Linux

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?

https://flathub.org/statistics

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'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!"

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

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?

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.

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!

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?

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?

Thank you everyone for your insight, comments, and help with the process! I'm started with Fedora, and after some brief confusion between Gnome and Plasma, I'm off! :D

Special thanks to all of you cool dudes: [@xylogx@lemmy.world] [@bell@lemmy.world] [@niucllos@lemm.ee] [@Archr@lemmy.world] [@bacon_pdp@lemmy.world] [@Gabadabs@lemmy.blahaj.zone] [@CoyoteFacts@lemmy.ca] [@paequ2@lemmy.today] [@SnotFlickman@lemmy.blahaj.zone] [@data1701d@startrek.website] [@swelter_spark@redhat.com] [@Crazyslinkz@lemmy.world] [@Kirk@startrek.website] [@spv.sh@lemmy.spv.sh] [@secret300@lemmy.sdf.org] [@enemenemu@lemm.ee] [@UNYON@linux.community] [@OldFartPhil@lemmy.world] [@Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz] [@Wolfie@lemm.ee] [@beagle@discuss.tchncs.de] [@octobob@lemmy.ml] [@teawrecks@sopuli.xyz] [@some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org]

5/5 stars, would upgrade again!

What's the future of screen capture on Linux? What's holding it back? What's pushing it forward?

A version of this question that might be more accurate/holistic: Do you think there'll be a standard, high-performance desktop API in our lifetimes?

It feels like there isn't the same market pressure like there is for Valve and Proton that'll make a good capture protocol appear. I'd love to eat my words, but I'd also easily bet one trillion dollars^fn1 that I'll be dead before anything dethrones GPU vendor extensions.

tangential additions / context for the terminally bored:

For example, Nvfbc+Nvenc is a must-have for game streaming with Moonlight and ALVR (not sure if AMD has anything like that), but it's my poor understanding that this type of GPU-only framebuffer capture isn't possible on Wayland for security or other reasons, which is sadly keeping me on X11.

Windows probably has awesome screencapture APIs given that the NVIDIA Capture SDK documentation cites it as why they removed Nvfbc from their Window's drivers but not their Linux drivers.

The proof that Windows reaped the rewards of unifying all their stuff can be seen in the Lossless Scaling-likes that are on the market (Magpie, Integer Scaling, etc.) while all Linux has is like Gamescope and vkbasalt [^fn2], so apples and oranges.

[^fn2]: super-tangential: I tried to ducttape a Lossless Scaling-like out of nvfbc, using a shader to do closest neighbor scaling. But once I had to truly delve into Xorg, I gave up, as playing Maple Legends was not worth all that effort.

https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/

The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.4. This fresh new release improves on nearly every front, with progress being made in accessibility, color rendering, tablet support, window management, and more.

Plasma already offered virtual desktops and customizable tiles to help organize your windows and activities, and now it lets you choose a different configuration of tiles on each virtual desktop. The Wayland session brings some new accessibility features: you can now move the pointer using your keyboard’s number pad keys, or use a three-finger touchpad pinch gesture to zoom in or out. Plasma file transfer notification now shows a speed graph, giving you a more visual idea of how fast the transfer is going, and how long it will take to complete. When any applications are in full screen mode Plasma will now enter Do Not Disturb mode and only show urgent notifications, and when you exit full screen mode, you’ll see a summary of any notifications you missed. Now when an application tries to access the microphone and finds it muted, a notification will pop up. A new feature in the Application Launcher widget will place a green New! tag next to newly installed apps, so you can easily find where something you just installed lives in the menu. The Display and Monitor page in System Settings comes with a brand new HDR calibration wizard, and support for Extended Dynamic Range (a different kind of HDR) and P010 video color format has been added. System Monitor now supports usage monitoring for AMD and Intel graphic cards, it can even show the GPU usage on a per-process basis. Spectacle, the built-in app for taking screenshots and screen recordings, has much improved design and more streamlined functionality. The background of the desktop or window now darkens when an authentication dialog shows up, helping you locate and focus on the window asking for your password. There’s a brand-new Animations page in System Settings that groups all the settings for purely visual animated effects into one place, making it easier to find and configure them. Aurorae is a newly added SVG vector graphics theme engine for KWin window decorations.

You can read more about these and many other other features in the Plasma 6.4 anounncement and complete changelog.

Hello, I yet again come, hat in hand, for assistance from those wiser in the ways of the Linux. I’m having a bit of an issue downloading Jellyfin on my ElementaryOS laptop. I’ve tried all the guide on the first few pages of ddg only to receive errors after entering the comman “ sudo apt-get update “. I get ERR:3 https//repo.jellyfin.org/debian circle Release 404 Not found.

If someone can point me the way I’d be most appreciative

Regular call to fzf, but output the index number of the selected entry, instead the text itself. It's a pretty niche use case, but there was a few times in the past when I needed it. You can use options for fzf just normally too.

fzn() {
    nl | fzf --with-nth 2.. "${@}" | awk '{print $1}'
}

Usage:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type d | fzn -e -m

I always forget how to do this manually, so I made this simple function for Bash. Just copy this like an alias into your .bashrc and use it like any other command in a pipe.

I know this probably comes up a lot and is liable to spark some debate, but I'm curious what the good options are for terminals. I've skimmed some reddit/lemmy posts about it and looked at a few options and I dunno how to decide between them because they all seem like they're too narrowly focused on some particular use case. I'm just using it for general terminal stuff, nothing terribly fancy. I'm aware that there's not one terminal to rule them all or anything, so I'm curious: what do you folks use, and more importantly, why do you use that over the (many) other options available?

Personally I've just been using konsole since it's what came with kde and it seems nice and all, but I feel like I'm missing out on features I don't even know about. One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such where i'm doing the tinkering instead of constantly tabbing out to duck.ai or w/e.

Single core, 32 bit CPU, can't even do video playback on VLC. But it kinda works for some offline work, like text editing, and even emulation through zsnes! It's crazy how Linux keeps old hardware like this running.

Thankfully though, this laptop CPU is upgradable, and so is the ram, so I'm planning on revitalizing and bringing this old Itautec to the 21st century 😄