This has nothing to do with Arch or Bazzite, it's actually a bug in recent kernels. Switching to Mint only fixed it for you because Mint uses an old kernel.
The fix/workaround is to enable "above 4G decoding" and "resizable BAR" in your BIOS. If your BIOS does not have these options, you can either downgrade to an earlier kernel (or OS image if you're on Bazzite), or switch to a patched kernel like the Cachy kernel.
Yes, it's been long abandoned - no updates in over 3 years. Anyways, this is why alternatives like hyfetch, fastfetch (and others) exist.
Others here have already given you some good overviews, so instead I'll expand a bit more on the compilation part of your question.
As you know, computers are digital devices - that means they work on a binary system, using 1s and 0s. But what does this actually mean?
Logically, a 0 represents "off" and 1 means "on". At the electronics level, 0s may be represented by a low voltage signal (typically between 0-0.5V) and 1s are represented by a high voltage signal (typically between 2.7-5V). Note that the actual voltage levels, or what is used to representation a bit, may vary depending on the system. For instance, traditional hard drives use magnetic regions on the surface of a platter to represent these 1s and 0s - if the region is magnetized with the north pole facing up, it represents a 1. If the south pole is facing up, it represents a 0. SSDs, which employ flash memory, uses cells which can trap electrons, where a charged state represents a 0 and discharged state represents a 1.
Why is all this relevant you ask?
Because at the heart of a computer, or any "digital" device - and what sets apart a digital device from any random electrical equipment - is transistors. They are tiny semiconductor components, that can amplify a signal, or act as a switch.
A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals controls the current through another pair of terminals. This resultant output represents a binary bit: it's a "1" if current passes through, or a "0" if current doesn't pass through. By connecting a few transistors together, you can form logic gates that can perform simple math like addition and multiplication. Connect a bunch of those and you can perform more/complex math. Connect thousands or more of those and you get a CPU. The first Intel CPU, the Intel 4004, consisted of 2,300 transistors. A modern CPU that you may find in your PC consists of hundreds of billions of transistors. Special CPUs used for machine learning etc may even contain trillions of transistors!
Now to pass on information and commands to these digital systems, we need to convert our human numbers and language to binary (1s and 0s), because deep down that's the language they understand. For instance, in the word "Hi", "H", in binary, using the ASCII system, is converted to 01001000 and the letter "i" would be 01101001. For programmers, working on binary would be quite tedious to work with, so we came up with a shortform - the hexadecimal system - to represent these binary bytes. So in hex, "Hi" would be represented as 48 69, and "Hi World" would be 48 69 20 57 6F 72 6C 64. This makes it a lot easier to work with, when we are debugging programs using a hex editor.
Now suppose we have a program that prints "Hi World" to the screen, in the compiled machine language format, it may look like this (in a hex editor):
As you can see, the middle column contains a bunch of hex numbers, which is basically a mix of instructions ("hey CPU, print this message") and data ("Hi World").
Now although the hex code is easier for us humans to work with compared to binary, it's still quite tedious - which is why we have programming languages, which allows us to write programs which we humans can easily understand.
If we were to use Assembly language as an example - a language which is close to machine language - it would look like this:
SECTION .data
msg: db "Hi World",10
len: equ $-msg
SECTION .text
global main
main:
mov edx,len
mov ecx,msg
mov ebx,1
mov eax,4
int 0x80
mov ebx,0
mov eax,1
int 0x80
As you can see, the above code is still pretty hard to understand and tedious to work with. Which is why we've invented high-level programming languages, such as C, C++ etc.
So if we rewrite this code in the C language, it would look like this:
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
printf ("Hi World\n");
return 0;
}
As you can see, that's much more easier to understand than assembly, and takes less work to type! But now we have a problem - that is, our CPU cannot understand this code. So we'll need to convert it into machine language - and this is what we call compiling.
Using the previous assembly language example, we can compile our assembly code (in the file hello.asm), using the following (simplified) commands:
$ nasm -f elf hello.asm
$ gcc -o hello hello.o
Compilation is actually is a multi-step process, and may involve multiple tools, depending on the language/compilers we use. In our example, we're using the nasm assembler, which first parses and converts assembly instructions (in hello.asm) into machine code, handling symbolic names and generating an object file (hello.o) with binary code, memory addresses and other instructions. The linker (gcc) then merges the object files (if there are multiple files), resolves symbol references, and arranges the data and instructions, according to the Linux ELF format. This results in a single binary executable (hello) that contains all necessary binary code and metadata for execution on Linux.
If you understand assembly language, you can see how our instructions get converted, using a hex viewer:
So when you run this executable using ./hello, the instructions and data, in the form of machine code, will be passed on to the CPU by the operating system, which will then execute it and eventually print Hi World to the screen.
Now naturally, users don't want to do this tedious compilation process themselves, also, some programmers/companies may not want to reveal their code - so most users never look at the code, and just use the binary programs directly.
In the Linux/opensource world, we have the concept of FOSS (free software), which encourages sharing of source code, so that programmers all around the world can benefit from each other, build upon, and improve the code - which is how Linux grew to where it is today, thanks to the sharing and collaboration of code by thousands of developers across the world. Which is why most programs for Linux are available to download in both binary as well as source code formats (with the source code typically available on a git repository like github, or as a single compressed archive (.tar.gz)).
But when a particular program isn't available in a binary format, you'll need to compile it from the source code. Doing this is a pretty common practice for projects that are still in-development - say you want to run the latest Mesa graphics driver, which may contain bug fixes or some performance improvements that you're interested in - you would then download the source code and compile it yourself.
Another scenario is maybe you might want a program to be optimised specifically for your CPU for the best performance - in which case, you would compile the code yourself, instead of using a generic binary provided by the programmer. And some Linux distributions, such as CachyOS, provide multiple versions of such pre-optimized binaries, so that you don't need to compile it yourself. So if you're interested in performance, look into the topic of CPU microarchitectures and CFLAGS.
Sources for examples above: http://timelessname.com/elfbin/
Really? Well, I'm from Utica and I never heard anyone use the term "upstate."
Just use NTFS for the whole drive. The new NTFS3 kernel driver in Linux has fairly decent performance (waay better than the old ntfs-3g driver), and has been pretty stable since kernel 6.2.
The key thing you'd want to do though is to use the mount options nocase and windows_names in your fstab.
nocase enables case-insensitive file/folder support similar to the default behavior under Windows with NTFS volumes.
windows_names prevents the creation of files or directories with names not allowed under Windows. This checks for forbidden characters in the name like /, , :, *, ?, <, >, |, " or ending with a space or a period. There are also other checks for matching the behavior of Windows with this mount option for rejecting file/folder names that may be valid on Linux systems but not under Windows.
These two mount options should solve most of the issues Linux NTFS users may face. Do note that to use the above mount options, you'll need to be on at least kernel 6.2.
That's not a standard Windows prompt, looks like some third-party application is intercepting the call.
Check the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options - for a key named taskmgr.exe. If it exists, see if the taskmgr.exe key has a value called Debugger. If so, delete the Debugger value, or rename the taskmgr.exe key to e.g. taskmgr.exe.old.
Then try launching Task Manager again.
If there's nothing in the registry, you could monitor the process tree in Process Explorer and watch what happens when you execute taskmgr.exe. You could also use Process Monitor if you want to dig deeper and find out exactly what's happening - you can filter out Microsoft processes to make it easier to see all thirdparty software interactions.
A couple of months ago, I came across the Minisforum UM780 XTX. People were raving about it at r/MiniPCs and r/Homelab - finally, we have a mini PC with a Zen4 CPU, decent graphics and compute performance, a good TDP window, excellent IOMMU grouping for virtualization, and future expansion capabilities (+Oculink!), which makes it suitable for both home lab and gaming scenarios. This seemed like the perfect option for me.
#Ordering Dramas - Part 1
I decided to buy directly from Minisform. Normally I'd prefer buying from local or well-known retailers like Amazon or eBay, but since the UM780 was brand new at the time, no one else stocked it.
I used PayPal to place my order. It was going well, until the payment screen got seemingly frozen at the "One more step... Finish paying at Micro Computer Tech Limited.." screen. I waited and waited and nothing happened. Had no other option other than to close the window, because it was going nowhere. Went back to my order on the Minisforum page and it looked like it hadn't been processed. Got no confirmation email either. Sweet, so I tried making the payment again, and this time it went thru just fine. A while later I decided to check my bank account, and it was just as I feared - I was charged twice! So looks like the payment for the first failed transaction did indeed go thru. No worries, PayPal are usually good at this stuff, so I raised a ticket with them, provided screenshots etc, and I had full confidence I'd get my money back, so I didn't worry about it any further.
Meanwhile, my actual order was seemingly progressing well - Minisforum had surprisingly shipped out my device the very next day, and was expected to arrive in just 3-4 days (via DHL)! It was pretty impressive, given that I live in New Zealand and getting stuff shipped here generally takes a while. Which was also a good thing, because I was going away on vacation in three weeks, and no one would've been around to receive the package (and I also wanted to set up a VPN on my box before I left).
I checked the tracking two days later, and I noticed something strange - the package was bouncing around in Hong Kong, and it seemingly looked like it was going back to the sender! I thought I was reading the log incorrectly or maybe it was one of those tracking quirks, so I decided to check it again the next the day. Day 3. I checked the tracking, and the status said that the package was indeed returned back to the sender! WTF! I checked my emails, and once again, there was nothing. I immediately contacted Minisforum for an explanation. They replied the next day, saying that they recalled my shipment because I had a PayPal dispute open (even though I already got back my money) and that according to their company policy, they had to cancel the order and they'd refund my second transaction as well. Double WTF.
#Ordering Dramas - Part 2
I was pissed off, but I was still really, really dead set on getting the UM780 - and that too before Christmas. I immediately placed a new order. This time around, thankfully, the order went thru without a hitch. If the last time was any indication, I expected that the package would be again sent out the next day, and that I'd receive it within a week. I checked my mails the next day and there was no tracking number yet. The order confirmation email did say there may be a 3-5 day delay due to the Christmas rush, so I decided to be patient. I checked again, 6 days later, and there were still no updates - so I reached out to Minisforum for for an update. They replied saying:
Your order is already being shipped, and the logistics information has not been updated yet. It is expected that the logistics information will be updated to you within 5-7 days, we will inform you in time.
I check again a week later, and there were still no updates. I'm starting to panic a bit, as it'd been two weeks since I'd placed the order and I still hadn't received a shipping number, never mind the actual product itself. And I knew for a fact that they had them in stock, since my old order was just returned, so it couldn't have been a stock issue. I also had just a week left before my holiday, so I ask them for an update. They responded saying:
Your package has been shipped, but the company name and address you filled in, please confirm what the company name is and send it to us.
WTF. They keep saying that my package was shipped, yet they're unable to provide the tracking number.. which didn't make any sense to me. So I ask them what the tracking number was, and also provided my company name (which I already provided in the order form, so not sure why they were asking for it again). I had it shipped to my work address since we have a bit of an issue with package thefts at home, and I didn't want to risk it.
They responded with:
After the company name is corrected, the tracking number can be updated and shipping can begin tomorrow under normal circumstances.
Bastards. Which means they never even shipped my package in the first place, and I was just f***** around with for the last couple of weeks. WTF. Why did they even say that my order was being shipped? If they needed more information to ship my package, why didn't the first agent pick it up and just straight up lied about it? And why did the second agent say that it was shipped as well? None of this made any sense to me.
I finally received my tracking number the next day, but being this close to the holidays, I'd lost all hope of receiving my PC before my vacation. Now there was a bigger issue of who was going to receive the package, since my office would be closed as well. Thankfully, my colleague volunteered to receive it, so I redirected the package to his address.
And it finally arrived, just a day after I went on my holiday. Sigh. Oh well, at least it arrived at last, and in one piece. But I had to wait until the new year to unbox it.
#Unboxing and Network Issues
I got back to work and found that my colleague had left the package on my desk. Woohoo! It's unboxing time! Finally, after all that drama and waiting, I get to play with my new toy. 64 GB DDR5, 5.2Ghz Zen4, USB4, Oculink, dual 2.5GbE... this thing is going to rock! Or so I thought.
After hunting around for a bit for a suitable distro, I decided to go back to my old favorite - Arch, with Hyprland, and the latest Xanmod kernel with the fancy new x86-64-v4 optimizations, and everything seemed to be sweet.
Except, I noticed that my dmesg was being constantly spammed by various "BadTLP" errors from a PCIe device. An inspection via lspci showed that the culprit was one of the NICs, ie the RTL8125 2.5GBE controller. A Google search suggested there were others out there too getting similar errors with this chip, and various fixes were suggested, but nothing worked - short of disabling the NIC itself, which I didn't want to.
I finally managed to come across a post from a random website called "level1techs", where it was mentioned that there was a new BIOS version (1.05) which fixed the BadTLP errors!
The release notes stated:
1.Update PI to 1.1.0.1a.
2.Set BASE_BOARD_VERSION to 1.1 for 1.1 MotherBoard.
3.Fix Network Stack load default issue.
4.Fix RGB LED load default issue.
5.Enbale pluton.
6.Add Enable option under Global C-State Control.
7.Fix WHEA-Logger 17 error in event viewer.
That looked promising!
#BIOS Update Woes
Now the big question was - how do I update the BIOS frrom Linux? fwupdmgr is usually the tool for that these days, however, while it seemed that fwupdmgr did support updating the BIOS, there weren't any updates available via the LVFS. I guess LVFS updates for a small brand like Minisforum, with no official Linux support, would've been too good to be true...
Another search later, I found this Reddit post with instructions on how to manually flash the update from a USB drive and the EFI shell, so I gave that a try. No issues kicking off the update, it seemed to be going off well but was a bit slow, so I decided to go and make a cup of tea. I got back to my desk, only to find a blank screen, with the RGB panel on the Minisforum flashing away in a loop (which in itself was strange, since I'd disabled the RGB panel previously). I waited and waited, and the screen remained blank. I went into panic mode. Google was no help this time unfortunately. In fact, I found several posts saying NOT to update the BIOS on Minisforum devices, as there was a high chance of bricking it - apparently these Mini PCs do not have a backup BIOS or a recovery option, unlike most PCs these days! To throw salt on the wounds, I came across another concerning post which suggested that Minisforum may not even cover this under warranty!
Comments like the one below did not inspire any confidence, and I wish I read these before attempting to flash the BIOS:
I had a UM690 that was bricked by a BIOS update. Here's the fun thing about minisforum computers: there's no way to reset or flash the BIOS if things go bad. The BIOS update also happens in windows. I tried updating my BIOS and halfway through, it just died and never came back.
I was fortunate that minisforum was willing to fully refund my purchase but I had to pay $120 to ship it back to Hong Kong.
Be very, very cautious about updating the BIOS. These are not robust machines.
I was tempted to power cycle the box, but instead, I took a couple of deep breaths and decided to just wait it out and see if something changes. 15 minutes later, I noticed the RGB loop on the box slowed down. I thought it was just my imagination, so I kept staring at it and all of a sudden, my monitor flashed - and I got a "Secure Boot Violation" error.
I thought it was strange, since I disabled Secure Boot, but anyways - progress! At least my box wasn't hard-bricked.. yet. I clicked the "OK" button, but the error popped up again. Clicked on OK again, and the same thing came up. Damn. Pressed OK a third time, and BAM, third time's the charm and now I'm in the BIOS! The version number: 1.05!
Now onto this Secure Boot thing - went thru the menus to see what's changed, and Secure Boot was now enabled, and the options to disable it was greyed out! WTF. I wasn't sure if this was a new "feature" as part of the update. I went thru all the BIOS options and couldn't find a way to enable the options. The changelog did mention that Pluton was now enabled, so maybe it had something to do with that. I decided to just reboot again and go back into the BIOS, and this time the Secure Boot options were changeable again! So I disabled it, managed to boot back into Arch, checked dmesg - everything's good, and we're back in business!
Fin.
If you've read thru and reached the bottom of this, thanks for tuning in.
TL;DR: Beware of Minisforum. If you really want to get one, buy from Amazon or some other retailer with a reliable ordering system, decent customer support and refund policy.
Um, that wasn't OP's story, it's an old copypasta from Reddit. https://old.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/9z7923/sr71_blackbird_copypasta/
Which was in turn derived from the book "Sled Driver: Flying the World's Fastest Jet" by Brian Shul.
Here's the Linux version of this:
This can be easily done using PowerShell, and rar.exe which is part of WinRAR. Just edit the first three variables below according to your needs and run the script. You don't even need to save it as a script, just copy-paste the code into a PowerShell window, you can use the arrow keys to edit the variables (or edit it using notepad if you like) and then press enter when you're ready to run the script.
$winrar = "C:\Program Files\WinRAR\Rar.exe"
$passlist = @("pass1", "pass2", "pass3", "pass4")
$folder = "C:\Path\To\Folder"
cd "$folder"
foreach($file in (dir *.rar).Name) { "Checking $file..."; foreach($pass in $passlist) { .$winrar t -p"$pass" "$file" *>$null ; if($LASTEXITCODE -eq 0){ " → Password for $file is $pass"; break }}""}
This would give you an output which looks like:
Checking file1.rar...
→ Password for file1.rar is pass1
Checking file2.rar...
→ Password for file2.rar is pass2
Checking file3.rar...
→ Password for file3.rar is pass3
If there's something you don't understand in the code above, lemme know - happy to explain further. :)
Good. Hopefully, at least some of these people realize that Reddit is a lost cause, and that their only option is to migrate to other sites.
Before y'all get excited, the press release doesn't actually mention the term "open source" anywhere.
This, to me, reads like it's going to be a "source available" model, perhaps released under some sort of a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). So, best to hold off any celebrations until we see the actual license.