And let's not forget Cortana.
Yes but it's unregulated and like most unregulated TLDs it has become a cesspool of malware and dark dealings. I don't think anybody would never if that were to happen to .io.
Normally that would have been the preferred solution, but since IANA has experienced all kinds of shenanigans on similar occasions they have decided to not allow ccTLD's to survive their former country anymore.
The dev has not made available any means to donate to him directly. He asks that people donate to the maintainers of the block lists instead.
Linux printing is very complex. Before Foomatic came along you got to experience it in all it's glory and setting up a working printing chain was a pain. The Foomatic Wikipedia page has a diagram that will make your head spin.
override the auto driving
I must be tired right now but I don't see how a remote operator could have driven better in this situation.
You can't get away from someone blocking your car in traffic without risk.of hitting them or other people or vehicles.
You probably meant they ought to drive away regardless of what they hit, if it helps the passenger escape a.dire.situation? But I have to wonder if a remote operator would agree to be put on the spot like that.
Great trick, I had no idea Flatpak can use an existing install as a repo!
If you end up with resizing /var as the only solution, please post your partition layout first and ask, don't rush into it. A screenshot from an app like Disk Manager or Gparted should do it, and we'll explain the steps and the risks.
When you're ready to resize, you MUST use a bootable stick, not resize from inside the running system. You have to make a stick using something like Ventoy, and drop the ISO for the live version of GParted on the stick, then boot with it and pick the Gparted live. You'll have to write down the instructions and be careful what you do, and also hope that there's no power outage during.
The safest method, if your /home has enough space, is to use it instead of /var for (some) Flatpak installs. You can force any Flatpak install to go to /home by adding --user
to the command.
If you look at the output of flatpak list
it will tell you which package is installed in user home dir and which in system (/var). You can also show the size of each package with flatpak list --columns=name,application,version,size,installation
.
I don't think you can move installed apps directly between system/user like Steam can (Flatpak is REALLY overdue for a good package manager) but you can uninstall apps from system, then run flatpak remove --unused
, then install them again with --user
.
Please note that apps installed with --user
are only seen by the user that installed them. Also you'll have to cleanup separately for system and user(s) in the future (flatpak remove --unused
for system, then flatpak remove --unused --user
for each user).
It's not an issue on Arch & derivates, due to the simple fact I mentioned above: third-party (AUR) packages are never allowed to use the name of an official package.
If a third-party package was already using a name that a new official package wishes to use, users are required to willingly uninstall the third-party package in order to be allowed to install the official one, and can never re-install the third-party package unless it changes its name.
It also helps that there's only one third-party repo (the AUR) so it prevents name overlaps among third-party packages. Although that's of secondary importance since it can be bypassed by crafting custom packages locally.
I appreciate the difficulty of enacting such a rule on Debian or Ubuntu now, considering the vast amount of already existing, widely established third-party repos, and also the fact that Debian official repos contain 3-4 times as many packages as Arch official repos. Which is why I think there's no way to fix this aspect of Debian/Ubuntu anymore.
I'm not saying that makes them unusable... but I believe that anybody who uses them should be [made] aware of this caveat. It's not readily apparent and by the time it bites a new user she's probably already invested a couple of years in them.
Interesting, I'll keep it in mind.
Still not sure it would help in all cases. Particularly when 3rd party repos have to override core packages because they need to be patched to support whatever they're installing. Which is another very bad practice in the Ubuntu/Debian world, granted.
I'm not sure how that would help. First of all, it would still end up blocking proper updates. Secondly, it's hard to figure out what exactly you're supposed to pin.
Third party package mechanism is fundamentally broken in Ubuntu (and in Debian).
Third party repos should never be allowed to use package names from the core repos. But they are, so they pretend they're core packages, but use different version names, and at upgrade time the updater doesn't know what to do with those version and how to solve dependencies.
That leaves you with a broken system where you can't upgrade and can't do anything entirely l eventually except a clean reinstall.
After this happened several times while using Ubuntu I resorted to leaving more and more time between major upgrades, running old versions on extended support or even unsupported.
Eventually I figured that if I'm gonna reinstall from scratch I might as well install a different distro.
I should note I still run Debian on my server, because that's a basic install with just core packages and everything else runs in Docker.
So if you delegate your package management to a completely different tool, like Flatpak, I guess you can continue to use Ubuntu. But it seems dumb to be required to resort to Flatpak to make Ubuntu usable.
How do you avoid interaction if it's being done automatically by your machine when you open up a print dialog, and if malicious servers can use the same names as legit printers?
People often think that things like recording your screen or keylogging are the worst but they're not. These attacks would require you to be targeted by someone looking for something specific.
Meanwhile automated attacks can copy all your files, or encrypt them (ransomware), search for sensitive information, or use your hardware for bad things (crypto mining, spam, DDoS, spreading the malware further), or most likely all of the above.
Automated attacks are much more dangerous and pervasive because they are conducted at massive scale. Bots scan massive amounts of IPs and try all the known exploits and vulnerabilities without getting tired, without caring how daunting it may be, without even caring if they're trying the right vulnerability against the right kind of OS or app. They just spray everything and see what sticks.
You're thousands of times more likely to be caught by such malware than it is to be targeted by someone with the skill and motive to record your screen or your keyboard.
Secondly, if someone like that targets you and has access to your user account, Wayland won't stop them. They can gain access to your root account, they can install elevated spyware, they can patch Wayland and so on.
What Wayland is doing is the equivalent of asking you to wear a motorcycle helmet 24/7, just in case you slip on some spilled juice, or a flower pot falls on your head, or the bus you're in crashes. All those things are possible and the helmet would come in handy but are they likely? We don't do it because it's not, and it would be a major inconvenience.
You were merely lucky that they didn't break.
Lucky... over 5 years and with a hundred AUR packages installed at any given time? I should play the lottery.
I've noticed you haven't given me any example of AUR packages that can't be installed on Manjaro right now, btw.
it wasn't just a rise in popularity of Arch it was Manjaro's PAMAC sending too many requests DDoSing the AUR.
You do realize that was never conlusively established, right? (1) Manjaro was already using search caching when that occured so they had no way to spam AUR, (2) there's more than one distro using pamac, and (3) anybody can use "pamac" as a user agent and there's no way to tell if it's coming from an actual Manjaro install.
My money is on someone actually DDoS'ing AUR and using pamac as a convenient scapegoat.
Last but not least you're trying to use this to divert from the fact AUR packages work fine on Manjaro.
That's exactly the problem. Wayland is a set of standards, more akin to FreeDesktop.Org than to X. It lives and dies by its implementations, and it's so utterly dependent on them that "KDE Wayland" has started to become its own thing. KDE are pretty much forging ahead alone nowadays and when they make changes it becomes the way to do it. Also what they do can't be shared with other desktops because they'd have to use KDE's own subsystems and become dependent on its whims.
It wasn't supposed to be "Kdeland" and "Gnomeland" but that's what it's slowly becoming. We're looking at major fragmentation of the Linux desktop because desktop teams have and do stop seeing eye to eye on major issues all the time. And because there's no central implementation to keep them working together they're free to do their own thing.
We need to keep a balance between security and convenience, to avoid systems becoming too awkward to use. Wayland tipped this balance too far on the side of security. Malicious local exploitation of the graphics stack has never been a big issue; consider the fact that someone or something would need to compromise your own account locally, at which point they could do much worse things than moving your windows around. It's not that the security threat doesn't exist, it's that Wayland has approached it at the wrong end and killed a lot of useful functionality in the process.
Also consider that this issue has existed for the entire history of desktop graphics on *nix and nobody has ever deemed it worth to destroy automation for it. If it were such a grave security hole surely someone would have raised the alarm and fixed it during all this time.
My opinion is that Wayland has been using this as a red herring, to bolster its value proposition.
Manjaro has no purpose, it's half-assed at being arch and it's half-assed at being stable.
My experience with Manjaro and Fedora, OpenSUSE etc. contradicts yours. Manjaro has the best balance between stability and rolling out of the box I've seen.
"Out of the box" is key here. You can tweak any distro into doing anything you want, given enough time and effort. Manjaro achieves a good balance without the user having to do anything. I remind you that I've tested this with non-experienced users and they have no problem using it without any admin skills (or any admin access).
Debian testing is a rolling.
It is not.
AUR isn't a problem in Manjaro because of lack of support, it's a problem because packages there are made with Arch and 99.999% of its derivatives in mind, aka latest packages not one week old still-broken packages.
And yet I've managed to install dozens of AUR packages just fine. How do you explain that?
Matter of fact, I've never run into an AUR package I couldn't install on Manjaro. What package is giving you trouble?
Manjaro literally accidentally DDoSes the AUR every now and then because again they're incompetent.
You're being confused.
AUR had very little bandwidth to begin with and could not cope with the rise in popularity of Arch-based distros. That's a problem that needs to be solved by the AUR repo first and foremost. Manjaro did what they could when the problem became apparent and has added caching wherever it could. Both Manjaro and Arch devs have worked together to improve this.
May I ask what fake location do you intent to provide? And have you considered that it might invalidate your claims? Like, you say your car had an accident but your location says you're in Antarctica, and they use that to weasel out of coverage.
Is "copy link without tracking" working for you?
It doesn't seem to be doing anything for me, even on large websites like YouTube or Amazon, it basically just copies the link as-is.
Photo manager that deals with RAW and JPG together?
I took some photos at an event and I need to go through them and get rid of the bad ones (eyes closed, things in the shot, out of focus, blurred etc.) I'm not a pro photographer so no idea where to begin with photo apps. I've used RawTherapee and Gimp a bit.
What app will let me quickly browse the photos and handle (delete/tag) photo formats together (both the RAW and the JPG)?
How do you guys use Tailscale (or other VPN) with containers
I wanted to run my VPN/Tailscale setup past you, see if anybody has suggestions on how I could do things better.
- Setup: home LAN (
10.0.0.0/24
), router+DNS on10.0.0.1
, server running docker containers on10.0.0.2
. - LAN DNS points
*.local.dom.tld
to the server, public DNS points*.dom.tld
to my dynamic public IP. - Containers run in bridge mode with host, expose ports on host IPs via "ports:" mapping.
- NPM with LE certs also in container, exposes
10.0.0.2:443
, forwards to various other services.
Goals for Tailscale:
- Accessing HTTP services via NPM from my phone when away from home.
- Exposing select UDP and TCP non-HTTP services such as syncthing (:22000) or deluge RCP admin (:58846) to other tailnet devices or to phone on the go.
Goals in general:
- Some containers need to expose ports on the LAN.
- Some containers need to expose ports via Tailscale.
- Some containers need to broadcast on the LAN (DLNA stuff) – but I don't want them broadcasting to Tailscale.
- G
Migrating away from Gandi, 9 months later
I'm posting this in selfhosted because Gandi increasing prices actually helped me a lot with being more serious about selfhosting, made me look into things like DNS and reverse proxies and VPN and docker and also ended up saving me money by re-evaluating my service needs.
For background, Gandi.net is a large and old (25 years) domain registrar and hosting provider in the EU, who after two successive rounds of being acquired by investment funds have hiked up prices across the board for all their services.
In July 2023 when they announced the changes for November I was using their services for pretty much everything because I manage domains for friends and family. That means a wide selection of domains registered with them (both TLDs and European ccTLDs), LAMP hosting, and was taking advantage of their free email hosting for multiple domains.
For the record I don't hold the price hike against them, it was just unsustainable for us. Their email prices (~5€/mailbox/mo) are in line with
Webmail client with decent search and large mailbox support?
I'm thinking of putting all my email archive (55k messages, about 6 GB) on a private IMAP server but I'm wondering how to access it remotely when needed.
Obviously I'd need a webmail client but is there any that can deal with that amount of data and also be able to search through To, From, Subject and body efficiently?
I can also set up a standalone search engine of some sort (the messages are stored one per file in regular folders) but then how do I view the message once I locate it?
I can also expose the IMAP server itself and see if I can find a mobile app that fits the bill but I'd rather not do that. A webmail client would be much easier to reverse proxy and protect.
What bootable "live" images of useful tools?
I've repurposed a 32 GB M.2 SATA SSD as a bootable "USB stick" and I'm putting useful tools on it. So far I've got memtest, seatools, gparted live, system rescue, clonezilla, and a live install iso of the distro installed on my PC. What other great bootable tools am I sleeping on?
Recommend me a graphical text editor that can deal with multiple workspaces (or lets you specify instance)
I use multiple workspaces and I open text files all the time.
Once upon a time Mousepad used to behave sanely and would open them in a new tab if there was already an instance on the current workspace, or open a new window (on the current workspace) if there wasn't.
They broke that at some point. Now it's anybody's guess where the file will open. Maybe it opens in a tab in an existing window on this workspace. Maybe in a tab in a window on a random workspace. Maybe a new window on this workspace even though there's one open. I've given up trying to figure it out.
As a last resort I can use wmctrl
to figure out how to open the files and can script a sane launcher myself – provided that the editor has --tab
and --window
options AND lets you specify the window instance. Mousepad has the former but not the latter.
So, do you know any editor that can do it by itself or has those options so I can do it myself? TIA
Subtitles for the despecialized Star Wars fan remakes?
Hi, I'm trying to find the subtitles for Harmy's "Despecialized" Star Wars remakes and I was wondering if anybody has any ideas. The original website for Project Threepio points at a blog that seems abandoned and an old private tracker (MySpleen) that never opens to public anymore. Even just the English subs would be great (the original pack contained extensive language coverage in DVD format so I was given to understand it was quite large). TIA for any hints.
Upgrading a self-hosted server (episode 3)
Upgrading a self-hosted server (3)
- Episode 1: Introduction and plans
- Episode 2: Hardware upgrades and installing Debian stable
- Episode 3: Installing Docker and basic containers (multimedia, files, printing)
A short intro to Docker
Docker is a lot less complicated than it was made out to be.
Docker is a way of taking a service (something like Plex) and making it work in a sort of "slice" cut out of the real machine's resources (CPU, RAM and disk space). These slices are called containers.
There are several benefits:
- If someone breaks into one of your services, they only reach one container not the real machine, and not any of the other containers.
- It's very easy to restore a container in case of machine reinstall, using "magical" recipe files called "docker compose yaml". If the main OS blows up you just need to reinstall stock Debian stable and Docker, then use the magical recipes.
- The con
Upgrading a self-hosted server (episode 2)
Upgrading a self-hosted server (2)
- Episode 1: Introduction and plans
- Episode 2: Hardware upgrades and installing Debian stable
- Episode 3: Installing Docker and basic containers (multimedia, files, printing)
Adding a secondary disk to the machine
I'd like to have the old system around while tinkering with the new one, just in case something goes south. Also the old system is full of config files and scripts that are still useful.
I was planning to use a spare SSD I had lying around but it was a bit more involved than I'd expected. The machine has two M.2 slots with the old system disk occupying one of them, and 6 SATA ports on the motherboard, being used by the 6 HDDs. The spare SSD would need a 7th SATA port.
I could go get another M.2 but filling the second M.2 takes away one SATA channel, so I would be back to being one port short. 🤦
The solution was a PCI SATA expansion card which I happened to
Easy way to remote share the desktop?
I need a very simple method for non-advanced users to share each other's screen explicitly when they need help. They're running XFCE on Manjaro and the machines involved are using Tailscale. Edit: SSH access is also available, with key authentication.
I need something super simple because they are remote from me and from each other and any graphical setup will have to be assisted sight-unseen over phone. So ideally just (1) install something (which I can do for them over SSH), (2) pick something from the Applications menu and maybe (3) press a big "START" button.
It's also ok-ish if the remote capability is present all the time and I can connect without their explicit permission, but you can see why it would be best if they did something to enable it...
I've been looking for a solution but all I find is stuff that's way too complicated OR starts a new desktop session instead of showing the current one.
Edited: to clarify I'm not the one who will be remoting-in and to mention SSH is
Why I'm leaving Gandi and where I'm going
I've been using Gandi for over 20 years, almost since it was founded. Since being acquired in 2019 by Montefiore Investment and this year by Total Webhosting Solutions their service have become more and more expensive and have finally priced me out.
For context, I administer a bunch of domains, mailboxes and HTML websites for my family and extended family, and I prefer services hosted in the EU because of GDPR and local availability.
This post is meant as a list of practical decisions in 2023 for the small time selfhoster. If anybody wants to comment on what Gandi (or rather TWS) is doing feel free to do so in the comments, I'm curious myself.
Prices I've mentioned use my country's VAT so will vary slightly for you.
Domain names
Domain names have always been a bit on the expensive side with Gandi but they used to include a lot of features for free with them (SSL, DNSSEC, mailboxes, a small static website, WHOIS privacy, local contact for TLDs that need it etc.) and what they a
Upgrading a self-hosted server (episode 1)
Upgrading a self-hosted server (1)
- Episode 1: Introduction and plans
- Episode 2: Hardware upgrades and installing Debian stable
- Episode 3: Installing Docker and basic containers (multimedia, files, printing)
Welcome
Hi, I'm starting a series of posts that will follow the upgrades I'll be doing to a self-hosted machine that serves as NAS and also runs all kinds of self-hosted software. I'm lazy so it will probably take time, don't expect me to post too often.
About me: I've been using Linux exclusively for personal use (both desktop and servers) for about 20 years now. I've used several distributions over the years, I've built my own stuff from source (including kernels) and I've done Linux From Scratch. I'm not a Linux expert or professional sysadmin but I know my way around it, and I can learn what I don't know. So don't be afraid to make any suggestions no matter how complicated.
The current sta
Google is moving reminders to Tasks, any other calendar app with a similar feature?
So I got a notification that Google is going to retire the reminders feature from Calendar and make it a Tasks feature instead.
The only reason I was using Google:s Calendar app was for their reminders (and because they've made it impossible for third party apps to use reminders).
The most important part of reminders for me was the way they worked, by putting up a notification that didn't go away until manually dismissed. Very useful for important stuff like taking a medicine.
Any suggestions for other apps that have similar notifications? It would be great if they were a calendar app, and even greater if they are synced to a calendar over a standard (like CalDAV etc.) so I can self-host it.