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DumbAceDragon ,
@DumbAceDragon@sh.itjust.works avatar

Can’t think of the most difficult problem, but I have managed to solve a lot of problems with btrfs snapshots.

LordCrom ,

I used a GPS module to feed time data to a custom ntp service with no jitter. About as close as I could get to atomic clock precision for under $150.

Hyrulian ,
@Hyrulian@lemmy.world avatar

Around 2017 I spent three days on and off trying to diagnose why my laptop running elementary OS had no wifi support. I reinstalled the wifi drivers and everything countless times. It worked for many days initially then just didn’t one day when I got on the laptop. Turns out I had accidentally flipped the wifi toggle switch while it was in my bag. I forgot the laptop had one. Womp womp.

Hawke ,

Womp womp.

I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home, they’re not much bigger than 2 meters.

passepartout ,

I had a friend come over to my place to fix her laptops wifi. After about an hour searching for any setting in windows that i could have missed, i coincidentally found a forum where one pointed out this could be due to a hardware wifi switch…

reddithalation , (edited )

single gpu vm passthrough. took a few days for troubleshooting, and i didnt even want to get it to be undetectable by game anticheat, i hear that needs building your own kernel for some advanced detection methods.

T4V0 ,
@T4V0@lemmy.world avatar

Not a Linux problem per se, but I had a 128GB image disk in a unknown .bin format which belongs to a proprietary application. The application only ran on Windows.

I tried a few things but nothing except Windows based programs seemed able to identify the partitions, while I could run it in Wine, it dealt with unimplementend functions. So after a bit of googling and probing the file, it turns out the format had just a 512 bytes as header which some Windows based software ignored. After including the single block offset, all the tools used in Linux started working flawlessly.

Hadriscus ,

This is so arcane to me. Like, I more or less understand your high-level explanation, but then you gloss over “including the block offset” but how would one do that ??

DickFiasco ,

Inspecting the file with a hex editor would give you lots of useful info in this case. If you know approximately what the data should look like, you can just see where the garbage (header) ends and the data starts. I’ve reverse engineered data files from an oscilloscope like this.

T4V0 , (edited )
@T4V0@lemmy.world avatar

Well, in this scenario the image file had 512 bytes sections, each one is called a block. If you have a KiB (a kibibyte = 1024 bytes) it will occupy 2 blocks and so on…

Since this image file had a header with 512 bytes (i.e. a block) I could, in any of the relevant Linux mounting software (e.g. mount, losetup), choose an offset adding to the starting block of a partition. The command would look like this:


<span style="color:#323232;">sudo mount -o loop,offset=$((header+partition)) img_file /mnt
</span>
Maxxus ,

Maybe this goes a bit deeper than the question intended, but I’ve made and shared two patches that I had to apply locally for years before they were merged into the base packages.

The first was a patch in 2015 for SDL2 to prevent the Sixaxis and other misbehaving controllers to not use uninitialized axes and overwrite initialized ones. Merged in 2018.

The second was a patch in the spring of 2021 for Xft to not assume all the glyphs in a monospaced font to be the same size. Some fonts have ligatures which are glyphs that represent multiple characters together, so they’re actually some multiple of the base glyph size. Merged in the fall of 2022.

bane_killgrind ,

How dare you science in a kvetching discussion

IzzyJ ,

This will feel extremely simple for some folks, but I was having a hell of a time getting Steam games that had previously worked through Proton running. I scoured the internet for solutions after trying to install proton-ge and testing multiple versions. Eventually someone had the galaxy brain idea to suggest installing WINE. For some reason, that fixed the problem real good.

Gabu ,

What’s the deal with Linux and Tomoko? lmao

I keep seeing memes featuring her on Linux communities. Is it only the shut-in nerdy vibes?

Waffelson OP ,

I think Tomoko would be an ideal Linux user

33550336 ,
@33550336@lemmy.world avatar

quit vim

RegalPotoo ,
@RegalPotoo@lemmy.world avatar

I can’t remember the details anymore, but for a year or two I had a bad run of absolutely hosing my boot config and leaving myself in a state where the system either couldn’t find it’s kernel or couldn’t find the root partition and would drop me into an initramfs emergency shell. I got pretty good at booting into a live environment, getting all my dm-raid and lvm disks discovered, mounting all the relevant file systems in the right place, chrooting in and rebuilding the pieces that were broken

Naz ,

Full kernel corruption after a botched sudo full-upgrade.

I got the wonderful “bailing out you are on your own” shit as well.

Read a guide online about a hail mary ext file system journal recovery protocol, I ran it, like most things without reading too deeply.

Kernel was successfully repaired, Kubuntu kept on truckin’

SpaceCadet ,
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

Full kernel corruption

What does that even mean?

Was the file system on which your kernel resided corrupt, or did something go wrong with a kernel upgrade/installation?

Naz ,

It was some combination of both, the system would post, past the bootloader, attempt to initialize drivers and other standard starting packages and then immediately panic and drop into an emergency terminal (/TTS), with a failure to mount the root partition, from what I can recall. It tried it a couple times and then there was an error message that said: “Bailing out, you are on you own, good luck”

Hadriscus ,

What is this “bailing out you are on your own” shit ?

shikitohno ,

An error message you can get if you really manage to mess things up. I got it once a few years ago.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/3fefa032-56e8-4dd7-8191-ca46b3aaf2b1.jpeg

Hadriscus ,

wow for real ? what causes it ? that sounds terrible. It’s not informative at all

Treczoks ,

My first Linux machine crashing. This was way before Redhat, Ubuntu, Arch, or OpenSUSE. This was installed from 60+ floppy disks on a 386-40 with 8MB of RAM.

This machine ran happily, but it crashed under heavy load. I checked out causing the load by using different applications, but could not nail it to a certain software. So the next thing I checked was the RAM. Memtest86 ran for a day without any problems. But the crashes still came. So I got the infrared camera from the lab to see if some hardware overheats. Nope, this went nowhere, either.

Then I tested the harddisk. Read test of the whole HD went without problems. I copied the data on a backup medium and did a write and read test by dd’ing /dev/zero over the whole disk, and then dd’ing the disk to /dev/null. Nothing did show up.

I reinstalled the Linux, and it crashed again. But this time, I noticed that something was odd with the harddisk. I added a second swap partition, disabled the first, and the machine ran without problems. Strange…

So I wrote a small program that tested the part of the disk occupied by the old swap space: Write data, read data, and log everything with timestamps. And there was the culprit: There was an area on the HD where I could write any data, but when I read blocks from that area, a) It took a very long time for the read, b) the blocks I read were containing all zero, regardless of what I had written, and worst of all c) there was no error indication whatsoever from the controller or drive. Down at the kernel level, the zeroed blocks were happily served by the HD with an “OK”. And the faulty area was right in the middle of the original swap partition.

TPTheWiper ,

lol nerd

ricdeh ,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

Blocked

TPTheWiper ,

Yes a compliment

ulterno ,
@ulterno@lemmy.kde.social avatar

If you were trolling, “Blocked” would definitely be a complement.

Hadriscus ,

Are you saying this as a compliment ? it’s not completely clear. Either way, it is a compliment

Overlock ,
@Overlock@sopuli.xyz avatar

Nice read! Did you delete the old swap space or left it as-is?

Treczoks ,

I took no risks and binned the disk. I wanted to buy a bigger one, anyway.

Commiunism ,

It’s not the biggest issue I managed to fix, but it was definitely the hardest to figure out a fix for:

Whenever I would boot up any game on my Linux machine I would have microstutters ever so often, and it was frequent and lengthy enough to be very annoying, and thus started my 2 month long quest to figure out what was going wrong.

To cut a long story short, the compositor I was using had suddenly decided to do a breaking update and change the names of the backends they were using.

Magnetar ,

I once broke my Ubuntu install by trying to convert it KDE Neon, that reinstalled half my packages and left it in an basically unusable state. I then un-broke the install while upgrading multiple Ubuntu releases, that reinstalled the other half as well. It actually worked, and I’m still using that install.

PrimalHero ,
@PrimalHero@kbin.social avatar

Tried to the same thing but didn't have the patience to fix it so I made a fresh installation of kde neon

lengau ,

Hehehe roughly same. I have a KDE Neon install that’s older than KDE Neon. It was originally Kubuntu 13.10 and I’ve done in-place upgrades since.

SpaceCadet ,
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

I’ve found that the silliest desktop problems are usually the hardest to solve, and the “serious” linux system errors are the easiest.

System doesn’t boot? Look at error message, boot from a rescue disk, mount root filesystem and fix what you did wrong.

Wrong mouse cursor theme in some Plasma applications, ignoring your settings? Some weird font rendering issue? Bang your head against a wall exploring various dotfiles and rc files in your home directory for two weeks, and eventually give up and nuke your profile and reconfigure your whole desktop from scratch.

ccunix ,

A couple of weeks ago I moved Firefox to one side. Window disappeared, but Firefox was still running “somewhere” on my desktop, but was not actually be rendered to the screen. Killing the process and relaunching just resulted in it be rendered to this weird black hole. Log out of gnome and log back in? Same! Reboot? Same!

Ended up deleting it’s config folder and re-attaching to Firefox sync in order to have it working again. No idea what went wrong, nor will I ever most likely.

slurpeesoforion ,

I feel like i had a disappearing window like that a lifetime ago and the fix was to change the resolution. I don’t know if that uncovered the void to the right or forced the window to reassign itself to usable space. But it worked then. Hell, it could have been windows for all I recall.

dejected_warp_core ,

There really should be a hotkey for “move window to primary display” or somesuch. The worst is when just the top “cleat” of the window is inaccessible, making it impossible to simply move the window yourself.

Alternately, a CLI tool to just trash a specific app’s window settings, or a system control panel that lets you browse these settings, would be incredible.

captain_aggravated ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

In every GUI I’ve used, there are tiling or snapping hotkeys, something like Super + Arrow keys or something, that will usually put the window somewhere sane.

Willdrick ,

Hold down meta and you can drag the window from anywhere (on gnome at least thats a default)

Vanshaj ,

I laughed so hard reading your comment. I totally agree.

MonkderZweite ,

Btw, QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR set to 0 breaks your Qt apps.

marilynia ,

Yeah for some reason a single game ignores the system sound settings and goes straight to a line out. My system doesn’t see that the game is outputting sound and I can’t change it. (Arch with KDE)

Corr ,

Somewhat related on windows 11, for some reason teams volume will desync from system volume. I’ll put system volume to 0 and still be hearing teams. It’s the same audio device being selected. I don’t understand why it would ever work that way but here we are

fossphi ,

Oh my god, you’ve put it into (really nice) words something I’ve felt since quite some time now. I’ve no trouble (in fact even joy) when something major is fucked up. But all this GUI shenanigans, I’ve usually no idea where to even begin. The lack of structure and hierarchy completely flummoxes me. Or maybe I just don’t have enough experience debugging userland stuff

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