Some middle-aged guy on the Internet; Seen a lot of it and occasionally regurgitate it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4.

Commented on Reddit (same name… at the moment) until it went full Musk.

Now I’m here.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • palordrolap@kbin.socialtoLinux@lemmy.mlDisk imaging
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    5 months ago

    Ones I have used: GNOME Disks’ create and restore image features. Possibly Mint’s mintstick for writing a distro’s .iso out to a USB stick. I am not too sure on that.

    I assume old-school dd still works as well, which might be a better option for scripted backups or minimal systems.







  • The gsettings command can change things on the fly in the dconf, assuming that’s where the setting actually resides. It’s a pain to do, but that means it’s possible to write a script that makes the necessary change(s) and that can then be assigned to a keyboard combo.

    For example, I have one that toggles a Cinnamon panel between the top and the bottom of its screen (I won’t get into why) and currently have it bound to Ctrl-Alt-Space.

    It’s currently a hack that uses a couple of hardcoded values that I pulled from the dconf by observing what it was set to with the panel in each location. If it finds the first value it changes it to the second, and vice versa.

    (In the unlikely event I come to change the layout to something it doesn’t recognise, it bails out, doing nothing.)

    Anyway, you could probably do something similar to toggle the dark/light mode.


  • Most shells will issue $PS2 as the continuation prompt if you quote a filename and try to insert a carriage return.

    Ctrl-V Ctrl-J is the explicit keypress pair to insert a carriage return without triggering $PS2, but beware: If the carriage return is outside of quotes, that’s equivalent to starting a new command in much the same way a semicolon or a new line in a shell script would.

    echo "hello^V^Jthere" [Enter] echoes hello on one line and then there on the next, but echo hello^V^Jthere [Enter] will echo hello then try to run a command called there

    We’d have to assume that whatever fixes spaces in filenames would also have an option to fix this subtlety. And I say to whoever tries: Good luck with that.



  • Most terminals start a shell as the first program, so you’re not really learning “Terminal” so much as whatever program it starts first. Bash is a pretty common shell, so you might want to search for things like “Bash examples” to get a feel for it.

    If that’s too simple, or you blast past that, then reading bash’s manual might give you some more ideas. The man command is your friend. The manuals are not necessarily quite so friendly, but they’re aimed at someone who’s already somewhat competent.

    Anyway, here’s one link from a Bash examples search I did: https://linuxsimply.com/bash-scripting-tutorial/basics/examples/

    If Bash isn’t what you have where you are, substitute its name instead. Zsh and Fish are pretty popular. There are others, but I don’t think any mainstream Linux uses them by default.

    To check what shell you’re using try an echo $0 or echo $SHELL.

    Finally, a bit of advice: Don’t go running commands you see on the Internet unless you’re sure what they’re going to do is something you have no problem with. And be careful with copy/pasting from web pages you don’t know or trust - I can’t vouch for the examples in the link I gave earlier, for example. It’s possible to make things look like a completely innocent command but when pasted does something else entirely.


  • I remember using Pico, Nano’s predecessor, in the mid-to-late '90s. Nano was created because there was a desire to distribute Pico with Linux. Unfortunately, the licensing was unclear so a clone had to be made. Fortunately there was no argument about editor appearance and behaviour.

    As shocking as the 2001 date might be, it seems like Pico might have ceased development as recently as the end of 2022 along with its e-mail reader parent program Alpine (formerly Pine).

    If true, Nano still has a few years to go before it will overtake its parent for longevity.

    (Both vi and Emacs are far older, of course.)


  • Eh. Not quite. Yes, the main editions use Ubuntu as a starting point, but they remove a load of Canonical’s cruft, like Snaps. They have their own suite of applications, the XApps, that are forks of other tools, as well as a number of other improvements and changes.

    I couldn’t say whether it’s as far from Ubuntu as Ubuntu is from the original Debian, but it’s some distance removed for sure.

    And LMDE is based on Debian, skipping Ubuntu entirely.


  • You could probably rig something up to periodically check RAM usage and if it’s dangerously high, send a system notification - or make an xmessage popup - to tell you to restart Brave ASAP. That is, before the death loop begins in the first place.

    You might also want to install an extension that unloads tabs that haven’t been accessed in a while, especially if you’re a tab hoarder.

    I don’t use Brave, so I’m making assumptions that such an extension exists and that Brave can be restarted without losing all tabs, etc.



  • English is an open-source project with no overarching plan and several major variants that has had literally millions of contributors over thousands of release cycles per branch. There’s bound to be some cruft in the code.

    Anyone who suggests reform is enacting that one xkcd about standards. And no-one will use their variant except for a few enthusiasts who think it’s the best thing since sliced silicon.





  • The Robustness Principle may seem like little more than a suggestion, but it is the foundation on which many successful things are based.

    To boil it down to meme-level old-school Torvaldsry: Assume everyone else is a f–king idiot who can barely do what they’re supposed to and expect to parse their files / behaviour / trash accordingly.

    If you do not do this, you are, without doubt, one of those f–king idiots everyone else is having to deal with. If you do do this, it does not guarantee that you are not a f–king idiot. Awareness is key.

    Examples where this works: Web browser quirks mode; Driving a car; Measure twice, cut once. This latter one is special because it reveals that often, the f–king idiot you’re trying to deal with is yourself.

    Assume everyone else is worse.

    Fun corollary: In altering his behaviour towards f–king idiots people who should know better, Linus has learned to apply the robustness principle to interpersonal communication.