[X] My Assistant

this time its the LED magnifying glass

another day another bodged 18650 solution that'll ultimately burn my house down one of these days
(IMG:[xn--z7x.xn--6frz82g] https://xn--z7x.xn--6frz82g/-/2hw7nb.png)

dont think theres any need to worry there, maybe some major DEs and distros will switch to it as a default option but the [drewdevault.com] inherent terrible experience with nvidia, [github.com] the crippling limitations for ''security'' reasons, and that still after all these years there isnt one goto wayland implementation so everyone is just doing something on their own(unless everyone starts using wlroots over night) would make it very unlikely.
I really doubt it'll be the thing that drives out X11.

Crippling limitations for security reasons didn't stop Mozilla from strong-arming it on everyone with firefox.
And Red Hat is pretty powerful apparently.

Also, off-topic, but since I started using a compositor (compton) on my X systems I've not really seen noteworthy tearing; Not 100% sure why everyone else still seems to be plagued with troubles with it. Also, on my intel systems, the 'TearFree' option in xorg.conf fixed it when the screen was rotated.

since I started using a compositor (compton) on my X systems I've not really seen noteworthy tearing; Not 100% sure why everyone else still seems to be plagued with troubles with it. Also, on my intel systems, the 'TearFree' option in xorg.conf fixed it when the screen was rotated.

is this with nvidia though? its the only system I can still get screentearing on even with compositors, amd and intel seem to work fine with just their own tearfree options set.

How many Xboxes with similar names does Microsoft want to support at once?

is this with nvidia though? its the only system I can still get screentearing on even with compositors, amd and intel seem to work fine with just their own tearfree options set.

My desktop uses nvidia and that works fine, too, although I had to make one change in about:config for firefox to get along with it (I believe it was to force enable acceleration on it).

CODE

compton --backend=glx --vsync=opengl

worked for me on the nvidia machine.
If you have multiple monitors, though, all bets are off on nvidia unless the monitors are identical. And I have absolutely no confidence in rotated displays' abilities to not tear either, since apparently compositors can't fix that alone.

Edit: Also, try:

CODE

nvidia-settings --assign CurrentMetaMode="nvidia-auto-select +0+0 { ForceFullCompositionPipeline = On }"

For persistence, add to xorg.conf:

CODE

Option "ForceFullCompositionPipeline" "on"

You can alternatively add a 'metamodes' line containing the string from the nvidia-settings command and that will also work.
(from [download.nvidia.com] here)

I'm currently building linux kernels from sources for both my desktop and primary laptop. First kernel builds I've done myself in a long time. No particular reason; just kind of felt like it.

I forgot that I need to make separate 32-bit kernel builds with matching version numbers if I want to do it The Debian Way (`make bindeb-pkg`). So I'll do that later, but my initial 64-bit kernel builds were successful.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 11 2020, 08:23

Is Linux Mint the most windowslike or are there better ones?

Oh, and what's a good basic(not barebones) linux that's good for a core duo laptop with 3gb ram and intel gma?

This post has been edited by Pillowgirl: Sep 11 2020, 21:48

Is Linux Mint the most windowslike or are the better ones?

Oh, and what's a good basic(not barebones) linux that's good for a core duo laptop with 3gb ram and intel gma?

Linux Mint with MATE desktop ran quite well on my Pentium M Dell Latitude D610 with 1GB of RAM and GMA. I still have it installed on there, but it's an older version now because I haven't kept up with it. I also used MATE on my Core 2 Duo laptop (D630) with 2GB of RAM.

MATE is pretty windows-like, and so is Cinnamon; I'd say MATE is moreso. GNOME 2 was largely a windows clone, and MATE is basically a maintained/updated GNOME 2 fork.

I am partial to my spartan FVWM setup these days, but MATE is still nice to use and I'd recommend it.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 11 2020, 21:02

Is Linux Mint the most windowslike or are there better ones?

Oh, and what's a good basic(not barebones) linux that's good for a core duo laptop with 3gb ram and intel gma?

probably anything that comes with a de that isnt kde, its really pick your poison in terms of package managers and repos with linux distro choices. you can more or less get any of them to look like anything with the choice of de/wm.

I wish there was one that 'just worked' and I could honestly recommend to people that just want to not bother with the internals. over the years I've attempted to recommend people ubuntu, mint and just debian. of which the latter is the most stable but possibly lacking in packages. I heared good things about fedora and suse, especially since they have rolling releases as well but not familiar with their packaging or ever using them for desktop installs.


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obligatory useless mention I use arch with dwm for desktop use because I set it up once and cant be bothered to get used to any other distro or wm

This post has been edited by cate_chan: Sep 12 2020, 00:26

debian…of which the latter is the most stable but possibly lacking in packages

No, Ubuntu and Mint have most of the packages they do because of the Debian infrastructure they borrowed.
It has a lot of packages. Just if you install Debian Stable they'll be kind of old versions.
Debian unstable has none of those problems.

I heared good things about fedora and suse, especially since they have rolling releases as well but not familiar with their packaging or ever using them for desktop installs.

I don't like Fedora because I don't like Red Hat (corporate parent) and particularly its influence over everything else (systemd is RH's fault IMO, same for Docker). Suse just never interested me.

obligatory useless mention I use arch with dwm for desktop use because I set it up once and cant be bothered to get used to any other distro or wm

I use FVWM because I set it up once and can't be bothered with anything else as well, although MATE, GNOME 2, and CDE were what I'd used before FVWM. I like that I can just copy my FVWM config to other machines and it'll work. My FVWM setup mostly mimics CDE (and the MWM (motif window manager) CDE's DTWM inherited a lot from).
And I use Debian Sid because my install from years ago hasn't irreparably broken still. Just recently moved it to booting from UEFI without reinstalling, even.

Not a thought really, but:


This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 12 2020, 01:27

I don't like Fedora because I don't like Red Hat (corporate parent) and particularly its influence over everything else (systemd is RH's fault IMO, same for Docker).

Much as I do like Fedora this is a pretty undeniable mark against it, the more Poettering in my OS the more annoyed at it I seem to get.

I'm at the point where I'm seriously considering giving Arch or something similar a spin just so if I get agitated by something I only have myself to blame for putting it there.

Much as I do like Fedora this is a pretty undeniable mark against it, the more Poettering in my OS the more annoyed at it I seem to get.

I'm at the point where I'm seriously considering giving Arch or something similar a spin just so if I get agitated by something I only have myself to blame for putting it there.

Arch uses systemd and does not officially support not using systemd. Most Arch users use it, and their wiki almost always assumes it.
Debian packages elogind (a Gentoo project), which has allowed me to avoid systemd-as-init there (I'm using sysvinit).
Gentoo is of course the other "main" option. I'd choose either Debian or Gentoo myself, because both support running on a wide range of machines and try to avoid unnecessarily forcing systemd on people. But I personally don't like the idea of having to build everything from the ground up, so Debian for me.
Debian does use systemd init by default, which is a bit annoying. But I can deal with it long enough to take it off my systems. And pretty much everything I do use still offers LSB init scripts.

The only init script I remember writing was for ZNC (my IRC bouncer).

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 12 2020, 02:33

No, Ubuntu and Mint have most of the packages they do because of the Debian infrastructure they borrowed.
It has a lot of packages. Just if you install Debian Stable they'll be kind of old versions.
Debian unstable has none of those problems.

was mainly talking about all the stuff like ppas for terrible proprietary things people might want to install, and from what I've seen debian unstable really lives up to the unstable part with how little packages for that are tested.

I'm at the point where I'm seriously considering giving Arch or something similar a spin just so if I get agitated by something I only have myself to blame for putting it there.

you can still get screwed by upstream, for example pango (gnome devs are the bane of my existence at this point) somewhat recently thought it was a good idea to just straight up drop support for pcf and bdf bitmap fonts, so I have that version locked. also they prematurely jumped to a new htop source which had some quality issues first release. besides those issues are far and few overall, its just the price you pay for having things up to date.

Arch uses systemd and does not officially support not using systemd. Most Arch users use it, and their wiki almost always assumes it.

as much as I personally like pointing out a lot of things in the aur will be a pain in the dick to deal with without systemd isms and you'll have to put in manual effort to fix up some package assumptions when you dont use systemd with arch, a lot of [artixlinux.org] artix users I've argued with claim it works without much issue. if you're dead set on not using systemd while still enjoying arch's repos

was mainly talking about all the stuff like ppas for terrible proprietary things people might want to install, and from what I've seen debian unstable really lives up to the unstable part with how little packages for that are tested.

PPA's are dumb and terrible (but not as bad as flatpak/snap usually). if you're installing proprietary stuff, get it directly from the original people producing it and then install it their way. This only holds for people who know what they are doing, of course.
PPA's tend to encourage sloppy maintenance in my experience.
And you may call it 'unstable,' but my desktop has been running the same sid installation for about 7 years. It's got around 30 days uptime right now (I rebooted it last when I got UEFI working on it; I migrated to it from MBR-based booting). I even run "unstable" on a Powerbook, and PPC 32-bit isn't even an officially supported architecture anymore. Still works mostly fine. One or two programs did need PPC-specific patches to make them work right, but overall things are pretty good.

you can still get screwed by upstream, for example pango (gnome devs are the bane of my existence at this point) somewhat recently thought it was a good idea to just straight up drop support for pcf and bdf bitmap fonts, so I have that version locked. also they prematurely jumped to a new htop source which had some quality issues first release. besides those issues are far and few overall, its just the price you pay for having things up to date.

Ahh, that'd explain why I suddenly was having wikipedia articles render wrong. "Times" was mapped to bitmap
I remember when I asked how I could do something in GTK3 on one of the official IRC channels, the answer was just "you can't." I think I wanted to disable the "insert emoji" context menu item in my program or something.

as much as I personally like pointing out a lot of things in the aur will be a pain in the dick to deal with without systemd isms and you'll have to put in manual effort to fix up some package assumptions when you dont use systemd with arch, a lot of [artixlinux.org] artix users I've argued with claim it works without much issue. if you're dead set on not using systemd while still enjoying arch's repos

AUR's can be as bad as PPA's (although I actually use _one_ AUR on my debian system - it's more convenient to just use his patches to fix the GTK3 file picker than to manually do it myself each time I need to update it). And there's a ton of stuff in Arch that can only be had via AUR's - much of that is in Debian proper.

I don't really _hate_ arch, I just prefer the more conservative approach Debian seems to take most of the time with things.
That and for the rare proprietary software bits I use, most are tested in Ubuntu so they are likely to work for me upstream (though this is changing with container bullshit).

I just mostly fixed FF 80's UI (except it's still missing a status bar and a couple things still look a little weird. Much more compact though and there's no stupid hamburger menu I can't remove anymore. I also can't move the find bar above the tab bar, unfortunately, but at least it's not way the fuck at the bottom away from everything else anymore. I also moved the 'new tab' button so it is always at the far left; this way I always know where to find it). Can't wait for FF 81 to break everything again.

People of Earth, your attention, please. This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council. As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system. And regrettably, your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.

There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.

…What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.

Apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy at all–

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 12 2020, 03:52

And you may call it 'unstable,' but my desktop has been running the same sid installation for about 7 years. It's got around 30 days uptime right now (I rebooted it last when I got UEFI working on it; I migrated to it from MBR-based booting). I even run "unstable" on a Powerbook, and PPC 32-bit isn't even an officially supported architecture anymore. Still works mostly fine. One or two programs did need PPC-specific patches to make them work right, but overall things are pretty good.

ah, yeah my 'unstable' call out mostly comes from one guy I knew that used it and what others always say about the package testing, dont run it on anything personally, it all depends on what packages you use as always. and if those ever make mistakes in upstream that would benifit from an extra test cycle. like with arch and non testing repos its minimal but at the very least a kernel version gets held back or skipped for a while if theres some horrid issue with it. what I've always believed/was lead to believe, that debian unstable you basically are the testing channel, no holdbacks on version that might be messed up at all.

Ahh, that'd explain why I suddenly was having wikipedia articles render wrong. "Times" was mapped to bitmap
I remember when I asked how I could do something in GTK3 on one of the official IRC channels, the answer was just "you can't." I think I wanted to disable the "insert emoji" context menu item in my program or something.

if it is related to that, it'll just make it so any pcf or bdf font cant be used anymore, or will show up as blocks when set. the last version that isnt fucked in that regard and I have it locked to is pango 1.43. [blogs.gnome.org] it all went wrong here from 1.44

AUR's can be as bad as PPA's (although I actually use _one_ AUR on my debian system - it's more convenient to just use his patches to fix the GTK3 file picker than to manually do it myself each time I need to update it). And there's a ton of stuff in Arch that can only be had via AUR's - much of that is in Debian proper.

not really sure about the process with making ppas, but with the aur the main downfall is the complete and total lack of any quality control, hell even I have some packages on the aur. though that's also what I like about it because the 0 barrier to entry means nearly every thing people might want to ever use or used before is easily installable through the aur, which would undoubtably be less the case if it was either more complex to be allowed to make packages or there were more stricter rules on what could be a package.

I just mostly fixed FF 80's UI (except it's still missing a status bar and a couple things still look a little weird. Much more compact though and there's no stupid hamburger menu I can't remove anymore. I also can't move the find bar above the tab bar, unfortunately, but at least it's not way the fuck at the bottom away from everything else anymore. I also moved the 'new tab' button so it is always at the far left; this way I always know where to find it). Can't wait for FF 81 to break everything again.

personally still not sure if I should be looking into ways to fix my broken transparency of menus or hope 81 unbreaks it again, stopped displaying correctly post 79:


the joys of firefox

This post has been edited by cate_chan: Sep 12 2020, 15:04

ah, yeah my 'unstable' call out mostly comes from one guy I knew that used it and what others always say about the package testing, dont run it on anything personally, it all depends on what packages you use as always. and if those ever make mistakes in upstream that would benifit from an extra test cycle. like with arch and non testing repos its minimal but at the very least a kernel version gets held back or skipped for a while if theres some horrid issue with it. what I've always believed/was lead to believe, that debian unstable you basically are the testing channel, no holdbacks on version that might be messed up at all.

Nah, that's the [wiki.debian.org] "experimental" channel. In practice, "unstable" isn't that bad. And it means I get rolling release updates like Arch would. So basically Arch is just as much a "testing channel" as Debian Unstable the way I look at it (unless I'm missing something).

if it is related to that, it'll just make it so any pcf or bdf font cant be used anymore, or will show up as blocks when set. the last version that isnt fucked in that regard and I have it locked to is pango 1.43. [blogs.gnome.org] it all went wrong here from 1.44

Probably not my exact issue then. Also, thankfully, most of my bitmap fonts I use are already in OTB format. The ones that aren't are only being used in plain X programs so it doesn't matter too much there.

not really sure about the process with making ppas, but with the aur the main downfall is the complete and total lack of any quality control, hell even I have some packages on the aur.

That's pretty much the exact issue with PPA's, although PPA's might have a _slightly_ higher entry barrier. I see it as akin to lusers running .bat scripts with no idea what they do. With that one AUR I do use, I step through the PKGBUILD file manually each time it updates and adjust a few things. I also have to replace one arch-specific script that wraps around part of Meson with my own command that does the same thing.

personally still not sure if I should be looking into ways to fix my broken transparency of menus or hope 81 unbreaks it again, stopped displaying correctly post 79.
the joys of firefox

Just assume it'll never work properly ever again.

I'm building that same kernel for 32-bit powerpc now, in a chroot on my amd64 desktop. Interested to see if it will work. I've tweaked a couple things, too, that I think might improve performance on my machine slightly. I'm specifically optimizing for the PPC 7447A ("G4"), for instance. Hope it works.

It may be building for quite some time, though, since I'm doing it the extremely lazy way and actually emulating a PPC CPU with qemu user-space emulation and powerpc-native GCC binaries, rather than properly "cross-compiling" with amd64 binaries that target the PPC.

When I cross-compiled Seamonkey I was using the less lazy approach, but it took so long to set up that I couldn't be bothered this time.

I've really taken to that trackball mouse I got. It's quite nice. IDK if I'm slower or faster than before, but I feel comfortable using it and it takes up less space than a conventional one. Regularly cleaning it's a little bit annoying, but not a deal-breaker (it doesn't seem to like getting too oily or the ball doesn't roll very smoothly anymore).

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 13 2020, 09:30

Just assume it'll never work properly ever again.

I can dream

I've really taken to that trackball mouse I got. It's quite nice. IDK if I'm slower or faster than before, but I feel comfortable using it and it takes up less space than a conventional one. Regularly cleaning it's a little bit annoying, but not a deal-breaker (it doesn't seem to like getting too oily or the ball doesn't roll very smoothly anymore).

oh nice what trackball do you have? still using my old logitech trackman marble mouse, usually a quick wipe of the little rollers with finger clears them up enough for smooth movement.
It's definitely been a saviour for my wrist and how little space it needs


on a somewhat unrelated note, happy new epoch (ticked over 1600000000 some ~10 minutes ago)

oh nice what trackball do you have? still using my old logitech trackman marble mouse, usually a quick wipe of the little rollers with finger clears them up enough for smooth movement.
It's definitely been a saviour for my wrist and how little space it needs
on a somewhat unrelated note, happy new epoch (ticked over 1600000000 some ~10 minutes ago)

A Microsoft Trackball Optical (the thumb-ball kind, not the uber-expensive finger ball one they also made) that I got for $1 at a garage sale.
Not my pic, but:
(IMG:[www.shareware-beach.com] http://www.shareware-beach.com/photos/J1282752.jpg)
Mine's got the MS logo and stuff partially worn off (probably from a palm resting on it), but other than that it looks the same. It's a very large mouse, but it also feels nice in my hand and doesn't need to move around.
I had to pop the bearings out and rotate them; they had flat spots in them. Next time I'll just replace them altogether, but I think I should get at least a few months out of these. I also opened it up completely to clean it out internally; I think the last owner had a dog or a cat because there was a lot of hair somehow inside the mouse under the right click button.
I don't have wrist problems yet, but I do like that I don't have to move it around.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 13 2020, 16:24

(IMG:[www.shareware-beach.com] http://www.shareware-beach.com/photos/J1282752.jpg)

Usually, I don't believe that cats would be that interested in a "mouse" if it's a computer one, but in this case, I expect them to really like it if they find out they can make the ball spin...and it's a bit the same color as a laser pointer too...somebody got a cat to sacrifice for an experiment in the name of science? (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

This PowerPC kernel compilation's been going for 13 hours now. Much, much, much slower than a native one. But I knew what I was getting into. Meanwhile I'm attempting to set up my "proper" cross-compilation environment again for other things.

Meanwhile, I've been building a few other things for my G4, and seeing the fans kick on far less often now. Specifically, playing playstation chiptunes used to reliably kick a fan on after around half a minute; now the fan never comes on. I'm guessing it's mostly because I remembered to build things with '-mcpu=G4 -mtune=G4' this time, which enables AltiVec code generation (and is probably just more efficient to begin with because I'm tuning for a specific model range). I'm assuming most Debian packages don't enable AltiVec because it's not ubiquitous.

I also patched an old program (recently removed from Debian Sid; grr) called '[packages.debian.org] mouseemu', which can intercept mouses and the keyboard and let you emulate middle/right clicks on a one button mouse. My patch just lets it pass through a couple extra buttons on my trackball mouse, since it would silently drop any buttons beyond the first three before. This was necessary because it intercepts all mouse devices, not just the ADB touchpad.

Usually, I don't believe that cats would be that interested in a "mouse" if it's a computer one, but in this case, I expect them to really like it if they find out they can make the ball spin...and it's a bit the same color as a laser pointer too...somebody got a cat to sacrifice for an experiment in the name of science? (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

My roommate has a cat.
She doesn't really play with things very much though; just cuddles and sometimes asks for food. Shows only the slightest interest in laser pointers. She likes laps though.
In fact she just napped on my belly for an hour or two.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 14 2020, 06:28

Usually, I don't believe that cats would be that interested in a "mouse" if it's a computer one, but in this case, I expect them to really like it if they find out they can make the ball spin...and it's a bit the same color as a laser pointer too...somebody got a cat to sacrifice for an experiment in the name of science? (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

as the owner of a cat and trackball mice, no luck. walking over the keyboard and standing infront of the monitor still beat spinning the pretty patterned ball