Linux

This app just starts some productivity session while forbidding some programs from starting. Is there a Linux and most importantly FOSS version of it?

Or historical exploits/trojans/etc. that deserve more attention? I've mostly heard about lucrative vulnerabilities that concern Linux servers, but what about the end-users on desktops? Or is the Linux desktop market small enough that we mostly just see one-off instances of users blindly running malicious scripts?

I bought Microsoft NTFS for Linux by Paragon Software for a linux version of chkdsk. It also includes "ufsd" a somewhat redundant driver for reading and writing ntfs. (I already had ntfs-3g) What are the differences between ufsd and ntfs-3g?

Good morning all,

I'm having an issue with my Jellyfin server and hoping that you lovely wizards can help me...again.

So I initially tried and failed to set up Jellyfin on elementaryOS(skill issue), I wasn't really invested in the OS so I just switched to Ubuntu. Things have been much easier for the get go. I now have set up Jellyfin on my ubuntu 24.04.2 and uploaded my library from my external hdd. Now I cant figure out how to connect other devices so I can watch my media on my macbook. I currently also use a PIA vpn with port forwarding on due to my qbit seeding. I feel like that is important info. I've looked up how to connect while one the same network but since I need my vpn to stay on I'm feeling a little outside my depth again. Ultimate goal is to be able to access my library on other devices mainly, mainly my macbook, while also being able to seed from Qbit safely.

I appreciate any assistance you all can offer!

EDIT: tldr - I was having issues creating a VM using Virtual Machine Manager on Bazzite Linux. Several responders chimed in that it's likely because I'm using the flatpak version of VMM. I probably still could make it work on Bazzite somehow, perhaps w/ the help of distrobox, but instead I've fired up a VM on an old laptop running Linux Mint and everything is smooth sailing. Thanks to all who took some time to help me find a solution.

Original body:

Background: I'm looking to set up a virtual Debian server using Virtual Machine Manager, but I'm stuck on creating my first VM. I'm running Bazzite on my host machine if that makes any difference.

Steps to Reproduce the Issue:

1. Launch Virtual Machine Manager.
2. Click File > New Virtual Machine, which opens the "New VM - Step 1" window.
3. Select "Local install media" and click Forward, which brings me to "New VM - Step 2."
4. Click "Browse..." which opens the "Locate ISO media volume" window:
5. Click "Browse Local," which opens the file browser.
6. Choose ISO file (in my case, I'm using debian-12.11.0-amd64-netinst.iso) and click Select, which returns me to the "New VM - Step 2" window.
7. Because the OS is not detected automatically, I uncheck the "Automatically detect from the installation media / source" checkbox, start typing the word "debian" in the text box above it, and select Debian 12 from the pop-up selection menu.
8. Click Forward.

Actual behavior:

Input Error - Error setting installer parameters. Validating install media '/run/user/1000/doc/c0a3c3fc/debian-12.11.0-amd64-netinst.iso' failed. Could not start storage pool: cannot open directory '/run/usr/1000/doc/c0a3c3fc': Permission denied.

Expected behavior: Create the VM and boot into the ISO that I selected in previous steps.

What am I doing wrong? Thanks!

solved: not plasmas fault: the monitors own smartcontrast did that.

Hi, please kindly direct me to the right community to ask this:

Plasma 6 is my favorite DE and i use KDE neon. The screen brightness adapts automatically to the windows i focus on, which is a good idea. But it does that the wrong way IMO. Dark windows are dimmed and bright windows are lit up. Why? Now i have both extremes switching back and forth all the time. Can we turn that the other way around or turn it off please?

I like that the screens hardware brightness setting is used now from the desktop. Great! But now i have no control over it anymore, since when i open a bright window, the brightness setting goes up too. I hate that at night.

Usually adjusting the brightness for me has one purpose:

• bright room: max display brightness (day)
• dark room: min display brightness (night)

...maybe something in between for transition. All the other features are nice to have but please only work on them when this main feature is secured.

Title mostly says it all. Preview is unironically an incredible piece of software. Between feature set and ease of use, I have yet to come across any FOSS that is comparable. Anyone know of a Linux alternative?

EDIT: Due to popular demand I should explain Preview more. It’s a “fully fledged” PDF editor, but somehow it’s completely different from something like Adobe Acrobat. The way most users will interact with it is as a seemingly very plain image viewer, but if you open a PDF you can add fillable boxes, rearrange pages, split and merge PDFs, etc. I cannot place exactly why it’s workflows feel so much better than something like Acrobat.

I want to put together a stack for hobbyist midi music composition. I understand there are a few more components to it than one might expect, but I think VMPK and Qtracer are going to be part of it?

Any tutorial links or suggestions appreciated!

https://vmpk.sourceforge.io/

https://qtractor.org/

Up to 2.7% in May 2025 from 1.5% in May 2023. Almost x2 in 2 years is very impressive.

Hello there,

I just want to buy a new gaming system, laptop, because I want to be mobile. There is only one game I cant give up that is league of legends. So I'm searching a manufactor, which can handle dual boot perfectly. I mean everytime I boot into windows and want to reboot into linux again, so my entry is gone (refind, systems and grub). Maybe there is a brand which separate two OS Hardware wise or has a BIOS espacially for such a case?

My friends and I are hosting a Linux and FOSS group chat to have some casual chat, help, and anything related to the topic really. We chose this platform to chat on to keep a privacy preserving way to engage with one another.

https://signal.group/#CjQKIBshKeuikl5HfagdB46bXpGOyQf_4cVvO3vUMs71DiB9EhDEbE8mS3EPYL0e9CQWHBsy

https://flathub.org/statistics

I never thought I’d be this upset to a point I’d be writing an article about something this sensitive with a clickbait-y title. It’s simultaneously demotivating, unproductive, and infuriating. I’m here writing this post fully knowing that I could have been working on accessibility in GNOME, but really, I’m so tired of having my mood ruined because of privileged people spending at most 5 minutes to write erroneous posts and then pretending to be oblivious when confronted while it takes us 5 months of unpaid work to get a quarter of recognition, let alone acknowledgment, without accounting for the time “wasted” addressing these accusations.

I beg you, please keep writing banger posts like fireborn’s I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back series and their interluding post. We need more people with disabilities to keep reminding developers that you exist and your conditions and disabilities are a spectrum and not absolute.

TheEvilSkeleton is a pretty big GNOME developer whom I'm pretty sure I've bumped into before.

I'm trying to boot some VMs using a script w/ a kickstart file. I'm using the following script that I found online and modified:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
#set -x
## Define variables
MEM_SIZE="8192"      # Memory setting in MiB
VCPUS="2"             # CPU Cores count
#OS_VARIANT="rocky9"   # List with osinfo-query  os
OS_VARIANT="rhel7.9"   # List with osinfo-query  os
ISO_FILE="~/Documents/software/os/RHEL-7.9-20200917.0-Server-x86_64-dvd1.iso" # Path to ISO file

case $OS_VARIANT in
        rhel7.9)
                KS=ks7.cfg;;
        rocky9)
                KS=ks9.cfg;;
esac

echo -en "Enter vm name: "
read VM_NAME
OS_TYPE="linux"
echo -en "Enter virtual disk size : "
read DISK_SIZE

DISK=~/.local/share/libvirt/images/${VM_NAME}.qcow2

echo "Creating disk"
sudo virt-install \
     --name ${VM_NAME} \
     --memory=${MEM_SIZE} \
     --vcpus=${VCPUS} \
     --location ${ISO_FILE} \
     --network network=default \
     --disk path=${DISK},size=${DISK_SIZE} \
     --graphics=none \
     --os-variant=${OS_VARIANT} \
     --console pty,target_type=serial \
     --initrd-inject ~/virt/${KS} --extra-args "inst.ks=file:/${KS} console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200n8"

I've obfuscated the directory paths, but they're all full paths and the script will build a VM. So basically just setting up a basic system, using the default network. Here's the config for that:

<network connections='3'>
  <name>default</name>
  <uuid>61afc7f1-9c5e-4cra-8d18-e3cf4f9358e9</uuid>
  <forward mode='nat'>
    <nat>
      <port start='1024' end='65535'/>
    </nat>
  </forward>
  <bridge name='virbr0' stp='on' delay='0'/>
  <mac address='52:54:00:7c:32:9b'/>
  <ip address='192.168.122.1' netmask='255.255.255.0'>
    <dhcp>
      <range start='192.168.122.2' end='192.168.122.254'/>
    </dhcp>
  </ip>
</network>

Looking at the XML for the VM, I see the following for the network:

<interface type='network'>
      <mac address='52:54:00:07:82:78'/>
      <source network='default' portid='800dfd67-d90a-42te-a0b7-c4c78cdae481' bridge='virbr0'/>
      <target dev='vnet7'/>
      <model type='virtio'/>
      <alias name='net0'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x01' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
    </interface>

When this VM is installing, and when it's booted, it does not have an IP. Meanwhile, if I go through virt-manager and select the default network, it gets an IP just fine. I've tried running the virt-install command w/ and w/o sudo (I run virt-manager as me - I'm in the libvirt group). Looking at the virt-manager built VM:

    <interface type='network'>
      <mac address='52:54:00:5e:f5:05'/>
      <source network='default' portid='d57dbc56-759e-40f9-856f-9623f4801a93' bridge='virbr0'/>
      <target dev='vnet8'/>
      <model type='virtio'/>
      <alias name='net0'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x01' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
    </interface>

Looking at virbr0:

$ ip link show master virbr0
11: vnet7: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue master virbr0 state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether fe:54:00:07:82:78 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
12: vnet8: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue master virbr0 state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether fe:54:00:5e:f5:05 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

Only difference I can see is one is created using virt-install and the other using virt-manager (which calls to virt-install, no?). I thought there was a way to see the actual virt-install command virt-manager was about to use when creating a VM, but I can't find it. Also can't find any logs to give me an idea why the VM isn't getting an IP. Running ethtool on the VM interface shows a link. I've wasted too much time getting this to work, and all the documentation suggests it should "just work!"

ETA: PEBKAC! Remember where I said I was using kickstart? Yeah, well it helps to actually include a network configuration, even if it is just DHCP! Feeling stupid, but it's working.

I have been tossing around the idea of a little distro hopping. I'm an avid mint fan. It was my first jump from windows. I became quite familiar with mint but felt the want to branch out and went down the rabbit hole (oh my lanta). I like stability and cleanliness. Security by default. Least mental load possible long-term.

I'm currently testing out NIXos. Next will be VanillaOS, 3rd will be Fedora Silverblue. Anyone have good recommendations? Easy backups, stability, security first posture, least maintenance and memory load. I hate getting scattered in symlinks, scripts, and filesystem placing.

I've tried going full custom Linux mint. But app armour and Firejail constantly conflict or require manual updating and tweaking to keep up to date with app installs, or general life cycle updates.

The most intriguing aspect if NIXos was that basically the entire configurable system was confined to two files. Infinitely reproducable. I tend to swap laptops or hardware relatively often being on the go or getting good tech deals. Having your entire system in two files essentially is awesome.

What are some pros and cons of different distros? What do you daily drive as a power user? Give me your thoughts and recommendations! Thanks.

I recently figured out how nice Wine works for running old Windows games. However, many of them are fixed at 800x600 or another similarly low resolution. No big deal under X11 or Windows since the game will just stretch to fill the screen. But on KDE Wayland, the game just runs unscaled with black bars all around and none of the display settings seem to help. Is there an accepted way of setting the screen to a lower resolution but stretching it to fit the full display on Wayland sessions?

Had to deal with this recently. The cause is openSUSE's move to SELinux on new installs, which by default blocks the required permissions for the RPM version of Steam. You can correct this with these commands: ausearch -c 'steam' --raw | audit2allow -a -M my-steam to create the permissions file and semodule -X 300 -i my-steam.pp to apply it. Hopefully this saves someone else from the wild goose chase I went on earlier.

Hiya!

I have a Raspberry Pi 4B set up as a print server, so it has to run 24/7. But it irks me that it's mostly idling.

I'd move my website to it, but I don't want to deal with it being open to the internet. The same goes for an e-mail server.

I was also thinking of running a Minecraft server on it. (Being able to play on the same world from different devices is kinda cool.) Alas, my RPi only has 4 GiBs of RAM. I worry that such a load would interfere with the print server.

Any ideas what I could run on it?

So I jumped from Windows to Linux, endeavouros btw, and would like to know:

how you keep your system clean? If you are infected how do you find out? What do you do about it then?

This blog post is already quite long, so it will omit changes merged for Plasma 6.5 (releasing in October, to be announced in a future post).

With the Plasma 6.2 release, we moved Plasma Dialer and Spacebar to the Plasma release cycle, allowing us to have consistent releases of the two apps. This completes our year long move to having all Plasma Mobile related projects released as part of wider KDE releases, streamlining the work for distributions and taking a load off us on having to maintain a separate release cycle!

In other news, a Fedora spin for Plasma Mobile was released! It will only be targeting devices that can currently boot Fedora (i.e. not ARM phones), but is very exciting nonetheless!