The Linux geek thread - The Bear and Badger

beano

I'll have whatever youse are smoking.

Ed_Flanders

Good news: Netflix on Linux
You still have to jump through a few hoops but it's nothing compared to having to use Wine and praying. I tried it today and it works perfectly.
- Make sure you have the latest version of libnss3
- Download and install the latest Chrome. I suppose Chromium also works but I didn't try it.
- Enable EME in chrome://flags
- Download the User-Agent Switcher Extension
* Add a new (fake) user agent using the extension and input the following
Name: Netflix Linux
String: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2114.2 Safari/537.36
Group: (is filled in automatically)
Append?: Select ‘Replace’
Indicator Flag: IE
Click "add"
* Add netflix.com to the permanent spoof list

Source: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/08/netflix-linux-html5-support-plugins

cockbeard

Don't know for certain but I do know that Chromium will fall over with the pay wall for Youtube paid content, so if it (Netflix in this case) doesn't work on Chromium, don't assume it won't work on Chrome. They are too often conflated

AJ

Blue Swirl wrote:

AJ wrote:

Oh? I always I thought GNU provides some important parts of the POSIX interface. Guess there's some pretty basic stuff I should know that I don't. What else do people use instead?

No no, I think you're right. I talked myself into a corner for the sake of conversation. GNU/Linux is definitely the right term, probably even with the more proprietary distros like Linux Mint.

I did a little reading and apparently there are OS' using Linux but not any of GNU. Most (presumably not all, but I've not yet found an example) desktop distros rely pretty heavily on it and actually comprise more GNU than Linux, but Android doesn't use it at all.

Blue Swirl

AJ wrote:

I did a little reading and apparently there are OS' using Linux but not any of GNU.

Wait, you mean I was right?

I mean, of course I was right. Android, I was obviously talking about Android.

Hodge360

Help please.
I'm having troubles with Kubuntu.
Can't update or install new packages. Considered a new install but it'd be nice to know what's wrong. Error codes refer to linux generic files and auto-removal had been mentioned as well.
Most recent error was along the lines of target destination full so I was looking at space.

Plenty of space on HDD but I noticed boot was showing at 100% use so I looked in there and there are a lot (6/7) of copies of various files. These files have the same name and size except at the end their numbers go up in relation to the date. I'm assuming these are version numbers but wonder is it safe to delete the older ones and would that resolve the problem for the time being?
Obviously if it is the case,there's a problem somewhere that these files are not being removed automatically so that would have to be looked at.
Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree and should go fresh install but it's nice to look sometimes.

hunk

Had the same problem on 14.10 once. The boot partition was the culprit because multiple old unused kernels were filling up that particular hdd partition.
Try ubuntu tweak to clear out old kernels manualy and free up disk space. You don't really need the old kernels so I don't see why this doesn't happen automatically.

http://ubuntu-tweak.com/

If all fails, backup your files and do a clean install.
Usually the quickest way to fix things ironically.

hunk

Ed_Flanders wrote:

Good news: Netflix on Linux You still have to jump through a few hoops but it's nothing compared to having to use Wine and praying. I tried it today and it works perfectly. - Make sure you have the latest version of libnss3 - Download and install the latest Chrome. I suppose Chromium also works but I didn't try it. - Enable EME in chrome://flags - Download the User-Agent Switcher Extension * Add a new (fake) user agent using the extension and input the following Name: Netflix Linux String: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2114.2 Safari/537.36 Group: (is filled in automatically) Append?: Select ‘Replace’ Indicator Flag: IE Click "add" * Add netflix.com to the permanent spoof list Source: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/08/netflix-linux-html5-support-plugins

Pipelight also works.
Mono should too but haven't tried that.

Hodge360

Thanks @hunk. I'll check it out later

Ed_Flanders

hunk wrote:

Pipelight also works. Mono should too but haven't tried that.

Thankfully you don't need any of that anymore. A clean Chrome install in a reasonably up-to-date Linux system should do the trick.

Scotswahey

I've had a bit of a ballache with Linux recently. I installed Linux Mint 17 on a tiny fanless PC i picked up without really looking at the specs it had. I just assumed... it's Linux it'll run so I just wrote over the Windows XP I had on there. It ran really slow so I installed Mint 13 Mate or whatever thinking it's designed for 32bit XP machines... that'll get it working.

Still runs really bad. I eventually found out that the graphics card used with the atom processor in the machine is one of the only ones Linux doesn't have the drivers for. So no matter where I've looked, what i've tried it's still pumping all the graphics stuff through the processor instead of the graphics chip.

But in other news my 7 year old Samsung netbook runs a treat with Mint. I had tried various versions of Ubuntu on it but I've never liked the way it looked. Linux Mint is definitely the way forward if you want an easy transition from windows.

hunk

OS memory (ram) footprint varies with different distros.
For older hw try lubuntu. There are other light distros but you'll have to Google for the most relevant.

dynamiteReady

hunk wrote:

OS memory (ram) footprint varies with different distros. For older hw try lubuntu. There are other light distros but you'll have to Google for the most relevant.

Arch is nice and light, and I prefer it's package manager (Pacman) to Aptitude.
But it's seen as fucking arcane.

I'd go with Hunk's suggestion, or try Debian, as it's very Windows like on install (I thought).

Ed_Flanders

Mint XFCE is quite light and Win XP-like.

LtPidgeon

It's been years since I looked at Linux. Far too much diy for my liking.

Did anyone ever use BeOS "back in the day"?

beano

Its fine if you don't use it as a desktop. Use it as a virtualiser I say, but if your machine can rock the VMware esxi then rock virtual machines, hotcaching CPUs, drives, and more. Draw back is security, if you don't encrypt your disc.

Never thought of mint as windas like tho. Doesn't go well.

Did something on beos, forums and irc.

Scotswahey

There just seem to be too many variations of Linux. Nobody is going to six this Wayland thing because oh guess what it's already factioned off into like 4 different development groups. There are too many variations of the same OS and sub variations of the variations.

beano

Probably just best to be a solid GNU/Linux head and abandon the search for best-out-of-the-box derivs.

hunk

Meh, Ubuntu seems to be the most standardized Linux distro out of the box. I'll stick with that. At least until SteamOS gets out of beta.

Blue Swirl

LtPidgeon wrote:

Did anyone ever use BeOS "back in the day"?

I had a friend of a friend who was mad for it.

hunk

Scotswahey wrote:

There just seem to be too many variations of Linux. Nobody is going to six this Wayland thing because oh guess what it's already factioned off into like 4 different development groups. There are too many variations of the same OS and sub variations of the variations.

Linux is quite a bit like Android.
You can view a Linux distro in the same vein as an Android developer/custom rom. The rom images use the same base (linux kernel) customised with their own custom libraries. Most software is x-compatible between distros if you have the right libs installed.
But yeah, there's no vanilla Linux OS like with Android. Which leaves the development of main features like Wayland quite fragmented. Perhaps Linus wouldn't have it any other way?

LtPidgeon

Blue Swirl wrote:

LtPidgeon wrote:

Did anyone ever use BeOS "back in the day"?

I had a friend of a friend who was mad for it.

I went through a phase of trying to get as many OS on one PC as possible. I really ripped the arse out of Partition Magic and Boot Magic back then.

Blue Swirl

LtPidgeon wrote:

I went through a phase of trying to get as many OS on one PC as possible. I really ripped the arse out of Partition Magic and Boot Magic back then.

Neat. How many did you get to? I've seen stuff online of people achieving over 100, though most were of course just different flavours of various Linux-based operating systems.

acemuzzy

We're using CentOS at work now. That's a pretty solid one from all accounts, can believe it's heavyweight though.

Blue Swirl

Hello badgers. I'm thinking of buying an ex-lease Lenovo Thinkpad T400 over the weekend, and installing a Linux-based OS on it. I've narrowed down my choices to Scientific Linux (Red Hat-based distro maintained by Fermi Labs) and elementaryOS (an Ubuntu derivative).

Any other recommendations? Which of the two above would you go for? I've also pondered Open SUSE and Xubuntu. I'm just looking for a solid desktop experience, with software working 'out of the box'. No fancy graphics or high end number crunching, it's mainly going to be a portable electronic type writer.

Blue Swirl

Actually, I'm probably kidding myself if I think my finances can stretch to a second hand laptop. Feel free to recommend a distro for when I can, though.

hunk

SteamOS!
Oh wait..

Ed_Flanders

Mint XFCE x64 is the one I've been using for a year and I totally recommend it. Rock solid and you can benefit from Ubuntu repositories.
And another recommendation for all Linux users: check out Linux Voice. You can download the free issues at http://www.linuxvoice.com/

Blue Swirl

Ed_Flanders wrote:

Mint XFCE x64 is the one I've been using for a year and I totally recommend it.

I've considered Mint. It's the most popular Linux flavour (no pun intended) on Distro Watch, in front of the mighty Ubuntu and Debian. Which is ironic, given that Mint derives from Ubuntu which derives from Debian. I think I've not bothered with Mint in the past given that it seems to focus on convenience over openness, which seems counter intuitive given it's a Linux-based OS. But heck, I use Windows and OS X on a daily basis, clearly I'm not that bothered about a Free/open source OS.

acemuzzy

My managee was just asking me about disk mounts etc.

To try and answer the question, we hit the CLI.

I started typing "the bear..."

And then had to talk very quickly, as I foolishly Ctrl+Ced rather than backspacing, meaning it was on the screen for the next five minutes

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