I find Firefox Translator doesn't pick up a lot of pages. The location bar button doesn't appear.

It works if I access via the hamburger menu. It is very slow to have to go via the menu for each individual page. I find no shortcut key or anything.

Sometimes this will correctly guess the original language but often not. It is saying pages are English even when they have little to no english, even using different alphabets.

Is there something the website admins can do to tell firefox what language it is? Encoding? Meta tag?

Can I force the location-bar translate button to persist on all pages regardless of what language it thinks the page is in? Then I could save going through the menu.

Here is an example: https://cn.chinadaily.com.cn/

I have a lowend netbook with debian-type linux only (no dualboot). Power management should be via XFCE4's xfce4-power-manager-settings.

I'm having weird behavior with suspend and trying to identify/troubleshoot it. It seems to be usually draining power and never charging when the lid is closed for many hours.

I tried explicitly entering power off, hibernate and suspend followed by unplugging then leaving it a few hours but couldn't replicate. It seems to be doing something on its own after being unplugged a long time.

What logs can I look at to see when my device changes its power modes, what were the triggers, what settings are governing it etc?

I can't tell if it's a software issue or there is some sort of power saving thing going on in the hardware or what.

Just hoping for some investigation tips here, I know its not enough info to solve.

Edit to clarify no dual boot.

I want to move a directory with a bunch of subdirectories and files. But I have the feeling there might be some symlinks to a few of them elsewhere on the file system. (As in the directory contains the targets of symlinks.)

How do I search all files for symlinks pointing to them?

Some combination of find, stat, ls, realpath, readlink and maybe xargs? I can't quite figure it out.

I have 2 directories which both have stuff in them:

• /home/user/folderApple

• /mnt/drive/folderBanana

I want to mount folderBanana onto folderApple like this:

sudo mount --bind "/mnt/drive/folderBanana" "/home/user/folderApple"

But I still want to be able to access the contents of folderApple while this is activated. From what I am reading, binding the original directory to a new location should make it available, like this:

mkdir "/home/user/folderApple-original"
sudo mount --bind  "/home/user/folderApple" "/home/user/folderApple-original"

But this just binds /mnt/drive/folderBanana to /home/user/folderApple-original as well. I tried reversing the order and result is the same.

How do I tell mount to look for the underlying directory?

I am happy to use symlinks or something else if it'll reliably get the job done, I am not wedded to this mechanism.

(The purpose of all this is that when an external drive is connected, I can have the storage conveniently available, but when it is not connected, the system will fallback to internal storage. But then I will want to move files between the fallback and external locations when both are available. So I need to see both locations at once.)

Is there anyway to pass terminal colors through a pipe?

As a simple example, ls -l --color=always | grep ii.

When you just run the ls -l --color=always part alone, you get the filenames color coded. But adding grep ii removes the color coding and just has the grep match highlighting.

Screenshot of both examples:

In the above example I would want ii.mp3 and ii.png filenames to retain the cyan and magenta highlighting, respectively. With or without the grep match highlighting.

Question is not specific to ls or grep.

If this is possible, is there a correct term/name for it? I am unable to locate anything.

Once again I try to get a handle of my various dotfiles and configs. This time I take another stab at gnu stow as it is often recommended. I do not understand it.

Here's how I understand it: I'm supposed to manually move all my files into a new directory where the original are. So for ~ I make like this:

~
  - dotfiles
      - bash
         dot-bashrc
         dot-bash_profile
      - xdg
            - dot-config
                user-dirs.dirs
      - tealdeer
            - dot-config
                - tealdeer
                       config.toml

then cd ~/dotfiles && stow --dotfiles .

Then (if I very carefully created each directory tree) it will symlink those files back to where they came from like this:

~
  .bashrc
  .bash_profile
   - .config
        user-dirs.dirs
      - tealdeer
          config.toml

I don't really understand what this application is doing because setting up the dotfiles directory is a lot more work than making symlinks afterwards. Every instructions tells me to make up this directory structure by hand but that seems to tedious with so many configs; isn't there some kind of automation to it?

Once the symlinks are created then what?

• Tutorials don't really mention it but the actual manual gives me the impression this is a packager manager in some way and that's confusing. Lots of stuff about compiling

• I see about how to combine it with git. Tried git-oriented dotfile systems before and they just aren't practical for me. And again I don't see what stow contributing; git would be doing all the work there.

• Is there anything here about sharing configs between non-identical devices? Not everything can be copy/pasted exactly. Are you supposed to be making git branches or something?

The manual is not gentle enough to learn from scratch. OTOH there are very very short tutorials which offer little information.

I feel that I'm really missing the magic that's obvious to everyone else.

Does anyone else find javascript/electron-based code editors confusing? I can never understand the organization/hierarchies of menus, buttons, windows, tabs. All my time is spent hunting through the interface. My kingdom for a normal dialogue box!

I've tried and failed to use VSCodium on a bunch of occasions for this reason. And a couple other ones. It's like the UI got left in the InstaPot waaaay too long and now it's just a soggy stewy mess.

Today I finally thought I'd take the first step toward android development. Completing a very simple hello world tutorial is proving to be challenging just because the window I see doesn't precisely correspond to the screenshots. Trying to find the buttons/menus/tools is very slow as I am constantly getting lost. I only ever have this in applications with javascript-based UIs

Questions:

1. Am I the only one who faces this challenge?

2. Do I have to use Android Studio or it there some kind of native linux alternative?

edited to reflect correction that Android Studio is not electron

I just noticed that eza can now display total disk space used by directories!

I think this is pretty cool. I wanted it for a long time.

There are other ways to get the information of course. But having it integrated with all the other options for listing directories is fab. eza has features like --git-awareness, --tree display, clickable --hyperlink, filetype --icons and other display, permissions, dates, ownerships, and other stuff. being able to mash everything together in any arbitrary way which is useful is handy. And of course you can --sort=size

docs:

  --total-size               show the size of a directory as the size of all
                             files and directories inside (unix only)

It also (optionally) color codes the information. Values measures in kb, mb, and gb are clear. Here is a screenshot to show that:

eza --long -h --total-size --sort=oldest --no-permissions --no-user

Of course it take a little while to load large directories so you will not want to use by default.

Looks like it was first implemented Oct 2023 with some fixes since then. (Changelog). PR #533 - feat: added recursive directory parser with `--total-size` flag by Xemptuous

Question: Is there any auto-correct that works globally in all (or at least, many) applications? Particularly non-terminal. So for example firefox (like this text box I'm typing into), chat, text editors, word processors etc?

Example: I often type "teh" when I meant "the". I would like to have that change automagically.

I'm sure somewhere in my life (not in linux

maybe on mac?) I had the ability to right click on a red-underlined misspelled word in any application and select "always change this fix this to.." and then it would.

Autokey is the only close suggestion I can find. But I guess you have to tell it about every single replacement through the configuration? Are there any pre-made configurations of common misspellings?

How is the performance if you end up with dozens, hundreds, of phrases for it to look out for?

Not looking for: a code linter, command line corrections or grammerly which are the suggestions I have found when searching.

I have a multiple user linux system. Well actually a couple of them. They are running different distros which are arch-based, debian-based and fedora-based.

I want to globally use non-executable components not available via my system's package manager. Such as themes, icons, cursors, wallpapers and sounds.

Some of them are my own original work that I manage in git repos. Others are downloaded as packages/collections. If there is a git repo available I prefer to clone because it can theoretically be updated by pulling. And sometimes I make my own forks or branches of other people's work. So it's really a mix.

I want to keep these in a totally separate area where no package manager will go. So that it is portable and can be backed up / copied between systems without confusion. Which is why I don't want to use /usr/local.

I also want to be able to add/edit in this area without su to root. So that I can easily modify or add items which then can be accessed by all users. Also a reason to avoid /usr/local

I tried making a directory like /home/shared/themes then symlinking ~/.themes in different users to that. It sometimes worked OK but I ran into permissions issues. Git really didn't seem to like sharing repos between users. I can live with only using a single user to edit the repos but it didn't like having permissions recursively changed to even allow access.

Is there a way to tell linux to look in a custom location for these resources for every user on the system? I also still want it to look in the normal places so I can use the package managers when possible.

fonts - once solved

On one install, I found a way to add a system-wide custom font directory though I am not able to recall how that was done. I believe it had to do with xorg or x11 config files. I can't seem to find in my shell histories how it was done but I will look some more. I do recall the method was highly specific to fonts and didn't appear to be transferable to other resources.

I accidentally removed a xubuntu live usb from the computer while it was running but it seems to be working just fine. I can even launch applications that werent already open.

Is that expected? I have always thought you need to be careful to avoid bumping the usb drive or otherwise disturbing it.

Where is everything being stored? In RAM? Is the whole contents of the usb copied into RAM or just some parts?

Edit: tried it with manjaro and it fell apart. All kinds of never before seen errors. Replacing the usb didnt fix it. Couldnt even shut down the machine, had to hard power off.

I've been using manjaro for a couple of years and I really like it. especially the wide variety of packages available. Recently been using yay to find/install.

I prefer to run FLOSS packages when they are available. But I do not find a convenient way to preferentially seek these out. Even to know what licenses apply without individually researching each specific package.

It does not seem to be possible to search, filter or sort based on license in the web interface for packagegs or AUR. I do not find anything about it in man pacman(8) or man yay(8).

The only way I have found to find license info from the terminal is using expac. You can use %L to display the license. I guess you could combine this in a search to filter, similar to some of the examples listed on pacman/Tips and tricks - ArchWiki. But I haven't quite got it to work.

This seems like something other people would want but I don't find any available solution for it. Am I missing something? Or is it something with the arch-based distros?