If you need to run commands as root regularly with Rofi, you may find this useful.

So let's say you want to run usb-creator-gtk to create a bootable USB stick. You have write access to the USB stick's block device but it's not enough: you need to become root.

You can of course open a terminal and run sudo usb-creator-gtk. But it's kind of tedious if you need to do that more than once.

If you want to permanently run that command as root, do this:

• sudo visudo to edit the /etc/sudoers file.
• Add the line yourusername ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/usb-creator-gtk
• Confirm that you can now run the command as root without being asked your password: sudo usb-creator-gtk should pop the USB Creator window rightaway.
• Create a desktop entry in your home directory that will override the system-wide one: cp /usr/share/applications/usb-creator-gtk.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/

That way, when Rofi looks for available applications in drun mode, it will find your local usb-creator-gtk.desktop file before the system-wide file of the same name and will use the local one and ignore the system-wide one.

If you'd like Rofi to list both, rename the one in your local directory to a different name from the system-wide one.

• Edit ~/.local/share/applications/usb-creator-gtk.desktop:
  • Modify Exec=usb-creator-gtk to Exec=sudo usb-creator-gtk.
  • Modify Name=Startup Disk Creator to Name=Startup Disk Creator (sudo), so you know Rofi picks your local desktop file over the system-wide one, or you can tell the sudo version apart from the normal version if you want to keep both listed.

And that's it!

Start Rofi, type "startup" and the autocompletion should list "Startup Disk Creator (sudo)" - and of course, selecting it should pop the window rightaway.

My preference is Diodon - especially with the Add images to clipboard history option enabled. And if you enable the Application Indicator plugin, it lhappily stays as an icon in your system tray.

The perfect clipboard for i3.

I use Remmina all the time to access remote computers through RDP and VNC. But it's annoying in i3 to open the main window, select a profile, then close the main window to leave just the remote session window.

Remmina does have a command line option to dock into the system tray using appindicator (the -i option, i.e. "start as a tray icon") and right-clicking the icon does provide a quick access to saved profiles.

However, there's a problem with it: when the last window closes, Remmina exits instead of staying docked in the systray- Unfortunately, the Remmina folks won't fix it - and in fact plan of killing the systray icon altogether.

There's always the possibility of making a small shell script that restarts Remmina each time it closes. The problem with that approach is, it a Remmina process doesn't terminate cleanly and stays in the background for some reason (it happens, especially if i3 is closed unexpectedly) then you have to open a terminal and kill the rogue remmina process, which is kind of a pain. Not to mention, if / when Remmina stops providing a systray icon, it'll stop working.

So instead, since I use Rofi as a launcher in i3 - like most everybody I believe - and Rofi supports custom scripts, I made a small script to parse saved Remmina profiles and add them to Rofi as a special mode, to provide quick access to them.

As a bonus, when you're not using Remmina, it's not running and eating up memory for nothing.

You can find it here, along with instructions to install it:

https://github.com/Giraut/rofi_remmina_profiles_menu

Kind of trivial, but I figured I'd share it in case someone else finds it useful.

If you remember Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft, you probably remember him as a buffoon with his foot more often in his mouth than in his shoe, a disgusting ultra-billionaire and a general dirtbag.

So I was properly surprised to watch his interview with Jon Stewart: he's created a website called USA Facts that actually seems to provide a genuine, much needed public service to this country, and against all expectations, the man really has interesting things to say for a change.

Although, Ballmer being Ballmer, he also managed to make a really cringy Twin Towers comparison on 9/11. Because Ballmer... You can't polish a turd.

Still, I encourage you to watch this interview: it's surprisingly interesting and a lot more profound than whatever you might think of Ballmer might have you expect. Unlike Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer might actually turn out to be somebody worthy of respect later in life after all.

Here are a few bindings in my i3 config file that I find super useful (bear in mind that I use a Kensington Expert Mouse and Button8 is a suitably unusual but still easily clicked button on that trackball, so you may want to change it to something more suitable to your preferred pointing device):

# Clicking the title bar with the upper-right button closes the window (regular default binding, just different button)
bindsym --release button8 kill

# Scrolling over any window title bar controls the volume
bindsym button4 exec pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ +5% && $refresh_i3bar
bindsym button5 exec pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -5% && $refresh_i3bar

[...]

bar {

        [...]

        # Clicking the empty space in the bottom bar with the upper-right button opens the launcher
        bindsym button8 exec "rofi -modi drun,run -show drun"

        # Scrolling over the empty space in the bottom bar controls the volume
        bindsym button4 exec --no-startup-id pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ +5% && $refresh_i3bar
        bindsym button5 exec --no-startup-id pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -5% && $refresh_i3bar
}

I find those bindings useful because unless a window is open fullscreen - which I rarely do personally - then there's always a window title bar at the top and the bar at the bottom.

As a result, when I quickly want to lower the volume - when the missus yells at me in the middle of the night for example 🙂 - I can slam the trackball up or down and quickly scroll the volume down.

Similarly, I can move the pointer all the way down and open the launcher with my unusual trackball button, and move all the way back up and close a window by clicking on the appropriate title bar with the same button, so that I don't really have to hit the keyboard most of the time for opening and closing simple stuff.

Anyhow, I thought I'd share.

Apparently I installed that thing in 2006 and I last updated it in 2016, then I quit updating it for some reason that I totally forgot. Probably laziness...

It's been running for quite some time and we kind of forgot about it in the closet, until the SSH tunnel we use to get our mail outside our home stopped working because modern openssh clients refuse to use the antiquated key cipher I setup client machines with way back when any longer.

I just generated new keys with a more modern cipher that it understands (ecdsa-sha2-nistp256) and left it running. Because why not 🙂

I still use the old - and last - official Linux .deb package for Teams and sure enough, it doesn't behave properly in i3: Teams starts and shows up in the systray but the window is fullscreen and won't close. I have to keep a workspace around just for Teams.

I suspect Electron of course. Electron doesn't integrate well with any Linux desktop environment. Just wondering if someone knows if there's a trick to make it close in i3.

I got into computers when there was no GUI.

Then years later I got a Win95 PC and I found the Windows GUI pretty good - although the rest of the OS was not. My personal Linux PC running Slackware 96 came with FVWM95 wich was a good approximation. So I switched to that.

That was just for graphical utilities of course - of which there weren't very many. I spent the rest of my time in the Linux console or in xterm using screen for convenience.

Fast-forward to today: I still do that. I still like the Win95 UI paradigm, so I run Mint / Cinnamon. But most of what I do with it is open a Gnome terminal, blow it up and start tmux - like screen but better.

And, ya know, for almost 3 decades, whether it's Mint or anything else I used, that's pretty much what I've been doing: running screen in a terminal in a Win95-like GUI. And it works fine for me.

I recently ordered a laptop that comes with Debian / Wayland and the Sway window manager installed by default. I learned a long time ago that it's often better to go with whatever is installed by default than try to reinstall everything and fight a system that wasn't designed for it.

The laptop will take a few weeks to get here. So to prepare for when it lands on my porch, I decided to get into Sway on my current machine, to get used to it. I figured even if I don't like it, at least that way I'll be comfortable with it, and I'll know whether it's acceptable as it is or whether I should spend the time installing something more Win95-like.

But my current machine doesn't run Wayland, just plain Xorg. 2 minutes of searching revealed that Sway is in fact i3wm for Wayland.

Great! I promptly installed i3 on my Linux Mint box, switch to it, fucked around with the config file for a few hours and... I love it! That's pretty much exactly what I do with Cinnamon anyway but quicker!

And just like that, I switch to i3. I felt right at home with it from the get-go. The whole Win95-like UI was just a familiarity: in fact, what I've always wanted was a tiling window manager.

And yes, I did spend a few hours - almost half a day really - configuring the thing exactly how I like. But if I'm honest, I probably spent just as much time with Cinnamon way back when I switched to that too. So it's no different really.

So the takeaway here is: even if you have decades-old die-hard habits and you don't want to change, you should expose yourself to change every once in a while: you might just get surprised 🙂

I'm about to step into the wonderful world of ARM Linux. I work with ARM32 as an embedded developer profesionally (Cortex-M3 specifically) so I'm not a complete newbie. But I've never used ARM64, and I've never used it with a desktop OS. So I'm doing my research, as one does, to know roughly what I'll be dealing with.

I have a few questions regarding backward compatibility and architecture-naming. Maybe you specialists out there could shed some light.

From what I could find, I understand the following:

• arm64 and aarch64 are the same thing: the former is what Linus likes to say while the latter is what ARM calls their own stuff.
• arm64 / aarch64 really mean "compatible with ARMv8" as a least common denominator, meaning ARMv8.x-y (x being the extension, y being A for application or R for realtime) will run it, just without taking advantage of any extension or realtime instructions.
• ARMv9.x will run arm64 / aarch64 kernels and applications, as it's (supposedly) backward-compatible with ARMv8, just without taking advantage of the ARMv9 ISA.
• If I want to create arm64 software that takes advantage of this-or-that extension or realtime instructions, I have to compile it in explicitely. I'm not sure if gcc handles special instructions, I haven't checked yet, but I suppose it does since it knows about the Thumb mode for instance.

Do I understand correctly?

If I do create some software that relies on extended ARMv8 or ARMv9 features and I want to release my software as a package, how should I name the package's architecture? Is there even a standard for that? Will it get rejected by the package managers of the few ARM distros out there, or will it be recognized as a subset of the wider arm64 / aarch64 architecture?

Hey everybody,

After a few months without using FreeCAD (but keeping up with the daily updates) I need to model a quick something today.

And I realize there seems to be a new feature in the 0.22.0-dev version that prevents me from orbiting around the model when I'm in the sketcher:

I use OpenSCAD-style 3D navigation, which means I left-click to rotate the model. In the sketcher, left-clicking is used to do a rectangular lasso selection, and that prevents me from orbiting around the model. I tried with shift, ctrl, alt and all combinations thereof, but there seems to be no way to disable that selection feature.

Fortunately I also use a 3DConnexion Spacemouse, so I'm not completely stuck, but it's kind of annoying to have to use that thing when I'd rather not move my hand away from the keyboard.

Anybody knows how to disable the lasso thing?

After their shameless Synology shilling a couple of weeks ago, today Techlore is trying to sell me Proton Pass.

Is Proton Pass a bad password manager? I don't know. It seems okay, but I have no opinion.

What I do know is that Techlore is affiliated with Proton, which makes their newest 10-minute video - in which they reveal the affiliation only at the last minute - 10 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

Unfortunately, In the business they're in, the merest hint of a bias kind of invalidates any advice they give. As the saying goes, when you point out other people's body odor, you'd better make sure you took a shower yourself.

Unsubscribe...

You might recall a few weeks ago that I requested from a well-known large and somewhat litigious company the source code of the modification they made to a certain GPL debugger, and that they grudgingly agreed after a long time.

So I set out to work on the pile of code they sent me and managed to extract their modifications and port them fo the latest version of that GPL tool... apart from one driver for their debug probes that we use throughout our company: the cunning bastards left a stub in the open-source debugger (I have the code for that) and that stubs talks to the rest of the driver in the form of a closed-source TCP server.

It's a blatant trick to go around the GPL by taking advantage of the grey area surrounding linking in the GPL - i.e. the question of whether a closed-source program can be linked to GPL code and not become GPL itself, which still hasn't been tested in court to my knowledge. If I recall correctly, the FSF is of the opinion that anything that dynamically links to GPL code becomes GPL too, but that's just an opinion.

And of course, here in this case, the aforementioned company added one degree of separation between their closed-source driver and the GPL tool that uses it by making it a server, so whatever argument against linking to GPL code becomes even weaker.

Anyway, as you can imagine, I'm disappointed: my work is 90% there, but I still don't have that one driver and their closed-source faux-server is half-broken and dog-slow because of the time it takes to spawn the server and communicate with it through TCP, and I can't fix it. And I'm 100% certain that if I asked them to send me the source code for that, they'd tell me to suck eggs.

But here's what happened: I got so tired of their shenanigans that I started investigating other debug probes I could use instead of their proprietary junk. And after quite a lot of investigation, I found one solution based on open hardware and open software that, with some careful configuration, works 2x to 3x faster than their proprietary debug probe. Wow! I didn't even know it was possible, and I probably wouldn't have researched it if I had had all I needed to make what we already own works.

Long story short: I proposed that my company replace all our existing proprietary debug probes with the open hardware one and my boss agreed. That's like 20 probes in total, between R&D, testing and production, and at the tune $266.99 per probe for the original proprietary one, that's $5339.80 the egregious GPL-violating company won't get from us. Not to mention renewal of the license for their IDE that we've been using for almost 2 decades, because finally, at long last, after over a month of solid work, I finally managed to free up our source code from their vendor lock-in and make it compile, debug and flash using open-source tools from start to finish!

So yeah, I didn't get what I originally wanted from that company. That's the bad news. But in the end I ended up better off without it, and that's the good news 🙂