Debian on passthejoe

GNOME Software was pretty much freezing in Debian 12. Here's how I fixed it

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 03:45:00 -0800

My 2011 iMac 27-inch running Debian 12 (upgraded since 10) was having an issue with GNOME Software. The app would start, but it would “spin” forever, never allowing me to add, remove or update software.

A quick search produced this fix, which worked immediately:

To fix Gnome Software getting stuck with “Software catalog is being loaded” being shown, kill the application and remove its cache using these two commands:

$ killall gnome-software
$ rm -rf ~/.cache/gnome-software

Then restart GNOME Software. It works!

I love a quiet laptop

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 13:02:19 -0700

I love a quiet computer. That’s one of the great appeals of the Raspberry Pi. No fans, no spinning drives. If only they had enough power to really do desktop things.

I’ve never experienced a Pi “bigger” than a Zero W version 1.1, so I don’t have enough information.

And like most people who still use “real” computers that aren’t smartphones, I do most of my computing on a laptop. And that laptop has an x86_64 (in my case Intel) processor.

Debian 11 on a Mid-2011 Apple iMac 27-inch

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 16:59:21 -0700

An Apple Mid-2011 iMac 27-inch “Core i5” 2.7 fell into my lap some time around 2017, and even though it had a few years of MacOS support ahead, it was slow — never mind the 20 GB of RAM I added when supporting it for an Adobe Creative Cloud workflow.

Booting took forever. Updates took forever. Saving an inDesign document took … you guessed it. A lot of spinning beach balls. (You know when I get spinning beach balls in Linux? NEVER.)

Pausing the Linux rebuild

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 16:48:56 -0700

I was all ready to crack open the HP Envy 15 laptop this afternoon, pull the 250 GB NVMe M.2 SSD and replace it with a 1 TB model. While in there, I planned to replace the battery, which has a dead cell.

But I decided to press “pause.”

I started running Linux on this particular laptop in 2019 (??) with Debian Stable (then Buster), replacing it with Testing (Bullseye) maybe a couple of months ago.

Backups in Linux: I keep it simple

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 15:55:35 -0700

The next step in putting a new hard drive into my laptop is to make a full backup of the /home files. I haven’t done a full-image Clonezilla-style backup in a long, long time, and I do recommend it it you have a spare drive and a lot of spare time.

Instead I just back up my user files. I have two working Linux computers right now, and if I need to rebuild one, I can do a reinstall and get my preferred applications set up fairly quickly.

Reinstalling a Linux computer system: Step by step

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 09:39:10 -0700

I’m about to put a new hard drive and battery in my main laptop, a 2017 HP Envy 15.

Whenever I make a change like this, I like to be ready with backups, Linux install images on USB drives and whatever tools and parts I might need.

I’m not as worried about running into problems because I now have a very decent second computer — the 2011 27-inch iMac running Debian Buster — if the laptop isn’t ready right away, I’ll still be able to work.

The new Debian Bullseye desktop background just moved onto systems

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 04:48:45 -0800

The new desktop background image for Debian Bullseye/Testing (the future Debian 11) appeared on my system last night in the updates.

It’s another in the hundreds (and probably thousands) of steps leading up to Bullseye becoming Debian GNU/Linux’s stable release later this year — sometime around July if the recent pattern holds.

I'm not opposed to nonfree firmware in Debian, but I removed it, and my laptop still runs fine

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 12:18:29 -0800

The debate over whether to include nonfree firmware in the Debian installer has emerged from the depths of the debian-devel mailing list under the title “Making Debian available.”

The gist of this extremely long e-mail thread (and Debian is a mailing list culture, despite attempts to pull it into the 21st century is that the Debian Project is hostile to new users because its standard install images do not include nonfree firmware, and installations on most laptops will go poorly because the Linux kernel and free firmware might not support their WiFi or display systems.

How this Debian Stable user ended up with Google Chrome from Google’s repository

Sat, 19 Dec 2020 16:52:21 -0800

Update: On Jan. 1, 2021, an updated Chromium package moved into the Debian Stable repository. Hopefully it will also become part of the Testing repo and appear in the next Debian release. The original post follows:

I guess I knew that the Chromium web browser — the code from the open-source project that is still coded by Google people but isn’t fully Googled — was very out of date in the Debian Stable repository.

Writing in git vs. blogging

Sun, 21 Jun 2020 14:10:21 -0700

Any of us who have been blogging over the past 10 or more years has written hundreds or maybe thousands of posts.

I’m pretty sure I have at least a couple thousand.

But blog writing and other writing are different. A blog tends to say “this is now, things below this are in the past, things above this will appear in the future.”

It’s reverse-chronological. That’s not a horrible thing.

Ruby gtk3 GUI applications ARE cross-platform

Sun, 06 Oct 2019 13:48:05 -0700

I’ve been intermittently struggling and totally forgetting about the best way to create cross-platform GUI applications. I’ve veered between Tk for Ruby or Python, JavaFX and Qt.

I recently stumbled on GTK3 in Ruby, and I’ve been going through a couple of tutorials in an attempt to figure it out.

Since I’m back on Debian Stable for 90 percent of my computing, I figured I’d give GTK3 a try. I knew that you could run GTK apps in Windows (and presumably also on MacOS), but maybe I’d have to resort to exotic packaging to make it happen.

Printing in Debian 10: CUPS isn't in the default desktop if you forget to check the box during installation

Wed, 11 Sep 2019 07:13:18 -0700

I haven’t had the occasion to print anything in Debian 10 Buster in the couple of weeks that I have been running it, but today is the day.

I knew from the release notes that Debian 10 included “driverless” printing, but I couldn’t find any printers in GNOME Setings, even though I have a wireless printer on my local network.

The reason? I didn’t have CUPS. I had forgotten to check the “print server” box during my installation.

Debian 10 Buster with GNOME 3: I didn't expect it to be this fast, but that could be the SSD talking

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 13:30:00 -0700

I don’t know how much of it is Debian 10 and how much is swapping a 5400-RPM hard drive with an M.2 NVMe SSD, but my 2-year-old laptop is FLYING now that I’ve ditched Windows 10 and the 1 GB magnetic drive that came with it.

And this is with GNOME 3. The stock or lightly/heavily-favored desktop environment in Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu looks great, runs with no hesitation (in constrast to Windows 10) and doesn’t have me thinking that I need anything else for speed-related reasons.

Set umask in vsftpd so incoming files have 644 permissions

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 13:09:18 -0700

If you are setting up an FTP server (I’m using vsftpd in Debian Buster), setting the umask is the way you get incoming files to “take” the right permissions.

For text files, I like the permissions to be 644, which is rw-r--r-- (read-write for user, read for group, read for the world).

To get this in vsftpd, uncomment this line:

local_umask=022

File permissions and ownership that make Ode's Indexette work on a Debian Buster server

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 13:00:40 -0700

This was easier on Hostgator, where everything is “owned” by my user account and everything works.

To get Ode addins to work, the /data directory is owned by my user and is in the www-data group.

The /data/addins/state directory has the same ownership and permissions (755).

The /data/addins/state/Indexette directory is owned by www-data and is in the www-data group and has permissions 755.

The files created by Indexette in /data/addins/state/Indexette are aux_index_file and primary_index_file. They are owned by www-data and are in the www-data group. Their permissions are 644.

When I try to arrange bookmarks in the Chromium or Google Chrome browsers in Debian Wheezy, the app crashes

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 13:05:09 -0800

Update: I only have this problem with the Chrome/Chromium menu while running the GNOME 3 desktop environment. In Xfce, everything is fine.

The original entry starts here:

I guess I should file a bug report against Chromium in Debian Wheezy about the following:

When I go into the menu in either Chromium or Google Chrome (yes, I have both) and try to edit the bookmarks, the browser crashes. So I can’t re-arrange my bookmarks in these two browsers.