks, that's what I wanted to know.
Liam Murphy
Thank you for reminding me never to buy a laptop with retarded graphical setups like that.
Wyatt Jackson
Yeah, I blame nvidia for the shitty linux support. I spent three days trying to make bumblebee work to emulate optimus but I ended up throwing the towel and just going with the iGPU, and even then I think the dGPU is still active since the laptop is idling at 50°C, trying to figure this out is a hassle
Andrew Foster
>Thank you for reminding me never to buy a laptop without windows ftfy
Zachary Gonzalez
I always run all commands as sudo because it avoid the annoying scenario where i have to rerun some commands all the time because they complain about not having root privileges
Juan Edwards
That's a very stupid thing to do and you are a retarded person.
Aiden Walker
Hi I am looking for a libre distro ( maybe source based ) with minimal packages. I've been thinking about SMGL, lunar linux or crux. Can anyone please help?
Jonathan Long
fuck, I'm sick of ubuntu fucking up my flash drive. When I use their basic utility to create a bootable linux distro, and then try to reformat, that flash drive in Windows, it always reformats it with lower capacity. Original capacity is 7gb, but after ubuntu has done its ways, it's about 1.5gb. How do I reformat a flash drive in Windows or Ubuntu to its normal capacity?
