How A Steam Bug Once Deleted All Of Someone’s User Data

January 20, 2024 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

In a retrospective, [Kevin Fang] takes us back to 2015, when on the Steam for Linux issue tracker [keyvin] opened an issue to report that starting the Steam client after moving the Steam folder had just wiped all of his user data, including his backup drive mounted under /media. According to [keyvin], he moved the standard ~/.local/share/steam to a drive mounted under /media and symlinked ~/.local/share/steam to this new location on the external drive. He then tried starting Steam, which failed, before Steam crashed and tried reinstalling itself. That’s when [keyvin] realized that Steam had apparently recursively deleted everything owned by his user from the root folder.

The infamous Valve code that made Linux users sad.

In the issue thread, user [doofy] got hit by the same bug when trying to directly start the ~/.local/share/steam/steam.sh script with debugging enabled. He then was the first to point out the rm -rf in that steam.sh script, but since this particular line is in a function only called when Steam tries to remove and reinstall itself to ‘fix’ a botched start, how did this happen? Ultimately it seems to be because of the STEAMROOT variable being set to an empty string, and another unset variable triggering the reset_steam() function, leading to the demise of all the user data.

Since then Valve has presumably fixed the issue, as no further users have filed tickets, but it’s concerning that a similar issue seems to still exist on Windows. Whether or not the original Linux issue has been fixed, it shows clearly how one should always check return values and perhaps, just maybe, never do an automated rm -rf or equivalent.

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Linux Fu: Where’s That Darn File?

January 17, 2024 by Al Williams 20 Comments

Disk storage has exploded in the last 40 years. These days, even a terabyte drive is considered small. There is one downside, though. The more stuff you have, the harder it is to find it. Linux provides numerous tools to find files when you can’t remember their name. Each has plusses and minuses, and choosing between them is often difficult.

Definitions

Different tools work differently to find files. There are several ways you might look for a file:

Find a file if you know its name but not its location.
Find a file when you know some part of its name.
Find a file that contains something.
Find a file with certain attributes (e.g., larger than 100 kB)

You might combine these, too. For example, it is reasonable to query all PDF files created in the last week that are larger than 100 kB.

There are plenty of different types of attributes. Some file systems support tags, too. So, you might have a PERSONAL tag to mark files that apply to you personally. Unfortunately, tool support for tags is somewhat lacking, as you’ll see later.

Another key point is how up-to-date your search results are. If you sift through terabytes of files for each search, that will be slow. If you keep an index, that’s fast, but the index will quickly be out of date. Do you periodically refresh the index? Do you watch the entire file system for changes and then update the index? Different tools do it differently. Continue reading “Linux Fu: Where’s That Darn File?” →

OpenWRT To Mark 20 Years With Reference Hardware

January 13, 2024 by Jenny List 17 Comments

The OpenWRT project is now two decades old. The project has come a long way since Linksys was forced to release the GNU-licensed code for the original WRT54G router from which the project takes its name. They’ve marked the occasion in an interesting manner: by proposing that the plethora of devices supported by the OS be joined by a fully upstream-supported reference hardware platform.

Spec-wise it’s what you would expect for a hackable router platform in 2024. A MediaTek chipset can be found at its centre, but the hardware is not in this case the important bit. Here will be a platform that won’t have to rely on proprietary manufacturer BLOBs, and which will thus likely continue to have up-to-date kernel support long into the future. So many enticing SBCs fall in this regard, and many retain ossified kernel versions after their manufacturers tire of them as a result.

It appears that the future of this project will be subject to an OpenWRT community vote, and we sincerely hope that it will come to fruition. Meanwhile, we couldn’t resist a peek at the status of the router that started it all, by our reckoning the original WRT54G was last supported by the OS over a decade ago.

FLOSS Weekly Episode 764: You Have To Be Pretty Cynical

January 3, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 8 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Katherine Druckman talk with benny Vasquez, chair of AlmaLinux, all about the weird road we’ve been on with Enterprise Linux distributions, and how that’s landed us here, where we have AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and multiple other Red Hat downstream distros. What’s the difference between those projects, and why does it matter?

Projects need more than just developers. How do you keep members doing documentation, bug hunting, outreach, and even graphic design plugged in and feeling like part of the team? How do you walk the narrow line between the different directions a project can drift, setting up your community for long term success? And where’s the most surprising place benny has found AlmaLinux running? And why is benny’s first name never capitalized? Give this week’s show a listen to find out!

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Welcome To The Year Of The Diagonal Linux Desktop

December 31, 2023 by Maya Posch 73 Comments

Sometimes you come across one of those ideas that at first appear to have to be some kind of elaborate joke, but as you dig deeper into it, it begins to make a disturbing kind of sense. This is where the idea of diagonally-oriented displays comes to the fore. Although not a feature that is generally supported by operating systems, [xssfox] used the xrandr (x resize and rotate) function in the Xorg display server to find the perfect diagonal display orientation to reach a happy balance between the pros and cons of horizontal and vertical display orientations.

As displays have gone wide-and-wider over the past decades, some people rotate their displays 90 degrees to get more height instead, which is beneficial when reading documents, yet terrible when watching most video content, barring vertical videos, so you either need more than one display, keep rotating, or settle on an optimal intermediate compromise. Interestingly, this wasn’t found at a straight 45°, but instead at 22° of rotation for [xssfox]’s 21:9 ratio ‘ultra-wide’ display. The xrandr settings for other display ratios can be easily calculated using the provided formula and associated JS-based tool.

So what are the advantages here? You get to keep long line lengths in IDEs, while gaining more vertical pixels in some areas. As disadvantages it only works with Xorg at this time, it’s a terrible setup for people prone to vertigo, and it’s decidedly hostile towards top-of-display mounted webcams. Yet with others picking up on this new trend, Linux might just corner the diagonal desktop.

Gentoo Linux, Now A Bit Less For The 1337

December 29, 2023 by Jenny List 37 Comments

Among users of Linux distributions there’s a curious one-upmanship, depending on how esoteric or hardcore your distro is. Ubuntu users have little shame, while at the other end if you followed Linux From Scratch or better still hand-compiled the code and carved it onto the raw silicon with a tiny chisel, you’re at the top of the tree*. Jokes aside though, it’s fair to say that if you were running the Gentoo distribution you were something of a hardcore user, because its source-only nature meant that everything had to be compiled to your liking. We’re using the past tense here though, because in a surprise announcement, the distro has revealed that it will henceforth also be available as a set of precompiled binary packages.

There may be readers with long and flowing neckbeards who will decry this moment as the Beginning of the End, but while it does signal a major departure for the distro if it means that more people are spurred to take their Linux usage further and experiment with Gentoo, this can never be a bad thing. Gentoo has been on the list for a future Jenny’s Daily Drivers OS review piece, and while we’re probably going to stick with source-only when we do it, it’s undeniable that there will remain a temptation to simply download the binaries.

Meanwhile this has been written on a machine running Manjaro, or Arch-for-cowards as we like to call it, something that maybe confers middle-ranking bragging rights. Read a personal tale of taking off those Linux training wheels.

* Used a magnifying glass? You’re just not cutting it!

Linux Fu: Preprocessing Beyond Code

December 28, 2023 by Al Williams 15 Comments

If you glanced at the title and thought, “I don’t care — I don’t write C code,” then hang on a minute. While it is true that C has a preprocessor and you can notoriously do strange and — depending on your point of view — horrible or wonderful things with it, there are actually other options and you don’t have to use any of them with a C program. You can actually use the C preprocessor with almost any kind of text file. And it’s not the only preprocessor you can abuse this way. For example, the m4 preprocessor is wildly complex, vastly underused, and can handle C source code or anything else you care to send to it.

Definitions

I’ll define a preprocessor as a program that transforms its input file into an output file, reacting to commands that are probably embedded in the file itself. Most often, that output is then sent to some other program to do the “real” work. That covers cpp, the C preprocessor. It also covers things like sed. Honestly, you can easily create custom preprocessors using C, awk, Python, Perl, or any other programming language. There are many other standard programs that you could think of as preprocessors, for example, tr. However, one of the most powerful is made to preprocess complex input files called m4. For some reason — maybe because of its complexity — you don’t see much m4 in the wild.

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