General Linux Chat and Small Questions v. Year of the Linux Desktop! - Hardware & Software

[QUOTE=helifreak;51806798]If in doubt just ditch Samba and use NFS.[/QUOTE] Wouldn't NFS still get fucked by the firewall?

Today I learned that ZFS and preallocation do not mix. I was trying to figure out why reading files from my media center was so slow, 5-30MB/s slow. Is the disk dying? No Is some other process thrashing the disk? No Network problems? No ZFS tuning options? Let's not get into this I haven't had to think about fragmentation in so long it didn't occur to me to check it for a while. What I found was disgusting: 63166 fragments on a 7GB file.

My laptop's battery life isn't amazing. Would a distro like Mint improve battery life over Windows 10, or would I have to go for a lighter distro? I'm only considering Mint because I've been a Windows guy my entire life and I'm used to things Just Working™, and Mint seems more of a Windows-style plug-and-play distro than others do. Laptop is relatively recent with a Skylake i5 and a 940M, but Acer had the bright idea of only including 24000 mAh of lithium. I get like 4 hours of wake time, tops. [editline]3rd March 2017[/editline] Should I be looking at Lubuntu or Xubuntu instead? And what desktop environment should I use? I have some sneaking suspicions about my hardware that makes me not want a DE that uses acceleration. Aaaah, so many choices :worried:

[QUOTE=AtomicSans;51911066]My laptop's battery life isn't amazing. Would a distro like Mint improve battery life over Windows 10, or would I have to go for a lighter distro? I'm only considering Mint because I've been a Windows guy my entire life and I'm used to things Just Working™, and Mint seems more of a Windows-style plug-and-play distro than others do. Laptop is relatively recent with a Skylake i5 and a 940M, but Acer had the bright idea of only including 24000 mAh of lithium. I get like 4 hours of wake time, tops. [editline]3rd March 2017[/editline] Should I be looking at Lubuntu or Xubuntu instead? And what desktop environment should I use? I have some sneaking suspicions about my hardware that makes me not want a DE that uses acceleration. Aaaah, so many choices :worried:[/QUOTE] Go with Xubuntu, you'll like that over Lubuntu. Lubuntu is designed with low end machines in mind and I think your laptop is far from low end.

[QUOTE=Mike16112;51911309]Go with Xubuntu, you'll like that over Lubuntu. Lubuntu is designed with low end machines in mind and I think your laptop is far from low end.[/QUOTE] Alright, I'll give it a try. Xfce seems nice.

Well I probably shouldn't have tried dual-booting my first Linux install because UEFI is making my life hell. It just boots straight into Windows no matter what. There isn't even a boot option for it in the boot menu. [editline]4th March 2017[/editline] It's definitely installed, there's just no way to boot it. I set up all my partitions correctly and I think GRUB is working, but it's just not bootable.

In case of future people with the same problem: Manually add Ubuntu's UEFI entry in the BIOS. It only automatically recognizes Windows installs.

AFAIK the only "automatic" UEFI booting is the default boot path /efi/boot/bootx64.efi. Any other UEFI boot entry has to be manually added.

I keep getting segfaults when playing Civ V :(

Would it be wise to dualboot Windows 10 and Linux over two drives? I wanna put Windows and /, /usr ,/boot, and maybe swap on an SSD, and then stick /var, /home/, and /temp on an HDD alongside the other Windows partition and a shared NTFS partition for Google Drive, Downloads, Music, etc. Could I also hypothetically set up LVM across the two drives and have that all abstracted away from me? I can set up my own partitions no big deal but I'm mostly curious.

[QUOTE=SGTNAPALM;51988931]Would it be wise to dualboot Windows 10 and Linux over two drives? I wanna put Windows and /, /usr ,/boot, and maybe swap on an SSD, and then stick /var, /home/, and /temp on an HDD alongside the other Windows partition and a shared NTFS partition for Google Drive, Downloads, Music, etc. Could I also hypothetically set up LVM across the two drives and have that all abstracted away from me? I can set up my own partitions no big deal but I'm mostly curious.[/QUOTE] I've been running a dual boot Windows 10/NixOS for a while now without any trouble.

I have them both on the same SSD. I have this odd quirk that when I press Super + shift + Q in grub, it exits grub and starts windows instead. I love it, because I couldn't be arsed to add Windows to the grub list.

even my mum uses numix theme now

I had Linux on a Btrfs RAID and Windows on an external HDD and oh god the performance was atrocious

Are there any real dangers at the moment to disabling secure boot? I bought a new Asus gaming laptop that had Windows 10 pre-installed, which is great for gaming, but I am trying to dual boot Ubuntu MATE with it. I tried to install it with secure boot enabled but I couldn't enrol the key for some reason. I know that I might be able to do it with some work, but I bought this laptop yesterday and don't want to mess with it too much so that I don't risk breaking it. So, I decided to disable secure boot and install Ubuntu. But are there any real security dangers to disabling secure boot? How common are boot kits and how does one get infected by one? I don't think I've ever encountered a boot kit. Does the attacker need physical access to your computer to install a boot kit or can it somehow be done remotely, and if it can be done remotely, how? What attack vectors do I need to be careful of? Thank you in advance for any and all answers! :)

Wouldn't it be about as insecure as any system pre-Secure Boot?

[QUOTE=FPtje;51990706]I have them both on the same SSD. I have this odd quirk that when I press Super + shift + Q in grub, it exits grub and starts windows instead. I love it, because I couldn't be arsed to add Windows to the grub list.[/QUOTE] A while ago I was messing with Puppy Linux. I used its creation tool and accidentally set it to mess with the bootloader on C:/ instead of my thumbdrive. For the past two years I've had GRUB for Windows and nothing else and I've never cared enough to fix it.

I use rEFInd (with [url=https://github.com/EvanPurkhiser/rEFInd-minimal]this skin[/url]) to dual boot Windows 10 and Arch, both using UEFI. It's real nice.

This feels like a stupid question, but is there a simple way to "launch" something from bash? This is essentially what I want as a script: [code] #!/bin/bash if [ "$#" -eq 0 ]; then exit 1 fi cmd="$1" shift if ! command -v "$cmd"; then exit 1 fi "$cmd" "$@" &>/dev/null & disown echo $! [/code] I know this seems like a huge workaround to avoid typing "&>/dev/null &" after a command, but I think it would be way more intuitive to just type [code]launch command[/code] from a prompt and have it run. [editline]22nd March 2017[/editline] Bleh, I gave up Googling too early. It's called "setsid", part of util-linux. [code]setsid command[/code] does exactly what I want. [editline]22nd March 2017[/editline] Shitfuck, actually it looks like setsid doesn't prevent stderr from flooding the shell.

Posting from Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi I got for free at work :D It's pretty speedy.

I am quite a novice when it comes to Linux so I might be better off to ask for some advice here. At work we have a relatively old machine which we want to re-purpose again as second workstation at our service desk, but the problem is it can barely keep up with Windows 10 (ran Windows XP flawlessly first). Since my boss is an absolute nut with computers and I don't want to explain too much, is there a lightweight Linux distro that has a UI either comparable to Windows or Mac OS?

[QUOTE=Merijnwitje;52010675]I am quite a novice when it comes to Linux so I might be better off to ask for some advice here. At work we have a relatively old machine which we want to re-purpose again as second workstation at our service desk, but the problem is it can barely keep up with Windows 10 (ran Windows XP flawlessly first). Since my boss is an absolute nut with computers and I don't want to explain too much, is there a lightweight Linux distro that has a UI either comparable to Windows or Mac OS?[/QUOTE] You could probably get away with using something with XFCE or MATE honestly, they're both fairly lightweight and resemble classic Windows in a lot of ways. If it's [I]really[/I] a potato... Might have to go with something LXDE/LXQt based..

[QUOTE=Merijnwitje;52010675]I am quite a novice when it comes to Linux so I might be better off to ask for some advice here. At work we have a relatively old machine which we want to re-purpose again as second workstation at our service desk, but the problem is it can barely keep up with Windows 10 (ran Windows XP flawlessly first). Since my boss is an absolute nut with computers and I don't want to explain too much, is there a lightweight Linux distro that has a UI either comparable to Windows or Mac OS?[/QUOTE]My dad uses Lubuntu on a 2005-ish Thinkpad without too much issue, and LXDE is very similar to Windows.

I haven't used Linux or a VM before so this may be a simple thing. Can I make a Live Linux USB drive to boot from while also being able load it in a VM on my main desktop? Also what distro should I install for general use and learning the OS? I'm guessing Mint.

[QUOTE=Shock_Coil;52015876]I haven't used Linux or a VM before so this may be a simple thing. Can I make a Live Linux USB drive to boot from while also being able load it in a VM on my main desktop? Also what distro should I install for general use and learning the OS? I'm guessing Mint.[/QUOTE] As much as I personally cannot stand it, Ubuntu is probably best for someone knew since every single question you will have is already answered 10+ times on askubuntu because nobody who uses Ubuntu can read.

My personal rule of thumb for Ubuntu derivatives is if I'm working with less than 2GB of RAM to go with Lubuntu, but if I have more than 2GB go with Xubuntu. [QUOTE=helifreak;52015885]As much as I personally cannot stand it, Ubuntu is probably best for someone knew since every single question you will have is already answered 10+ times on askubuntu because nobody who uses Ubuntu can read.[/QUOTE] I don't see any reason why Xubuntu isn't just as easy as Ubuntu, and 95% of the Q&A on AskUbuntu still applies. Its UI is also much more familiar to Windows users.

[QUOTE=helifreak;52015885]As much as I personally cannot stand it, Ubuntu is probably best for someone knew since every single question you will have is already answered 10+ times on askubuntu because nobody who uses Ubuntu can read.[/QUOTE] I suggest Linux Lite for beginners. Its XFCE implementation is set up to look like Windows, and it includes a ton of offline documentation. I've had computer illiterates use this distro just fine. It's also Ubuntu derivative so every google search for Ubuntu will still apply.

[QUOTE=Shock_Coil;52015876]I haven't used Linux or a VM before so this may be a simple thing. Can I make a Live Linux USB drive to boot from while also being able load it in a VM on my main desktop?[/QUOTE] Could you set the VM to boot from the Live USB?

What's all your opinions of Linux Mint? I've used it a little bit on a frankenstein computer I threw together but I've never used any other linux distros so i'm not sure how it compares.

[QUOTE=Pelf;52017150]What's all your opinions of Linux Mint? I've used it a little bit on a frankenstein computer I threw together but I've never used any other linux distros so i'm not sure how it compares.[/QUOTE] It was alright when I used it, but then they had that thing where someone compromised the actual ISOs on their website with malicious code, which is hugely worrying. I also like Xubuntu (an officially-recognized flavor of Ubuntu) better anyway, so I generally don't even bother with Linux Mint. I also found Cinnamon was really glitchy with a Nvidia GPU but maybe that was just me. I used quite a few Ubuntu derivatives before switching to Manjaro/Arch Linux, and I definitely think Xubuntu is the best of the bunch.