Linux

RTL8188 adapter upgrade hell

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On my desktop I've been running Linux Mint for the last few years, and have always done the distro upgrade-in-place. This time I tried it and there were too many errors — the upgrade tool wanted to remove around 50 apps, disable all my repos, and generally mess around with my system in too many ways, so I opted to go the "wipe and install fresh" route. My reasoning was also that after 6 years of upgrades, there were probably a few extra files on there, that I didn't need ( a mysterious 3 Gb in the flatpak directory for eg), and I'd messed around with the system config a few times over the time — pipewire, different DNS resolvers etc — so a fresh install would be a good thing. And it was, but for one nightmare: my RTL8188 adapter.

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Node Package Manager install surprise. 387 extra packages!

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I've got a server running Ubuntu 20, and wanted to try out something on it with nodejs. I checked on the server and apparently nodejs was already installed. I guess some previous dependency had put it on there a long time ago. node –version v10.19.0apt-cache policy nodejs nodejs: Installed: 10.19.0~dfsg-3ubuntu1 Candidate: 10.19.0~dfsg-3ubuntu1 OK, so the … Read more

Add a better PDF printer in Linux

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One of the major revelations to Windows users when they migrate to Linux is that its no longer necessary to pay for a PDF printer, or install an open source one: Linux knows how to print PDFs already. However its default implementation is a little irritating. When you print you have to accept the document … Read more

fail2ban sqlite database prune

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On servers where fail2ban has been working for a long time, you might notice the size of its database eating up your disk space. I just found one that had ballooned to over 2Gb over the course of a year. You'll find it hiding in /var/lib/fail2ban/ If its causing you anguish, then you can easily … Read more