Users of all levels are welcome to ask questions about GNU/Linux and share their experiences.
*** Please be civil, notice the "Friendly" in every Friendly GNU/Linux Thread ***
Before asking for help, please check our list of resources.
If you would like to try out GNU/Linux you can do one of the following: 0) Install a GNU/Linux distribution of your choice in a Virtual Machine. 1) Use a live image and to boot directly into the GNU/Linux distribution without installing anything. 2) Dual boot the GNU/Linux distribution of your choice along with Windows or macOS. 3) Go balls deep and replace everything with GNU/Linux.
Resources: Please spend at least a minute to check a web search engine with your question. *Many free software projects have active mailing lists.
$ man %command% $ info %command% $ %command% -h/--help $ help %builtin/keyword%
Don't know what to look for? $ apropos %something%
I've been considering the switch for a long time but I've never used linux before. is Solus the best way to start with gaming and an easy transition in mind?
i have a video that almost matches the aspect ratio of my monitor, and i'd like to watch it without black bars or stretching/distortion in mpc-hc, setting this to "touch window from outside" would zoom in the video so that there are no black bars but a little of it gets cropped
is difficult is arch? I had manjaro kde and I liked it, but kinda want to give a different distro a go. Was running kde neon as my main for a good minute.
Isaiah Green
Im running an Ubuntu live session in a usb and it feels really limited but i dont want to install a dual boot on my drive because i could fuck up my windows, what do bros
Charles Thomas
its a pain in the ass to install at first. most of my problems came from installing with wifi, which also turns out to be rather easy to deal with i was just sent on a wild goose chase as at the time i found the arch wiki hard to follow. my reading comprehension increased a lot from going through with it
i use arch fulltime and i say its worth trying, but do so in a virtual machine because you may realize that you rather like your setup as it is
Jacob Kelly
ah ok, I was asking because I was dual booting in my previous pc, but mainly used kde neon. I'll get a vm and run arch see how I like it and try it out. IDK, windows is cool, but I think I got used to linux.
Asher Collins
Dualbooting won't do anything to windows. If anything windows might mess with Ubuntu when it updates.
Angel Hernandez
Not true. Grub or systemd-boot can fuck your boot partition.
spend an hour or two reading about how the bootloading process works for various bootloaders windows bcd is not particularly hard to understand and can be viewed and manipulated from within windows pretty easily
if you understand the basics of how it works, it's not hard to set up or even repair on your own you can pretty safely set it up so that your main bootloader is windows bcd and just set up your linux install as a boot entry on that. if by some freak of nature windows stops booting, you can pretty easily repair the install from a windows recovery usb by manipulating the bcd. if the bcd got overwritten, you can recreate it from the recovery usb. this is all stuff you can learn and understand how to do in an hour or two reading basic documentation and that's just limited to using the bcd. other bootloaders aren't much different, grub isn't exactly rocket science
alternatively, if you're really scared of screwing things up and can't do basic research on how to fix easily fixable mistakes (protip you tend to learn best by making mistakes, consider using a burner laptop or even a virtual machine to screw around with things and figure out how they work), you could always set up a linux virtual machine and pass through some of your hardware. that removes access to that hardware from your host while it's being passed through, but it means you'll have e.g. your graphics card working natively on your vm instance
Matthew Allen
moreover, you can pretty easily back up the current state of your bcd before doing anything to it. just print your current bcd state, save it in a text file on a flash drive or something, and if anything happens, throw your recovery drive in and write the original state back to it. you may want to make note of where the bcd store location is on windows (see superuser.com/questions/1240086/where-is-the-bcd-store-physically-located ) and you should probably be aware that when you boot into a recovery drive, your drive letters get shifted around (you can always use diskpart to figure out what's what assuming you know the size of your partitions)
Zachary Nelson
one thing worth noting is that you can also use kde on arch linux, if you wanted a similar experience. there is even a lightweight version (plasma-desktop) if you JUST want the desktop environment and nothing else. the main appeal of arch linux is "building" the distribution so you will want to figure out all the components of your operating system. this wasnt frustrating to me as i found it interesting, but simply know "plasma-desktop" likely wont be EVERYTHING you want (doesn't come with a web browser and likely doesn't set up pulseaudio for example). be prepared to read a good deal
Elijah Murphy
I'm close to giving up on init freedom. I had mpd working last week (on Artix) and now it and mpv falls to start and I get mpd: error while loading shared libraries: libcdio.so.18: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory This is unacceptable to me so now I ether suck pothead's dick or find a way to install Gentoo.
Thay have Steam and Lutris in the repos. All you need for Linux gaming after that is Wine and sc-controller.
if you play a lot of games, there's really no avoiding some kind of interaction with windows at some point. even with all the headway steam has made on that front, there are too many games that don't have native linux ports and while wine is always getting better, it's still a long way from as good of an experience as just using windows my recommendation is to install linux and then set up a windows guest vm and pass through the things it makes sense to pass through while gaming. you could do a dual-boot, but you'll just end up staying booted into whatever's most convenient.
Kayden Campbell
I changed my CPU govenor to powersave and cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor Actually shows me I'm in powersave, but cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq Still gives me the maximum frequency. That and the fact that my fan is still noisy as fuck lead me to the conclusion that nothing fucking changed. Sorry if I left some critical infos, I'm new to this stuff and would appreciate some help.
Robert Taylor
how'd you get the computer? Seems very heavy duty with the CPU and 128GB RAM. Could you use speccy/hwinfo?
Cooper Torres
anyone good with wayland and hidpi? why does gnome at 200% scaling work perfectly with everything, but using sway (tiling wm for wayland) fuck up chromium? I've set 200% scaling in sway and everything except chromium scales just like gnome. how does that make any sense? why would the same program scale differently? it's two different compositors but it's using the same scaling functionality, right? this thread on reddit illustrates the problem but I haven't found a solution
>recommending something with NO documentation at all it seems like a great idea until you start googling your questions and finding that every single ffucking link to their official wiki is down permanently
Elijah Roberts
I'm pretty sure you can't scale programs than run with Xwayland on Sway.
Mason Mitchell
What CPU are you (ab)using? that does sound like you're locked to a frequency (BIOS) or using a CPU which doesn't work with cpufreq. It's mostly for AMD CPUs. take advice and run cpupower frequency-info and see what's supported. you can also see what frequencies you're actually at with the monitor argument, ie. run watch cpupower monitor
Bentley Moore
>What CPU are you (ab)using? An A8-6600k housefire. Power save worked fine on Win7 though. This is what frequency-info gave me analyzing CPU 0: driver: acpi-cpufreq CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0 CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0 maximum transition latency: 4.0 us hardware limits: 1.90 GHz - 3.90 GHz available frequency steps: 3.90 GHz, 3.60 GHz, 3.00 GHz, 2.50 GHz, 1.90 GHz available cpufreq governors: conservative ondemand userspace powersave performance schedutil current policy: frequency should be within 3.90 GHz and 3.90 GHz. The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use within this range. current CPU frequency: 3.90 GHz (asserted by call to hardware) boost state support: Supported: yes Active: yes Boost States: 3 Total States: 8 Pstate-Pb0: 4200MHz (boost state) Pstate-Pb1: 4100MHz (boost state) Pstate-Pb2: 4000MHz (boost state) Pstate-P0: 3900MHz Pstate-P1: 3600MHz Pstate-P2: 3000MHz Pstate-P3: 2500MHz Pstate-P4: 1900MHz
Ian Miller
Alright, cpupower frequency-set --min 1900 actually works now. Thanks for the help!
Joshua Barnes
>install void I did and the installer kept trying to install the bootloader on a partition that did not exist.
>it seems like a great idea until you start googling your questions It's already awful on Arch. A lot of wiki pages are poorly written.
Carter Taylor
a friend of mine is having problems when installing Lubuntu 18.04.2 LTS in a very old pc he has sitting in his house: CPU is Pentium E2180, mobo is a PCCHIPS P53G I told him to use latest Rufus, version 3.3.1400, check if MD5, SHA1 and SHA256 matches with those of the ISO he downloaded, quick format his usb flash drive as FAT32 and finally extract Lubuntu's ISO to it -- he did everything, also MD5, SHA1 and SHA256 all of them match now when he tries to boot from his usb drive he gets the following error: >SYSLINUX 6.03 EDD 2014-10-06 COPYRIGHT (C) 1994-2014 H. Peter Anvin et Al >Failed to load Idlinux.c32 >Boot Failed: please change disks and press a key to continue
how can I make it work so he'll be able to install Lubuntu?
Jonathan Nguyen
Are linnix jobs dying away due to devops?
Samuel Martin
ok, this is cringe
Evan Perry
that's nice hans but nobody's fooled
Ayden Walker
void also supports doing a chroot install similarly to how you install gentoo you can get a rootfs tarball from one of the mirrors or use xbps from a live image to install the base-system package onto the partition you want there are some guides on the wiki (each has a few things wrong to throw off beginners so make sure to read all of them)
Sebastian Brown
? wiki + man pages are still up. if you go on their official site it should have a wiki link right on the top.
Lucas Russell
Why do Koreans have 0 ass?
Jonathan Adams
I've got 2 laptops. One of them runs a debian netinstall, works great, been using it for a while. I just put debian netinstall again on my daily driver and the fucking touchpad (it's an alps dualpoint) is wonky as shit, glitchy movement and sometimes it acts like a scroll wheel or something because it'll switch my current window manager tag?? Google is useless here, someone know anything about this?
Evan Gonzalez
I dont know if this is the right thread, but its about linux so i think its the most fitting. I want to set up a VM to acess the internet. So i wanted to know about the most secure distro to use in a VM, also, is a virtual machine enough or should i use a VM inside a VM? The second VM being of a diferent linux distro ofc. Also, how should i configure my VM to avoid guest to host acess exploits?
Levi Clark
I'm in quite the pickle. My desktop died today and Im stuck with a Thinkpad X60. Im a long time Slackware user, and my mind is fucking blown by the lack of "normal" disros nowadays. Is it so hard to ask for a distro that is: 1) Stable, and NOT rolling release 2) Doesn't use SystemD 3) has a netinstall so I can set up a minimal system The only thing that I can think of that fulfills these requirements is Devuan, but apt is the biggest piece of fucking shit Ive ever used and it makes me want to skullcap myself when i ahve to use it. I'm not even trying to talk shit about SystemD, or people who like it, but I'm horribl worried about the lack of user choice in the Linux world right now. I could always install Gentoo on this thing, but I dont wanna update world every week on a core duo. Any serious advice?
Hi friendos I am trying to put together some step-by-step stuff for mates to try out gaming on linux I am going with manjaro-xfce (blame LTT for this) since it's the easiest to get to look like windows imo without risking it borking itself (looking at you, GNOME) Anyway what I'm looking for is some decent hardware gui hardware monitoring. Need to be able to examine cpu clock speeds, temps, usage, gpu temps, usage, fan usage. CPU is easier to manage (sensor viewer is installed by default) however live clock speed updates and/or usage graphs (option for per-core or otherwise) seems a bit harder GPU seems a shitshow. Easiest part is honestly just making sure the power limit is maxed out, however live updated clockspeed/mem speed/fan speed/temps is annoying to get going
Anyone using Manjaro got some preferred packages for this sort of thing? Anything in the repositories or AUR are fine, getting linux noobs to install from elsewhere seems like a risk.
Jaxon Wright
I ended up finding this on SO DIR="$(cd "$(dirname "$0")" && pwd)" ruby $DIR/src/start.rb
Probably not the best, but it works as expected from anywhere now
Bentley Hill
In Manjaro, how do I set a hard drive to mount when starting my PC?
Jeremiah Clark
/etc/fstab
Thomas Hernandez
ok am i better off installing an arch derivative or should i just go ahead and install arch?
Joseph Johnson
How new are you This is a serious question, how new are you to Linux systems
Isaiah Anderson
i too would love to know how to get easy performance monitoring on arch systems personally i don't have any idea how to even to check clock speeds
Justin Taylor
Why the fuck doesn't League of Legends or Steam work on Arch Linux anymore?
Fucking cuckolded.
John Powell
>steam like, even before you get to proton?
Andrew Fisher
well i am pretty experienced and have installed arch before
Aiden Parker
wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/steam >Warning: Steam native is currently broken on Arch Linux. For reference, see FS#62095 >Note: Steam for Linux only supports Ubuntu LTS.[1] Thus, do not turn to Valve for support for issues with Steam on Arch Linux.
Joseph Robinson
if you're familiar with arch, stick to arch then unless you really want to use something like extreme ease of use or a platform for running games (apparently that's what Manjaro is targeted at)
Owen Jenkins
well fuck works on Manjewro so i guess it's a recent issue that borked steam
Nicholas Mitchell
What is the most Boomer Loonix/stallman distribution and Desktop?
>native well, just install the normal package then, doubt you save much space by installing native
Luis Nelson
>but apt is the biggest piece of fucking shit Ive ever used and it makes me want to skullcap myself when i ahve to use it If you seriously think 2019 apt is shit then you are either living in the past and crying about shit happened in debian decades ago or simply fucking retarded. Probably the later.
Matthew King
STOP USING RUFUS FOR LINUX ISOS
Goddamnit. Rufus fucks up syslinux almost all the times. Tell him to get win32diskimager and write the iso to the flash drive. It's identical to using dd in real operating systems.
Adam Diaz
>it's two different compositors but it's using the same scaling functionality, right? Wrong. Wayland doesn't have a central server like X has, so each compositor has to implement everything by itself. There are libraries with common functionality, but Sway and Gnome use different ones anyway. Welcome to the future of Linux desktop. This sort of idiotic balkanization is why some of us don't like Wayland as the successor to X.
Elijah Gray
So, I've never used linux before and I'm planning on going with Manjaro. Are there any DE recommendations?
That's actually a pretty common problem and I've seen bug-reports about that exact error relating to quite a few distributions. Apparently something tends to go wrong when you select fat32 and not just fat in Rufus. Tell him to try that. Or be kind and make a USB stick and verify that it works and give that to your friend. I personally tend to make them with dd since that just works.
Evan Jenkins
??? ``` [m@Vytis ~]$ steam /home/m/.local/share/Steam/steam.sh: line 106: VERSION_ID: unbound variable /home/m/.local/share/Steam/steam.sh: line 106: VERSION_ID: unbound variable Running Steam on arch 64-bit /home/m/.local/share/Steam/steam.sh: line 106: VERSION_ID: unbound variable STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically Pins up-to-date! Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(1555457005) libGL error: No matching fbConfigs or visuals found libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(1555457005) Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(1555457005) libGL error: No matching fbConfigs or visuals found libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast Steam: An X Error occurred X Error of failed request: GLXBadContext Major opcode of failed request: 151 Serial number of failed request: 49 xerror_handler: X failed, continuing Steam: An X Error occurred X Error of failed request: BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation) Major opcode of failed request: 151 Value in failed request: 0x0 Serial number of failed request: 48 xerror_handler: X failed, continuing Steam: An X Error occurred X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes) Major opcode of failed request: 151 Serial number of failed request: 50 xerror_handler: X failed, continuing crash_20190421184028_1.dmp[8800]: Uploading dump (out-of-process) /tmp/dumps/crash_20190421184028_1.dmp /home/m/.local/share/Steam/steam.sh: line 906: 8778 Segmentation fault (core dumped) $STEAM_DEBUGGER "$STEAMROOT/$STEAMEXEPATH" "$@" crash_20190421184028_1.dmp[8800]: Finished uploading minidump (out-of-process): success = yes crash_20190421184028_1.dmp[8800]: response: CrashID=bp-ea39dfa5-6f3c-4a85-aae6-a9c4a2190421 crash_20190421184028_1.dmp[8800]: file ''/tmp/dumps/crash_20190421184028_1.dmp'', upload yes: ''CrashID=bp-ea39dfa5-6f3c-4a85-aae6-a9c4a2190421'' ```
Oliver Price
did u forget to select DD
Ian Garcia
Don't use gnome It borks itself by having default extensions bug out even without installing any that aren't bundled with manjaro KDE is probably what you want
Jason Bennett
I'm personally very comfortable using Xfce4 but I can't really recommend anything for you, I don't know you and what you're familiar with or comfortable with. It is a very personal choice.
However, I can give you this recommendation since you're planning on switching to GNU/Linux and don't know what's what: Just try each for one week. It doesn't really matter which Manjaro "flavor" you install, it's the same one with different packages installed by default. You can install any edition and install the rest of the desktops that are available and choose from the login-manager. Trying all of them is easy, just use each for one week - less if you don't like it before the week's up. Use your machine normally while you try. You'll know which you prefer after a month.
Evan Ward
install the git version, it's a fresh bug
Nathan Thompson
Hey /fglt/, need some help
Currently using i3 ontop of a kubuntu install, and it works real nice.
Only thing is that when I get a notification, i3 loses focus of the screen I'm working on and focusses on the notification, which is really annoying. Anybody got an idea on how to solve this?
Jacob Bailey
New to KDE. How do I make KDE 5.15 look flashiest, blurriest possible to fit in with the screenfetch cool kids?
What is the best Linux distribution? I want to use that.
Thomas Lee
Steam can be tricky. Try running it without the runtime for the update: STEAM_RUNTIME=0 steam And when it updates run it normally again.
Oliver Perry
Unironically kubuntu at the moment.
Jason Ortiz
whichever runs steam games the fastest the rest all do the exact same shit if you want it to
William Jones
I found this old piece of shit T430 with that stupid red mouse button in the middle of the keyboard that my father had and I want to put Linux on it because it doesn't have an OS on it and I don't want to pay for windows. But what distro runs steam great? I have no idea senpai.
Gavin Lopez
Help a retard please?
I'm switching from Debian after using almost all flavors, Mint, Fedora, Debian, BSD, Kali (Meme), CentOS, and so on. They've all worked well. So I decided to install Arch and get my desktop the exact way I want it. Problem is I always used the babies first features like auto config or plug ins', copy pasted vimrc/bashrc etc, and it's always worked nicely.
Now however In Arch I can't figure out anything. I can install KDE Plasma or XFCE just fine and away I go, but I want to use only i3, a terminal like Alacritty, xorg/xinit/startx/xterm and custom vim and zshrc's, etc. But I can't figure this shit out for the life of me. Is there a retards guide for i3 install/customization or something? Please I can't figure this out at all and it's killing me. I just wanna rice with the big bois