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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • That’s a pretty good one, hadn’t heard about it until you mentioned it. xournal++ is great at marking up PDF files and was able to keep the layout formatting intact with my janky test PDF (a sad document that must have been print-to-pdf’d multiple times under Windows).

    I also like that it’s easy to use and has just about every markup tool you’d want, all the stuff that Firefox is missing.

    Only thing missing is that it doesn’t have the advanced .pdf export options that the other tools have, but that’s kind of minor… figure I could open/re-export the marked up .pdf in another application if I really want to configure any advanced .pdf options for the final document.


  • LibreOffice Draw can do markup and much more, the downside like OP mentioned is that sometimes the formatting of the PDF can get messed up so it’s a bit hit-or-miss.

    Beyond that try Firefox (yes the web browser), its PDF markup capabilities are way better than you’d expect and the PDF formatting tends to stay intact. It’s probably better than LibreOffice for simple markup stuff, I just wish Firefox included a way to draw straight lines/arrows and shapes (circles, squares, etc.) to complete the markup toolbox. It does have a pen and highlighter but drawing an arrow via mouse looks a bit janky, LOL.

    If you do a lot of the same type of markup (say an arrow pointed right) you could probably just save an image of an arrow and keep pasting it into the Firefox PDF editor, it’ll probably look better vs drawing them out.


  • I haven’t needed to do this myself but have a few ideas if you haven’t already tried these yet

    • Are you trying to mount as HFS, or as iso9660? Those CD media you are looking are are probably hybrid ISO/HFS discs so they technically can be read in either format… I suspect mounting as iso9660 with/without its mount options could help you copy the data afterwards. Check the man page for mount to review the options, thinking iocharset and/or utf8 could be helpful if the defaults aren’t working.

    • If the standard mount / cp isn’t working you could also give other tools a look. Have not tested this myself but I saw the Debian repo has hfsplus - which includes hpmount and hpcopy which should in theory be able to copy off HFS+ media. No idea if the tool also works with HFS but could be worth a go.


  • Look into audio normalisation… for playback purposes scanning/applying Replay Gain on the files should help a bit. Most audio playback software has support for that.

    There is also EBU R 128, a slightly different type of loudness normalisation, it uses a different algorithm vs traditional Replay Gain. For my own usage I found it works better keeping the loudness at the same level when playing through a bunch of different audio tracks. No idea about VLC but the Strawberry application does support it so it could be worth a look if you want to try other audio playback software.





  • Not Teamviewer-ish but on Windows I’ve set up a simple batch file that launches a reverse VNC connection (using TightVNC) from the remote system to myself in the case someone needs me to look at something on their desktop. Nothing fancy about it, just something simple to get going if you don’t want or need anything more complex.

    Haven’t done it on Linux yet but I suspect a bash script + a VNC app (TigerVNC maybe?) would be able to do the same thing.


  • Mainly the users folder(s) e.g. c:\users\YOURUSERNAME , the hidden appdata\local and appdata\roaming folders in there probably contain way more than you actually need to back up but you could back up the whole thing to be on the safe side. Most of your user’s program configuration data is in those folders.

    Sometimes systemwide program config data is in the hidden c:\programdata folder but I wouldn’t back that up aside from specific programs you really want to save config info for.

    Aside from that any other folders you created containing data you care about.

    And like the other comment mentioned, the Windows registry also has lots of program config data but I usually skip that, the majority of it is useless… but if there’s a great need for you to export a specific registry tree you could do that via the command prompt to export to a backup text file. I think reg export would do it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/reg-export


  • Is there something I am missing, or does it really just come down to people not wanting software that isn’t “cutting edge” release?

    It might just be that, people tend to gravitate to the next shiny new thing. But you’re right, even when the application repos skew a bit older they’re not really that old. And technically nothing is stopping you from running a more up-to-date application via flatpak, appimage, or just compiling directly. I think it’s perfect for people looking for a more vanilla boring experience with the standard DE environments (GNOME, KDE, etc.).

    I will say for total noobs another distro is maybe more friendlier, more polished installer, etc… before settling on Debian I was happily using Ubuntu which felt easier for someone still getting used to Linux. But I always knew it was Debian based which made me curious about eventually just running Debian itself… nowadays Debian is my main and has been great.


  • That’s weird, maybe an update broke something? What I would maybe do is uninstall Xrdp (and maybe remove/rename the old config files just in case), then re-install and configure it. From there if it’s still not working try to see what’s showing up in the log files maybe.

    I did notice that Xrdp requires some extra configuration to work properly with Linux Mint Cinnamon, you apparently need to create a .xsession file in the home folder of whichever user(s) you’re trying to remote into. I’m not on Linux Mint myself but maybe searching around will give you some tips e.g. this seems like a good rundown https://gist.github.com/ParkWardRR/2ab9b5d41bbaceca8471d591755a1898

    EDIT: You probably already know this from using it before but for RDP on Linux you’d need to remote into a user that is not already logged in… it’s not like in Windows when you can RDP into any user regardless if they’re already logged in or not.






  • You already tested with a standard Windows 10/11 install ISO? Put that on a bootable USB along with your exe but instead of installing you go into the recovery options and should see a way to get to the cmd prompt where you can test run that .exe. It might have the same results as Windows PE but it’s worth a try and downloading the Windows ISO is free anyway.

    Worst case if you have a spare HDD/SSD you can put that into your system, temporarily install Windows 10/11 onto it (I don’t think you even need to worry about activation), run your .exe, then shutdown and swap your drives back to your normal setup and be done with it.

    But yeah I get what you’re saying, ideally there’s a better way but I’m not too sure what else to suggest within Linux itself.


  • A little research got me to a “systemrescue” iso and that one worked fine. The live environment fired up and I was able to save all my data by mounting the partition via terminal into /mnt/mountfolder/.

    Nice. I always keep an ISO of systemrescue on a bootable USB for these occasions, it’s gotten me out of jams in both Windows and Linux situations.

    Not sure what to make of your issue with Ubuntu stopping from working, including the live boot, only for it to work again for you in the end. My hunch is wonky hardware but can’t really say.



  • Will be curious what solution you come up with. I tried to do this with my current Debian installation but never quite got it to boot off the RAID-1 array. In the end just went without RAID on the drive with Debian installed, maybe will re-attempt next time I do an OS install. I do have mdadm RAID-1 working normally for my data drives, just not the boot drive… you technically could just do that if you want to have your RAID-1 data drives separate from your OS boot drive.

    Can’t comment on the Calameres installer but the regular Debian installer does detect RAID configurations from other mdadm setups. So you could either create your RAID-1 configuration in the shell during the Debian install or even create it in another Linux boot shell before jumping into the Debian installer. e.g. booting any live Linux with mdadm in it, configure the RAID-1 there, then boot into the Debian installer - the Debian installer will know there’s a prior RAID-1 on those disks and allow you to proceed with installing on the array if you wanted.

    What tripped me up afterwards was trying to get it to boot off that RAID-1 afterwards, that part is not so straightforward. The link in the other comment does go into that so maybe it’ll helpful.