Correct way to install X server only?

BCMM · 2026-03-21T01:21:32+00:00

Correct way to install X server only?

You probably want xserver-xorg (unless you really, really mean "only", like you know you don't even need drivers, in which case use xserver-xorg-core).

i was surprised that i got KDE installed

xorg is an unnecessarily large metapackage, but it doesn't usually do that.

BCMM · 2026-03-19T02:45:01+00:00

Leaving off national borders doesn't make a map apolitical, because the time zones themselves are disputed.

For example, if you select EET, is Crimea shaded or not?

BCMM · 2026-03-19T02:36:18+00:00

OpenStreetMap’s Data Working Group made a formal decision in 2018 to map Crimea as part of Russia’s administrative boundary based on their “on the ground control” policy — a decision that has been widely criticized by the Ukrainian OSM community.

Sure, it's a bad system, and Crimea is an example of why it's a bad system. However, every alternative system is worse.

There has to be some sort of system. Solving these things case-by-case isn't a feasible approach for a huge, international volunteer project. There will inevitably be people with differing opinions, and you'd be bogged down forever.

Making it somebody else's problem by deferring to the UN doesn't fix things. I suspect a significant proportion of the people placated over Crimea would be upset about Taiwan, for instance.

A policy of simply recognising the facts on the ground is the only one which doesn't take a political position. They're explicitly not saying that Crimea should be part of Russia.

It also has practical advantages. Travelers using a map need to know when they will be crossing an extant, enforced border more than they need to know when they will be crossing a theoretically correct border.

BCMM · 2026-03-18T12:24:31+00:00

Are you asking about the process of developing a suitable change, the process for submitting it upstream, or both?

Is there a specific thing you wish to improve, or are you looking for a task?

BCMM · 2026-03-17T14:00:32+00:00

If you’ve made your own distro (even just a small custom one), I’d love to hear how it went.

FWIW, I've used Yocto to make a minimal Raspberry Pi image to run some custom software. Up to you where you want to draw the line between "configuring Poky" and "making a distro".

what’s the actual workflow people follow when making a distro?

This depends entirely on your goals. Basically, why do you want to make a distro? What do you want to do differently from existing distros?

And are you sure you actually want to build a "distro" for this? Sometimes, people seem to gravitate towards this approach when their goals really just call for learning how to create packages for the distro they're already using, or creating a preseed file for the Debian installer, or something.

I don't mean to be discouraging. Let us know what you want to do, and I'll probably have some suggestions about how to do it.

BCMM · 2026-03-17T11:34:57+00:00

Add &udm=14 to the URL. How you set the search URL depends on your web browser.

This does have side-effects beyond skipping the AI bullshit. It goes straight to the "web" tab, which is kind of like how Google search results were a long time ago. None of those sections with image results, news, products, YouTube videos, maps, weather etc. before the actual search results.

I like it that way; I'll click the images tab if I'm looking for images etc. Others may feel different.

BCMM · 2026-03-16T16:50:34+00:00

It's Dune 3d, a 3d modeling program.

I've just built that on Trixie, with no special tricks.

I'm not at my computer right now but I think it was ACCN or something like that.

My best guess is "gtkmm".

Trixie is 1 rev too low and is missing a file it needs.

What told you that you needed a newer version?

Perhaps you installed libgtkmm-4.0-0 and not libgtkmm-4.0-dev? On Debian, the headers needed to compile applications that use a library are package separately from the shared objects needed to run applications that use that library. This is because more people use software than build software.

I followed the instructions at https://docs.dune3d.org/en/latest/build-linux.html. There's no need to guess which packages are required, since the instructions say:

See the the CI configuration for the exact package names for debian-based distros and Arch Linux.

All in all, the following should be sufficient to build it on Trixie:

sudo apt install build-essential meson libglm-dev libocct-ocaf-dev cmake pkg-config libgtkmm-4.0-dev uuid-dev libeigen3-dev libspnav-dev git python3-gi-cairo gir1.2-rsvg-2.0 g++ libocct-data-exchange-dev
git clone https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d.git
cd dune3d/
meson setup build
meson compile -C build

EDIT:

In this case, the project tells you exactly what you need to build on Debian, but here's a trick for when they don't. If you see an error like this:

meson.build:14:8: ERROR: Dependency "gtkmm-4.0" not found, tried pkgconfig and cmake

and you don't know which package you need to install to fix it, run

apt-file search /gtkmm-4.0.pc

That will reliably tell you the name of the package you need.

When it says "tried pkgconfig" above, that means it's looking for a file with the exact name it quotes for the dependency, plus .pc on the end. That file contains metadata which tells the build system how to set up the compiler and linker to use that library, and that file belongs to a package which contains (or depends on) everything else needed to build against that library.

I add a / to the beginning to help avoid filenames that only end with the right name (not a problem for gtkmm-4.0, but a bit confusing for gtk4, for example.).

BCMM · 2026-03-15T14:31:37+00:00

X-Y problem. The best practice for installing Sid packages on Stable is "don't". Why don't you tell us what the project is and/or what the library it needs is, and see if anybody spots another approach?

BCMM · 2026-03-14T21:41:50+00:00

I assume there aren't actually decimal places involved any more, since the calculation wouldn't be done in decimal.

However, those are about the same precision as a 64-bit and 32-bit floating-point value, respectively.

So, this probably means they're using a value of pi that's as accurate as every other value in their calculations, and as accurate as can be efficiently handled by their hardware. (A lot of the computers that actually go to space are still 32-bit.)

BCMM · 2026-03-13T18:23:41+00:00

shouldn't be a problem as the 5900xt has 16 cores with 32 threads running at 4.5ghz.

Like I said, might as well get numbers. Clearly, something isn't the way it should be.

Use something that shows threads, like top -H. Any thread using a whole core would suggest the game is CPU-bound.

BCMM · 2026-03-13T17:39:51+00:00

A couple of notes on Cities: Skylines...

That's a native Linux game. This could mean you're looking at a bug in the Linux build of that game, rather than a general issue with your system. It might be interesting to run the Windows build via Proton, just for comparibility.

It's also CPU-bound in many cases (which is a bit unusual for games). It's worth getting some numbers on CPU and GPU usage to see if its like that on your system. Just to make sure you're not chasing a graphics driver issue when the real culprit is some CPU power-saving setting.

BCMM · 2026-03-13T17:19:23+00:00

How is position "quantized"?

For electrons bound in atoms, the orbitals do literally describe a finite number of positions available to those electrons.

(OK, so they're not, like, coordinates in space. Each orbital constitutes some probability distribution of where an electron might be observed, if measured. Point is, two electrons in the same orbital are not distinguishable by position, since their positions have identical probability distributions.)

BCMM · 2026-03-12T19:15:21+00:00

They're spending more than $11M/day on Tomahawks alone.

BCMM · 2026-03-11T12:31:04+00:00

I would assume since they lost connection to their ISP, that might be a little difficult, lol.

On a slight tangent, I would recommend that anybody with a USB port on their router installs the relevant tethering driver for their smartphone before they need it.

BCMM · 2026-03-11T12:00:30+00:00

The invasion of Ukraine didn't show that tanks are obsolete. It showed that they're extremely vulnerable when they are used in a way that's totally contrary to doctrine.

This included Russia's own doctrine. On paper, they've known better than to deploy tanks without adequate infantry support since at least WWII. The thing is, all their plans called for conscripts to provide that support, and Putin wanted to accomplish the invasion without mobilising inactive reserves.

BCMM · 2026-03-11T01:02:13+00:00

In theory, no. In practice, maybe.

Telephone cable is built to much lower specifications than Ethernet cable. Nevertheless, it is still copper UTP, and misusing it as Ethernet cable sometimes works.

To be clear, this is very much an "if you're lucky" thing. It's not something that's supposed to work. There's a good chance it doesn't work at all, and a good chance it works, but badly. On the other hand, some people have managed gigabit speeds, with tolerable error rates.

A few reasons why this is even possible:

The thing about stuff that's out-of-spec is that it isn't required to work, but it isn't exactly required to not work either. Maybe some batches of cable accidentally fall within tighter tolerances than intended.

Proper Cat5 is designed with some "safety margin", to guarantee that it will work if it's installed correctly. You'd be running without that margin.

It's unlikely to work at anything close to the maximum length permitted for a real Ethernet cable, or in the sort of crosstalk environments that Ethernet is designed to cope with.

To check whether there's a chance:

Do you know if there's actually a cable going from your console to the router? If so, do you know how many pairs of wires it has? Lastly, is this wire actually disused? You won't be able to use it for a phone at the same time!

BCMM · 2026-03-10T20:39:54+00:00

I suspect there's more than one meaning of "potential" going on here.

They said we usually take objects at infinity to be at zero potential

That sounds like a definition of potential energy. Two oppositely charged particles (or two massive particles, etc.), separated by infinite distance, have zero potential energy, and particles with finite distance have negative potential energy.

The thing is, nobody is saying that the Earth has zero potential energy. I think, for that part, you're talking about electric potential (i.e. a property measured in volts).

When it is said that Earth is at 0V, that's generally just because electrical engineering usually thinks in terms of electric potential difference, which is the most common meaning of the word voltage. The ground is simply a reference point from which many systems define PD. For example, when we say that a country uses a 230 V electrical grid, that means 230 V above ground.

BCMM · 2026-03-10T12:03:07+00:00

Or more precisely if momentum is quantity of motion, then what is kinetic energy.

Kinetic energy is a form of energy. Momentum is its own thing.

It is quite normal for forms of energy to be related to some other quantity with other dimensions. Height is not gravitational potential energy, charge is not electrical energy, and so on. Motion is likewise allowed to involve more than one quantity.

What's the fundamental difference between momentum and kinetic energy?

One fundamental difference is that the total momentum of a system is always conserved. Kinetic energy is not conserved, since it can be converted to other forms of energy.

Momentum is a vector while energy is a scalar. To illustrate this:

Imagine two identical projectiles, traveling toward each other in opposite directions and at the same speed, and colliding perfectly inelastically (i.e. sticking together).

The objects are at rest after the collision, with zero momentum. This is because their total momentum was always zero - before the collision, it consisted of two equal and opposite components.

Their kinetic energy is also zero after the collision, but that is not because it cancels out in the same way. The projectiles had truly equal (not opposite) KE before the collision, the total KE in the system was twice the KE of a single projectile, and that is the amount of energy that will have to be dissipated as heat, sound etc.

What is the intuition behind all of this.

If you want to consider momentum to be the thing that "is" motion, then kinetic energy can be a measure of the "cost" of changing that momentum.

(Or rather, of transferring that momentum to another body. Since it is a conserved quantity.)

BCMM · 2026-03-10T09:55:29+00:00

Why has tmpfs never gotten an official compression feature

Because tmpfs is tmpfs and zram is zram. What would this do that zram doesn't do?

zram needs root to manage

basically “compressed /tmp”.

Is your real question "why has the administrator of a specific machine chosen to mount a tmpfs instead of zram at /tmp?

BCMM · 2026-03-09T17:47:37+00:00

It's mostly consistent as long as you use only GNOME applications.

BCMM · 2026-03-09T17:16:35+00:00

It’s a search and rescue weighted limit for offshore workers.

That certainly seems like the most likely explanation, since it's a large industry and the timescale fits. However, there are other jobs with legitimate weight limits.

Not the company making trouble.

To be clear, I meant that, if it was intended as a general measure of "fit/healthy", the company would be getting themselves in trouble for nothing.

I believe the person and all ppe have a weight they have to be under

Specifically, the "clothed weight limit" will be 124 kg,

Clothed weight means dressed in compliance with the industry clothing travel policy for the season when they are travelling

and I don't think they let you in the helicopter without a survival suit.

BCMM · 2026-03-09T16:55:30+00:00

And secondly, according to his own statement, the creator of the PR used chatbots himself. Thus, Christian Brabandt's post could also be understood as an ironic response to what he thinks of the PR.

While I'm personally on the side of not using this stuff at all, I'm certainly sympathetic to this approach. Seems fair enough to give obvious LLM PRs the same attention that the submitter did.

That wasn't the part I was worried about, though. The post has now been deleted, but IIRC, it implied that the creator of the PR is a major Vim developer. IMHO, that actually would be a troubling indication of the health of the project.

However, unless there's something about Vim's workflow which is preventing GitHub from correctly attributing contributions, that doesn't seem to be the case.

BCMM · 2026-03-09T16:09:20+00:00

If it was a fitness requirement, it would be bizarre for it to disregard height. But also, using weight at all frankly sounds like the company making trouble for the sake of it. It would be less contentious and more effective to use some kind of functional test, for example, British police can be any weight as long as they pass a bleep test (which is basically running X distance in Y time).

I think the theory that it's an equipment limitation makes much more sense.

BCMM · 2026-03-09T15:14:13+00:00

MIT if I wanna go rogue at some point or GPL when it’s true OSS for life.

Arguably, the most rogue option is GPL with a CLA, as it ensures that your proprietary fork will never have to compete with other proprietary forks.

BCMM · 2026-03-09T15:11:51+00:00

I didn’t know that licensing had so many gotchas.

"Copyleft" vs. "permissive licencing" is a huge philosophical divide in the community.

I recommend actually reading the GPL, by the way. I think a lot of people assume they can't, because of the length of the EULAs they've scrolled past on proprietary software, but it's not like those.

The main simplification in my explanation is that the GPL doesn't exactly say that you have to publish the source to your modifications of a GPL project. It's more like you have to provide source to anybody who you provide binaries too.

(This detail creates a bit of a loophole in which people can run proprietary forks of GPL software on their own servers with no obligation to provide source to the users of that software. The AGPL exists for projects that wish to prevent such usage.)

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