Notes

You’ve obviously stumbled upon a link at the bottom of the page. While the notes I’ve recorded here may be useful to you in some way, they’re way more useful to me. Normally, I would just add them to a relevant article (and some articles already contain variations), but most of these notes are too short to add to anything.

More than anything, they’re ready reference notes I can fall back on when setting up different linux distributions.

Bluetooth

When I installed Linux Mint 21 on my mini PC, which has an Intel processor, Bluetooth didn’t work. Based on web references, I had to obtain the files named ibt-0040-1050.sfi and ibt-0040-1050.ddc from https://anduin.linuxfromscratch.org/sources/linux-firmware/intel/, and place them on my PC, in the /lib/firmware/intel directory. Bluetooth worked after I rebooted.

I didn’t have any issues when I installed Linux Mint 22.

MP3Gain

MP3Gain can be installed from Debian sources, using the APT package tool:

sudo apt install mp3gain

Once it’s installed, move into the directory where your mp3 files are stored and run this command in the terminal:

find . -name '*mp3' -exec mp3gain -r -k {} \;

I did this with over 2000 files. It reduced the volume in most of the files, and only raised it in a few. This is how normalization works.

Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi foundation doesn’t support the Cinnamon desktop environment. I installed Raspberry Pi OS Lite and then installed Cinnamon. Later, I installed xrdp on it so I could use Remmina to connect to it using RDP.

I found out that I could not connect to the default user on the Raspberry Pi until I edited /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf and replaced

# user-session = Session to load for users

with

user-session = Cinnamon

I was happy it worked, so I didn’t bother to check to see if it needed be capitalized or not.

Rsync

Rsync from directory to directory on the same computer:

rsync -a src/ dest

Rsync to another computer through SSH:

rsync -avzh -e ssh /home/localusername/directory/ [email protected]:/home/remoteusername/directory/ --delete

Trim

Trim, the fstrim command, won’t work on an external USB SSD without a change to the provisioning mode:

#!/bin/bash
if [ "cat /sys/block/sdb/device/scsi_disk/*/provisioning_mode" != "unmap" ] ; then
    echo unmap | tee /sys/block/sdb/device/scsi_disk/*/provisioning_mode
fi

I have the BASH script, in a file, called from a cronjob every hour on any distribution booting from an external USB SSD. The “sdb” in the first two lines must be changed to “sda” if booting from a USB SSD with no internal drive (like the Raspberry Pi).

Another method by Jeff Geerling.

Windows Product Key

The product key is in the firmware for most computers when Windows comes preinstalled. To obtain the key, run this:

sudo cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM

If that doesn’t work, and you don’t have a sticker or certificate with the product key on it, you have to contact the company that sold it to you. That’s what I had to do with my mini PC so that I could activate Windows in a virtual machine.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay