If you're a PulseAudio user on Linux, you might have seen this newish feature: When you change the volume in an application, it changes the system volume at the same rate.

This feature is called "flat volume" and seems to be targeted to users who do not understand the concept of a mixer. For example someone might turn up the volume of an application (i.e. Spotify or Youtube) all the way up while the system volume is very low or even at zero and wonder why "it" isn't working.

On a first glance, this might seem reasonable. However, speaking from personal experience,...

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The Lenovo X1 Carbon 6th gen is quite a nice laptop overall. It used to have some quirks under Linux, with regards to ACPI sleep, CPU frequency and such. They have all been taken care of by BIOS upgrades, already, so just upgrade if you any issues there.

There was one thing that I never got properly to work: Bluetooth. The new 6th gen uses a different chipset than the older models which I saw working just fine on my colleagues machines. It turns out, that the new chipset also did work fine under old Kernels (I tested 4.9) while on...

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This is an update to our post from yesterday X1 Carbon 6th gen about 50% slower on Linux.

Based on the Intel datasheet on my CPU (i7-8550U), it seems that with the 'fix' enabled, the CPU potentially draws a lot more power for longer times than it is designed to do (see the TDP numbers in the sheet). This whole clocking issue seems to be an issue for people that really know what they're doing - and I feel I don't have all the information to make a reasonable decision to overrule the defaults. I have the feeling that...

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The X1 Carbon is one of the most popular notebooks for the ambitious Linux user. With the 6th gen, however, there have been a couple of caveats. Some other notebooks of the same family (like the T480s) are affected, as well.

If you're not running the latest BIOS version (1.30), we strongly recommend upgrading. The most pressing issues under Linux that have been solved since 1.23 are:

• ACPI S3 (Sleep/Suspend) doesn't work (A workaround exists which involves patching the ACPI tables manually)
• When using speakers through the audio jack, there was a pretty annoying fizzling sound - unless a certain audio volume was...
  

  • Debian
  • #x1_carbon
  • #x1_carbon_6th_gen
  • #linux

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If you recently upgraded the Slack Desktop App on Debian and now are wondering what happened to your automatic HiDPI recognition: Don't worry any further. It's a little peculiar, since this regression doesn't seem to be well documented on the net. However, the solution is easy. Slack on the Desktop is an Electron app - therefore it generally supports the same flags that other Electon Apps (like Spotify) support and Electron has a flag since 2014 --force-device-scale-factor. On my Macbook Pro, I'm using a scale-factor of 1.5.

Here's a little convenience wrapper around the slack binary to always start Slack...

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Generally speaking, Linux tooling support is pretty great these days. I'm running Debian Stable on a Macbook Pro (MBP) and couldn't be happier. Most things just work as expected.

Apart from a few tiny things here and there. One of them is the ability to adjust brightness. The standard way for many window managers (WM) is to defer that functionality to xbacklight. However, this doesn't work on the MBP.

...

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After upgrading to Chromium 60 on current Debian Testing you might find yourself with a huge UI if you are on a HiDPI device. The current Chromium version has a bug (see Debian tracker). The proposed solution is to run Chromium with a manual scale factor setting. On a 15" MBP Retina, using chromium --force-device-scale-factor=1.5 yields the same UI size that I was used to before the upgrade.

Looking at the Chromium upstream bug tracker, this issue is solved since end of May. It'll find it's way to Debian, eventually. In the meantime the workaround works just as well.

The exact...

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If you happen to upgrade your Debian Jessie to Stretch (currently Debian Testing), one of the things you might want to patch is the default behavior of Chromium having extensions disabled by default. There's no way to fix that in the UI, it has to be done by setting a global configuration flag.

There's also a reason why extensions are disabled by default. Apparently Chromium started downloading binary extensions that don't show in the extensions list which had access to the Google Voice API which sounds kinda scary. Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

However, if you decide you can't live...

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