WirelessMoves – My Thoughts on the Evolution of Wireless, FOSS and the Past, Present and Future of Computing

A Debian 13 VM with 300 MB RAM

Virtual machine RAM use with Debian 13 and Wireguard running in a Docker container.

Back in 2022 I upgraded most of my virtual machines to Ubuntu 22.04. As I had quite a number of VMs that only ran a single program, I ran them with 512 MB of RAM. The bad surprise: Ubuntu 22.04 significantly increased the RAM requirement out of the box, so the VMs wouldn’t even boot anymore after upgrading until I increased the assigned RAM to the VM to 768 MB. Disappointing, but what could I do, I thought at the time. Now I know: Go back one step and use Debian as basis for my VMs. This gets rid of all the stuff Canonical has added to Ubuntu over the years, which I really don’t need on my VMs. Ubuntu is based on Debian, so the learning curve was not that steep. But RAM usage is now even less than what I ever required for an Ubuntu based VM!

Pixel 8 vs. 10 – Do I Upgrade?

The Pixel 11 has recently been released, so it is time to get a Pixel 10 while it is still on the market. The discount is significant. I’ve been using a Pixel 8 for the past 2 years and I needed a backup device so I went for it. I then installed GrapheneOS on the Pixel 10 and installed all apps I have on my Pixel 8 as well. What I didn’t do so far: Move all my data and configure all the apps. This is a lot of work, so the question is if I save myself the extra work for now or go for it? I decided that the answer depends on what kind of benefits I would get from the change.

Buying ASAP vs. Holding Out

Prices for RAM, Flash, hard disks and graphics cards keep rising and rising. The AI bubble keeps inflating and it’s anyone’s guess when hardware prices will return to sane levels. This definitely has an influence on my buying behavior but interestingly enough, in both directions: I buy some things right now because because I expect that those things will get more expensive, and I’m holding out at buying other things which I would have otherwise bought, because I have enough in stock, or because they are good enough. I haven’t made an exact calculation, but overall I think I’m spending less, despite buying things now.

GrapheneOS – When An App is Slow…

I’ve been using GrapheneOS for about a year now and overall, I am very happy with the security and privacy features. There is one app, however, that runs noticeably slower on my Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS than on other Android devices: OpenstreetMap for Android (Osmand). The good side of this is that it has made me look for other map applications on Android, and I’ve found CoMaps that meets almost all of my needs. But still, I’d like use Osmand every now and then as well. So after looking around a bit, I found the reason behind why it is so slow on GrapheneOS and how to ‘fix it’.

Moving an SSH Session to TMUX

If you are a regular user of tmux on the shell, I ‘m sure you been at the following point before as well:

I have logged into a remote host over ssh and started a long running command. I usually start a remote tmux session first, so I can close my notebook and cut the connection at any time if necessary. No harm done, the long running command continues running and I can come back to it at any time by attaching to the remote tmux session again. Every now and then, however, I forget to start tmux before that long running command, so I’m stuck and can’t close the notebook if I want the command to continue running on the remote host.

When this happened to me again recently, I wondered if I could move this ssh session to a new tmux session while the long running command is already active. And it turns out that this is actually possible!

Ubuntu 26.04 and Eduroam – Finally a Secure GUI Config

Another year, another Ubuntu version or certificate to be used with Eduroam Wifi. Keeping an Eduroam configuration secure, safe and private is a bit of a challenge on Ubuntu, because so far, the certificate check could not be configured on the GUI and had to be done manually in the configuration file. But Ubuntu 26.04 finally configures the certificate check on its own… if a certificate is configured rather than the option being disabled completely by ticking the ‘No CA certificate is required’ box. This works as well, but then everybody can impersonate ‘eduroam’ and steal your credentials.

Ubuntu 26.04 Fixes – 4 – Flameshot on Wayland

Ubuntu’s built-in screenshot utility has come a long way and is quite good in the meantime. Unfortunately, there are two features that are missing: I can’t blur parts of the screenshot during the process and I can’t mark a certain part of the image or put an arrow onto the image to draw attention. Sure, I could do it later with another program, but that’s just overhead that keeps me from doing it. Thus, I’ve been using Flameshot for many years. When I moved over to Ubuntu 26.04, however, it looked like it wouldn’t work anymore. Wayland, you know… But that’s not true and there is even a way to make it work without modifying configuration files!

Ubuntu 26.04 Fixes – 3 – Remote GUI Sessions and Suspend/Resume Crashes

I was hoping that waiting 4 months after the release of Ubuntu 26.04 would mean that most stability issues were out of the system. But it seems there are still quite some irritating things left as this is already part 3 in this series.

Today’s issue: When I’m logged into a remote Ubuntu 26.04 notebook via Remmina on my side and the default Remote Desktop feature of Ubuntu 26.04 on the notebook’s side and leave the RDP connection running while I suspend, I only get a white screen after a resume when establishing a new RDP session. Even worse, the notebook’s audio subsystem doesn’t re-initialize properly anymore after resume, and no sound is played anymore. The syslog is then continuously spammed with a lot of error messages including this one:

sof-audio-pci-intel-mtl 0000:00:1f.3: snd_sof_boot_dsp_firmware: failed to boot DSP firmware: -110

The only way to get out of this is to reboot. Another fun fact: It doesn’t happen always, but I can frequently reproduce it one notebook. On another notebook it doesn’t happen at all. After 5 hours of trial and error, I finally found the reason and a fix for it.

Ubuntu 26.04 Fixes – 2 – Frameless and Flat Qt Windows

One of the small quirks I noticed after installing Ubuntu 26.04 was that some apps like Wireshark, LuckyBackup and KeePassXC look strange. The reason: There is no window decoration so they appear flat, which looks especially strange against a white background. What they all have in common: They are Qt based applications. And it seems there is a dispute between Wayland, to which I had to switch from X-Windows on the one hand, and Qt on the other. Wayland insists that apps themselves should be responsible for drawing their window frames. Qt on the other hand thinks this should be done by the the compositor. So in Ubuntu 26.04, neither side draws the window frames for Qt apps, which makes them look flat and ugly on the system. But there is a fix 🙂

Ubuntu 26.04 Fixes – 1 – Virtualbox and Suspend/Resume VM crashes

From the credible – to the unlikely – to success. A quick war story today: When I recently created a new Ubuntu 26.04 system from scratch for use as my primary OS on my notebook, I waited with one thing until the end: Installing Virtualbox. Not that I was of the complexity, it is actually straight forward. However, I did most of the apps and tools installation and the configuration for it in a virtual machine, and only moved the installation to a real notebook once I was almost done. Much more comfortable to do it this way. So one of the last tasks was to install Virtualbox, since that is, of course, best run on physical hardware. While things looked good at first and all my virtual machines ran as they should, including the USB mapping into the VMs for some special tasks, I soon noticed I had a big problem: In 80% of the cases where I suspended and resumed the notebook by closing the lid, my virtual machines would crash after resume. Totally reproducible. What a nice surprise at the end of a week long process.