Nicholas Toone

Linux

All things Linux. Especially if I had to dig and tear some of my hair out to solve a problem, in which case I’m putting the solution here.

  • Clickable list of my saved Linux tips.

  • Project: Friction – Update 2. Backup And Bullshit.

    Data backup has been, well, something. While working on the NAS, I’ve been figuring out how much data we have to backup and where to put it. It was in the middle of this where I found out that the freezing I’ve been experiencing on my PC was most likely due to one of two things:

    • A whacked out file somewhere in the large mess of directories and files or
    • the backup drive I was trying to copy file over to/from

    I zeroed in on the drive and started using Konsole to copy but holy hell, even rsync froze the computer. Jesus, wtf?

    I did some research and found that freezing while copying large amounts of files can be attributed to a bad disk – and for some reason I’d ignored the fact that this large USB backup drive is well over ten years old. Guess I needed to check it for errors and, well, smartctl wouldn’t pick up anything about this old drive at all, so eeeek. At this point I don’t even know how it was managing to spin its platters. All I knew was Linux wanted all but nothing to do with it.

    I plugged the damn thing into the old Windows 10 laptop we have that’s doing nothing but being an interim Plex server (until I get a NAS up and running, which is a story on its own) to see if I could find out anything and Windows complained that “This disk has errors, please fix”. I let it do its thing and everything worked out enough for me to move data off that old drive onto the SSD on the laptop – which is now being copied over to the secondary drive on my desktop (by way of the temporary TrueNAS Core machine). Convoluted? Sure. But, as they say, it is what it is for now.

    Speaking of Windows. The aforementioned laptop is an old Dell, i5 that I put a new SSD drive in. It runs Windows 10 which has been fine. Yesterday I turned it on and it took its time updating, like Windows does, and it eventually landed here:

    What the absolute shit is this? A few more services, eh? I really, really dislike this “oh! they must have all the things connected all the time!” mindset.

    I clicked Remind me in 3 days (because of course they won’t make a button that’s labeled: “No, never. Absolutely not ever in a million years do I want to connect to more of your services, even if it’s just a few”. That would take up the whole bottom of that screen and it would look yukky design wise) and it put me at the login screen. I logged in…

    .. And there was a Copilot button next the the Start menu.

    I just can’t with this AI shit. At least I could uninstall it. No matter. Once all the file copying and NAS setup is done, this old laptop is going to be introduced to Linux.

    Goddamned Phone

    GrapheneOS update: I got one of my work apps sending notifications. I really wish I could move to this full time, but I just can’t at the moment.

  • ToneLib-GFX: libgl1-mesa-glx

    On Ubuntu Studio I ran into an issue installing ToneLib-GFX. It was telling me that the libgl1-mesa-glx dependency was missing on my system.

    Here’s my notes on the two ways I could get this solved. Note: ToneLib-GFX-amd64.deb file is in my Downloads directory.

    Download/Command Line

    Download the package. I got it at pkgs.org but I’m sure you can find it all over the place.

    This will, of course, put it in your Downloads folder

    cd to Downloads, then:

    $ sudo dpkg -i libgl1-mesa-glx_22.3.6-1+deb12u1_amd64.deb

    Once this runs, then install ToneLib:

    $ sudo dpkg -i ToneLib-GFX-amd64.deb

    Command Line Only

    Update apt

    $ sudo apt update

    Install the package

    sudo apt -y install libgl1-mesa-glx

    Once that’s complete, install ToneLib

    $ sudo dpkg -i ToneLib-GFX-amd64.deb

  • 2/24/2025 – Randoms Go Boom!

    Oh, FFS. Really. FFS.

    Weirdness abounds all of a sudden. First up, Plasma Discover is acting strange. I get this when I launch it:

    Dunno why. Researching online shows that I may have (re)configured repositories when installing my shit. Or not. Who knows really.

    I do know that when I uncheck all of these:

    The error goes away, but then I have problems installing shit. Windscribe was a particular pain to get on here even though I’ve never had issues installing it in the past. I did find a fix for this (the missing dependencies bit), however it included rechecking all of those Other Software options. So now the error is back in Discover… until I pulled the nuclear option and ran sudo rm -r sources.list.d (after I backed it up, of course). That removed all of those entries on that list and I probably have to build the repositories again… we’ll see I guess.

    Another thing to note is that my computer is randomly freezing. No rhyme or reason. Just in the middle of something, anything, and boom! Frozen. Hasn’t happened since early this morning, so maybe that nuke I dropped on the repository sources fixed up something else that fixed the freezing? I’ll never know.

    I’m kind of kicking myself since the Ubuntu Studio install I had prior to the complete wipe and reinstall was humming along just fine. Or was it? everything but my gamez was ok. Now my gamez are ok.

    Make of it what you will.

    I’m not adverse to wiping and starting all over again, but I’d much rather not.

  • 2/21/2025 #2 – Too Much

    One quick gripe before I sign off.

    These Linux distros come with so much bundled software it’s not even really funny. I mean, come on. There is

    just

    so

    much.

    Some are cool (I’m really going to give LMMS a serious look). Most are not anything I need. More than a few appear to be borderline useless. Some of them crash on startup and have I mentioned there are a LOT of them?

    Yes I did mention that, and I’ll say it again: There are a lot of preinstalled apps.

    I will say this: while there are a lot, there isn’t bloat like they way PC companies garbage up Windows (HP being the biggest offender). Most all of the apps I’ve removed are small, tiny even, and are not running in the background hogging up resources.

    So I guess it’s not all that bad really. What the hell am I complaining about anyway?

  • 2/21/2025 – Snow Everywhere

    Now that this here PC was wiped clean and up running with just Ubuntu Studio, and I don’t have to pay attention to boot loaders and all that, I really don’t want to install Windows again.

    Of course, I keep saying the one thing that would make me setup a dual boot with Windows is gaming. I’m not a huge gamer, but I do loves me some RPG action.

    The last time I tried to play The Witcher 3 via Steam/Proton on Ubuntu Studio it took well over five minutes to load up to the main menu. Then I set my video and gameplay preferences back to the way I like, played for five minutes and it crashed. Hard. To the point that when I booted into Windows to see if my save had taken, it wouldn’t even load as my cloud save was all jacked up.

    I eventually got everything back in order (on Windows) but it worried me that games on Linux was a fools errand.

    Seems that I just need to settle down and spend time looking through ProtonDB. After some minor configs for The Witcher 3, I seem to have it running just fine. Time will tell, but it’s launching and loading quickly and gameplay seems smooth. Hopefully it stays this way because I’m just about to start the final battle of the main storyline.

    Then I have the expansions to wade through.

    Another favorite is Skyrim which seems to work flawlessly out of the gate. Although I must admit I haven’t played Skyrim since last summer and I’ve forgotten most all of the controls and basic fighting tactics, bit that’s all a me problem, and nothing to to with the system it’s running on.

    So far so good!

  • Project: Friction

    Following up on my last post, I’ve come up with a plan to untangle myself and Ms. Tucker as much as we can from Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

    And, because I’m oh, so very edgy, I’ve named whole thing Project: Friction. Here’s what I’m tackling:

    Microsoft 365

    I’m not going to lie, I kind of like MS 365. Scratch that, I like OneDrive which is one of the better of the Big Tech cloud storage options that is pretty seamless across Windows, macOS, and even Linux by way of InSync. However, like everything else Big Tech, they done gone and fucked it up. Standalone OneDrive accounts are gone. You can now only get a “basic” plan that includes 100GB of storage, the web based apps, ad free Outlook (seriously) and some other nonsense. If you want more space, then you need to sign up for one of their personal or family accounts that has 1TB of space (ok, cool) and a bunch of shit you may never use (it will install all of their apps on your computer, most of which you’ll probably never use). Oh, and they just increased the prices because they’re forcing stupid Copilot on everyone.

    Essentially, fuck all that. Reminds me of this from last year:

    Same mood now as then: fuck you and your growth at all costs.

    I’m taking the following approach with Microsoft:

    Cloud/OneDrive: A new provider that’s (a) not based in the US and (b) supports Windows, Linux, and macOS. I think we’ve settled on pCloud. I’ve been playing around with the service on a basic month to month plan for about a week now and, so far, it’s pretty amazing. Aft first it was not as straightforward as OneDrive but that was to be expected. It is a wee bit of a finicky setup on Linux but that was figured out (and I’m keeping this link handy). I have everything backed up and syncing and it’s humming along doing it’s thing. Remember: Embrace Friction. Bonus points to pCloud for offering a lifetime option; pay once and it’s yours.

    At the same time I’m working on configuring a local NAS. While I love the idea of syncing files to the could, let’s face it, we all should have local backups on hand just in case. I have an old, second hand mini computer and will be testing out TrueNAS CORE. This will be a challenge for sure

    Apps: This one’s easy: LibreOffice. I mean, come on. It all does the same shit as Microsoft’s apps and, let’s face it, the Microsoft stuff has never really been great. Microsoft is just a monopoly and they tell us they’re the best while duct taping more shit (sorry, “features”) onto their apps. Now we have to deal with Copilot and they can just fuck right off with that.

    Operating Systems

    At this point in the game, I’m back to Linux being my daily driver. I may setup a dual boot of Windows for the sole reason of playing games1, but we’ll see. Now that I’ve made a full cloud backup with pCloud, I’ve completely flattened my PC and started fresh with just Ubuntu Studio. I’m taking my time configuring everything to my tastes.

    Note that I’m not going to force anyone else in the house to take the Linux path but, going forward, I will be looking at setting Windows up without an MS Account.

    Goddamn Phones

    This one is the most difficult. Your choices are Apple/iOS, or some flavour of Android be it Google or Samsung or whoever. Which means you need to have an Apple ID or a Google account (or a Samsung login or whatever) in order to use the phones in any real capacity.

    Then we tripped across GrapheneOS.

    A hardened version of Android with all of the Google slop stripped out? And the Google stuff you do install has to live in a sandbox where YOU control its permissions?

    Fucking sign me up.

    So here we go…

    After four days my oh so brief review is this: GrapheneOS is excellent except for two things:

    1. The handful of apps I need for my job don’t work 100%.
    2. I can’t get RCS chats working.

    The apps I require for work are only half functional. Messages do come into them, but notifications are broken; they simply just don’t alert me. Since part of my job is an OnCall sift every few weeks I need to ensure that I get notifications. I’ll have to stick to the stock Google OS until I can get this figured out. If I can’t get these apps sending notifications at all, then GrapheneOS will have wait.

    RCS is another matter. Do I really need it? No? It is nice, but it’s not a deal breaker. I can make due with SMS and I’m working to find out who on my contacts list uses Signal. I know that RCS in the Google Messages app is implemented via Google and I suspect that I can’t get it working because my Google account is not tied to the GrapheneOS phone.

    On the other hand, Ms. Tucker has an iPhone 8 that is giving up the ghost and she’s not sure that she wants to give any more money to Apple. So the plan may be to slowly get her used to a Pixel 7 running GrapheneOS with the limited Play services so she can access the apps she needs and see how that goes.

    GrapheneOS is amazing even if it reminded me how much shit actually runs on a phone all in the sake of “convenience”. Thanks to playing around with GrapheneOS, I’ve managed to clean up a pile of apps from my stock phone.

    None of this is easy, but it’s not meant to be. And I’m back to enjoying what I enjoyed about Linux those couple of years ago: learning new things. Yet it was so easy back then to just give up at the slightest hint of inconvenience and take the stupid, familiar route. Hell, it’s easy to do that now.

    At the end of the day, stupid, familiar routes are boring. And I just don’t want to fall back on that anymore.

    1: I am attempting to get my games running under Linux (Steam/Proton/Lutris) again.

  • 2/11/2025 – Deep Breath

    I’m reporting from Ubuntu, where most things have been great and others have been a little bumpy…

    Music

    Fucking hell, I got Reaper working with the Scarlett! Not sure why, but I think it’s because I install installed it using sudo which put the app into /opt/REAPER. After I became tired of fighting with it, I uninstalled Reaper with the idea of recording just in MixBus but quickly found my next bit of frustration was using synths and instruments in MixBus whose piano roll editor is less than stellar. On a whim, I decided to reinstall Reaper and see if I could get it working.

    This time, I decided to install it without using sudo and put it in /home/my_un/opt/REAPER/ and holy shitballs, it picked the Scarlett up on first launch and it just works.

    Now I need to see what exists as far as decent drum plugins for Linux. Off to Linux Music Rocks! I mean, AVL is fantastic, but I’m not sold on all the sounds yet and there is no way you can fine tune the individual drums.

    Writing

    Scrivner is doing its thing even though I dislike the non-native aspect. It also handles fonts weirdly. Some parts of the interface are just difficult to read and the editor does this weird thing where if I use italics some letters become illegible or, like, a capital P looks like a capital F, etc. Whatever, this is a minor gripe considering it works just fine past that.

    Gaming

    I know, I know, games are not that important in the large scheme of things, but I built this here computer for two reasons:

    1. Multimedia
    2. Gaming

    While Proton is an absolutely great idea, I am finding playing games challenging. Granted, I’m only playing The Witcher 3 at the moment, but it takes forever to load (mostly around two minutes or so, but there have been times that just getting the CDPR launch window took around five minutes after Steam loaded a bunch of Vulcan stuff), crashes randomly, some of my settings are never saved, and the cut scenes are playing only on the far right side of my monitor cutting off a chunk of the scene.

    I’m trying to take all of the gaming issues in stride. I know the issue is Proton is a compatibility layer that was created to allow Valve to build and sell Steam Decks. I know that they offer Proton to Linux users but pretty much wash their hands of it. Who can blame them? There is a literal metric fuck tonne of distros out there and Valve can’t honestly be held responsible for ensuring the games they offer in Steam are 100% flawless on every single one.

    At this point, I’ll probably be keeping a Windows partition around just for when I feel like fighting Drowners and Wyverns.

    Other Items

    Not Linux related, but my Razer Deathadder V2 Pro is slowly dying. I mean, I did buy it second hand, and the wireless dongle died a couple of months after I picked it up, but the Bluetooth has been aces. Now when the battery gets low and I plug it in, the mouse just stops working. Whatever. Not sure I’ll be picking up a wireless mouse next time around. For now I have an old Deathadder Chroma that is doing just fine, thank you very much.

    Flipping back and forth between Linux and Windows is hell on Bluetooth in general. Pretty sure this is because I’m doing it on the same hardware. It’s not a huge deal, I just have to remove and then re-pair my shit when I boot into a different OS.

  • 2/5/2025 – Pray For Me

    There are a pile of updates sitting in Discover. While there are security updates and patches, there are also a ton of updates to Plasma.

    To this point on Ubuntu, I’ve not installed anything past security updates. In the past, on Fedora, I had at least one major update hose my system so bad that I had to reinstall and turn off updates just to keep things running.

    This isn’t Fedora and, as I’ve mentioned, Ubuntu seems to be more… mature? I don’t know how else to describe it.

    Based on that, I’m going to run these updates. Even the Plasma ones.

    I’ll update here as to what happens. If you don’t see something in the next couple days, assume I’m reinstalling.

    Update: Well, that was a whole lot of worrying about nothing. Everything updated quickly and painlessly. Nice :)

    … Side note, my Razer Deathadder V2 Pro shit the bed. It won’t connect at all, even wired, Windows or Linux. It just sits there with a solid blue logo. Searching the internet for causes/fixes is like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m just going to let the battery drain right out and see what happens.

    Update: battery drained. Logo went blank. Plugged it in. Seems to be working. Hope it stays that way. I love Deathadder mice as they’re just perfect ergonomically – I’ve tried a bunch of different mice and the Deathadder is, for me, the best.

  • 1/30/2025 – Knocking On ALL The Wood

    Not bad, not bad at all. The only weird thing I’ve run into is if I fullscreen Firefox, then restore it (y’know, F11 and all that) my screen starts to flicker. A restart fixes it, but it’s just weird.

    I’m still amazed at how well Bluetooth works on this distro. Both my mouse and my headphones connect without any issue at all and stay connected.

    I should have more to update but I haven’t run into issues since the last update. I mean, Spotify shit its pants the other day, but Spotify shits its pants on all platforms, so I don’t even consider that an issue.

    I did open Mixbus and do a quick remix of Oh! What A Time To Be Alive using just the inline EQ and compression (with some delay and reverb added via the included ACE plugins) and it turned out fantastic. Reminded me that you really don’t have to add a bunch of fancypants plugins to your tracks. As always, keeping things simple is usually best.

  • Well, Ok Then

    So, I’m typing this in the Block editor after fighting to get my site to look like this. Take a look around. Basic as basic can get, right?

    This look is slightly not what I was aiming for. I did plan to have an image at the top there, but the Block I was using fucked with the colour of the font in the navigation drop down so you couldn’t actually see the links. I mean, whatever. For now this is ok.

    Edit: Fixed this, obviously. I will warn you that as I poke more, there may be more changes but I’m going to try keeping it minimal.

    Anyway, I have been picking away at Linux and I’m still here. For those that really want to see what’s happening, I’ve started a journal that you can navigate to via the fancy new Linux > Linux Journal link in the navigation. I didn’t want to clutter up the main page with my prattling, so you can find it there.

    One thing I’ll update here is I noticed some issues with the Scarlett 2i2 in Mixbus, namely shaky playback and the inputs would drop out depending on how it was set in either System settings or in the Mixbus audio engine settings. Well goddamn, after some digging around I came across this video on YouTube that all but fixed me up.

    If you have a Focusrite, Scarlett 2i2 Gen 3, keep this handy:

    $ echo options snd_usb_audio vid=0x1235 pid=0x8210 device_setup=1 > /etc/modprobe.d/snd_usb_audio.conf

    There’s more info in the video, of course, and it’s all great.