Love talking all things trrpg. I primarily GM Genesys RPG, sometimes also Star Wars RPG and Hero Kids.
Also into Linux, 3D Printing, software development, and PC gaming
I use LibreWolf, and I do have issues with a few sites (my local utility company’s bill pay only works on chromium), but I still refuse to use a chromium based browser except for those specific sites.
It is inconvenient, but it can still make a difference. If sites that have chromium only functionality see that enough FireFox users are trying to use the site, they may update it. I know web devs check those kinds of metrics.
Someone at work made a “who on earth uses FireFox” comment recently, like it was some obscure and inferior / outdated software (our company includes FF as part of the standard image for both PC and Mac users). I did not go into my “why chromium is evil” rant, but I did tell them how to adjust their settings to fix some performance issues they were having with it. I’m pretty sure they still switched to Chrome.
That sounds very promising, I’ll look into it!
Debian is my favorite as well. I prefer KDE, though, because it is pretty. I also don’t get the GNOME hate, I just don’t love it as much and at this point KDE is way more familiar.
Thank you! Once I can figure out the margins I’m going to get a custom btop preset configured. Right now I can’t configure it in a way that important info isn’t cut off on the edges.
The TV does have dials to adjust, but only slightly, and if I adjust too much, it messes up the scan lines and the signal doesn’t come through clearly. I feel like the answer is just a little further down the rabbit hole of kernel params :)
Thank you! I’m very happy with it, and I learned a lot. If I can figure out the margin thing I will definitely try to set up a fancier looking monitor, but right now htop is the most legible because of how it is displayed. Mainly just menu labels get cut off
This was really helpful - It got me pointed down the right track to figure out the video= settings in the grub config. I was able to disable the laptop monitor and enable the CRT by adding this to /etc/default/grub
# Disable laptop monitor (LVDS-1) and only output to CRT (HDMI-A-1)
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="video=LVDS-1:d video=HDMI-A-1:1024x768"
I initially set it to 640x480, but display was better with higher res and large font size, which I scales up with sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup
I created a service account for this, and set up a systemd service to start getty on that account based on those docs
[Service]
Type=idle
ExecStart=
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --skip-login --noreset --noclear --autologin axies - ${TERM}
Then I added htop to the ~/.bash_profile for that user and… done!
Only thing is there is some overscan on the display and initially about 3 rows / cols were cut off on each side. I was able to adjust the CRT display itself to mostly mitigate this, so now only a bit is cut off and it’s usable, but it’s not perfect. I tried setting the margin in the video options in grub with margin_top, margin_left etc., as per these docs but that didn’t work, even though I verified the resolution was applying correctly. But it is functional!
You mean like using a separate computer to display? I thought about that. Actually this old thing has a battery compartment with enough space to fit a raspberry pi inside so I may try and make it a self contained PC at some point. Would be cool to have it monitor multiple servers and display a status dashboard when they’re up. That sounds like a fun future project :)
I was trying to start the monitoring program as part of the systemd service. Idk why I didn’t think to use the bash profile on a service account. That should work perfect! Thanks
This is great info, thanks! I did some messing around yesterday and got it opening a tty on boot, and disabled the startx so it stays there. I will look into the monitor power stuff too. Thanks!
I do get a tty and that works fine if I start it manually. I can also ssh into it while on my local network.
I think what I need to configure is to have it automatically start a tty at boot with specific credentials and auto start whatever monitoring I want. That should work I think. The only downside of that is I don’t want it to run on the laptop screen at all, only the hdmi output, so that is where I want to learn more about how all of those display interfaces work on linux so I can configure the service accordingly (I think)
That definitely looks like it is in the direction I want to go. I’ll read those docs. I do have getty on mint so I’ll do some testing
From what I know, headless means different things depending on context - in this instance I’m using it in the sense that my server does not require any user session, or any user input devices, it just powers on and all of the services start up at the system level. I can SSH into it to configure things, but it doesn’t require any user session or input to run the services. A video output probably falls outside of this in some sense, but I would like it to be automatic without requiring an active user session.
The monitor I have is an old Panasonic tv / radio combo, so the display can be flipped on with a physical switch when I’m at my desk, so shouldn’t be any wasted power usage. It won’t be on all the time.
I’m using Linux Mint, which is probably not optimal, but I had a USB ready and I’m just using terminal stuff so it didn’t seem like it mattered too much. It does have systemd, which made it pretty easy to set up the docker stuff
Thanks for the input!
I have an older nvidia card (1070) and had more of an issue than that getting the correct version of the driver installed for my card, and getting it to use the correct driver instead of the open source one that didn’t work well. It’s also possible I was doing something wrong. But yeah, it’s definitely doable, and it’s not too bad, but it’s fiddly compared to the ubuntu driver gui or something like bazzite that works out of the box with it.
Yeah, I probably wouldn’t buy a new laptop for a server, but it’s a great way to re-use what would otherwise be e-waste. I have a 20 year old laptop running as a server, currently just for FoundryVTT, but it works great. 4GB of DDR2 ram, Intel celeron dual core cpu. I stuck a new ssd in it (old hdd died) and it works great, as long as I don’t run any graphical interfaces while I have the server running. One ram stick was bad, but DDR2 cost me about $11. Total hardware cost was around $50 USD.
Thinking about just removing the lid entirely, since I don’t use it graphically (I can hook up a monitor if absolutely needed).
I have used gnome, plasma, and xfce and they are all fine. I prefer KDE personally but they’re all going to do what you need to do. It’s all down to personal aesthetic preference, and picking one won’t hinder you in any real way. KDE to me just looks super nice out of the box for my taste, and I like the customization.
I love Debian. Been using it on my laptop for over a year. Some specific drivers are a little fiddly if you have nvidia graphics but it’s not too bad, lots of good info on the debian wiki.
“Install this bloated spyware in exchange for a little bit of convenience” is like 80% of modern tech and I don’t know how people are just ok with that
I installed Bazzite and it felt so much like installing Windows for me (huge install image, slow process, lots of loading wheels and user friendly “pretty” screens to get set up). It didn’t feel great, but I figured I’d give it a fair chance and learn how to use a different setup than I’m used to.
I still haven’t had a chance to actually do much with it (only a couple of hours between work and other stuff) but I am really interested in the concept. After reading up more and watching some videos I now understand why the install process is so big and the reasoning behind it. This type of distro really does seem like a great option for regular users.
Only issue I’ve had so far is connecting to my RaspberryPi to control my 3d printer using the .local hostname, since flatpak apparently has a bug with mDNS. IP works fine, and I did rps-ostree install a browser, which was kind of a pain, and probably not the correct way to address the issue, but that was within the first hour or so of using it and I haven’t figured out the best way to do that type of thing yet. Really looking forward to learning more about the setup and how to customize stuff on top of it. Distrobox seems extremely powerful and sounds like it will give me everything I want.
Still have vanilla Debian on my laptop, which I absolutely love, but using it on my desktop PC was kind of a pain due to some proprietary drivers required there (nvidia).
I left work early one day and was driving home on some back roads. I got behind a jeep that started to slow and drift into the other lane. He kept drifting and went off the road, jumped the bank and went into a very deep quarry pond. I heard a splash and pulled over and called 911. While on the phone I heard a yell for help and hung up (I didn’t think to stay on the line until after) and ran across to find this guy barely treading water. I swam in and helped him to the bank and talked to him until the emergency services arrived.
Turns out he had some severe internal bleeding and passed out driving. The cold water woke him up, but he was too weak and disoriented to swim.
If I would have left work 5 minutes earlier or later, or if he didn’t have the top off on his jeep, he would have died and nobody would have known where. The pond was deep enough that even the vehicle wouldn’t have been found.