Category Archives: Technology

Manjaro

I’ve been continuing to tinker with ArchLinux and Manjaro and have since found out about “Oh-My-Zsh” and “Oh-My-Bash” — basically addons you can add onto your shell via the shell’s rc and profile files and it provides a really nice prompt that tells you additional information at a glance, like which branch you are in if you are in a git repo, or whether the previous command returned a non-zero error code.

They are quite polarising though, as I found out when I mentioned this to one of the systems architects here in the office. One of the architects told me someone he worked with even considered OMZ malware.

Vanilla ArchLinux uses bash out of the box, Manjaro uses zsh out of the box, which is how I found out about the OMZ/OMB addons.

OMZ has a ton more plugins than OMB – unsurprisingly since it’s also the default shell for Macs (vomit).

I did start copying my files across to my Manjaro installation. It took nearly 6 hours to copy. However, when trying to do the backup afterwards, it failed with a btrfs checksum error. That worried me since I hadn’t done anything since the previous backup other than copying files.

I do remember running into similar issues with btrfs last time I tinkered with it when reinstalling Fedora. It could end up with me switching to either ext4 (like I did with Fedora) or trying the xfs file system option in Manjaro.

Manjaro

Referring to my earlier blog post, I finally got Manjaro sound to work and have been spending my spare time working on getting the Arch/Manjaro side of my setup playbook to work. VirtualBox has helped with that.

I’ve been struggling with making CloneZilla backups on my new Toshiba SSD. The transfer speed onto it is horrendous, but the speed on my Samsung SSD is fine. And the return window is now closed so I can’t return it. I guess, I’ll need to look at purchasing yet another external SSD.

Twitter, TFL and Dilbert

It’s been a while so here’s a few updates in the meantime

It’s coming up to a year since I moved house and only now have the pile of construction rubbish been moved from outside my old flat. Dumping of rubbish by the neighbours in the adjoining block of flats into the garage is still happening.

Conservatives lost control of the area to Labour but I’m seeing absolutely no change

We went through a period of very cold weather (-6degC) and this was costing us £10-£15 per day in gas usage.

Moving onto other updates. As posted previously, I went into hospital to remove a lump from my mouth. I’ll soon get a follow up call from the doctor to check how I’m doing. Stitches took about 10 days to dissolve. I just have a small white patch there now where the lump was removed and the doctor cauterised the wound.

Twitter has descended into a real s**thole since Elon took over. First killing all third-party clients and then indicating it may start charging for API usage.

The third-party client purge I can tolerate — it was originally started during the Jack era, but charging for API usage, or even limiting tweets per day is not something many people will accept.

I started working on stripping out twitter functionality from my TFL updates bot and that’s near enough done now. It now tweets (or should that be toots) into a Mastodon account at https://mastodon.xyz/users/updatesbf

RSS feed functionality should still work, but it is not enabled yet, until I can get Keda to work.

StackOverflow Survey

Now here’s a surprise:

Linux users surpass macOS users on SO survey responses.

Windows still trumps both, though.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-popular-technologies-operating-system

Apple Locking Out Older Devices

My dislike of the Apple brand is well-known and documented, and recently, I came across a story that made me hate them even more.

It seems like Apple are now locking out older devices and devices running older versions of their OS. This obviously then forces them to buy the newer, greater model and spend more money in their stores, forcing customers to remain locked into their ecosystem.

Heck, I still have an ASUS TF101 running Android Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.4) and it still runs. Sure, a lot of apps refuse to install, but the basic stuff I need the device for works, and that’s all I need.

You Have Cancer… Oh Wait, You Don’t. Merry Christmas

When your festive f**k-up makes it onto The Register, you know you’ve fked up good.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/03/askern_medical_cancer_message/

The message went out to patients of the medical facility – there are reportedly about 8,000 of them – on December 23, 2022. It asked patients to fill out a DS1500 form, which is used to help terminal patients expedite access to benefits because they may not have time for the usual bureaucratic delay.

About an hour after thoroughly alarming recipients of the not-so-glad tidings, the medical facility reportedly apologized in a follow-up text message.

Error or not, there should have been failsafes to prevent this happening. Even Tom Scott has a story from personal experience when he had to get himself tested for STDs (his face tells you everything you need to know

WeChat on Fedora

Finally found a way to do the install on Wine on Fedora — and that’s using Lutris. Lutris lets you install Windows games onto Linux and allows you to script the setup of the game environment to fit the game itself.

So I used it to download the WeChat binary, setup the environment (which involved downloading fonts via winetricks) and adding a registry hack. That seems to work now. Have added it to my app-installs playbook on Gitlab (https://gitlab.com/blenderfox/pixelbook-fedora-setup)

It’s not fully automated, it does still require you to run through the setup manually, and then quit both the WeChat application (so Lutris sees that the setup has exited) and Lutris before the playbook proceeds.

Installing Fedora on Pixelbook

This slightly lengthy article goes through my attempts at installing and setting up Fedora on my Pixelbook.

I previously had Ubuntu on there, modified and hacked using https://github.com/yusefnapora/pixelbook-linux.

However, as Ubuntu progressed on, it was clear this repo was not being maintained and updated and rapidly, stuff starting to fail as it required later versions of packages. Even the kernel was still on 4.4.x even now. I spent a long time trying to compile the kernel while trying to figure out the right options for a working kernel, with not much luck.

Putting in things like the “old-releases” repos helped keep things ticking over, but things were still breaking repeatedly, and the microphone kept breaking during calls due to the way the hacks were implemented.

The final straw came when the office decided to buy Apple M1 Macs for the developers (I refused to use one. My hate-hate relationship with Apple is well documented)

The decision to use M1 macs has now led to a problem whereby the docker images that are used are no longer compatible with the macbooks since they are arm64. The macs can use qemu emulation, but that is not perfect, giving weird errors when running the docker images under emulation. Leaving it to me, who is still using an amd64 machine to try to figure out multiarchtecture builds.

I was (and still am) reluctant to do the multiarch builds. Using multiarch builds would mean the devs are running a docker image that is not the same as that which is running on the test and production clusters and that in itself, means they are not developing on, or testing on an infrastructure that is representative of the test or production environments.

If the infrastructures were arm-based environments, sure, then that would be representative then, but not as it stands.

In fact, right now, if the developers build the docker image locally to test something, then pushed that to production, they would break production, as it runs on amd64 images.

I don’t think this was thought through carefully enough, to be honest.

But enough of the rant. We are where we are, and I need to try to bail out the situation.

My hacked Ubuntu would not support multiarch build no matter what I tried, but when I tried to use Fedora in a Qemu VM (virtualbox also wouldn’t work, since the virtualbox installer compiles kernel modules and that always failed with the custom kernel used by the hacked Ubuntu installation.)

So I decided to try to wipe the Ubuntu installation and start again from scratch, with Fedora.

Fedora 35 was the version I ended up using, and the latest at the time I started this activity.

Out of the box, it had native support for the touchpad, including two and three-finger scrolling via Unity 41. Two-finger scroll scrolls the active window. Three-finger scrolling up gives the window overview, and three-finger scrolling left or right switches workspaces.

Fedora by default uses btrfs. CloneZilla didn’t seem to play well with that so had to start again, but perhaps it was due to the MyChromebox BIOS being too old. Upgraded and that seemed to work better.

After CloneZilla’ing the initial install so I could rollback to that if everything fell over, I started setting up the installation.

First thing I did is visudo‘ed myself into the sudoers file, with a NOPASSWD param for passwordless sudo

Next I ran dnf update to update packages. There was about 1G of data to update and install.

Then I ran a CloneZilla to backup the laptop state at this point.

From this point, I started setting up the laptop. I found this repo on GitHub where the owner created a setup for Pixelbook https://github.com/jmontleon/pixelbook-fedora — similar to the one I used for setting up Ubuntu on the Pixelbook. The repo owner also appears to have compiled his own version of the kernel and has his own COPR repository.

After spending a week tinkering with the instructions and getting some bugs ironed out, audio finally worked.

I built an Ansible playbook to help with the instructions running. This was adapted and incorporated into the repo.

With audio now working, I CloneZilla’ed the laptop state again, to have a good state to rollback to.

I then copied my file backup from my external USB into the laptop and then CloneZilla’ed the state again

With the files copied, now it was time to get the apps installed. I built another Ansible playbook to help speed things up and it’s located here https://gitlab.com/blenderfox/pixelbook-fedora-setup/

The repo contains two playbooks one for doing the audio (it’s essentially the same one in the jmontleon repo) and the second for app installs.

Summary of apps I installed initially:

Three

I’ve been suffering from horrendously slow network speed with Three since August, and all my complaints have not been satisfactorily dealt with.

I took the complaint up to the Ombudsman and eventually was ruled against and so now I can either leave the network by paying the leaving penalty (though reduced) and returning the phone.

But I don’t even have my old Samsung anymore so that isn’t an option.

So now I’m stuck with the network for 2 years until I go out of contract again and can leave without penalty.

DON’T USE THREE.

Australia to require social media to ‘unmask trolls’ • The Register

A step in the right direction

Australia to require social media to ‘unmask trolls’ • The Register