[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Monday 18 March 2019

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

>     EasyOS 1.0.13 is an update supposedly but I had a lot of
> trouble getting online.  I.E I could not get online.  The WiFi
> card could not be found.

Does this merely mean that you hoped EasyOS would autofind and
autoconfigure your wireless, it didn't work out that way, and you did no
other attempt to diagnose and fix the problem?  I ask because your
phrasiing 'the WiFi card could not be found', read at face value, seems
to suggest a hypothesis about, say, the chipset not being reported by
lspci/lsusb (whichever, as appropriate), or something like that.

Bobbie, you've been working with Linux for, what, over a decade now,
right?  Isn't it time you moved past 'Something wasn't right, so I fixed
the problem by switching to a different Linux distribution'?

You logically should have started with 'Oh, what's my wireless chipset,
and what driver does it need'?  If you don't know, that's your _first_
task, and you start by running lspci (if its internal) or lsusb (if it's
on USB) to spot the wireless chipset.  Then, you use the Key Skill of
the Early 21st Century (Web-searching) to find out what driver is
required for that chipset.  Or, y'know, you could ask a Linux user
group, such as you could do right here and now.

Armed with knowledge of what the chipset is, you can look at system
logfiles to see if the kernel tried to modprobe that driver, and what
happened when it tried, e.g., if it failed to initialise the hardware
because a proprietary firmware BLOB is required that the distro didn't
furnish (often because it cannot lawfully do so).

You could remove the driver:

# modprobe -r [drivername]

You could then reload the driver to see what happens (again, looking at
the logs):

# modprobe [drivername]

You could run iwconfig to see whether the driver is configured.  And
like that.  

Not bothering and instead giving up and switching to a different
distribution means you have no chance to _really_ evaluate the
distribution.  You're implicitly judging the distribution by its
installer, which is like judging a car by its startup sound or a house
by its front door.  You spend half an hour running through a distro
installer, and potentially many years running it.  Shouldn't you give
the distro a chance, by bothering to try to solve initial problems,
rather than giving up the first time something doesn't work right for
you?


>     pclinuxos-kde-darkstar-2019.0315.iso was slow booting
> It has the latest kernel but an obsolete version of Libre Office.
> Falkon is the only browser supplied though it runs the latest
> kernel 5.0.2.  Darkstar the compiler for this release wanted
> a small fast downloading system so he used links to get
> the full versions of the applications he lists.

Falkon (formerly QupZilla) is a pretty nice lightweight Web browser.  Also, 
again, you spend only a tiny amount of time running the installer and
then potentially many years running the distribution.  Aren't 
your choice of other Web browsers just one easy package operation away?
So, why does it matter that you for some reason are dissatisfied with
Falkon?

> debian-live-9.8.0-amd64-kde was very disappointing
> with few of the KDE tools I am used to using. Getting on
> line was impossible for me as Debian is using tools similar
> to what I saw 10 years ago. You have to know a lot &
> enter it before you can get it started. I pointed this
> out to Jim and he asked why they would set it up like
> that.

Since obviously you were seeking cutting-edge 'desktop Linux' software,
why on God's green earth were you trying the Debian 9 'Stretch' Stable 
release?  It seems like you didn't get past Debian 101:

Debian Stable is a release-oriented distro with overwhelming emphasis on 
shipping stable, ergo rather old, versions of the software included.  
The old versions adopted as standard for each release receive backported
bugfix refreshes only during the distribution's lifetime.  They are 
not replaced by a different upstream version until the next Debian
Stable release.  (Debian 9 Stretch was a 2017 release.)

For the KDE image of Debian 9 Stretch, one can use the plasma-nm KDE
widget (a graphical front-end to NetworkManager) to configure wireless.
https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse#KDE_Plasma

This is a few years old because Debian 9 Stretch is the Debian Stable 
release (that FYI is about to be replaced as Debian 10 Buster finishes 
the release process).  Is plasma-nm a bit antique by bleeding-edge
desktop Linux standard?  Sure, but you went out of your way (with Debian
Stable) to be out in the sticks, long miles from the bleeding edge.

As I've said on this mailing list many, many times before, people
wanting the bleeding edge on Debian can easily get it, by NOT going 
mindlessly for Debian Stable.  Debian has two closely related rolling
distributions, Debian Testing and Debian Unstable.  Testing gets its
package repos updated each night by a quarantining / quality control
script run on maintainer uploads to Debian Unstable.  If you understand
this, and understand that Testing packages that clear quarantine might 
have dependencies on packages (such as libraries) whose relevant
versions haven't yet cleared quarantine, Testing can be a good choice.
(There is an easy way to deal with that problem, but I won't get into it
here). 

_Or_, one can use one of the many Debian derivatives that are based on
Debian Testing / Debian Unstable, such as one of the Siduction
live-distro flavours.

Anyhow, good grief, Bobbie.   When you went for Debian 9, 'old versions'
is pretty much what it said on the tin.  You asked for that, you got it.



> Aside from that this is one of the most boring
> looking desktops I have seen.

Aren't there dozens and dozens of theme packages, each of them one
package operation away?  I'm not a KDE guy, but that's my recollection.

Again, good grief!  Evaluating distributions by their initial end-state
at the end of the installer run-through and first boot is unbelievably
short-sighted.  I like a restaurant that looks nice, too, but I'd be
mostly interested in the food.





> AntiX 17.4 in the 32 bit version would not boot on my
> machine.

With what diagnostics?  Did you even look?  Did you try any of the
debugging options outlined in the antiX FAQ or elsewhere?  Did you 
make sure you used the antiX version appropriate to your machine's
hardware limitations (e.g., not use the 'full' flavour solely because
it's the one linked from the DistroWatch coverage, even though it 
won't boot if you have too little RAM)?


>     4MLinux 28 in the 32 bit version also hung on my
> computer.  There is no desktop 64 bi version

Again, any effort at debugging at all?  

>     Jim S. Showed up about 7 PM, had something to eat
> and read a bit in Linux Pro latest issue.  He is very
> interest in SCAPY which has something to do with
> Python but SCA is undefined in the magazine article
> apparently.


  Scapy is a powerful Python-based interactive packet manipulation
  program and library.

  It is able to forge or decode packets of a wide number of protocols,
  send them on the wire, capture them, store or read them using pcap
  files, match requests and replies, and much more. It is designed to
  allow fast packet prototyping by using default values that work.

  It can easily handle most classical tasks like scanning, tracerouting,
  probing, unit tests, attacks or network discovery (it can replace hping,
  85% of nmap, arpspoof, arp-sk, arping, tcpdump, wireshark, p0f, etc.).
  It also performs very well at a lot of other specific tasks that most
  other tools can't handle, like sending invalid frames, injecting your
  own 802.11 frames, combining techniques (VLAN hopping+ARP cache
  poisoning, VoIP decoding on WEP protected channel, ...), etc.

  Scapy supports Python 2.7 and Python 3 (3.4 to 3.7). It's intended to be
  cross platform, and runs on many different platforms (Linux, OSX, *BSD,
  and Windows).

https://github.com/secdev/scapy