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Toshiba Satellite L500 rejects Linux
by Giles Orr 16 Jun '23

16 Jun '23

I've recently acquired (through a friend who stopped using it) a Toshiba Satellite L500 - Core i3 (3rd gen?), 4G RAM. I'm determined to get Linux onto it (preferably Debian). I thought I had succeeded: I booted from a Debian USB stick, installed to the HD. All appeared to go well, but the system won't boot. It returns to the Boot Menu and says "HDXXXX has failed." What the search engines are telling me is that with this generation of Toshibas, the problem is generally Secure Boot / CSM etc. Which makes sense, but ... there is absolutely zero mention in the BIOS/UEFI ("Phoenix SecureCore Tiano Setup") of "Secure Boot," "CSM," "Legacy," or "UEFI." Acccording to notes I found online, "SecureCore Tiano" has "full support" for legacy booting. Another issue with this machine is my mixed success booting from USB sticks: I have an old-ish USB stick I built myself that has GRUB and a large menu of ISOs: works great on most systems, won't boot on this thing - probably because it's an old-style BIOS-boot only(?). One of my ideas was to upgrade the BIOS: it appears there's a newer version available, but it's NOT available from Toshiba, which is the only place I'd want to download it from. The rest look like dubious secondary download sites (if you know one you consider reliable, let me know). What I read online said that Fedora's installer puts an EFI partition on the HD as part of the install, while Debian doesn't. And that may(?) be why I can't boot from my Debian install? So ... I downloaded the Fedora installer, put it on a USB stick ... and no joy: the Toshiba doesn't recognize the Fedora USB stick as a bootable item. Would this be because I burned it on a "Legacy" system? Is there a fix for that? Except ... I'm about 99% sure the Debian Installer USB stick was created on the same machine. Worst case, I can stick the HD from the Toshiba into another machine, install Fedora on it, repartition to make room for Debian, put the HD back into the Toshiba ... but that's getting damn complicated and annoying. As always - any suggestions welcomed. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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computer hobbiest with about 45 minuets?
by Karen Lewellen 15 Jun '23

15 Jun '23

Hi folks, The freecycle cafe used to be wonderful for this sort of thing. If I am honest my situation is sort of getting desperate. On top of my lack of usable landline services, my main computer is having issues now. what I need quite intensely Is sighted help in person to trouble shoot what I cannot due to blindness. and no, CNIB has not provided resources of this kind since well..ever. At least not without a 2 or 3 year waiting list. Might be fun for someone curious about adaptive technology in a low graphics setup. Any prospects? I am on Kingston road if that helps. Thanks, Karen

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Meeting 2023 June 13: Digital Citizenship, Part 2
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 12 Jun '23

12 Jun '23

with Warren McPherson 13 June, 2023 at 07:30 PM “Being involved in open source indicates an interest in the ethical aspects of technology” For this meeting we wish to get your input on what it means to you to be a digital citizen in 2023. What is a Digital Citizen and why is it important? https://www.digitalcitizenship.net/nine-elements.html https://usidhr.org/what-is-digital-citizenship-and-why-is-it-important/ We're going to use Big BLue Button for this meeting: https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl Time: June 13, 2023 7:30 PM Eastern Time Join us on Big Blue Button: https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl

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War Story: old Nvidia card vs. Fedora 38 upgrade
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 10 Jun '23

10 Jun '23

My desktop computer is quite long in the tooth. It runs on Fedora Linux. It uses an Nvida GTX 650 video cart that I bought in 2012. I used this card because of the screen resolutions it supported. BACKGROUND: you may ignore this - the computer came with an OK AMD video card, but the OEM (HP) limited it to 1920x1200 (the non-HP versions supported dual link DVI, which is what I initially needed. - although the Haswell CPU's integrated GPU could support DisplayPort up to 3840 x 2160 @ 60 Hz, the motherboard didn't have a connector for that. Over the years, it has taken some babying to use this video card with Fedora. - the open source driver, Nouveau, never worked reliably for me (I only tried a few time). - Fedora itself will not distribute proprietary drivers. - over the years, third party repositories have made using the Nvidia driver mostly easy. RPMFusion is a good repo. FOREGROUND I did an upgrade to Fedora 38 and a bunch of video-related things went wrong. - my desktop was switched from X to Wayland - my video card doesn't work in Wayland, in mysterious ways that need debugging - current Nvidia proprietary drivers can now live with Wayland (this is fairly recent). (I think that that is why the Fedora upgrade felt that it could switch me to Wayland) - my card is no longer supported by Nvidias current drivers, I have to use "legacy" drivers. They apparently don't support Wayland. Solutions: - I discovered these gradually, painfully, tentatively. Appropriate documentation is not very discoverable - in GDM (GNOME login screen), after you have selected your identity but not entered you password, there is a gear symbol towards the lower right of the screen. When you click it, you can select one of GNOME <== the default GNOME Classic GNOME Classic on Xorg GNOME on Xorg Select one of the ones with Xorg - this is not enough. I needed to make GDM itself use X. Change /etc/gdm/custom.conf to enable the command WayLandEnable = false - to fix screen-blanking after 30 seconds, I typed "xset -dpms". I don't know why I started having to do this with Fedora 38. I don't know the correct way of having this apply automatically

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war story: supporting an old printer on Windows, with Linux
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 05 Jun '23

05 Jun '23

A friend has an old trusty HP LaserJet 4MP printer. This is so old that HP no longer makes Windows drivers for it and HP no longer has online manuals for it. I'm guessing that the 4mp model was introduced about 30 years ago. (I bought a LaserJet IIP in 1989 for $1400. Long dead.) It works fine under Linux (he has used Ubuntu). He did need a dongle to connect the serial or parallel port (I don't remember which) to a USB port on the computer. There is a hack to support this for use by Windows: <https://openprinting.github.io/wsl-printer-app/> Highlights: - run Ubuntu in WSL2 (requires Win11) - use ubunto-previow because that allows systemd, which is needed - use <https://github.com/dorssel/usbipd-win> to pass through the USB device to Ubuntu He is about to try this. I hope it work Boy is that a lot of duct tape.

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Anybody using rclone?
by Giles Orr 05 Jun '23

05 Jun '23

I saw a tech news article about a cloud storage provider reducing their rates ( https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/02/dropbox-like-cloud-storage-service-shadow… ) and this reminded me that I've been thinking about using cloud storage as backup ... so long as it's encrypted with a key that's on my side (only). A quick search pointed me to "rclone" ( https://rclone.org/ ) which sounds outstanding if their self-promotion is to be believed. The fact that rclone is included as a standard package in Debian stable goes a long way to convincing me. Ironically, "Shadow Drive" isn't one of the providers that rclone lists themselves as working with. This seems like a good starting guide (and makes rclone look fairly straight-forward). I haven't used it so I'm uncertain of its accuracy: https://www.linuxuprising.com/2020/05/how-to-encrypt-cloud-storage-files-wi… My current backup systems live and die by 'rsync', so I'm quite familiar with a program rclone seems to be partially based on. I've been trying/hoping to move to 'rsnapshot', although it's kind of a PITA (but good). I use Fedora occasionally, but mostly Debian. This has left me with so many questions, to which I would happily take any and all answers: - is rclone good? - is rclone easy to use? - does rclone handle encryption of remotes (mostly) transparently? - in particular, is mounting remote encrypted cloud drives as local drives fairly easy? - what cloud storage providers have you used rclone with? - do you recommend a particular cloud storage provider? Why? - do you disrecommend a particular cloud storage provider? Why? -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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War Story: distro version upgrades can be dangerous
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 03 Jun '23

03 Jun '23

One of my gateway machines uses Fedora. I used to use CentOS for that kind of purpose, but no longer. When CentOS changed, I decided to try Fedora instead. The first downside is the torrent of updates. But that doesn't really seem to be a problem. The second downside is that support for a release of Fedora is two and a bit 6-month release cycles. An upside is that version upgrades are automated (unlike CentOS) and that automation generally works. This upgrade takes the machine offline for perhaps an hour at a time of your choosing (If one isn't diligent, one can fall way behind upgrading distro versions. This is particularly easy in systems like CentOS or debian where there is a combination of long support periods and no automated version update procedure. Ubuntu LTS appears to get this right: long support and update automation.) Fedora has been working pretty well on my gateway for the last few years. I like it that the packages are up to date (CentOS packages tend to be old). I upgraded the gateway machine from Fedora 36 to 38 a couple of days ago. It didn't go smoothly. A couple of small-ish hangups caught me. This is not ideal in a gateway. Luckily, I have more than one. ==== Problem 1: firewalld firewalld had a new bug. Or maybe it was iptables. I don't need to know which. The firewalld settings could not be loaded. So the firewall had default settings. These were safe but not functional for a gateway machine. I could manually install what I wanted in the running firewall but those settings would not persist. I could not make persistent changes. I reported the bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2209199 Within a day or so, a work-around is suggested and a bug fix is initiated. This shows outstanding support for which I pay nothing. (Actually, I have done free support for specifically for Red Hat as part of an upstream project. But there is no connection.) ==== Problem 2: GNOME now suspends the machine when it thinks nobody is using the console. See <https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/gnome-suspends-after-15-minutes-of-u…> Guess how I found out? No, not reading the Fedora 38 release notes. I discovered it when my gateway suspended. What the heck?!? This is a disaster for any machine that has tasks that need to run all the time. Clearly this applies to a gateway machine, but even on my desktop machine, this isn't correct: - I want to be able to SSH into my desktop at any time - I run Hexchat IRC client 24/7 on my desktop so that I can know of activity while I'm not there. - My desktop is an internal mail server and needs to handle mail at all times. There is a "Fedora Server" version that gets this right. I haven't figured out how to get Fedora Workstation to stop suspending generally. The work-around is that you can get each possible console user to turn this feature off. And you have to do this for GDM (the login screen) too.

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Chromebook death dates
by Stewart C. Russell 03 Jun '23

03 Jun '23

TIL that Chromebooks brick themselves when they hit a hard-coded date: the date when Google stops providing updates: https://coloradosun.com/2023/05/26/colorado-schools-chromebooks-churn-outda… The article's about Denver Public School District, who are finding a whole lot of their Chromebooks bought during pandemic are running out of life. The environmental and cost impacts are huge. Stewart

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an odd question about well on going service factors.
by Karen Lewellen 31 May '23

31 May '23

Hi folks, Tapping into your genus once again. At this moment Bell and I continue to fight, land line wise and otherwise. they seem to be preventing Teksavy from helping me either, I get an announced visit when not home, then weeks of someone will call you with a solution. If I am honest, because my analog phone services support my brain health and I expected to be back on track all this is rather emotionally challenging. then there is the television situation, which leads to my question. My landlord is including access to his Fibe TV account, he already provides internet as a part of my rent. That means I need a set top box of some kind, my television is conventional, I do not use the Internet for viewing, its not inclusive for my combination of disability experiences. Here is the question..or two of them. first, is there a universal box of some kind that I can get which will let me access the available Fibe TV services without using one from Bell specifically? if not then... Second, can one just rent a set top box by itself? Thanks all around, Karen

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ISC DHCP server is reaching End of Life.
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 30 May '23

30 May '23

I've been using ISC DHCP server for a long long time. I just noticed this article. It focuses on Kea DHCP server as a replacement. <https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/04/27/use-kea-dhcp-server-as-isc-dhcp-ser…>

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