Linux

From time to time, often after I've restored from sleep or finished playing a Steam game, one of my CPU cores is pinned at 100% with no indication of what might be doing it. Running htop, btop, or GNOME system monitor all show the same thing: CPU0 at 100% while the rest are doing near-nothing, and no process in particular seems to be using those resources.

If I restart, it's back to normal, and sometimes I can play a game in Steam or let the computer go to sleep and it doesn't do this, but it happens often enough that's annoying/confusing so I'd like to know if there's a way to either (a) diagnose which processes are using which CPU cores, or (b) somehow "reset" the checking of these values to make sure that something's not just being misreported.

This is a desktop system running Arch & GNOME.

Too bad the desk space sucks...

High res image

Caption: Picture of a giant display in a big event/concert space. The display shows a terminal with the output from hyfetch. End caption

High res image

Anyways here's the real setup that was controlling that big ass screen

Also sorry if the text formatting is messed up (I am posting from mobile)

I am contemplating buying one of the Seagate OneTouch Hub external hard drives as a backup for my media that's currently stored on some other external hard drives connected to my home server since they are always spinning.

My local retailers don't give me many options as far as large storage storage solution goes, and the only other viable option now is a WD My BOOK 14 TB.

However, the retailer I will be buying it from goes out of its way to state that Windows or macOS is required. Is there any reason I should believe that I will run into troubles under Linux? I've had no issues whatsoever with some other Seagate hard drives (Expansion 5 TB), which I just instantly reformat to ext4 and use as normal. My guess is that this is just for the included software? I just want to make sure before I order.

(More long term I will set up a NAS, but for now time to learn and configure is more scarce than money, so I just want a solution that will prevent me from losing my data)

EDIT: For anyone coming to this later wondering the same thing, I can confirm that it works just fine. It is just the included backup software that is not compatible. I've formatted it to ext4 and currently using rsync to backup my media.

Can someone point me to a helpful beginners resource explaining some Linux basics? Like what is the difference between "distro", which is what, like Ubuntu, fedora, Debian (? Or is that a category of distro?) And desktop environment which is what, KDE, Lubuntu, gnome? Like I don't even know I have these categories right let alone understand why I'd pick one over another and what practical effects it will have- which apps will I/won't I be able to install, etc...

I'm not expecting anyone to answer these questions for me, but if you could point me to something already written, I'd appreciate it.

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.

This week's changes and improvements cover a wide range of applications, from audio apps (including the classic Amarok, which is making a comeback) to Kate getting improvements to its integrated Git features.

In between, you have everything from new functionalities for note-taking utilities and media players, to upgrades in financial software and mobile apps.

TLDR;

It literally hurts me personally to see this happening. It's like a kick in the gut. I used to be proud about having had an involvement with the Linux kernel community in a previous life. This doesn't feel like the community I remember being part of.

This is something I have been stuck on for a while.

I want to use Wayland for that variable refresh rate and some better handeling of screen recordings.

I have tried time and time again to get a wayland session running with the proprietary nvidia driver, but have not gotten there yet.

Only the X11 options are listed on the login screen. When using the fallback FOSS nvidia driver however, all the correct X11 and Wayland options show up (Including Gnome and KDE, both in X11 and Wayland).

Wasn't this fixed, like, about a year ago? I have the "latest" proprietary nvidia driver, but the current debain one is still pretty old (535.183.06).

Sun Oct 27 03:21:06 2024       
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 535.183.06             Driver Version: 535.183.06   CUDA Version: 12.2     |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                      |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+======================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB    Off | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| 25%   43C    P0              25W / 120W |    476MiB /  6144MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                      |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                            |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                            GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                             Usage      |
|=======================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A      6923      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                          143MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      7045    C+G   ...libexec/gnome-remote-desktop-daemon       63MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      7096      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                         81MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      7798      G   firefox-esr                                 167MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      7850      G   /usr/lib/huiontablet/huiontablet             13MiB |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

;-)

I run a qemu/KVM setup in which I have different VMs for different use cases/profiles. Very similar in theory to something like Qubes OS. So far when I want to swap to another VM I have to first un-fullscreen, then click the other VM display window and fullscreen that. I was beginning to work on hotkeys and scripts to allow switching between VMs by assigning Ctrl+NumPad# to specific VMs and then having the triggered VM appear in full screen. But I'm imagining there's probably already a VM display manager that streamlines this.

Does anybody have any suggestions?

The biggest factor is that the display needs to be responsive as I'm using these VMs for daily tasks.

Bonus points if the display manager can output a variable for the currently focused VM so I can script the keyboard backlight to change to an assigned color as well as change the power profile of the base operating system to match the currently highlighted VM better.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21289888

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/chaftrix

This program written in C will render the matrix effect in the terminal window in the background, while rendering an image in the foreground, allowing animation of this image in one or two dimensions.

Image rendering is done with chafa.

This program is the continuation and evolution of other projects:

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/matrix_clone

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/ascii-matrix

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/animatrix

Does anyone here use Starlabs computers? I'm thinking of buying one of their laptops and I'm interested in how well their products are supported in the long term. Specifically, firmware updates and spare parts & repairs.

Thanks

Hello! My girlfriend bought a new pc, an HP pavilion x360 with the touchscreen, and asked me to install her kubuntu as in her previous non-tablet pc, and so I did. It works very well, except for the fact that I tried really hard without success to setup a virtual keyboard. fcitx5 was already installed, but I couldn't find a way to use it as virtual keyboard, and apparently it does not bundle a UI. i then installed maliit (the one that I use on my EndeavourOS 2in1 laptop flawlessly) but it seems to have a strange bug where it only works once, then after you close it it will never pop up again. I tried the workaround suggested here but it works once every 4 tries and the keyboard pops up but is unable to write anything.

Has anyone achieved to install a virtual keyboard on Kubuntu 24.04? I'd rather not switch to X11 because except for the keyboard, the touch support is way better under wayland

thanks in advance to anyone!

If you love exploit mitigations, you may have heard of a new system call named mseal landing into the Linux kernel’s 6.10 release, providing a protection called “memory sealing.” Beyond notes from the authors, very little information about this mitigation exists. In this blog post, we’ll explain what this syscall is, including how it’s different from prior memory protection schemes and how it works in the kernel to protect virtual memory. We’ll also describe the particular exploit scenarios that mseal helps stop in Linux userspace, such as stopping malicious permissions tampering and preventing memory unmapping attacks.

Memory sealing allows developers to make memory regions immutable from illicit modifications during program runtime. When a virtual memory address (VMA) range is sealed, an attacker with a code execution primitive cannot perform subsequent virtual memory operations to change the VMA’s permissions or modify how it is laid out for their benefit.

...

mseal digresses from prior memory protection schemes on Linux because it is a syscall tailored specifically for exploit mitigation against remote attackers seeking code execution rather than potentially local ones looking to exfiltrate sensitive secrets in-memory.

...

From the disallowed operations, we can discern two particular exploit scenarios that memory sealing will prevent:

• Tampering with a VMA’s permissions. Notably, not allowing executable permissions to be set can stop the revival of shellcode-based attacks.
• “Hole-punching” through arbitrary unmapping/remapping of a memory region, mitigating data-only exploits that take advantage of refilling memory regions with attacker-controlled data.

...

There are likely many other use cases and scenarios that we didn’t cover. After all, mseal is the newest kid on the block in the Linux kernel! As the glibc integration completes and matures, we expect to see improved iterations for the syscall to meet particular demands, including fleshing out the ultimate use of the flags parameter.

This started today and hasn’t happened before. Initially I thought it was an application from work that was causing issues. I SSHed into the machine and didn’t see anything strange - I used btop.

I updated the system and rebooted. A few minutes later when I got to the machine to check everything, was frozen again. I hadn’t even logged in.

I’ve used the eos-sendlog feature to get the logs and it seems like it might be GPU related.

I was using KDE with X11 when this happened, but I’ve been using that combination for months at this point. Nothing that I’m aware of has changed or been updated recently to possibly cause this issue.

Update: I’ve done a complete shutdown (turned the PSU off) and rebooted with the LTS kernel. So far so good. It doesn’t seem to be a hardware issue as it worked fine on the live USB.

This is probably the last version by me.

Features:

• Linux native
• time, 3BV/s and IOE high scores, including percentiles and non-flagging versions
• scores kept indefinitely for all played games
• recording and playing replays
• CSV export
• timing in milliseconds
• responsive on slow hardware
• adjustable square size
• to reveal squares around a numbered square with flagged adjacent mines you can click the square with any button
• no "?" marks
• pause