agrep -pB IT /dev/life
Xterm misses the convenient option to resize the fonts with Ctrl+<plus> and Ctrl+<minus> like xfce4-terminal or gnome-terminal do out of the box. This feature can be added on Debian systems by dropping a configuration snippet into /etc/X11/Xresources/x11-xterm-fontsize : ! Allow XTerm font size to be changed with Ctrl+<plus> and <minus> XTerm.vt100.translations: #override \n\ Ctrl <Key> minus:…
Trixie ships Gimp 3.0.4 and the 3.x series has gotten incompatible to XSane , the common frontend for scanners on Linux. Hence the maintainer, Jörg Frings-Fürst, has disabled the Gimp integration temporarily in response to a Debian bug #1088080 . There seems to be no tracking bug for getting the functionality back but people have been commenting on Debian bug #993293 as that is ... loosely related…
As per the previous Polkit blog post the policykit framwork has lost the ability to understand its own .pkla files and policies need to be expressed in Javascript with .rules files now. To re-enable allowing remote users (think ssh) to reboot, hibernate, suspend or power off the local system, create a 10-shutdown-reboot.rules file in /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/ : polkit.addRule(function(action,…
On the way to Trixie, polkitd (Policy Kit Daemon) has lost the functionality to evaluate its .pkla (Polkit Local Authority) files . $ zcat /usr/share/doc/polkitd/NEWS.Debian.gz policykit-1 (121+compat0.1-2) experimental; urgency=medium This version of polkit changes the syntax used for local policy rules: it is now the same JavaScript-based format used by the upstream polkit project and by other…
Apt in Trixie (Debian 13) has the annoying function to tell you " Notice : Some sources can be modernized. Run apt modernize-sources to do so." ... every single time you run apt update . Not cool for logs and log monitoring. And - of course - if you had the option to do this, you ... would have run the indicated apt modernize-sources command to convert your sources.list to "deb822 .sources format"…
Apparently somebody managed to resell Seagate hard disks that have 2-5 years of operations on them as brand new . They did this by using some new shrink wrap bags and resetting the used hard disk SMART attributes to factory-new values. Luckily Seagate has a proprietary extension "Seagate FARM (Field Access Reliability Metrics)" implemented in their disks that ... the crooks did not reset. Luckily…
In 2020 my company bought a DYMO LabelWriter Wireless. It is an awesome little device for thermal printing a wide variety of labels. The labels are easily available both from DYMO and from third parties so the pricing is quite acceptable. Unfortunately DYMO supplies their DYMO Connect Software only for Microsoft Windows and MacOSX. A mobile app of the same name for Android and Apple iOS devices is…
November 2024 will be known as the time when killing peanut, a pet squirrel, by the New York State DEC swung the US presidential elections and shaped history forever. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on each side, the tireless campaigning by the candidates, the celebrity endorsements ... all made for an open race for months. Investments evened each other out. But an OnlyFans producer…
esptool , the Espressif SoC serial bootloader utility, tends to dislike cheap Flash chips attached to the various incarnations of the ESP32 chip family. And it seems to dislike them even more when running esptool on Linux than on other OSs. The common error mode is seeing it break at the 2MB barrier when trying to dump ( esptool read_flash ) a 4MB flash configuration. esptool -p / dev / ttyUSB0 -b…
After the unfortunate and somewhat surprising shutdown of the Open Collective Foundation (OCF) , htop and Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) have migrated to Hack Club . Initially founded to improve STEM education, support high school computer science clubs and firmly founded in the hacker culture , Hack Club have created a US IRS approved 501(c)(3) charity that provides what Open Collective did/does 1…
Update 28.02.2024 19:45 CET: There is now a blog entry at https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-official-statement-ocf-dissolution/ trying to discern the legal entities in the Open Collective ecosystem and recommending potential ways forward. Gee, there is nothing on their blog yet, but I just [28.02.2023 00:07 CET] received this email from Mike Strode, Program Officer at the Open…
Thunderbird in Debian stable (Bookworm) has received Thunderbird v115.3.1 as a security update . With it comes "Supernova", a UI redesign. There is a Mozilla blogpost with a walk-through of the new UI . Unfortunately it features a super eye-catching "New Message" button that - thankfully - can be disabled. Even the whole space above the email folder pane can be recovered by disabling the folder…
Installing a laptop with the shiny new Debian Bookworm release finds a few interesting things broken that I probably had fixed in the past already on the old laptop. One, that was increadibly unintuitive to fix, was lots of applications (like xfce4-terminal or Telegram) opening links in Chromium despite Firefox being set as the preferred webbrowser everywhere . update-alternatives --config…
After an upgrade of my PC s mainboard BIOS the boot would take a minute or more to complete and sometimes the lightdm login screen would sit there but not accept keyboard input for another minute or so. Then the keyboard got enabled and I could log in normally. Everything worked fine after that bootup struggle completed. This was fully reproducible and persisted across reboots. Weird. The kernel…
Canonical has implemented a staged roll-out for some Ubuntu package updates. I find that rather annoying at times, e.g. when preparing the laptop for traveling. So for my memory and for the benefit of others: # disable the phased roll-out feature on this apt upgrade run sudo apt -o "APT::Get::Always-Include-Phased-Updates=true" dist-upgrade This can - for permanent use - be put into a config file,…