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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • My system completely locks up every few hours. It’s not just a DE crash; the entire machine becomes unresponsive. The mouse and keyboard are completely dead (no cursor movement, Caps Lock key doesn’t toggle).

    Before you rule out a DE (or Wayland issue), are you 100% sure the entire system is unresponsive? Like is it still online and responding to ping or SSH? Just to be sure try enabling SSH on the system - then set up a spare laptop/computer on the same network that can normally ping or SSH to your Linux system. Next time the issue occurs test to see if the Linux system is truly unresponsive by checking if it is still responding to pings and allowing you to SSH into it.

    If you don’t have a spare laptop/desktop but do have an Android phone you could do the same with Termux.

    Also if you can SSH into it you should be able to force logout your own user, that would bring your Linux system back to the login screen and you’d then be able to use mouse/keyboard normally again. (run “who” to view logged in users, run “pkill -u your-username” to kill and logout the user, may need to run those with sudo)

    Only reason I mention it is that I have an ancient desktop that exhibits similar behavior occasionally but my system is still alive on the network. So far for me it seems like it might be a Wayland + Nvidia + GNOME issue. Once I switched back to X11 it doesn’t seem like the issue occurs anymore.


  • Some ideas:

    • You could try changing some of the power save settings when you close your laptop lid to see if it helps. I have a spare laptop that used to get stuck with a scrambled display when going into suspend then waking up, it ended up being easier just to disable suspend altogether… I think for whatever reason Hibernate actually behaved better than suspend in my specific case. Granted its been a while since I retested all that against the current Debian version. Take a look through https://wiki.debian.org/Suspend for some ideas

    • It’s possible Nouveau is still a bit buggy with suspend/resume, plus maybe when paired with hybrid/optimus graphics mode? I don’t have a solid solution for that but it could be worth experimenting with the regular Nvidia driver, Debian has a pretty detailed how-to on setting it up https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers … in particular take a look at enabling NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations (see https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Wayland_configuration) to help with suspend/resume, maybe the driver along with that setting will do the trick? The big caveat here is that same Debian page mentions

    Warning: enabling NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations will cause the driver to malfunction on laptops with Optimus hybrid graphics.

    and it does sound like you have some sort of hybrid graphics setup, so I can’t say if enabling it would be helpful or very bad in your case. :/

    • I wonder if the issue is manifesting due to the hybrid graphics? I haven’t played around with one of those type of configurations but maybe you could go into your laptop’s BIOS and try disabling one of them so you’re always using the Nvidia graphics, or the AMD graphics?

    • Speaking of BIOS, kind of a longshot but you could double-check if your BIOS is up-to-date. Power saving issues could just be due to buggy firmware particularly with laptops. But sometimes you’ll just have to look for workarounds if the firmware itself quite right and the laptop vendor never fixes it.



  • 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.