dotfiles

Various dotfiles, associated scripts and cheatsheets as well as installation scripts and notes

Ubuntu installation

0. Make sure we're using UEFI (system setup). This will affect how the installation of third-party stuff goes, so we need to do it first.

1. Run install.sh after updating any explicitly-specified versions

Note that zsh-install.sh & vscode-install-extensions.sh are run automatically after Oh-My-Zsh & VS Code are installed, respectively.

Note also that vim-plug installs fzf, so the latter won't be available until nvim is started for the first time.

Note finally that the iriun deps installation will require some interaction when UEFI is configured. I haven't tested this in the script as of writing.

Manual Steps

Display

After setting up displays, if the login dialog is still on the wrong monitor, run

sudo cp ~/.config/monitors.xml ~gdm/.config/monitors.xml

Turning off network printer discovery

Ubuntu will repeatedly install all network printers on every connect and quite annoyingly inform the user everytime it has done so. Per ask ubuntu, it's possible to turn this off as follows:

sudo systemctl stop cups-browsed
sudo systemctl disable cups-browsed

This isn't included in install.sh in case it's desirable behavior.

Backup via Timeshift

Timeshift is automatically installed but needs to be configured. Open the Timeshift application and set up as appropriate. Boot + monthly/weekly/daily snapshots seem appropriate.

GNOME Tweaks

All tweaks are automatically set via gsettings during installation. If desired, additional customization can be performed via the Tweaks interface or gsettings. Here is a convenient one-liner for listing available settings into a searchable file:

gsettings list-schemas | \
   perl -ne 'print; chomp; $schema = $_; for my $key (`gsettings list-keys $schema`) { \
   print "  $key"; for my $rangeItem (`gsettings range $schema $key`) { \
   print "    $rangeItem" } }' > all-gsettings.txt

Windows dual-boot

If the system is dual boot with windows, run this command to fix windows time going awry every time linux is booted:

timedatectl set-local-rtc 1 --adjust-system-clock

In reverse:

timedatectl set-local-rtc 0 --adjust-system-clock

GNOME extensions

While it's possible to install GNOME extensions programmatically, one has to match the download url with one's shell version, and the maintenance cost just isn't worth it for a small list of extensions. I'm only using a few at the moment, so it's much easier to manually enable it using the GNOME shell integration chrome plugin. A list of install url(s) follows:

• OverviewNavigation (Not compatible with gnome > 42)
• Dash to Panel. (Not currently using in preference to Dash to Dock) This extension has a config dump baked into the GUI, so we don't have to use dconf (see below) but probably can. I exported its settings to dash-to-panel.ini
• V-Shell
• WSP (Windows Search Provider)
• Dash to Dock
• Hide Cursor (Wayland replacement for unclutter)
• Just Perfection
• All Windows. I'm using this for the save/restore window positions feature. I forked the extension and exposed those functions to DBus so I can trigger them from a script (see laptop-monitor-toggle). As such, we can't install from the the extensions page until it's merged upstream and published. Follow the instructions I wrote down in the testing section of the readme.
• CHC-E. I use this for a few custom shortcuts (prefixed by Super+Shift) and nothing else. Note that its visual effects (none of which I use) seem largely broken.
• Focus
• Space Bar

For extensions with lots of configuration, we can dump it to file using dconf. For example, the Just Perfection config can be exported via dconf dump /org/gnome/shell/extensions/just-perfection/ > just-perfection.ini (see just-perfection.ini) and imported via dconf load /org/gnome/shell/extensions/just-perfection/ < just-perfection.ini. Anything I've dumped at any point lives in this repo. The dump/load cycle is scripted by dconf_sync.sh.

Note that the GNOME Shell Integration Chrome extension is supposedly able to sync these, so this may no longer be a manual step. (Untested)

GPG

Needed for Github Credential Manager. The first git action will trigger login.

1. gpg --full-generate-key
2. pass init <gpg-id>

Mounting a partition as /home

This answer is exactly what's needed for a clear drive. For an encrypted drive, rsync per the answer and then use the Disks GUI to set up auto-unlock/mount.

navi

This first time running navi, it will need to load cheat sheet repos. After installing the default, make sure to also run navi add thisisrandy/cheatsheets.

Audio sleep

Ubuntu puts the audio interface to sleep after a few seconds by default. This results in a loud popping sound in headphones when the interface cycles, and Bluetooth speakers may go to sleep and not recover without manual cycling. Fortunately, the fix is easy: Add the following lines to /etc/modprobe.d/audio-powersave.conf (which may not exist):

options snd_hda_intel power_save=0
options snd_hda_intel power_save_controller=N

This probably drains battery powered output devices faster, but it's worth the trade-off.

Mouse chugging under network load

I was observing some bad mouse chugging when the system was under network load only (lots of CPU available). This is probably due to the mouse experiencing interrupt starvation since the network interface is generating tons of packet interrupts. Amazingly, my first attempt to fix this succeeded. We can modify /etc/default/grub as follows:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="usbhid.mousepoll=2"

If the variable isn't already empty, append to it. Per the archlinux wiki, this changes the frequency of mouse polls in ms. Also according to that page, the default is 8 (rounded down to a power of 2 from 10), so I've 4x'ed the work my CPU has to do to handle the mouse. I doubt I'll notice any negative impact from this, but need to remember that it's set just in case. The mouse is noticeably smoother with this setting on.

Mounting external RAID member HDDs

The wisdom found collectively in Ubuntu doesn't "see" external USB Hard Disk, mount: unknown filesystem type 'linux_raid_member', and mount unknown filesystem type 'lvm2_member' gets us through to the win. In particular:

• ls /dev/ | grep sd before/after to detect whether the HDD is even seen
• sudo fdisk -l to find the correct device
• mount complains about 'linux_raid_member'
  • mdadm --assemble --run /dev/md0 <DEVICE>, assuming /dev/md0 does not currently exist
• mount complains about 'LVM2_member'
  • sudo apt-get install lvm2 to install the logical volume management tools
  • vgdisplay to get volume group UUID
  • vgrename <VG UUID> new_name to rename it if there's a name conflict
  • modprobe dm-mod to add a device mapping driver
  • vgchange -ay to activate
  • lvscan to list all logical volumes in all volume groups
  • mount /dev/new_name/root /(mnt|media/user)/whereever. May need to create mount location first

GNOME Boxes

A note upfront: I have abandoned Boxes for VirtualBox, which is also free and just way better at basically everything. I'll leave this around for reference, I guess.

Getting files out of a VM

1. Launch the client, then click on the client in the Boxes menu and go to Preferences -> Devices & Shares -> Folder Shares and add a folder
2. On the client, install spice-webdavd, then run sudo spice-webdavd -p 10000. "Spice client folder" should now be available from the "Other Locations" menu in Files
3. Sometimes when attempting to open the Spice client folder, it will error with HTTP error: Could not connect: Connection refused. It seems, per this discussion, that the best way to fix the issue is to manually type dav://localhost:9843 into the Other Locations -> Connect to Server textbox

Migrating a VM to another host

First, get the necessary software using

sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-daemon-system

Dump

1. Grab the QCOW disk image(s) in ~/.local/share/gnome-boxes/images
2. Dump the machine config(s) as follows:

sudo apt install qemu-kvm libvirt-daemon-system
virsh -c qemu:///session list --all | awk 'NR>2 { print $2 }' | \
    xargs -I {} sh -c 'virsh -c qemu:///session dumpxml $1 > $1.xml' -- {}

Load

1. Replace the QCOW image(s) in the same location
2. Run virsh create CONFIG.xml for each

Other notes

• Remember to adjust the power settings on new VMs. Boxes doesn't seem able to recover when the guest blanks its screen

Making use of older GPUs

Ubuntu does a pretty good job of automatically installing nouveau, but it uses the on-board graphics by default for everything. We can tell any application to use the Nvidia GPU by specifying DRI_PRIME=1 in its environment. See this answer and also this documentation. There's also an application called switcherooctl that handles this in a more complete way. Note that prime-select from the nvidia-prime functions, but doesn't seem to have any effect.

DroidCam Virtual Camera Audio Setup

Persistence

The naive instructions below don't persist, and in kind of an asymmetrical way. Despite the fact that I set up a default.pa under my home directory, VirtualSpeaker doesn't exist after rebooting. However, OBS remembers VirtualSpeaker, except it's really just remembering some dangling reference. So the best I have right now is to set this up manually for every session. That means the following:

1. Open OBS settings and set Monitoring Device to something other than VirtualSpeaker.
2. Run the pactl commands to create VirtualSpeaker and VirtualMic.
3. Reselect VirtualSpeaker in OBS.
4. Hit "Start Virtual Camera" in OBS.

Naive Instructions

Get pactl

sudo apt-get install pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils

Create a virtual speaker and mic that connects to it

pactl load-module module-null-sink sink_name=VirtualSpeaker sink_properties=device.description=VirtualSpeaker
pactl load-module module-virtual-source source_name=VirtualMic master=VirtualSpeaker.monitor

For persistence, put these lines (sans pactl) in ~/.config/pulse/default.pa.

In OBS Studio, File -> Settings -> Audio -> Advanced and set Monitoring Device to our new VirtualSpeaker. In the Audio Mixer pane, find the DroidCam source and click "Enable Monitoring" (the headset icon near the bottom). VirtualMic can now be selected as the system input source.