Tips – Page 4 – Guy Rutenberg

Downgrade PipeWire 0.3.39 to 0.3.38

PipeWire 0.3.39 on Debian deprecates pipewire-media-session in favor of WirePlumber. The main issue I found with the new version is that it doesn’t support Bluetooth profile autoswitching, as it is unimplemented in WirePlumber. The best solution until this is resolved is simply holding back upgrading to 0.3.39. If you already upgraded, downgrading is a bit of hassle.

The first step is to retrieve all the necessary packages in the last working version, which is 0.3.38-2.

$ cd `mktemp -d`
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . gstreamer1.0-pipewire 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . libpipewire-0.3-0 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a all --binary -d . libpipewire-0.3-common 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . libpipewire-0.3-modules 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . pipewire-audio-client-libraries 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . pipewire-bin 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . pipewire-pulse 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . pipewire 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . pipewire-media-session 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . libspa-0.2-modules 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . libspa-0.2-bluetooth 0.3.38-2

Install all the retrieved packages and mark some of the packages back as automatically installed.

$ sudo apt install ./*.deb
$ sudo apt-mark auto gstreamer1.0-pipewire libpipewire-0.3-0 libpipewire-0.3-common libpipewire-0.3-modules pipewire-bin pipewire libspa-0.2-modules

Mark pipewire-media-session as held so it won’t get accidentally removed again.

$ sudo apt-mark hold pipewire-media-session

Finally, restart PipeWire.

$ systemctl --user daemon-reload
$ systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse

GPG doesn’t recognize Yubikey

Sometimes GPG stops recognizing my Yubikey. Usually restarting pcscd resolves it:

systemctl restart pcscd

Removing PulseAudio after migrating to PipeWire

After migrating to PipeWire you would want to fully remove PulseAudio. The problem is that certain packages, for example libcanberra-pulse, depend on pulseaudio even though they would work just as well if pipewire-pulse is installed. There are several relevant bugs to solve this issue, but meanwhile we could use equivs to generate a fake package that provides pulseaudio.

Copy the following file locally as pulseaudio-fake:

Section: misc
Priority: optional
Standards-Version: 3.9.2

Package: pulseaudio-fake
Provides: pulseaudio
Description: Fake pulseaudio package to satisfy depdendencies.
 This solves depdendencies for packages like libcanberra-pulse when actually using PipeWire instead of PulseAudio.

Build a package from it using equivs and install it:

$ equivs-build ./pulseaudio-fake
$ sudo apt install ./pulseaudio-fake_1.0_all.deb

Now you can safely remove pulseaudio.

GNOME 40 on Debian Unstable

These are the steps I took to install (most of) GNOME 40 Debian Unstable:

$ sudo apt install -t experimental gnome-shell gjs mutter gnome-control-center gnome-desktop3-data
$ sudo apt-mark auto gjs mutter

Failing to install gjs 1.68 from experimental will result in white or blue desktop backgrounds regardless of the wallpaper you choose. This bug was reported in Arch.

Most of GNOME 40 functionality should now work, including the updated activities overview.

What doesn’t work? Settings->About still display GNOME’s version as 3.38. I suspect it’s because gnome-session is still at 3.38.

Update 2021-08-24: I upgraded to gnome-session 40.1.1 and it didn’t solve the version string issue.

Update 2021-08-31: Following a comment by Jeremy, I installed gnome-desktop3-data from experimental and it fixed the version string issue.

[coc.nvim]: UnhandledRejection: Launching server “jedi” using command jedi-language-server failed.

Recently I switched over to coc.nvim, and when trying to edit a Python file, I encountered the following error:

[coc.nvim]: UnhandledRejection: Launching server "jedi" using command jedi-language-server failed.

The first problem turned out to be that while I had jedi installed, I didn’t install jedi-language-server. This can be done using:

pip install -u jedi-language-server

Next, coc.nvim couldn’t find the jedi-language-server executable, despite it being on my $PATH. The solution was to specifically define it in ~/.vim/coc-settings.json:

{
  "jedi.executable.command": "/home/guyru/.local/bin/jedi-language-server",
}

tmux <-> Wayland Clipboard integration

tmux 3.2 and above provides the copy-command option to set a command to pipe text to copy. You will also need wl-copy command from the wl-clipboard package. Add the following line to your ~/.tmux.conf:

set -s copy-command 'wl-copy'

As of writing this post, tmux-3.2 is only available in experimental, so you’ll need to install it from there:

$ sudo apt install -t experimental tmux

Session specific tmp folder

You can use bubblewrap to create isolated tmp directories accessible only for a specific shell.

$ bwrap --dev-bind / / --tmpfs /tmp $SHELL

This can be used for example to restrict access to sensitive files from outside process while being able to freely access them from a specific session.

Autostart rclone mount using systemd

Create the following file under ~/.config/systemd/user/rclone-dropbox.service:

	[Unit]
	Description=Dropbox (rclone)
	AssertPathIsDirectory=%h/Dropbox
	# Make sure we have network enabled
	After=network.target

	[Service]
	Type=simple

	ExecStart=/usr/bin/rclone mount --vfs-cache-mode full Dropbox: Dropbox

	# Perform lazy unmount
	ExecStop=/usr/bin/fusermount -zu %h/Dropbox

	# Restart the service whenever rclone exists with non-zero exit code
	Restart=on-failure
	RestartSec=15

	[Install]
	# Autostart after reboot
	WantedBy=default.target

view raw rclone-dropbox.service hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Reload the user services, enable and start the new service:

$ systemctl --user daemon-reload
$ systemctl --user enable --now rclone-dropbox

Import Subversion repositories to Git

Install the git-svn package:

sudo apt install git-svn

Create a file named authors.txt with a mapping between svn user names and git authors. For example:

guyru = Guy Rutenberg <guyrutenberg@gmail.com>

Do the actual import:

git svn clone --no-metadata --stdlayout--authors-file=authors.txt file:///path/to/svn/repo

The --no-metadata option will get rid of the git-svn-id: ... lines in the commit messages. It is useful in case you are doing a one-off import of svn repository to git. However, if you plan to repeatedly synchronize the svn to the git repo that option should be omitted.

The --stdlayout flag instructs git to assume the Subversion repository has a standard layout of trunk/tags/branches.

References:

git-svn manpage

Rename Debian packages according to version

This is a small bash utility function to allow renaming deb archives according to their version.

rename-deb () 
{ 
    base="${1%.deb}";
    version="$(dpkg-deb -f $1 Version)" || return 1;
    new="$base-$version.deb";
    mv -i "$1" "$new";
    echo "$1 -> $new"
}

You can either run it one time in your shell, or define it in your ~/.bash_aliases.

Example:

$ rename-deb zoom_amd64.deb
zoom_amd64.deb -> zoom_amd64-5.5.7011.0206.deb