Today I learned how to install nvidia firmware on debian. ChatGPT strikes again!
Tag Archives: debian
Default Chromium links on Debian
The default toolbar links which ship with Chromium on Debian are:
Installing Debian ‘sid’
See the installation guide. Basically: install ‘stable’ or ‘testing’ and then update apt sources and `apt update && apt dist-upgrade` your way to victory!
Debian Packages that Need Lovin’
There is a list of Debian Packages that Need Lovin’. The contents of the list are quite surprising. e.g. libreoffice, grub2, and samba make the list…
A folder named ~/.cache/kioexec/krun/13821_0/ already exists
2017-12-09 jj5 – TODO: document this on my blog…
On Debian GNU/Linux 9.1 (stretch) when I try to open an *.desktop (application/x-desktop) link in a browser I get:
A folder named ~/.cache/kioexec/krun/13821_0/ already exists.
Searching for:
A folder named kioexec krun already exists
turned up diddly squat.
I solved the issue (for me) by changing:
System Settings -> Personalization -> Applications -> Default Application s-> Web Browser
from:
Open http and https URLs in an application based on the contents of the URL
to:
Open http and https URLs in the following browser: firefox

Installing .NET on Debian 9
After installing Visual Studio Code I followed the instructions from .NET Tutorial – Hello World in 10 minutes, basically:
wget -qO- https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | gpg --dearmor > microsoft.asc.gpg sudo mv microsoft.asc.gpg /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/ wget -q https://packages.microsoft.com/config/debian/9/prod.list sudo mv prod.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/microsoft-prod.list sudo chown root:root /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/microsoft.asc.gpg sudo chown root:root /etc/apt/sources.list.d/microsoft-prod.list
Then:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install dotnet-sdk-2.1
Then for example to create a new console project:
dotnet new console -o myApp cd myApp
I ended up reading MICROSOFT SOFTWARE LICENSE TERMS for the MICROSOFT .NET LIBRARY which included this doozy:
The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft.
Ah, Microsoft. You haven’t changed.
I found some notes about how to disable telemetry:
Telemetry
———
The .NET Core tools collect usage data in order to help us improve your experience. The data is anonymous and doesn’t include command-line arguments. The data is collected by Microsoft and shared with the community. You can opt-out of telemetry by setting the DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT environment variable to ‘1’ or ‘true’ using your favorite shell.Read more about .NET Core CLI Tools telemetry: https://aka.ms/dotnet-cli-telemetry
I have added the opt-out environment variable via jj5-bin.
Backup Thunderbird data
I wanted a backup of my Thunderbird data on my Debian desktop, and I created it like this:
jj5@tact:~$ tar -c -f jj5-.thunderbird.tgz --use-compress-program='pigz -p 7 --best' .thunderbird
Adding weekday to Date column in Dolphin in KDE on Debian GNU/Linux
cd /usr/share/i18n/locales cp en_AU en_JJ vim en_JJ
Change metadata:
title "English locale for John Elliot V" language "John's English"
And prefix d_fmt with:
d_fmt "<U0025><U0061><U0020>
Then:
sudo localedef -f UTF-8 -i en_JJ en_JJ.UTF-8
Then:
vim /etc/environment
add add:
LC_TIME="en_JJ.UTF-8"
Enabling TRIM in Debian fstab for ext4 file-system on Samsung SSD 960 EVO NVMe M.2
So I was trying to find why in my Debian 9 system my SATA drives are called SCSI devices, and I was reading Why my SATA drive is identified as a SCSI device in Device Manager where I read:
The Intel Rapid Storage driver version 12.6 (Released in March 2013) and newer versions classify all drives as SCSI devices for uniformity. This (and later) versions of the driver also allow for TRIM support (Allows for management of data blocks no longer in use) in SSD drives in RAID 0 arrays and other flexibility in operation of storage devices.
So I’d never heard of “TRIM” so I searched for that and found the Wikipedia Trim (computing) article, but Why SSD TRIM Support is So Important and How to Enable It caught my eye, because, “important” you say?
So that article about the importance of TRIM was for Windows, so I searched again and found How to properly activate TRIM for your SSD on Linux: fstrim, lvm and dm-crypt which suggested things were a bit complicated for LVM (and MD RAID?).
I ended up reading How to set up SSD raid and TRIM support? which sent me to Re: Best way (only?) to setup SSD’s for using TRIM which argued that perhaps TRIM configuration wasn’t necessary at all.
It was then I realised that I probably don’t care about TRIM on my MD RAID SSD drives, but I probably do on my M.2 SSD, which isn’t using MD RAID, but which gets massive tgz files written to it and deleted from it every day. So some more searching and I found Samsung SSD 960 EVO NVMe M.2 Review: Ultra Fast, Affordable Storage which said TRIM was supported:
Supporting features: TRIM (Required OS support), Garbage Collection, S.M.A.R.T
So then I found Enable TRIM On SSD (Solid-State Drives) In Ubuntu For Better Performance which showed me how to enable TRIM in /etc/fstab. So the relevant fstab line was:
# /data/fast was on /dev/nvme0n1p1 during configuration UUID=87bcc5fa-9261-404b-8bc7-a214f4651b49 /data/fast ext4 noatime,discard 0 2
Note the ‘discard’ option, that’s where the magic happens.
So I unmounted and remounted the partition,
root@tact:/home/jj5# umount /data/fast root@tact:/home/jj5# mount /data/fast
And dmesg indicated the discard option had been applied:
[34783.251592] EXT4-fs (nvme0n1p1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: discard
Now I guess we wait and see if my performance issues improve…
Airgap file-system
So I needed to create a file-system to house a handful of archive/backup tarballs (around 40 of them). I created an ext4 file-system with 100 inodes, like this:
# mkfs.ext4 -b 4096 -L airgap -m 0 -N 100 -v /dev/sdc1
Note: 100 inodes isn’t very many! Only supports up to 100 files/folders. Also note that 0% space is reserved for root. If you’re copying the above command make sure you replace /dev/sdc1 with an appropriate partition device.