Linux 101 stuff. Questions are encouraged, noobs are welcome!

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Linux introductions, tips and tutorials. Questions are encouraged. Any distro, any platform! Explicitly noob-friendly.

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1
 
 

I have a VPN daemon that needs to run before the client will work. Normally, this would have been set up automatically by its install script, but the system is immutable.

I've created the systemd service via sysyemctl edit --force --full daemon.service with the following parameters:

[Unit] 
Description=Blah
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=root
Group=root
ExecStart=/usr/bin/env /path/to/daemon

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

I've verified that the daemon is actually executable, and it runs fine when I manually call it via sudo daemon. When I try to run it with sudo systemctl enable --now daemon.service, it exits with error code 126.

What am I missing?

Edit: typo

Edit 2: Added script modifications. Daemon appears to be some kind of pre-compiled binary.

Solution: ExecStart wanted /usr/bin/env to launch the binary. The service file above has been edited to reflect the correct solution. See this post for further discussion.

2
 
 

Which folders and files do I need to exclude from TimeShift?

Also is there a way to also exclude programs installed as .deb ?

I doing this to reduce Backup size as I have limited storage.

100GB - Windows 11
400GB - Storage
400GB - Mint
100GB - TimeShift
3
 
 

Where should I mount my internal drive partitions?

As far as I searched on the internet, I came to know that

/Media = mount point for removable media that system do it itself ( usb drive , CD )

/Mnt = temporarily mounting anything manually

I can most probably mount anything wherever I want, but if that's the case what's the point of /mnt? Just to be organised I suppose.

TLDR

If /mnt is for temporary and /media is for removable where should permanent non-removable devices/partitions be mounted. i.e. an internal HDD which is formatted as NTFS but needs to be automounted at startup?

Asking with the sole reason to know that, what's the practice of user who know Linux well, unlike me.

I know this is a silly question but I asked anyway.

4
 
 

So which one is actually official one? I can't describe what "official" mean here, maybe the one that actually came from reddit or the one with more subsscribers or one with more activity ?

Also Why there are multiple copies of same community in different instances? Isn't the whole point of lemmy is that it is federated?

There is also three linux4noob communities 🥲

5
 
 

So first off, what I'm TRYING to accomplish here is to have 3 drives show in Dolphin with their correct names. They are 3 physical drives (no crazy partition shenigans), but I'm having several issues trying to get them to be usable. All 3 are nvme drives connected directly to the board. (I'm new to Linux, not building machines.) The main drive is encrypted and is showing as type LVM2, the others are just ext4.

I am still fairly new with this, and didn't mess with this much when I used Windows, but when I did everything worked fine the first time. I'm pretty competent at following directions, and willing to learn vocab and lingo.

So the 3 drives are:

-main system drive

-drive to store photos (labelled 'Archive')

-Had a 3rd drive sitting around when I put this system together. No real intended use for it yet, but I'll think of something later.

So I'd like to have them listed as Main, Archive, and Drive3 for now. For a while I just had Main and Archive working. I just tried to add some photos to the Archive drive a couple minutes ago, but it's not longer showing in the Devices section in the sidebar. There is still a "Main" listed, but it says "An error occurred while accessing 'Home', the system responded: An unspecified error has occurred: No such interface “org.freedesktop.UDisks2.Filesystem” on object at path /org/freedesktop/UDisks2/block_devices/dm_2d0" whenever I click on it.

Seeing as I know my computer is currently working, that doesn't make any sense to me. There is another drive simply listed as "1.8 TiB Internal Drive dm-1" which is actually the correct drive for my system install. So the listing it was under now doesn't work, but it's still easily accessible with this default name.

There is now a recovery device listed, but I haven't created a recovery partition, and I certainly don't want to see it listed in the devices, as if I need it I will just use it as intended, I don't ever need to browse it easily.

The Archive drive is not listed at all anymore. I can still see it in GParted, and it shows up just fine, but says it isn't mounted. At the moment I still have the original copies of everything I've put on it, so worst case scenario I can reformat it and start over, but I'm just trying to understand what happened here so it isn't a recurring problem. It wasn't mounted according to GParted and the Disks utility, so I just tried mounting it and it worked, but none of the files that were on it are still there. But they're still on the Main drive, so I can just drag them back.

After mounting the drive just now, the Devices section has disappeared in Dolphin. I'm getting more and more confused the more I try to figure it out and fix it.

I'm assuming if it's showing blank (other than an empty 'lost+found' directory that means the data is gone. I'm almost afraid to reboot now and feel like it's about to implode on me. I can get screenshots of whatever might need to be seen, but honestly now with the Devices section just entirely missing, the idea of this being convenient is becoming hopeless. I just want the drives to always show up with the correct names, and not give errors trying to navigate them. This shouldn't be this complicated. At least the system itself is functioning, but this is killing me. I've never had drives just stop showing up before.

Oh so the 3rd drive I did just add recently, so it really hasn't had time to have an error with it, as I haven't touched it yet. Nothing is on it, it was just recently added

So in short, any ideas why the "Main" listing stopped working and why it showed up as a default named partition? The Archive part actually may not have been copied over yet (I can't remember stuff to save my life sometimes) but I know the drive itself was at least accessible before. Which it seems to be now, but was unmounted by default, which is kinda odd. Also when I mounted it, it showed up as a folder with a long name of random numbers and letters, but it still shows the correct partition name in GParted. The 3rd drive shows correctly as "Drive3" which is its volume/partition name, but the partition on this drive is named/labelled "Archive" but shows as a long string of numbers, letters, and dashes.

And now I'm unsure which drives are still working at any given moment since the Devices part isn't even there and I have to keep manually digging into them from the media mount point "folder". I can make a version of it by manually adding a "Place" to the Dolphin sidebar, but it's not in its own category anymore, and is much more annoying to me this way. I could use it like that if I have to, but I'd rather go back to each one showing on its own.

Any ideas or help?

edit- Using Pop with KDE

6
 
 
                 -`                     hellmo@archie
                 .o+`                    -------------
                `ooo/                    OS: Arch Linux x86_64
               `+oooo:                   Host: INTEL
              `+oooooo:                  Kernel: Linux 6.9.7-zen1-1-zen
              -+oooooo+:                 Uptime: 7 mins
            `/:-:++oooo+:                Packages: 1169 (pacman)
           `/++++/+++++++:               Shell: bash 5.2.26
          `/++++++++++++++:              Display (ASUS PB278): 2560x1440 @ 60Hz
         `/+++ooooooooooooo/`            Display (ASUS VG32V): 2560x1440 @ 144Hz
        ./ooosssso++osssssso+`           DE: KDE Plasma 6.1.1
       .oossssso-````/ossssss+`          WM: KWin (Wayland)
      -osssssso.      :ssssssso.         WM Theme: Breeze
     :osssssss/        osssso+++.        Theme: Breeze (Dark) [QT], Breeze-Dark [GTK2], Breeze [GTK3]
    /ossssssss/        +ssssooo/-        Icons: candy-icons [QT], candy-icons [GTK2/3/4]
  `/ossssso+/:-        -:/+osssso+-      Font: Noto Sans (10pt) [QT], Noto Sans (10pt) [GTK2/3/4]
 `+sso+:-`                 `.-/+oso:     Cursor: breeze (24px)
`++:.                           `-/+/    Terminal: yakuake 24.05.1
.`                                 `/    CPU: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700KF (20) @ 5.00 GHz
                                         GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 [Discrete]
                                         Memory: 3.43 GiB / 62.60 GiB (5%)
                                         Swap: 0 B / 4.00 GiB (0%)
                                         Disk (/): 151.91 GiB / 1.82 TiB (8%) - btrfs
                                         Local IP (enp7s0): x.x.x.x/x *
                                         Locale: en_US.UTF-8

I am having some issues with my Arch install:

  UNIT                LOAD   ACTIVE SUB    DESCRIPTION              
● grub-btrfsd.service loaded failed failed Regenerate grub-btrfs.cfg

Legend: LOAD   → Reflects whether the unit definition was properly loaded.
        ACTIVE → The high-level unit activation state, i.e. generalization of SUB.
        SUB    → The low-level unit activation state, values depend on unit type.

1 loaded units listed.

I have already tried:

sudo systemctl restart grub-btrfsd.service

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg


Does anyone have any suggestions? I am failing to understand how to resolve this issue... Any help would be wonderful...

7
 
 

I know that !selfhosted@lemmy.world exists, but to be honest I feel like going there to ask some noobs questions is like going to the arch forums in my first day of using Ubuntu as my first distribution, my probably super dumb question it'll be obvious to the big majority except me. And no, I am not meant that the people in selfhosted is going to be angry with me or something like that, is that I just don't want to ask stupid questions there.

I already tried asking an IA but let be honest, the IA just go into the service repo and try to answer me using the information that I already read.

Edit: Thanks for all the answer, I gonna try asking on c/selfhosting. :3

8
 
 

I use Ubuntu installed on a hard disk. My computer also comes with a tiny (16GB) SSD that I've another Ubuntu installation on. While a fresh install on the SSD worked great, this is too small to hold all the packages I will eventually need.

Is there any way to only have the core bits of the distro on the SSD, and have all the other packages I later install on the HDD?

I want this so I can have a fast boot (boots slowly using the HDD) and since I'm happy with the speed of apps as they work while now installed on my HDD, I'd like to keep using them off of it.

All idea welcome :)

9
 
 

So, I finally ditched Windows... All except for my need for a VM to use some hardware that aren't supported in Windows.

I setup a Virtual Machine with Virt-Manager for a Windows VM but the network traffic is being blocked by UFW. If I disable UFW the Windows VM can pull an IP, which is static as is, and even after turning UFW back on, the network traffic is still allowed.

I am in need of some help with networking for the VM.

<interface type="network">
  <mac address="52:54:00:d7:8f:48"/>
  <source network="default" portid="d7ff3b1f-2c9b-4a62-b9e0-180855f14de7" bridge="virbr0"/>
  <target dev="vnet2"/>
  <model type="e1000e"/>
  <link state="up"/>
  <alias name="net0"/>
  <address type="pci" domain="0x0000" bus="0x01" slot="0x00" function="0x0"/>
</interface>

This is the networking setup within Virt-Manager.

Any advice for getting network access on the VM?

10
 
 

I run a raspberry pi that identifies birds by their song, and records time, date, and species etc in an SQLite3 database.

The rpi app comes with some basic reports, but I'm wanting to expand on them, so that I can show monthly/yearly trends etc.

On windows at work, I'd use something like Power BI, but a) it's windows and b) it's overkill for my current needs.

I've only recently moved entirely to linux, so I'm not really sure of what the linux alternatives are, and I'm looking for suggestions :)

11
 
 

Title. More specifically, for the orange pi zero 3. It has a mali-G31 gpu. Thanks in advance.

12
 
 

In Ulauncher you simply search for the name of the file and when you click on it, it will open the default player of that file in your system. Is there any way to do the same but in Rofi? Or maybe another launcher for Windows with Rofi theme?

13
 
 

EDIT: Reinstalled pipewire, Mostly Fixed

Jack doesn't start

trying to start jack in qjackctl: Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory Cannot connect to server request channel jack server is not running or cannot be started JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock\

14
 
 

So far, Ubuntu 24.04 was an absolute nightmare for me. While upgrading to it in a VM, it randomly crashed, which broke the GUI. I had to go to the tty, and finish the upgrade that way to get back into GNOME. Then every time I launched its default file manager or its screen settings app (which became mandatory as it just randomly switched to 1280x800, thus making work a nightmare), it crashed so hard it took the VM host with itself.

Switching to VMWare, it was more stable, stable, but after the first restart, I get a lot of graphical glitches and a black background. Tried Kubuntu to see if it's a GNOME-related thing, but similar issues prevail, this time with a tanked performance until I switch to tty.

I need an easy-to-use and relatively stable distro, for compiling, testing, and rewriting software with GUI, thus I cannot use WSL on Windows 10. I want to spend my time developing, and not resolving bugs, nor with tinkering with the OS. Likely I will have to keep my primary development platform as Windows, and Linux does not offer me anything more, and "deploying/cross compiling to Windows" is not very feasible to me at the moment due to I'm writing my own middleware to interface with OS API, and I also want to test on native Windows rather than in an emulator. Windows 11 might push me in the direction to use a Windows installation inside a VM, but only if disabling telemetry becomes impossible.

15
 
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16176944

I've installed fedora 40 on my jurassic Macbook 13 2011 and so far i'm in love with it. The only issue was the wifi. I've checked different posts and articles and in the end i've find this [https://darryldias.me/2020/linux-wifi-drivers-for-2012-macbook-pro-offline-method/] which worked... up to a point. When i turn off or restart the machine i have to use the comand "sudo modprobe -v b43" to enable the wifi each time.

Any idea?

16
 
 

I'm using TetherFi to share my phone's internet connection. I understand how to setup the proxy settings in the browser on my laptop to get it working, and I've also been able to get Freetube working by changing the proxy settings within the app.

What I am wanting to know is if there is a way to set up a system wide proxy setting so that other applications on my laptop will work without having to go into each app individually. The desktop versions of my messaging app, steam, and the app store are all inaccessible to me currently and it would be nice to be able to get these working automatically through the proxy if possible?

I'm on Pop_os.

17
 
 

I have a laptop with a 3072x1920 monitor, and everything is really small. I know you can change global scale in display settings, but that doesn't work for everything. Is there any way to make everything bigger without changing screen resolution?

(it's weird because GNOME worked just fine. Does it have a lower resolution by default or something?)

18
 
 

Sometimes adding a blank character helps with formatting. For example on Lemmy, it helps me separate lines of text if I insert a blank character between other lines. Currently, do that by copy-and-pasting the blank character from elsewhere. Here is an example

Is there a way I can do this on Linux easily from the keyboard? I am using KDE Neon and have the compose key enabled so that I can easily type uncommon characters like , ñ, and é easily.

19
 
 

Title. I'm trying to come up with a fully functional, optimal yet read-only scheme for fstab and I could use some pointers.

Thanks in advance.

20
 
 

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/9339950

Would this be an ok option for use on linux? Any thoughts on the brand, etc.?

HORUS K609 SE (Redragon)

21
1
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by technomad@slrpnk.net to c/linux4noobs@lemmy.world
 
 

Is there any way to disable the power button popup window? I'd like it to be just an immediate shutdown switch, not have to confirm or wait 60 seconds...

I'm on Pop OS

22
 
 

cross-posted from: https://lemy.lol/post/24413858

Help Needed: Configuring ASUS Fingerprint Sensor on Fedora

I recently got my hands on an ASUS device equipped with an fingerprint sensor . As a Fedora user, I've been trying to set up the fingerprint sensor on my system, but it's proven to be quite a challenge.

So, I'm reaching out to the community here for some guidance. Has anyone successfully configured an ASUS fingerprint sensor on Fedora before? If so, could you please share your experience and any tips or resources that might be helpful?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

23
 
 

I tried using the default 'eddy' installer as well as 'gdebi' but both of them throw an error message.

gdebi says "error: dependency is not satisfiable: libssl1.1 (>=1.1.0)

eddy says "installation failed, child process exited with code 100"

24
 
 

I'm trying to invoke scrot with a bindsym so I have a keyboard shortcut to take screenshots

This command works when run as a one-liner or as a bash .sh:

save_dir="/home/dork/apache/drkt.eu/subdomains/u/";
random_name=$(cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9' | fold -w 6 | head -n 1).png;
scrot -s "$save_dir/$random_name";
echo -n "https://u.drkt.eu/$random_name" | xsel --clipboard

It does not work when ran by i3 bindsym $mod+Shift+Z exec bash -c save_dir="/home/dork/apache/drkt.eu/subdomains/u/"; random_name=$(cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9' | fold -w 6 | head -n 1).png; scrot -s "$save_dir/$random_name"; echo -n "https://u.drkt.eu/$random_name" | xsel --clipboard

i3 reports an error when the above is run, but not when as a shell script, though neither work. I assume that's just because bash is eating the error and not reporting it back to i3

This is the error when ran as a one-liner:

ERROR: Received ConfigureNotify for unknown window 0x00600000
ERROR: Received ExposeEvent for unknown window 0x00600000
ERROR: Received ConfigureNotify for unknown window 0x00600000
ERROR: Received ConfigureNotify for unknown window 0x00600007
ERROR: Received ExposeEvent for unknown window 0x00600007
ERROR: Received ConfigureNotify for unknown window 0x00600007
ERROR: Received ConfigureNotify for unknown window 0x0060000a
ERROR: Received ExposeEvent for unknown window 0x0060000a
ERROR: Received ConfigureNotify for unknown window 0x0060000a
ERROR: Received ConfigureNotify for unknown window 0x0060000d
ERROR: Received ExposeEvent for unknown window 0x0060000d
ERROR: Received ConfigureNotify for unknown window 0x0060000d
ERROR: Received ConfigureNotify for unknown window 0x00600010
ERROR: Received ConfigureNotify for unknown window 0x00600010
ERROR: Expected one of these tokens: <end>, '[', 'move', 'exec', 'exit', 'restart', 'reload', 'shmlog', 'debuglog', 'border', 'layout', 'append_layout', 'workspace', 'focus', 'kill', 'open', 'fullscreen', 'sticky', 'split', 'floating', 'mark', 'unmark', 'resize', 'rename', 'nop', 'scratchpad', 'swap', 'title_format', 'title_window_icon', 'mode', 'bar', 'gaps'
ERROR: Your command: exec bash -c save_dir="/home/dork/apache/drkt.eu/subdomains/u/"; random_name=$(cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9' | fold -w 6 | head -n 1).png; scrot -s "$save_dir/$random_name"; echo -n "https://u.drkt.eu/$random_name" | xsel --clipboard
ERROR:                                                                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
/run/user/1000/i3/errorlog.1235 (END)

I am open to alternatives if there is a better way to do this than the i3 config!

Thank you for reading <3

25
 
 

I've just put Fedora40 on my Lenovo legion. I installed kde spin. I've got two strange issues.

The first, when adding file attachments in Firefox, it opens the gnome file manager instead of dolphin. Annoying but not major.

The second, when playing a steam game (fallout4) on multiple monitors, it seems the mouse isn't trapped to the game window, and when it inevitably makes it's way to the second monitor, a click will change focus. For this issue, I have been trying to use the kde window rules, but that doesn't seem to work. Nine of the rules seem to force the mouse to stay in that window.

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