I understand the need for something like Tails OS and I am glad it exists. But I am looking for a distro that is not as hyper focused on extreme privacy and anonymity and is designed to be sort of like mobile computing.

I know many(if not all) distros can be live booted. I am also aware the likes of MX Linux and others leave unallocated space that can be formatted and used for this purpose but what I am looking for is this process being stream lined.

In Tails, there is a dedicated "Persistent Volumes Manager" app where you select what information you wish to put in your persistence storage. For example, you can choose to store your settings, installed apps, wifi passwords, app configuration, browser bookmarks and other useful stuff. Persistence storage is optionally encrypted to prevent sensitive data from being extracted from stolen flash drive.

When you boot up, you will be asked whether you wish to unlock persistence volume or not. If you agree, all your settings will be loaded into current live boot session, if not, it wont be.

The distro does not act or try to pretend like Tails but rather acts and feels like a standard linux distro, not hyper focused on anonymity, maximizing user convinience over privacy and security.

Essentially: When you boot, if you choose to use persistence storage by unlocking with password, etc, all your settings, installed app, etc get loaded from it. If you dont, the distro default is set.

When persistence folder is unlocked, there could be a Persistence folder in the live user's home directory where we can store files we wish to persist between reboot. Everything outside is non persistent.

If you have used Tails OS, its exactly that, except not hyper focused on anonymity and security requiring Tor to be running to access the network

This laptop was originally sold with Windows 7 32-bit edition installed. Even back then it was really unresponsive and clunky. After several years of it lying around and being useless, I decided to do a really lightweight debian install on it.

And guess what? It can do so much more than sit idly in some landfill.

Now I can use it to write my study notes in neovim (gives me a good excuse to learn vim, and I'm learning slowly), listen to music with gst123, learn c and c++, torrent large files with transmission-cli and qbittorrent, and the list goes on....

I mostly just use tty. I hit "startx i3" if I absolutely need a GUI, but for everything else, tty. I use links2 for Wikipedia, online resources and browsing memes which is already a big chunk of my internet usage. I was really giddy when I saw Tor browser had a 32-bit version, it runs surprisingly well even with less than 1 gigabyte of memory (unless I visit some really bloated sites)

I can't play videos though, that's the one major thing it can't do. The integrated GPU is unsupported so playing videos or 3d-gaming is out of the question.

BTW is there a lemmy instance/frontend I can use via CLI or links2?

Hi there!

A bunch of us at work have been looking at getting Intune running on our Linux machines, this is needed to get Wi-Fi access at work. While there is a guide on getting this on Linux - the requirements are strictly limiting this to RedHat and Ubuntu and Gnome only. Has anyone here had any success with setting this up? Was it difficult?

I tried myself just once last week, but on Aurora (KDE), via a RHEL distrobox, and assumed it failed due to my main system not having gnome-keyring installed(?) as the terminal would spit out "gnome-keyring" a couple of times when launching Intune. Was gonna try with RHEL myself during this week, but wanted to hear here first if anyone has had any success with this at all before i attempt to get it running.

Appreciate any response on this :)

Source for getting Intue on Linux. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/user-help/microsoft-intune-app-linux

I feel like Im dancing around perhaps the most fundamental piece of my operating system everytime I run and install software. Starting services with systemctl and checking logs with journalctl is the extent of my knowledge.

Do you know of good resources or tutorials for learning how systemd works and how to use it to run software on my desktop and servers? Thanks.

https://flathub.org/apps/com.bitwarden.desktop

Hi everyone! I want to be able to access a folder inside the guest that corresponds to a cloud drive that is mounted inside the guest for security purposes. I have tried setting up a shared filesystem inside Virt-Manager (KVM) with virtiofs (following this tutorial: https://absprog.com/post/qemu-kvm-shared-folder) but as soon as I mount the folder in order for it to be accessible on the ~~guest~~ host the cloud drive gets unmounted. I guess a folder cannot have two mounts at the same time. Aliasing the folder using bind and then sharing the aliased folder with the host doesn't work either. The aliased folder is simply empty on the host.

Does anyone have an idea regarding how I might accomplish this? Is KVM the right choice or would something like docker or podman better suited for this job? Thank you.

Edit: To clarify: The cloud drive is mounted inside a virtual machine for security purposes as the binary is proprietary and I do not want to mount it on the host (bwrap and the like introduce a whole lot of problems, the drive doesn't sync anymore and I have to relogin each time). I do not use the virtual machine per se, I just start it and leave it be.

(for anyone who do not know, bc is a "arbitrary-precision arithmetic language". its syntax is similar to C)

Gavin Howard's bc (bc-gh) is adopted by busybox, toybox, FreeBSD, Android, macOS for its robustness and superior performance. It is also shipped with Gentoo Linux; LFS also use bc-gh.

Even though bc-gh is more robust and updated, Linux distros other than Gentoo and Fedora do not package it it. bc-gh is not available on Arch (available on AUR), Debian and perhaps all of its derivative. The reason seems to be a licensing reason: bc-gh is under the BSD license.

bc-gh is clearly superior to GNU bc, Gavin Howard's benchmark show that bc-gh is faster than GNU bc in most case, while bc-gh actually do more work than GNU bc.

Today I tested GNU bc and bc-gh. I let they do this operation: (1024*1024)^(1024*1024). GNU bc give me the answer in five minutes, bc-gh give me the answer in two minutes.

GNU bc do not have a repository. All development happen in private, and we can't make sure it is still maintained. The latest version is 1.07 from 2017. bc-gh have a public repository and it is actively maintained.

So it is clear that other Linux distro not adopting bc-gh is purely licensing reason. They reject software not under the GPL license, even if they are more robust and more performant.

We need a campaign to raise awareness about superior software alternatives. We need to stop Linux distro for not adopting superior and updated softwares for licensing reasons.

Does anybody know of a list of usb live-bootable distros, with links to the download pages?

I have a coworker who wants to switch his gaming computer over to Linux, he has Linux experience but from like a decade ago.

He's not partial to any particular distro, so I was hoping to just put together a multiboot flash drive with a bunch of live images he could try. But I'm not sure what I should include, and what has live images, vs. install only images.

I'm most comfortable in an environment with apt, so Debian and Mint are of course already covered, but if the gaming-specific distros have live usb images, that would probably be the best thing for him to try.

For most of college, I’ve kept it simple: I’d create a directory in my home folder for each project, then eventually move older or inactive ones into ~/programming/. When I change devices or hit file size limits, I’ll compress and send things to my NAS.

This setup has worked pretty well so far. But now that I’m graduating and my projects keep stacking up, I’m starting to wonder if there’s a more efficient system out there.

Curious—how do you all organize and store your projects? Any tips or methodologies that have made your lives easier over time?

The only person I’ve talked to about this is my mentor who’s been programming since the 60s (started on the IBM 1620 and Bendix G15) and he just mostly keeps projects in directories in his home directory and uses his godly regular expressions skills to find things that way. Makes me wonder if I’m overthinking it…

Hi guys.

Just started looking at using Linux on my main pc. I don't use it too often these days but I like to play around with my pc.

I tried Fedora and it seems fine. I chose Fedora 41 as I wanted to have working Nvidia drivers and secure boot. Got that working but then I tried to use my wireless Xbox series X controller and had no luck getting it working. I tried to install xone but was getting errors.

I've tried Ubuntu is the past but just wasn't to my liking. Linux mint was ok but didn't like the available desktop environments.

I know Nobara is available, but I'd prefer to have something minimal and be able to configure everything myself to my liking.

I'm not so fussed about which distro. Can anyone recommend something that works with: Nvidia drivers Secure boot xone (or something else)

I like the gnome desktop environment.

Thanks. ☮️❤️

I had a teeny pet project using GNU assembly that was going to target two platforms.

Instead of keeping my handwritten worst-practices Makefile I decided to try GNU Autotools for the educated reasons of:

• Text scrolling by looks pretty
• Vague memories of ./configure make make install tarballs

I got hit with mysterious macro errors, recompile with -fPIE errors (didn't need this before?), autotools trying to run gcc on a .o file w/ the same options as an .s file, "no rule for all:", and other things a noob would run into. (I don't need a bugfix, since my handspun Makefile is "working on my machine" with uname -m.) So there's a bit of a learning curve here, inhibited by old documentation ~and~ ~more~ ~quietly,~ ~genAI~ ~being~ ~shittier~ ~than~ ~normal~ ~in~ ~this~ ~department~

With this I ask:

Do people still use Autotools for non-legacy stuff? If not, what do people choose for a new project's build system and why?

edit: trimmed an aside

I updated my graphics drivers from nvidia 470 to nvidia 560 due to issues running certain games. It's fixed my gaming issue but reintroduced the problem that kept me from updating for so long.

After setting my computer to "suspend," it wakes up to this screen on all monitors. I am unable to scroll up or type further commands, my only option is to reboot the machine.

• My graphics card is: NVIDIA Corporation GP104 [GeForce GTX 1070]
• Nvidia driver version: 560.35.03
• My desktop environment is Cinnamon X11. (This does not occur on Wayland, but there is no Cinnamon Wayland.)

I can't make heads or tails of this error screen. The best I can understand is the "Fixing recursive fault but reboot is required!" line. How can I get more information? Does anyone have any ideas on how I can fix this? Thanks in advance.

Edit: It seems important to mention this is happening only on X11 (Pop default and Cinnamon), and not on Pop!_OS on Wayland.

Hi there, was thinking around of the best place to post this. Initially I thought maybe the Dovecot mailing list but I'm not sure if this is a Dovecot issue or if the issue lies with Postfix, so I figured maybe a more general Linux community. If people have suggestions about where I could post this that may have more people see it who are able/willing to help, I would also appreciate that.

I apologise, this post will probably be quite long, so I really do appreciate if anyone takes the time to read it and give advice.

Anyway, I was following this tutorial to set up a mail server with Postfix and Dovecot. The tutorial is for Ubuntu but I am using an Alpine Linux server, however the tutorial mostly concerns configuring Postfix and Dovecot which is distro-independent.

Deviations from the tutorial

I followed the tutorial with the exceptions of the following (deviations listed in order of the part of the tutorial they deviated from, so hopefully this is easy to follow linearly):

My server's hostname is domain.com not mail.domain.com (mail.domain.com is what my MX record points to), but this shouldn't really matter as I configured postfix with:

myhostname=mail.domain.com
mydomain=domain.com

I installed packages with apk not apt obviously, and installed Postfix with doas apk add postfix.

I didn't get the ncurses Postfix configuration popup when I installed or started Postfix.

Alpine doesn't auto-start the Postfix service, so I did

doas rc-update add postfix default
doas rc-service postfix start

I used doas apk add mailutils --update-cache --repository https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing/ to install and test the mail program.

I didn't increase attachment size limit.

Alpine doesn't seem to have a dovecot-imapd package, so I just installed dovecot and dovecot-lmtpd.

When configuring /etc/dovecot/conf.d/15-mailboxes.conf, I also set Drafts, Junk, and Sent Messages to auto-create as well as Trash.

I started the dovecot service the same way I did postfix above.

What works

I can send mail with sendmail and GNU mailutils mail. The following works:

echo "test email" | sendmail my@email.com

And

mail -a FROM:me@domain.com my@email.com

(where domain.com is my Postfix mail server, and my@email.com is my existing email address with an external provider)

The above results in me receiving the email in my spam folder at my@email.com from me@domain.com, email all appears normal to me.

The issue

I've noticed two problems which may be related.

Can't log into Thunderbird

Firstly, I can't log into Thunderbird. I get the following error:

(Transcription: Unable to log in at server. Probably wrong configuration, username or password.)

To log in, I am entering my email address at user@domain.com, where user is my UNIX user (which is part of the mail group), and domain.com is my domain. I entered my password as my user account's password.

Thunderbird seems to recognise my mail server as it auto configured to the following:

INCOMING: IMAP, hostname mail.domain.com, port 993, SSL/TLS, normal password, username user (i.e. without the @domain.com)

OUTGOING: hostname mail.domain.com, port 465, SSL/TLS, normal password, username user

I have also tried the same configuration with STARTTLS and ports 143 and 587, to the same error.

Can't receive mail

I've also tried to send myself emails from my other email addresses. I've tried two of my external email addresses so far. My email clients say they've sent the emails and they appear in my Sent folder, however my Protonmail has sent me some emails today from their mailer daemon complaining that Your email could not be delivered for more than 12 hour(s).:

<user@domain.com>: host domain.com[MY IP] said: 454 4.7.1
    <user@domain.com>: Relay access denied (in reply to RCPT TO command)

I've checked /var/log/messages (which is the Alpine Linux syslog) and found the following, which I don't know how to interpret:

Nov  2 17:57:03 domain mail.info postfix/smtpd[28188]: connect from mail-41103.protonmail.ch[185.70.41.103]
Nov  2 17:57:03 domain mail.info postfix/smtpd[28188]: Anonymous TLS connection established from mail-41103.protonmail.ch[185.70.41.103]: TLSv1.3 with cipher TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 (256/256 bits) key-exchange X25519 server-signature ECDSA (prime256v1)
Nov  2 17:57:04 domain mail.info postfix/smtpd[28188]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail-41103.protonmail.ch[185.70.41.103]: 454 4.7.1 <user@domain.com>: Relay access denied; from=<my@protonmail.com> to=<user@domain.com> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail-41103.protonmail.ch>
Nov  2 17:57:04 domain mail.info postfix/smtpd[28188]: disconnect from mail-41103.protonmail.ch[185.70.41.103] ehlo=2 starttls=1 mail=1 rcpt=0/1 data=0/1 rset=1 quit=1 commands=6/8

I have dovecot configured to use the maildir format (or at least I think I do; I followed the tutorial to set it up to use maildir) but I don't see anything in my ~/Maildir directory.

Running GNU mail results in the output:

Cannot open mailbox /var/mail/user: No such file or directory
No mail for user

My configuration

Output of postconf -n:

command_directory = /usr/sbin
compatibility_level = 3.9
daemon_directory = /usr/libexec/postfix
data_directory = /var/lib/postfix
debug_peer_level = 2
debugger_command = PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin ddd $daemon_directory/$process_name $process_id & sleep 5
home_mailbox = Maildir/
html_directory = no
inet_protocols = ipv4
mail_owner = postfix
mailbox_size_limit = 0
mailbox_transport = lmtp:unix:private/dovecot-lmtp
mailq_path = /usr/bin/mailq
manpage_directory = /usr/share/man
meta_directory = /etc/postfix
mydomain = domain.com
myhostname = mail.domain.com
myorigin = $mydomain
newaliases_path = /usr/bin/newaliases
queue_directory = /var/spool/postfix
readme_directory = /usr/share/doc/postfix/readme
sample_directory = /etc/postfix
sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail
setgid_group = postdrop
shlib_directory = /usr/lib/postfix
smtp_header_checks = regexp:/etc/postfix/smtp_header_checks
smtp_tls_loglevel = 1
smtp_tls_mandatory_protocols = !SSLv2, !SSLv3, !TLSv1, !TLSv1.1
smtp_tls_protocols = !SSLv2, !SSLv3, !TLSv1, !TLSv1.1
smtp_tls_security_level = may
smtp_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtp_scache
smtpd_tls_cert_file = /etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.domain.com/fullchain.pem
smtpd_tls_key_file = /etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.domain.com/privkey.pem
smtpd_tls_loglevel = 1
smtpd_tls_mandatory_protocols = !SSLv2, !SSLv3, !TLSv1, !TLSv1.1
smtpd_tls_protocols = !SSLv2, !SSLv3, !TLSv1, !TLSv1.1
smtpd_tls_security_level = may
smtpd_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtpd_scache
smtputf8_enable = no
unknown_local_recipient_reject_code = 550

Output of doveconf -n:

# 2.3.21.1 (d492236fa0): /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
# OS: Linux 6.6.58-0-lts x86_64  
# Hostname: domain.com
auth_debug = yes
auth_mechanisms = plain login
auth_username_format = %n
auth_verbose = yes
log_path = /var/log/dovecot.log
mail_debug = yes
mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir
mail_privileged_group = mail
mbox_write_locks = fcntl
namespace inbox {
  inbox = yes
  location = 
  mailbox Drafts {
    auto = create
    special_use = \Drafts
  }
  mailbox Junk {
    auto = create
    special_use = \Junk
  }
  mailbox Sent {
    special_use = \Sent
  }
  mailbox "Sent Messages" {
    auto = create
    special_use = \Sent
  }
  mailbox Trash {
    auto = create
    special_use = \Trash
  }
  prefix = 
}
passdb {
  args = scheme=CRYPT username_format=%u /etc/dovecot/users
  driver = passwd-file
}
protocols = imap lmtp lmtp
service auth {
  unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/auth {
    group = postfix
    mode = 0660
    user = postfix
  }
}
service lmtp {
  unix_listener lmtp {
    group = postfix
    mode = 0600
    user = postfix
  }
}
ssl = required
ssl_cert = </etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.domain.com/fullchain.pem
ssl_key = # hidden, use -P to show it
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers = yes
userdb {
  args = username_format=%u /etc/dovecot/users
  driver = passwd-file
}

Logs

This seems to be a dovecot log of an authentication attempt.

Nov 02 18:11:11 auth: Debug: client in: AUTH    3       PLAIN   service=imap    secured=tls     session=JeHL+PEltufBIH/a        lip=<my server IP>       rip=<my home IP>      lport=993       rport=59318     local_name=mail.domain.com       resp=<hidden>
Nov 02 18:11:11 auth: Debug: passwd-file(user,<my home IP>,<JeHL+PEltufBIH/a>): Performing passdb lookup
Nov 02 18:11:11 auth: Debug: passwd-file(user,<my home IP>,<JeHL+PEltufBIH/a>): lookup: user=user file=/etc/dovecot/users
Nov 02 18:11:11 auth: Info: passwd-file(user,<my home IP>,<JeHL+PEltufBIH/a>): unknown user
Nov 02 18:11:11 auth: Debug: passwd-file(user,<my home IP>,<JeHL+PEltufBIH/a>): Finished passdb lookup
Nov 02 18:11:11 auth: Debug: auth(user,<my home IP>,<JeHL+PEltufBIH/a>): Auth request finished
Nov 02 18:11:13 auth: Debug: client passdb out: FAIL    3       user=user       original_user=user@domain.com
Nov 02 18:11:13 imap-login: Debug: Ignoring unknown passdb extra field: original_user
Nov 02 18:11:13 imap-login: Info: Disconnected: Connection closed (auth failed, 3 attempts in 22 secs): user=<user>, method=PLAIN, rip=<my home IP>, lip=<my server IP>, TLS, session=<JeHL+PEltufBIH/a>

Thanks for reading this fairly long post. Do ask if I need to provide any more configs, logs, etc. Appreciate any help, thanks in advance

Hello,

I bought a razer blade 15 laptop a while ago, and world like to install Linux on it, mostly to play games. So, ideally I'd like a distro that can make the most use of the hardware and let me play the most games, while being the easiest to use and lowest maintenance possible. Any recommendation?

Long story short, I made a post in '23 August about my predictions for linux in the next 10 months. It has been more than 10 months I am here. Old post here: https://lemmy.world/post/3322139

Here were my predictions:

• Pop OS 24.04 will be awesome and be the go-to recommendation when it is released
• SteamOS for PCs will not be released yet
• Linux market share will be around %2-2.5 in Steam hardware survey
• Plasma 6 will be released around January and will be a bit buggy, but most rough edges will be smoothed by the next release in 3-4 months
• NVK will have performance parity with official drivers in certain configurations
• Wayland will gain wider adoption, even on Nvidia
• There will be little to no progress in compatibility with current anti-cheat blocked games
• (bonus, not related to Linux) Web environment integrity will be adopted only in education industry because it is dominated by Chromebooks at least in US.

And the results:

• Pop OS 24.04 is still not here and even if it was I wouldn't recommend it to anyone yet because their custom DE is still cooking. (incorrect)
• SteamOS is not released. (Correct)
• Linux is exactly at %2 on Steam survey right now and was even higher before (Correct)
• Plasma 6 is in a good shape (correct)
• I haven't followed NVK development closely but afaik it doesn't offer performance parity at the moment. (incorrect)
• 2024 has been a good year for Nvidia + Wayland :) (correct)
• Ah, the anti cheats... <insert it's evolving but backwards meme here> (correct)
• Web Environment Integrity is dead (incorrect) source: wikipedia

So I got 5/8. Before you ask, no, the "decommision my PC" part didn't work out. That endeavour lasted only 1 and a half month. But I managed to isolate myself from Linux news.

I've attached a literal screen shot of all systemd errors. It seems to be caused by kscreenlocker_greet because of a missing shared object file. The boot 9 hours ago was from a read-only snapshot, and therefore doesn't have it.

I have already tried updating with zypper dup, but that did not help.

Error as text:

PAM unable to dlopen(/usr/lib64/security/pam_pkcs11.so): /usr/lib64/security/pam_pkcs11.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This is an Acer Aspire one laptop, with a 32 bit CPU and Debian 12.7. Whenever I install Linux on it, the Internet works for about one day. And when I boot it up the next day, it just stops working. This is the case for WiFi, Ethernet and USB tethering via Android.

After running networkctl it gave me this:

I can ping 8.8.8.8 in this state, but not gnu.org. I can't open websites in Firefox either.

Then I ran "sudo systemctl start systemd-networkd". The networkctl output changed but everything worked exactly as the above two images. Couldn't open websites still.

Yesterday everything was working perfectly

Edit: Thanks to @nanook@friendica.eskimo.com and @MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml I finally have internet access on my 12-year old e-waste!

marty@Marty-PC:~/git/exllama$ pip install numpy
error: externally-managed-environment

× This environment is externally managed
╰─> To install Python packages system-wide, try apt install
    python3-xyz, where xyz is the package you are trying to
    install.
    
    If you wish to install a non-Debian-packaged Python package,
    create a virtual environment using python3 -m venv path/to/venv.
    Then use path/to/venv/bin/python and path/to/venv/bin/pip. Make
    sure you have python3-full installed.
    
    If you wish to install a non-Debian packaged Python application,
    it may be easiest to use pipx install xyz, which will manage a
    virtual environment for you. Make sure you have pipx installed.
    
    See /usr/share/doc/python3.12/README.venv for more information.

note: If you believe this is a mistake, please contact your Python installation or OS distribution provider. You can override this, at the risk of breaking your Python installation or OS, by passing --break-system-packages.
hint: See PEP 668 for the detailed specification.

I get this error every time I try install any kind of python package. So far, I always just used the --break-system-packages flag, but that seems, well, rather unsafe and breaking.

To this day, I see newly written guides, specifically for Linux, which don't point out this behaviour. They just say [...] And then install this python package with 'pip install numpy'

Is this something specific to my system, or is this a global thing?