Category: Mint

librewolf doesn’t work with passkeys

whbeebe
Screen capture of Yubico authentication failure (I deleted my username before I took this capture)

I installed LibreWolf on my Linux Mint system after reading about it on a fellow blogger’s site (see link below). It installed easily, appeared highly performant, and even took the tab fix I’d written about for Firefox nearly two years ago (again, see link below). I wanted to try this alternative to Firefox because of all the recent drama about how Firefox will now handle personal data; it didn’t go down well at all with a lot of users, myself included. But long before all this happened, I frankly got tired of all the limitations I kept running into using Firefox, so I switched to Vivaldi and haven’t looked back. But hope springs eternal, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for Firefox when it was young and pure of heart. So I decided to install LibreWolf and see if it could rekindle a bit of the old Firefox magic.

After following the clear installation instructions for installing LibreWolf on my Linux Mint system, I tried to use LibreWolf to log into my GitHub account using my Yubico security key. That’s when I got the web page at the top of this post. My Yubico key works just fine with Vivaldi, Google Chrome, and original Firefox on my Linux Mint system. Why LibreWolf, which bills itself as a more secure rebuild of Firefox won’t support my Yubico key is beyond me. That lack of full support is a hard failure as far as I’m concerned. I won’t get rid of LibreWolf as I have more than enough disk space to let it sit on the “shelf” while it matures a bit more. I’ll check out any new versions that drop and see if this problem gets fixed. But if you’re like me and use Firefox with a hardware passkey to log into sites that support it, then I’d give a long hard thought about replacing Firefox with LibreWolf, no matter how you might feel about Firefox at the moment. You will not be happy with that decision, I assure you.

Links

Goodbye Firefox, hello Librewolf

LibreWolf — https://librewolf.net

what browser should i use on linux?

Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic — https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/firefox-deletes-promise-to-never-sell-personal-data-asks-users-not-to-panic/

Yubico — https://www.yubico.com

robot operating system 2 on raspberry pi 5

whbeebe
ROS 2 running TurtleSim with two turtles, rqt, and two control consoles

This is the Raspberry Pi 5 (hereafter just Pi5) that I’ve been working with since late 2024, with Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS for the Pi5 installed. It’s been my ambition for some time to build a sophisticated robot around this type of platform (a Raspberry Pi running Linux), more so that what I’ve been tinkering with for some time. I had originally thought to use something based on the early nVidia Orin SBCs, but that fizzled in the late 2010s when I discovered the rough state of the software platform. I had begun to hear about Robot Operating System, or ROS, but did nothing substantive with it until very recently. I’ve now installed ROS 2 on my main system under Linux Mint 22.1 and on my Pi5. I wanted to be able to switch back and forth in case I ran into any issues on the Pi5, to see if the same issues were also on the Linux Mint system.

I also wanted to see if I could indeed install ROS on Linux Mint. ROS officially supports just a few Linux distributions, one of which is Ubuntu 24.04. Since Linux Mint is downstream from Ubuntu, meaning Linux Mint 22.1 is derived from Ubuntu 24.04.1, ROS theoretically should install without issue on my Linux Mint system. Sure enough, it did, and it appears to operate properly so far.

I have more tutorials to get through, and as I said above I’ve not run into any problems. Well, perhaps a little one, easily fixed. When you start rqt the first time, the services are not populated. Close rqt and then reopen it and the services will be properly populated. The tutorial instructions are more complicated than that, but I don’t think they’re necessary.

I’m hoping to reach a point where I can begin to integrate hardware into the software platform sometime in February, and later, a local LLM for autonomous control.

Links

ROS — Robot Operating System — https://www.ros.org/