When trying to enable the discrete NVIDIA GPU of the Acer Nitro ANV15-41[ANV], the graphical login screen "hangs": the OS works fine, but won't accept keyboard or touchpad input, which makes it unusable. It took me a day of wrong paths taken to realise that X11 picks the wrong input devices. The fix is to … Continue reading Acer Nitro V15 login hangs
Tag: ubuntu
Running even larger LLMs on small hardware
In a previous post [GM4] we ran gemma4 12B on a 16GB RAM budget; today we'll push the envelop and run deepseek-r1:14b-qwen-distill-q4_K_M on the same budget. While last time we got away by fiddling with the model definition, today we'll have to reconfigure the OS itself (in addition to fiddling with the model definition). While … Continue reading Running even larger LLMs on small hardware
Adding an entry to Nautilus’ context menu
I'm missing, dearly, the "Play with VLC" context menu entry in Ubuntu 24.04. There's a cumbersome workaround(open -> with -> *scroll scroll scroll* -> VLC), but I want something faster. What started as a side quest for some convenience eventually taught me how to add arbitrary functionality to Ubuntu's file manager context menus. Step 1: … Continue reading Adding an entry to Nautilus’ context menu
Minimising screen brightness in Ubuntu
I like working at night, but nearly every laptop I've tried with Ubuntu can't reduce screen brightness to comfortable levels. Thankfully there is a convenient workaround. Under Ubuntu 24.04 / Wayland find Accessibility -> Zoom -> Colour filters and adjust to your liking. You probably want to pin the magnification factor to 1.00, too. The … Continue reading Minimising screen brightness in Ubuntu
HOI4 right-click border selection fix
On some of my (many) Ubuntu desktop installations, Hearts of Iron 4 has an annoying bug, in that right-clicking for partial border selection selects the entire border and borders can't be edited. It seems to be caused by a weird combination of Gnome session, Wayland/Xorg and using a touchpad. This command fixes the issue for … Continue reading HOI4 right-click border selection fix



