RESEARCHUT

System76’s COSMIC Desktop Environment—written from the ground up in Rust—is one of the most exciting developments in the Linux desktop ecosystem. Built for modern Wayland composition, modularity, and high-performance UX, it has captured the attention of desktop enthusiasts across distributions.

However, for users running Debian Testing or Debian Unstable, getting COSMIC onto their machines traditionally presents a steep hill to climb. The official upstream codebase consists of dozens of independent repositories (cosmic-comp, cosmic-panel, cosmic-applets, cosmic-settings, cosmic-files, and more) along with hundreds of Rust crate dependencies. Packaging each component individually according to strict Debian policy involves filing dozens of ITPs, waiting through NEW queue processing, and managing endless dependency updates.

Immutable Atomic Linux Distirbutions

Of late, I’ve been hearing a lot of (good) things about Immutable Linux Distributions, from friends, colleagues and mentors. It has been something on my plate for some time, to explore. But given the nature of the subject, it has been delayed for a while. Reasons are simple; I can only really judge this product if I use it for some time; and it has to be on my primary daily driver machine.

With KDE 6.5.0, PowerDevil has broken forced its own set of suspend/hibernate inhibitors onto logind. And to my knowledge, there’s no way to disable them.

As a user, I’d prefer to set lid action as Do nothing and really expect KDE/PowerDevil to do nothing in that regard. But with KDE 6.5.0 PowerDevil forces those inhibitors whatsoever.

❯ systemd-inhibit  --list
WHO            UID  USER PID   COMM            WHAT                                                                       WHY                                                        >
ModemManager   0    root 3541  ModemManager    sleep                                                                      ModemManager needs to reset devices                        >
NetworkManager 0    root 3453  NetworkManager  sleep                                                                      NetworkManager needs to turn off networks                  >
UPower         0    root 4342  upowerd         sleep                                                                      Pause device polling                                       >
PowerDevil     1000 rrs  82735 org_kde_powerde handle-power-key:handle-suspend-key:handle-hibernate-key:handle-lid-switch KDE handles power events                                   >
Screen Locker  1000 rrs  4844  kwin_wayland    sleep                                                                      Ensuring that the screen gets locked before going to sleep >

5 inhibitors listed.

This essentially prohibits logind to act on the lid actions. And instead forces the user to depend on nothing else and other than PowerDevil. This assumes the wishful thought that PowerDevil is Solid.

apt-offline 1.8.6

apt-offline version 1.8.6 was released almost 3 weeks ago on 08/February/2025

This release includes many bug fixes from community users.

• Error out if we cannot initialize the APT lock. Thanks to Matthew Maslak
• check for checksum and handle appropriately (#217) Thanks to Dan Whitman (Github:kyp44)
• Honor the –allow-unauthenticated option. Thanks to João A (Github: Jonybat)
• Retry when server reports 429 Too Many Requests occurs. Thanks to Zoltan Kelemen (Github: misterzed88)
• Also support file:/// url types. Thanks to c4bhuf@github
• Honor user specified extra gpg keyrings

Changelog

apt-offline (1.8.6-1) unstable; urgency=medium

  * Error out if we cannot initialize the APT lock.
    Thanks to Matthew Maslak
  * check for checksum and handle appropriately (#217)
    Thanks to Dan Whitman (Github:kyp44)
  * Honor the --allow-unauthenticated option.
    Thanks to João A (Github: Jonybat)
  * Retry when server reports 429 Too Many Requests occurs.
    Thanks to Zoltan Kelemen (Github: misterzed88)
  * Also support file:/// url types.
    Thanks to c4bhuf@github
  * Honor user specified extra gpg keyrings

 -- Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@debian.org>  Sat, 08 Feb 2025 20:46:24 +0530

Resources

• Tarball and Zip archive for apt-offline are available here
• Packages should be available in Debian.
• Development for apt-offline is currently hosted here

Of the many things we care for in our garden, having some Carnivorous plants was also one to have.

Plants are tricky. A lot of information they pass. And depending on where you are and what plants you are with, the results can vary. The Nepenthes family isn’t native to where I live but I still wanted to have them. While not impossible, though a difficult task to bring up such species.

Finally, TIL, what can all be the reason for systemd services to hang indefinitely. The internet is flooded with numerous reports on this topic but no clear answers. So no more uselessly marked workarounds like: systemctl daemon-reload and systemctl-daemon-reexec for this scenario.

The scene would be something along the lines of:

rrs         6467  0.0  0.0  23088 15852 pts/1    Ss   12:53   0:00  |   |   \_ /bin/bash
rrs        11512  0.0  0.0  14876  4608 pts/1    S+   13:18   0:00  |   |   |   \_ systemctl restart snapper-timeline.timer
rrs        11513  0.0  0.0  14984  3076 pts/1    S+   13:18   0:00  |   |   |       \_ /bin/systemd-tty-ask-password-agent --watch
rrs        11514  0.0  0.0 234756  6752 pts/1    Sl+  13:18   0:00  |   |   |       \_ /usr/bin/pkttyagent --notify-fd 5 --fallback

The snapper-timeline service is important to me and it not running for months is a complete failure. Disappointingly, commands like systemctl --failed do not report of this oddity. The overall system status is reported to be fine, which is completely incorrect.

There surely is need for better tooling on the BTRFS File System side.

While migrating my setup from one machine to another, this is one issue I came to be aware of, only today, when my backup tool (btrbk) complained about it. Following the pointers, I see the below snippet in btrfs-subvolume manual page.

       A snapshot that was created by send/receive will be read-only, with different last change generation, read-only and with set received_uuid which identifies the subvolume on the
       filesystem that produced the stream. The usecase relies on matching data on both sides. Changing the subvolume to read-write after it has been received requires to reset the
       received_uuid. As this is a notable change and could potentially break the incremental send use case, performing it by btrfs property set requires force if that is really desired by
       user.

           Note
           The safety checks have been implemented in 5.14.2, any subvolumes previously received (with a valid received_uuid) and read-write status may exist and could still lead to
           problems with send/receive. You can use btrfs subvolume show to identify them. Flipping the flags to read-only and back to read-write will reset the received_uuid manually. There
           may exist a convenience tool in the future.

Fixing the Received UUID: flag meant running the below:

apt-offline 1.8.4

apt-offline version 1.8.4 has been released.

This release includes many bug fixes but the important ones are:

• Better GPG signature handling
• Support for verifying InRelease files

Changelog

apt-offline (1.8.4-1) unstable; urgency=medium

  [ Debian Janitor ]
  * Update standards version to 4.5.0, no changes needed.

  [ Paul Wise ]
  * Clarify file type in unknown file message
  * Fix typos
  * Remove trailing whitespace
  * Update LICENSE file to match official GNU version
  * Complain when there are no valid keyrings instead of missing keyrings
  * Make all syncrhronised files world readable
  * Fix usage of indefinite articles
  * Only show the APT Offline GUI once in the menu
  * Update out of date URLs
  * Fix date and whitespace issues in the manual page
  * Replace stereotyping with an appropriate word
  * Switch more Python shebangs to Python 3
  * Correct usage of the /tmp/ directory
  * Fix YAML files
  * Fix usage of the log API
  * Make the copying of changelog lines less brittle
  * Do not split keyring paths on whitespace

  [ Ritesh Raj Sarraf ]
  * Drop the redundant import of the apt module.
    Thanks to github/dandelionred
  * Fix deprecation of get_bugs() in debianbts
  * Drop the unused IgnoredBugTypes
  * Set encoding for files when opening
  * Better error logging when apt fails
  * Don't mandate a default option
  * Demote metadata errors to verbose
  * Also log an error message for every failed .deb url
  * Check hard for the url type
  * Check for ascii armored signature files.
    Thanks to David Klnischkies
  * Add MIME type for InRelease files
  * Drop patch 0001-Drop-the-redundant-import-of-the-apt-module.patch.
    Now part of the 1.8.4 release
  * Prepare release 1.8.3
  * Prepare release 1.8.4
  * debian packaging
    + Bump debhelper compatibility to 13
    + Update install files

  [ Dean Anderson ]
  * [#143] Added support for verifying InRelease files

 -- Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@debian.org>  Sat, 12 Feb 2022 18:52:58 +0530

Resources

• Tarball and Zip archive for apt-offline are available here
• Packages should be available in Debian.
• Development for apt-offline is currently hosted here

After a hiatus of 6 years, it was nice to be back with the ThinkPad. This blog post briefly touches upon my impressions with the current generation ThinkPad T14 Gen2 AMD variant.

Lenovo

It took 8 weeks to get my hands on the machine. Given the pandemic, restrictions and uncertainities, not sure if I should call it an ontime delivery. This was a CTO - Customise-to-order; so was nice to get rid of things I really didn’t care/use much. On the other side, it also meant I could save on some power. It also came comparatively cheaper overall.

The Lotus story so far

My very first experience with water flowering plants was pretty good. I learnt a good deal of things; from setting up the pond, germinating the lotus seeds, setting up the right soil, witnessing the growth of the lotus plant, fish eco-system to take care of the pond. Overall, a lot of things learnt.

But I couldn’t succeed in getting the Lotus flower. A lot many reasons. The granite container developed some leakage, which I had to fix by emptying it, which might have caused some shock to the lotus. But more than that, in my understanding, the reason for not being able to flower the lotus, was the amount of sunlight. From what I have learned, these plants need a minimum of 6-8 hrs of sunlight to really give you with the flowering result, whereas the setup of my pond was on the ground with hardly 3-4 hrs of sun. And that too, with all the plants growing, resulted in indirect sunlight.