Looking for a compact keyboard with an integrated touchpad, I found the Atlantis KD3616 keyboard.
It is an Italian brand, and I’m not sure if this keyboard is available outside Italy.
What sold it to me, was the promise of three finger gestures on the touchpad, which I use a lot in Gnome, to switch between desktops and open and close the overview.
It does, kind of, but it also doesn’t.
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Moving Darktable’s from one place to another was surprisingly easy.
The file library.db contains all the photos, but the same data is in the sidecar files, which are read during import.
Styles, presets and all the other things, are in either data.db or darktablerc.
The file data.db might contain some paths, such as defaults for various widgets.
As computer prices are skyrocketing due to the as-of-now not yet burst AI bubble, I decided to get a newer and more capacious computer, as most of what I have is old, as in last decade. I might not be able to afford one next year.
As I’ve been delighted with the StarLite mkV, and especially with the support from the StarLabs team, I pre-ordered a StarBook Horizon, which arrived yesterday.
After twenty-five years with Debian, which StarLabs doesn’t offer pre-installed, I did the installation myself as soon as it arrived.
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I have an external SSD in a NVME USB enclosure, with an EXT4 file-system. When I plug it in, it doesn’t auto-mount, and haven’t done so for a while.
Most other external disks do auto-mount.
I finally figured out why, and how to fix it.
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Something highly unusual has happened to me in the last few days.
I have bought some Microsoft branded hardware, and I am actually delighted about it.
As a die-hard Unix and Linux user for some forty years, that’s something.
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I received my StarLite mk V Linux tablet from StarLabs systems a couple of weeks ago. It came with Ubuntu, but as a Debian user for some twenty years, my preference was for Debian, as I have on all the other computers.
I tried with Ubuntu for a while, but even if the differences aren’t that huge, it was still a nuisance.
My main preoccupation was that I’d lose much of the tablet-specific parts, such as the touch interface, if I abandoned the vendor supplied OS.
Consequently, I have installed Debian Testing on the thing.
The TL;DR is that everything works, almost out of the box.
My main reference for the installation was Setup Debian 12 on the Starlabs Starlite mk V by Alexandre Martin. There were several apparently important tidbits in that post.
I had bought a Debian rescue USB key with the tablet, which is a bootable live Debian system with the bookworm netinst installer.
The normal installation procedure went without a hitch. The installer found the Wi-Fi adapter, listed SSIDs and allowed me to enter the passphrase.
The grub bootloader installed by Debian overwrote the fancy branded bootloader from StarLabs Systems, but with Plymouth, I have a nice rocket hurling through space during boot 🙂
Once the basic installation of stable was done, I changed ‘sources.list’ to testing, and updated again.
Several reboots later, I installed all the software I need, which includes the GNOME desktop.
Everything appears to work.
It is the first time I have a Linux computer with a touch interface, so I was a bit worried that it would cause me grief.
It didn’t.
With GNOME under Wayland, the touch screen just worked. I did nothing.
Touching to move the cursor, clicking, scrolling by dragging, even multitouch gestures, like using three fingers sideways to change the desktop.
GNOME has a simple on-screen keyboard, which does its job. It is not fancy like on Android, but it works and it appears when needed.
Alexandre, in his blog post, had to do something to get automatic screen rotation to work, but with Debian testing, it just worked.
All the usual bits, sound, Wi-Fi adapter, Bluetooth, worked out of the box.
For accelerated graphics with OpenCL, I had to install the OpenCL driver for the integrated Intel GPU.
StarLabs Systems also sells a pen, which works flawlessly.
The StarLite uses coreboot for BIOS, which on Ubuntu appeared updatable through fwupd, but it doesn’t seem to be on Debian.
While on Ubuntu, I attached the tablet to a larger monitor, in a dual monitor setup.
Using a USB-C to DisplayPort cable works just fine, with a 4K display.
To get touch scrolling and pinch to zoom to work in Mozilla Firefox, two environment variables are needed:
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1You can set them wherever is best for you, as long as they’re set before you start Firefox.
This was way easier than I had anticipated.
And, the StarLite tablet is absolutely magnificent. It has a 3K touch screen, a very nice detachable keyboard with a touchpad, two USB-C ports which both and charge or attach an external display. There’s also a micro-SD card slot, headphone plug and a micro-HDMI port which I haven’t tried yet.
The only auxiliaries I had to get, to make this work, was a USB-C to DisplayPort cable, and a cheap USB-C hub with power delivery, so I can attach USB-A cables and have an SD card reader.
This one single piece of computer can be a tablet, a small laptop and a nice desktop computer, all in one, and, most importantly, running the same OS and software that I have everywhere else. No more fighting with Android to do basic tasks on a tablet.
It’s not a foreign place like Android or (for me, surprisingly) Ubuntu. It’s like home, and it’ll do everything I need.
This is running on a Synology DMS home NAS. Having been running Unix and Linux for forty years, I’m rather used to overseeing my own systems. Not so much with the NAS.
Today I discovered that if you run the command synogear install as root, it’ll install a hidden package full of diagnostics commands.
I found it because I needed iotop.
My next NAS will be home-spun with a standard Debian based system, so I can do what I want without jumping through useless burning hoops.
In the almost two months we’ve spent in Coronavirus lockdown here in Venice, I’ve had the opportunity to get some of the old forgotten tasks done. During one of these I finally got around working with WordPress from the command line, and directly from PHP without running a web server.
It is amazingly simple. My server is running Debian, and this code is all that’s needed to run WordPress from the command line:
// The site you want to access using Debian's multisite
$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] = 'wpsights.seindal.dk';
// Location of WP installation on Debian
define('ABSPATH', '/usr/share/wordpress/');
// Load the beast
define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-load.php');After this WordPress is loaded for the site given by HTTP_HOST and you can do anything you want with the WordPress API.
Reading a JSON file and inserting 1200 pages in a hierarchy becomes just a few dozens lines of code.
The task at hand was migrating a very old site to something more recent. The site in question, sights.seindal.dk, was made almost twenty years ago, and had been abandoned for at least fifteen years. Yet, back then I’ve put in a lot of effort, and the site did have some decent traffic still.
The old site was programmed in Perl using the Mason framework, with a mysql backend. The new site would be WordPress because it’s ubiquitous and fairly easy to work with, and I have a bunch of other sites on WP.
There were some 1200 pages on the site, and about 10,000 photos, all meticulously tagged and cross-indexed. Many articles are quite substantial. Everything was cross-linked automatically on the site. I wanted all this moved over, and preferably not by hand.
In the end I modified the old perl code to export the pages and photo metadata as JSON, and wrote various small scripts in PHP to read the JSON and load everything into WordPress as pages, media, tags and categories.
Given the ease of using WordPress directly from the command line, I could make many small scripts and do the migration a bit at a time.
Add to that a child theme of a very basic free theme, and a content filter to do the automatic linking, and the task was done.
It took about a week to get all the data over, and another week to do the child theme and automatic linking.
I have bought an Asus EeePc 1000H which is one of the new popular netbook – a very small and light weight notebook.
I chose the Asus EeePc 1000H for several reasons:
VOLUME_LABEL='Master' HEADPHONE_LABEL='Headphones'Apparently the default setup is for the latest Alsa release, but not the one used by the 2.6.26 kernel.
ffmpeg -i input.m4a -acodec mp3 -ac 2 -ab 128 output.mp3Batch conversion can be done with
for i in *.m4a; do
ffmpeg -i "$i" -acodec mp3 -ac 2 -ab 128 "${i%m4a}mp3";
done
Sometimes it really is simple 🙂e2label /dev/sdc1 yourlabelReplace the partition with the one you want to set the label on.