in reply to gwilikers

It used to be button 10 (also counting 4 scrollwheel directions and click) of my Elecom trackball. I had written a small C program reading the device node and writing the events just of that to stdout, then piping that to a tclsh script (so I could change it easily and it's still super fast for gaming) which did something in X. Horrible.
But then they added support for more buttons to everything (kernel, X) and now I can just map it in games, like any other.
in reply to DasFaultier

It was definitely a headache for me as well, but you need a guest agent (like vmwaretools or qemu-guest-agent), a cloud init ready template for the distro of your choice, a cloud init config file (network/user/vendor) and a custom SCSI/ide cloudinit cdrom mounted at boot on your VM.
You also can find cloudinit logs on your VM to try and figure out what's missing or what went wrong.
in reply to gwilikers

XDG portal filechooser for Firefox: the KDE implementation uses Dolphin, which is full of features and I use most of them; the default GTK one is mildly infuriating to use and looks ugly too, but getting the browser to use the portal I want was a nightmare - especially since GTK discontinued the GTK_USE_PORTAL envvar.
The related Firefox config entries make no sense either.
in reply to projectmoon

I think GNOME's filechooser is the GTK one (never used it so I'm not sure), mine looks like this:

Image/photo

It's entirely possible that Firefox changed and now uses XDG portals by default, I configured it like this a long time ago.

As for how to configure it, I honestly don't know.
It was a combination of messing with widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal on about:config, and changing XDG envvars and dotfiles; both by following several conflicting Reddit and bbs.archlinux.org posts.

in reply to gwilikers

Motion on my RPI. I didn't want it to save videos or photos, so I turned it off in the config. But it still saved them. So I tried a few other places in the config to turn it off, but nothing worked and I'd run out of space within a day. So I changed the save directory to /dev/null.

Then I tried to upgrade the pi, and the new version of motion has a different config, incompatible with the old one. So I'm running the old one.

in reply to gwilikers

Setting up a matrix server was a god damn nightmare for me. I eventually got it working but I hit pretty much every conceivable obstacle along the way. Getting the config file just right, the networking, the federation, the coturn server, getting end users to understand they need to backup their keys....

I'm sure it'd be easier for a Linux pro but I was in way over my head. Only got it working through stubbornness and help from the community.

in reply to beeng

If you connect to the network and open firefox, it will display a toast to open the corresponding captive portals page. You can then login through that. Given that your VPN isn't blocking unencrypted connections etc.

Extrapolation of partial knowledge warning


I assume the network advertises a captive portals url and identifies you based on your MAC address.

The config is server-side (router).

This entry was edited (7 months ago)
in reply to beeng

I use this project (github.com/FiloSottile/captive…) which works most of the time.

Most captive portals work by answering the DNS requests with the captive portal ip. This works only if the correct dns servers are configured and a lot of security features like dnssec, DOH, ... are disabled.

More info from the project author: words.filippo.io/captive-brows…

in reply to gwilikers

Configuring captive portal wifi without network manager or any aids beyond what's provided by wpa-supplicant. Eventually I gave up, since it wasn't really that important.

Adjusting freetype so that it works more-or-less the way I want it to, because the maintainers hate anyone who disagrees with their current hinting algorithm and make the setting as opaque as possible. I would prefer it if they allowed me to have hinting on some fonts and exclude only the ones that were designed to be pixel-aligned, but unless something's changed recently, that option isn't even offered.

in reply to electric_nan

I learned this lesson pretty quick when working in IT.

It's not always feasible to document everything as it happens, but I definitely learned to do so if I had the time and means to while I was doing the thing.

Just started at a new company with 0 documentation, they're super psyched that I've actually been writing down all their processes/procedures/configurations etc. as they explain them to me/as I work with them.

This entry was edited (7 months ago)
in reply to electric_nan

If you want to get into doing it, I found searching through a lot of note taking applications until I found something I really liked helped me remember to go do it regularly.

For FOSS stuff a lot of people like Joplin, and I could certainly recommend it. Personally though, I really like Obsidian for its backlinking and graph view features, but it's not open source.

Furthermore, just carrying around a notebook and a pen everywhere you go as a habit helps a lot. I got into the habit of doing this by maintaining a personal journal for some time. For writing effective notation on paper which can easily be digitized, I would recommend looking into "bullet journaling" methods, and again, finding a notebook and pen that you really quite like, helps a lot to make the experience enjoyable and develop it as a skill.

in reply to gwilikers

I've been on arch for years, but have recently started pc gaming. Lutris has been surprisingly easy to get working. I have a nintendo switch already and decided I want to try to use the joycons for the computer, don't want to buy gamepads but it gives and alternative to keyboard and mouse. Getting them consistently recognized by bluetooth has been a massive pain, but after searching I've figured out a package that I can install that fixes the issues. In fact, I couldn't find anyone who found a solution to this issue without installing this specific package.

That package is pulseaudio-bluetooth, even though the nintendo joycons do not have an audio jack or capability to receive audio. I've had my audio set up and configured with alsa, and alsa does everything (relating to audio) that I need it to, but pulseaudio-bluetooth requires me to install pulseaudio (duh) and will not work unless I enable the pulseaudio service, which fucks up my alsa config. I've spent a while dicking around trying to get pulseaudio to pretend it doesn't exist except for connecting joycons, but there's always some nuisance popping up. I also tried using a different usb bluetooth controller and plugging them into different usb ports. Given up for the moment and will probably just buy another gamepad and hope it works better without needing pulseaudio-bluetooth.

In all honesty I still don't really know what the hell I'm doing on arch, I originally installed it to learn this stuff better but all I've really learned is how to read documentation well enough to get things working by trial-and-error. I've had a stable system for like ten years now though and I'm too comfortable with it to warrant switching to a friendlier distro, but this specific issue is a pain in the ass.

This entry was edited (7 months ago)