I have bind mounts configured in my /etc/fstab. The source (i.e. where the files physically exist) is on a removable USB drive.

Right now it works but I have to mount/unmount everything individually when I plug/unplug the drive. I would like to be able to have the bind mounts follow the state of of the USB drive automatically.

Is there a way?

Edit here is relevant section of fstab:

/dev/mapper/external-crypt	/mount/external		auto	nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-systemd.device-timeout=5	0 0
/mount/external/realfolder	/home/user/folder	none	bind,nofail	0 0

So when I run sudo mount "/mount/external" I want sudo mount /home/user/folder to be implied; likewise for umount.

I having a hard time updating my arch-based computer because the downloads are so painfully slow. It takes hours and hours. Eventually some kind of error happens and Ive already left my computer to do something else so the task times out. Or download stalls to nothing and the process kills itself.

I have already adjusted the settings in yay to be more tolerant of slow connection, but can hardly ever manage to complete the upgrade. And the longer you wait, the more updates there are.

Does anyone else have this issue? I don't have a great connection but this is ridiculous. I do have a VPN running on router. This could be affecting it as github in particular seems to make downloads a slow trickle on certain VPN endpoints but lately I can't find any that satisfy it.

I start at least 1 upgrade task every day, sometimes multiple attempts but I have only had 1 successful full system upgrade in the past 2 or 3 weeks.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/56895639

My friend who uses google wants to share their calendar (read-only). I don't use google. How can they do that?

My friend who uses google wants to share their calendar (read-only). I don't use google. How can they do that?

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.

Title is TLDR. More info about what I'm trying to do below.

My daily driver computer is Laptop with an SSD. No possibility to expand.

So for storage of lots n lots of files, I have an old, low resource Desktop with a bunch of HDDs plugged in (mostly via USB).

I can access Desktop files via SSH/SFTP on the LAN. But it can be quite slow.

And sometimes (not too often; this isn't a main requirement) I take Laptop to use elsewhere. I do not plan to make Desktop available outside the network so I need to have a copy of required files on Laptop.

Therefor, sometimes I like to move the remote files from Desktop to Laptop to work on them. To make a sort of local cache. This could be individual files or directory trees.

But then I have a mess of duplication. Sometimes I forget to put the files back.

Seems like Laptop could be a lot more clever than I am and help with this. Like could it always fetch a remote file which is being edited and save it locally?

Is there any way to have Laptop fetch files, information about file trees, etc, located on Desktop when needed and smartly put them back after editing?

Or even keep some stuff around. Like lists of files, attributes, thumbnails etc. Even browsing the directory tree on Desktop can be slow sometimes.

I am not sure what this would be called.

Ideas and tools I am already comfortable with:

• rsync is the most obvious foundation to work from but I am not sure exactly what would be the best configuration and how to manage it.

• luckybackup is my favorite rsync GUI front end; it lets you save profiles, jobs etc which is sweet

• freeFileSync is another GUI front end I've used but I am preferring lucky/rsync these days

• I don't think git is a viable solution here because there are already git directories included, there are many non-text files, and some of the directory trees are so large that they would cause git to choke looking at all the files.

• syncthing might work. I've been having issues with it lately but I may have gotten these ironed out.

Something a little more transparent than the above would be cool but I am not sure if that exists?

Any help appreciated even just idea on what to web search for because I am stumped even on that.

For a given device, sometimes one linux distro perfectly supports a hardware component. Then if I switch distros, the same component no longer functions at all, or is very buggy.

How do I find out what the difference is?