October 2020 - main

Changing a laptop disk drive (with MS Windows as well as Linux on it)
by Chris Green 26 Oct '20

26 Oct '20

What's the easiest way to change the disk drive in a laptop? I want to change the drive in a Thinkpad from a 240Gb spinning disk to a 480Gb SSD, both are SATA drives. The laptop has only one SATA socket. Can I simply connect both drives to SATA interfaces on another system and (very carefully!) us dd to copy from the old disk to the new one? Will this copy the boot sectors, the windows partitions and everything correctly? I know I'll need to resize the partitions after doing this but the alternative of recreating all the partitions from scratch and then copying the contents of each (there are four partitions I think) seems rather messy. -- Chris Green

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Why is anacron usually set up to only run checks from 07:00 to 23:00?
by Chris Green 24 Oct '20

24 Oct '20

I have a daily backup that is run by a script in /etc/cron.daily, this is thus controlled by anacron so that it gets run once a day even if the system isn't turned on all the time. I noticed that the backup gets run at about 07:30 and on checking how anacron is configured I notice that it only runs hourly from 07:00 through to 23:00. On modern systems this is configured by systemd (systemctl edit --full anacron.timer), on non-systemd systems there are other mechanisms but it still has the same configuration with anacron only being run from 07:00 to 23:00. Is there any reason that it's configured this way? In particular is there any downside to changing it to, say, 03:00 to 23:00? I can't really see any reason why one shouldn't schedule the anacron check *every* hour but maybe there is a reason for having an 8 hour gap. I want my backups run earlier so that there's less chance of me using the system when the backup is running so I have changed the systemd setting from "OnCalendar=*-*-* 07..23:30" to "OnCalendar=*-*-* 03..20:30". My systems are *mostly* turned on all the time but not absolutely always so anacron rather than cron is the best way to run the backups. -- Chris Green

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Gnome character applet
by Bev Nicolson 10 Oct '20

10 Oct '20

A while ago I expressed some frustration that there wasn't a character applet with Mint [Tessa] that included fractions etc. (I know you can use unicode but I've never found that method works for me.) Well I found the Gnome version in Synaptic today but I can't work out how to use it. By this I mean, how to find it in a menu or see it when I right click the panel so I can add one to the panel. I think I have enabled everything I should, and restarted this laptop just in case but nada. I have had a look at the Mint forum. Bev.

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Re: [ALUG] Spectacle file save failing
by Srdjan Todorovic 08 Oct '20

08 Oct '20

On Thu, 8 Oct 2020 at 14:12, Peter Berrie <peter.northerly(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Whatever this is, it survived both upgrade and dist-upgrade. I guess the next thing would be to try it in a VM. You might be able to try it out be creating a new user account - it will have the defaults for all the ~/.config/* files. I'm guessing you can still launch Dolphin fine and browse folder and open files that way? > Its not the end of the world, it is saving the files where they are supposed to go, so just not being able to trigger file opening from that particular menu isn't game over. But it seems very weird. This is very weird indeed. What version of Spectace? I have 19.04.3 Also, check out the 3rd post here: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=224&t=143366 You can see the full list of mimetype associations via: K > System Settings -> Applications -> File Associations -> and find inode/director to check that one. > You helped me once before with Sigil, which is working fine for me now, that was very much appreciated by the way. Oh, I have to admit, I don't remember that. I'm not all that active on ALUG these days (but still use Linux 100% at home :D ) Best regards, Srdjan

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Spectacle file save failing
by Peter Berrie 08 Oct '20

08 Oct '20

Does anyone have any idea how to approach this situation? I am using spectacle, the kde screenshot taker. It has an option to go to the folder in which it stores screenshots. When you try this, it ends up trying opening it in deadbeef the music player! I took a look at .config/mimeapps.list, which didn't help much. There was an entry for deadbeef, something to do with inodes. I deleted it, which did not change anything. Then I uninstalled deadbeef with the result it now goes to vlc! I suppose I could go on deleting all the player applications... but then it would probably start trying to open the folder in something else equally useless. I have noticed this behaviour before but forget exactly when. When answering yes to a prompt of 'open in file manager', what I got was an attempt to open the file in a (different) music player. Does anyone know where this stuff is configured? This is Debian stable, up to date. Something has clearly gone wrong, but what? The nice thing about spectacle is that it allows you to repeat the same screen area selection while taking a series of screenshots. So if for instance you are trying to do a tutorial showing how to edit a picture, you can just keep taking snaps of the small changes without having to redraw the whole area each time you take a shot. Same thing with if you are reading a document in an app and want to take a shot of several pages one after the other. Peter

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Local IP addresses in external DNS
by Mark Rogers 03 Oct '20

03 Oct '20

I have the following configuration: - External hosted DNS for *.example.com - Some hosts point to "local" IP addresses, eg test.example.com => 192.168.0.100 If I use dig or nslookup on my laptop, test.example.com resolves correctly to 192.168.0.100. But if I put that into my web browser I cannot access the site (to be clear here: 192.168.0.100 is on my local network and I can access it using its IP.) Chrome reports a DNS lookup error. My home network uses OpenWRT (on a Pi4) and if I use the network diagnostics on that to lookup test.example,com it fails. (It works for hosts configured with routable addresses, but not for any on my local network.) OpenWRT uses dnsmasq. Any suggestions how I can get this to work? Or even just why it doesn't? (Yes I know it's an odd configuration! But I am not aware of a reason why it shouldn't work and I've never had a problem with it before.) -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Re: [ALUG] Pinebook Pro
by Chris Green 03 Oct '20

03 Oct '20

On Sat, Oct 03, 2020 at 10:38:48AM +0100, Phil Thane wrote: > On 03/10/2020 09:26, Chris Green wrote: > > On Sat, Oct 03, 2020 at 09:18:29AM +0100, Mark Rogers wrote: > > > On Sat, 3 Oct 2020 at 08:46, Chris Green <cl(a)isbd.net> wrote: > > > > Do you *really* need any/all of those apps? [...] > > > > > > > > Everthing else is on the laptop. > > > Each to their own, obviously, but these days I increasingly ask myself > > > if I need the laptop; there isn't anything I can't do on the phone, > > > and plenty I often can't do on the laptop for the simple reason it's > > > not with me at the time I want to do it. (Much like the best camera is > > > usually the one you have with you, I find the same with laptop > > > functions.) > > > > > Yes, I can understand that. However when I see other members of my > > family (all younger than me) struggling to reply to E-Mail on their > > phones or trying to buy things on line I realise why (for me) the > > laptop is so much faster and easier. > > > > It's the 'unix philosphy' use small dedicated 'things' each good at > > what they do. :-) I have a digital camera which is pocketable but > > is *way* better than even the best smartphone camera and it's a > > fraction of the price (proper viewfinder, 30:1 zoom, etc.). > > > There's also the online banking app which works on the phone to generate a > code to login on the PC. > Works perfectly on a feature phone like mine, it's just an SMS message. -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] Pinebook Pro
by Chris Green 03 Oct '20

03 Oct '20

On Sat, Oct 03, 2020 at 10:57:19AM +0100, Phil Thane wrote: > > On 03/10/2020 08:45, Chris Green wrote: > > Do you*really* need any/all of those apps? > > I don't actually have many, my personal take is that most ought never to > have been developed when you could achieve much the same via the web. But > companies like apps because they have more control and harvest more data so > some things are hard or even impossible unless you cave in and get the app. > And some odd, niche things really do need them. For example I have OSMand > (satnav based on OSM). I have had, but lost when I upgraded, a canal/river > satnav app with useful info for boaters. I'll reinstall when I go away next > year (Covid willing). I have used a phone tracker app to upload details of > my solo trips for friends and family to keep a track of where I am. As per > previous mail there's online banking too. > A phone is too easily lost or stolen IMHO to be safe for personal banking. > Some of the other apps (Nextcloud for example) could be replaced by the > desktop versions on Linux, but I'm not sure how they'd scale to fit the > screen. And the functions are different, Nextcloud on the desktop is chiefly > designed for syncing files. On a phone that'd be mad because the multi-GB > server isn't going to sync with a phone. The phone app is mostly for syncing > contacts, calendar, downloading files when needed rather than syncing > everything. But I don't have contacts or calendar on my phone so there's no point in syncing them. I so rarely have my phone with me or turned on that calendar in particular would be pointless. I have a calendar on my laptop which is on almost all the time, and with me. > It also has an Instant Upload function so (given a data > connection) photos are uploaded to the server within seconds of taking them. > Useful for an oaf who might at any time fall in the water! > As I said I don't use the camera on my phone, I have a much, much, much better camera in my pocket more often than the phone. -- Chris Green

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Pinebook Pro
by Phil Thane 03 Oct '20

03 Oct '20

Hello Lugs, Pinebook Pro still going well. Issues so far: Changed OS to Manjaro with KDE (default on newer releases). Built-in speakers are tiny, therefore tinny. They were stupidly quite too until I discovered you can use KDE settings to crank up volume. Currently run them at 150%. Earphones OK at 100%. Then app vol sliders work OK. Zoom app not available and Zoom web won't work on FF. Does work on Chromium but is a bit flaky. KDE themes don't always work, fail during install. Maybe some rely on dependancies not ported to Arm64. Struggling to find my ideal KDE theme. AFAIK a light, transparent panel also means a transparent app launcher which is unreadable when it pops over a window with text in. Opaque panels look a bit clunky and I don't like dark themes. Will carry on looking. Sleep mode works but battery consumption whilst asleep is too high. I shut down if I expect to leave it more than an hour or two. Still think it was a good buy. I've been following development of PinePhone too. As with Pineboook the prototyping is being done openly with early adopter versions for software devs released a while ago. There are about 6 OS projects being ported but only one is Android (AOSP) based. The others are 'pure' Linux eg UBports. It's tempting but so much these days relies on mobile apps and there aren't going to be many of them for Linux OSs. Any thoughts anyone? -- Phil Thane Tweet @pthane www.pthane.co.uk 01767 449759 07582 750607

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