Hello everyone,

I'm looking to increase the security of my computers a bit through firewalld (with the KDE settings). I have a desktop and a laptop, both running Fedora 40 with KDE plasma. I don't have access to the router's firewalls etc etc this is only for my machines.

The issue is I'm having a hard time navigating the zones and setting rules the way I want. I don't wanna deal with switching to UFW and while I generally like CLI stuff I'd prefer to generally stick with the GUI here even though I find it a bit confusing (I will use CLI if necessary tho).

Anyways, let's get to the point. Firstly the only difference between the laptop and desktop, in terms of use-case, is that on my desktop I'm always connected to my home's subnet via LAN while on my laptop I often connect to public wifis, so naturally the laptop is a little less secure.

For my use-case I care about 3 network interfaces:

• tailscale: this is the one I use to ssh into my machines and stuff and I want this to be the only interface which allows me to ssh. This is because not only it allows me to ssh remotely but also I figure is also the most secure way to use ssh as the tailscales team is probably better at security than I am.
• Proton VPN's: this I use for gaming, web browsing and seeding Linux ISOs so I'd like settings that block everything without affecting these usecases.
• normal internet: I almost always have my VPN on but occasionally I don't for one reason or another and I only use this for web browsing and gaming via steam. Settings I'd like here are essentially the same as ProtonVPN's but stricter if it makes sense to be stricter, especially on the laptop where it's likely a public wifi I'm conencting to when I'm not home. If it's possible I'd also like this interface to be hidden from nmap scans.

I do some light pentesting to learn so there's also that.

I currently have every relevant connection set to FedoraWorkstation zone by default except I manually tell the laptop to switch to public zone for public wifis (I'd change the default to be public and specify other zones for non-public connections but rn I'm in a period of time when I'm only connecting it to my home network so I wanna figure out this out first).

My question is, which zones should I use and what rules should I implement to make this more secure?

Thanks in advance

Step 1: Install the game via Lutris

(Use steam if you bought it via steam)

• Click the + sign, search Black Desert and install the first one
• Choose the installation path (default is fine)
• Do not create any shortcuts during any point of the installation
• Do not run BDO after installation

Step 2: Add the game to your steam library

Why? Because via Lutris' wine version the camera doesn't work properly

• On steam go to Games > Add non-steam game on the top right
• Find the BlackDesertLauncher.exe in the instalaltion path. Should be /install/path/drive_c/PearlAbyss/BlackDesert/BlackDesertLauncher.exe
• Right click the game on your library and go to properties > force compatibility layer > proton experimental

Step 3: Run the game via Steam

If at first it doesn't run just close it and open it again. The Black Spirit's Adventure, the Adventurer's board, and the guild daily message doesn't display properly (you can still use them however if you remember the buttons by memory), everything else works perfectly fine.

Note: if you have it, SELinux tries to block it, you can dismiss the reports and it should work fine, otherwise you may need to set policies or disable SELinux. I will look into this further

Hello folks,

I wanted to know if anyone has any idea why distrowatch periodically goes down for days before returning.

I mainly use it to find out if some distros have updates to their ISOs but I find it very annoying that quite frequently it's down completely.

First of all, sorry if it's the wrong community. I tried asking in the NixOS Discord but they were completely useless so far.

As stated above I use NixOS (btw). I have two PCs, a Lenovo A285 and a desktop, both have NixOS with the same exact configurations (except for hardware related stuff, so disk encryotion for my laptop, automounting disks for the desktop, stuff like that). The program versions are both the same, however on my laptop the HoI4 launcher looks like pic related, while it works perfectly fine on the desktop.

If I resize the launcher the background image displays for a little bit but then it goes blank like in pic related, I can still push button and all and they work but without knowing what I'm clicking it's kinda useless.

Running journalctl I get this.

Obviously this is an issue as I can't change mods unless I uninstall and reinstall them whenever I need to disable/enable them.

Anyone know what could be the cause?

EDIT: I want to note that other games work fine, and I never had this problem with Arch and arch-based distros.

EDIT 2: Forcing it to go through Proton works though if someone finds another solution for native do let us know.

Hello,

I'm looking for as many cool, even if pointless, programs as I can, be them terminal programs or gui ones. What do I mean by this? I'll use some examples:

• The Cube (I believe it was called Compiz): the one we all know and love.
• cmatrix
• the hollywood one
• That one whose name I forget but basically spawns a cat that chases your cursor, I saw it showcased on Pop!_OS' mastodon.
• wobbly windows
• Burn my window
• tplay

if any of you know any other fancy program like this let me know please. I want to showcase them to non-linux people to show them what can be done here but not necessarily in other OSes (particularly Windows).

Hello everyone,

I wanted to post this in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. community but it seems pretty much dead so I'm gonna post it here instead.

I wanted to write a guide on how to play Anomaly on Linux which works as of 19th November 2023.

I use Arch with KDE plasma (and I also tested it with Xfce4) and it works perfectly fine, it even seems to work on Wayland session but I haven't done extensive testing. It should work for any distro as long as it has what you need. So here it goes.

Step 0: Requirements

You'll need to have Steam, Protontricks, and obviously the game files downloaded from the official sources

Step 1: Extract the game files

You can put them wherever you want, I personally chose ~/Games/Anomaly/. Essentially put the ".7z" files wherever and extract them, I do this with this terminal command:

7z x Anomaly-1.5.1.7z

and then

7z x Anomaly-1.5.1-to-1.5.2-Update.7z

Make sure to overwrite anything when extracting the 1.5.2 patch

Step 2: Add the game to steam

Open up steam, on the top right go to games > Add a non-Steam game > Browse and then navigate to and select the .exe file, then Add program.

Step 3: Set up Steam compatibility layer

On your Steam library Right click the Anomaly game and go to Properties > Compatibility and click Force the use of a specific compatibility layer and select whichever proton version you prefer. I went with Proton experimental and it works fine. After all of this is done, run it once and wait for it to crash.

Step 4: Protontricks compatibility

Now open up protontricks, I'll use the GUI via running:

protontricks --gui

Then, select the Anomaly game > Default profile > Install DLL and you'll want to select these:

• d3dcompiler_43
• d3dcompiler_47
• d3dx10
• d3dx11_43
• d3dx9
• d3dx9_43

Let it install everything then close it and launch the game via steam. You're set to go.

Hello y'all,

I need to get some information out of a .mcn file that is used by the Cary WinUV program (for windows XP), I know the file contains the info we're looking for but it's not readable on a text editor as per screenshot (the same thing appears via OSS - code and cat). Same for Nano which gives me a lot of tiny amongi.

Cary WinUV for some reason doesn't display the information we want, who know what they were thinking.

Anyone know a way to read the characters missing?

EDIT: Thanks everyone, I solved by saving it into csv through Cary WinUV but that may not work for everyone so thanks for all the replies

Hello everyone,

I was wondering if anyone here knows if it's possible to set up Proton VPN with CLI on my Raspberry Pi 3B which is running raspbian OS (no graphical interface).

Essentially I have a server, which I access with tailscales sometimes in case that could cause any interference (it doesn't with the other computers), and I want it to connect to a specific ProtonVPN server with P2P at all times. Is there a way for me to do this? On the official website there isn't much info on whether that is possible or not.

Thanks in advance

EDIT: Would OpenVPN work?

Hello everyone,

I set up a file-sharing server on my raspberry pi using samba and tailscale to connect to it from networks that aren't the same as the raspberry pi's.

Recently I added a second user so that they can backup their stuff. On linux everything works fine but on Micro$hit's Windows 10 it doesn't let them connect to the file server. Or rather, at first I tried with an unrelated person who only accessed the public folder as a "guest" (rather: no user) from windows and it worked. Then we tried with this person and it let her access the server at first but wouldn't let her log in with her credentials. Turns out I forgot to add the user to samba, so I do that, reboot the server, and then it just doesn't let her connect to the server in the first place, giving an 0x80004005 unspecified error.

I should also point out that she's accessing the machine as an external tailscale user with the device being shared to her.

What could be the cause of this and how can we go about solving it? I'd love to just tell her to just install linux and be on with our day but that simply isn't much of an option.

Sorry if the information isn't too precise, I'm still a bit of a noob.

EDIT: It works through the local network after disabling the firewall but connecting through tailscale doesn't work.

Hello everyone,

I am very new to self-hosting. I just set up a file sharing server with raspberry pi and samba. Now I'm sure this is asked quite a bit but searching for it I couldn't find the answers I'm looking for most of the time or the answers are confusing.

I need to be able to access the raspberry pi from different networks than the ones it is connected to. Specifically in 2 ways:

1. I need to access it via ssh to manage it remotely. I know you can do this by port-forwarding port 22 but that doesn't seem safe looking at a recent post here. I heard about tailscale but I'm not sure how it works too well rn and while I am willing to learn I want to ask what other options are out there and which ones do you guys prefer usually.

2. I need to be able to access the files in the server while following the samba configurations I set up. For me it is fine to use the file explorer normally used with samba, especially if that works with tailscale or whatever solution for point 1, but I plan to share some directories with some close friends who are not tech savvy at all and I know the idea of typing an ip adress in the file manager every time may scare them already, let alone having to install something like tailscale or anything. So I wanted to try and make something easier to access, like a self-hosted website or a web ui (I tried the one recommended in this guide, and therefore the relevant instructions in this github page, but it wouldn't install for a bunch of problems that make no sense). Doesn't need to be anything fancy, just an address to type in the browser and it will show the files (according to the samba configs so directories not public require a log-in), download them and upload some. The main point is that it needs to be very easy for the end-user who wants to download/upload files from anywhere, ease to set up is ok but not necessary. Do you guys know any good resources for stuff like this or program I can use without having to make a website from scratch (I will do it if necessary but I'd rather avoid that)?

Thanks and sorry for the very noobish questions.