Root Moose

https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@RootMoose

Monkeying with computers since 1984, Linux user since 1994.

Free/Libre Open Source Software, data sovereignty & privacy advocate.

I've seen some things; is there such a thing as computer related PTSD?

Transitioning to "just a user".

Linux distros I'm "into" lately:

* Alpine Linux: https://alpinelinux.org
* Debian Linux: https://debian.org
* Casuarina Linux: https://casuarina.org

My automotive half can be found at https://weird.autos/@fxworks

Boosts / Shares ≠ Endorsement.

#nobot #noindex

Website: https://moose.ca
Car Stuff: https://fxworks.ca

Public Key

npub1g88vfnts4jvrhe6y4msskx87q7htmq3nt09etka3wnvru4vth6hsvena9y

NIP-05 Address

rootmoose_at_mastodon.bsd.cafe@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsyrnkye4c2expmuaz2acgtrrlq0t4asge4hju4mwchfkp72k9matcpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds2xlsrl

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1g88vfnts4jvrhe6y4msskx87q7htmq3nt09etka3wnvru4vth6hsvena9y

Show more details

Last Notes

2026-05-21 14:30:07 UTC

- reply

I run this 'literally everywhere' except in the console... for now. Tired old eyes, need all the help they can get.
I'm also a fan of the font aesthetic of 2001 A Space Odyssey (for different reasons). I tend to lump OCR[A,B] with them as well.
https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/

2026-05-21 14:22:59 UTC

Anyone else running Debian Testing/Forky still stuck on 6.19.14+deb14 due to in-repo zfs and/or nvidia modules not playing nice with 7.0.x?
Some other module? Would be interested to know of others.
Not a big deal (7hi$ 1s 73st1nG!) , but polling for apt update like some kind of a demented squirrel trying to get a nut through a wire fence is getting long in the tooth. Ha.
Maybe it's just me? 🙃
#Debian #Debian14 #Forky #DebianTesting #Linux

2026-05-20 14:33:03 UTC

- reply

So many auth keys improperly obscured now in the wild...

2026-05-20 14:17:23 UTC

It's been 0 days since my fat fingered morning routine of logging into my box with failed passwords made me wonder if the previous day's updates broke PAM and I'd have to boot single and inflict violence on the host.

2026-05-20 04:33:04 UTC

People still use Google search? Huh...

2026-05-15 18:49:39 UTC

Took the day off to get my MX-5 out of winter storage.
So far have been under a greasy tractor all afternoon replacing fuel lines and pump.
Should've gone to work. lol

2026-05-15 15:02:50 UTC

- reply

Probably be perfectly fine provided the wifi chip is supported. Some macbooks of this era use Broadcom B43 chips. These are supported but some distros make it unnecessarily difficult to set it up.
Boot the live CD with Mint and see if the Wifi works. If not, check the forums.

2026-05-15 06:45:30 UTC

Migrated my laptop off Solus to Debian Testing/Forky. Of course there seems to be issues building the Nvidia drivers with 7.0.4+deb14 'cuz lpe's and firefighting response time reasons.
It's almost 3 am, fawk it. Machine runs fine on Intel igpu for now.

2026-05-14 20:38:18 UTC

- reply

I managed to get the 11700k to have a pkg idle at ~5.5W (from ~14.5W). This is running a full KDE Plasma desktop and driving two 4K displays.
Go into your BIOS and change all the C-states settings from "Auto" to "Enabled", C-10. That's all it took.
Well, I installed tlpd and acpid but I doubt they contributed a lot to reducing the number.
I'm content with this for now.
The AMD 3600X - can't do a damn thing with it - other than turn it off. I'll probably do that. Much cheaper than replacing with a 5650GE. Ha.

2026-05-14 17:16:56 UTC

- reply

The past two weeks have been a miserable fat fingered period of time for me... I feel your pain.

2026-05-14 14:06:10 UTC

- reply

This article is a little dated but most likely still relevant. He also has many articles reviewing grfx tabs on his site.
https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1030/debian-12-kde-plasma-2024-install-guide

2026-05-14 13:40:40 UTC

- reply

surphie

2026-05-13 20:04:50 UTC

- reply

frame and bulkhead...

2026-05-13 18:38:19 UTC

- reply

And I don't get how the 10700k gets ~1W for pkg as displayed in btop, turbostat, etc. Can't be correct. Mind you, both the 3600X and 10700K machines have kill-a-watts and the Intel is ~20W less than the AMD (65W vs 87W).
Weird.

2026-05-13 18:32:33 UTC

- reply

Some more numbers of systems I forgot I had handy...
Intel Core 3 N355: < 1W !!!
Intel N150: < 1W !!!
These don't have the compute power of any of the others though... well, maybe in line with i7-3770. Ha.

2026-05-13 18:21:54 UTC

- reply

Agree, between power sched, undervolting, and base clocks there's probably more to be gained.

2026-05-13 18:20:50 UTC

- reply

[ Ack! turbostat - been struggling to remember the name of that all day ]
Ok, very cool. So, at ~6W that makes it potentially running at ~30% of the 3600X I have in one of my machines.
Thanks for taking the time to round up this info. Appreciated!

2026-05-13 18:15:00 UTC

- reply

Actually, I mispoke - no need to "make". <too many ball in the air>
That musl package is statically compiled/bound - just untar and run it.

2026-05-13 18:08:05 UTC

- reply

There's probably easier ways to get the info... but everyone loves colourful btop, right? 🙃

2026-05-13 18:06:41 UTC

- reply

if you run btop as root it should appear in the top right above the temperatures.
If btop is older it may not be there. If you install the version in the releases section of their github page it should work. 'make install' sticks it in /usr/local/bin so it doesn't pollute your system (depending on system). Or just run it out of where you cloned and don't do an install.

2026-05-13 18:04:37 UTC

Made the mistake at looking at current 8TB spinning rust hard drives...
WTAF?!
We are getting ripped off.

2026-05-13 16:49:38 UTC

- reply

In the past I haven't had much luck with setting things in that tab making much of a difference. I just revisited and by bulk setting everything to "good" maybe there is a ~1 W difference if I squint at the averages. "AMD things" perhaps.
I think the CPU number in btop correlates to the package power. My thought is that maybe moving from a 95W CPU to a 35W would cut the power in half. That would be ~10W on a 5650GE but not the 3W on a 5825U.
Hmm, I think I just talked myself out of that 5650GE in my aliexpress shopping cart. Ha.

2026-05-13 15:18:39 UTC

- reply

Is there anyone out there running an AMD 5650GE based system running Linux or BSD?
Can you tell us your CPU and GPU idle power numbers as displayed in btop?
Maybe this is an "easy button" of sorts to reduce power on an existing AMD AM4 system without the going through the machinations of new mobo, ram, etc., etc. Get most of the way there?
#Linux #RunBSD #AMD #5650GE #PowerConsumption #Power #HomeLab #SelfHosting #SelfHosted #SOHO

2026-05-13 08:10:03 UTC

- reply

I've got a Prusa Original XL and have been very happy. "Fire and forget" type of machine.

2026-05-12 21:53:55 UTC

It always amazes me how a coloured bash prompt can "lift" your view of a system.

2026-05-12 19:02:27 UTC

- reply

Some numbers so far (rounded up next 0.5W):
i5-6400 + R6600: 2.8W + 3W ~= 6W
i7-10750H + GTX1650 Ti Mobile: 4.3W + 3W ~= 7.5W
i7-11700k + RTX4070S: 14.7W + 6.25W ~= 21.5W
i7-10700K + GTX1060-3GB: 1.1W <?!> + unknown (toss these value - can't be correct)
Ryzen 5 3600X: 20W
And from someone in this thread that provided:
5825U: <3W

2026-05-12 16:57:34 UTC

Is there anyone out there running an AMD 5825U based system running Linux or BSD?
Can you tell us your CPU and GPU idle power numbers as displayed in btop?
#Linux #RunBSD #AMD #5825U #PowerConsumption #Power #HomeLab #SelfHosting #SelfHosted #SOHO

2026-05-12 14:51:36 UTC

- reply

NVM, looks like the new 7.0.4 "shiny kernel" doesn't have zfs support in some fashion.
I guess I have to wait.
*** ZFS Version: zfs-2.4.1-1
*** Compatible Kernels: 4.18 - 6.19
https://media.bsd.cafe/bsdmmedia01/media_attachments/files/116/562/160/204/314/738/original/72df7c1d27f2990a.png

2026-05-12 14:37:34 UTC

Anyone else having difficulties applying 7.0.4+deb14-amd64 to a testing/forky host with Nvidia CPU?
#Debian #nvidia #Forky #Testing #DebianTesting

2026-05-11 13:20:24 UTC

- reply

I installed it the other night (sysv init). Pretty cool. Kind of takes the kitchen sink approach on the base install. There's a lot of stuff installed that I wouldn't have expected.

2026-05-10 13:15:59 UTC

- reply

Thanks, will check it out. I expect this will be a thing for Stargate especially.

2026-05-10 13:15:14 UTC

- reply

It just seemed like an odd thing to setup and enable by default as part of a user guided installer. I've never seen (noticed?) that on any other distro.
Most distros don't even add rsync commands in the base installer and you need to manually install rsync after the fact. To add an actual rsync daemon seems... different, especially on a distro that is intended as a desktop distro.
Anyway, not a negative or positive, just different. Caveats about extra open ports and attack vectors, yadda, yadda, nothing burgers for a desktop an internal network.

2026-05-10 05:56:34 UTC

The other thing that sucked up some time this evening was messing around with Mame to emulate those old stand-up, coin-op games I used to play way back when.
Defender! Stargate! Scramble! Sky Shark! Galaga! Moon Cresta! Phoenix! Missile Command! Space Invaders!
(Yes - I have a type - ha)
So much fun and they all work and look like the original. It's really kind of amazing in a way.
My son had an extra ps5 controller lying around and that paired over Bluetooth to my Linux laptop with zero issues. That was really cool too.
Dunno why I never tried Mame till now.
Fun!
#Gaming #Linux #Mame #VideoGames

2026-05-10 05:28:50 UTC

Spent some time tonight messing around with MX Linux (Plasma + SysV). MX is a Debian stable respin.
I like it. The installer is pretty vanilla and it automated setting up an optional samba server and some other services, including rsync (am I the only one that finds the choice of rsync daemon eyebrow raising?).
I think this is the first SysV box I've touched on the better part of 10 years. Listing services gave me flashbacks to the fleet of several hundred RHEL 5-6 I used to maintain. Ha. Good times....?
The apt sources directly reference debian.org and there is another sources file for MX Linux specific endpoints. I guess it makes sense but adds load to debian.org without the direct credit in a way.

2026-05-09 05:46:31 UTC

- reply

I was messing with Devuan earlier this week and came across similar stuff and didn't proceed. It's general lack of polish didn't help either.
The list of distros that I will consider per usage gets shorter and shorter...
* Alpine (openrc, anti-AI)
* Debian (systemd)
* Chimera (musl, dinit, anti-AI)
* Elementary (systemd, anti-AI)
* Mint (systemd)
* Zorin (systemd)
* Solus (systemd)
Not sure about AerynOS (systemd, anti-AI). Haven't dug into them yet. The Solus upset back in the mid-teens is giving me pause. Need to see how the org is structured before spending any time on it.
Looking forward to testing the first release of Casuarina (glibc fork of Chimera).
MX?
So . Much . systemd . ugh
I've been distro hopping a lot lately but am back on Debian. Getting gpu's and their associated libraries and modules to work is just easy on a mainstream distro.
I couldn't get rocm+hip to work on Alpine for Blender and the Solus upgrade cycle seems to dislike people screwing with the boot setup like adding a mirror to btrfs root (at least it seems). Otherwise Solus seems pretty awesome, rocm, hip, cuda all works out of the box. I don't know their stance on AI. Alpine is awesome, ran it for several months (plasma) without issue except the gpu thing. Still run it on other machines.
There's the BSD's ofc.
Arch based stuff is cool but I'm so 'over' 20-40+ packages getting updated every day or two.
I hear there's binary Gentoo nowadays. Gentoo was so time intensive and I'm not talking about compile times - not really interested in that similar to Arch.
Le sigh.

2026-05-08 20:28:08 UTC

When I set up this Debian box with ZFS I tried setting up ZFS swap to see how it worked. There were warnings in the OpenZFS docs but I gave it a go anyway.
The system is configured with two fast NVME connected to the CPU and mirrored for the root pool. Swap was created as part of the rpool.
It's a bad configuration. After a number of hours the load average consistently heads into the high teens or higher. Turning off swap makes it drop immediately to ~1.0 (typical for this box running a desktop and futzing around in browsers and shells).
As far as I can tell it's not possible to resize a ZFS partition in situ so I added the swap partition on the third NVME that is formatted EXT4 (south bridge x4).
Not ideal but it is perfectly serviceable.
NVME drives are so fast, would I really notice a difference by the seat of the pants with the swap on partitions on the north bridge connected mirrored devices? Probably not.
Leaving sleeping dragons for now.
#Linux #Debian #ZFS #OpenZFS

2026-05-08 16:57:32 UTC

- reply

I've been happy with Waterfox, and I run it with a fleet of self-protection extensions, and it works perfectly fine.
This particular problem is me shooting myself in the face by running testing instead of stable. Ha

2026-05-08 15:55:19 UTC

Niggle that is hard to research...
For anyone running Debian Testing (Forky) and using Waterfox, some video will not play due to Waterfox 6.6.12 not being compatible with ffmpeg v8. It is expecting v7 and I guess there are some videos where the video won't start due to switches, params, or whatever.
My use case was an old Youtube video that I snarfed many years ago and had on my Jellyfin server.
[ Stream #0:0[0x1](und): Video: h264 (Main) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p(progressive), 854x480, 1100 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn (default) ]
Waterfox (v6.6.12) won't play it but Librewolf (150.0.1-1) does. Both are installed from PPA, not flatpak.
New stuff plays fine so I hadn't noticed it since ~Wednesday when this box was re-imaged and moved into.
Apparently the Waterfox flatpak doesn't have this problem (probably has it's own ffmpeg v7 bundled inside or has a flatpak ffmpeg dependency).
I could get into the weeds further to confirm but Librewolf works for now. I'll wait for Waterfox to work through it. 🙂
#Linux #Debian #Testing #Forky #Web #Waterfox @npub1gcd…4j0h #Librewolf #PPA #Flatpak

2026-05-08 09:49:50 UTC

Seems like a lot of people are being surprised to find out Fedora is not really a community distro... Centos was the warning.
Fedora is RHEL beta testing and Red Hat will not give that up.
#Linux

2026-05-08 09:42:53 UTC

- reply

FWIW, when I was running my my own personal instance I had the retention cranked right down and didn't notice anything from an experience pov. From memory, it made a big difference to the space used though. Instead of 10s of GB to single digit numbers iirc.
A lot of it depends on who and how many people you follow and what they post but pretty certain you will notice a big difference. Also, iirc, you can set your own content to be infinitely retained as a separate config setting.

2026-05-07 22:16:32 UTC

- reply

Yep, looks great. I also set everything to "Atkinson Hyperlegible Next" to save my tired, old eyes.

2026-05-07 22:13:35 UTC

- reply

32" 4K at 145% in Plasma here.
Full page 8.5x11 sheet held up to Libreoffice, other apps, at 100% is 1:1. Perfect.

2026-05-07 13:03:45 UTC

- reply

As a Linux greyhair I'll say, for me, it's less about the age verification thing and more about how terrible systemd is in practice.
Systemd's latest BS is just a tipping point of sorts to say "enough" in spite of any old thing being put into the age fields if necessary. It's just bad.

2026-05-06 15:10:35 UTC

- reply

Regardless of what words are in the agreements, any data housed under the Thunderbird Pro banner will be subject to NSA/DHS/CIA visibility.
To think otherwise is naive.
Just don't go there.

2026-05-06 03:42:25 UTC

- reply

Yeah, seems like it may be geoip or ASN related.
Using the same box with multiple different browsers with all the safe for network extensions turned off or not installed results in the same thing.
Going in from a VPN in a different zone works consistently.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2026-05-05 01:08:42 UTC

Anyone else having issues connecting to the Debian wiki? I get the initial anti AI screen or whatever it is and then it gives me a "Forbidden" page.
Accessing via VPN works but from my normal Bell CGNAT IP does not. It's not a 403, just a text pages saying Forbidden.
Did the Debian admins block Bell Canada residential IP ranges by mistake?
#Linux #Debian #Bell

2026-05-05 01:00:29 UTC

After a bunch of futzing around the machine is back on Debian (testing) with zfs root.
Sometimes you just have to stop swimming against the current and go with the warm fuzzies. For now.
#Linux #Debian #Distro #DistroHopping

2026-05-04 18:31:32 UTC

- reply

The part that really stands out in my memory was the walls of laser blaster fire coming off the star destroyers trying to get you. Puckering good fun.

2026-05-04 18:26:19 UTC

Ok, backup of the broken system done. Let's give Devuan testing a go as a creative desktop.
#Linux #Devuan

2026-05-04 18:25:14 UTC

- reply

Great game - many, many hours...

2026-05-04 16:55:35 UTC

I did the non-standard install thing with Solus (root on btrfs, add a mirror after the fact).
Looks like Friday's set of patches and new kernel (7.0) broke the boot. Reverting to 6.8 is also broken.
I've been futzing with it on and off for the last couple of hours. About to give up and repave with a different distro me thinks. Shame.
#Linux #Solus

2026-05-03 03:47:31 UTC

- reply

My main thing with systemd-boot is it's fugly and not a lot of options.

2026-05-03 03:45:38 UTC

Finally got around to checking out Little Snitch for Linux. It might be ~20 years since the last time ran it (Leopard! Tiger!).
Worth a look if you haven't checked it out yet.
Web interface is cool, especially for simplified look at what hosts are experiencing.
Not packaged for Solus or Alpine but the static musl binaries linked on the download page work fine.
./littlesnitch --daemon
./littlesnitch <- sends you to the default browser and loads the page on localhost:3031 IF the daemon is running
https://obdev.at/products/littlesnitch-linux/download.html
#Linux #LittleSnitch #Network #Solus #Alpine

2026-05-03 03:22:46 UTC

systemd-boot: wtf is this dreck?
It works, but like lilo back in the '90s. Actually, that's probably not fair to lilo.
Now I understand why most distros configure it to not display and make you press/hold space to access the menu at boot time. The less we see it the better.
#Linux #systemdboot

2026-05-03 03:16:21 UTC

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@krutonium/116507098018804092
I actually lol'ed for realzies.

2026-05-02 15:36:24 UTC

Looks like the Debian backports kernel got the copyfail fix overnight. All public stuff patched up.
#Linux #Debian #copyfail

2026-05-02 10:02:37 UTC

Anyone have recent experience with the PineTab2?
Usability when running pmos or some other distro?
#pine64 #pinetab #pinetab2 #linux #tablet #rk3566 #rockchip #pmos #postmarket #postmarketos

2026-05-02 09:47:43 UTC

- reply

All hail lasagna! We went vegan ~2.5 years ago and just in the last while my wife has perfected a good vegan lasagna. It was one of the few things I missed! Ha.

2026-05-02 09:44:36 UTC

- reply

Sorry to hear this. I wasn't aware of his 2020 accident. Sad news for certain.

2026-05-01 19:37:40 UTC

Setting up a fresh instance of Mediawiki (1.45.3) for the first time in like... a decade?
OMG, I've been dragging a lot of cruft in extensions and whatnot that ships directly with Mediawiki nowadays. I desperately need to redo/re-baseline my mediawiki site to streamline it.
#Mediawiki #SelfHosted #SelfHosting #Web #wiki

2026-05-01 15:25:39 UTC

Working on a lab opnsense box for the last hour trying to figure out why the WAN connection wasn't working. After all that raw dogging WireGuard and the NAT/FW rules I probably borked something along the way...
Note to self: make sure the egress WAN connection switch is turned on.
<double_face_palm_meme />

2026-05-01 15:20:43 UTC

- reply

I did a bunch of testing yesterday and iirc testing and unstable were ok (I didn't write anything down - lol).
Edit: just retried on both testing+unstable (6.9.13_deb14 + 6.9.14+deb14) and the vuln doesn't work.

2026-05-01 13:28:37 UTC

FWIW, the Debian backports kernel series has NOT been patched for copyfail yet. At least my hosts are not being offered anything new and the vuln still works when run against the host.
#Debian #copyfail #Linux

2026-05-01 11:05:15 UTC

- reply

Get well, Dude. Stop and take the time.

2026-04-30 20:47:14 UTC

My solution to the copyfail account escalation thing was to delete all the users.
Problem solved!
- b0fh
#copyfail #Linux

2026-04-27 16:33:32 UTC

- reply

Some reviews...
https://www.davidrevoy.com/index.php?tag/hardware

2026-04-24 17:13:46 UTC

I'm running Plasma 6.6 on a box and I'm kind of struggling with the lack of adjustable window outline intensity. I really miss this... whined about it elsewhere.
Examples attached of with and without and where to set it in pre-6.6 and 6.6.
Anyone know how to get this setting back, either via command line or smoke signal or whatever?
#KDE #KDEPlasma #Plasma #Plasma66 @npub1ncy…3x0q
https://media.bsd.cafe/bsdmmedia01/media_attachments/files/116/460/795/410/038/411/original/9fc3a2ab27e9adbd.png
https://media.bsd.cafe/bsdmmedia01/media_attachments/files/116/460/797/276/518/951/original/4db497fda372dca4.png

2026-04-05 16:10:14 UTC

- reply

IIRC there was a thread here several days ago that was talking about reverting that ... think the FF social team was involved and discussed.
Sorry, that's the only deets remaining in the brane pan atm.
cc: @firefoxwebdevs

2026-03-24 01:28:17 UTC

Sometime around 2017 (IIRC) I got nostalgic for a little "netbook" type computer and decided, for some reason, that an HP Stream 14 would scratch that itch.
These are really low spec machines, even for 2016-2017. It came with Windows 10 and the first Windows Update basically filled the disk and effectively bricked the device. LOL!
I installed Linux on it after that (ofc) but didn't really use it much. So slow....
I was digging around in my service manuals library this evening and stumbled over it in a drawer of files... for some unknown reason it was in the drawer.
I started it up thinking it was still running Arch from back before Covid and might be entertaining to try to get it to update to the present.
Hmm, Alpine 3.21 boots console but sway is installed. Weird, no recollection of doing anything with this machine 12-18 months ago. "I'm not saying it's aliens..."
Ok, Alpine updates to 3.23 without issues. I'm not much of a tiling window manager person so I installed Plasma. Bad idea! With 4GB of ram and an afterthought of a CPU and storage it doesn't run very well at all.
Installed LXQt with labwc and it runs great! Tweaking and themeing to come. (Hi @npub1hrx…rxkj 👋 )
Not sure what I'm going to do with this machine but currently it is pretty usable for simple stuff. Screen and keyboard sucks, pretty close to e-waste. Lesson: ~$200 (retail) laptop is about as good as you would expect a $200 laptop to be. Ha.
#Linux #AlpineLinux #LXQt #netbook #labwc #windows #Windows10
https://media.bsd.cafe/bsdmmedia01/media_attachments/files/116/281/512/468/584/824/original/8196c5f4abc3e90f.png