November 2023 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

Browsers (and Thorium to be specific)
by Evan Leibovitch 24 Nov '23

24 Nov '23

Hi all. I've been a happy (sorta) user of Firefox for a long long time but I found I have needed a Chromium-based backup because there are some sites that Just Won't Work under FF. Blank white screens, hanging, missing frames, the problem varies but it never exists on Chrome or Edge. (Sorry, Brave, just couldn't get into it.) Now The YouTube recommendation algorithms have been of late feeding me with quite a few reviews of the Thorium browser, some of which come from channels I have watched before. Is it worth the hype? At very least, is it a better alternative to Chrome or Edge? I would like to sync bookmarks, plugins and logins between devices and have some sense of stability (is that it will be around for a while). Is there something else even better? Thanks for any feedback. -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56

7 7

Linux Unicorns
by ac 24 Nov '23

24 Nov '23

I have been wondering about tech unicorns and Linux. WARNING : do not read beyond this point if you are not at least somewhat bored. - reading drivel is a choice, and this does at least have a warning label :) Does anyone on the list actually know (as in personal experience) whether/which (or even if) most tech unicorns are Linux based or with a Linux origin story? Of course the very obvious next wonderation would be which distro these peeps used? With FB, I would guess Slack (but maybe Debian??) Personally, early 2000's sometime I moved off slack and onto lfs, but i love most distro's equally - some are just easier than others tho, anyway, unicorns... I am thinking about making a tech unicorn, I have not yet tried making one b4, but how hard can it really be? unicorns are horse like? horses used to be wild, at some point in time at least but nowadays horses all belong to someone. Even wild horses belong to the gov (on public land anyway) and nobody can just go and catch a wild horse, it just is not legal/allowed or even acceptable. Tech unicorns all like to think that they all belong to someone, but well, imo we are still pre 1961 in terms of horse legislation anyway, so right now there is still a possibility of rusling up a tech unicorn, if one be so inclined. all you have to do is make something really cool and universally useful that operates in an entirely new fashion or method (and does not infringe on 5million different software patents) - incase you are wondering, I have other weird thoughts as well, like the advantages of being able to restart drivers without PID collapse (like in minix or micro kernel env) and combining this with re-loops to use for machine learning (i tried this already in the early 2010's btw and yes, it did work) So, you see, I am quite nuts (which helps) If anyone read up to here it would be much appreciated if you could tell me that I cannot make a tech unicorn, as this will then motivate me for the next few years while I get to the gluing of this shiny horn to this currently very unwilling horse :)

1 0

issues with "fractional scaling" for displays
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 21 Nov '23

21 Nov '23

In GNOME (and surely other systems) you can specify that you want the contents of the display scaled. For example, 200% scaling doubles the size of everything on the display in both dimensions. The control for selecting scaling is in GNOME's "Display Settings", under "scale". Easiest way to get there: right-click on empty part of the desktop and select "Display Settings" This is useful if you have a HiDpi (high resolution) display and low resolution eyes. Note: this is different from changing the display itself to a different resolution. Scaling by integral amounts has been available for a long time. But it isn't that useful. It would be better if the system could handle scaling by non-integral amounts like 125%. For example, I have a 13.3" with 2560x1600 resolution. 100% scaling is very fine. Sometimes 150% scaling is easier to read. Wayland allows this non-integral scaling. Yay! XWayland copes poorly with this: everything gets a bit fuzzy, even at integral scaling points (but perhaps not at 100%). XWayland is used by programs that use the X Window System APIs. (I don't even know which programs that I use are using XWayland so I don't know how badly this would affect me.) I was looking forward to fractional scaling in Fedora 39 / GNOME 45. But it seems to be turned off, again: See <https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/357> It appears that the Fedora folk think that: 1. fuzziness at integral scaling in XWayland is unacceptable 2. making a clear user choice "fuzziness is OK" isn't reasonable Fractional scaling has been available before this with a magic incantation. I haven't tested it with Fedora 39. $ dconf write /org/gnome/mutter/experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']" This only takes effect after the next login.

1 0

labwc is unhappy with Debian 12 and LightDM ...
by Giles Orr 16 Nov '23

16 Nov '23

I'm trying to get `labwc` running on a Debian 12 system using LightDM as the login manager. I chose labwc because I'm a long-time Openbox user, and labwc is supposed to be almost a drop-in replacement for Wayland. Unfortunately, it's not available as a package so I had to build it myself. Which went reasonably well - although it demands a newer version of wlroots than Debian has (Debian has 0.15.1, labwc wants 0.16), so it downloaded and built that itself. And at the end of this, I ran `meson install --skip-subprojects -C build/` and it put stuff in the /usr/local/ tree. This dropped a /usr/local/share/wayland-sessions/labwc.desktop file which LightDM has ignored. Probably fixable, but I instead copied it to /usr/share/wayland-sessions/ alongside "weston.desktop". This worked, in the sense that I now have a "labwc" option at the LightDM login screen, but didn't work in that attempting to use it blacks the screen for 5-10 seconds and then returns to LightDM. I should add that the "weston" session works as expected. Also, running `labwc` inside an X session produces a window with a functioning labwc session inside of it. But of course I want to log directly into labwc. Any thoughts or suggestions appreciated. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

1 0

Introduction and hello.
by Nick Accad 15 Nov '23

15 Nov '23

Hi Yesterday was my first time attending a GTALUG meeting, and as suggested I am sending this to say hello and introduce myself. Originally from Egypt, I got off the boat in Montreal in 2000, and moved to Hamilton in 2009. I was one of the original members of Montreal LUG (mlug.ca) before moving, that group is no longer active. I have been using and managing Linux systems since Kernel 1.1 (Slackware, then RedHat and Debian since 2002), with a smattering of Net/Open/FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, HPUX and even some OpenVMS. I currently work for Dell Engineering fixing VMware issues while writing bad Python code and Bash scripts. Looking forward to the next meeting, -nick

1 0

(very off topic) torque spec of impact wrench
by William Park 15 Nov '23

15 Nov '23

Hi (another very off topic), Wheel bolts on my VW are seized pretty hard. Standing on 24in breaker bar doesn't help, and that's 300ft-lb torque. So, I'm thinking about getting an impact wrench. Those with greater than 300ft-lb are very expensive. I found one with 250ft-lb spec at my price range. Question is, is there difference between static torque vs impact torque? In other words, will 250ft-lb impact wrench loosen 300ft-lb bolt? Browsing YouTube, I learned that torque specs are always misleading and inflated. This means, I have to find 600ft-lb or greater, and that's serious money.

12 17

GTALUG General Meeting Reminder
by Alan Heighway 15 Nov '23

15 Nov '23

AGM, then ‘You Don’t know Jack about Application Performance’ <https://gtalug.org/meeting/2023-11/> with Dave Collier-Brown <https://gtalug.org/> 14 November, 2023 at 07:30 PM We will start with the AGM, then we will have a talk by Dave Collier-Brown We're going to use Big BLue Button for this meeting: https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl *Time:* November 14th, 2023 7:30 PM Eastern Time *Join us on Big Blue Button:* https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl. Hopt to see everyone there! *A*lan *H*eighway <http://heighway.ca/> heighway.ca VA3WAH / VA3YKZ [image: Please consider the environment before printing]

2 1

[GTALUG-Announce] Membership Dues
by Warren McPherson 13 Nov '23

13 Nov '23

With the agm coming up, now is a great time to renew membership and make a small twenty dollar contribution to the organization. For those looking forward to the chance to wind their way through the Interac E-Transfer process again here is my summary of how it works. (Actually I forget each time so the novelty never wears off -- luckily it is easy.) Log in to your bank and look for "Interac e-Transfers" you may need to go to the "Transfers" page and then you will see this option. Select "email method" and use the email address: membership(a)gtalug.org Putting your name in the message can be helpful as the notification I get can sometimes be a touch obtuse. Thank you to those who have already contributed! (I know who you are. Ha ha) Thank you, Warren --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

5 5

Toronto Public Library website
by Warren McPherson 09 Nov '23

09 Nov '23

What is going on with the library website? There was a CBC article that said there was a ransomware attack, but it's been down for a week and it's hard to imagine why it would take so long to recover unless their infrastructure was much weaker than I would expect.

7 9

growing an EFI System Partition (ESP)
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 08 Nov '23

08 Nov '23

(This is a recipe. If you find errors or think of improvements, please let me know.) == context == The ESP is the partition to hold anything the UEFI firmware can run. Mostly bootloaders but also diagnostics and firmware updates. It is a FAT filesystem in a partition with a special type. In a running Linux, it is usually mounted on /boot/efi. This stuff is a little bit tricky and not well-documented. I tried to be very detailed to make sure you don't get lost. == motivation == The ESP doesn't have to be very big, but sometimes it isn't big enough. I often buy computers pre-loaded with Windows -- typically cheaper than computers without Windows. Sometimes the ESP is 100MB. This has pinched. So I want to increase the size. I have a feeling that 200MB would be a good size, but I will probably settle on 400MB. == naive method and a failure == Tools: - a live USB Linux system. [You don't want to be doing partition surgery on the disk from which you are running.] - some place to temporarily hold the contents of the ESP. It could be on another partition of the same disk or on a USB devicee. - gparted for partition manipulation. You could substitute with something like parted(8). - gnome "disks" (gnome-disk-utility). I find it convenient for mounting, unmounting, and looking at the properties of disks and partition. You can choose to do these things with other tools. 1. boot the live Linux stick. 2. if your live system doesn't include gparted, install it. Fedora: "sudo dnf install gparted" debian or Ubuntu: "sudo apt install gparted" 3. run gparted and point it at the disk with the too-small ESP. Make sure that none of that disk's partitions is mounted. 3. shift and shrink partitions to make sufficient unallocated space adjacent to the ESP. If you are going to install Linux on the disk, this would be a good time to make space for it too. Make sure to tell gparted to "apply" these changes. 4. If you changed the size of any NTFS partitions, gparted might have damaged some redundant metadata. Fix it now. - boot into Windows - ask it to scan and repair the volume(s) - reboot into your live Linux system and get back into gparted 5. ask gparted to resize the ESP. It should succeed in resizing the partition but may fail in resizing the FAT filesystem. The failure message will be rather obscure: No Implementation: GNU Parted cannot resize this partition to this size. We're working on it! What it means is that libparted-fs-resize doesn't have code to deal with some common forms of FAT. The message is wrong: the partition has been resized but the filesystem it contains has not. Oh, and nobody has worked on this in a decade. If you had no failure, STOP HERE, you are done. Continuing past FAT filesystem resize failure: 1. exit gparted 2. mount the old ESP. GNOME "disks" has a button for that. 3. copy the contents of the ESP somewhere safe. It could be to a USB device or even a non-ESP partition on the system disk. "sudo cp -a ESP SAVED" ESP is the ESP mount point. SAVED is to be a new directory in the place where you have enough free space 4. unmount the old ESP 5. Make a new, larger FAT filesystem, filling the partition: "sudo mkfs.vfat X" where X is the device name of the ESP partition. On my system, it was /dev/nvme0n1p1 but yours might well be different This will wipe the old FAT filesystem and make an empty new one that fills the partition. 6. mount the new ESP 7. copy the old contents of the ESP into the new ESP. "sudo cp -a SAVED/* ESP Note: the /* bit is to avoid creating an extra directory layer in the ESP. * isn't great but FAT filesystems don't have files starting with ".". 8. shut down Linux; unplug the live stick FINI

2 2