Linux

After a single APT command gone wrong made my Debian installation unusable, I decided to reinstall Linux. I tried to back up everything to my external hard drive, but it kept unmounting, so I elected to use Filen (a FOSS cloud storage provider) instead.

It was only after installing openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma that I realised I hadn't actually synchronised the folder I had moved my backup to; meaning I have lost everything but a single Minecraft world (which I had backed up to a Compact Flash card in February).

Tl;dr: Double check your backups, and use physical storage whenever possible.

TIL the French government may have broken encryption on a LUKS-encrypted laptop with a "greater than 20 character" password in April 2023.

• https://nantes.indymedia.org/posts/87395/une-lettre-divan-enferme-a-la-prison-de-villepinte-perquisitions-et-disques-durs-dechiffres/

When upgrading TAILS today, I saw their announcement changing LUKS from PBKDF2 to Argon2id.

• https://tails.boum.org/security/argon2id/index.en.html

The release announcement above has some interesting back-of-the-envelope calculations for the wall-time required to crack a master key from a LUKS keyslot with PBKDF2 vs Argon2id.

And they also link to Matthew Garrett's article, which describes how to manually upgrade your (non-TAILS) LUKS header to Argon2id.

• https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66429.html

How do people here feel about mosh to the wide internet? We provide SSH, and use both normal secure passwords and duo for all logins. We've had a few more inquiries about using mosh recently, and looking at it, the big concerns I'd have are potentially the firewall rules (is it outgoing or incoming high port?) and the long lasting authentication across IPs and network connections. On unmanaged collaborator or partner devices this seems like a kind of hole if the device is compromised or stolen, where the session can live for "a long time".

However, I tend to believe them that their AES session keys make it pretty unlikely to be hijacked just over the net. Is there any consensus?

Was thinking about trading in my gaming laptop and opting for a tablet to be more mobile. Any Linux tablets out there? Or would it be better just to by like a Surface and install Linux that way? TIA

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/730698

I'm looking to move away from Google Photos, and I already use Backblaze B2 to sync my Joplin notes. Is there a piece of software that can store my photos on S3, while also providing a gallery view (á la Apple/Google Photos)?

I will be using this on iOS, Linux, and possibly a deGoogled Android ROM (in the future). Multiple different apps are fine, as long as they can work together.

In terms of features, I don't really care whether it's minimalist or if it has all the bells and whistles. As long as it does its job.

I have already looked into Nextcloud and Piwigo, but it's not financially sustainable for me to self-host at the minute. I also don't want to pay for Cryptomator if there's a free alternative.

Thanks!

who has sent invites?

I was thinking of sending out invites to my old Puppys (Puppy users) but I use Raspbian, Manjaro and [shield your eyes] even BSD derivative IOS … ☺️

Is we St Ignatius of GNU compatible? 🤔

Many years ago when I was a baby distro-hopping penguin, I new so little. And many distros were full of watered down unix illuminati. Very condescending/dismissive/unkind advisory know it alls. Boo! Hiss!

A rather intriguing Linux, not even on version one had a kind user; knowledgeable, patient and willing to answer my noob questions. I had that distro on the back burner, valuing its incredible speed and efficient programs but its screen scrolling was s l o w on my hardware …

And then … I was helped with making use of my very old graphic card. Whoosh, all of a sudden Puppy Linux was viable and still very different, experimental and well … just small, efficient, ran from RAM as root. Basically the way Linux for a desktop could be …

I was hooked in …

I was not much for programming but could support in a variety of other ways. Daily news-letters, youtube talks, curating the wiki, posts on the forum. Testing every release and reporting back etc. etc.

I am no longer active but remember …

… support your distro … My very first act was starting this page … grown a bit since then https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppy_Linux

I'm trying to set up a Linux laptop for a friend who lives in another city. They have only ever used Windows, and likely won't have easy access to fix issues (not that I'm an expert).

First off, is it a good idea to give them a Linux PC at all? Have others had good/bad experiences giving technophobes Linux?

Secondly, if I go ahead with it, what's a good, stable, "safe" OS for a beginner? I'm shy of anything that's a rolling release (e.g. Arch, Manjaro etc) as "bleeding edge" can break things more often than not. I'm leaning towards Debian or something Debian based. But I've also heard good things about Fedora.

If I was the one using the PC, I'd have installed Fedora, as I've heard it's well-maintained. Then again there's been some good buzz about Debian 12. What would your advice be? Thanks!

Are there issues with sharing /home and other directories between linux distributions on the same system? What about sharing between linux and bsd?

Just curious.

Linux foundation and a number of big names in tech commit top talent and invest on RISC-V. The companies that support this initiative are, among others, Google, Intel, MediaTek, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Red Hat, Samsung, SiFive, etc.

I started my computer today and after the BIOS boot logo nothing showed up. Usually Plymouth's disk decryption screen shows up as my SSD is encrypted. I legit thought something had broken my computer and even updated my BIOS. Still, nothing, just a black screen.

Then I checked Reddit's /r/Pop_OS and many users have had the same problem. Apparently the latest system update has broken Plymouth, so after the BIOS logo one has to input the decryption password blindly. And BAM – then the Pop OS desktop shows up! I'm telling this here in case anyone else uses Pop OS. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.