Relatively Linux Newbie here. Been playing with flavors of Linux/Unix/BSD for a few decades but only recently moved to having one as my primary OS.

My question is: Since I don't think of myself as a person of interest, is there a solid reason to do things like validate hashes or signatures when I get packages from a non-standard repo?

For example, I want to do something with a tool that doesn't have it's own repository. They have a website with a .deb or .tar.gz download and an accompanying signature file or hash. There are instructions for grabbing the public key from their domain so I can verify the file or there is a hash text string.

I can go verify a hash or signature... but if I got the file and the signature from the same place . . . If an attacker wanted to hand me bad code, couldn't they also hand me a bad signature/certificate/key?

If I was given a flash drive with a tool by a random person, then I might want to validate it, but if I download a file from an org that I went to on purpose then the org giving me their key doesn't seem to do much. Aside from file corruption, there's nothing to prove and a corrupted file is likely to fail in other ways such as a .gz checksum.

I'm not saying the practice is bad. But if I'm not important enough to have someone waiting to intercept my random app download and give me a backdoored version and I trust the developer to not be giving me malware in the first place, is there a need to verify?

I am trying to use find (or a similar tool, I also really like fd)

• to locate directories matching the query

• only those directories which are the deepest match

• the target directories are not all the same depth, so -maxdepth or -mindepth can't do it

• it would be the opposite of -prune

Given the below directory tree, looking for directories with "red" in the name, the ones with Yes should be the matches:

$ tree
.
├── blue                = n
├── green               = n
│   ├── red-apple       = Yes
│   └── red-book        = n
│       └── red-pen     = Yes
├── red                 = n
│   └── red-strawberry  = Yes
│   └── 
└── yellow              = n
    └── basket          = n
        ├── flag        = n
        │   └── red     = Yes
        └── painted-red = Yes
            └── wagon   = n

So "red-book" does not match because it contains a subsequent match ("red-pen"). But it's OK to have a deeper non-matching directory (like "painted-red").

This is my basic command which finds 2 unwanted items:

$ find . -type d -name "*red*"
./green/red-apple
./green/red-book
./green/red-book/red-pen   # wrong
./yellow/basket/flag/red
./yellow/basket/red
./red                      # wrong
./red/red-strawberry

Title.

I know there are tools to set up a linux distro's installer on a USB flashdrive. What I'm looking for is slightly different: I want to install a linux distro (a Debian derivative, but am still unsure which) on a USB hard drive, but I want to do it from a running system, rather that have to boot into installer mode.

The rationale is that this is the only active machine I have ATM. I guess this exists since that's how "live distros" with installers even function in the first place, but I haven't had much luck searching for information.

After an update something must have broke. I depend on kid3 (KDE's audio tag editor) and it stopped working. I ran it from Konsole I am greeted by this:

kf.i18n: KLocalizedString: Domain is not set for this string, translation will not work. Please see https://api.kde.org/frameworks/ki18n/html/prg_guide.html msgid: "Your emails" msgid_plural: "" msgctxt: "EMAIL OF TRANSLATORS"  
kf.i18n: KLocalizedString: Domain is not set for this string, translation will not work. Please see https://api.kde.org/frameworks/ki18n/html/prg_guide.html msgid: "Your names" msgid_plural: "" msgctxt: "NAME OF TRANSLATORS"  
qt.multimedia.ffmpeg: Using Qt multimedia with FFmpeg version n9.0.1 GPL version 3 or later  
Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_nvidia.so: ne eblas malfermi komunan objektdosieron: Dosiero aŭ dosierujo ne ekzistas  
WARNING: radv is not a conformant Vulkan implementation, testing use only.  
[2026-08-26 17:23:41.060] [MANGOHUD] [info] [gpu.cpp:90] Set renderD128 as active GPU (driver=amdgpu id=1002:7550 pci_dev=0000:0f:00.0)  
[2026-08-26 17:23:41.076] [MANGOHUD] [info] [cpu.cpp:636] hwmon: using input: /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon4/temp1_input  
[1]    9907 segmentation fault (core dumped)  kid3  

It complains about missing something VDPAU related which I wouldn't think would be relevant. I would be grateful for any help. This is driving me insane.

Solved: OpenSnitch, https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch available via Software Manager on Mint as well.

There was a windows firewall (tinywall?) that worked like this:

1. Something wouldn´t work on the internet.
2. I'd query the firewall to see what was just blocked.
3. I'd whitelist that traffic.

Pretty painless and I never was forced to think about the firewall until absolutely necessry, and then only to the least possible amount.

Is there any firewall on Linux that works similarly? Running Mint.

(And, why? If you like.)

Hello Linux gang! Hopefully this is a quick one and I'll feel like a goober after. I am trying to mount a network share on a new VM. On my first VM, this seemed to work flawlessly. Here is the fstab entry for the working VM:
//192.168.1.186/gilashare /home/marighost/gilashare cifs uid=1000,gid=1000,credentials=/home/marighost/.sharelogin,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,x-systemd.automount,_netdev 0 0

The permissions for the .sharelogin are chmod'd to be 600.

In the .sharelogin itself, I can assure you that my username and password are correct, however, my password does contain a semicolon, if that matters at all (it doesn't seem to for VM 1).

I copied these over 1:1 into my new VM, and get the following error:

mount: /home/marighost/gilashare: cannot mount //192.168.1.186/gilashare read-only. dmesg(1) may have more information after failed mount system call.

So I check dmesg | less and see:

`[565649.948728] CIFS: enabling forceuid mount option implicitly because uid= option is specified
[565649.948730] CIFS: enabling forcegid mount option implicitly because gid= option is specified
[565649.948731] CIFS: Attempting to mount //192.168.1.186/gilashare
[565649.950091] CIFS: VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -13'

In searching for the solution for that return code (which doesn't really seem to map to a specific error), it seems like it's just "your password's wrong." But I can assure you that it isn't. .sharelogin on VM 2 has the same text and permissions as the file in VM 1. The fstab entries are identical. The mount points exist, each VM can see the share server and ping the IP.

I even tried mounting the share via the standard mount command with the following:
sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.186/gilashare /home/marighost/gilashare -o username=marighost,password=[REDACTED]

I mentioned earlier that my password contains a semicolon (;), which seems to effect Bash in ways I don't fully understand. I wrapped my password in the CLI with apostrophes (''), and the command takes, but nothing happens. Checking dmesg just shows [565649.948731] CIFS: Attempting to mount //192.168.1.186/gilashare with no errors, and the drive still does not mount.

I thank you for reading and taking the time to respond.

SOLVED EDIT: Remember to update your packages, folks. The Samba package was out of date on the file server. The reason VM1 worked is because they had the same package version. VM2 had the newer version.

Hey all!

Let me go stratight to the point:

I have an audio player in which I want to clone my ~/Music directory when I connect it to my computer. The only relevant thing about it is that it's a barebones filesystem and I cannot run cool stuff like Syncthing on the player (otherwise this question would already have a solution). Right now, my solution is that I connect the player to the computer and manually copy file to and delete files in the player. As you may have guessed, this is an error prone process. In order to solve that, I want to run a single command that clones ~/Music (src) into /path/to/player/Music (dst).

My requirements are:

• All new files in src MUST be copied into dst.
• All files no longer present in src MUST be deleted from dst.
• All files present in both src and dst that have more recent modifications in src MUST be copied and overwritten into dst.

As you can see, my player's filesystem is a strict replica of my main computer's. Now, I know I can write a Python script in an afternoon to do just that, but I want to know if there are any good tools first to do this. I searched the web in hope that rsync would help me here, but the only answers I can find are for buffier cp. It may be that I have a vocabulary problem and I'm not searching for the correct terms.

I'd love to read your ideas! A note about LLMs: I'm not interested at all in any comments about how llm-of-the-week coded this in a moment, I asked fake-chat and here's what it said or whatever. If you are not a human that can be bothered to write an answer, I won't be bothered to read it.

Thank you!

I got this error after opening my laptop, I am using Kubuntu
Thanks in advance

UPDATE:
I fixed it by looking in system logs and I realised something was wrong ith the cloned mac address and I fixed it and now it works.

I can't consistently connect my android phone to my Linux Mint box consistently with any of the apps I've tried, because frankly, they are all janky as fuck. Sometimes they work instantly, then they disconnect and then they refuse to work. I feel like a lab rat in a random reinforcement maze because I think I've memorized the precise magical steps to get these services working, but it is just random.

Things I know about: How to turn off the firewall, how to turn on the firewall, how to open ports, how to close ports, how to keep a wifi network connected on android even if it has no internet connection, how to connect to the same wifi network, how to see if a device is visible on the network, how to find ip addresses, etc.

So here are the ones I've tried: KDEConnect (most reliable but I've spent 30 minutes on it today) LocalSend (tried it today, can see each other but "no route to host" when I try to send) Warpinator

I'm thinking of ditching WiFi and exploring Bluetooth at this point, even if it would take all night to transfer files, if it were reliable, it would be worth it.

Background: I run internet only through my phone, including downloads. To transfer files onto my computer, I need to connect my phone to my computer unless I want to burn through my hotspot data and download it directly to my computer. My USB-C port is unfortunately broken, so I have to do this.

Hi, I want to delete .cr2 files that don't have a .jpg file in another directory. The idea is:
-Search files in jpg directory
-Select files in .cr2 directory that dont have matching names
-Delete them while keeping the .cr2s that have a corresponding .jpg so I have raw files for the good photos
Is this possible in a single command or do I have to write a script to do this?

A week ago I decided to give Fedora another try. I installed Fedora KDE and it caused me problems. I naturally thought it was a Fedora thing but ends up it was a KDE thing. So I installed my DWM repo and the problems I was having with Fedora went away. I don't want to use KDE anymore and would rather just keep using Fedora with DWM or a wayland WM.

My question is do I just keep using Fedora KDE or do I have to switch to another Fedora "spin"? I don't want to use KDE anymore, I'd love to just remove it all completely, switch login managers, and free up some space but apparently doing so would break my Fedora install from what I read online and that alone is making me question my decision to switch to Fedora. I feel like I'm "locked in" to a version of it I'm not really going to use. i.e. when it updates, it's going to update KDE with crap I won't use.

Can I remove KDE? switch login managers? is there an easier way to switch my Fedora version instead of having to reinstall the distro?

Distribution: Fedora Linux 44 (Workstation Edition)

I created a new Linux user and gave it admin with the gui interface, I then switched to it, but could not run sudo commands.

So I entered sudo usermod -a -G wheel [USER] to grant sudo rights through the cli, but still, the new user could not use sudo.

I logged in and out multiple times, but it did not help.

Then I restarted Linux and suddenly the new user could use sudo.

To test if it was now working, I striped sudo rights from the new user. But then I realized that the new user could still use sudo.

So it seems that sudo privileges only update on operating system restart? Is this correct, or is something wrong with my system?

Sorry if this is a stupid post

I installed some updates and after a restart the network manager thing in the taskbar said NetworkManager wasnt running so i tried to run it in terminal and it said i didnt have permission so i ran it with sudo and it worked. How do I get it to automatically start?

(I also posted this here: https://piefed.social/c/linux4noobs@programming.dev/p/2244265/networkmanager-doesn-t-run-on-startup)

UPDATE:
fixed with sudo apt install --reinstall network-manager

I have been having some issues lately with fedora. This install was pretty reliable and never threw any errors until recently. I also noticed really slow read and write speeds one day. Like 2 times slower then a hard drive. But that went away after some use.

Later that day I updated and it wouldn't boot. Just a blank screen. I was able to Ctrl alt f1 into a login sceen and run dnf and update.

That fixed it.

Then comes the second issue. I was programming and all of a sudden my python file disappeared out of thin air! Which is funny because I remember saving it. So I downloaded a backed up copy from my nas, and it disappeared again.

I figured it was a problem with Kate so I reinstalled it and it worked and saved files without removing them. Then I shut the computer down when I was done and this morning it boots to a blank screen. And the initial fix I did a while ago doesn't work. I'm pretty stumped on it and I did capture some photos.

It gets stuck loading this process

Same here

Then it passes them and tries something else

Then we enter this never ending loop.

So what do you guys think? New install of fedora needed or do I need a new ssd?

Upgraded to amd 5900xt & 7090xt and am experiencing random crashes. No overclock, no xmp/docp, no pbo (not defaults cause Asus has pbo on by default). 1000w seasonic PSU.

Whole screen goes green and reboots. Happens in heavy gaming, watching YouTube and even at idle.

Journalctl lists an mc5 hardware error suggests the cpu, but none of the troubleshooting has fixed it.

BIOS updated, c-states disabled, triple checked all settings, fully up to date Arch, but still randomly crashes.

Where do I go from here?

Hi there!

I recently switched from Arch Linux after a decade and now settled on Void Linux. So far so good. However sometimes I gather minor things here and there. My current issue is, the proprietary drivers of Nvidia still seeking systemd for some parts and not sure how to walk around this.

I cannot suspend my PC because when I wake it up I always see something about nvidia-sleep.sh. Probably it cannot wake the GPU up properly.

#!/bin/bash

if [ ! -f /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend ]; then
    exit 0
fi

RUN_DIR="/var/run/nvidia-sleep"
XORG_VT_FILE="${RUN_DIR}"/Xorg.vt_number

PATH="/bin:/usr/bin"

RestoreVT() {
    #
    # Check if Xorg was determined to be running at the time
    # of suspend, and whether its VT was recorded.  If so,
    # attempt to switch back to this VT.
    #
    if [[ -f "${XORG_VT_FILE}" ]]; then
        XORG_PID=$(cat "${XORG_VT_FILE}")
        rm "${XORG_VT_FILE}"
        chvt "${XORG_PID}"
    fi
}

case "$1" in
    is-suspend-then-hibernate-supported)
        # suspend-then-hibernate only works correctly if $SYSTEMD_SLEEP_ACTION
        # is supported, which was added in systemd 248.
        systemd_version=$(systemctl --version | head -n1 | cut -d' ' -f2)
        if [ "$systemd_version" -gt 247 ]; then
            exit 0
        fi

        echo "systemd version $systemd_version is too old to support suspend-then-hibernate with NVIDIA." 2>&1
        echo "Please upgrade to systemd 248 or newer." 2>&1
        exit 1
        ;;
    suspend|hibernate)
        mkdir -p "${RUN_DIR}"
        fgconsole > "${XORG_VT_FILE}"
        chvt 63
        if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
            exit $?
        fi
        echo "$1" > /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend
        RET_VAL=$?
        #
        # If suspend/hibernate entry fails, switch back to the active VT
        #
        if [[ $RET_VAL -ne 0 ]]; then
            RestoreVT
        fi
        exit $RET_VAL
        ;;
    resume)
        echo "$1" > /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend
        RestoreVT
        exit 0
        ;;
    *)
        exit 1
esac

I'm using Niri so no desktop environment here if that helps. My driver is nvidia580. Also using greetd (w/ tuigreet). So, what can I do here?

Linux void 6.18.38_1 
pkgver: runit-2.3.1_1
Nvidia 580.159.04 

Edit: Tried nouveau and suspend works with it. However because Nvidia didn't provide firmware blobs for my card (GTX 1080) I cannot use the open drivers well.

Edit 2: Tried to give power management from acpid to elogind, thinking it might help to fool this script since it's systemd's standalone part here. Currently elogind both handles my seat and power management. I actually had some hope here, but sadly didn't work. Here are my elogind config files anyway:

/etc/elogind/logind.conf.d/logind.conf
[Login]
KillUserProcesses=no
HandlePowerKey=poweroff
HandlePowerKeyLongPress=poweroff
HandleRebootKey=reboot
HandleRebootKeyLongPress=poweroff
HandleSuspendKey=suspend
RemoveIPC=yes

/etc/elogind/sleep.conf.d/nvidia-sleep.conf                                    
[Sleep]
AllowSuspend=yes
AllowHibernation=no
AllowSuspendThenHibernate=no
AllowHybridSleep=no
#SuspendMode=deep
SuspendState=mem standby freeze
HandleNvidiaSleep=yes

Nvidia, this is for you:

On Mint. Tried installing Anki from the app store, but the web was unhappy with that version's time zone handling, so I couldn't sync.

I downloaded the tarball from the developer and it installed fun, but when I run it I get:

 Starting Anki 26.05...
Qt warning: From 6.5.0, xcb-cursor0 or libxcb-cursor0 is needed to load the Qt xcb platform plugin. 
Qt info: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found. 
Qt fatal: This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: linuxfb, offscreen, xcb, minimalegl, eglfs, vkkhrdisplay, minimal, vnc, wayland-brcm, wayland-egl, wayland.
 
Aborted (core dumped)

The Qt debug's only issue is this:

Qt debug: Got keys from plugin meta data QList("wayland", "wayland-egl", "wayland-brcm") 
Qt debug: checking directory path "/home/alex/Downloads/anki-linux/platforms" ... 
Qt debug: "/home/alex/Downloads/anki-linux/app_packages/PyQt6/Qt6/plugins/platforms/libqxcb.so" cannot load: Cannot load library /home/alex/Downloads/anki-linux/app_packages/PyQt6/Qt6/plugins/platforms/libqxcb.so: libxcb-cursor.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory 
Qt debug: QLibraryPrivate::loadPlugin failed on "/home/alex/Downloads/anki-linux/app_packages/PyQt6/Qt6/plugins/platforms/libqxcb.so" : "Cannot load library /home/alex/Downloads/anki-linux/app_packages/PyQt6/Qt6/plugins/platforms/libqxcb.so: libxcb-cursor.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" 
Qt warning: From 6.5.0, xcb-cursor0 or libxcb-cursor0 is needed to load the Qt xcb platform plugin. 
Qt info: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found. 
Qt fatal: This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

I've checked that location and libqxcb.so is exactly there where it should be, so I'm not sure why it can't read.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled and still have this problem.

Any ideas?

Edit: Solution:

Try installing the packages mentioned here: https://docs.ankiweb.net/platform/linux/installing.html#requirements

Hi, I've been having this problem with my system for like a week where it just locks up and has to be hard restarted. The screen freezes, input devices are unresponsive, bluetooth disconnects, sftp server stops etc. This can happen anytime; while I'm moving the mouse, in a game, while idling.. And the worst part is that when I check the journal afterwards there's absolutely nothing there. No errors, no coredumps, no other messages (from the freeze time)

I've run the aur malware checker and it's clean. I've also updated the system a couple times and it feels like the frequency of freezes only increased over time.

That makes me suspicious of a hardware failure, but I've had similarly strange problems before and every time it was a software problem. I've started a memtest (clean so far) but I'm not sure what else to do on that front. What component's failure would result in a freeze, but not a crash or any errors?

System is zen4 with nvidia graphics.

Anyone experiencing something similar? Are there new driver / system incompatibilities that I should know about? How would you debug this? Is there a way to figure out the origin of the freeze despite the empty journal?

Edit: Memtest passed 3 times. Now it's burned into the lcd screen 🥲😭 Edit: burn-in gone after color cycling

Edit 2: I think the problem is the bios settings after all. I had a -6 curve optimizer offset, and the freezing hasn't happened since I removed it. Silicon degrades over time, apparently.

Edit 3: Nope it froze again

Edit 4: After the last edit I installed cachyos on a separate partition and I've been using that for the last week. It hasn't crashed even though I reenabled curve optimizer after installing it, so I think the issue must be with my Arch installation.

Edit 5: It froze literally 2 hours after the last edit. I think I found the cause though, it's most probably this: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=311723 Here's hoping it wone freeze again

I'll admit I have used Artix, Peppermint OS (Devuan), and Void Linux because I thought the idea of a SystemDless distro sounded cool. It wasn't because I had a problem with SystemD. It's more so that I love that numerous options exist for different system components. For me it's sad to see that certain features or applications require SystemD be present. I like SystemD, just to be clear. I also like the freedom to choose. Maybe, i'm missing something. What do y'all think? What do you use and why? If you use OpenRC or something, why? I'm guessing most people use SystemD and don't give it any thought which is fair.

Hey y'all, I lack the vocabulary to search for what I'm looking for. I have a bazzite desktop, and I found an old nvme with Mint on it. I want to wipe the mint ssd and install windows onto it, and then install that into my bazzite PCs second nvme slot. I know there's some stuff I need to do to make sure windows doesn't fuck my bootloader (I think?) but I'm not sure what. And the stuff I've been finding is about setting a partition up on the same drive, usually setting up a Linux partition on a Windows drive. So I'm not sure how much of this applies to my situation. I would really appreciate some help/ being pointed in the right direction haha

I have a rather large library of movies gathered over the years (all entirely legally I assure you officer). I'm in the process of setting up a Jellyfin server so I can stream them on the go.

Currently it's just one folder full of individual files but Jellyfin wants each movie within it's own folder.

Is there a command, or set of commands, that would do this all in one go? ie iterate my way through a folder, create a new folder with the same name as a file, move that file into this new folder and repeat a few hundred times.

I am using Cachy OS (arch) and have Dolphin and yazi as file managers if that helps. I guess a bash script would be the best way to achieve this but my skills are quite rusty.

I installed arch (https://github.com/warpme/miniarch) on one of those small android tv boxes (A53 Cpu and 4gbs ram) that usually come with android+spyware and vague promises of piracy and i want to turn it into a small homeserver. I dont really know anything about servers so I dont know where to go from here. Im planning on connecting a 1TB drive to the box. I want some folders from my PC and phone(specifically documents) to be synced to the server automaticly whenever both are connected to my network, but I also have a ton of audio books, ebooks movies that I obviously only want to be accessible (by my TV, ereader, phone) but not synced accross devices. Ive also been thinking about having shared compute running in the background (seti or folding@home or something else). Obviously everything should need as little maintenance as possible, i want to have it sit in a corner and be able to forget about it. Could you point me in the right direction? Thanks in advance