Running Linux with Secure Boot in a multi-boot machine often turns into a struggle. In my case the system is set up with KDE Neon as the primary OS, Kubuntu for testing, and Windows as the third option. Windows assumes it should control the EFI boot order and sometimes even clears MOK keys when it writes to firmware. At the same time, NVIDIA drivers do not always cooperate with Secure Boot because the modules are unsigned. The result is that Linux may fail to load the GPU driver after every reboot into Windows, and boot order often shifts away from Neon. This tutorial explains the full process I followed to solve these issues in a reliable way. 1. Identify the correct NVIDIA driver and install a DKMS build.   The first requirement is to get the correct NVIDIA driver installed. Using a DKMS package is important because DKMS automatically rebuilds the modules whenever the kernel changes. Without DKMS, every kernel upgrade would break the driver until you reinstall it. Installin...

 Saw a random status today. One of those “pain leads to success” things people keep posting. Usually I scroll past, but this one made me stop. Not because it was profound, but because it felt wrong. It said: “Every successful person has a painful story. Every painful story has a successful ending. Accept the pain and get ready for success.” Sounds nice, but it assumes pain is proportional to success. If that were true, someone dying in constant pain from cancer, or someone who lost everything in a landslide but survived, would be the most successful people alive. That is clearly not reality. Plenty of people suffer with no “success” at the end, and plenty succeed without great pain. It reminded me of Dickinson’s line: “Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all.” Read alone, it feels comforting. Put it next to Nietzsche’s “Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man” and it turns into somet...

Sometimes situations arise when we need to work on computers on multiple networks and are behind different VPN networks. VPN networks comes in multiple flavors to complicate the situation. Setting an OpenVPN or CISCO VPN network with default settings will set the system to route all the traffic (including internet) to flow via the VPN tunnels. This may not be ideal for most people working on multiple networks. Before going into how to setup this I will explain how we can connect an OpenVPN and CISCO VPN network from the network manager. Ubuntu ships by default with the plugin for the Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) not for OpenVPN or CISCO VPN. The following settings were tested under Ubuntu 18.04 and 16.04 64 bit versions. Connecting to a CISCO VPN network In order to connect to CISCO VPN network from the Network-Manger in Unity or Gnome we need to install two packages sudo apt install network-manager-vpnc sudo apt install network-manager-vpnc-gnome   To set-...