Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

  • 2 Posts
  • 356 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • Binface could easily do better than Farage has. I mean, it’s not exactly a high bar.

    Farage barely shows his face there and almost never in Parliament.

    You can guarantee that Binface would be more than willing to show up in both places frequently. He might even go so far as to represent Clacton properly. Perish the thought!

    (I can imagine that if he won they wouldn’t let him into the Commons due to not being dressed sensibly and then refusing to recognise him if he does so, because that’s the sort of dirty trickery I’d expect from Parliament. So I’d be very interested to see what he does in order to comply with both directives at the same time.)


  • Do you use the “Restore Previous Session” feature of your web browser between reboots? Do you use keyboard controls to open new windows like Ctrl+N?

    If yes to both, chances are that your mystery window had remained part of that continued session, and was reactivated with a Ctrl+Shift+N or equivalent. Shift is right next to Ctrl so if you fat-fingered a Shift at the same time that could explain the apparent necromancy.

    As to where it went originally, you could have moved it to a different virtual desktop, moved it off-screen accidentally or, heck, even misclicked or miskeyed to have it actually close. A reboot would then have closed it for certain, except for the fact that it was still lurking in your session.

    Another thing that can cause windows to move around is when a HDMI or DisplayPort monitor disconnects. Unlike with older connection types, those disconnecting is detectable and modern window managers try to “save” windows by throwing them on any remaining active monitors. If you have both types of monitor connection, or had at some point in the past, it could be that your mysterious window was lurking on a screen you couldn’t see but the system still thought exists, at least until it was closed for certain.

    Admittedly unlikely, but you could rule that out by checking the system monitor arrangements in the settings.




  • Until I saw this, I assumed it must be a problem with newer Nvidia cards because I almost never had a problem with my ancient GTS450 on Mint and LMDE.

    And that “almost” is because of the one time something got added to the kernel that didn’t play nice with the OEM driver. Later kernels didn’t have the same problem.

    All that said, I’m team AMD again and am likely to stay that way. The old computer was built during a very brief window about 15 years ago where it wasn’t uncool to buy Intel CPUs and NVidia graphics and, I assume, AMD were having problems.

    The PC before that was AMD/ATI, hence “again” now.






  • Seems like removing the file from /home/YOURUSER/.config/autostart/ ought to have undone the problem. Booting from external media of course, so as to be able to get to it, which you have to do anyway to reinstall.

    I realise this is long after the fact.

    Having something just sitting there in /usr/local/sbin shouldn’t have any effect at all, so I can’t imagine that was the issue, so calling it must be.

    And the only thing I can think of is if there was a permissions problem and Cinnamon choked because the exec-er refused to run.



  • If that’s an every time thing, I’d be tempted to compile myself a very simple C program that uses system or execl to run /usr/sbin/iwconfig and my preferred parameters. Then I’d change the owner to root, give it the SUID bit and then put a call to it somewhere in my startup.

    (As to where on the system I’d put it, /usr/local/sbin is probably the best choice. Where/when in the startup is slightly more difficult. On a single user machine, it might be OK, or even work best, in the GUI’s Startup Applications, rather than anywhere like /etc/init.d/)

    If I was really curious, I’d go digging to find anything else that might already be doing that and if not, where the default settings are kept and see if they can be changed, making the above unnecessary.

    For the sake of this comment I had a quick dig around and didn’t find anything obvious on my own machine, but then, this isn’t a Mac nor do I use wireless, which might be hampering my efforts.