August 2025 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

getting back space from snap
by CAREY SCHUG 25 Aug '25

25 Aug '25

my root partition has been skirting full for months. I found a 1.4 gb snap for kde support. kf6-core24 supposedly deleteing a snap warns me if there are dependencies. actually I deleted a couple of programs i installed that did not like and never use first, but it took the delete command without complaint. going to the snapd directory shows the file is not there. i emptied trash (did not see any large files in trash). that graphical display of used space shows it gone from \var\lib\snapd\snaps no change for a while, but now my root partition is 98% full per df -k this was 20 minutes ago, i think it takes a while to reclaim space from deleted files, but this long? from system monitor, there is no task doing disk writes except intermittantly, but maybe cleanup isn't included (that would be a MAJOR deficiency if so). I'm guessing somebody will tell me I have to reboot, but why did none of the instructions on the internet say that? and since I was allowed to delete all the snaps that should imply none were in use, so why would a reboot be needed? Carey

3 5

fish vs bash: a progress bar from YSAP and some timing measurements
by Ron 25 Aug '25

25 Aug '25

Thanks, Evan, for bringing fish shell to my attention. I'm really liking it - it's just what I needed and didn't even know it. So, I'd mentioned it feeling faster, which William commented on. Thanks William, you got me thinking. "Feels faster" ≠ "is faster" and I thought I'd measure something. And along comes Dave from YSAP with a great video on how to make a progress bar in bash. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL3xdQyMs5o I love his videos, he's highly knowledgeable and quite engaging. He make bash scripting look fun. I decided to implement his idea without too much peeking at the solution, then re-implement it in fish. Despite me saying earlier that I'd probably continue scripting in bash. The fish syntax is *so much better*. When I went to add a feature to the bash script, once again I got caught up in punctuation hell, where fish mostly eschews that inscrutable mess for things like: $ math "10 * 5 / 100" 0.5 Note the floating point math... When done, I ran them both with the `time` command, and bash version was consistently faster (results at bottom of message). However, if one takes into account dev time, fish is faster despite it being new to me. So it depends on how you rank run time vs dev time which is "faster", but I'm giving the win to fish in this case. Adding to that the luxurious interactive features and it's a no-brainer: fish is the (my) future. The tab-completion is light years ahead of bash (but so is the tab completion in node.js, bash is kind of lagging behind here these days). $ time ./progress-bar.bash START: files count: 500 Batch size: 3 [||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||] 500/500 (100)% ________________________________________________________ Executed in 1.04 secs fish external usr time 115.62 millis 545.00 micros 115.08 millis sys time 58.08 millis 214.00 micros 57.87 millis $ time ./progress-bar.fish START: files count: 500 Batch size: 3 [ ] 500/500 (100)% ________________________________________________________ Executed in 1.50 secs fish external usr time 490.80 millis 0.00 micros 490.80 millis sys time 148.81 millis 760.00 micros 148.05 millis

2 3

Re: [kwlug-disc] fish vs bash: a progress bar from YSAP and some timing measurements
by Ron 23 Aug '25

23 Aug '25

Ron wrote on 2025-08-23 00:28: > The fish syntax is *so much better*. I'm reminded of how nginx came along and really took a lot of install base from Apache. Is it because it's faster? Maybe; debatable on equivalent work loads (from my understanding). Is it because the configuration syntax is much cleaner, clearer, legible, and sane? I think so. One quirk I've encountered is in passing an array to a function and accessing it as a variable. This may be due to a failure to understand something on my part, but I don't think so. Functions are defined something like this (formatting for personal preference only): ``` #!/usr/bin/env fish function myfunc \ --description "This appears in tab-completion hints" \ -a my_arr echo -e "Inside myfunc \$my_arr has $(count $my_arr) item:\n $my_arr" echo -e "Inside myfunc \$argv has $(count $argv) items:" set -l i 1 for arg in $argv echo " $i/$(count $argv): \$argv[$i]: $argv[$i] (or \$arg: $arg)" set i (math $i + 1) end ## printf "myfunc argv passed: %s\n" $argv end ## In bash, ** requires `shopt -s globstar` ## and `shopt -s nullglob` lest one gets either the string "./**/*.cache" ## if no matches or something else unwanted (I forget) set files (ls ./**/*.cache) echo "Found $(count $files) files in a test array" ## Indexing starts at 1 (yay!): myfunc $files[1..5] $ ./test2.fish Found 500 files in a test array Inside myfunc $my_arr has 1 item: ./baz/delme-100.cache Inside myfunc $argv has 5 items: 1/5: $argv[1]: ./baz/delme-100.cache (or $arg: ./baz/delme-100.cache) 2/5: $argv[2]: ./baz/delme-101.cache (or $arg: ./baz/delme-101.cache) 3/5: $argv[3]: ./baz/delme-102.cache (or $arg: ./baz/delme-102.cache) 4/5: $argv[4]: ./baz/delme-103.cache (or $arg: ./baz/delme-103.cache) 5/5: $argv[5]: ./baz/delme-104.cache (or $arg: ./baz/delme-104.cache) ❰uid1❙~/utils/ysap-bash/progress-bar❱ ✔ ≻ ``` So, passing in an array and capturing the entire array in a local variable does not (seem to) work. However, that array is accessible as $argv, so ... that's okay. I do like that indexing starts at 1 - that's great!

1 0

Go fish?
by Evan Leibovitch 22 Aug '25

22 Aug '25

Wondering if anyone here has experience with the fish shell <https://fishshell.com/>, which I discovered as it is the default in Bazzite Linux. Non-POSIX-compliant by design, it appears to be far more advanced in tab-completion and inline syntax checking than bash. ("You'll never write esac again", they say...) Has anyone tried it? Is it anyone's daily driver? Thanks! - Evan

9 28

Does anyone use this, Part 3: Hyprland
by Evan Leibovitch 21 Aug '25

21 Aug '25

I appreciate the feedback so far on the fish shell and Bazzite Linux. The latest curiosity that seems to be attracting attention is something called Hyprland. This is a window manager/compositor that's Wayland-only but apparently extremely resource-light and customizable. It's also increasingly showing up in Linux forums that I watch and has the now-typical small but very noisy following who say it's the Next Big Thing in open source. Having said that, Hyprland is not a full replacement for GNOME or KDE; no panels, utilities, widgets, GUI settings app. It needs these from other sources which could well come from the KDE or GNOME suites. But does that defeat the purpose? Is this the first software that finally lets Wayland shine? Or is it an open source Labubu, the hottest thing around but forgotten next year? -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56

2 1

Dollar store computer audio system...
by Colin McGregor 21 Aug '25

21 Aug '25

A feature of the original Raspberry Pi from the original on up to the Raspberry Pi 4 was a 3.5 mm audio jack for sound output. I am told by audiophiles that the Pi audio out ... wasn't very good, but to me it sounded fine. With the Raspberry Pi 5 that audio jack was dropped. The loss of that audio jack isn't an issue if you're connecting to a TV via HDMI (use the TV audio), or if you don't need audio, or you use a Bluetooth speaker. But what if you want things more-or-less the way they were before? A visit to Dollarama might be your answer. At Dollarama I ran across a USB-C to audio cable for use with the likes of mobile phones for a little less than $5. Of course the Raspberry Pi 5 uses USB A for its' USB input/output connectors, but again for a little less than $5 you can get a Dollarama USB A to USB C adapter. Connect the above together and the Raspberry PI will see this as an audio device and be able to pass audio out. Less than $10 (before tax) and you can be back almost to the way things were before (okay granted this way you are down one USB port :-( , still that isn't too bad in most situations). Going beyond the above, Dollarama does sell an audio speaker (available in white red or black) about the size of a beverage can with a 3.5 mm input jack for $5 (plus HST) that can (in my case) run off an old phone charger (I didn't try the Dollarama phone charger, but that could be an option). Add in a Dollarama audio cable and you are good. Now, I am not enough of an audiophile to be able to tell if all of the above is good, but it does sound fine to me. I thought that getting a complete, if VERY modest, computer audio system at a dollar store is a bit wild and worth sharing.

16 31

What font are you using in LibreOffice
by William Park 18 Aug '25

18 Aug '25

I'm using "Noto Serif" in LibreOffice Writer. But, it looks a bit crowded. I prefer "Times Roman" style, at least for my resume and cover letter. What font are you using in LibreOffice Writer?

7 11

trying this from a different angle
by CAREY SCHUG 15 Aug '25

15 Aug '25

One of my issues with snaps is that it is frozen in time, since it was first installed. Specifically, my snap of a browser is fixed with the default cursor definition I had when I installed the snap. Since then, I have made it larger and added mouse trails. But anything in a snap is stuck where it was. 1. I suppose I should request that Ubuntu (or snapcraft?) provide a command to copy all and/or popular subsets of system settings from the current live system to any given snap. 2. I have been trying to find where the cursor setting are stored. as an inexpert, every search I do tells me to look in a directory that I cannot find on my system. 3. can anybody suggest how to phrase a query to find this, or just tell me? 4. I presume if I copied such file(s) from my live home directory to the directory for that snap it would propagate my cursor settings there, right? Carey

1 0

bash strict mode (set -e)? - not so fast unless you know these quirks
by Ron 14 Aug '25

14 Aug '25

Quick question: * how regularly do you put `set` in your bash scripts? * how often do you trap signals in your bash scripts? On to the video: > The Problem with Bash 'Strict Mode' > > - Why I Don’t Use `set -euo pipefail` More bash enlightenment by Dave @ YSAP on the topic of bash strict mode (set -e). There are some damned weird gotchas to beware of! I had no idea. His "contrived" example of how it can make your life much harder: $ ((i=0)) ; echo "i: ${i} exit code: $?" i: 0 exit code: 1 Longer form: $ ((i=-1)) ; echo $? 0 $ ((i=0)) ; echo $? 1 $ ((i=1)) ; echo $? 0 So, it's returning an "error" code of 1 that will cause `set -e` to bring your program to a grinding halt where it is inappropriate to do so. No errors were generated in that code. His second example is even more inscrutable. I really have been questioning bash a lot lately. He then covers `set -o pipefail` and again, weird behaviour. $ ( cat /usr/share/dict/canadian-english-insane |head -n 1) A $ (set -o pipefail cat /usr/share/dict/canadian-english-insane |head -n 1) Here, the "error" was that the pipe closed because `head` got its one line and `cat` had no where to send the rest of the file. Finally, he covers `set -u` for unbound variables. It's nice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jo3Ml53kvc The comments are also good, possibly the best on any tech channel i.e. how to handle exit values > 128. He shouts out the shellcheck.net service (accessed via CLI!)

2 1

Debian 13...
by Colin McGregor 14 Aug '25

14 Aug '25

I changed to Debian about 1999. I had been a Red Hat user before that, but... Red Hat with the split between Red Hat and Fedora was looking like a @#$% show. With Debian I saw a system that could get a bit more ...ideological... than I was happy with, but at least you always knew where they stood and why. I also knew that there wasn't a corporate owner that might suddenly pull the rug out from under you in order to make a few extra $$. So, last weekend starting with my laptop PC (which was designed for Windows 10, but has never successfully booted a MS Windows OS) I upgraded from Debian 12 to 13. Then this week I upgraded my daily driver desktop PC from Debian 12 to 13. VERY few issues and I am basically happy with what I am seeing. I look forward to seeing how all this will impact the Raspberry Pi boxes I own 🙂.

2 1