People love to complain about CMake, often with valid complaints as well. But it - to this day - remains the only build system where I’ll actually trust a project when they say they are cross-platform.
Being the Windows maintainer for OpenMW, it used to be absolute hell back a decade and half ago when an indirect dependency changed - and used something like SCons or Premake while claiming to be “cross-platform”, used to be that I had to write my own build solutions for Windows since it was all hardcoded against Linux paths and libraries.
CMake might not be the coolest, most hip, build system, but it delivers on actually letting you build your software regardless of platform. So it remains my go-to for whenever I need to actually build something that’s supposed to be used.
For personal things I still often hack together a couple of Makefiles though, it’s just a lot faster to do.
Not really, WSL seems like it was mainly supposed to stop people leaping ship to be able to develop Node without the horribly painful Windows JS experience. And wouldn’t you know it, Microsoft has been making their own JavaScript language in Typescript.
Yes, you can. But the usual setup is to have a file system root that is nothing but subvolumes, which you can then use and mount basically as if they were independent partitions. But when you don't create a root subvolume for your system root first, you install the system directly on the file system root alongside created subvolumes. This tends to get messy as strictly speaking the file system root is a subvolume, too. So now you have that with your system installed and all other subvolumes nested inside it.
Yes. Usually the OS installer takes care of creating a root and home subvolume. Except Arch and similar barebones installer have instructions in the wiki.
Timeshift works only with BTRFS subvolumes, thus, if you wanna have backups (snapshots), you have to have subvolumes and not install in the root of a BTRFS filesystem 😔.
If you want to you can just create a new subvolume, mount it temporarily and move all your files from root to there. Then you need to figure out how to make the new subvolume your root directory upon boot and you are done.
I know how to do that, you set the subvolume as the default one, thus, when mounting, if no options are passed, it always mounts that subvolume as root.
But, you have to disable that. Sure, I set it during install, cuz installers are stupid (if you tell it to install in /@, it will most probably moan), but disable it after first run (set the real root as the default subvol, i.e. mount point) and just add subvol mount options in fstab.
It’s just extra steps I have to do now 😒, that’s why the rant.
That’s only to backup/rollback the root though, right? If one’s looking to backup - say - their home dir, they can just recreate the home as a subvolume without reinstalling the system. Or am I mistaken?
Snapper also uses btrfs subvolumes to create snapshots, so if you did create them during your installation process, nothing to worry about.
I don’t remember if there is a way to create them after the installation, neither if it’s a tough process tho. I used to simply reinstall when I messed up with the subvolumes.
Yeah, but Timeshift uses the Ubuntu style subvolume naming, @ for root, @home for /home, so you have to create them that way, otherwise, it won’t work. It can work if you tell it to ignore home, but checks for @ as root on start up.
I have a Retropie and I use wpa_supplicant to manage my connection there. It looks like this: the router is downstairs and I use a repeater in the room next to the Retropie to have better wifi coverage upstairs. The router itself is reachable, but the signal strength is worse. So, as a fallback, I put both the router and the repeater connection in my wpa_supplicant config file with the router having a lower priority. Still, sometimes my retropie clings onto the worse connection for some reason and there is no way to change it but to do a complete reboot. If I just restart the wifi with ifdown and ifup, it will either not reconnect to any wifi at all or reconnect to the shittier connection again, it’s kinda a fifty-fifty. A reboot will always properly choose the best signal tho and I am very confused why this is happening. Any ideas?
The repeater uses a fixed channel (I think I set it to 7 or 8) and the router is set to automatic channel selection. Do you think fixing the router’s channel would help?
See if they’re overlapping, do a survey with your phone and WiFiAnalyzer (or another app). If they’re close or overlapping, set the router to a fixed channel as well.
Set your wpa_supplicant to use the BSSID of the repeater’s access point and don’t put the SSID in the conf file. Then it will connect to only the repeater.
If the repeater just re-transmits tho main AP’s BSSID and packets, you need a better setup. Cheap WiFi extenders do this and almost always cause collisions, making the overall speed slow at all points.
It’s the same problem that all the prepackaged modified Windows have when I go to try them out in a VM. They always seems to be way out of date and with all the security problems of Windows, I don’t want to run an old version just to save the time of cleaning out the telemetry and bloatware. Powershell scripts are more robust for me.
Installed Ubuntu on my first netbook and had to sit in the stairs to the second floor jacked into the single Ethernet cable we had for a few hours to troubleshoot it.
I haven’t used every distro, but it seems like most of them are plug and play these days.
I just installed mint on a new laptop. The wifi surprisingly didn’t work on the liveusb, but switching to the Edge release with a newer kernel worked fine.
Possibly. Some XPS models (~9310) cheaped out on the WiFi chipset, which was really bad at reconnecting after sleep/suspend on Win 10/11 right out off the box.
Tried a live Linux install and it worked perfectly, so made the switch as there was no Win-only software that I needed.
Printer are worse. try to get a decade old brother to print more than a half page without completely freezing and needing a hard restart. driver is unmaintained unfortunately.
on Windows the printer works perfect though. which makes me quite unhappy :|
wifi on the other hand is not a problem i can remember. even on a 15 year old laptop, the AUR has a driver that it extracts from a ancient .deb and then patches it to make it work with modern kernels. lovely.
I specifically bought a Brother printer because they at least try to support Linux. My previous one Samsung was much worse, it had Google cloud print so I could still use it. But Google like always killed something people liked.
The driver shows up as “cups + gutenprint” and as far i can tell there is no other. so i guess that is already the one and only available driver.
and i have to correct myself, it is a Canon, not a Brother. Canon MX300 from 2007.
I mean it is not that big of a deal anyway. there is a single Windows machine left in this household that i can use for print jobs. and yeah, maybe i could use it as print server, that is actually a interesting idea lol.
Try searching online for cups filters. Maybe someone made a custom filter file for that printer that works… worth a shot 🤷. I’ve had luck hunting down custom filters for some obscure printers in the past.
Setting up a shared printer in Windows is (could be) a PITA though… not being able to choose SMB versions can make your Linux setups with SMB a pain 😔. That’s why I prefer Linux with samba as the print server, you can fine tune almost everything to make it work with any Windows and Linux install.
Also, true story, LTSC 2019 can’t see shares from LTSC 2021, but the opposite works without a problem 🤣. It was a bug, they eventually fixed it, but took them like a year or so (they threw the ball at users, not setting up the shares correctly 😒), and I already reinstalled all rigs with LTSC 2019, so… too late MS 🤷… I haven’t used LTSC 2021 from that point on.
It’s the newer Wi-Fi chips that have issues, those for which drivers aren’t yet released. There always seems to be a year-long delay between the next gen laptops being released and the wifi drivers for them.
I’ve only had problems with wifi drivers twice, immediately after clean-installing fedora 38 on two different devices. Plugging my device into ethernet and updating fixed it instantly.
Not sure about iPhones, but I’ve used an android phone a couple times to both USB tether with data and to act as a WiFi receiver to download drivers in a pinch.
Use a second computer or a friend’s one to download the updates, get a USB ethernet adapter (a 100mbps one is like $5), put the system drive in a computer with lan, tether with another device via USB (phone, pi zero, etc) or use a different version/distro. I’m sure there are a bunch of other solutions.
I guess an ethernet to USB adapter might be your next best bet.
Alternatively, you could USB tether your phone if you have a good data plan
If you are in the unlikely event that you don’t have ethernet port to plug your device into, and no cell service, such as I was, you can use a spare wireless AP to get wifi if you’ve got one
10 years ago was the turning point. I remember as late as 2010 -2012 having to use NDISwrapper to install the windows XP wifi drivers because there were no native drivers so you had to run the windows drivers through an emulation layer to get wifi to work. Even within the past 5 years I’ve had to compile my own fixes for realtek chips because the auto installed drivers were not working optimally
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