Thunderbird message fonts

I was getting really irritated with my attempts at changing the font size of message renders in Thunderbird. I was doing what appeared to be the right thing: Hamburger menu > Settings > Language & Fonts > Advanced ... and then set family and sizes as desired:

Notice that "Latin" is selected in the Fonts for: dropdown. This was the default setting, and given the other choices (Arabic, Armenian, etc.), it seemed to be the correct option. But nada.

Fortunately, a statement made almost in passing on this post revealed the solution: You need to configure "Other Writing Systems" as well:

 

Why? Because "Other Writing Systems" deals with Unicode encoding, and because it's 2025 you're probably sending and receiving Unicode messages.

It's easy when you know how.™ (But almost impossible to discover.)

You may also benefit from the ui.textScaleFactor hack described in my Firefox page rendering size entry. You can access Thunderbird's equivalent of the about:config page by scrolling to the bottom of the Settings page and clicking the Config Editor… button.

Enabling SMBv1 in Samba

 Even though it's bad for security, sometimes you just have to do it.

1.  Make sure you have a /etc/samba/smb.conf file. You would have gotten this if you installed smbclient. If you didn't, then do that now. 
2. Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and put somewhere below "[global]" the following line:
   client min protocol = NT1
3.  The change will likely be instantaneous (i.e., no restart required). When you are done, be sure to comment the line out:
   # client min protocol = NT1

 References here and here.

 

Copying files over a network with rsync

I thought I had found a good solution to copying files over a network with scp, but it turns out that utility doesn't copy symlinks as symlinks. Rather, it replaces the symlink with a copy of the content.

 Fortunately, rsync can be used for this. The magic invocation is:

rsync -r -t -p -v --progress -l -s -e ssh {username}@{address}:'//home/foo/Documents/myDir' /home/bar/Documents

The options are as follows:

-r: recurse into directories

-t: preserve modification times

-p: preserve permissions

-v: increase verbosity

--progress: show progress during transfer

-l: copy symlinks as symlinks

-s: no space-splitting; wildcard chars only

-e: specify the remote shell to use (ssh in the above)

You can also get this done with grsync. In fact, I got the above command line by examining grsync's output. The gotcha here is that you need to be able to access the source account without a password. rsync will prompt you for a password if necessary.

Linux Mint themes in Debian

Adwaita was my preferred theme for use with Cinnamon on my Debian boxes. But its use with Cinnamon has now been blocked because reasons. You may see it as one or more of the themes in use, but once you switch to something else, you can't get it back.

IMHO, the next best option is to use Linux Mint themes, which inconveniently aren't available in Debian or by downloading through Cinnamon's control panel.

However, for the time being at least, you can get them by adding a Linux Mint repository to your apt. This is documented here.

The steps I use are:

1. As root, inside /etc/apt/sources.list.d create the file linuxmint.list
2. Using your favorite editing means, put the following line to the file:
   deb [trusted=yes] http://packages.linuxmint.com zara main
   This points to the Zara release. In the future, you may want to point it to something newer.
3. apt-get update
4. Use Synaptic or your favorite tool to browse the new packages. I installed:
   mint-cursor-themes
   mint-l-icons
   mint-l-theme
   mint-themes
   mint-x-icons
   mint-y-icons is in Debian, so I didn't install the Linux Mint version.
5. After installing what you want, edit linuxmint.list to disable the repository by putting a # in front of the repo info:
   # deb [trusted=yes] http://packages.linuxmint.com zara main
6. apt-get update (again)

The last two steps are important so you don't continue to see the Linux Mint packages and inadvertently do something with them that borks your system. This also means you won't be notified of updates to the theme packages, so you might want to enable the repo periodically and check.

I'm currently using the Mint-Y-Blue application theme along with GNOME-Colors Brave for icons and a DMZ cursor. It works for me. If that's all you want too, then you only need to install mint-themes from the linuxmint repos.

Firefox page rendering size

After I installed version 134.0 of Firefox on my Debian sid system, web pages were rendered about 20% larger than they should be. The UI wasn't oddly scaled though; the issue was limited to the web page rendering area.

I tried working with layout.css.devPixelsPerPx, which comes up often in search engine results. But this scaled everything, including the UI.

Then I tried the first solution described in Fix UI Scaling and Large Fonts Issues in Firefox 103 and Later Versions, and it's working beautifully. Specifically, here's what I did (quoting from the article):

1. Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. It’ll show you a warning message, click on “Accept the Risk and Continue” button. It’ll open Firefox’s hidden secret advanced configuration page i.e. about:config page.
2. Now create a new preference ui.textScaleFactor as NUMBER and set its value to 100 to fix the scaling and fonts issue.

This appears similar to the "--force-device-scale-factor" hack that I need to use to get Google Chrome to behave.