Linux, BSD, Servers and Computer Hardware Articles
Added a script which does all the same things as the Debian MATE XSS script did…
Installs the Full XScreenSaver collection (GL + Extras)
Removes MATE Screensaver
Symlinks XSS commands to replace MATE SS commands
Optional SETUID for Sonar
Ensures MATE SS doesn’t try to reinstall
Locking works via “System” –> “Lock Screen”
Fix for locking via keyboard shortcut
I’ve been using apt-cacher-ng for a few months now. For those who don’t know, this is a service you can run locally which will proxy apt requests from your network clients. This way, each time a package or update is requested there will be a copy retained in the cache. Upon each subsequent request for the same file(s), the local copy can be served instead. This saves bandwidth, and offers a speed advantage since you’ll likely be getting full GB ethernet line speed on your LAN. Read more about ACNG here.
While several local machines and VMs have no issues using my local ACNG proxy, the server actually hosting ACNG itself seemed to be giving errors when doing an apt update.
You’ll likely see the warnings “503 Server reports unexpected range” as well as “Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.”
Basically, because the machine is trying to proxy through itself, some kind of problem occurs. Now, the simple solution is to just point to the normal Debian mirrors directly. That however wouldn’t offer the benefit of our local cache! The more boxes / VMs pulling for it, the more value you’re getting out of the whole setup… So here’s how we resolve this issue.
Write a text file to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00acng and place the following lines inside:
Acquire::http::Proxy::localhost “DIRECT”;
Acquire::http::Proxy::127.0.0.1 “DIRECT”;
Acquire::http::Proxy::novo.lan “DIRECT”;
Of course, change “novo.lan” to the hostname of your ACNG host. My sources.list looks like this, hence the hostname used in my example.
deb http://novo.lan:3142/deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://novo.lan:3142/deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main non-free-firmware
deb http://novo.lan:3142/security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://novo.lan:3142/security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
deb http://novo.lan:3142/deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://novo.lan:3142/deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware
You may want to add a 4th line, with your actual LAN IP if you’re naming the apt mirror by IP instead.
Here is a bit of KDE software which I was not aware of. It was not included in Debian 11 (Bullseye) — you had to build it from source or use third-party packages… However it was officially packaged starting with Debian 12 (Bookworm) and newer.
Here it is, running it on Kubuntu 25.04:
Excellent little tool for those who don’t want to benchmark disks in the terminal via dd / fio. Nothing wrong with healthy feature parity & easy of use!
I’d like to take a moment to explain a handy feature of htop, a system monitoring and process management tool — basically a text-based “Task Manager,” but far more powerful and flexible. I run it on my desktops, laptops, servers, and occasionally on virtual machines, whether in a graphical session or a terminal-only environment. Below, you’ll see it running on my server, where I’ve configured it to display the frequency of each CPU core, temperatures, total disk I/O, and total network I/O. As you can tell, activity is minimal — not much happening at this early hour, around 7 AM, when both local and internet traffic tend to be quiet.
htop is a brilliant little utility that punches way above its weight. It’s lightweight, packed with functionality, and refreshingly easy to use. Better yet, there are hardly any dependencies required, and it’s so cleanly written that even a novice should have little trouble building it from source, should they desire to do so. Remarkably portable, htop will compile on just about any Linux system, any of the BSD variants, macOS, Solaris and illumos derivatives, Haiku, and Cygwin (Windows). I think you get the point.
One handy but often overlooked feature is that htop can remember your custom display settings. Whether you prefer to see CPU frequencies, temperatures, disk I/O, or network traffic meters — you can tailor your view exactly how you like it.
Once you’ve customized your layout (press F2 in htop to access the Setup menu), simply press capital S (Shift + s) to save your settings. The next time you launch htop, it’ll load up your preferred view automatically.
I still like having them. And while most people have moved on from X.Org on Linux, well… here we are.
The 5300U in my ThinkPad has more than enough GPU power to display some beautiful screensavers. But by default, the system will ramp up into a higher performance state — because normally, that’s exactly what you’d want. Like if you were playing a game, or trying to load some bloated modern website.
But my idle laptop? I don’t want it getting all hot while it’s sitting on my lap or on the bed, just because it’s running a screensaver. So this is my little attempt to fix that — and it’s looking pretty promising.
When XScreenSaver runs one of its screen hacks (screensavers), we’ll put the CPU into its lowest available frequency. That way, even when running hardware-accelerated 3D, the system will stay nice and cool.
Fortunately, the author of XScreenSaver — Jamie Zawinski — is a pretty smart dude, and the software already includes a clean little mechanism we can hook into to make this work.
Here’s how I’ve got it set up:
Create a script in your home folder, or wherever you want. xscreensaver_freq_watch.sh
#!/bin/bash
# Save current CPU and GPU max frequencies
CPU_MAX_BEFORE=$(cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq)
GPU_MAX_BEFORE=$(cat /sys/class/drm/card0/gt_max_freq_mhz)# Watch xscreensaver events
xscreensaver-command -watch | while read -r line
do
case “$line” in
LOCK*)
# Optional: do something on screen lock
;;
UNBLANK*)
echo “Screensaver stopped — restoring frequencies…”
echo $CPU_MAX_BEFORE | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq > /dev/null
echo $GPU_MAX_BEFORE | sudo tee /sys/class/drm/card0/gt_max_freq_mhz > /dev/null
;;
BLANK*)
echo “Screensaver started — limiting frequencies…”
echo 500000 | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq > /dev/null
echo 300 | sudo tee /sys/class/drm/card0/gt_max_freq_mhz > /dev/null
;;
esac
done
Of course, make it exactable with chmod +x. Also, use nopasswd in your /etc/sudoers line for your user.
Now because I’m using MATE / LightDM, I’m going to use a .desktop file. You could do something else, .xinitrc or a systemd service, but this is how I did it.
mkdir -p ~/.config/autostart
nano ~/.config/autostart/screensaver-watch.desktop
And inside that, we have the following
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=/home/ben/screensaver_freq_watch.sh
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name=Screensaver Frequency Watcher
Comment=Limits CPU and GPU frequencies while the screensaver is running
So far, it’s looking good! You may need to change this a bit depending on your configuration.
I run several virtual machines on a home server, and this setup works out quite well for a couple of reasons. First, the VMs can run tasks at any time without slowing down the machine I’m actively working on. Second, Virt-Manager is a pretty slick solution—it gives you access to local LXC containers, QEMU virtual machines, or even lets you connect to VMs on another server over SSH.
If you’re just looking for the front-end functionality of Virt-Manager, you might find this interesting: you don’t need to install all the QEMU and libvirt daemon packages!
On Debian Bookworm, when I try to install Virt-Manager, it tells me it’s going to install 107 new packages, using about 220MB of disk space. Now, that’s not a ton of space, but it is quite a few packages. So let’s try a leaner approach:
That only pulls in 22 packages, using around 25MB of disk space.
For those who don’t know, the --no-install-recommends option in apt tells it to skip non-essential (recommended) packages when installing software. It still grabs everything needed to run the software, but skips the extras that apt thinks most people might want. Usually, that’s fine—Debian actually splits packages pretty aggressively (and sometimes annoyingly so).
For example, you’ve probably noticed that nearly every package with development tools also has a separate -dev version. Or maybe you’ve seen how xscreensaver is split into four separate packages, even though it’s distributed as a single application by its author.
Oh, and unless you’re exclusively using serial consoles through libvirt, you’ll probably want SPICE support working too! That means installing a couple more packages—just over 2MB extra:
sudo apt install libspice-client-gtk-3.0-5 gir1.2-spiceclientgtk-3.0
Let those install with their normal dependencies and recommended packages—otherwise the SPICE graphical interface won’t function correctly.
Anyway, remember that --no-install-recommends trick—it’ll definitely come in handy someday!
Happy to see that OpenBSD 7.7 is officially released! What’s new? More than I’ll even try to list here. Well… that’s a lie! I’ve got to mention some of it.
Personally, I was definitely pleased to see amongst the changes there are lots of kernel improvements. Many SMP enhancments, New AMDGPU hardware supported, as-well as Intel Arrow Lake. Perhaps post exciting is they’ve updated DRM to Linux 6.12.21. Also
acpipci now active on hypervisors, resolving longstanding SeaBIOS/qemu issues
-f, simplifying rc(8) startup.
If you do a quick search online, you’ll find plenty of discussions where people ask about turning off zram—for one reason or another. They’re often met with a barrage of comments saying they’re making things worse. “Zram is free performance, didn’t you know? It costs nothing and doubles your RAM!”
Yeah, well—hear me out.
My desktop has 16 GB of RAM. I don’t even get close to running out of memory unless it’s been up for 30 days straight with 100 different apps or browser tabs open. My newer ThinkPad has 8 GB.
Now, 8 GB isn’t considered a large amount of memory anymore. In fact, people will tell you it’s rapidly becoming the bare minimum. But I’ll tell you this: for most people’s needs, especially on a laptop, it’s plenty. I don’t tend to have much open on my notebook—just a couple of browser windows, a few terminals, email, maybe a file manager. Any more than that and I start feeling lazy, because odds are I’m not really using all that stuff. I tend to be more focused when I close down things I’m not actively using.
Anyway, back on topic—why don’t I use zram?
My machines are all 8 years old, or older. They work just fine, but they are not new.
My desktop has a 4th-gen Intel chip, and my laptop runs a 5th-gen low-voltage i5. Zram does give you “more memory,” but it comes at a cost. It works by compressing unused memory pages, which means your CPU has to do that work. Every time a page is written to zram or read back out, it must be compressed or decompressed.
Whether or not that impact is that noticeable, I can’t say for sure—I haven’t run benchmarks. But I do know this: my machines are fast enough, and I like to keep them light, fast, and nimble. And since I already have enough RAM, it makes no sense for me to use zram. If I do need to swap, all of my systems have fast SSDs to handle swapping well enough. I typically allocate 1–4 GB of swap space, and I do that on the fastest SSD in the system.
If you’ve got multiple drives—say, NVMe, SATA SSD, and a spinning hard drive—only put your swap on the NVMe. Another tip: if you’re not planning to hibernate, there’s no reason to make your swap as large as your RAM. Swap is useful as a safety net so your system doesn’t lock up when you run out of memory, but in my experience, I’ve rarely used more than 1 GB. If you’re consistently using multiple gigabytes of swap, you probably just need more RAM.
Another argument I often see is: “Zram doesn’t consume extra memory.” Well… how does that make any sense? Of course it does. Sure, it’s compressed—maybe you use 500 MB of RAM for what would’ve been 1 GB of swap—but I’d rather use that 500 MB as actual RAM and just let the system swap to SSD.
If you want to disable zram on Fedora, just create an empty config file called zram-generator.conf and place it in /etc/systemd/.
You can even do this from the live installer, while it’s still copying data. Just pop open a terminal and run:
To keep things clean and organizedI’ve put most of the code I’ve shared here all up in one place. Everything has a .txt extension, so it can just be viewed in the browser, copied and pasted. There are some readme files, but they are minimal… and this is just a start; but a start is better than nothing.
TLDR; That screenshot isn’t of jspaint.app — but with the exception of trading the blue titlebar for your web browser’s UI; it is basically the same thing. I stumbled upon jspaint.app while looking for a basic, simple Linux\Unix paint program.
Genuinely useful, I would say. For when you need to just draw a circle, a dot, an arrow to draw attention to part of a screenshot. When you need to do a simple resize, rotate, crop. And of course, it can save and open files from your local machine. The uploading and downloading is mimicked through the win32 inspired dialog, it even plays a Win 9x error warning chime to remind you to save upon quitting! And I’ll be damned, I wrote this whole thing up not knowing that there is much much more, if you Exit the “program” instead of just closing the tab. Some very cool stuff. Definitely will scratch the nostalgia itch, but genuinely useful too.
Anyways, that was the main point of this; sharing something I thought was pretty cool and unique. Despite being a copy of something, I’d imagine it is a complete re-implementation, and probably took some serious programming chops to pull off so cleanly. As far as I can see, it has full feature parity with the mspaint in Windows 95 – XP. (in my opinion, the best version.)
But, my search continued. I want something installed on the system, I’m not into web apps — but I made an exception to share that. It’s pretty darn neat. Both Krita and GIMP are fantastic image editing applications, but they’re packed to the gills with features. Most of the time, yes that is a great thing. But sometimes, it simple isn’t needed. Both applications take at least 5 – 10 seconds to start up, and if you haven’t worked in them in a while it can feel a bit cumbersome finding your way through whatever edits you’re trying to make as you re learn the interface and layout. I’m a casual user. If I the software daily, I’d have no complaints.
In my 5 minute search to see what was out there I found a few things of interest…
Pinta looked like a great option. However, you need to install Microsoft’s .NET SDK in order to compile it yourself. It isn’t already in the debian repositories of course either. They did have a tarball of it, I’ll probably go back and try that… but I ended up moving in. Yes, they had flatpacks and snaps, I’m all set since I have no other software in the format thus far and ehh, I just prefer more minimalist solutions.
I ended up installing Dibuja; had to of course do some terminal funkery but wasn’t too bad. Basically there was a dependency issue with libgdk-pixbuf, I installed the current replacement but apt wasn’t happy with that… However it was an easy fix, equivs came to the rescue.
First off, we install the updated library libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-0. Go ahead and try just installing the .deb for Dibuja because my issues may have been because I’m running on trixie… I doubt it though, but not sure. If you have dpkg complain that you’re missing libgdk-pixbuf, continue on to install equivs.
For those in the same pickle as I was:
mkdir ~/equivs-dibuja
cd ~/equivs-dibuja
equivs-control control
Open control in an editor and add the following:
Package: libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0
Version: 2.22.0
Provides: libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0
Description: Fake package to satisfy dibuja
Then run equivs-build control. Install by running sudo dpkg -i libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0_2.22.0_all.deb
Now… we try installing Dibuja again…
As you can see, quite simple. No layers, unicorn shaped brush tips, flatsnaps, just a good BASIC image editor.