Open Keyboard settings and add application/custom shortcuts:
Thunar file manager has the location/address shown as buttons. Use shortcut Ctrl+L to enable typing.
To move along GUI tabs, use Ctrl+PageUp/Down in Linux instead of Ctrl+(Shift)+Tab in Windows.
To expand/contract GUI trees, use Shift+Left/Right instead of simply Left/Right in Windows
Most Linux come with Samba Client (smbclient) installed that allows you to access Windows shares, the Samba Server is typically not installed by default, therefore you will need to do more work to share Linux folders with Windows. Here are the tools for a more complete experience:
For some reason, after installing and uninstalling samba and smbclient a few times, Linux Mint stopped connecting to Windows computer (yet other SMB running MX linux can be accessed fine), despite this worked fine out of the box.
Turns out it’s this flaw (not in MX linux) that it cannot negotiate with newer SMB versions that might have been addressed but it can stuck being unable to negotiate with Windows 7 (it has SMB1 and SMB2 enabled) under certain conditions. After placing “client max protocol = NT1” in smb.conf and reboot, it worked, then I removed the line and reboot and it still worked afterwards. Weird!
Linux Mint 19 also does not resolve local hostnames from DNS right out of the box (also the live CD boot) because it came with systemd-resolve which does not handle local hostnames resolution right away.
Windows 10 cannot access network file shares of older Windows (7 and before) out of the box, and I’m not impressed that Microsoft let millions of users waste their productivity to figure it out.
The issue is caused by SMB negotiatons. Basically at the time of writing, there are 3 major versions of SMB:
| Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 | Windows 7 / 2008 | Windows 8 / 10 | |
| SMB v1 (No encryption) | Default | Default (for backward compatibility) | Need to turn on SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support |
| SMB v2 | X | Enable SMB2 in registry (for 2008) | Default (for backward compatibility) |
| SMB v3 | X | X | Default |
More accurately, this blog post provides the negotiation chart for up to Windows 8 (think of Windows 10 is the same for now).
Turn on SMB 1.0 in newer Windows (8, 10 and above):
The SMB v1 does not have encryption, therefore a security risk. Makes sense to disable it unless there’s a compelling reason (like obsolete industrial computer under tightly controlled network).
SMB v2 might need to be enabled by registry in Windows 2008 if not already done so:
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters SMB2 (DWORD): 1 for enable, 0 for disable
This web page tells you how to turn on/off each SMB version individually.
I recently sent a 1152A probe for calibration and was surprised to find out the data on the calibration report tells little about how the tests are done and under what settings. I searched the throughly and called tech support and they confirmed my observation the performance validation procedures are not mentioned anywhere in the published documents.
I called Keysight cal department and was able to reach a super-helpful tech, Markis, who did the calibration for my 1152A probe and he explained to me how the calibration process is done when I called.
HP/Agilent/Keysight probes using AutoProbe interfaces are powered by 1143A (that was intended for 54701A probes) through a N1022A adapter (the one used in 81600 Infiniium DCA) for Keysight’s calibration process, which measures uncompensated probe-only performance. I saw the calibration reports from 3rd party-labs, and probes are are calibrated inside the oscilloscope they are used in, and therefore it’s measuring a compensated system (scope+probe) performance.
There is a 30 minute warm up period.
The procedures resembles to what’s detailed in the old 1144A probe user/service manual, (page 10-14) with the exception that the ‘Gain Accuracy’ done there is ‘AC gain accuracy’ (at 1kHz, 1Vrms) instead of ‘DC Gain Accuracy’ claimed on the report. In fact, given that it’s simply measuring relative error (multimeter reading of the probe BNC output divided by the 5V Fluke Calibrator reference) at one voltage setting, I believe it should be called ‘DC measurement accuracy’. The number on the calibration report was divided by 10 times since 1152A is a 10:1 probe.
The bandwidth test for 1152A is simply looking at attenuation at the advertised bandwidth (2.5Ghz for 1152A) relative to 50Mhz (low frequency reference set at 0dBm).
I tried Ubuntu on my old laptop, but it was unbearably much slower than that Windows 7 so I was looking for lightweight options. After some shopping, I settled on MX Linux as the drivers worked right of out the box for the hardware and it gave me the best user experience so far.
Other than responsiveness, the deciding factor that moves me away from Ubuntu is the amount work required to get the basic things working out of the box. Internationalization is almost fully configured in MX Linux, while I had to jump a few hoops to get the VL Gothic (Japanese) font in and struggled to get the IME to switch using Ctrl+Space / Ctrl+Shift (or any default shortcut keys) like in Windows. In MX Linux, they are the defaults right away.
I was really turned off by the fact that Ubuntu’s (minimal install) default Archive Manager is half-working out of the box: I get weird errors and partial success extracting RAR files because unrar was not installed by default! It just showed the lack of consideration about user experience.
MX Linux defaults to ibus, which works right out of the box with mozc (Japanese) language support. But I’d like to have a Cantonese IME that allows me to swear (the ibus-table-cantonese package was censored), so I opted for Andrew Choi’s CAP, which runs on fcitx. He used to have an iBus version, but it was a decade ago and I couldn’t get it to install.
Turns out it’s not that MX Linux is not that prepared when you want to use Fctix. None of the languages shows up when I tried to add an IME! After a lot of googling, I realized it requires im-config, and you need to install zenity before installing im-config!
After that fcitx works like a charm: mozc, CAP works in harmony, and I can turn the IME on/off by Ctrl+Space and switch between IMEs using Ctrl+Shift (just like in the old days)
EDIT: After all the praise I have on MX Linux. I noticed it overlooked something very basic! It does not make you configure timezone during setup and it’s not easy to change it! To do it the GUI way, first you have to go to “MX Time Settings”, and you have to type in the EXACT timezone string (TZ database name)! Geeze! It’s so caveman that we still have to do this in 2019!!
How did I noticed that I forgot to change the timezone? I realized the time in my Windows keeps getting changed (suspiciously a time-zone offset like difference) after I booted into MX Linux and boot back to Windows. That’s insidious!