Tag Archives: Linux

Coronation and Linux

8 May 2023 By in Linux, News, Technology Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This weekend was the coronation of King Charles III, the first new monarch for most of the people in the UK. Some may have been alive for the late Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation but the are few now.

I was working coronation support cover on the Saturday from around 6:30am to about 3pm. Fortunately no major issues. One alert towards the tail end of the day, but that was about it.

Sunday were the street parties. Our local one was relatively small compared to the one during the Jubilee celebrations. Was great for the local kids though, and the weather was perfect for it.

Monday is a Bank Holiday so no-one was working in the London office, although the other offices were still working.

I chose today to retry doing my Manjaro file copy, and again it failed with checksum errors when I tried to back it up (even the btrfs check didn’t manage to fix it)

I guess I’ll have to restart my Manjaro attempts and not use btrfs — probably return to using ext4 and lvm.

Fedora

4 May 2023 By in Linux, Technology Tags: ,

The final issue with the post-upgrade is now fixed (dependency issue) and it self-resolved by a new package update that came through this morning

I did fine one new issue — a new kernel dropped and installed successfully, but did the same thing as the upgrade and did not generate an initrd line, but did generate the initrd line once I regenerated the grub configs.

Fedora

2 May 2023 By in Linux, Technology Tags: ,

Managed to fix the issue mentioned in my previous post.

Looks like the system upgrade messed up generating the config during the system upgrade process.

The first time, with the blockdev error and second time, it was missing an initrd directive.

So I booted into the previous installation (which was still available as I made the grub menu visible as part of my Ansible playbook)

Inside the old installation, I just regenerated the grub configs:

sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /etc/grub2.cfg
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /etc/grub2-efi.cfg

And this readded the initrd line and now I am able to boot into F38. Everything still works, I have some errors with VirtualBox and qemu that I will need to fix at some point:

  • VirtualBox has an error when you start it saying “Unable to enumerate USB”
  • Qemu has a dependency error (must have changed between F36 and F38) so I’ll need to probably remove and reinstall that.

Fedora, Manjaro, WordPress & Twitter

30 Apr 2023 By in Linux, Social Networks, Technology Tags: , , , , , , ,

So, quite a few things have been happening recently.

I tried to go the next step on Manjaro and copy my home directory across ready for me to run the Ansible playbook to do the setups (I’ve been testing it would work via VirtualBox on my Windows laptop)

After waiting ages for the file copy, when I went to do the backup, there was a btrfs checksum error so I’ll have to try again some other time.

Separately, I got a message on an issue I raised at Fedora’s bugzilla the Fedora 36 (the version of Fedora I raised the bug on), was coming up to EOL so I should look to move away from it or upgrade. So I decided to try doing the upgrade.

The upgrade completed without error, but first boot after the upgrade hung with a weird Kernel Panic error (I have posted this on the Fedora Forums)

So I rolled my laptop back to preupgrade state for now.

I suspect I may need to end up doing a clean install, so I’ve prepared a btrfs and a ext4 lvm installation and have imaged those in preparation.

Finally, WordPress posted that they’re stopping Autosharing to Twitter because of Twitter’s Idiot-in-Chief screwing up the API usage.

Still, they have mentioned they will be adding autosharing to Instagram and Mastodon instead, and that helps me, since I’m slowly moving what little Twitter presence I had onto Mastodon anyway.

My Twitter has been disconnected from my WordPress and I’ve revoked its access from Twitter’s side anyway.

Manjaro

24 Apr 2023 By in Linux, Technology Tags: , , , , , , ,

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

10 Apr 2023 By in Linux, Technology Tags: , , , , , ,

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.

Manjaro and ArchLinux

20 Mar 2023 By in Linux Tags: , , ,

After spending many years using Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora, I’ve decided to look at going a bit deeper and start tinkering with ArchLinux

Initially I tried to use Manjaro, but I couldn’t get its sound working with my Pixelbook, even using u/LyncolnMD’s setup (reddit link here). That being said, a commenter on that thread did say they had sound working, so I’m not sure how he made that happen.

Bizarrely, under vanilla ArchLinux, on which Manjaro is based, it works. So I’ve decided to go into ArchLinux instead.

I spend several hours making backups of my current Fedora setup and making CloneZilla images.

It took several hours to copy back the files too (212GB of content in my home folder).

I have also decided to reutilise my pixelbook-fedora-setup repo to configure for archlinux too. That will take a while to reconfigure everything since ArchLinux uses pacman as its package manager (with some AUR helpers like yay or pamac). Ansible has a pacman module, but no yay module, so each time I have to use yay to install packages under ArchLinux, I have to use the shell module instead. A minor issue, and I can see a few people have already worked on some yay modules, but none are officially distributed yet.

So until I finish reconfiguring my pixelbook setup repo, I’m staying on Fedora. I’m using a VirtualBox machine to do the testing of the setup.

WeChat on Fedora

25 Dec 2021 By in Linux, Technology Tags: , , , , , ,

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.

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