13 August 2024
I bought a very small laptop to use with radio work in the field, and the screen resolution is a bit small (1366x768). Pair the small display with current desktop environments' tendency toward chunky, touch-friendly interfaces, and it doesn’t allow one to cram much on the screen.
My desktop environment is Gnome, so I slimmed it down with some stylesheets:
headerbar {
margin: 0 1em 0 1em;
padding-top: 0;
padding-bottom: 0;
border-width: 0px;
font-size: 12pt;
min-height: 0px;
}
headerbar * {
margin: 0;
padding-top: 0;
padding-bottom: 0;
border-radius: 0;
border-width: 0px;
min-height: 0px;
}
headerbar box {
padding: 0.1em 0.5em 0.1em 0.5em;
}
WSJT-X is a QT app, so I scaled the fonts there to make everything fit better by setting the DPI in a launch script:
#!/bin/sh export QT_FONT_DPI=75 /usr/bin/wsjtx
26 April 2022
I had previously flailed around trying to fix occasional WiFi drops on my Pop_OS(Ubuntu) laptop. The intermittency made it hard to know if I really fixed it or not, and it turns out I hadn’t.
I installed Arch Linux on another computer here on my desk. While it sat around idle, I found it one day having lost its internet connection just like the Pop_OS machine does!
Now I knew this problem with the network connection wasn’t isolated to one machine. To recap:
the wired connection is fine
the Mac on the wireless network is fine
the mobile devices are fine
the 2 linux machines drop their connections every couple days
I started the search again for a solution with more information. I found some hints about power-saving options in NetworkManager.
On the Pop_OS machine,
there’s a configuration file,
/etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf,
that I changed to disable powersaving:
[connection] # 0: default, 1: leave untouched, 2: disable, 3: enable wifi.powersave = 2
I had to add a file to the Arch machine in the same location to hold this configuration. Now these machines have been maintaining their connections for days.
12 July 2021
Upon the release of Pop OS 20.10, my System76 laptop and my Arris router started having some disagreements. The laptop would drop connection every couple hours and not reconnect itself. I’d see the little question mark in the WIFI indicator, and I needed to manually turn WIFI off and back on to restore the connection.
I found mentions of this behavior in Ubuntu and in Pop OS forums, and supposedly newer NetworkManager from Gnome would fix it, so I suffered and waited for the beta of Pop OS 21.04 to be available. That didn’t fix it, so I started digging around some more in System76’s page for Troubleshooting Wireless.
I picked my way through the tips and applied some of them. Disabling band steering in the router finally seems to have fixed the problem. I’ve kept my WIFI connection up and running for days now. I didn’t need to name the 5GHz and 2.4GHz networks differently.
19 April 2021
I have a desktop server running Debian Unstable in the house, and I occasionally reboot it without logging back into the local desktop session. If I don’t login, I’d later find the machine mysteriously inaccessible — asleep. It’s set to never sleep, but that’s when I’m logged in.
To disable sleep in the GDM3 Greeter,
I edited the /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults,
found the "Automatic suspend"/[org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/power]
section and followed the comments to add:
sleep-inactive-ac-timeout=0
Now the machine will act a little more like it’s a server.