I love the idea of trying Debian but every time I try to ditch Arch for it I end up just giving up after not being able to find all the packages I need in the repos.

How do you guys deal with that? I’m not even talking about them being out of date. I’m talking about them missing altogether.

Hello everyone! It's been about a month that I'm experimenting Debian on an external disk. For the most time, I've been using Testing. The issue is, that some packages are missing from Testing, while they exist on Stable (or on Unstable). The biggest problem with that is that some packages require dependencies that don't exist on the Testing repo and as such I can't install those apps.

So, I thought about adding the Stable repo, at a lower priority. If something doesn't exist on Testing, it will grab it from Stable.

How bad is that approach? I'm not doing the reverse (using stable and grabbing apps from testing), which might be way worse. Does anyone else do that? I couldn't find anything related online.

PS. I'm a bit tempted to switch to Unstable all together, but I don't know if I'll be careful enough to use it in the long run.

PPS. I might build a home nas at some point (with Debian Stable) and keep regular backups of my laptop so that I'll be kinda safe if I ever switch to Unstable.

Morning everybody. I’ve got a server at home running Debian and I handle everything over SSH aside from file transfers for which I use webmin. I’d be trying to get Frigate working on it using Podman but couldn’t get it to find the hardware I was passing to it and got pissed off and gave up, that was a few weeks ago and everything was fine. The Podman container had its own user and I’d set it up so I couldn’t access the containers with any other users, even with sudo. I’ve gone back to it this morning and found that when i try to sudo su in (which is what I normally do) i get “This account is currently not available”. I checked everything my friendly AI hero suggested but I couldn’t figure out why it had locked. The last reference in journalctl was me closing the session and there was no records of failed logins or fail2ban being triggered. I had the ! in the shadow file and passwd was showing me an L to say it was locked. In the end I gave up trying to figure out why it had locked because I couldn’t see evidence of anything dodgy so I just went to unlock it. I’ve tried passwd -u and I’ve remember the ! and rebooted but it still won’t unlock.

I suspect Podman may have done something but I’m pretty sure I stopped the containers before I last logged off because I got sick of them filling the log files up, and though I’ve rebooted at least once in the last three weeks I don’t know if my containers are auto starting, or what that would do. I can’t even check until I’ve got the user logging on.

Anyone have any ideas?

I know it's my fault for believing what my neglected laptop told me about its battery but I went ahead an did a kernel update anyway and wound up needing to repair my system.

After a quick search I wound up on https://wiki.debian.org/GrubEFIReinstallOnLUKS per usual.

The biggest hassle of this is having to type out the longish for loop to bind the various vfs to the chroot environment. It was bad enough when it was proc/sys/dev but it's worse these days: for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /sys/firmware/efi/efivars /run; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt$i; done

I realise there are various things that'd automate that if I connected the rescue image to the internet and added a package but that's also hassles as I've really just booted it with the express purpose of reinstalling grub.

But maybe there is already some form of shortcut for this in the system that I've missed? Or some existing ticket/effort to enact one I could +1?

Small question: I am on Debian and use Gnome. I'm the only user on this laptop.

Is it possible to hide my username from the log in screen? So that only the password field shows?

The point is, my login name is my first name, and I don't like it ...

1. ... when people in public transport can see my first name when I log in
2. ...that if I lose my laptop, the people who find it can easily know my first name

I realize I could also simply pick a username that is not my first name, but it would save me a lot of reconfiguration if I could simply hide the name from the login screen.

1. for Konsole
2. for use in LibreOffice

The original font was called Albertus

I recently added an external monitor to my Debian 12 laptop, setting it as the primary display while using the laptop's monitor as secondary. However, I'm experiencing an issue where the external monitor randomly goes black, while the laptop screen continues to display normally. Moving the mouse brings the external monitor back to life. Interestingly, this happens while YouTube is running, with the audio playing uninterrupted. So far, I haven't noticed this behavior with any other applications.

Update: I was running YouTube from within the Firefox browser, not a YouTube app (If one even exists)

If anyone has a debian/windows dual-boot laptop and has been waiting until Microsoft's secureboot surprise is defused before booting into Windows, and you don't want to wait any longer, what you need is shim-signed_1.39+15.7-1_amd64.deb from bookworm-proposed-updates.

Hello everyone, I am running Debian on my home server and I also do have a raspberrpi with raspberry pi os.

When I do connect to my raspberry via ssh (with keys, not password) I do not need to enter a password when I do run a command with sudo.

Someone here can guie me on how to replicate that behaviour on Debian 12 stable?

Been daily driving Arch for 6 months now, but considering moving back to Debian. Not really taking full advantage of the Arch pros

While a bleeding-edge kernel is great, I don't particularly need it. pacman is nice, but apt gets the job done too. Has anyone else switched from Arch to @debian? If so, did you miss anything from Arch that Debian couldn't replicate?

I'm using Debian 12, KDE, in X11.

I have a 5120x1440 monitor I use with my laptop. I sometimes use my laptop display (3840x1080) when I'm undocked.

Using Wayland this generally just works. But I can't use Wayland (see below).

In X11, when I move between displays I need to change the resolution, the scale and the Task Manager height etc. It's a PITA.

This is likely a very easily solved problem. But I'm new-ish to desktop Linux and I'm unsure of how to solve it.

Any help appreciated.

(Why I can't use Wayland - it causes problems primarily for Zoom (I know, I know, it's a work thing). I assume this is because I'm also running an NVIDIA GPU on the laptop and Debian stable hasn't got those extra bits and pieces that have been added recently, in there to help make it work (that is the beauty and the curse of a stable distro like Debian 😀). As an aside I did think of trying Debian testing to see if that helped with this.

I know about the issues with Zoom, and in particular Zoom on Wayland. I use Debian 12, kernel 6.1.0-18 (Bluetooth issues on later kernels) with KDE on X11. So I primarily use the web app, which works really well on the whole.

Occasionally, I need to use the app (reasons below for clarity, but not what I'm asking about):

• When doing a presentation, for example, sharing the screen still allows you to see the other people on the call.
• Controlling somebody else's presentation in the web view just doesn't work (they can't give you control, as you don't appear in the list).

I have also tried using the Flatpak and had issues (which I cannot remember).

Whenever I use the Zoom app, using the native web app downloaded from https://zoom.us/client/latest/zoom_amd64.deb, I have weird issues when I click the chat window. The mouse pointer turns into the icon used when dragging a window and I cannot click anywhere in Zoom (none of the buttons work, keyboard shortcuts, I can't type in the chat box). But the call continues.

This has happened over and over again in different kernel versions of Debian 12 and different versions of Zoom client (I noticed this maybe 6 months or so ago, so have been regularly trying it since then).

I have searched for an answer and for something close, and have never found anything (I could be searching for the wrong thing).

Does anybody have any suggestions?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17750757

> Randomly on my laptop screen this appears and debian just freezes. Sometimes these vertical lines don't appear and system freezes anyway. Its just random. How do i identify if this is hardware or software issue? and then how to identify exact piece of hardware or software causing this problem.

My laptop is an Acer A515-51-30C9 CPU: Intel Core I3-7020U GPU: Intel HD Graphics 620 OS: Debian 12 with MATE

Please, help me fix this warning.

My system seems to crash from time to time. I still don't know what causes it.

If I leave it untouched for a few hours, sometimes, it crashes.

To resume, I have to force a reboot by unplugging the power cable (not even pressing the power button for N seconds seems to work).

Then, it seems to work just fine (after displaying some error messages about lost or orphaned inodes at boot). Until, one day, it happens again. When? I never know. It seems to follow some strange and unpredictable pattern.

Where should I start investigating?

Hey guys,

Im a relatively new Linux user, so pardon the stupidity thats about to follow. I have an Asus gaming laptop on which I installed Debian 13/ testing. Everything worked well, until I tried installing new AMD drivers.

I followed this wiki article for the installation of the drivers. However after I ran the command

# apt-get install firmware-amd-graphics libgl1-mesa-dri libglx-mesa0 mesa-vulkan-drivers xserver-xorg-video-all

and rebooted my system, I was no longer able to access my Desktop ("unable to access Cinnamon session").

The good news is I can still access the terminal via Ctrl & alt & f2. However I am not able to reinstall cinnamon because I dont have network access (I think).

I might be wrong but I think thats because before rebooting I ran a VPN with killswitch enabled, which is now blocking my network access, but I have no idea how to disable this from the terminal.

Could you help a noob out to repair his system?

I would hate to reinstall and lose all my data :(

What is the best way to back up as much as possible of Debian 12 on my laptop to a server that has SSH available? I am currently backing up my users /home/<homedir> folder, but I would like to be able to nuke and restore the system from a backup.

I have ventoy on an external drive if that helps any.

P.S. I would like to be able to do incremental backups too.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14997235

> From https://old.reddit.com/r/wallpaper/comments/1c9d2gk/debian_gnulinux_wallpaper_19201080_76804320/

Congratulations to Andreas! It seems like he has lots of ideas for how to improve things in packaging, and for communicating with other distros. Debian is a big ship to steer, and I personally hope the leader can facilitate people working together to reach our goals.

What do you think of the platforms?

https://www.debian.org/vote/2024/platforms/tille

https://www.debian.org/vote/2024/platforms/srud

I'm using Debian 12 with Gnome on my Surface Go 2, and while the multitouch gestures are great, when I use them I also click on anything where I start a 3 finger gesture. I like my panel hidden except in the Dash overview, but I disabled this so I don't have to use gestures. When I do use them I have to use them on an empty part of the screen to prevent clicking anything.

Is there any setting I can change to prevent left clicks when using 3 finger gestures?

#!/bin/bash

#Requires: html2text, wget

wget -q -O - https://www.debian.org/releases/ | html2text > /tmp/debian.txt

cat <<EOF

$(grep '* Debian.*[Rr]elease' /tmp/debian.txt)

$(grep 'current testing' /tmp/debian.txt)

----------------------------------------------------------- This system:

$(lsb_release -a)

EOF

rm -f /tmp/debian.txt

sleep 60

exit 0

Does anyone know when the new KDE plasma 6 is expected to be on unstable?

I usually switch to testing about 1 year after the release of stable. We're about the 9 month mark and I'm getting anxious. Any major issues running testing? This is for my main desktop.

I've heard that Wayland works a lot better now on Nvidia GPUs, so I wanted to give it a try. I've heard that GNOME wants to focus on Wayland, and that it is selected by default. BUT... I can't find it. When checking the server in the terminal, it says X11. And when on the login screen, I can choose between GNOME and GNOME Classic, which is also X11. I really want to at least try it out, as the variable refresh rate and some of the screen taring improvements would really benefit me, but I have not yet found the right package (?) To install.

Just installed Debian 12 on a Dell Inspiron 14 Plus. I know there are those out there who are curious about different machines, and especially the Dell machines that come prepackaged with Windows 11 and all the bloat you can shake a stick at.

Reporting in that it works great, it's lightning fast, it required zero driver installation. It just works, right out of the box.

Now I've messed with a few different Linux packages before, but I've never had it on a main machine. I've done this because I'm highly dissatisfied with Microsoft burying generative AI directly into the operating system so that you're forced to see it, if not interact with it. And who knows what it's doing with your data.

Not going to be me, but now I've got to maybe find a replacement for Photoshop, and figure out how to get Steam on here, and a few of my other work programs. But all-in-all I'm extremely surprised that all I had to do was install it and I was good to go.

I suppose I'll close this out with a question to start some discussion: What are your go-to apps to install right out of the box on a fresh Debian setup?

I am supposing this will not work - simply using dd to copy the booted disk /dev/sda for example to a file on an external hard drive. This would not be a good back as too many system file would be missed. right?

Updating to kernel 6.1.0-18 with Nvidia driver installed, seams broken?

I get a lot of "error processing package" from pdkg, complaining about dependency problems.

Apparently I'm not the only one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77974173/dependency-problems-while-updating-kernel-6-1-0-18

New debian user here. I'm using sway and have a script in my waybar config to look for upgrades and indicate if any are available. However, it typically doesn't find anything because I first need to run a sudo apt update first.

I don't really want to figure out someway to do a sudo through this script and was curious how gnome finds updates without me needing to enter a password.

It looks like I can use unattended upgrades to do the apt update.

https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades

though I don't want it to do upgrades until I do a sudo apt upgrade after being notified of upgrades. I created a 02periodic file in /etc/apt/apt.config.d as indicated, but I only included the lines

APT::Periodic::Enable "1";

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";

Will this run an apt update every day for me? Is there any issue I'm unaware of in doing this? Thanks for any help!

Anyone else having this oddity? Debian SID here!

I have a small server in my closet which is running 4 Debian 12 virtual machines under kvm/libvirt. The virtual machines have been running fine for months. They have unattended-upgrades enabled, and I generally leave them alone. I only reboot them periodically, so that the latest kernel upgrades get applied.

All the machines have an LVM configuration. Generally it's a debian-vg volume group on /dev/vda for the operating system, which has been configured automatically by the installer, and a vgdata volume group on /dev/vdb for everything else. All file systems are simple ext4, so nothing fancy. (*)

A couple of days ago, one of the virtual machines didn't come up after a routine reboot and dumped me into a maintenance shell. It complained that it couldn't mount filesystems that were on vgdata. First I tried simply rebooting the machine, but it kept dumping me into maintenance. Investigating a bit deeper, I noticed that vgdata and the block device /dev/vdb were detected but the volume group was inactive, and none of the logical volumes were found. I ran vgchange -a y vgdata and that brought it back online. After several test reboots, the problem didn't reoccur, so it seemed to be fixed permanently.

I was willing to write it off as a glitch, but then a day later I rebooted one of the other virtual machines, and it also dumped me into maintenance with the same error on its vgdata. Again, running vgchange -y vgdata fixed the problem. I think two times in two days the same error with different virtual machines is not a coincidence, so something is going on here, but I can't figure out what.

I looked at the host logs, but I didn't find anything suspicious that could indicate a hardware error for example. I should also mention that the virtual disks of both machines live on entirely different physical disks: VM1 is on an HDD and VM2 on an SSD.

I also checked if these VMs had been running kernel 6.1.64-1 with the recent ext4 corruption bug at any point, but this does not appear to be the case.

Below is an excerpt of the systemd journal on the failed boot of the second VM, with what I think are the relevant parts. Full pastebin of the log can be found here.

Dec 16 14:40:35 omega lvm[307]: PV /dev/vdb online, VG vgdata is complete. Dec 16 14:40:35 omega lvm[307]: VG vgdata finished ... Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: dev-vgdata-lvbinaries.device: Job dev-vgdata-lvbinaries.device/start timed out. Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: Timed out waiting for device dev-vgdata-lvbinaries.device - /dev/vgdata/lvbinaries. Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: Dependency failed for binaries.mount - /binaries. Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: Dependency failed for local-fs.target - Local File Systems. Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: local-fs.target: Job local-fs.target/start failed with result 'dependency'. Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: local-fs.target: Triggering OnFailure= dependencies. Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: binaries.mount: Job binaries.mount/start failed with result 'dependency'. Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: dev-vgdata-lvbinaries.device: Job dev-vgdata-lvbinaries.device/start failed with result 'timeout'. Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: dev-vgdata-lvdata.device: Job dev-vgdata-lvdata.device/start timed out. Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: Timed out waiting for device dev-vgdata-lvdata.device - /dev/vgdata/lvdata. Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: Dependency failed for data.mount - /data. Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: data.mount: Job data.mount/start failed with result 'dependency'. Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: dev-vgdata-lvdata.device: Job dev-vgdata-lvdata.device/start failed with result 'timeout'.

(*) For reference, the disk layout on the affected machine is as follows: ````

lsblk

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS vda 254:0 0 20G 0 disk ├─vda1 254:1 0 487M 0 part /boot ├─vda2 254:2 0 1K 0 part └─vda5 254:5 0 19.5G 0 part ├─debian--vg-root 253:2 0 18.6G 0 lvm / └─debian--vg-swap_1 253:3 0 980M 0 lvm [SWAP] vdb 254:16 0 50G 0 disk ├─vgdata-lvbinaries 253:0 0 20G 0 lvm /binaries └─vgdata-lvdata 253:1 0 30G 0 lvm /data

vgs

VG #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize VFree debian-vg 1 2 0 wz--n- <19.52g 0 vgdata 1 2 0 wz--n- <50.00g 0

pvs

PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree /dev/vda5 debian-vg lvm2 a-- <19.52g 0 /dev/vdb vgdata lvm2 a-- <50.00g 0

lvs

LV VG Attr LSize Pool Origin Data% Meta% Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert root debian-vg -wi-ao---- 18.56g swap_1 debian-vg -wi-ao---- 980.00m lvbinaries vgdata -wi-ao---- 20.00g lvdata vgdata -wi-ao---- <30.00g ````

Looks like there is another issue in the recently updated kernel 6.1.66 which prevents shutdown with certain WiFi modules. At least my laptop now doesn't shutdown anymore and needs a hard power off 😐