An engineer's life around Kyoto

Recently, the 11th point release of Debian 11 has been announced, and it will be the last one. For I am still maintaining one Debian 11 machine, I am starting to prepare its upgrade to Debian 12. Because it is a dual boot machine, I must not forget about the change of grub OS probing. Before I ugrade, I have to add  GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false to / etc/default/grub,  or I lose grub menu for Windows OS.  Another thing that impacts me is the change of gnome-text-editor. In Debian 11, gnome-text-editor is a kind of alias of gedit controlled under the Debian alternative system with update-alternatives command. On the other hand, a new package gnome-text-editor appears in Debian 12, and it is a different thing from gedit. For I am an uim user, I was confused when I tried to use launch a Japanese input method via uim on gnome-text-editor in Debian 12, for it wouldn't work as in Debian 11. Yes, these two things are important reminder to me.

 Back in 1990's, it was common practice to share one home directory between many UNIX servers using NFS. But it is not in these days. But I have become to want to share my home directory between two different Linux machines: One is  a Debian GNU/Linux installed as a primary OS of a dual boot machine,  and the other is a virtualized Linux box within the Virtualbox running under the Windows 10, a secondary OS of the dual-boot. They have different display resolutions and pointing devices. These differences led me to an annoying problem: if you open GNOME desktop environment, display and pointing device setting became broken. Today's GNOME desktop environment stores most of the settings to the files under $HOME/.config directory. But if you share $HOME/.config between two machines, the stored configuration for a particular machine may become incompatible with other machines with different display resolutions and pointing devices. Indeed, my GNOME desktop has become unusable. ...

A couple of months ago, I installed Microsoft Teams app in my Debian buster machine for a online meeting. The application worked fine, but it always started up automatically when launching the GNOME desktop environment. The behavior is quite annoying for me, because it take quite long time for the desktop to be ready for my normal use with the machine being rather old and its storage is HDD. But I couldn't find the settings or properties within the gnome-control-center setting items.  Today I find another way to stop automatic launch of the Teams app. Applying the patch below to the ~/.config/autostart/teams.desktop file would work fine: 12c12 < X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false --- > X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true Thanks to those blogs and articles: Gnome Desktop Entry Format extensions - bootlegged documentation ArchWiki 自動起動

 On December 6, Debian 11 installer alpha 3 has been released. As I wanted to install Debian to my new laptop machine Panasonic CF-SV9, I tried it. The result: fine. Debian 11's Gnome desktop environment is running on my new machine now. I am keeping pre-isntalled Windows 10 pro, and the machine is  Windows and Linux dual booting machine. The installer seems matured, inspite of its version name. But there is one drawback remaining. The circular pad built-in is not working correctly inspite of xorg synaptics input device settings written in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. It may be caused that the graphic is now under control of wayland, in place of  Xorg server in my buster machine. If you want to follow me, please take care of Windows 10's  BitLocker. It will demand recovery key after your installation of Debian. Take some backups of the recovery key before hand.