The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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Computer viking: May 30, 2011; Now with less breakage.

ExcessBLarg! posted:

dd with a large bs (say bs=1M) will issue far fewer syscalls than cat which might only read in 4k increments, but on a modern system the syscall overhead is pretty meh.

If you were doing direct I/O the large bs would also be beneficial on magnetic media to avoid extra seeks but this is going through the kernel's block cache voodoo anyways.

Modern hard disks will probably handle a blast of small-but-adjacent reads reasonably well, too; that sounds like something the command queuing logic would deal with?
(But yes it'll probably be coalesced in the kernel long before it hits the queues.)

# ? Mar 14, 2023 02:59

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# ? Jun 9, 2024 05:24

Storm One: Jan 12, 2011

Twerk from Home posted:

Both at work and at home, I have machines with a ton of RAM but using network storage that is better at continuous reads rather than low latency IOPS. When I've needed random read access to a file, I've found that it's much faster to start a "cat /path/thefile > /dev/null" as I start accessing it to get the whole file into page cache. This feels like a terrible hack, is there a better way to tell the OS that I want a whole file preloaded into page cache to better consolidate reads?

If the the list of files you want preloaded is fixed, you can mlock them all at startup by running vmtouch in daemon mode, or even plain vmtouch -t if you don't expect their pages to be evicted by the time you need them. You might be forced to raise the memlock limit in /etc/security if it's too low for your needs.

If it's not predictable, then your cat > /dev/null has probably the same effect as vmtouch.

e:fb

# ? Mar 14, 2023 03:08

Subjunctive: Sep 12, 2006; ✨sparkle and shine✨

ExcessBLarg! posted:

dd with a large bs (say bs=1M) will issue far fewer syscalls than cat which might only read in 4k increments, but on a modern system the syscall overhead is pretty meh.

that only works if your page size is > 1M, or you�re just doing random access yourself

# ? Mar 14, 2023 03:13

Storm One: Jan 12, 2011

Storm One posted:

your cat > /dev/null has probably the same effect as vmtouch.

I tested it and they're both equally fast, the bottleneck seems to be my HDD:

code:

cat bigfile > /dev/null
real	0m28.199s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m1.454s

code:

vmtouch -t bigfile
real	0m28.342s
user	0m0.191s
sys	0m1.515s

# ? Mar 14, 2023 03:22

ziasquinn: Jan 1, 2006; Fallen Rib

to be clear, when what I said about Linux daily usag being annoying some days and frustrating on others I was being genuine. I love the nightmare of running Arch.

# ? Mar 14, 2023 03:22

I would blow Dane Cook: Dec 26, 2008

Do people here like to use drop down terminals like guake/yaquake? Which one? Do kids these days even know the joy of pressing a button and typing in console commands in their favourite shooter games?

# ? Mar 14, 2023 04:12

Nitrousoxide: May 30, 2011; do not buy a oneplus phone

I just hit super and start typing "terminal" and slap that enter when it's close enough in Gnome.

# ? Mar 14, 2023 04:26

Tad Naff: Jul 8, 2004; _{I told you you'd be sorry buying an emoticon, but no, you were hung over. Well look at you now. It's not catching on at all!}

I used yaquake a long long time ago. But now it's just <super> T, that's built into XFCE anyway.

# ? Mar 14, 2023 07:07

KozmoNaut: Apr 23, 2008; Happiness is a warm
Turbo Plasma Rifle

Ctrl+alt+T for Konsole in KDE, but before that I used Yakuake.

# ? Mar 14, 2023 12:12

DeathSandwich: Apr 24, 2008; I fucking hate puzzles.

Has anyone dug their teeth into Kali Purple yet? I used regular kali a few times for some one-off things, and I spun Purple up in a VM, but my knowledge of like high level Linux security and red team / blue team ops are extremely limited (yay Jr sysadmin) so I don't really know what I should be looking at. Are there some online resources people like for it?

Edit: including article with iso link if anyone else wants to try it. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/kali-linux-20231-introduces-purple-distro-for-defensive-security/

# ? Mar 14, 2023 14:26

ExcessBLarg!: Sep 1, 2001

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Do kids these days even know the joy of pressing a button and typing in console commands in their favourite shooter ames?

My desktop usage is more like a text adventure with nested screen sessions.

# ? Mar 14, 2023 14:29

Computer viking: May 30, 2011; Now with less breakage.

Goddamn do I hate RHEL as an enduser experience. What do you mean I need some marketing-named repository to install boost-devel so I can install R so I can install Rstudio, and what do you mean I don't have a subscription that entitles me to install it, and why the HELL are the instructions for EPEL on all other distros "just enable the thing and it'll work" but on RHEL one of steps is installing "codeready-builder" ... which, as previously mentioned, I'm not allowed to.

I'm currently installing R from pkgsrc. Thank someone for NetBSD and their crossplatform goals.

e: You do what to use gcc11?

Computer viking fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Mar 14, 2023

# ? Mar 14, 2023 14:49

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Do people here like to use drop down terminals like guake/yaquake? Which one? Do kids these days even know the joy of pressing a button and typing in console commands in their favourite shooter games?

I have yaquake running, and when I first saw it I thought I'd love it. But it turns out I hardly ever use it. The two main things I need a terminal for are
1. managing system stuff that is complex and I don't want to do a pull-down terminal
2. a one-off grep or something like that, but in the context of whatever stuff I'm working with in GUI programs. In which case right-click, open console here in the file manager is much faster than cd'ing to the right location

I still love the idea. I guess the FPS console I want would attach to the file manager rather than the whole screen, and the prompt would automatically follow whichever folder I'm looking at. That'd be pretty cool.

# ? Mar 14, 2023 15:06

xzzy: Mar 5, 2009

We jump around that by disabling the subscription manager and dropping repo files into /etc/yum.repos.d/.

But we also don't use rhel, we're centos and transitioning to alma. If I want boost-devel all I have to do is 'dnf install boost-devel' and it does the thing. :science:

# ? Mar 14, 2023 15:07

Computer viking: May 30, 2011; Now with less breakage.

xzzy posted:

We jump around that by disabling the subscription manager and dropping repo files into /etc/yum.repos.d/.

But we also don't use rhel, we're centos and transitioning to alma. If I want boost-devel all I have to do is 'dnf install boost-devel' and it does the thing.

Right, I'll probably try that eventually. Right now I'm kind of curious about how pkgsrc in /opt will work, though.

And yeah I wish we could do that. Getting these VMs set up in the first place was an incredible bureaucratic journey, and they're in a weird spot where we're allowed sudo access and can go hog wild, but they also have to be installed as RHEL machines with a lot of instrumentation for reasons.

# ? Mar 14, 2023 15:12

Nitrousoxide: May 30, 2011; do not buy a oneplus phone

I've been poking around with CoreOS and it's been pretty neat and lean. Once you figure out how to actually implement the ignition/butane file it also makes it really easy to deploy a new vm with the same start state. But everything I need can be containerized so if you're trying do stuff outside of that I could see it being a pain.

# ? Mar 14, 2023 15:19

xzzy: Mar 5, 2009

Isn't CoreOS dead and no longer maintained? Or is there a fork out there I missed under the same name?

(I know about rancher, which is also cool and good. And flatcar which I'm pretty sure is a fork of coreos)

And yes container only operating systems are a lot of fun to play with.

# ? Mar 14, 2023 15:26

Nitrousoxide: May 30, 2011; do not buy a oneplus phone

xzzy posted:

Isn't CoreOS dead and no longer maintained? Or is there a fork out there I missed under the same name?

(I know about rancher, which is also cool and good. And flatcar which I'm pretty sure is a fork of coreos)

And yes container only operating systems are a lot of fun to play with.

Fedora CoreOS is still being maintained and actively developed.

You're probably thinking of CoreOS Container Linux which was sunsetted ~3 years ago.

Flatcar is also a fork of the origional CoreOS Container Linux which is still being developed.

I'm experimenting with K3OS (which is the replacement for RancherOS) too, though I've not gotten it to use the cloud-init file correctly so far.

# ? Mar 14, 2023 15:32

BlankSystemDaemon: Mar 13, 2009

Computer viking posted:

Goddamn do I hate RHEL as an enduser experience. What do you mean I need some marketing-named repository to install boost-devel so I can install R so I can install Rstudio, and what do you mean I don't have a subscription that entitles me to install it, and why the HELL are the instructions for EPEL on all other distros "just enable the thing and it'll work" but on RHEL one of steps is installing "codeready-builder" ... which, as previously mentioned, I'm not allowed to.

I'm currently installing R from pkgsrc. Thank someone for NetBSD and their crossplatform goals.

e: You do what to use gcc11?

Credit where credit is due, pkgsrc took the concept of ports from FreeBSD, and did something utterly amazing with it - it made it available just about everywhere it could.

A datacenter I once co-managed back in the early 2000s consisted partly of Solaris, partly of NetBSD, and partly of FreeBSD - and the only way to get the same software was to use pkgsrc.
As in, it couldn't be done any other way, without building every single piece of software as well as its dependencies by hand.

# ? Mar 14, 2023 16:31

cruft: Oct 25, 2007

Nitrousoxide posted:

Fedora CoreOS is still being maintained and actively developed.

You're probably thinking of CoreOS Container Linux which was sunsetted ~3 years ago.

Flatcar is also a fork of the origional CoreOS Container Linux which is still being developed.

I'm experimenting with K3OS (which is the replacement for RancherOS) too, though I've not gotten it to use the cloud-init file correctly so far.

We use (and love) Flatcar for our clouds at work, AMA.

# ? Mar 14, 2023 16:45

xzzy: Mar 5, 2009

I'm bummed/confused that digital ocean got rid of their container os options. I've been using the service for years and going back to a normal OS feels like a backwards step.

I know I could upload a custom image and do it that way but it still feels backwards.

# ? Mar 14, 2023 19:27

Computer viking: May 30, 2011; Now with less breakage.

Speaking of containers and RHEL and such joys: Distrobox is neat. It's a container thing that lets you run a random distro-in-a-container as a normal user, with working X (and presumably Wayland, but we're using it over Xrdp).

After trying a handful of different things, seriously considering "sudo debootstrap testing /" (it's just a VM, they can make me a new one), and poking around, this actually ended up working fine as a way to install and run normal desktop software. I'm mildly surprised that I can install podman and friends, and even more surprised that it actually works - but I'll take it.

e: The sheer levels of indirection here are disturbing.
On my screen, I have a copy of Rstudio running in distrobox on a linux VM on ESXi piped over Xrdp to a windows VM on ESXI (different server) piped over citrix to my laptop. It's not super snappy.

Computer viking fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Mar 15, 2023

# ? Mar 15, 2023 17:47

Elias_Maluco: Aug 23, 2007; I need to sleep

Im having a really dumb weird little issue in KDE, I have no idea where to even start looking to fix it

I had to disconnect my 3rd monitor and when I reconnected it I had to re-enable it on Display Configuration and after I did that, something happened to my 2nd monitor config.

Resolution is correct, but when I try to maximize a window, it gets like this:

Like that was the max height of the screen. I can still manually resize the window to occupy the whole space, but maximizing always do that, and only in that monitor

Anyone has a clue? What I broke here? Tried restarting and all, but no changes

edit: thats KDE 5.26.5, on KDE Neon 5.26

edit 2: vvvvv argh. thanks, but I would like to avoid that, if possible. Ill keep looking for a solution for a while

Elias_Maluco fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Mar 18, 2023

# ? Mar 18, 2023 13:40

atomicpile: Nov 7, 2009

I had a similar issue a few months back and ended up deleting the KDE .config folder in my home directory and redoing my desktop setup. Maybe not the best fix but worked for me.

# ? Mar 18, 2023 14:49

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

Elias_Maluco posted:

edit: thats KDE 5.26.5, on KDE Neon 5.26

edit 2: vvvvv argh. thanks, but I would like to avoid that, if possible. Ill keep looking for a solution for a while

You can make a backup of it just to test what would happen. If that works then I'd look into maybe copying configurations over until it breaks. There shouldn't be more than 1-2 files that actually break the thing. If you have Nvidia cards, maybe try nvidia-settings to see if setting the resolution correct in there will help.

# ? Mar 18, 2023 16:05

Mr. Crow: May 22, 2008; Snap City mayor for life

Stupid question but does reboot fix it? Ive had that happen on older kde desktops in a vm usually rebooting resolves it, or as was suggested running the nvidia display settings and saving to xorg if ypu have nvidia

# ? Mar 18, 2023 17:03

Elias_Maluco: Aug 23, 2007; I need to sleep

Mr. Crow posted:

Stupid question but does reboot fix it? Ive had that happen on older kde desktops in a vm usually rebooting resolves it, or as was suggested running the nvidia display settings and saving to xorg if ypu have nvidia

No, it didn�t, I tried.

Also tried changing the resolution (if I change to any other resolution, the problem does goes away, actually. but when I change back to the correct resolution, it�s back again) and back again and also doing the same in the nvidia settings

# ? Mar 18, 2023 17:36

other people: Jun 27, 2004; Associate Christ

Elias_Maluco posted:

No, it didn’t, I tried.

All out of ideas. Try a different distro.

# ? Mar 18, 2023 17:38

Elias_Maluco: Aug 23, 2007; I need to sleep

zhar posted:

my windows experience as of late is making me lust for: tiling window manager; neovim; anime girl wallpaper

Windows 11 has some tiling functions built in. On windows 10 you can install powertoys and get the fancyzones. The other two have also been ported to windows.

# ? Mar 19, 2023 11:16

Computer viking: May 30, 2011; Now with less breakage.

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Windows 11 has some tiling functions built in. On windows 10 you can install powertoys and get the fancyzones. The other two have also been ported to windows.

You're not exactly wrong, but the Windows support for anime girl wallpapers will always be a bit of a hack.

# ? Mar 19, 2023 12:38

I would blow Dane Cook: Dec 26, 2008

Computer viking posted:

You're not exactly wrong, but the Windows support for anime girl wallpapers will always be a bit of a hack.

Yeah you really need to install wallpaper engine to get the full anime girl functionality.

# ? Mar 19, 2023 12:44

zhar: May 3, 2019

aside from these features, recently defender has been interacting with firefox such that my cpu fan is making airplane noises when i click a button, ive also been messing with ai stuff and apparently windows reserves a flat 19% vram (regardless of how much you have) for reasons beyond my understanding. win explorer also spikes cpu. i have powertoys and just updated it, been keeping an eye on antimalware service executable in task manager since the firefox issue and during the update alongside that windows compatibility telemetry was experiencing "very high power usage". i dont want to be spending cpu cycles on this! there are more of these things that have added up i wont go into in the linux thread.

have used all three main os to some extent i think when you have a problem with windows there's good odds its microsoft or some software vendors fault (and they're probably up to no good), on mac it's often working as intended you just disagree with apples vision and on linux it's usually your fault (or at least that's what they tell you on github) and for this i love myself too much to get annoyed. unfortunately the frustration in configuring the fucker offsets these emotional savings...

i have been using windows most recently so its most likely a case of the grass being greener and i may come crawling back to windows but i would estimate a >50% chance i install linux within a few days on a dualboot. been a while since i used desktop linux but even if it turns out to be some poverty safari that would still make me tolerate windows more. sorry for rant.

# ? Mar 19, 2023 12:51

DerekSmartymans: Feb 14, 2005; The
Copacetic
Ascetic

zhar posted:

when you have a problem with windows there's good odds its microsoft or some software vendors fault (and they're probably up to no good), on mac it's often working as intended you just disagree with apples vision and on linux it's usually your fault (or at least that's what they tell you on github)

That�s the best summary and comparison of OS�s I think I�ve ever seen written down.

# ? Mar 19, 2023 15:11

Satire Forum Mom: Oct 4, 2003; MY CUNT DRIPS BROWN REFUSE LIKE A DIRTY HOOKAH. PS. THE BACK OF MY THIGHS ARE RIDICULOUS - COTTAGE CHEESE ANYONE?

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

How do you make the fonts not look like poo poo in chrome on arch?

Do you have sub-pixel rendering and hinting enabled?

Also, installing something like this https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-ms-win11-auto from the AUR might help - I don't use Chrome, but I could see it looking better with Times New Roman installed.

# ? Mar 19, 2023 18:17

F_Shit_Fitzgerald: Feb 2, 2017

I'm writing a script that uses grep in a while-loop. Is there a way to get grep to shut the gently caress up so that I don't have to see the

Usage: grep [OPTION]... PATTERNS [FILE]...
Try 'grep --help' for more information.

message every time I run the script? The -s flag doesn't seem to work.

F_Shit_Fitzgerald fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Mar 19, 2023

# ? Mar 19, 2023 22:08

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# ? Jun 9, 2024 05:24

AlexDeGruven: Jun 29, 2007; Watch me pull my dongle out of this tiny box

Sounds like your grep is failing. What's the line you're trying to run?

# ? Mar 19, 2023 22:24

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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