I did a zsh! I'm all modern and stuff. Hooray me.

@Kusalananda Actually, zsh is coming up to its 30th anniversary.

@FaheemMitha Well, more modern than the Bourne shell at least then.

Wow, it's bed o'clock! Take care!

@Fabby I'll have to try that.

I was wondering if people could suggest something a bit more stable/durable/professional than the external USB drive (I'm using a Passport) for a local backup.

One problem is that it's lying on the floor, and regularly gets moved during cleaning.

Obviously, something that would be available in India.

Maybe something that sits in a box?

Something like a NAS drive perhaps? But that's just shot in the dark.

@Fabby It worked!!! It took a little bit longer than usual, but it worked! I was able to login from the GUI, and then the desktop came up!!!! So does this imply that some cinnamon config files are borked?

IDK if it's odd, but when, as the new user (DebugUser), I tried to apply an update listed in dnfdragora, it asks for the password of my normal user, the one that can't load a desktop...rather than root, or DebugUser's password.

Is firefox-esr the current version of Firefox for Debian Stable? It looks like I'm running an unsupported version. I'm not sure why.

I copied DebugUsers's .cinnamon directory, and moved my user's .cinnamon and .themes directory into a different directory. Unfortunately, that didn't fix the issue. Not yet sure where to go from here

@derobert Thanks. What do you mean by being harder to compromise?

Might as well face it, I'm addicted to ed

@Motivated Better security, including, typically, better default security.

@FaheemMitha What does default security mean though?

I believe Windows default security is not so great. And possibly its security model, though I don't really know anything about it.

@Motivated The settings when you install the thing.

Debian, for example, if you do a minimal installation, it doesn't really have much running at all, or much open.

@FaheemMitha What settings are considered to make it more secure? For example, i have observed when installing Ubuntu, the firewall isn't enabled by default. I don't consider that being more secure.

Say for example, on Linux, if you have a virus in an email attachment, even supposing it's something that would run on the OS, which is probably not the case. You'd have to go to quite a lot of trouble to execute it. On Windows, I think you may just need to click on it in a GUI, or something.

@FaheemMitha Possibly although how does this compare to desktop deployments?

@Motivated No, there isn't a firewall, but you don't need a firewall if you don't have any open services. Firewalls aren't a magic solution to anything.

@Motivated I'm not sure what you mean.

Actually, I think this firewall thing was discussed in a question/answer there at one point.

@FaheemMitha I have observed that a number of distributions assume a default build that includes mariadb. If the firewall isn't enabled, it's exposing a service that could be compromised.

@Motivated Really? Which distributions?

@Motivated And by build, do you mean installation?

@FaheemMitha The example you cited was a minimal installation. If Linux is deployed as a desktop solution, how does its security compare? Is the base build as secure? If yes, what configurations are enabled to enhance its security posture?

@FaheemMitha OpenSUSE is an example.

@Motivated You keep using build when I think you mean install.

@FaheemMitha I am referring to the default install.

@Motivated If you run services, then sure, those can accept connections from the outside. Then one should make sure those services are as secure as possible. The first thing is to make sure the software running is as up to date as possible. And major Linux distributions are pretty good at that. And those services should also have conservative setttings.

One can also isolate those services from the OS, and each other.

@Faheem Mitha - If you consider the default install of Ubuntu, it's security settings by default in my opinion aren't secure. The firewall for one isn't enabled. It installs countless applications. Yes, i agree that the services should be configured such that they enhance security however given the adoption by new users, it's nigh impossible to know this implicitly. It also demands a level of experience and knowledge.

@Motivated What "countless applications"? And are they listening to the outside?

You seem a bit fixated on firewalls. Seriously, they aren't that useful.

Like Trump's wall, people talk a lot about them. But they don't really solve much of anything.

If you don't need to run services, don't run them. It's really not that hard. Is there anything in particular you are concerned about?

Most people run ssh. There are a number of things you can do to make ssh more secure.

But on a desktop, that may be it.

@FaheemMitha I don't have it installed any longer so i can list it immediately. I'm curious as to why you believe they aren't useful. If a malicious user is attempting to scan for open ports, surely a firewall could be configured to drop all requests.

I mean, that may the only service you are running.

@FaheemMitha Since i'm running OpenSUSE, it's running services such as mariadb by default for example.

@Motivated If you don't have any services running, or just not accepting connections from the outside, why do you need to worry about scans for open ports?

@Motivated Well, that's dumb.

If you don't need it, uninstall it.

@FaheemMitha Yes i agree although not every new person coming to Linux will know that.

I suggest checking for what services are running. A sensible OS doesn't run things that aren't needed. And it's always a good idea to do as small an install as possible, and then add things as necessary.

@FaheemMitha This assumes that the user knows about the services. A person new to Linux won't know necessarily. You may be assuming a level of knowledge and experience which isn't always present.

@Motivated Well, ok. But if you want to run a computer, you need to learn about it. There isn't any good substitute.

@FaheemMitha Sure and i agree. Hence it may be of value to enable services such as firewalls by default until the individual has developed the know-how.

@Motivated Possibly. It sounds like a crutch at best. And if you need to run services that are listening to the outside, a firewall isn't going to do much to help you.

NAS storage seems kind of expensive for something that is basically a box for hard drives. Am I missing something?

@Fabby I installed GNOME, and selected that at login. My user still gets stuck on a black screen. I have no idea what to do :( I'm not sure a reinstall of Fedora will fix this.

Compiling rust (which needs slightly more than 3GB of RAM to compile) is not fun on a 2GB virtual machine... Lots of swapping.

@Ungeheuer IMO, questions of this kind may be downvoted because: 1) are about issues that are specific to a single installation, hard or impossible to reproduce elsewhere; so, they often don't lead to a proper answer. Referring to voting arrows' tooltips: considered not useful. 2) A list of performed troubleshooting actions is often missing - the first coming to my mind being searching through the logs. This may be interpreted as lack of research effort.

@Ungeheuer Anyway, in front of a single downvote you will be likely told to just ignore it and move on.

@Ungeheuer Offering to provide further information is usually not required. Other users will ask for that in comments anyway.

One of our cats, reflecting the general mood in the house today: instagram.com/p/Bs0QKnbF645

@Kusalananda That would be a cat nap?

I am first time on chat, I needed little help and I can't ask it as a new question.

I am solving this question unix.stackexchange.com/q/495470/255251

can someone tell me how to to append single quotes to this value. So it should be like $$STATE='CA'

@P_Yadav Switch to double quotes around the sed expression, then use '\1'.

A single quoted string can not contain a single quote. Not even an escaped one.

@Kusalananda tried that, now I asked a fresh question please see unix.stackexchange.com/q/495487/255251

You may have to escape the backslashes in front of $ an extra time as well.

Or, use sed 's/.../'"'"'\1'"'"'/'

Does anyone happen to know what went wrong here? In particular I'm not sure why the out of space error is happening.

 dpkg-deb: building package 'texlive-latex-extra-doc' in '../texlive-latex-extra-doc_2018.20181214-1_all.deb'.
 dpkg-genbuildinfo
 dpkg-genchanges  >../texlive-extra_2018.20181214-1_amd64.changes
dpkg-genchanges: info: including full source code in upload
 dpkg-source --after-build texlive-extra-2018.20181214
dpkg-buildpackage: info: full upload (original source is included)
Now running lintian...
command failed with error code 2 at /usr/share/lintian/collection/unpacked line 217.
warning: collect info unpacked about package texlive-pstricks-doc failed

escape backslash I think I was missing that one, but it would be more useful if you answer that question.

@FaheemMitha Well, are you out of space on that partition?