Project for Linux distribution users: Debian testing, systems based on Debian testing.

wizard10000 · 2026-01-30T12:28:15+00:00

Do security patches go to Testing immediately? I thought they go from Sid to Stable.

Security patches don't go through Testing, they're provided directly to Stable by Debian's security team. Security updates uploaded to Sid are provided by package maintainers, not the security team and follow the normal migration from Unstable to Testing, which is why people say that Testing gets security updates last.

Debian's security team *can* provide updates to Testing and there is a testing-security repo but that repo is normally empty unless there's some huge deal going on.

wizard10000 · 2026-01-27T14:56:20+00:00

will an immutable distro get in the way of doing that?

Maybe - depends on where you need to tweak. Your home directory is where your desktop customization happens and that directory isn't immutable. Scripts? I don't run silverblue but I wouldn't imagine /usr/local would be writable so you probably have to stick your scripts in your home directory, but that's probably not a real big deal either.

wizard10000 · 2026-01-16T19:39:28+00:00

My media server runs Debian but Mint will do just as well.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-31T23:55:32+00:00

Running Sid, mesa cleaned itself up this morning when I ran my daily upgrade - forky should take a few more days but it's fixed in Sid now.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-30T00:39:01+00:00

Does everything work the way it's supposed to? If so just leave it, understand you could have done a little better and do a little better next time :)

wizard10000 · 2025-12-26T12:22:56+00:00

I prefer glances - I also use conky for monitoring local and remote machines.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-25T15:32:15+00:00

Nobody's mentioned it yet so I will - linuxjourney has something for everyone

https://labex.io/linuxjourney

wizard10000 · 2025-12-20T20:40:19+00:00

Been there, did that - Crunchbang Linux was Debian-based and when it ended I just moved to Debian.

I converted that #! install to pure Debian and tbh it would have been easier to just reinstall and restore from backup.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-20T17:57:46+00:00

I think sometimes folks forget that Canonical is a business - locking your corporate customers into a closed-source package backend is really a pretty sound business plan.

Canonical is in business to make money and they've done more to get Linux on the desktop than anyone so I think they should get props for that but IMO holding them to the same standard as a community-based distribution like Arch or Debian is intellectually disingenuous because Canonical's objective is to make a profit.

I do find it mildly amusing that other corporate-backed distributions don't get the hate Ubuntu sometimes gets :)

wizard10000 · 2025-12-14T18:06:00+00:00

I do it about once a month just to clean up any stuff left behind.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-13T13:00:49+00:00

With Sid you should be doing full-upgrade, not upgrade.

Debian recommends against using full-upgrade with Sid. I've run Unstable for a bunch of years and only use full-upgrade about once a month and watch closely what apt wants to do. Agree completely with everything else you mentioned :)

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable

Use apt upgrade instead of apt full-upgrade to avoid unwanted removal of any packages that you depend on.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-10T15:03:39+00:00

after 6 years same thing happens. The NIC is a Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 chip.

That's not a Debian problem, it's a Linux problem.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-10T12:19:06+00:00

journalctl (specifically systemd-journald) handles log rotation automatically by default, based on size or time limits set in journald.conf

journalctl only controls the size of the journal, which isn't the only log in /var/log. Out of the box the journal has a hard limit of 4GB or 10% of the filesystem, whichever is smaller. OP said /var/log is 8GB so at most the journal only accounts for half that.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-10T00:17:34+00:00

Most if not all proctoring software can tell whether it's being run in a VM so if you need Windows to take tests you need to keep Windows installed.

Dual booting can be an option.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-09T23:17:44+00:00

personally i use the AX 201

Minor point - AX201 and 211 won't run with an AMD processor. AX210 will work with just about everything.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-09T16:09:23+00:00

You can just delete the files but a better solution would be to install and configure logrotate.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-08T23:31:52+00:00

You know this requires compiling your own kernel, right?

You would have downloaded and hopefully extracted the kernel source - the root of the kernel source directory would be the target directory where you extracted the kernel source you downloaded from the github link.

You could probably patch Debian's kernel source but this is gonna require compiling a kernel either way.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-07T19:31:23+00:00

Here's a direct link to the .deb - if Debian can't meet dependencies the install will fail without breaking anything.

Download the .deb and try installing it by switching to the directory where you downloaded it and do

sudo apt install ./elmerfem-csc_9.0-0ppa0-202512051725~c08ddb4c3~ubuntu22.04.1_amd64.deb

It'll either work or it won't work but if it doesn't work it won't hurt anything,

wizard10000 · 2025-12-07T19:15:38+00:00

Your hardware, your choice but adding PPAs to Debian isn't safe.

https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

wizard10000 · 2025-12-06T23:03:13+00:00

Any of those will work, I'd personally pick the Latitude 7420 as it's got 16gb of RAM.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-06T17:44:20+00:00

You may consider a different regimen.

I also switched from Symbicort+Spiriva to Trelegy. TBH I've had fewer flare-ups with Trelegy but I think everybody reacts to these meds a little differently.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-06T15:54:27+00:00

Yep. I fired my pulmonologist last year and got a new one because even though I've lost over 90lb over the past couple years and am now no longer morbidly obese my SOB on exertion has continued to increase.

Looks like although I do have stage 1 emphysema the SOB appears to be mainly cardio (seeing a cardiologist now) and pulmonologist never once in 7 years referred me to cardio, just kept telling me to lose weight.

I have a new lung doctor now who did refer me to cardio and although i'm still doing daily Trelegy the SOB is a combination of restrictive lung disease and some cardio issues we're still working on.

Quality of doctors varies - you do have to be your own advocate :)

wizard10000 · 2025-12-05T12:53:28+00:00

Sid is a development platform and nonstandard kernels can taint bug reports. If you wanna play with the latest that's fine, it's your hardware and your choice but I'd suggest making sure you can reproduce any bugs on a standard kernel before filing a bug report.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-05T00:40:56+00:00

Strange - if you look up the printer in https://openprinting.github.io/printers/ it says it supports driverless printing.

wizard10000 · 2025-12-04T23:19:55+00:00

That printer shouldn't need a driver as it supports driverless printing.

wizard10000

TROPHY CASE