A monk once got locked out of the monastery.

To get back in, he went to the market, bought a dozen bananas.

He thus got hold of the monkey, unlocked the gates, and went inside.

🐒 = 📿 + 🔑

I've been using it for months now .. I love that I can play droidfish (cuckoo chess engine is great for lower rated games.. really good practice partner). I started with the default (degoogled) image, but gave in and installed the Google play enabled one. Now I can read google play/kindle/o reilly/blinkist.

Recently installed Minecraft education for a young family member... Runs like a charm too.

Go waydroid!

Linux Firmware Update Utility Fwupd Will Use Zstd Compression for Future Releases

The devs are also considering enforcing signed commits in an attempt to prevent supply chain issues like the XZ backdoor.

Edit: note for downvotes: I understand some of you disagree with the need for a switch. However, are you downvoting the news itself (i.e. shooting the messenger?)

I've gotta hand it to the new GNU Linux mascot replacing Tux as of today, brabix. Love the matrix themed T-shirt!

Ref: this post celebrating the first of the fourth 🍀

Edit: The Big Day is over. For those of you (I'm kinda guessing there were quite a few) who weren't sure what this was (and for everyone else too, thanks for being a sport) (Happy??) April Fools! (please tell me you already knew this!)

I realized (as I was commuting) this morning, that some people must live near timezone borders.

How does that work for you? Do you think in work time at home? Home time at work?

It must be easier these days with smartphones and smart watches automatically adjusting time according to you location?

Share your experience please, I'm curious!

I'll need to mirror print stuff regularly (flip across the vertical axis), and I'm trying to make the process convenient.

The manual way to mirror print would be by invoking lp, e.g.

lp -o mirror myfile.pdf

Invoking lp would work for images, PDF, ps etc. But but for application (open office draw) files. Unfortunately, I don't see an obvious way to mirror print within the application itself.

I'm thinking of setting up a mirror printer in CUPS that would automatically apply the -o mirror to any documents that hit it.

I suspect this would require some tinkering with CUPS filters - I'll dig into it sometime.

I can't be the only one who's needed this at some point in time.

Has anyone here done something similar? Looking forward to your thoughts!

I recently ran across SpiralLinux - GitHub page, and found the concept of how the maintainer is packaging it very cool.

The maintainer has been maintaining Gecko Linux for a while now - it has the same underlying concept.

The gist is - you're basically installing Debian, but with customizations that the maintainer(s) thought would be very helpful. Basically - better out of the box experience for new users, but also less work to do even for experienced users, and it comes with different download flavors - Gnome, Plasma, XFCE, Mate, etc.

Bit more detail by the maintainer in this Reddit comment:

Exactly. It's like I went over to your house and installed and configured Debian on your computer, and then you kicked me out of your house as soon as I finished. ;-) The installed system no longer has any connection whatsoever with me or the SpiralLinux project, which is good because you wouldn't want your entire system to depend on a random single developer maintaining it.

(original Reddit comment has more details).

I thought this was pretty cool. I'm still trying to read up online on trying to find how the package lists are maintained, etc., and I might be interested in contributing if I'm able to in the future.

Just wanted to share!

How are y'all managing internal network certificates?

At any point in time, I have between 2-10 services, often running on a network behind an nginx reverse proxy, with some variation in certificates, none ideal. Here's what I've done in the past:

• setup a CLI CA using openssl
  • somewhat works, but importing CAs into phones was a hassle.
• self sign single cert per service
  • works, very kludgy, very easy
• expose http port only on lo interface for sensitive services (e.g. pihole admin), ssh local tunnel when needed

I see easy-RSA seems to be more user friendly these days, but haven't tried it yet.

I'm tempted to try this setup for my local LAN facing (as exposed to tunnel only, such as pihole) services:

• Get letsencrypt cert for single public DNS domain (e.g. lan.mydomain.org).. not sure about wildcard cert.
• use letsencrypt on nginx reverse proxy, expose various services as suburls (e.g. lan.mydomain.org/nextcloud)

Curious what y'all do and if I'm missing anything basic.

I have no intention of exposing these outside my local network, and prefer as less client side changes as possible.

Two main points:

• no one unified distro to keep things simple (thread OP)

VS

• people don't care. Someone else needs to advocate, sell, migrate, and support (medium term) Linux (whichever distro they want) for the intermediate term (few months at least) - thread response).

I think a lot of the 97% desktop market share is like this, instead of the hands on 2-3%.

I never imagined I'd like playing Tetris on the command line, on a terminal on my phone (termux), but here I am!

I couldn't find any Tetris app on fdroid, and just checked if pkgs had one. Lo and behold! It asked me to run pkgs install vitetris, and when I did, the tetris command was there to launch the game.

It's a two step process, as opposed to just launching an app, but it is very lightweight, no tracking, and FOSS.

For anyone with termux already installed and feeling a bit nostalgic, might be worth trying it out.

I have mixed feelings about calling this one a tip.. but I've recently been interested in giving a shout out (think passive advertising) to open source technology I use and like (🐧, 🦎, vim, etc..).

I bought this set of 206 stickers from Amazon a few weeks ago for $10 (9.99, but that's really 10).

The stickers are very hard to peel off till you get the hang of it, but can vouch.

Inspired by this Lemmy post

Use !! to substitute your last command

browse Lemmy

check the hole out

try digging in a bit

profit!

I couldn't find a nix community, so I'm hoping it is ok that I'm posting on the nixos one instead. I'll switch to mailing list/discord if necessary, but I have a lemmy app on my phone, and it is much easier to have an ongoing conversation from here, so I decided to give it a shot. Here goes!

While I have a NixOS laptop, I primarily use other systems (e.g. OpenSuse Tumbleweed) as of now.

I love the ability to define the packages I want installed, with home-manager managing my command line utilities (e.g mtr, dig, protobuf etc).

I've been playing around a bit with protobuf recently, and after generating some c++ code using protoc, I loaded up the generated code in vscode, which understandably wasn't able to find the development headers for protobuf (since they are in the nix store - /nix/store/h2h5fs8iv2a8rmlkfhr6id6y4jxwd5i1-protobuf-3.21.12/include/google/protobuf/io)

I tried to compile the code anyways on the command line, and got some errors.

I might need an OS specific protobuf install just for the development headers, but I'm pretty sure I should be able to, and just don't know how. Here's what I get when I try to compile:

$ g++ searchReq.pb.cc
In file included from searchReq.pb.cc:4:
searchReq.pb.h:10:10: fatal error: google/protobuf/port_def.inc: No such file or directory
   10 | #include 
      |          ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.

Any tips/pointers would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

===========================================

Edit: Thank you all, particularly @[email protected] and @[email protected] for the help. After setting the include path (compile) and LD_LIBRARY_PATH (link), things work great.

I ended up writing a small Makefile for convenience in the short run:

INC_FLAGS:=-I$(HOME)/.nix-profile/include -Icpp
LD_FLAGS:=-L$(HOME)/.nix-profile/lib -l protobuf

run: task
	LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(HOME)/.nix-profile/lib ./task

task:
	g++ $(LD_FLAGS) $(INC_FLAGS) main.cpp cpp/searchReq.pb.cc -o task

regen:
	protoc --python_out=python --cpp_out=cpp searchReq.proto

That's enough to get me going for now.

TODO - read up the NIXOs Wiki C page in more detail

fortune | cowsay -f turtle | lolcat is a fun thing to have in your .bashrc