Linux

BZ2-ing up a terabyte of zeroes (back when a TB was more than people commonly had, then zipping that file up together with another file, to bypass virus scanners in emails that prevent emailing .exe files.

I've also seen a self-referential .zip file somewhere that contains itself.

On my previous laptop, the trackpad had a bug that made it spam interrupts after waking up from sleep. It ruined battery life and basically kept one core at 100% permanently.

So I duct-taped a systemd script that unbound and bound the trackpad after each wake up.

#!/bin/sh
case "$1" in
        post)
                echo -n "i2c_designware.0" > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/i2c_designware/unbind
                echo -n "i2c_designware.0" > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/i2c_designware/bind
        ;;
esac

I have a hardware malfunction with my secondary hard drive. Every once in the while it locks itself into read-only mode and corrupts a log file that crashes my system. My solution is to reboot Fn + Alt + Sysrq + 'b' and periodically delete the log files that exacerbate the issue. I need to replace the drive but that requires money and a backup solution, neither of which i currently have. It's been an ongoing issue for at least 4 years now.

Not me personally, but in one of my past project, my boss was running a bunch of "services" by leaving it on GNU screen terminal sessions and detaching from them.

Everytime I went in to debug something, I'd need to go thru a list of sessions, attach to one hoping that it's the right one (sometimes they'd name 'em), then see the console output.

Building a custom Buildroot Linux for a Pentium 2 laptop that can fit on a CD so I could back up a 2.5" IDE drive to a USB drive, probably.

On another note, last night, I had to get a Google TV set up on my dorm Wi-Fi, which requires me to either go through a portal to set it up or to go into my account and add the device's MAC address. The TV (which was brand new and doing OOBE stuff) wouldn't let me go to settings to get the MAC address without a network connection. Even more infuriating, there was a button in the Google Home app that said "Show MAC address", but when I pushed it, it would say "Can't get MAC address." What I ended up doing to get around that crap was setting up my Debian Thinkpad (which I am writing from now) to share its internet connection over ethernet to finish the setup process so I could get to settings and get the MAC address.

On one hand, a funny experience, but on the other hand, I'm simultaneously both mad at Google and my dorm internet provider.

You guys will probably groan but lots of people in this comment section should look into NixOS. My old Ubuntu machine was loaded with hacks I got from stack overflow to get certain things working (a script that runs at boot and shutdown to mount and unmount some network drives I wanted to appear natively). But now, I just use NixOS and there’s nothing on my machines that is even remotely hackey now. I just declare the drives as I want them and when I boot they are there and work as needed.

It makes me mad to see the current state sway is in, I even bought an AMD GPU for nothing.

In the earlier days of Plasma 6, it would crash on me when waking from sleep, so I had a small script that would basically restart plasmashell when waking so I didn't have to wait the several seconds for the system to realize that it was frozen before I had a functional desktop.

Got fed up of Pipewire suspending (old receiver takes ~2 sec to work again after spdif stream is cut) that now I auto-run aplay to play a silent .wav on loop

not sure if duct tape or brute force but if I can't stop a file from getting overwritten like resolv.conf I just make it immutable with chattr

I'm not technically inclined at all, so the most duct tapey thing I can remember was hacking Gnome to use Nemo as my file browser instead of Gnome's default file browser once.

I ran out of crtcs, but I wanted another monitor. I widened a virtual display, and drew the left portion of it on one monitor, like regular. Then I had a crown job that would copy chunks of it into the frame buffer of a USB to DVI-d adapter. It could do 5 fps redrawing the whole screen, but I chose things to put there where it wouldn't matter too much. The only painful thing was arranging the windows on that monitor, with the mouse updating very infrequently, and routinely being drawn 2 or more places in the frame buffer.

I duct taped a Raspberry Pi to the back of a television once. Does that count?

Well it was more like a temporary duct tape, but I "installed" a copy of Ubuntu in RAM from the running Ubuntu system so that I could "boot" (pivot_root) into it without restarting it

All because I didn't want to wait on a ticket for my dedicated server provider to hook in a KVM LOL

(See my meme post I posted to c/linuxmemes a few weeks back for more info)

My Nvidia card won't properly resume the display after suspend with the default suspend script, but if I correct the script file, every time aptitude updates the nvidia drivers, it restores the bad version of the configuration file. If you set the file immutable with chattr, aptitude throws a fit and goes into a broken state when it can't overwrite the file on a driver update.

So I keep a good copy of the script file in the directory, and in my pre-suspend script file I overwrite the main suspend script with the good version. Every single time.

I made a systemd script that fires when going to / waking up from sleep - it checks how long the sleep was and if it was just a few seconds, it puts the computer back to sleep.

In hindsight, I think the thing that made it work was bluetooth was somehow responsible for the initial failed suspend. The second shot at sleep happened before bluetooth came back up, so it succeeded.

I keep a small local knowledge base with common fixes for problems I find recurrently (over and over again in some cases).

It has a bit over 1,300 lines of markdown files split by category of problem. It saves me the trouble of finding that exact solution in stack overflow that fixed this exact problem 5 months ago.

sometime ago I had my home directory managed by systemd-homed on Fedora (before 38 even afaik). the SELinux policy wasn't configured properly for it though, so I had to keep setting it to permissive mode. for some stupid reason I remember running the command to do that on every. single. boot. lol

Not exactly mine but I've used it. I have a fast but data-limited internet connection and a slower unlimited connection. When I need the faster connection to do something I connect to it through wifi while staying connected to the other through Ethernet. Then use this project to bind a specific app to wifi while everything else keeps using Ethernet. It uses LD_PRELOAD to link its own version of network connect that calls the real method. There's definitely a better way to do this with iptables but it's a good enough patch for when needed.