The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[ToroidalBoat]

Is it normal for that jbd2 process to be running nonstop? Shouldn't it finish at some point?

[...]

No need to be a dick about it. I haven't disabled journaling (jbd2 is still running), I keep backups, and all that constant writing did make me "autistically care" because I didn't know that much about SSDs. Having to replace a drive or reinstall an OS is a pain. Also I still think it's not a dumb idea to minimize writing to flash memory anyway.

I have never once seen even my cheapest chinesium SSDs max out despite having 1TB torrents running all the time.

That's a lot of torrenting.

 

[TJT]

I am not using a rawhide install but Fedora nonetheless had a system update to Fedora 42 that fucked the kernel for me. I have it mostly working now but it changed basically everything about systemd and how services start.

While I am a retard and I do enjoy this kind of tinkering I specifically did not want any of these experimental updates but the OS prompts you into them so beware I guess.

Such nostalgia going through all the shit I never use and trying to determine where to update things. AI does speed this process up a lot more than in the past though.

These days I have a mac for something I know will just work and linux boxes for all of my old man basement tinkering.

 

[analrapist]

Is it normal for that jbd2 process to be running nonstop? Shouldn't it finish at some point?

It is a kernel service. It runs so long as you're using ext4 journaling.

Having to replace a drive or reinstall an OS is a pain.

In Linux, it's not. Boot a kernel with init=/bin/bash then dd if=/dev/olddrive of=/dev/newdrive. Next, tune2fs /dev/newdrive -U $(uuidgen). Next Grub run, change root=UUID=[whatever uuid uuidgen created], boot, run update-grub. Windows is way more irritating.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Gonna post here cause I don't wanna bump another thread. I recently did a fresh install of EndevourOS on my PC and I noticed that the thumbnails for my video files are fucked.



Sometimes a file will have a proper thumbnail, but it seems like they only look proper if they were manually set and not the auto-generated ones.



Is this because I switched to using MPV as my player? I thought this would be something with the Dolphin file manager since I had a similar issue with no image thumbnails before but that was a setting about file sizes and for video files it doesn't seem to be a thing. And yes I do have the ffmpg or whatever that is meant to generate thumbnails.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Boot a kernel with init=/bin/bash then dd if=/dev/olddrive of=/dev/newdrive. Next, tune2fs /dev/newdrive -U $(uuidgen). Next Grub run, change root=UUID=[whatever uuid uuidgen created], boot, run update-grub.

So what does all that do? Make a usable copy of the OS on another volume?

 

[analrapist]

dd copies all the info from one drive to another. That completes the transfer of data: your drive is backed up. The rest is just paranoia/polish. It might be enough, after the dd, to shutdown and pull the old drive.

The stuff with UUIDs just changes the UUID of the new drive so you can refer to it unambiguously. update-grub updates your bootloader (presuming you're using Grub, which you ought if you're newish) so that it knows about your drives. So you'll have both drives online for that boot, so you can be sure nothing funky happened. Shutdown again, pull the drive, boot again, update-grub. Now your new drive will be the only one listed in the next boot.

Again, because I'm just sketching the outline here and the coffee's still kicking in, you have to run tune2fs on your partition, so /dev/newdrive[n] is actually what the tune2fs command will look like.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

the coffee's still kicking in

Does your mug look like that PFP?

Anyway can an ISO on a USB be copied to another USB with normal copying, or would that somehow not work?

 

[analrapist]

Does your mug look like that PFP?

Nah, I use glass, so I can see how much cream I added.

Anyway can an ISO on a USB be copied to another USB with normal copying, or would that somehow not work?

"Burning" ISO on a USB (eg. Rufus or whatever) is an ugly hack. If you use dd, you should just be able to transfer things over, but again, ISO on USB is a hack, so who knows. I disrecommend this; learn how your computer boots and set up your USB to boot accordingly.

If you've got a normal file system on both USBs, and an ISO in that normal file system, yes.

 

[AnOminous]

Nah, I use glass, so I can see how much cream I added.


"Burning" ISO on a USB (eg. Rufus or whatever) is an ugly hack. If you use dd, you should just be able to transfer things over, but again, ISO on USB is a hack, so who knows. I disrecommend this; learn how your computer boots and set up your USB to boot accordingly.

If you've got a normal file system on both USBs, and an ISO in that normal file system, yes.

Ventoy takes a lot of the experimentation and bullshit out of what is often a frustrating process. Before this it seemed every time I wanted to "burn" an ISO to a USB, I had to try a half dozen different things before it would take, and dd takes so long that a single failure eats up a bunch of time, while giving virtually no feedback on what's actually happening.

Never mind it's really easy to tard out and accidentally get utterly shrekt. I haven't done that yet, but I'm always slightly afraid to use it.

Basically the Ventoy tool creates a bootable USB and then you just drag the ISOs into a folder on it and when it starts you automatically get a menu with all your ISOs and can choose one. I have a 128 GB USB with a bunch of Linux distros I don't use often, rescue CDs, low level disk tools, etc. so if (more like when) I somehow wreck my system again I have everything I need to fix it again.

 

[analrapist]

Ventoy takes a lot of the experimentation and bullshit out of what is often a frustrating process.

My experience is contrariwise. Everything other than "write this image file to USB like dd" or "make sure your loader is in /efi/boot/bootx64.efi / DIY the whole boot process" has been an exercise in futility. Couldn't remember Ventoy's name, but I've tried it as well. But at this point, I'm comfortable with Grub, and making a Grub bootloader USB isn't a headache to me.

 

[Betonhaus]

I'm just annoyed how Linux lies about how long copying a file to a USB drive takes. You think it's done it you have to run sync to see it takes another ten minutes or so to complete

 

[Slav Power]

Ventoy is a solid choice. Nowadays when a 64GB USB stick costs pennies, would you rather:
-wipe it clean
-prep it to be bootable
-unzip a 4GB ISO onto it
-have 60GB of space left unused
-do it all over again once you want to boot a different ISO

or:
-wipe it clean
-prep it with Ventoy
-copy a 4GB ISO on it
-have 60GB of space to be used for more ISO's
-copy another file to have multiple ISO's bootable from a GRUB menu

The last time I had a serious issue with Ventoy refusing to cooperate was on some dodgy old laptop I tried putting some lightweight Linux distro on just so that it could browse web, but the fucker would refuse to see the damn thing even if I used Rufus so that was a lost cause. Otherwise the fucker's been reliable in booting up on a wide variety of hardware. Not to mention it can do more advanced shit like booting into VHD images so you could have multiple OS instances on something like a SATA/NVMe SSD in a USB enclosure to fuck around with.

Ventoy is especially good for distrohopping, booting into EndeavourOS just to test something real quick took nothing. Download the ISO, pop it on the stick, reboot, change boot device, select ISO, boom. Though I guess if you find masochistic pleasure in excessive purism then you can do the entire dd chain every time you want to try a different distro.

The Linux-running computer I'm on is about 5 years old now. The TBW to the SSD is now almost 20 TB.

Don't be so fucking squeamish about SSD wear. My previous system SATA SSD had like 80 something % of life and it's still fine. The reason I stopped using it was because the OS on it shat itself and I reused a different SSD just to get things going again, and guess what, same thing will happen to you sooner than the SSD wearing out: your OS shitting the bed in one way or another. Don't forget that most consumers will rape these SSD's not only with stock Windows, but also modern browsers that constantly do write operations in the background, yet they don't fail. And if you really care about your data, back it the fuck up.

 

[Miller]

Gonna post here cause I don't wanna bump another thread. I recently did a fresh install of EndevourOS on my PC and I noticed that the thumbnails for my video files are fucked.

View attachment 7559522

Sometimes a file will have a proper thumbnail, but it seems like they only look proper if they were manually set and not the auto-generated ones.

View attachment 7559523

Is this because I switched to using MPV as my player? I thought this would be something with the Dolphin file manager since I had a similar issue with no image thumbnails before but that was a setting about file sizes and for video files it doesn't seem to be a thing. And yes I do have the ffmpg or whatever that is meant to generate thumbnails.

Do you have the packages "gst-libav" and "ffmpegthumbnailer" installed? That should make the proper thumbnails automatically.
edit: check the post below

 

[YoRHa No. 2 Type B]

Do you have the packages "gst-libav" and "ffmpegthumbnailer" installed? That should make the proper thumbnails automatically.

Since he mentioned using KDE, the correct package is the annoyingly similar "ffmpegthumbs".

"ffmpegthumbnailer" is for GTK stuff like Thunar.
I would double check that the video previews are enabled in Dolphins settings (Under Interface -> Previews like the image above)

Gonna post here cause I don't wanna bump another thread. I recently did a fresh install of EndevourOS on my PC and I noticed that the thumbnails for my video files are fucked.

View attachment 7559522

Sometimes a file will have a proper thumbnail, but it seems like they only look proper if they were manually set and not the auto-generated ones.

View attachment 7559523

Is this because I switched to using MPV as my player? I thought this would be something with the Dolphin file manager since I had a similar issue with no image thumbnails before but that was a setting about file sizes and for video files it doesn't seem to be a thing. And yes I do have the ffmpg or whatever that is meant to generate thumbnails.

Try clearing the thumbnail cache folder, which is located at "~/.cache/thumbnails"
Delete everything in the folder (but not the folder itself) and restart Dolphin. Had this issue before and that fixed it.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Gonna post here cause I don't wanna bump another thread. I recently did a fresh install of EndevourOS on my PC and I noticed that the thumbnails for my video files are fucked.

View attachment 7559522

Sometimes a file will have a proper thumbnail, but it seems like they only look proper if they were manually set and not the auto-generated ones.

View attachment 7559523

Is this because I switched to using MPV as my player? I thought this would be something with the Dolphin file manager since I had a similar issue with no image thumbnails before but that was a setting about file sizes and for video files it doesn't seem to be a thing. And yes I do have the ffmpg or whatever that is meant to generate thumbnails.

I don't know much about dolphin. But generally with other file managers they use an external program to general thumbnails. You probably want to look into how dolphin does it. You might be missing a dependency.

Is it normal for that jbd2 process to be running nonstop? Shouldn't it finish at some point?


No need to be a dick about it. I haven't disabled journaling (jbd2 is still running), I keep backups, and all that constant writing did make me "autistically care" because I didn't know that much about SSDs. Having to replace a drive or reinstall an OS is a pain. Also I still think it's not a dumb idea to minimize writing to flash memory anyway.


That's a lot of torrenting.

They are probably right though. Its likely not worth caring, or paying attention to at least. Unless it's spending a lot of CPU cycles writing. That is noticably degrading performance. Which I doubt it is.

I'm just annoyed how Linux lies about how long copying a file to a USB drive takes. You think it's done it you have to run sync to see it takes another ten minutes or so to complete

Probably depends on the specifics of your system. I've had some long syncs while using some stuff. But generally at least with how I have my schedulers, and filesystems now. After the program is done. The sync is pretty much instant. Though obviously the actual copying part is a little longer.

 

[YoRHa No. 2 Type B]

I'm just annoyed how Linux lies about how long copying a file to a USB drive takes. You think it's done it you have to run sync to see it takes another ten minutes or so to complete

Does anyone know of a way to make it work like Windows (where once its done in the file copy dialog its just done, and doesn't lie to you that its done and still copying in the background)?
Its been one of my biggest pet peeves with Linux and I've used it for several years.
I couldn't find a way to fix this other then manually writing udev rules for every device, which I would rather not do.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Does anyone know of a way to make it work like Windows (where once its done in the file copy dialog its just done, and doesn't lie to you that its copying in the background)?
Its been one of my biggest pet peeves with Linux and I've used it for several years.
I couldn't find a way to fix this other then manually writing udev rules for every device, which I would rather not do.

At least Gentoo has a package called something like

Nvme-schuduler-udev-rules.

Or SSD. I can't remember. Anyway. It makes it easy. It just has a config file in /etc/default you edit and it takes care of that for you.

Also in general I find using fast file system with good defaults helps. For me I like xfs. And if you don't have to worry about other operating systems for usb's f2fs is pretty good actually. But if you need compatibility it's not the best.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Try clearing the thumbnail cache folder, which is located at "~/.cache/thumbnails"
Delete everything in the folder (but not the folder itself) and restart Dolphin. Had this issue before and that fixed it.

It worked flawlessly! Took a little bit of time to delete all of it sure, but once I started Dolphin again and went to the folder it was all looking normal now, thanks!

 

[ToroidalBoat]

hey @Darkholme's Dungeon

Found out that leaving System Monitor open is what's causing the issue with the systemd journal. The cause, rather than the symptom. There was an endlessly recurring "gnome-system-monitor.desktop[2583]: glibtop(c=2583): [WARNING] statvfs '/run/user/1000/doc' failed: Operation not permitted" message. With System Monitor closed, it is more quiet.

Another recurrent thing: opening that "more items" thingy in that dock makes repeated "Couldn't find child [[hex code] Gjs_ui_windowPreview_WindowPreview ([file or tab])] in window slots" for some reason. Any and all open tabs in Firefox (and any and all open images in Image Viewer) get listed with every use of that in that systemd-journal text.

hey @Slav Power

squeamish about SSD wear

Couldn't help it. I also tend to worry in general more than average, so that doesn't help much.

My previous system SATA SSD had like 80 something % of life and it's still fine.

So 20% or 80% remaining?

The reason I stopped using it was because the OS on it shat itself

What happened and how long did it take to happen?

back it the fuck up

I've been backing stuff up since I got my first computer almost a quarter of a century ago.

(can't quote post even by selecting text for some reason)

 

[AnOminous]

But at this point, I'm comfortable with Grub, and making a Grub bootloader USB isn't a headache to me.

The last time I had to do a major rescue was because I'm a GRUB retard (well GRUB2) and shitter-shattered my entire boot.