Hello, I am looking for help with some small issues I’ve been having with gnome (bazzite), mostly annoyances. Their discord is okay ish as a resource but takes a long time to get replies to specific issues, especially when they are more generally Linux questions and not specific to bazzite. So here goes:
I have 3 drives installed, one of them an old HDD for media storage. During the bazzite setup I selected all of them to be included since was about to reinstall the OS (and had them retroactively mounted in the old install and figured they might be treated more natively this way in the new installation).
Well the plan worked too well, and I now have no discernible drives I can locate individually outside the drive manager app, which doesn’t really bother me beyond not knowing if the system will use it inefficiently (I.e store things aside from data and media on the slow HDD). Is there a way to configure how it will use the drives?
Second, I was given a pre-made admin account during setup. I really want to not have to log in with a password on each boot, is it possible to skip (only) that somehow and auto log in? I still like the password for admin level privileges.
And last, part of the reason for my reinstallation was constant issues with the stupid keyring app (seahorse?). Most of the time it would prompt me on boot, when my VPN app would try to retrieve its credentials, to set up a new keyring for it despite there being literally dozens of keyrings from its previous boots with the needed info, all freely accessible.
I have so far begrudgingly refrained from installing the VPN again because I want to find a solution for this first; and discovered that i can also set up a VPN connection directly in the OS. However from what I can tell this would prevent me from switching locations / slow servers easily, is there an alternative I am missing such as a different keyring app I could install or a function in Linux to change servers effectively (with load info and preferably without having to set up vpns manually for all the hundreds of possible servers I can choose from my VPN provider)?
Thank you for reading the wall of text this has become 👀
TLDR:
-
different types of hard drive are being used. How does the system, which manages them apparently as one, utilize them?
-
pre made admin account requires password which makes login tedious. How to skip the password only for login?
-
keyring issues. Is there any alternative to it?
Well the plan worked too well, and I now have no discernible drives
Never used Bazzite, but to me that sounds like one of the following possibilities
- the drives have been automounted and you do not know where
- Bazzite uses LVM to create a “pool of storage” to be used instead of using drives seperately
Disks have been automounted
You can check if this is the case by opening a terminal and typing in
lsblk
. This command lists all drives and the folder they have been mounted to.Sample output from my pc:
❯ lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS zram0 251:0 0 8G 0 disk [SWAP] nvme0n1 259:0 0 931,5G 0 disk ├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 600M 0 part /boot/efi ├─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 1G 0 part /boot └─nvme0n1p3 259:3 0 929,9G 0 part /home / nvme1n1 259:4 0 465,8G 0 disk
As you can see, this means I have 1 zram disk as swap space, 1 M.2 NVME disk (
nvme0n1
) with 931GB (1TB) split into 3 partitions (mounted on/boot/efi
,/boot
,/home
and/
) and one unused M.2 NVME disk (nvme1n1
) with 465GB (500GB).As @dustyData@lemmy.world in his answer said, Bazzite might mount drives somewhere in
/var/mnt
.Bazzite uses LVM
LVM (Logical Volume Manager) is used to create a “storage pool” out of multiple disks, even if they have different sizes etc. If Bazzite used LVM to “fuse” your disks, you will not be able to use them seperately.
You can check if LVM was used by opening a terminal and executing the following commands:
sudo pvdisplay sudo lvdisplay
These commands show the physical volumes (
pvdisplay
) known to LVM and the logical volumes (lvdisplay
) managed by LVM. If there’s no output it means that Bazzite did not use LVM.is it possible to skip (only) that somehow and auto log in?
Using Fedora Workstation 42 with GNOME 48 I can enable autologin in the system settings app. You should be able to find it under system -> users
Linux is unique in that all files, drives, devices, everything exists on a single file structure. All bazzite did was automount your drives to specific directories in the hierarchy. Check the documentation but usually the drive manager will tell you exactly where are the drives automounted. The hierarchy filesystem standard (HFS) says it would be ‘/var/mnt’, see there but double check with bazzite docs. There’s little reason to deviate from that standard behavior.
As for VPN, the apps all mostly suck in some way, both on Linux and windows. Just generate the keys for the main locations you like to use and use the OS openVPN connection. If you really must install the provider client, you’ll have to tinker somewhat. They’re usually capricious and don’t play nice with flatpak. Layering should be your last option.
Add: as for the auto login, I don’t know how it works in GNOME, I prefer KDE plasma and also prefer password.
The keyring issue is usually from lacking a specific portal or a misconfig, with the app expecting a particular wallet.
EDIT: On bazzite mnt is inside var.
For autologin, you’ll need to make configuration changes to your display manager, GDM. Here’s how. I’m not 100% sure if you can just edit this file as root (since Bazzite is atomic) - just try it.
Immutable only means the binaries. Config and user data are segregated and perfectly mutable. Any change on ‘/etc’ or anything on ‘/var’ should work.