- Talk - lists.gtalug.org

Firefox "kinetic" scrolling
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 28 Oct '22

28 Oct '22

In Firefox, when you scroll with a touchpad, Firefox acts as if the document has momentum and continues scrolling when you take your fingers off the touchpad. This works particularly poorly on my Logo Yoga 2 Prow notebook because when I remove my fingers from scrolling on the touchpad there is some kind of jerky signal sent. As a result, considerable momentum is supplied. After too much research, I found <https://kparal.wordpress.com/2019/10/31/disabling-kinetic-scrolling-in-fire…> (Kinetic seems an odd word to use for this behaviour.) Solution: about:config set apz.gtk.kinetic_scroll.enabled to false. I guess I could report a problem to the libinput folks. But others have done so, more or less. An nine year old computer model doesn't get much attention.

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war story: CMOS battery AKA Real Time Clock (RTC) battery in a notebook
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 22 Oct '22

22 Oct '22

Almost all PCs have settings that they want to keep while the computer is off or even unplugged. Ones that they don't want to keep on disk. Things you set up from the firmware setup screen. Furthermore, they have a realtime clock that runs when the machine is turned off or unplugged. These are all powered by a lithium coin cell. Eventually, that battery runs down and you have to replace it. Five or ten years of lifetime seems normal. When it runs down, the computer will forget the date, time, and all its setting when it is turned off. This is annoying: every time you start up you have to fill in the time and other settings. Luckily, for most computers it is easy to replace: it is in a socket in the motherboard. The battery can be sourced from Dollarama or Amazon for a buck or two. Just get the size right. For (some? all?) notebooks the coin cell battery isn't used if there is a charge in the main battery. So you may not notice that the coin cell battery is failing. I flattened my notebook's main battery somehow (left it sleeping for a week?). When I powered it on, it had no idea of the time nor what to boot. Upon investigation, I find that I have to completely disassemble my computer to replace the battery! They placed it on the top of the main board whereas access is to the bottom. If you care, you can read page 50 of <https://dl.dell.com/topicspdf/xps-15-9560-laptop_setup-guide_en-us.pdf> It looks as if I will need some new thermal grease since I have to remove the heat sink from the processor. And the coin cell assembly is not generic -- no Dollarama battery. <https://www.amazon.ca/LeFix-Replacement-Battery-Connector-Precision/dp/B082…>

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confusing standards: first USB, now HDMI
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 14 Oct '22

14 Oct '22

The USB standardization committee has created layers of naming confusion. Horrible. Now I find out that that is the case for HDMI too. See <https://tftcentral.co.uk/articles/when-hdmi-2-1-isnt-hdmi-2-1> HDMI 2.0 no longer exists, and devices should not claim compliance to v2.0 as it is not referenced any more The features of HDMI 2.0 are now a sub-set of 2.1 All the new capabilities and features associated with HDMI 2.1 are optional (this includes FRL, the higher bandwidths, VRR, ALLM and everything else) If a device claims compliance to 2.1 then they need to also state which features the device supports so there is “no confusion” (hmmmm) Here's a list of the interesting new stuff in HDMI 2.1: Support for much higher bandwidths than older generations, allowing Support for higher resolutions – including 4K and even up to 8K Support for the combination of 4K and 120Hz high refresh rate (including at 10-bit, HDR and without colour compression) Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode) support

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wired headset suggestions?
by Karen Lewellen 12 Oct '22

12 Oct '22

Hi folks and happy thanksgiving if you are celebrating. Given others might spend far more time in on line meetings than myself, plus the ideas here tend to be workable, I thought I would toss this question out here. There are some firm details for me, rather a few strictly digital, or wireless headphones actually can make me dizzy. part of my auditory processing condition. so, seeking wired headset ideas, with a boom mic, think for a laptop, just plug in no pairing required. I understand plantronics now Poly?, are a fine brand, but realize there may be others. Even if older, especially since my search is not producing options in a safe sensitivity range, either too low, as in less than 100, or too high, well above 110. I prefer impedance in the 32 range as well. Any model ideas? Thanks, Kare

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Messed up migrating 20.04 to 22.04
by Jim Ruxton 11 Oct '22

11 Oct '22

I'm stuck. I was upgrading from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 and during the install my network stopped working. I believe all packages were downloaded by that point. When I tried rebooting to get back my network (big mistake) I no longer had a working system. Booting into recovery mode I tried finishing the upgrade. For some reason the system doesn't see my /boot/efi partition even though it is mounted. My fstab file looks correct. Below is my screen when I try the upgrade command. Any suggestions what I can try to fix the system or do I need a fresh install. By the way this is dual boot beside Windows which is still working. https://photos.app.goo.gl/fozqMvjWhpi2kUeF9

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General Meeting Reminder
by Alan Heighway 09 Oct '22

09 Oct '22

State of Mozilla with Mike Hoye <https://gtalug.org/meeting/2022-10/> with Mike Hoye <https://gtalug.org/> 11 October, 2022 at 07:30 PM We're going to use Big Blue Button for this meeting: *Join Big Blue Button:* https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl *A*lan *H*eighway <http://heighway.ca/> heighway.ca VA3WAH / VA3YKZ [image: Please consider the environment before printing]

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war story: Thunderbird needs to be told to compress its folders
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 07 Oct '22

07 Oct '22

TL;DR: If you use Thunderbird, once in a while, do this: File: Compact Folders This may be the only way to get space back for deleted messages (I'm not sure). Now for the war story. One of us uses Thunderbird to read mail. It stopped working yesterday, with no useful diagnostic. In particular, it would no longer pick up mail from our POP3 server. There was no signal to the user. I looked in the Error Console (meant for developers, not users) and saw two messages, the first being: tb.account.size_on_disk - Truncating float/double number. What does this mean? First guess: Javascript stores numbers in 64-bit IEEE 754 floating point representation. A large integer may not be precisely represented. But there are 52 bits for the fraction AKA mantissa and 2^52 is very very large. My mail files were at most a small number of gigabytes - perhaps 2^32. So this cannot be the explanation. Googling didn't help: the message showed up in posted logs but wasn't relevant to failure to fetch mail. Still, some did suggest that a Compact Folders command was in order. About three gigabytes of space freed and the first message disappeared. <https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1391958> We still could not pick up mail.

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recruiting: junior/intermediate system administrator
by John Sellens 05 Oct '22

05 Oct '22

Hope this is okie dokie to mention. We're recruiting an all-rounderjunior/intermediate system administrator. Remote likely most of the time, but would need to be able to get to the office in Newmarket about once a week and to the colo in Scarborough when necessary (not very often). https://www.aecdaily.com/careers/#sysadmin Happy to elaborate if anyone is curious. Thanks - cheers John

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odd error when running the screen program?
by Karen Lewellen 02 Oct '22

02 Oct '22

Hi folks, Both shellworld, and dreamhost, use Ubuntu as the basis for their shell workspaces. Sharing that up front, as this may be tied to Ubuntu. There is a program called screen, apparently common across some Linux distributions. one can create the equal of a screen shot, screen www.website.com followed by control a -h. This creates a file called hardcopy, with numbers going up for each file. However, when I run screen www.site.com Regardless of the site I get. screen cannot accept www.site.com no such file or directory screen is terminating. Suggesting that there must be a configuration issue since Debian users I know <and who have likely built there own stuff> are not encountering the same problem. Any tips? Kare

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war story: power failure makes CentOS system unbootable
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 30 Sep '22

30 Sep '22

tl;dr / spoiler: change fstab so that /boot/efi is not automatically mounted. See the recommendation at the end of this message. My gateway computer is a little PC running CentOS. It does not come back after a power failure. The reason (as best I can tell) is interesting and I think that I have a fix. My system is UEFI. It boots from a UEFI system partition, known as /boot/efi to Linux. If this gets corrupted, it won't boot. It is a VFAT partition. On my gateway (a Zotac Zbox RI321, a cute little box with two ethernet ports), the UEFI firmware apparently won't boot if the dirty bit is set in the system partition. CentOS normally runs with /boot/efi mounted. So when the system isn't shut down cleanly, the dirty bit will be on. Consequence: the system is not going to boot after a power failure. Odd observation 1: if I put a live Fedora 25 USB stick in the system and try to boot in this otherwise-unbootable state, CentOS boots from the main disk. So this really looks like a firmware bug/quirk. Odd observation 2: fsck doesn't seem to automatically fix the system partition. Once CentOS 7 booted, I dismounted /boot/efi and did an fsck on it. $ sudo fsck /dev/sda1 fsck from util-linux 2.23.2 fsck.fat 3.0.20 (12 Jun 2013) 0x25: Dirty bit is set. Fs was not properly unmounted and some data may be corrupt. 1) Remove dirty bit 2) No action ? 1 Leaving filesystem unchanged. /dev/sda1: 16 files, 2420/51145 clusters Googling got me to <https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=50917> In particular, this advice seemed quite good: ==== recommendation ==== Two other changes I recommend for UEFI systems, to each OS's /etc/fstab. - For the /boot/efi mountpoint, add the mount options x-systemd.automount,noauto - Change fs_passno (last column) to a 1 or 2; the canonical fstab instructions suggest 2, but systemd treats 1 and 2 as the same. The first change means the EFI System partition will not be automatically read-write mounted at boot time; it's a bad idea this is the default because it puts the ESP at risk especially if ther are crashes, FAT has no journal and will therefore always be marked dirty in such a case; no other UEFI OS mounts the ESP by default. Second, if anything tries to access /boot/efi (read or write), systemd will automatically mount it, and because of the fs_passno 1 or 2, it will fsck it first and that fixes and clears the dirty bit in case it's set. Right now without these changes, it's just a matter of having the right number and bad timing of crashes to render the EFI System partition corrupt.

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