Turns out it’s a common problem when dual-booting Windows and Linux, they keep changing the hardware system clock on each other (unless you live in GMT+0 zone) because Windows assume the system time is the one at the set timezone while Linux think the system time is the UTC+0 time (and offset it afterwards).

Linux updates the time through NTP server blindly while Windows 7 check if the current time is within 1hr from the NTP server to avoid unintended time changes (I have to give Microsoft credit for that). EDIT: Windows 10 blindly updates the time like Linux too.

The easy solution is to have Linux follow Windows’ suit:

timedatectl set-local-rtc 1 --adjust-system-clock

x11vnc is a relatively smooth experience, but there are quite a few common use cases that would have been automated away if it’s a Windows program, namely have it start as a service on boot (before logging in)

It’s from babelmonk’s solution on StackExchange. Paraphrased here to make it easier to understand:

After installation, create the password file with -storepasswd switch AND specify the where you want the password saved as an optional argument, and I prefer /etc/x11vnc.pass:

sudo x11vnc -storepasswd {your password goes here} /etc/x11vnc.pass

which will be read by -rfbauth switch for the x11vnc program.

Build your own (systemctl) service by creating /etc/systemd/system/x11vnc.service:

[Unit]
Description="x11vnc"
Requires=display-manager.service
After=display-manager.service

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/x11vnc -xkb -noxrecord -noxfixes -noxdamage -display :0 -auth guess -rfbauth /etc/x11vnc.pass
ExecStop=/usr/bin/killall x11vnc
Restart=on-failure
Restart-sec=2

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then, start with:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start x11vnc

Enable the service (if not already done by previous commands) so it will start on boot

sudo systemctl enable x11vnc

Adobe gave up supporting Acrobat reader for Linux long time ago, so it’s stuck at the old 32-bit version (9.5.5):

http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/9.x/9.5.5/enu/AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/9.x/9.5.5/enu/AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb

The tutorial websites tells you to use wget, but sometimes you might run into authentication problems. You can simply use the links above and double-click the .deb file to install.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t work right out of the box in modern 64-bit Linux. You’ll run into a missing library

libxml2

on run because you didn’t install the 32-bit version of it. Enable i386 (x86 or 32-bit) packages first then get the 32-bit library:

dpkg --add-architecture i386

apt-get install libxml2:i386 ia32-libs

There are some GTK complaints if you run it on a command line, but it doesn’t affect the uses so you can safely ignore them

I lost the internet (actually just DNS not resolving correctly) after installing Winscribe for Linux and disconnecting the session. WTF windscribe! I know it’s beta version, but at least you should check if it bricks people’s internet after a fresh install and first use!

Turns out that on first connection, it re-binds /etc/resolv.conf to /run/resolvconf/resolv.conf which has this line:

# Generated by resolvconf
nameserver 10.255.255.2

So like systemd-resolve, Windscribe lets resolvconf steal the DNS redirection that’s supposed to go straight to my router to an intermediary 10.255.255.2 that doesn’t do the job! Aargh!

To fix it (needs to be done every time after a Windscribe connection, so I’m getting rid of this lamely written Windscribe CLI for now), remove the symlink /etc/resolv.conf:

sudo rm /etc/resolv.conf

and restart NetworkManager

sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager

so NetworkManager will re-generate /etc/resolv.conf directly (no symlink) with the correct name server from the GUI config program (in my case, automatically obtained from my router).

Turns out it’s a common scene that in Linux, many DNS resolution program fight over the control over /etc/resolv.conf. NetworkManager kicks in after you disabled the rest.