Linux

The developers of the Manjaro Linux distribution, built on the basis of Arch Linux and aimed at beginners, announced the beginning of testing a new service MDD (Manjaro Data Donor), designed to collect statistics about the system and send it to the external server of the project. The author of the MDD intended to enable telemetry by default (opt-out), but the decision has not yet been approved and, judging by the objections of some developers and users, it is likely that telemetry will be offered as an option requiring prior consent of the user (a request to enable telemetry is proposed to be added to the greeting interface after the first download).

The report includes data such as host name, kernel version, desktop component versions, detailed information about hardware and drivers involved, screen size and resolution information, network device MAC addresses, disk serial numbers, disk partition data, information about the number of running processes and installed packages, versions of basic packages such as systemd, gcc, bash and PipeWire.

The sent data is stored on the project server in the ClickHouse database and visualized using the Grafana platform. The IP addresses of users are not stored, and the hash from the /etc/machine-id file is used as the system identifier.

Аccording to the code https://github.com/manjaro/mdd/blob/master/mdd.py#L40 sends everything.

The LXQt team announces the release of LXQt 2.1.0, the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment.

Through its new component lxqt-wayland-session, LXQt 2.1.0 supports 7 Wayland sessions (with Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland, Sway, River and Niri), has two Wayland back-ends in lxqt-panel (one for kwin_wayland and the other general), and will add more later. All LXQt components that are not limited to X11 — i.e., most components — work fine on Wayland. The sessions are available in the new section Wayland Settings inside LXQt Session Settings. At least one supported Wayland compositor should be installed in addition to lxqt-wayland-session for it to be used.

There is still hard work to do, but all of the current LXQt Wayland sessions are quite usable; their differences are about what the supported Wayland compositors provide:

• Labwc provides the most stable session, is very lightweight, neat and configurable, and has an extremely helpful and responsive team.
• Perhaps the most complete Wayland session is provided by KWin when extra KDE packages are installed. For now, it is the only Wayland compositor that supports LXQt Panel’s desktop switcher and LXQt Power Manager’s settings for turning off the monitor (see the Wayland Wiki for the latter).
• In additon to Kwin, fancy effects are also provided by Wayfire and Hyprland, the latter being one of the 4 tiling WMs to choose from.

Anyway, the best result is achieved by installing the latest stable version of the chosen Wayland compositor. Wayland users need to get familiar with Wayland counterparts of some X11 tools and the configuration of the compositor. They may use X11 apps through XWayland, but using apps that work directly on Wayland is the best choice. Also, see the Wayland Wiki.

Democratizing Social Media Networks: 🚀 #Fediverse, #Lemmy, #Mastodon, #Pixelfed and many other #Decentralized #Federated Networks have significantly democratized the sharing of information through #ActivityPub .

📅 On Saturday, November 9, 2024, at 15:30 (Athens Time), I will be presenting “Welcome to Decentralization” at FOSSCOMM 2024, hosted by the University of Macedonia! 🇬🇷🇪🇺

🗓️ Agenda and Streaming Links: 🔗 2024.fosscomm.gr

#FOSSCOMM2024 #Decentralization #OpenSource#Federation

Hi all, I've been using an RX 580 for about a year now. It's been ok, but I needed an upgrade for a little more FPS. Found this RX 6600~~XT~~ used and snagged it for $100. Are there any packages I'll need to install to make sure I get the best out of it? I know AMD support is baked into the kernel, but I remember having to install some Vulkan driver for my old GPU when I had some gaming issues. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Distro is Endeavour OS with the latest KDE plasma on Wayland.
Thank you

The German government wants to stabilise and rename the Sovereign Tech Fund for the promotion of open source. In future, a state-owned company under the name ‘Sovereign Tech Agency’ will promote the development of basic open source technologies. The new agency is to be linked to the federal government's leapfrog innovation agency SPRIND as a limited company The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection (BMWK) has funded 60 technology projects to date through the Sovereign Tech Fund, which was established in 2022. For example, open source is to be strengthened by funding vulnerability research. Maintainers of critical components can also be supported as fellows. In addition, the Sovereign Tech Fund organises competitions to structurally improve the quality of relevant open source developments. ‘Open source components form an important basis of the global digital infrastructure,’ says Franziska Brantner (Green Party), Parliamentary State Secretary at the BMWK. ‘However, up-to-dateness and security depend far too often on dedicated developers maintaining the components in their free time, usually without remuneration.’ Professionalisation via the STF shows that this can be done differently.

More funding for 2025

According to its own information, the Sovereign Tech Fund has so far received 500 applications for funding totalling 114 million euros. To date, 23.5 million euros in funding has been made available, which is now set to increase to 29 million euros in the upcoming federal budget. ‘The agency will continue to focus on digital infrastructure, open technologies in the public interest and common digital resources,’ reads a statement on the Sovereign Tech Agency's website.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

This laptop was originally sold with Windows 7 32-bit edition installed. Even back then it was really unresponsive and clunky. After several years of it lying around and being useless, I decided to do a really lightweight debian install on it.

And guess what? It can do so much more than sit idly in some landfill.

Now I can use it to write my study notes in neovim (gives me a good excuse to learn vim, and I'm learning slowly), listen to music with gst123, learn c and c++, torrent large files with transmission-cli and qbittorrent, and the list goes on....

I mostly just use tty. I hit "startx i3" if I absolutely need a GUI, but for everything else, tty. I use links2 for Wikipedia, online resources and browsing memes which is already a big chunk of my internet usage. I was really giddy when I saw Tor browser had a 32-bit version, it runs surprisingly well even with less than 1 gigabyte of memory (unless I visit some really bloated sites)

I can't play videos though, that's the one major thing it can't do. The integrated GPU is unsupported so playing videos or 3d-gaming is out of the question.

BTW is there a lemmy instance/frontend I can use via CLI or links2?

I understand the need for something like Tails OS and I am glad it exists. But I am looking for a distro that is not as hyper focused on extreme privacy and anonymity and is designed to be sort of like mobile computing.

I know many(if not all) distros can be live booted. I am also aware the likes of MX Linux and others leave unallocated space that can be formatted and used for this purpose but what I am looking for is this process being stream lined.

In Tails, there is a dedicated "Persistent Volumes Manager" app where you select what information you wish to put in your persistence storage. For example, you can choose to store your settings, installed apps, wifi passwords, app configuration, browser bookmarks and other useful stuff. Persistence storage is optionally encrypted to prevent sensitive data from being extracted from stolen flash drive.

When you boot up, you will be asked whether you wish to unlock persistence volume or not. If you agree, all your settings will be loaded into current live boot session, if not, it wont be.

The distro does not act or try to pretend like Tails but rather acts and feels like a standard linux distro, not hyper focused on anonymity, maximizing user convinience over privacy and security.

Essentially: When you boot, if you choose to use persistence storage by unlocking with password, etc, all your settings, installed app, etc get loaded from it. If you dont, the distro default is set.

When persistence folder is unlocked, there could be a Persistence folder in the live user's home directory where we can store files we wish to persist between reboot. Everything outside is non persistent.

If you have used Tails OS, its exactly that, except not hyper focused on anonymity and security requiring Tor to be running to access the network

Hi there!

A bunch of us at work have been looking at getting Intune running on our Linux machines, this is needed to get Wi-Fi access at work. While there is a guide on getting this on Linux - the requirements are strictly limiting this to RedHat and Ubuntu and Gnome only. Has anyone here had any success with setting this up? Was it difficult?

I tried myself just once last week, but on Aurora (KDE), via a RHEL distrobox, and assumed it failed due to my main system not having gnome-keyring installed(?) as the terminal would spit out "gnome-keyring" a couple of times when launching Intune. Was gonna try with RHEL myself during this week, but wanted to hear here first if anyone has had any success with this at all before i attempt to get it running.

Appreciate any response on this :)

Source for getting Intue on Linux. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/user-help/microsoft-intune-app-linux

https://flathub.org/apps/com.bitwarden.desktop

I feel like Im dancing around perhaps the most fundamental piece of my operating system everytime I run and install software. Starting services with systemctl and checking logs with journalctl is the extent of my knowledge.

Do you know of good resources or tutorials for learning how systemd works and how to use it to run software on my desktop and servers? Thanks.

The following boards have been added since the Canoeboot 20240612 release:

Sony PlayStation (PCSX Redux Open BIOS) Dell Latitude E4300 (courtesy of Nicholas Chin) Dell OptiPlex 780 MT support Dell OptiPlex 780 USFF support The OptiPlex models are X4X/ICH10 platform, while the E4300 is GM45/ICH9. Both run 100% blob-free, with the Intel ME firmware completely removed, by using modified Intel Flash Descriptors similar to that seen on ThinkPad X200/T400.

E4300 has the same installation procedure as the E6400.

Hi everyone! I want to be able to access a folder inside the guest that corresponds to a cloud drive that is mounted inside the guest for security purposes. I have tried setting up a shared filesystem inside Virt-Manager (KVM) with virtiofs (following this tutorial: https://absprog.com/post/qemu-kvm-shared-folder) but as soon as I mount the folder in order for it to be accessible on the guest the cloud drive gets unmounted. I guess a folder cannot have two mounts at the same time. Aliasing the folder using bind and then sharing the aliased folder with the host doesn't work either. The aliased folder is simply empty on the host.

Does anyone have an idea regarding how I might accomplish this? Is KVM the right choice or would something like docker or podman better suited for this job? Thank you.

Edit: To clarify: The cloud drive is mounted inside a virtual machine for security purposes as the binary is proprietary and I do not want to mount it on the host (bwrap and the like introduce a whole lot of problems, the drive doesn't sync anymore and I have to relogin each time). I do not use the virtual machine per se, I just start it and leave it be.

For most of college, I’ve kept it simple: I’d create a directory in my home folder for each project, then eventually move older or inactive ones into ~/programming/. When I change devices or hit file size limits, I’ll compress and send things to my NAS.

This setup has worked pretty well so far. But now that I’m graduating and my projects keep stacking up, I’m starting to wonder if there’s a more efficient system out there.

Curious—how do you all organize and store your projects? Any tips or methodologies that have made your lives easier over time?

The only person I’ve talked to about this is my mentor who’s been programming since the 60s (started on the IBM 1620 and Bendix G15) and he just mostly keeps projects in directories in his home directory and uses his godly regular expressions skills to find things that way. Makes me wonder if I’m overthinking it…

Does anybody know of a list of usb live-bootable distros, with links to the download pages?

I have a coworker who wants to switch his gaming computer over to Linux, he has Linux experience but from like a decade ago.

He's not partial to any particular distro, so I was hoping to just put together a multiboot flash drive with a bunch of live images he could try. But I'm not sure what I should include, and what has live images, vs. install only images.

I'm most comfortable in an environment with apt, so Debian and Mint are of course already covered, but if the gaming-specific distros have live usb images, that would probably be the best thing for him to try.

I updated my graphics drivers from nvidia 470 to nvidia 560 due to issues running certain games. It's fixed my gaming issue but reintroduced the problem that kept me from updating for so long.

After setting my computer to "suspend," it wakes up to this screen on all monitors. I am unable to scroll up or type further commands, my only option is to reboot the machine.

• My graphics card is: NVIDIA Corporation GP104 [GeForce GTX 1070]
• Nvidia driver version: 560.35.03
• My desktop environment is Cinnamon X11. (This does not occur on Wayland, but there is no Cinnamon Wayland.)

I can't make heads or tails of this error screen. The best I can understand is the "Fixing recursive fault but reboot is required!" line. How can I get more information? Does anyone have any ideas on how I can fix this? Thanks in advance.

Edit: It seems important to mention this is happening only on X11 (Pop default and Cinnamon), and not on Pop!_OS on Wayland.

I had a teeny pet project using GNU assembly that was going to target two platforms.

Instead of keeping my handwritten worst-practices Makefile I decided to try GNU Autotools for the educated reasons of:

• Text scrolling by looks pretty
• Vague memories of ./configure make make install tarballs

I got hit with mysterious macro errors, recompile with -fPIE errors (didn't need this before?), autotools trying to run gcc on a .o file w/ the same options as an .s file, "no rule for all:", and other things a noob would run into. (I don't need a bugfix, since my handspun Makefile is "working on my machine" with uname -m.) So there's a bit of a learning curve here, inhibited by old documentation ~and~ ~more~ ~quietly,~ ~genAI~ ~being~ ~shittier~ ~than~ ~normal~ ~in~ ~this~ ~department~

With this I ask:

Do people still use Autotools for non-legacy stuff? If not, what do people choose for a new project's build system and why?

edit: trimmed an aside

Hi guys.

Just started looking at using Linux on my main pc. I don't use it too often these days but I like to play around with my pc.

I tried Fedora and it seems fine. I chose Fedora 41 as I wanted to have working Nvidia drivers and secure boot. Got that working but then I tried to use my wireless Xbox series X controller and had no luck getting it working. I tried to install xone but was getting errors.

I've tried Ubuntu is the past but just wasn't to my liking. Linux mint was ok but didn't like the available desktop environments.

I know Nobara is available, but I'd prefer to have something minimal and be able to configure everything myself to my liking.

I'm not so fussed about which distro. Can anyone recommend something that works with: Nvidia drivers Secure boot xone (or something else)

I like the gnome desktop environment.

Thanks. ☮️❤️