SSHD and Selinux

In Summary: Turn off SELinux. ALWAYS.

Sorry for the huge text, I just spent an hour in Fedora trying to get my firewall to allow SSHD to operate. No matter what I did, it would not work. Finally I disabled the firewall completely for debugging purposes, but it still wouldn't work! The error messages were no help!

Then, after raging at the machine for an hour, it dawned on me. This was a fresh install of Fedora. I hadn't disabled SELinux.

I can't believe how many times SELinux has bitten me in the ass. It never seems to work for anything good, but always hinder people. I consider myself a very advanced Linux User and I find it overly cumbersome. There needs to be a less.... ogre-like system put in place by default, like Ubuntu's Apper. That never got in my way BUT EVERY FLIPPING TIME SELinux has got in my way.

On systems with SELinux disabled, the SELINUX=disabled option is configured in /etc/selinux/config:

# This file controls the state of SELinux on the system.
# SELINUX= can take one of these three values:
#       enforcing - SELinux security policy is enforced.
#       permissive - SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing.
#       disabled - No SELinux policy is loaded.
SELINUX=disabled

Go do this now. You will thank yourself. I've never heard of SELinux benefitting the average user. Ever. Ever ever ever. I'm sure someone in a corporate environment has had luck though, but they have someone on retainer there to babysit this monstrousity. And I pity that person.

Gnome developers once again demonstrate the bad community approach

This may be old news to some but I was just bitten by it when upgrading to Fedora 22. Some of my favorite applications (Firefox among them) upgraded to GTK3.

Now GTK3 isn't supposed to be terrible. In fact I have come to seriously appreciate some of the keyboard accelerators in GTK2 File-saving and File-opening dialog windows.

But apparently effeciency, ease of use, understandability of design, and generally being good are something that the Gnome developers hate. Simply put:

GTK 3.10 Drops Menu Icons and Mnemonics

This is the new GTK3 default, unannounced as far as I can tell, and not publicly discussed. Thank you Gnome Developers. I wasn't aware Gnome is how you spell Microsoft.

Okay, I'm being a bit harsh but the Gnome project has a nasty habit of taking very very little public input and being a difficult community to penetrate. I've tried to join Gnome three projects in the past, bringing some patches and code features I'd made, but it was like talking to a black-hole.

This is one of the reasons I love KDE. They have a thriving vibrant community (and sure they make their mistakes but they keep fixing things, not breaking them and sipping their soy-bean lattes and pretend they are flawless).

I digress.

The Bad News Gets Worse

For now you can restore the missing menu icons. (But knowing Gnome I wouldn't hold out on that one lasting forever.) However...

No Mnemonics Either – At All
In addition, as you can see in the above shot, mnemonics have been removed entirely. These are where eg “Copy” in the menu has an underlined ‘C’, allowing you to press Alt+C to activate it. SpaceFM allows you to customize these too. Mnemonics have also been removed from dialog labels, meaning, for example, you can no longer press Alt+N in SpaceFM’s rename dialog to put the cursor in the Name box, and you can’t click an OK button by pressing Alt+O.
Unlike the missing menu icons, it appears that mnemonics have been permanently disabled. Per the GTK 3.10 docs: “gtk-enable-mnemonics has been deprecated since version 3.10 and should not be used in newly-written code. This setting is ignored.”

The Irony is Terrible

I guess it’s telling that the GIMP project, the original developer of GTK (GIMP Toolkit), is sticking to GTK2, and they’ve been told not to expect to be able to use GTK3 for such a robust app.

Firefox add on could not be installed because it appears to be corrupt

Just a quick reference for those out there that encounter this problem. Today I was having problems with Firefox failing to save any pictures to my harddrive. The moment I clicked "Save as..." the screen would blink and there would be a "Failed' item under my downloads list.

I tried Refreshing Firefox and also creating a couple of new Firefox profiles. But when I tried to Refresh or create a new profile, I encountered this error message:

"This add on could not be installed because it appears to be corrupt."

I have never seen this error before. Soon all the add-ons from Mozilla I tried to install were seemingly corrupt. More and more digging finally lead me to an unlikely problem:

On my Linux machine, the /tmpfs drive (located in /run/user/1000) had completely filled up. This has also likely been the source of problems with Ktorrent not functioning properly.

So to those who encounter this problem: Clear your tmpfs! I rebooted and it solved the problem temporarily.

Fedora Upgrade from 21 to 22 Experience

Fedora 22 is without a doubt the most broken KDE has been in literal years.

Foreward
So this is a long somewhat ranting list about problems I had with Fedora 22. I don't want readers to mistake my opinion on Fedora, Linux, and KDE in general. I love Linux. It makes me happy to use it, and I have trouble imagining my Linux experience without KDE. Lastly Fedora 21 has treated me very very nicely, and I'm sticking with Fedora and KDE even through this.

Overview
The breakage is to be expected somewhat, with all their huge move to KDE5 apps. But the amount of breakage across so many apps is horrible. I wouldn't let this thing out of ALPHA testing at this point, some of these bugs are very bad for users.

I feel I should restate though that I really love KDE as a whole and I'm sure they will iron out most of their problems. (Though they SERIOUSLY need to give Gwenview some love. It's been neglected for years....)

The Good
The default color scene is better, the default window decorations are better as well. They are still a little avant-garde for my tastes, but not bad.

Only... it's horrible broken. So while it looks nice it functionally fails thoroughly. Read on.

The Not So Bad
It's been weeks, possibly months and several major bugs haven't been fixed. Also I keep finding new ones.

I think my favorite non-rage inducing bug is when I had two VLC windows open. One was open, paused mid-video and minimized. I was watching another video, and somehow, when my instant messenger beeped me (Skype, which is itself its own massive shit pile when it comes to Linux sound integration), my OTHER minimized VLC window suddenly started playing again! ... What?


The Bad
The new version of Klipper for KDE unfortunately VERY unstable. Using it for much of anything locks up the Plasma Shell and causes a runaway memory leak. Thank God I memorized the unattended reboot command for KDE. It is also missing some important features. One of them being Pasting as Plain Text. Two, being able to TURN IT OFF if you want. Three, USING AN ALTERNATIVE CLIPBOARD MANAGER. I'm sure some of these will be eventually address. Another problem with the user interface is that the preview area of the text snippets is notably smaller than the previous version.


KDE-Telepathy popped up and would not go away. I could only hide it but not quit the program. Eventually I had to find the package name and uninstall it to stop the app from autostarting.

Which is another thing, how to disable auto-loading of some services like Telepathy is not obvious.

Shutting down occasionally my laptop takes a LOOOOONG time. Almost a full minute before it actually kicks off. Update: This appears to be have been mitigated after a recent update.

Wine Systemtray icons aren't working properly, but I remember the KDE system tray got a big overhaul lately. Wonderful, and by that I mean totally not. (Not KDE's fault, but still annoying.)

Gwenview Zooming: Even after all these years, those ugly artifacts with Gwenview zoom-in / zoom-out still remain. This program needs some serious love.


The Worse
All my KDE session data was completely lost. The dozens of Gwenview windows I had open were gone. All my Konquorer windows and tabs were gone. All my Kate sessions were gone. This is really something special because I had backed up my session data to file folders as well.

Konsole lost EVERYTHING! All my konsole settings, which have worked for half a decade, failed to be imported. There was a serious bug with never removing the window frame as well. Update 1: Good news is the location for the konsole settings was moved, and all that was required was moving my config files to there. Annoying but fixable. Update 2: The window frame bug has to do with the management themes... which isn't user error because these were the default chosen themes and default packaged themes. But if you find the right combination the problem won't appear.

Window Management Bugs: There are several small bugs that keep popping up. The desktop slideshow wallpapers layer over each other as they change. Shading a window still leaves the window-border. Update 1: The window frame bug has to do with the management themes... which isn't user error because these were the default chosen themes and default packaged themes. But if you find the right combination the problem won't appear.

Good news: Turns out the problem was a bug in one of the default Application appearance themes. Under Application Style -> Window Decorations, pick something other than Plastik.

KDE Keyboard configurations were completely fucked, no matter if I exported from a working prior version and reinstalled. Nothing worked. I had to manually redo every single damn thing. Also many previously working global hotkeys were missing, but I attribute that to applications themselves (probably). Days later, the Global Keyboard shortcuts area is still fairly buggy. If you try to export all your keyboard settings (and why isn't there a Select-All options? SERIOUSLY!!?), but don't save, and try to export again, the System-Settings locks up.

The desktop wallpapers fail to clean themselves up as they slideshow through. Small annoyance but very ugly. At least it will probably be an easy fix for some developer.

Color schemes are somehow broken for Firefox and for Konqueror, pretty badly. I cannot see many icons and I wouldn't know they were present if I hadn't already known. They are basically invisible.

Firefox HTML5 Video / WebM Support: For whatever reason about half the videos on Firefox 38 on Fedora 22 will not work at all.

Shutting Down: Impossible sometimes. This seems to be a KDE5 bug, but basically there are rare cases where trying to trigger a shutdown/restart sequence through the KDE menus fails completely. (Sometimes it causes Plasma to crash and sometimes not.) The only option is to invoke the system command to shutdown. There used to be a KDE specific command you could throw from commandline to do it, back in KDE3. I've never found KDE4's version (and I've looked several times), nor heard of one.

The Terrible
Removing features, that really weren't an improvement: KDE removed some hotkeys to switch to the next desktop wallpaper. I wouldn't even call them hotkeys, but more like assisted underlined letters in mouse-menu commands. I cannot for the love of God fathom why these were removed. I should put in a feature request to get them restored.

Widgets: The Motif of new KDE in Fedora (or maybe it's new KDE and not Fedora's doing?) is TOO artsy, because many times I am not aware "hey, that widget is actually a button!" or "hey, there's an expand-folder arrow there!" because the style blends too much together. Sometimes it is completely invisible. This has happened about five times now, and it's not going to get any better without some change. This is a major major design flaw. I'm not sure if it is due to my color scheme not meshing well, but that's something that should have been accounted for, since I chose one of the built-in color schemes that are standard packaged with KDE.

Good news: You can fix this by going to system-settings -> Application Styles -> Widget styles -> Select something different than Breeze, as that is the source of the problem.


File-Saving / File-Picker Dialogues: The name field for saving filenames in QT applications seems to be trying to help, but is in fact really hindering.
For example, say you had a prior file like this name:

"kde4 shortcut keys layout all 2015-05-28 (Fedora 22 KDE 4.14.8)" and you wanted to edit the date for a new save file. You select it and start editing the numbers. QT/KDE auto-highlight everything else after your cursor, and any further keypresses will erase it. Worse, CTRL+Z does not bring it back. So it effectively destroys an important time saving feature of reusing text input. This is just awful and I swear to god if it is not a bug, someone needs to go back to school on interface design.

Randomly missing Keystrokes: The application Kate/Kwrite suddenly forgo 95% of all my keystrokes, even CTRL+V. KDE's Run command doesn't respond to the up-arrow for recalling previous entries.

The Absolute Worst of All --> GTK3 or the Gnome Developers

I hate to sound like a ranting lunatic but GTK3's default settings are, without a doubt, the biggest FUCK-YOU to its users I have ever seen. They would make Microsoft proud. And no, I'm not exaggerating here.

Long story short, Mnemonics are gone and many of the shortcut keys have been removed, so not only are they hidden some won't work. Lastly key-stroke accelatores are gone permanently. I would personally slap the developer(s) who thought removing keystroke accelators was a good idea. That is fucking horrible. Horrible. Gnome developers, are you listening to us?!!!

Actually I know they won't hear me. I've tried talking to the Gnome developers about four times in the past, and it is like talking to a rude concrete wall. They don't want help and they don't care about community input or external developer code. They are, and I hate to say this, the Microsoft of the Linux community

Gnome and the GTK3 team are clearly invested in spreading decelerators. Yes, that is the correct word, and no, any Gnome devs who read this you can't deny it. You know this is true. You have slowed down the speed of use, the elegance of design, and the order of presentation. I think I'll have to use the word decelerators from now on when describing this problem. Perhaps vile decelerators.

The End

After letting that Fedora 22 installation operate on my Laptop, with various problems building and building (and never any fixes coming down the pipe), it has finally rotted until I can no longer stand it. I don't know what caused it, but this afternoon I woke it up from suspend, and the Wireless network stopped working. I rebooted it. It never came back and the widget was blank. I connected via wired input, but still nothing. I tried several commands to bring up the network, and it all died.

It may be premature to judge, since there is the remote possibility this problem is hardware related. But I'm more willing to bet somehow it is this botched upgrade. I'll be reinstalling Fedora tonight, and it won't be version 22, I can tell you. Thus ends the absolute worst instance of Linux I've ever run in my 12 plus years in the genuinely wonderful world of Open-Source. To anyone reading, this isn't normal. In fact it is very very rare, and I can only think of one or two other times tops, where this has happened.

Ironically, my experience was made all the more aggravating because of the coincidence of Gnome GTK3's fuckery with punching their users in the face with decelerators. You can endure a lot when your web-browser is okay, but when that's screwed, you really feel it.

Firefox with Feedly rss/atom subscribing

I use Feedly for consuming my RSS/ATOM feeds, and I use Firefox as my primary browser.

Here is a useful article on setting up Feedly to be natively available within Firefox for subscribing to a website within the Firefox menus.

http://hackerspace.lifehacker.com/add-feedly-to-firefoxs-feed-handlers-list-829563457

Firefox Memory Leak Problems -- Refresh Firefox

So I've been experiencing major memory leaks with Firefox since version 36. Using around 1.7GB of memory and very slow sometimes for certain pages. Google searches revealed that yes, there was a major leak. It was supposed to be fixed.

Now in late version 37, the problem still persisted for me.

(WARNING: Always backup your firefox profile before testing other version!)

I tested using their version 38-beta8 candidate. Problem still was around. I tested their alpha version of 40, but still it persisted.

More googling revealed a new solution I hadn't tried: Refresh Firefox


Refreshing cleans out all prior add-on settings and caches.

Here is how to do it.

1. Click the menu button and then click help .
2. From the Help menu choose Troubleshooting Information.
3. Click the Refresh Firefox… button in the upper-right corner of the Troubleshooting Information page.
4. To continue, click Refresh Firefox in the confirmation window that opens.

Source taken from here:Refresh Firefox - reset add-ons and settings | Firefox Help

The good news is this worked. My memory usage is down a lot, and pages are loading much much faster.

Getting Tox to work with Pidgin in Fedora 21

Quick guide to getting the encrypted instant messenger service Tox to work with Pidgin.

General information for those who need to look elsewhere when this guide isn't enough:

Website     http://tox.dhs.org/
GitHub      https://github.com/jin-eld/tox-prpl.git
Maintainers Jin^eLD

Most of these commands should be run through a console.

1) You need to be using Pidgin 2.10.10 or later.

2) Make sure your firewall has trusted ports for the Tox account settings you prefer. The default port is 33445.

3) In case you haven't already, install the build tools you'll need:

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
yum install libtool autoconf automake check check-devel

4) Install the plugin build dependencies:

# For ToxCore
yum install libvpx-devel opus-devel 
# For Tox-prpl
yum install libpurple-devel

5) Build and install libsodium (a dependency for the ToxCore). Grab your release from here: http://download.libsodium.org/libsodium/releases/. For this guide I used version 1.0.2. The compile instructions are the standard ones.

./configure
make
sudo make install

6) Grab the version 0.4.2 release of ToxCore from here: https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/releases . This is the old API of Tox which is compatible with the current Tox plugin for Pidgin. The new API is not supported yet.

autoreconf -i
./configure
make
make check # My network test didn't pass but that's okay. Move along.
sudo make install 

7) Grab the tox-prpl plugin from here: https://github.com/jin-eld/tox-prpl . The latest version (as of posting now), includes a minor but important fix from on Feb-26.

At this point you should quit / exit Pidgin. Make sure it's not running for this stage.

git clone https://github.com/jin-eld/tox-prpl.git
cd tox-prpl
autoconf -i
# Note that here I had a library path problem,and had to manually specify where the libtoxcore.pc file was located on my system. Some users may be able to get away with just doing plain old ./configure or may need to set a different PKG_CONFIG_PATH= value.
./configure PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
make
make check

Almost done!

mkdir ~/.purple/plugin

If you get an error saying this folder already exists, that's fine. Move along.

cp build/.libs/libtox.so ~/.purple/plugins/

8) Start Pidgin back up.

9) Next create a Tox account in Pidgin, using these options. This fix is from here: https://github.com/jin-eld/tox-prpl/issues/36#issuecomment-75612106. See that bug-report for details on why you need this workaround.

In the Pidgin Tox account creation window, enter this settings under Advanced tab:

Server: 194.249.212.109
Port: 33445
Server key: 3CEE1F054081E7A011234883BC4FC39F661A55B73637A5AC293DDF1251D9432B

Done!

New Google Drive Warning

Not really related to Linux but a warning to all of you who use ODT for your offline document formats (good choice). Recently Google updated their GoogleDrive, removing an incredibly important and key feature.

GoogleDrive no longer honors any default document download preferences (for multiple file downloads). It will 100% default to Microsoft's DOCX format. (Which for those of us in the Open-Source world, is truly appalling and unacceptable.)

If you select multiple files and try to download them, you will get DOCX, every time. The only way around this is to download each document individually, setting a preference for download format each time. That's a lot more clicking and annoyance. Ffor some of us (with hundreds of documents), this is unacceptable.

Google should have defaulted to ODT or something equally open, in order to make the world start to convert to a usable, worthwhile format, instead of pandering to yet another of Microsoft's continuing bad formats.

Google.com no Longer useful for Image Searches

Quick note to inform any readers: It appears that Google.com is no longer useful as a proper reverse-image search tool. I found out recently that Google.com (for the USA/United States) heavily HEAVILY censors the results it shows users, even if you have SafeSearch EXPLICITY turned off. There is absolutely nothing you can do to actually get the real results using simple searches. If you specify your search, you may get better results but general ones are censored.

Simple test: Search for "boobs" on google.com and google.co.uk and you will get different results. The results from the .co.uk will be more explicit.

It's even more apparent if you search for anything vaguely pornographic using Bing.com. While Bing is very well known for censoring their search results in order to kowtow to the RIAA/MPAA and Big Media (along with buckling at the first sign from political entities like China), they apparently don't feel the need to molly coddle adults from sexuality. Search for boobs there and you really get good matches.

The list of failures by Google are growing, and this is certainly one that's going to be high on the list. And it pains me to say that, because generally I like Google. (And I positively loathe Microsoft.)

Google Hangouts

So it's universally acknowledged and there can be no argument that Google Hangouts, though having some nice features, is pretty bad when it comes to actual chats. I mean really bad.

Want to look at a chat you had 6 months ago? Good luck finding it. (I'm not even sure that functionality is possibly any longer, which says something. Even if it is still around, the fact that it's so obscure that the incredibly tech savvy can't find it readily is an abject failure.) Try finding that old chat with the gmail app? Nah, not happening. Even when you could, it was HORRIBLY broken.

As for missing chats from people, Hangouts is actually worse. You see, if you have Hangouts logged in on one of your devices (Phone or Tablet), the message will be received. But it won't TELL you that you've got the message if you log into your desktop. If you are lucky the message will appear as non-new (already read) message in your inbox. However there are times when it won't even show up there.

So how do you know if someone sent you a message? Well, if you notice that you've received something, then you can go dig through your "Chats" section on your desktop browser with gmail.com.

So yeah, Hangouts is arguably the most broken mainstream app from Google to date, which is really sad. Not to mention the bitch is a pain to log out of. You have to do five clicks and a couple of scrolls. Bad. Bad bad bad.

KDE longer able to handle rars / rar files

Quick one: If you are using KDE (probably on Fedora) in the last several months, and suddenly Ark has stopped being able to open/extract Rar files and gives you the message:

Failed to locate program lsar on disk

This solution may work for you. You need to install the package 'unar', and no that is not a typo. It stands for Unified Archive extractor or something. It's basically a back-end or go-between for Ark to handle multiple file types, such as rar.

Open up the konsole terminal, and type this:

sudo yum install unar

I did not have to even restart KDE, but you may need to restart KDE or reboot before it takes effect.

Tiny Trick to make Autopager work again for Firefox

Overview

tl;dr When a page that should Autopagerize doesn't work, open the "Manage Setting" in Autopager. Find the specific rules for site (via searching usually, and make sure you haven't created any personal ones that overrides it). On the "General" tab on the right, uncheck the option "Enable Javascript while loading page." Then try loading your page again. This fixed my problems.

The Problem

I've been using Autopager for the better part of a decade, and it's changed the way I browse the internet.

Unfortunately I have noticed on occasion that sometimes with certain pages Autopager doesn't work in Firefox like it should, especially when the pages used to Autopagerize properly. (I think that's the right word for it.) For example, Autopager doesn't work on Deviantart in Firefox. I usually attributed the failure to a Rules download problem and left it to be fixed automatically overtime. However lately I've noticed some problems have persisted for months and sometimes years.

Recently I decided it was time to fix this problem.

Diagnosis

First I tried loading the pages in Chrome, and sure enough, they Autopagerized correctly. I created a fresh copy of Firefox with no add-ons, loaded Autopager and tried again. Didn't work, so I could rule out conflicting add-ons.

Googling for help produced no usable information. It's apparently not a well documented problem.

From the autopager home website, I tried importing various different rules for DeviantArt, made by different people. But none of them worked

I began manually inspecting the rules for one problem page (that example happened to be DeviantArt) and I could find nothing unusual or wrong. Then I noticed something I hadn't seen before, a checkbox option to "Enable Javascript while loading page." This was checked. Having nothing to lose, I disabled that option, and tried reloading the DeviantArt gallery I was currently browsing.

Amazingly, it worked! Fantastically!

Cause of Problem

My guess is that while the front end of a page doesn't change a lot, the underlying structure, which includes Javascript, might. It's something the average user and even developer isn't going to notice right away. It can also be done overtime by third-parties so even main websites might not be aware.

I also use NoScript to disable a lot of javascript execution, so this too could cause problems, but it did not in this case. My tests with the fresh profile of Firefox with no add-ons aside from Autopager specifically didn't have NoScript installed. Still, this is worth considering.

Solution
So the solution when a page that should Autopagerize doesn't work, open the "Manage Setting" in Autopager. Find the specific rules for site (via searching usually, and make sure you haven't created any personal ones that overrides it). On the "General" tab on the right, uncheck the option "Enable Javascript while loading page." Then try loading the page again.

Clean Up Twitter's cluttered website

I don't like Twitter. But the service has its uses. So if you ever have to use the Twitter website and you don't want to view all the garbage they forcefully throw at you, such as Trending and Suggestions for things to follow, here is a really easy way to remove that worthless junk.

If you are running Adblock Plus (and you probably should be), you can simply add these custom filter rules to that add-on's preference configuration:

twitter.com##*.ProfileWTFAndTrends
twitter.com##*.wtf-module
twitter.com##div.trends-inner

And now suddenly Twitter is significantly less annoying.

Baloo File Indexer / File Extraction

How to fix Baloo File Index --> Disable it!

Problem

Many desktop indexers as they are implemented in KDE unfortunately are problematic. They are slow and resource hogs, taking up gigabytes of drive just to store indexes of files you won't use. Worse yet, they habitually lag my machine. The problem really arises when I'm copying multiple gigabytes of files over USB (but usually less than 30 files total). The Baloo file extraction process starts up and lags frequently.

Unfortunately there is not neat graphical way to disable the Baloo indexer. 

Quoting one of the Baloo authors:

There is no explicit “Enable/Disable” button any more. We would like to promote the use of searching and feel that Baloo should never get in the users way. However, we are smart about it and IF you add your HOME directory to the list of “excluded folders”, Baloo will switch itself off since it no longer has anything to index.

Solution

Here is how to disable Baloo from operating. Edit the file $HOME/.kde/share/config/baloofilerc. It is enough to edit it and change the option:

Indexing-Enabled=true 

to (or add if there is not such option)

Indexing-Enabled=false

to disable baloo.

I know it is way too easy but it did work for me and also for the guy who posted this simple solution on this page.