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Linux

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS issues with apparmor, bwrap and an intermediate solution

Upgraded to 24.04 on a whimp, but realized that it caused multiple issues with applications not launching. Could have been patient and waited for updates, but the deal breaker was that my email client Geary, Chrome and Microsoft-edge wouldn’t launch. Not to mention my self compiled gnome-calendar and a host of other apps.

This effectively meant that i couldn’t do any work. It seems that something changed and bwrap, together with apparmor was causing issues – (you can see this in the syslog). It was just too many things to fix and i needed to get my system back on quick.

This is the snipped that got everything working again. put it into the sysctl.conf file to make it persistent. Not ideal, but it works until Ubuntu gets it act together to update its hardening policies without breaking every application out there.

sudo sysctl kernel.apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns=0

Until there is a proper fix… get back out there and start working…..

General, Linux, Personal

My strategy to backing up my media

This is not a post on how to choose a NAS box. This is also not a post to provide a step-by-step guide on how to configure one. This is also not a post on how to do enterprise backups, while some concepts apply, i’d say that this is mainly for personal backups.

This is a post to share the choices that i made to create a back up plan for my media such that i minimize the risk of losing the media that has been accumulated throughout my PERSONAL life. Some of these are irreplaceable memories of phases, experiences that are usually nostalgic and you definitely don’t want to lose them.

[This post was inspired by a conversation that i had with a retiring colleague/friend who just ventured to purchase a Synology NAS, with the goal of backing up his photos from his upcoming travels and perhaps to catalog them. As we chatted, i realized that i am repeating the comments, recommendations that was provided, to many people, many times over the years.

My choices has served me well all this while and has been running the same way for almost 10 years. I have not had major issues and failures, even though some outages has induced panic for a while, it has always been recoverable.

I hope that by sharing my backup strategies and rationale here, it will help someone in the future.]

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General, Linux, Personal

Re-enabling the Kindle Screensaver Hack on an Ad-Supported PW3

I recently jailbroken/rooted the Kindle PW3 to enable an entire host of capabilities. But for some reason, i decided to register my PW3 to amazon and i found that the Kindle Screensaver hack no longer worked! Putting the device to sleep only resulted in an annoying ad that forced me to the Kindle store. Maybe because i live in a non-ad supported country and have an ad supported kindle.

Searching the web seems to suggest that there was no way to revert this, or maybe, i just couldn’t find any related post.

As i was desperate to keep the “Last” view on screen with the screensaver hack, i started digging into the system. The biggest hint was that this issue arose only AFTER i registered my kindle to amazon. There is a way to fix this! To get into it. I assume that you have the following:-

  1. A Jailbroken Kindle
  2. KUAL
  3. USBNetwork or kterm
  4. linkss and its related python packages

If you have no idea what the above is, then this process is not for you. But if you do, please proceed.

TLDR; Remove the directory /var/local/adunits to revert to pre-registration state!

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