In light of all that is currently going on with the #Linux kernel, while we wait for the dust to settle and everyone to find out the hardway that an OS kernel is literally the worst possibly place ever to use a LLM for vibe coding, does anyone know what the last truly safe kernel is? I'm thinking it might be a good idea to start masking packages and sticking to specific versions, only ever updating the kernel when strictly necessary.

I guess "last safe" may require a balance of "fixes the worst security flaws" and "has the least vibe coding." I think strictly no vibe coding likely will have too many security issues.

I didn't see anyone complaining about them using awful mics. Are you people getting a better recording than the one I watched? I had trouble understanding them half the time because it sounded to me like they had cheap mics.

#Monsterdon

So for fellow AMD GPU users using #Linux / #LinuxDesktop (especially for #LinuxGaming ) I just found out something interesting. amdgpu exposes a /sys/class/drm/card*X/device/hwmon/hwmonX*/power1_cap which, as you can guess, sets the maximum amount of power the GPU can use before it starts throttling. There are also power1_cap_min and power1_cap_max values. My power1_cap was showing up as 0 which I guess means let the card's firmware do whatever it wants. (There is also a power1_default value which was set to the same as the max on my system, but apparently default does not mean default here. 🙄 )

I've set power1_cap to the same number as power1_min and indeed, on those things that push my system to the absolute max, I see less overall power usage and lower GPU temperatures.

I have a question for #Linux users or more specifically #LinuxGaming :

Has anyone forked vkBasalt and resumed progress on it yet? Because we seriously need it and eventually it's going to stop working...

I'm not insane!

I'm not if he's not!

I'm not either!

#Monsterdon

Oh wow. This movie starts with a banging music track.

#Monsterdon

I have started trying to learn how to use docker today.

I regret my life decisions.

So far my journey with Gentoo has been... surprisingly decent? I know now what I did wrong the first time I decided to try it. Installation is absolutely no fun and I still strongly dislike emerge and the way I'm sometimes forced to just straight up manually write in package.use or etc files, but all in all it's working surprisingly well. Everything is very snappy and efficient. In fact, power usage is slightly lower for whatever reason. I will say I still feel like OpenRC is a pleasure to use. I don't see why everything is still relying on systemd when OpenRC is available and excellent.

Still worried I'll run into something I want but can't get working since there seem to be no downloadable packages (and my luck with compiling such things is bad,) but, all in all it's going great.

Hey #Linux users, I'm running into an annoying issue where my system randomly just soft-locks, but only on Gentoo. It didn't do it on Debian-based systems or Arch-based systems for me. (What little I used of Fedora also didn't do it, but I'm not sure if I used in long enough.) It's a bad lock, but it's a soft-lock, so if I hold ctrl+alt+F3 or whatever for about two or three minutes, eventually I get to a console and can reset. The GUI never returns. The specific error seems to be "flip_done timed out" from amdgpu.

My searches so far have yielded claims that disabling variable framerate and adding KWIN_DRM_NO_AMS=1
and KWIN_DRM_NO_DIRECT_SCANOUT=1 stops the freezes and so far it seems to have done so, but I really want variable framerate back...

Again, only in Gentoo...

So I just had an idea on using zram swap. I setup two swaps instead of one. First lz4 compression for one with the highest priority (I did 1000, but it doesn't really matter,) then zstd compression for the one with a priority above disk swapping but below the first (I did 100, but again doesn't matter what number really.) Lz4 being faster but not compressing as well and zstd being slower but better compressing. Most normal swapping going on is small and goes into the faster one first, but if it gets filled up, then the zstd one takes over. Then, as always, if that fills up too, disk swapping comes in at the lowest priority.

I don't know if I even have the means to test any performance differences, but, well, it makes sense anyway.

#Linux

Just to share, well, I just found out that the reason I spent about three hours trying to get dropbear-initramfs to accept a key when using ssh is because you must convert the key running /usr/lib/dropbear/dropbearconvert from the dropbear format to the openssh format or vice versa depending on which you used to generate it or you get a libcrypto error and not one single guide I followed anywhere mentioned this...

As a side note, a lot of ssh users probably already know this, but I finally figured out the most reasonable way to deal with the fact that the key is different between the dropbear server and the normal ssh server is to just use a manually set known_hosts file like so:

ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=~/.ssh/known_hosts.initramfs -i ~/.ssh/dropbear-server.key root@[address]

#Linux

Here is another #Linux question for those of you in #VideoEncoding / #Encoding . ffmpeg is super powerful, but it also has an insane number of parameters we're supposed to memorize even to do some fairly simple tasks. I need something that gives me the level of control ffmpeg has, but with a basic GUI or easier to use parameters at the very least. That is to say I want to be able to select what video codec, quality, which tracks to use, resolution, etc etc without memorizing a whole bunch of crazy command line parameters to do it. Way back in the day I used to do all this stuff with VirtualDub/VirtualDubMod in Windows. Yeah, ok, that's way back... I miss it.

I know there are editors like OpenShot/Shotcut/etc with a limited range of these functions. Is there any just encoder?

So I found out something in #Linux that I thought seemed kind of neat. You can apparently turn on an automatic suspend option for any USB device that supports suspending. There's even a timer for the delay (which defaults to 2 seconds — far too short of a time really, it absolutely needs to be set higher.) It seems to be really smart on determining whether something is in use or not too. Specifically "control" and "autosuspend_delay_ms" under /sys/bus/usb/devices/whatever You can set a udev rule even:

/etc/udev/rules.d/99-power-idobao75.rules
'''
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}"6964", ATTRS{idProduct}"0075", TEST=="power/control", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo auto > /sys$env{DEVPATH}/power/control && echo 900000 > /sys$env{DEVPATH}/power/autosuspend_delay_ms'"
'''

Ok, another question for #Linux users. I have all my storage on #luks 2 encrypted volumes with #cryptsetup . I like to be able to shut off one harddrive (which is in a bay with a switch.) I had a nice little script to unmount, close the volume, and then put the drive to sleep so I could safely shut it off. But recently cryptsetup has been failing to actually close volumes. I couldn't figure out what even had changed at first, but now I suspect it's because I enabled the KVM module after I ran across this: https://alext.mail.at/post/cryptsetup-close-crypt-fails-with-device-crypt-is-still-in-use

The problem is I have no clue how to use that... I can't find whatever is holding it and can't unlock it.

What I really need is something I can put in that script...

I don't really want to disable the KVM module just for that.

Anyone know what would cause an EXT4 filesystem to just suddenly insist it has zero bytes free no matter what? I deleted files and everything and it still said 0 bytes free. I ran multiple filesystem checks (it was marked as dirty, and said mounted with errors, but just in case I forced extra checks) and in the end it did a repair or something and then from there on just insisted there was nothing wrong anymore. I even used gparted to shrink, move, and then resize it back (poor memory card!)

In the end I had to use tune2fs to adjust the reserve down to 1% (I probably don't need any, this is on a secondary memory card for a retro handheld.)

Like did the reserve just... somehow get changed somehow to 100% or something stupid? How would that even be possible?

#Linux #EXT4

So after trying MX Linux Xfce4 version on my secondary system I guess I've been more or less convinced to give a vertical task bar a serious try. It has the obvious advantage of using a bit of the dimension that we have more of on modern widescreen displays. But I normally prefer KDE at least on my main desktop.

I am running into one problem. The built in digital clock widget was absolutely not meant for this. When I first switched the panel over, it became utterly unreadable. It shrinks everything to fit in a very tiny margin. I tried everything and I've had to turn off the date (I miss that already) switch to 24 hour format because the AM/PM text is still too much width, and use a crazy CGA 8x8 2Y font. Isn't there some way to make it work better?

#Linux #KDE #KDEPlasma

I think I'm going to have to miss out on this #Monsterdon due to sheer tiredness. :Sobbing: Someone throw in a good riff or two for me. This movie has to be good for a riff...

Strange #Linux / #LinuxGaming (specifically #WINE ) question: I know that when you use winetricks to install various components it caches them, but it seems like the cache gets deleted or invalidated from time to time. Is there any way I can just download some sort of pack of everything it does for offline use and protect them so they don't get deleted? I want to be able to rely on being able to get the components into a new prefix when needed offline and I'm so tired of actually going through the process to actually install all of them (which takes forever with a lot of popups and etc) and then of course have to delete the prefix since installing everything generally breaks stuff. (Plus maybe it deletes some things as it goes? Some seem to show up as not cached.)

Just curious #Linux users, but is there a good stable third party kernel package available for Debian/Debian-derived distros? I know of Liquorix and XanMod, but they're performance focused and bring in quite a share of their own issues. (I still can't even figure out how to get the VirtualBox dkms module to work with XanMod even with the lts version for example. I can't go around recommending people use a thing that requires figuring out some obscure missing package for such simple things...)

I don't think backports is a good solution to this really.

Basically I'm just looking for a newer kernel with some basics like ntsync and etc rather than some super high performance thing that might produce 1 fps more in some games.

Ok, another strange #Linux question:

Is there any way to put sddm on a specific tty? It seems to pick something almost at random and I don't know if I'm reading that right, but apparently they consider it a systemd standard to put it on 1 which, of course is used by the system and not allowed so it never can use 1 (am I wildly misunderstanding something here? That seems... dumb.)

lightdm can go to 7 which is great. lightdm even can put the DE on 8, which I just love. Neither clobbers any of the terminals I normally use and I'd really love to do that with sddm as well.

(Note, I'm setting this up on a system that isn't using systemd for init. Right now I'm trying this on Devuan with "openrc" aka sysvinit + some very basic openrc stuff. I might also do this on MX Linux with sysvinit)