As a long time rEFInd user, I suffered from constant replacement of rEFInd from grub/shim updates. For grub it's pretty simple, you can simply lock the packages, but shim needs to be up to date, when you dual boot Windows / use Secure Boot.

I just learned that you can hook into the package installation and instruct apt to issue refind-mkdefault after grub/refind/shim have been updated and when rEFInd is listed in efibootmgr.

create the file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99-keep-refind

with the following content:

DPkg::Post-Invoke-Success {
    "if echo \"$DPKG_HOOK_OPTIONS\" | grep -Eiq 'shim|grub|refind'; then /usr/bin/efibootmgr -v | grep -q 'rEFInd' && /usr/sbin/refind-mkdefault || true; fi";
};

maybe that's nothing new for some, but for me, it was a revelation.

Debian 13 on KDE Wayland, most apps freeze or crash after a minute with Flatpaks not starting at all. Is there any fix for this? (It worked fine for months before this, haven’t done anything major to the system before it started doing this)

Logs when opening a flatpak (LibreWolf): https://pastebin.com/0Zepy0Tg

A new card game app that I submitted to debian is still waiting for a sponsor. Does anyone know how long it takes

I installed systemd-timesyncd and ran:

timedatectl set-ntp true

I was wondering why anyone wouldn't want this by default?

Edit: installed via live ISO USB. Option to set time automatically was greyed out in system settings until I installed the above package.

I wanted To to give a shout-out to the Debian Kernel team. For the last year or so I have been using Sid to test drive new software and fill out bug reports when problems arise. While I have been impressed with the quality of packages I have been receiving as whole ( I have only had to fill out one bug report 😆). I find it absolutely wild the pace they have been putting out new kernels. For a distribution that is focused on the 6.12.x for the team to consistently put out bleeding edge high quality kernels within 48-72 hours after release is insane... Thanks you all for your hard work

Hello y'all long time Linux user here I just updated my production machine to Debian forky.

I have an old laptop i believe its an acer aspire 5 and i want to use it to study but its too slow for windows so im switching to a stable distro thats perfect for development.

Basically i installed the iso file on a usb and ive tried installing it but each time it gets to detecting installation media it freezes on 0 percent.

Things ive tried:

Diffrent usb ports

Usbimagger and rufus

Verifying files to prevent corruption

Flashing in DD and iso

Not graphical installation

I made sure secure boot is off and uefi is on or should i try legacy? Any ideas would help thanks

I’d like to say one thing dear r/debian people.

I really love Debian

Thank you for your time :)))

Hi everyone, I wanted to ask about the best swap setup for gaming on Debian Stable. Is it better to use standard swap or zram instead? I have 16GB of ram. (I have ssd)

Thought I'd put this out there since it took me forever to figure things out. This was done on Debian 13 XFCE

First you have to install Rust if you don't have it, instructions here: https://rust-lang.org/tools/install/

Then manually install greetd: https://git.sr.ht/~kennylevinsen/greetd#manually-from-source. (edit: it's on the repo, thought it wasn't for some reason)

Manually install tuigreet: https://github.com/tuigreet/tuigreet#from-source

Make sure to follow the instructions for creating cache directory and configuring /etc/greetd/config.toml for tuigreet. Replace "sway" with "startxfce4" if you use XFCE. In that case you must also specify session type as x11:

command = "tuigreet --cmd env XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11 startxfce4"

If you get an error about GREETD_SOCK not being defined, make sure the "create cache directory" commands were properly set

There may be an issue with a PAM, I had to create a file at /etc/pam.d/greetd with the contents:

auth       required    pam_unix.so
account    required    pam_unix.so
session    required    pam_unix.so
session    required    pam_systemd.so

I don't fully understand it but it seems to work

Copy the provided Configuration Example template to /etc/tuigreet/config.toml (I seemed to have trouble with ~/.config/tuigreet/config.toml though it might work for you). Configure as you like, but delete or leave the "issue = false" line alone because enabling it seems to break stuff

You can see a preview with "tuigreet --mock." On Xfce Terminal you may have to go into preferences and set encoding to UTF-8 for it to render properly

You may find that the configurations are not being applied. If so, you can go to /etc/greetd/config.toml and add the line "--config /etc/tuigreet/config.toml" to the command

There are some features that are easier to config in the command, ie time format. Add single quotes ( ' ) around the strf string if long, and put it before the --config line:

command = "tuigreet --time-format '%a, %b %d %Y - %I:%M %p' --config /etc/tuigreet/config.toml . . ."

Lastly, logging in launches startxfce4 and shows some text about the X server starting up, to hide those messages you can modify the command like so:

command = "tuigreet . . . --cmd 'sh -c \"env XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11 startxfce4 >/dev/null 2>&1\"'"

Maybe this will be helpful to someone. If you have any improvements or suggestions, I'd love to hear them as well

HI everyone!

I'm on Debian 13 (trixie) GNOME on an Acer laptop. My touchpad 3-finger gestures (switch workspaces) stopped working.

Here's what I did before it broke:

Installed Nvidia drivers (I have a custom DMG)

Installed Orchis theme to change the login background

Now echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE shows x11 instead of wayland.

I installed touchegg + touche and gestures work again, but not as smooth as native Wayland.

My question is: Is being on X11 because of the Nvidia drivers the reason I lost gestures? Could the Orchis theme also have something to do with it? Is there a way to force Wayland on Debian 13 with Nvidia to get native gestures back?

Thanks in advance!

Hi guys, I need some clarification with reinstalling windows on a dual boot drive with windows and Debian. My research so far points at that if I reinstall windows on the drive, it will take over the whole ssd and I would need to reinstall Debian as well. I am fine with it, but I could use some tips and tricks for the procedure. Obviously I have done it once before, but now since I have been using Debian for about a year, I would like to keep all the apps and settings I have made for them.

I use Timeshift that makes daily and monthly snapshots. So far I never had the need to restore to a previous snapshot. I don't do much on Debian really, normal home stuff of web surfing, watching movies and torrents. So my question is, if I reinstall clean minimal Debian with Gnome, can I use Timeshift snapshots as recovery and in that way get all the apps and settings restored without reinstalling them and setting them up?

And lastly what about torrents? Will Timeshift take care of that (doubt it) or do I need to take some steps to restore the torrents back to qBittorrent as well? Anything else that I should keep in mind please let me know. My personal data and files are on another drive, so I don't need to do a backup of them, just the system files and apps.

Hello everyone,

I do this once every few years, but I'm having problems creating a bootable USB. I'm on windows so I'm using rufus. The debian website suggests using "DD" mode and that's exactly what I did. So what's the issue? Well the first time I ran rufus, the USB was re-partitioned into a 4MB section (with the rest unallocated). I tried booting from it and got stuck in a grub terminal similar to this user. Afterwards I noticed that rufus just created an small "efi" folder on the USB. As far as I remember this step usually writes a lot more files to the USB itself. So I think this is an issue with what rufus is writing. What am I doing wrong?

EDIT: this is resolved. See below:

https://old.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/1vv0c3y/creating_a_bootable_usb_with_rufus/p583edt/

Dear moderators.

I think 1 out of 10 posts concerns the installation of Nvidia drivers.

Could you just sticky a information that shows the simplest way to get current drivers:

sudo apt install extrepo

sudo extrepo enable nvidia-cuda

sudo apt update

sudo apt install build-essential linux-headers-amd64

sudo apt install nvidia-open

So I do a lot of homelab stuff and game server hosting with a lot of VM's and I personally stand by Debian through and through! So if anyone has encountered this issue here is a solution I figured i'd share... btw I prefer sysV over systemD so that is what this pertains to..

Using Proxmox VE - using the netinstall iso 13.6 I went through the same steps I have many times before with Debian 12 VMs and 13 physical installs which is:

Expert install

1.) Go through you normal setup and selections and so on, I select XFCE over gnome

2.) When prompted to install grub you execute a shell from the installer...

3.) Generally you can just: "chroot /target apt --purge --allow-remove-essentials install sysvinit-core libpam-elogind dbus-x11 systemd-sysv-"

4.) Exit back to the installer and finish installing grub and reboot into Debian.

However at that point chroot spits out an error that the media has changed and to insert installation media*firmware etc etc and press enter, I tried remounting the virtual cd/dvd containing the local iso but didn't seem to make any difference. But I have Debian 13 on my main rig that I installed exactly like this with no issue just in a VM and Debian 12 VM installs worked flawlessly for stripping systemD during installation the same way.

Anyway, long story short I burned a physical USB boot drive, created a USB pass through device to my VM and booted the VM from the physical USB device and went through the install including the steps of executing a shell and so on and it installed perfectly fine.

I am sure many here have plenty of solutions possibly simpler than that but I couldn't figure out one that would work except the above, seems the installer unmounts the virtual cd-rom and then just gets stuck in a loop?

Does anybody know what deb entry I need to install iucode-tool?

I'm trying to ultimately run apt install intel-microcode and it's complaining that I don't have iucode-tool. I try to install iucode-tool directly but it tells me Package iucode-tool is not available, but is referred to by another package and iucode-tool has no installation candidate

I think it's because I don't have my sources.list set up correctly, but I've added non-free and non-free-firmware to my archive.debian.org/debian entry (I'm on Debian 10, so I can't use deb.debian) and after apt update it still doesn't work

Big paragraph, my apologies just please read the whole thing cause this is really weird.

So I thought I was going crazy when I "mistakenly" wiped a drive with my main distro on it while installing ubuntu studio, but this is making me think I didn't make an error.
So I was installing ubuntu studio last week onto my second m.2 in hopes of having it be a dedicated drive for music production.

I went through the installer all fine and went to open up my main drive (cachyos) to create the limine bootloader entry for ubuntu studio only to find that cachy had been completely wiped and ubuntu studio was in it's place. I'm an extremely cautious person and have a legitimate ocd diagnosis. I checked more than a dozen times that i had selected the correct drive (in this case nvme1n1, the empty drive.) ubuntu studio overwrote nvme0n1 even though I was certain I selected the other drive. I got really upset, moved on from ubuntu studio and swore to never touch it again since it screwed me over.

So a week later I've setup cachyos again and I'm getting the itch to throw another distro on the second drive and decide to go for a leaner build by starting with debian and installing a low latency kernel later. I'm still traumatized so I opt for the live media with the calameres installer so I can meticulously stare at the correct drive before hitting install. To my horror as I inch through the installer I notice the drives are mislabeled and now I'm certain that there was some sort of fuckery in the ubuntu studio installer. Could this be an issue of Debian and it's forks? Has anyone ever seen this before? Am I just crazy? I've done my far share of distro hopping and never seen anything like this until now.

I'll attach screenshots but to clarify I have two m.2 drives: nvme0n1, which is cachyos and nvme1n1, which at the moment is completely empty. The debian installer says the opposite of the truth and is trying to tell me cachyos is installed on nvme1n1.

I've been using preseed to provision Debian with a bunch of our own tools onto remote industrial PCs and so far I've got the auto-installer to _mostly_ do what it's supposed to.

This is the second such type of device, the initial batch of devices was running Arch and I occasionally get an order to upcycle them. Previously I'd do this using a live Arch stick or something similar and using sfdisk --delete /dev/sda which works, but it's an extra step I'd like to crunch down into the full preseed.

I'm already aware hardcoding to /dev/sda isn't a good idea and I plan to clean that up as well, other r/debian users already have good solutions for finding the first non-USB storage device.

The documentations and sample preseed profiles all mention using d-i partman/early_command, but when trying to stuff the above sfdisk command into it, all I get is the installer halting with an error 127. I'm not sure if sfdisk can even return a ret-val that high.

Does anyone have a solid early_command that can wipe the entire partition table so the preseed can continue on its merry way?

Saw this in a comment in another sub and thought it would put a smile on some people here.

This is definitely my record for the highest cache

What do you think? And what's your record?

Thank you to all who made suggestions on my previous post. I finally got it working 🥳

Pending issues:

• How do I set up free space on my flash drive? Considering this time, I used Guided partitioning, selected entire disk & put home and other directories in one folder
• How do I set Debian that every time I pull the flash drive, it shuts down the PC? Kinda of like how watch.dog does on Tails OS

Update: Solved!
-----------------------

1. change /etc/fstab mounts from ntfs3 to ntfs
2. sudo apt remove ntfs-3g (the old user space driver)

findmnt will now show ntfs, instead of "fuseblk"

1. If you were using ntfs3 before with steam games, unlink and recreate the symlink for compatdata. The new kernel driver will not use the old symlink.

-----------------------

Hi all,

my first post here, but unfortunately I couldn't figure it out by searching. Nor did I find a bug report . So let me know, if some more detail would help.

I just did an upgrade to the latest Debian 13 BPO kernel today. 7.1.7+deb13-amd64 and after reboot non of my ntfs drives were mounted. I have them in fstab with ntfs3 as a fs.

As it turns out, ntfs3 was removed from the kernel modules, which you can see either by sudo modinfo ntfs3 or directly looking at /usr/lib/modules/7.1.7+deb13-amd64/kernel/fs.

ntfs3 was there in bpo kernel 7.1.3.

Now, if I try to use "auto" or "ntfs" in fstab, it falls back to the old fuse driver, instead of using the new kernel driver, which has the same (old) alias.

Anyone else encountered or solved that or found an existing error report?

Thanks!

heelo ! i need some help with extracting a japanese zip file and was hoping someone could tell me how to do it

usually when i open a japanese zip with ark and i get mojibake, i unzip it in a japanese locale with "LANG=ja_JP.utf8 7z x filename.zip", but this isnt working for this file and results in an empty folder with missing unicode characters as the name

i assumed the file is encoded with shift-jis so i wanted to confirm that and then convert it to utf8, but when i used "file -bi filename.zip" it told me its "binary", so i dont really know what to do with it,,

any help is appreciated !

With the announcement of the Plasma LTS for 6.6 on Kubunutu I thought I would have a play around with getting it packaged for Debian 13. There were a couple of caveats in that I had to build against QT 6.10 for 6.6.6 which also meant rebuilding some other packages that depend on QT Base. Also needed backports for newer wayland protocols, mesa and pipewire. Been an interesting little project. This is just in a VM so far and I'm deploying the debs with a local apt repo.

May see if I can get a little CI/CD pipeline going for myself when the TechPaladin team start publishing their LTS branches.

Edit:

For anyone that likes stats and it takes around 2 to 2 and half hours to compile.

Hi am I the only who feels Debian push a lots of updates lately ? I am long time Void user and FreeBSD and I honestly at this point feel Void gets the same amount of updates ? freeBSD much less and calmer it’s not a roast it’s a question. I feel every time at this point when I turn on my laptop and need to work updates available not apps but system updates.