My boot process was pretty slow in a new setup I had. It would stop for about 30 seconds and then give the following error:
Gave up waiting for suspend/resume device
Turns out I had a resumable device listed in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume even though my swap is both encrypted with random keys and too small. Editing that file and setting RESUME=none and running sudo update-initramfs -u fixed the issue.
Zoom has a native Linux client which supports screen sharing in Wayland, at least on some platforms. Today when I tried to start a Share Screen I encountered the following error:
Can not start share, we only support Wayland on GNOME with Ubuntu 17 and above, Fedora 25 and above, Debian 9 and above, CentOS 8 and above, OpenSUSE Leap 15 and above, Oracle Linux 8 and above, Arch Linux, AnterGos, Manjaro. If your OS is not on the list, please use x11 instead.
The feature works for me when I’m using Debian Stable (Buster), and also worked for the short while I’ve used Debian Testing (Bullseye). So, I guessed that the feature is broken due to wrong OS version detection. The fix is easy: Remove /etc/os-release (which is by default a symlink to /usr/lib/os-release) and append to the original contents the following lines:
VERSION_ID="99" VERSION="99 (sid)" VERSION_CODENAME="sid"
So the entire file should look like:
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux bullseye/sid" NAME="Debian GNU/Linux" ID=debian HOME_URL="https://www.debian.org/" SUPPORT_URL="https://www.debian.org/support" BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/" VERSION_ID="99" VERSION="99 (sid)" VERSION_CODENAME="sid"
When I first encountered the error, I guessed Zoom doesn’t actually attempt the Share Screen, but relies on a pre-configured list of supported distros and (minimal) versions. It worked for me with Debian Stable (10) and Testing (11), but what version number is Unstable? Debian Unstable doesn’t have a version number associated with it, so it must be the problem.
A quick strace revealed how Zoom retrieves the current distro name and version:
$ strace -f -tt zoom
...
107498 11:20:58.943764 openat(AT_FDCWD, "/etc/os-release", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC
107513 11:20:58.943771 futex(0x565257f88760, FUTEX_WAIT_BITSET_PRIVATE|FUTEX_CLOCK_REALTIME, 0, {tv_sec=1592727659, tv_nsec=303765000}, FUTEX_BITSET_MATCH_ANY
107498 11:20:58.943779 <… openat resumed>) = 17
107498 11:20:58.943787 fcntl(17, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0
107498 11:20:58.943802 fstat(17, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=200, …}) = 0
107498 11:20:58.943817 read(17, "PRETTY_NAME=\"Debian GNU/Linux bu"…, 200) = 200
...
As you can see Zoom reads (and probably later parses) the entire /etc/os-release file. This file contains identification data for the current running distro including name and version. Because Debian Sid doesn’t have the version variables set, Zoom erroneously misinterpret it as an old version instead of the newest. Thus, it refuses to enable the Share Screen feature. Adding the relevant version variables solves this issue.
See also: man os-release (5)
By default, PulseAudio allows an application to change the max volume output to be louder than the one set by the user. I find it annoying that some apps tend to set volume to 100% which ends up increasing the system volume to unreasonable levels. You can prevent it by setting flat-volumes to no in ~/.config/pulse/daemon.conf.
$ echo "flat-volumes = no" >> ~/.config/pulse/daemon.conf
$ pulseaudio --kill
$ pulseaudio --start
With flat-volumes = no PulseAudio uses relative volumes. Each applications sets its own volume relative to the system output.
References:
Recently I noticed xdg-open started failing opening links in Firefox. Giving me the following error:
Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.
It happened while I had Firefox running and responding to everything else. I’m running the latest stable Firefox (74 as I’m writing this) on Wayland. Wayland brings a lot of good things, but also a lot of interoperability problems, so I suspected it had something to do with it. Thanks to Martin Stransky I found out that the solution is to set the MOZ_DBUS_REMOTE environment variable prior to launching Firefox. If you are using a desktop file to launch Firefox, you can set the variable in the Exec line like this:
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Firefox
Exec=env MOZ_DBUS_REMOTE=1 MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 /home/guyru/.local/firefox/firefox %u
X-MultipleArgs=false
Icon=firefox-esr
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
Terminal=false
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;application/rss+xml;application/rdf+xml;image/gif;image/jpeg;image/png;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;
You will need to restart Firefox before the fix will take affect.
JetBrains Mono is a new monospace typeface designed to be comfortable to read. It has clear distinction between the different letters and relatively high x-height.
The installation instruction were tested on Debian, but should work on every Linux.
Download and unzip the font:
$ wget https://download.jetbrains.com/fonts/JetBrainsMono-1.0.0.zip
$ unzip JetBrainsMono-1.0.0.zip
Install the font to either the user’s font directory
$ mv JetBrainsMono-*.ttf ~/.local/share/fonts/
or the system-wide one:
$ sudo mv JetBrainsMono-*.ttf /usr/share/fonts/
To use the font in gVim set guifont accordingly in ~/.vimrc:
:set guifont=JetBrains\ Mono\ 13
After playing with installing and removing the amdgpu and amdgpu-pro drivers, my system could not load the radeonsi. glxinfo returned the following error:
$ DRI_PRIME=1 glxinfo | grep OpenGL
libGL error: unable to load driver: radeonsi_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: radeonsi
It was solved by cleaning up leftover symlinks and reinstalling libgl-mesa-dri
$ sudo find /usr/lib/ -lname "/opt/amdgpu/*" -print -delete
/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/dri/kms_swrast_dri.so
/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/dri/r600_dri.so
/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/dri/r200_dri.so
/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/dri/vmwgfx_dri.so
/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/dri/swrast_dri.so
/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/dri/radeonsi_dri.so
/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/dri/r300_dri.so
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/kms_swrast_dri.so
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/r600_dri.so
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/r200_dri.so
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/vmwgfx_dri.so
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/swrast_dri.so
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/radeonsi_dri.so
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/r300_dri.so
$ sudo apt install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-dri
By default, trimming is disabled in Debian Buster. If you have an SSD, you can enable periodic trimming:
$ sudo systemctl enable fstrim.timer
The alternative is continuous trimming, which is enabled by passing discard option to the filesystem in /etc/fstab/.
Installing Firefox via Snap is an easy way to get the latest Firefox version on your favorite distro, regardless of the version the distro ships with. However, due to Snap’s security model, Yubikeys, or any other FIDO tokens do not work out of the box. To enable U2F devices, like Yubikeys, you need to give the Firefox package the necessary permissions manually:
$ snap connect firefox:u2f-devices
A quick and secure way to generate numerical PINs. The only dependency is coreutils so it should work on almost any system out-of-the-box.
$ shuf --random-source=/dev/urandom -i 0-9 -r -n 6 | paste -sd ''
659010
The following snippet should work on every system that has coreutils.
$ shuf /usr/share/dict/words --repeat --random-source /dev/random -n 5
You can swap /usr/share/dict/words with any good wordlist, like EFF’s or Arnold Reinhold’s Diceware list.
You can also add it for ease of use to your ~/.bash_aliases
alias passphrase="shuf ~/dotfiles/misc/diceware8k.txt --repeat --random-source /dev/random -n"
And then you could easily use it in bash:
$ passphrase 5
notch
kane
to
drag
cater