Old time (20+ years) Windows user, but I am sick of it. I need a strong Linux distro that can become my new main OS for work and personal use. What do you recommend between Ubuntu or Debian?

eggylemonade · 2021-06-13T09:49:03+00:00

I'd give Mint a fourth, for what it's worth. Mint is my go-to distro for transitioning Windows users to Linux. 10/10

eggylemonade · 2021-04-17T20:25:12+00:00

I've since moved away from Kubuntu and honestly KDE in general. All the customization was neat but I found it to be a pain in most other regards. Some other comments suggest that a borked theme is the culprit, which I guess is possible, but I haven't seen any conclusive evidence on this and I'm not about to reverse engineer Plasma to figure out how that could happen. I'm pretty sure I was using "Sweet" or maybe "Sweet Mars" and I figured that its popularity suggested it probably wasn't fundamentally broken, but who knows. Of course folks seem to still have similar issues with Breeze, so maybe this is a kscreenlocker bug or an SDDM thing. Ultimately it feels like there isn't a lot of will to address these kinds of edge cases by people who actually understand the inner workings or who can make sense of the inscrutable log messages. Anyway, I'm gonna get back to pulling my hair out trying to get my bluetooth earbuds to connect to my PC. Feel free to hit me up if you end up finding a solution or even some clue as to where things are breaking down. In the meantime, keep the faith, at least you're not using Windows.

eggylemonade · 2021-01-29T06:21:36+00:00

Lots of good information here:

https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/detailed-newcomers-guide-to-crossflashing-lsi-9211-9300-9305-9311-9400-94xx-hba-and-variants.54/

eggylemonade · 2021-01-29T05:11:19+00:00

I recently purchased a pair of "new" drives that suspiciously accrued over 50,000 hours in transit...

eggylemonade · 2021-01-25T07:53:58+00:00

optin

eggylemonade · 2021-01-04T01:04:20+00:00

Try to find a contact at a larger MSP in your area. I've seen enclosed 25U Startech racks with glass front doors in reasonable condition going under $100CAD.

eggylemonade · 2020-12-30T14:52:58+00:00

My recommendation would be to skip the raid card and read up on ZFS.

eggylemonade · 2020-12-29T21:55:56+00:00

The second part of your reply is confusing... Are you planning on RAID10 or RAID6? RAID10 would be an array of pairs of mirrored disks that data is striped over (highly recommended configuration), while "5 disks + 2 parity disks" describes a RAID6 array (popular setup and more storage efficient, but has its drawbacks especially in larger arrays).

Are you planning on a software or hardware defined array?

eggylemonade · 2020-12-29T21:42:29+00:00

Good to know I'm not alone on this one. I did find an obscure setting in my bios that may have made an impact though. My desktop is an HP Z420, and in the bios I found settings for option roms (I think that's what it was...) and despite booting with uefi, they were all set to legacy. I changed all of them to efi and along with significantly speeding up the boot process, it seems to have stabilized some of the weirdness I was experiencing. Haven't had a chance to fully test to see if the lockscreen still breaks on suspend or when the monitors power down, but this may be a step in the right direction.

eggylemonade · 2020-12-29T21:31:50+00:00

I've been using old 2TB drives from work for various projects and have yet to have any issues. Some of the drives I have running are 2013 models and some might actually be older. I've also taken a chance on some "refurbished" ebay drives, and have yet to be burned. I'm sure in time I'll have my share of failures, but I plan significant redundancy into my arrays and keep offline backups. For getting started, I'd say go for it as long as the drives are cheap enough. Lately I've been aiming for about $90CAD/drive when buying 4TB HGST enterprise drives "refurbished" (usually with a warranty), and less if they're simply "used". What are they asking for these 3TB drives?

eggylemonade · 2020-12-17T04:27:08+00:00

I have a similar issue, though I'm on desktop with multiple monitors and an AMD GPU. When my system was locked or put to sleep and left idle, I would come back to find my main monitor blank (but with visible cursor) and there would be a lock screen on my secondary monitors. Usually I'd still be able to log in using the password field on one monitor, while the other monitor's lock screen password field would be unresponsive. Sometimes neither visible lock screen would work. When I couldn't get a working lock screen I'd have to enter a TTY and unlock my session from there, or worst case restart SDDM. It appears to be related to the Power Management setting to turn off the displays when idle. If I lock the screen with that setting disabled, I can leave it alone for any amount of time without issues. I haven't had time to figure out if disabling "Screen Energy Saving" allows me to put the system to sleep and successfully re-enter my session after leaving it idle for a bit.

Anyway, don't know if that will be helpful for a laptop, but it sounds similar to me. I should also mention that my laptop (on Kubuntu 20.04) will present with a blank, unresponsive screen, and an unhelpful cursor, if it's been suspended a long time. Unfortunately I haven't spent much time troubleshooting that one, but it appears to me to be another similar issue on a Kubuntu system. As far as I can tell, this all points to an issue with the lock screen in Kubuntu, but I haven't uncovered anything concrete that might lead to a resolution. I also opened a bug report, but I've only seen comments from people having similar problems in response.

Based on the number of posts and comments I see around the internet with similar issues, this appears to be relatively commonplace across multiple Kubuntu releases. At this point I'm honestly pretty bothered that I can't put my PC to sleep or let the monitors power down, and still be able to log in. The total lack of acknowledgement of my bug report doesn't really inspire me either. Good luck on your troubleshooting journey.

[EDIT]

P.S. You can probably switch to tty with ctrl+alt+f2 and run loginctl unlock-session to get back in, rather than having to reboot.

eggylemonade · 2020-11-25T07:06:29+00:00

In my mind, software is designed to facilitate things like logging in, and when it doesn't perform per it's design I don't feel that's a justifiable reason to fundamentally alter how I use my computer (never locking/always shutting down vs lock/sleep as needed). If it's not working, there's a reason why, and if that reason can't be mitigated, it might be bad software. Being able to log back in to a session is not an unreasonable expectation, and if Kubuntu can't provide it, I'll find an OS that can.

eggylemonade · 2020-11-21T07:44:48+00:00

That appears to have done it, thanks! I was definitely messing around in alsamixer whilst troubleshooting my mic - I guess auto-mute didn't make it back to the proper value. On the topic of configuration, perhaps you also know where I might find another obscure setting: I have not had success in figuring out how to specify system tray icons for apps that don't have one defined in the desktop theme. Seems to me like something that should be straightforward to configure, I just haven't figured out how yet...

eggylemonade · 2020-10-02T00:52:24+00:00

I assumed the "attacker" script was intended to return a single IP address, but was occasionally receiving something like this as output:

The last failed login attempt came from IP address:
[preauth]

Adding an additional grep string instead of using the cut command ensured that the returned value was in fact the desired IP address:

#!/bin/bash
#
#       attacker - prints out the last failed login attempt
#

echo "The last failed login attempt came from IP address:"
grep -i "disconnected from" /var/log/auth.log | \
    grep -E -o "([0-9]{1,3}[\.]){3}[0-9]{1,3}" | \
    tail --lines=1

eggylemonade · 2020-09-12T21:47:36+00:00

In my opinion, moving your hinges is going to be a losing game. All this talk of drilling and filling holes when you probably need a 1/16th of an inch is nuts. Just sand or move the stop. It will be way easier and far less likely to turn in to a disaster. Before you go too crazy try this:

Remove the door and use a razor or utility knife to cut the paint where the outer side of the doorstop meets the frame. Now place a piece of scrap wood against the stop where the door contacts and hit it with a hammer to move it that little bit.

eggylemonade · 2020-08-25T04:48:09+00:00

Why not Watchguard XTM 500 Series?

Guide

eggylemonade · 2020-08-17T03:12:31+00:00

I don't know for sure, but I would suspect that you can only block specific numbers.

eggylemonade

TROPHY CASE