I had a Chinese Android box gathering dust in a drawer. It had been sidelined because it was stuck on an outdated version of Android, with no updates in sight from the manufacturer. I started considering alternatives like a Raspberry Pi or a budget x86 mini PC to set up a PVR with TVheadend. But before placing an order, I wondered if I could repurpose the Android box as a Linux server. After all, it had decent specs: an Amlogic S905X2 chip, 4 GB of RAM, and 32 GB of internal storage.

A quick search revealed that it was possible to boot Linux on the box using a microSD card or USB stick. Within an hour, I had CoreELEC up and running. One of the great things about CoreELEC is the ease with which you can install Docker and TVheadend. This meant that my forgotten Android box was now transformed into a functional Linux server.

I hooked up a TV tuner (yes, I'm aware it's not exactly cutting-edge, but I need OTA TV for work) and installed TVheadend. It essentially turned the box into a budget-friendly HDHomeRun. I even set up AdGuard Home and configured my router to use it as a network-wide ad blocker.

Once you have Docker running, the possibilities are endless. To my surprise, I even discovered that you can boot Armbian on these inexpensive boxes and use them as a lightweight desktop. Or turn them into a router or pihole box using openwrt.

What am I doing wrong here? The computer has Windows 11 on it but I don't want to use it I want it all the way off the machine.

Can this installer not overwrite the Windows OS with Debian? Edit: Just want to say thanks to all of you I'm going to experiment around with the advice you all have given and see how it works out! Absolutely love the passion and helpfulness of this community here on Lemmy for real!

On Debian's website it is saying to write the image to the USB stick I should use a bash script "# cp Debian.iso /dev/sdX

sync"

Is there another way to do this without using root access?

Userland library functions such as allocators and threading implementations often require regions of memory to act as 'guard pages' - mappings which, when accessed, result in a fatal signal being sent to the accessing process.

The current means by which these are implemented is via a PROT_NONE mmap() mapping, which provides the required semantics however incur an overhead of a VMA for each such region.

With a great many processes and threads, this can rapidly add up and incur a significant memory penalty. It also has the added problem of preventing merges that might otherwise be permitted.

This series takes a different approach - an idea suggested by Vlasimil Babka (and before him David Hildenbrand and Jann Horn - perhaps more - the provenance becomes a little tricky to ascertain after this - please forgive any omissions!) - rather than locating the guard pages at the VMA layer, instead placing them in page tables mapping the required ranges.https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/cover.1729196871.git.lorenzo.stoakes@oracle.com/

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21065836

Hi friends, as promised, I'm back with my second post. I'll be hanging around in the comments for any questions!

In this post, I take a look at a typical deployment process, how long each part of it takes, and then I present a simple alternative that I use which is much faster and perfect for hobbit software.

My old 4790k finally died, and I need to replace both the CPU & MB. I was wondering if there would be any conflict in having an AMD CPU and an Nvidia GPU.

I want to use Bazzite on it. I'm running the same distro on my main rig and I'm very happy with it.

Any suggestions?

I've got a Linux server running Xubuntu at the moment (It was a media player first), and it also runs two Minecraft servers for the family. It has two network cards that are both connected to the internet. Is there a way to bind the VPN to one of the cards and use the other one for regular use?

I've got Surfshark as my VPN, and it doesn't allow port forwarding under Linux. I've got some software that I want to keep behind the VPN, but the lack of port forwarding is stopping me from sharing the Minecraft servers, and when the VPN is active, it slows down the connection to some of my services like Plex.

I've tried to look it up, but I just don't know enough to get myself anywhere. I've found results that talk about name spaces and routing tables, but they assume a level of knowledge that I just haven't got yet.

I want to use the Arr suite and qBittorrent as the main programs behind the VPN, and Plex, Mylar (a comic manager), Syncthing, and Minecraft as the main programs without it. If I set up qBittorrent and the Arrs as Docker containers, can I use Gluetun to bind just them to the VPN? The VPN is using OpenVPN connections if that makes a difference.

Thanks in advance :)

I'm considering buying a secondhand Yoga Slim 7 with AMD/Ryzen 7 for 400 dollars. Is this a good deal? My parents advise against it because the laptop is old (3-4 years), so I'm not sure. I also don't know how well Linux (Fedora/KDE) runs on this particular model. It comes with 512/16GB. I need advice cause I need to make a decision in like 2 days.

I like my Breeze-hacked cursor but I think it's time to find a native Wayland replacement.

I have some problems with X11 cursors and that's quite normal with Wayland obviously. For example, my cursor can become invisible if my screen sleeps. Additional controllers that control mouse cursor don't control X11 cursor, however they still work, I just don't know where the cursor is unless it highlights something. Things like this.

It's becoming kinda inconvenient so I'm asking for a replacement. Currently I don't really care how it looks.

I'm on River by the way.

So I've been looking into moving back entirely to Linux, but I play a lot of games so would likely need access to windows. I'm considering using KVM as dualbooting isn't really something I'd want. I've some questions I don't really get from how this setup would work:

• I have 3 monitors. I have 1 Nvidia 2060. I imagine I might have to get a cheap-ish 2nd video card for Linux as the 2060 would have to be passed through to the guest (windows) VM.. right? (I have integrated graphics, but not enough connections for the 3 monitors on it)
• how do you switch between playing on the host and playing on the guest? I.e. if a game runs fine native on Linux, I'd want to use that instead of the windows vm. Is it possible to use the Nvidia card I'd normally pass through on the host? The only thing I can think of here is to run a Linux VM on the Linux host so the card can be passed through to it..? Or is it just not worth it and better to stick to just playing on the windows VM?
• how do multiple monitors behave in this? E.g. I connect the 2 monitors on the left/right to the weak card which I dont have yet. I connect the middle monitor to both cards. Once I launch the VM I change the input on the main monitor to the connection with the Nvidia card. How will my monitors behave (and will I have any control over it)? E.g. will I be able to move the cursor across from the left monitor through the middle monitor and to the right or would they act more like 2 different PCs?
• how do other things work, like microphone? E.g. can I have discord running on Linux and talk in voice chat, while also using the microphone to talk in game chat in the windows VM?

Answering any of them is useful, thanks in advance. Also if I misunderstood how this setup is meant to work, feel free to correct me.

Greetings, I am asking whether Linux has helped your family or not going from Windows to a friendly distribution that caters to young or elderly.

How was your experience with helping relatives or your kids with Linux? Was it because of an older spec machine? Costs etc?

I helped get my grandmother (dad's side) to move from windows 8.1 to Linux Mint which so far has been good, she only really browses and required some basic budgeting apps.

This was on something like an older core i3 or i5 but I didn't hear that many problems apart from getting drivers for her Epson printer to work.

So how has it been for you?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21023181

Sharing some lessons I learned from 10 years/millions of users in production. I’ll be in the comments if anyone has any questions!

I hope some of the lessons in this series help people learn to adopt Linux directly into their stack as a simple tool that can be managed easily on a server.

So. I have a soundboard application (Soundux) running in Hyprland. I got shortcuts to work by force running it in XWayland however these only work when the application is focused. Is there ANY way that the shortcuts work when i focus another window?

Edit: spelling

I used GDM Settings and broke GDM, every normal fix doesn't work to restore GDMs first login screen back to normal (all colors are black except background and icon, trails when items move).

I switched to LightDM and its working perfectly EXCEPT my monitor doesn't sleep when LightDM lockscreen is up.

I'm newer to Linux so I don't know how the Monitor sleeping system works, or what the hierarchy is, or configuring it.

I know that Pop_OS and dconf editor can both edit the Monitor timeout time, but that doesn't seem to affect LightDM, any suggestions? (I'd rather work on this than GDM because I've spent hours on GDMs theme being busted)

You know, immutable enterprise systems.

I installed HeliumOS (Almalinux bootc) on a corebooted Chromebook. Works really well, but audio needs to be configured.

The script needs a recent python which is not available there.

Go and rust can be installed for a user only. Is there something similar for python?

Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) for people who want to record, edit, mix and master audio and MIDI projects. When you need complete control over your tools, when the limitations of other designs get in the way, when you plan to spend hours or days working on a session, Ardour is there to make things work the way you want them to.