If it makes you feel any better, I decided earlier today to experiment with “castnow”, a command-line program for casting to a Chromecast device.
I grabbed the url of a video off of Archive.org, used wget on a box I was ssh’d into to download the video, and then ran my “castnow” command to cast it to the Chromecast.
I got a progress bar and current/total time on the TV, but aside from that only a black screen and no audio.
I tried getting the latest version of “castnow” from the Git repo. I tried transcoding 7 different ways with FFMPEG. A bunch of things.
Finally, copied the video to my local machine and ran it in mpv.
The video itself was solid black with no audio and the Archive.org page had comments on it saying “why is there no video or audio?”
I tried a different video and it worked fine.
Back in the dark, old days of Linux I spent 5-6 hours digging through dbus events and X11 configs to get my mouse working. It was unplugged.
In my defense, in those days, Linux was such an insane asylum that diving into dbus and X11 as a first step was usually the logical approach.
Jesus Christ. I’ve never been so thankful for being a Linux noob in my life. That sounds awful.
Remember make
Oh wait. Missing something.
Download it.
Tar unzip make missing something else. Tar unzip make.
1 hour later. What was I doing?
Had a similar experience with Mint (of all distros) on an old laptop where it would not detect the headphones I plugged in. Spent like 30 minutes troubleshooting the settings/configuration and googling. Turns out the cable was weird and I just needed to not push it in too deep for it to be detected.
Been there with those old printer cables that had the two thumb screws. I spent way too long troubleshooting print problems turned out with some cables if you dont screw the thumb screws all the way in you don’t get a good cable connection.
Ah yes the good ol’ LPT ports. Back in the days of pin printers and them catching on fire. Good times.
Back in the dark, old days of Linux I spent 5-6 hours digging through dbus events
That’s not possible. In the dark, old days of Linux, dbus didn’t exist yet.
Once helped a nice old lady troubleshooter her computer. Everything was yellow. Checked monitor settings three times. Checked Windows for f.lux. Checked Windows video settings. Reverted drivers. Updated drivers.
Jiggled the cable.
I am still bitching when I have to touch anything dbus, x11 or xdg.
Also, finding where an environment variable comes from is fun too.
You can always cd’s nuts
No, you just had a 3 hour learning experience.
Educator here. This is called “discovery learning”. (The alternative to discovery learning, “direct instruction”, would be if someone had told OP about these permissions before OP got themselves into a pickle)
When discovery learning is successful, it leads to better learning outcomes. Compared to direct instruction, you learn the material more deeply and will have better recall of the material, often for the rest of your life. The downsides to discovery learning are that it’s very time-consuming, very frustrating, and many students will just fail (give up) before learning is completed.
Consider yourself one of the lucky ones, OP.
It happened to me countless times that I was suffering with a task for hours and hours and hours, then finally found what the problem was. Then a few weeks later, facing the same issue again somewhere else, I only remembered the fact that I had that same issue weeks ago, but I completely forgot what the solution was.
Weirdly enough, sometimes it’s indeed a lifelong experience and I can remember the solution forever. I don’t really know what it depends on.
SELinux enters the chat
Sure you own it, your groups owns it, its permissions are 777, SELinux says GEEEEEEET FUUUUUUCKED.
Honestly I’ve never had to do anything but the defaults so I can’t really testify to that.
