It’s pretty new. Has wayland and pipewire. You can just enable a checkmark in the installer to install codecs. Uses Gnome, so a non-Windows like workflow. Pretty sure Eduroam would work there, as many schools use Ubuntu by default.
I haven’t tried Ubuntu yet myself, but generally I’m turned off by some decisions Canonical makes, especially the whole Snap thing adding complexity, slow app startup and proprietary store. Not very trustworthy.
But you are right, Ubuntu is the most popular and things like eduroam will likely work.
If your want something that just works, Ubuntu is pretty hard to beat. Snaps are really not a big deal anymore, performance wise; a lot of the bad rap on slow startups etc. are from years (and many versions) ago.
If you don’t want Ubuntu and you don’t like Mint, there are also other options in the Ubuntu/Debian family. Pop_OS and Zorin are both popular.
generally I’m turned off by some decisions Canonical makes
Those decision will trickle down to Ubuntu remixes like Mint eventually. Canonical’s plan is to replace as much as technically possible with Snaps. They just barely delayed shipping CUPS itself as Snap but it will come, so even a basic task like printing will rely on Snap. I don’t see Mint having manpower to package everything on their own, even if it’s “just” about porting Debian packages. Might just as well use LMDE right now.
that's the whole reasoning behind having LMDE. seems a little redundant today; but within a release or two mint may very well be only based on debian itself, with the way canonical is steering ubuntu.
within a release or two mint may very well be only based on debian itself, with the way canonical is steering ubuntu.
I expect Canonical going hard in the Snap direction leading up to 26.04. They are desperate given the fact that Flathub got a huge popularity boost thanks to SteamOS. I don’t think Ubuntu remixes will come out unscathed.
Worked in IT, target disk mode is a life saver when you have to recover data from a laptop with a broken screen/keyboard/bad ribbon cable and don’t want to take apart something held together by glue.
Seems like there’s some bitrot in the middle of the file, and whatever you’re using to play back the original file just skips it and doesn’t care enough to halt playback. You might try looking for ways to restore as much of the file as possible with something like this, assuming the mkv is a unique copy that you can’t get anywhere else.
Edit: I’m also curious if this file lives on an XFS/BTRFS/ZFS filesystem. The reflink property of these filesystems may be the reason that you can copy within the same folder without it throwing an error.
Yes it lives on BTRFS, I tried a few solutions but some gave this Read error Error demuxing input file 0: Input/output error video1.mkv: Input/output errorand other things i tried said that i dont have hevc support(Yay Fedora) I might be wasting more time than necessary on the file.so i might just give up
Fair enough. I would at least try to get the damaged file off of the disk so you can potentially fix it later, or just have it available to play in its broken state. For the future you should probably be running monthly BTRFS scrubs to detect bitrot sooner, and potentially you should have some backups or data redundancy so you can repair the bitrot when it’s detected.
I did a BTRFS scrub on the partiton and this is what came up Duration: 0:17:54 Total to scrub: 63.82GiB Rate: 60.85MiB/s Error summary: read=528 csum=48 Corrected: 570 Uncorrectable: 6 Unverified: 0 I dont know what else to do from here
It goes without saying but the number of errors you should get on a scrub is ideally 0. Bitrot happens from time to time which is why you should keep some data redundancy/backups so you can repair it when it’s detected, but that number seems higher than normal. Your disk may be going bad if you’re getting that many read errors; I’m not sure. I believe you’re already backing up data off this drive but yeah I would get everything important off the drive ASAP, then run a SMART short test and a SMART long test to see if that reports that anything is wrong. The disk may be fine but better to be safe than sorry.
Back to the video file, I’m assuming it was not one of the ones that BTRFS fixed automatically? The only real options for data recovery are to rescue the file minus the bad blocks with e.g. ddrescue (which I don’t personally have familiarity with) or something similar, or to encode through the errors with ffmpeg if it will let you.
A SMART Test showed 6 bad sectors but overall disk assessment was ok(I dont think there is any connection between the file and the HDD), yes that file has not been fixed, the disk in question used to be my main bootdrive a few days ago, I shrunk the partition and created a new EXt4 and i am slowly copying files that are worth keeping, i removed the ODD from my laptop and installed a caddy, intend to use it as a second drive(The file in question has no sentimental value)
Okay cool. I would be wary of that drive just in case, and I would definitely schedule weekly SMART short tests and monthly BTRFS scrubs on it if you go with BTRFS in the future. EXT4/XFS/etc do not have a concept of data checksums, which means they can’t scrub and check for bitrot - this might be problematic if you find that your disk starts causing bitrot because you won’t know where it’s happening.
Thank you Id 197 and 198 reported 5 & 6 respectively(bad sectors decreased from 6 to 5), Is it possible to copy a file non sequentially; say back to front so i can just join those 2 parts together?
Try this answer. I guarantee there is a way to read the file front to back while skipping errors, but I run so much data redundancy that I don’t have any experience with it.
I can’t really give a super useful opinion given that I haven’t really touched fedora, but I’ve been using mint for school for almost a year, highly recommend
Even if Mint (Cinnamon) doesn’t look as good as GNOME, you can always install another desktop environment.
I’d recommend fedora silverblue. You’ll install all graphical packages via a Software store and you won’t brick your system. Even if, you may just recover an old state. I installed media codecs via the software store, not command line.
And bringing the cycle full circle, Microsoft is barreling headstrong into “embrace” to build up leverage and goodwill before fucking everyone over again
Chances are your friend’s secondary laptop doesn’t have extra resources for Gnome to run smoothly. Sad thing is nowadays Gnome is very heavy and bloated.
Also, he may try both distros live-usb. Maybe he don’t care about Mint looking outdated. But if he does, you may try Fedora live-usb and check if university wifi works properly.
It’s his laptop after all, so I believe your appreciations on the beauty of desktop environments are secondary.
It’s his laptop after all, so I believe your appreciations on the beauty of desktop environments are secondary.
You are right. I was thinking that the Fedora workflow might give him some Linux-exclusive benefits over Windows so he might consider switching his main laptop too. Mint is rather a drop-in replacement for Windows so the advantages of Linux are not very visible/important for a newcomer. At least compared to a DE like GNOME.
I installed Mint on someone’s old laptop at my Uni’s lab (it’s mostly for the field of environment and agriculture so nobody is an IT expert here), he didn’t have any complaints and is actually falling down the Linux rabbit-hole, while others are considering switching to Linux too after seeing how it resurrected 2 old basically-defunct laptops.
I’d go with that, it is a trusty and reliable distro for newbies. I even know some greybeards that use it.
Then again as others pointed out he can try both from live USB. The important part is that you explain a distro can have everything another distro has with the right know-how and some patience, as well as how things work on Linux (for example: imstall programs using the package manager whenever possible). But again he isn’t a tinkerer so stock Mint will work just fine with him.
This does sound very unusual that it would try to connect, so I wanted to add more context about how bluetooth works, which might help figure out where to look next or if you should look into it at all
In bluetooth there is the idea of a central device and peripheral device. Peripheral devices advertise of their existence in hopes that a central device establishes a connection. The central device always has the final say. For example, a phone (central device) connecting to bluetooth headphones (peripheral device).
Your computer should really only act as a central device. So you get to choose which devices are allowed to connect … but there are two exceptions:
a device can auto-connect to a previously paired device. Maybe you accidentally paired with the Linux device, or thought it was another device. You can unpair / forget the device if you did.
special software which auto-connects to devices. For example the nintendo switch auto-connects to controllers when the “change grip/order” menu is open. I think this would be very unusual, even for malware.
Technically, the bluetooth spec does allow bluetooth devices to be a central and peripheral at the same time. In theory if Windows is advertising itself as a peripheral, then the Linux device could connect as a central. The issue is, I don’t know if or when Windows is sending these bluetooth advertising packets. Maybe when bluetooth settings are open or if you have a wifi hotspot enabled?
Also, not all devices support running both modes at the same time, so you can rule it out if the device can’t be a peripheral. According to this guide, this is how you check that: howto-connect.com/see-if-windows-10-pc-supports-b…
If it just appeared in the connectable device list, then there is nothing to worry about really, bluetooth has some range to it, and it could just be a neighbor’s device.
Great point that I hadn’t even considered, why was it initiating the connection? That actually just made me all the more confused and paranoid about the whole thing. I use a Bluetooth dongle, but I figured it was acting as a central device as expected.
I think i’m still confused on how you came to know the device was trying to connect to you :D Was there a Windows notification? Did it ask you to enter or confirm a code? Were you using bluetooth in general at the time?
I guess my main proposal is that central device can’t begin to initiate to another central device. In the discovery phase, a central device is like an ear, and a peripheral device is like a mouth. Ears can’t speak to other ears, and mouths can’t listen to other mouths. Mouths don’t know if ears are even there to listen, only the ears can initiate a connection.
In most cases Windows is like an ear. Neither a central nor peripheral can initiate a connection to you. Only you can initiate a connection to some other peripheral.
However Windows can act like a mouth under specific circumstances, specifically I found that you can use your computer as a hotspot and share over bluetooth. Sharing over bluetooth means Windows opens its bluetooth mouth to tell anyone willing to listen that it is connectable. So if you were doing something bluetooth related at the time it could have allowed a foreign (central) device to initiate a connection
It’s funny, everyone keeps asking the same things so I have to keep typing the same information in this thread. 😅
It came up as a Windows notification center popup in the bottom right corner of the screen saying it was trying to connect or something like that, but when I clicked on it, it came up with a different window offering me yes or no, I clicked no, then it came up in the bottom right corner again starting the loop over, I clicked no several times before opening the connected devices app and disabling Bluetooth completely. This all happened in about 60 seconds as I saw it when grabbing my keys to leave for work at 5am, no one else was awake and I wasn’t interacting with ANY devices or my computer at all beforehand.
Sorry 😅 I probably could have taken a closer look at other comments, but in any case this paints a nice picture for me, thank you :)
Edit: Actually I decided to boot into Windows and test this a little myself, and turns out when bluetooth is on it is discoverable (Windows is a peripheral, the BlueZ device is a central wanting to connect). When i connected from my phone to my computer, It seemed more accurate to what you described too. If you dont use bluetooth disable it, or make your device not discoverable. 😅
It does help to know it was a notification and to know what was in it. I was able to find an image which looked similar and led me to find a Windows feature called Swift Pair. It lets you connect to a bluetooth device via notification, rather than in the settings. You can try disabling Swift Pair if it is enabled.
Here is my conclusion:
As others said, BlueZ is essentially the program that allows bluetooth to run on Linux. The name alone doesn’t tell you if the person behind has malicious intent.
It’s possible that somebody was making a swift pair compatible device using Linux. Maybe they thought 5AM was early enough that the swift pair notification would only show up on their computer since they wouldn’t be able to prevent other people from seeing it otherwise 🤷
It could also just be some device rebroadcasting itself on a clock. I’m not sure why or what you would do with this other than to annoy people?
If you especially don’t trust your neighbors and want to imagine a worst case scenario, it could be spoofing something like a bluetooth keyboard, rebroadcasting until someone connects, and runs a series of shortcuts / commands to infect your computer to replicate the virus further. ((Issue is, it doesn’t make sense they’d develop on Linux with BlueZ even though the virus could only propagate on Windows. Kinda fun to think about regardless though))
I’ll still never probably fully know what happened, but that was a great reply and I appreciate all your help. Luckily my direct neighbors on both sides are old AF and I trust them to not be doing anything like this because they wouldn’t even know what any of it means, but the sketchy businesses behind us that include a liquor store, vape shop and sex shop among others I can’t say I trust as much. I’m glad Windows was kind enough to ask instead of just connecting. 😂
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