The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Considered HARMful]

The offending package in question was firmware-iwlwifi, which contains drivers for dozens of wifi cards and copies them all into /lib/firmware. So obviously there are millions of people out there with extraneous drivers (presumably most people only have 1 wifi adapter at most) and it works fine. Except when it doesn't, apparently.
I would consider "Any extra driver file wrecks you" to be reasonable behavior, or "Extra drivers are always fine", but not this.

Wow, I've installed iwlwifi on many machines and haven't seen such breakage before. I'd love to see the dmesg when it happens. Can you provide the card model and names of the offending firmware files? I would very much like to research that issue further.

What happens is that on startup it gets partway through the text-mode init process (whatever exactly you call that), and then the screen goes black. No chance to get into a console by hitting Ctrl-Alt-F3 or anything like that.

Maybe the kernel panics. Does the LED for Scroll Lock (or was it Num Lock?) flash on and off after the lockup?

You fix this by just deleting the offending files, but you can only do this if you have some sort of working OS dual-booted or you have a boot disk. That seems unnecessarily limiting. Ideally I think the solution would be to have a boot mode that loads up only enough drivers to have a keyboard and monitor, mount the storage device where your system is, and get you logged into a console session. It sounds like something that should be possible.

This should be doable with GRUB, as you can blacklist specified modules from being loaded. So you can define a menuentry with a more or less module blacklist and boot into single-user mode to be extra-sure of that recovery mode. I agree that it sucks that your distro doesn't provide such a menuentry by default (probably mine doesn't too, but then again, I'm compiling my own kernels).

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[Kosher Dill]

Wow, I've installed iwlwifi on many machines and haven't seen such breakage before. I'd love to see the dmesg when it happens. Can you provide the card model and names of the offending firmware files? I would very much like to research that issue further.

Well, it seems like I was actually chasing ghosts this whole time. Turns out the real issue is that about 95% of the time my laptop's LCD panel isn't recognized properly, but I just happened to hit the bootup lotto at the same time that I was mucking about with drivers and firmware. Once I got an external monitor hooked up it became clear.
I wonder what it is about bootloaders and live install discs that is different from my freshly-installed setup in that respect, I'll have to look further into this.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I always thought GRUB is a convoluted mess. On EFI based machines you can directly have the firmware load the kernel and don't need a bootloader, literally just put IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS on C: . bzImage on a small, usually FAT32-formatted partition. Yes, it's less flexible but if you compile your own kernel to begin with you rarely ever touch any parameters etc. after you set it up once, really and there's rarely something that needs to be clearly set by boot time and can't be changed later. You then can combine this with a minimal initial ramdisk that lets you do fancy stuff like mount your encrypted harddrive.

This tentative relationship to concepts like "booting" (from weird inits to crap like GRUB) is probably the most embarrassing corner the Linux world has and every time somebody touches anything there, there's a 50/50 chance he makes it worse while everyone else pretends this is the emperors most beautiful suit yet. I've been using runit and my bootup script that sets shit up once has a strange similarity to AUTOEXEC.BAT. It's almost like simple solutions are sometimes good.

My wild guess in the aforementioned black screen problem is there's something going wrong between EFI initializing the framebuffer and handing it off to the starting OS, I had problems there too back then when they changed the whole process around that some years ago. (see: making it worse) I don't remember how I resolved it, of course.

 

[Kosher Dill]

My wild guess in the aforementioned black screen problem is there's something going wrong between EFI initializing the framebuffer and handing it off to the starting OS

Turns out it was just that the BIOS needed patching to report (or not report) its screens correctly. I guess Windows is able to deal with this on its own but Linux isn't.

I don't know why that's something that would cause failures only most of the time, but I guess it doesn't matter as long as it works now.

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

So I installed Kubuntu in order to start learning KDE since everyone sucks it off. Somehow I disabled the windows key (I think it's called the meta key?). Any suggestions to see what I did wrong?

Also going to give Manjarro another go to see what Arch life is like.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

So I installed Kubuntu in order to start learning KDE since everyone sucks it off. Somehow I disabled the windows key (I think it's called the meta key?). Any suggestions to see what I did wrong?

Also going to give Manjarro another go to see what Arch life is like.

Super key borking up in KDE is apparently common. It happened to me. Does resetting the keyboard shortcuts work?

 

[AmpleApricots]

Turns out it was just that the BIOS needed patching to report (or not report) its screens correctly. I guess Windows is able to deal with this on its own but Linux isn't.

I don't know why that's something that would cause failures only most of the time, but I guess it doesn't matter as long as it works now.

EFI firmware like a lot of such software is often very poorly written and a mere afterthought to the rest of the product, complete with very generous Ctrl+C'ing from some reference implementations and earlier hardware iterations, which by themselves are often not exactly shiny examples of good practices, especially for consumer crap. The complexity of such code also has to go nowhere but up, offering even more chances to fuck up. In my experience, the people working on Windows have a better line to such stuff, the better connections to find out about internals and are better at implementing workarounds in Windows for quirks and faulty things that don't stick 100% to the rules, where Linux more often assumes (has to assume) that everything does it's job correctly.

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

Super key borking up in KDE is apparently common. It happened to me. Does resetting the keyboard shortcuts work?

Reset global shortcuts didn't help and I'm trying to find the command itself in the settings.

Also I installed Manjaro and it's not showing up in Grub for me to boot it. I know doing more than 2 bootables is kinda frowned upon but any suggestions to make it show?

 

[Dick Justice]

Reset global shortcuts didn't help and I'm trying to find the command itself in the settings.

Also I installed Manjaro and it's not showing up in Grub for me to boot it. I know doing more than 2 bootables is kinda frowned upon but any suggestions to make it show?

One of the grub commands, I want to say grub-update but I don't appear to have that (?) on my system. Maybe grub-probe or grub-mkconfig?

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

One of the grub commands, I want to say grub-update but I don't appear to have that (?) on my system. Maybe grub-probe or grub-mkconfig?

Nothing is happening. The distro is there but I'm getting frustrated so I think I'm going to stop the distro hopping and will just focus on Mint for now.

My current gripe is that Lutris is shitting itself for me now. I'm trying to try to install a game (legend of grimrock) but when I add the game and install it, every time I try to boot it up it just wants to run the installer again. I had installed spelunky from exe as well and that works just fine. I don't get what I'm doing wrong.

I think I said it already, but fuck it I'll sperg out some more.. It's really depressing how I can't even get the 'it just works' shit to actually work. Every distro I've installed is borked in some way. Programs work and then don't the next time I boot up.

I'm grateful for all the help.im getting on here and I'm sorry I keep screwing up lol. I'm going to do a real power session this weekend and if I don't feel like I've made any progress then I'll probably shelve it until later.

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

OK so 2 issues solved.

I got the meta key to open the the application menu by setting the command to Alt+F1. Don't know why that works but hey.

Lutris needs a community installer for your game in order for it to work right. Now I need to figure out why it won't install non community installs in the game folder I made and instead puts them in the shadow realm of .wine

 

[Friendly Primarina]

Does anyone still use WINE? Has anyone else noticed the performance tanking recently? I'm noticing significant framedrops in all applications. I can use WINE 6.7 and the performance goes back to normal. Is it just me?

 

[BootlegPopeye]

No, you aren't alone - the main WINE has been shitty and harder to use for the last couple of years. I still need to use it for a couple of non game programs, so obviously using it under the proton fork won't do.

 

[rawhide_k]

with the deck news, I've been motivated to try linux on my personal computer again. I've tried it a few times in the past. always gave up due to weird driver issues with my AMD cards that apparently nobody liked, as well as gaming and VR support being immature at the time. not a problem anymore, and not a problem if you have an index.

I've just checked and lo and behold, ACL extensions are compiled into my current distro and my filesystems have been mounted with it.

but POSIX DRAFT ACLs really suck. super useless. there is windows-style non-selinux ACL out there! RichACLS and NFSv4 ACLs! Out for years! fully featured! fully functional! but not mainlined on linux. SAMBA can't meaningfully use POSIX draft ACLs for windows guests. they're a dog to use. and far worse than windows acls in featureset. it has caused me great pain and suffering. however, NFSv4 ACLs are supported on the linux nfs *client* and freebsd nfs server and freebsd version of zfs. this has caused me to consider moving my fileserver to freebsd... but I haven't yet. I really like this post. http://michael.orlitzky.com/articles/there_was_an_attempt_to_save_linux_filesystem_acls.xhtml

 

[Friendly Primarina]

No, you aren't alone - the main WINE has been shitty and harder to use for the last couple of years. I still need to use it for a couple of non game programs, so obviously using it under the proton fork won't do.

That's just the thing, though. 6.8 was released in April, and it was fine before then. Some shithead on the WINE dev team fucked things up.

 

[rawhide_k]

everything is awful

NVIDIA + Wayland + KDE has broken screen rotation... among a host of other issues, including hard crashes so common I couldn't even figure out if xwayland or KDE was intrinsically broken.

GNOME works... but it's GNOME.

and, well, that's really all the options there are for nvidia and wayland.

X would be an option, sure, but I have a 144hz VRR screen and secondary 60hz screens. everyone knows how that goes. badly!

guess I'm waiting until nvidia and kde have this GBM bullshit figured out... or I get my hands on a new AMD gpu that's actually supported.. or I upgrade to triple threat 144hz VRR. that's not likely.

 

[Considered HARMful]

Why would you use wayland?

 

[rawhide_k]

Why would you use wayland?

X doesn't support mixed screen refresh rates / VRR + normal screens.

 

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X doesn't support mixed screen refresh rates / VRR + normal screens.

60Hz is enough for anyone.

 

[rawhide_k]

60Hz is enough for anyone.

No!