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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I bought a Lenovo about 2 years ago that I’ve been really happy with. I wanted something with a metal shell because I carry my laptop around sometimes and use it balanced on one hand, and my previous Dell (plastic) started flexing and having weird issues with the TouchPad as a result. The Lenovo has been solid. I’m running Kubuntu on it, but my plan is to go Debian at some point.


  • limelight79@lemm.eetoLinux@lemmy.ml___
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    1 month ago

    That is, ummm, interesting. Can their installed system do anything, though? There are so many restrictions, it seems like it would be a difficult installation to daily drive.

    And some of the justifications are really confusing. I realize some are probably typographical errors, but I can’t figure out what a few of them are saying at all. It reminds me of the people that invent their own lexicon and just expect everyone to understand what they are saying.



  • Nah. One of my coworkers stays home for every vacation and reads. We try to guess how many books she’ll read during her week off each time. Closest guess, without going over, wins. She loves it and crowns a winner each time she returns, but the winner only gets bragging rights until her next vacation.

    A few years ago I was at a gas station pumping fuel on a trip, while prices were extremely high, and I was thinking to myself that her way is certainly much less expensive.





  • I’ve been using this client on our DirecTV device, which is Android based, and I noticed an odd bug. I’ll have to check what version it is, though.

    When an episode of a TV show finishes, if you hit back to go to the episode screen instead of letting it play the next episode, on the bottom of the screen, where it shows the next up: It’s always skipping the next episode.

    For example, if I finish watching episode 12 and go to that screen, I’ll see episode 14 as next (and that’s what plays if I click on it). It skips episode 13. I’ve repeated this several times with different episodes, so I’m convinced it’s not a one-off. I haven’t tried on my Android tablet or phone to see if the bug exists there, too.

    I plan to write this up as an official bug, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.


  • Back in the early 1990s, I worked at a small-town hardware store chain (nuts and bolts, not computers) that was computerizing. A few weeks after we rolled it out, a customer came in with two gift certificates to purchase one item.

    It seems pretty basic now, but using two gift certificates to purchase one item was simply not a requirement anyone had thought of. The system had no way to ring it up. The assistant manager of the store did the smart thing and rung it up as a gift certificate plus cash for the balance, so that the customer was good to go. They had to do some adjustments on the back end for that one sale and then update the software to allow for that situation.

    I always remember that when I’m working on requirements for systems, wondering what obvious things we’re not thinking of…



  • Data and configurations.

    If you have the space, software is nice because it’s easier to get the system going again, but the data (your files - music, documents, pictures) and system configuration files (/etc for example) are the most critical. If you have databases set up, learn about their dump commands and add that.

    You don’t have to use the same method for everything. My pictures are backed up to another side in a second computer and to Amazon Glacier for $2/month (I’ll have to pay to download them if I ever need it, but I’ll gladly pay if I’m in that situation - those should only be needed if I have a major house fire or something like that). My weekly backups are my /home directories, /etc, /root, a database dump, and maybe one or two other important things.






  • Slackware in the late 90s. 3.x version. “If you want to know how Linux works, ask a Slackware user” used to be the mantra back in the day.

    I’ve been using Kubuntu on my desktop machines for at least a decade now. So, I’ve completely lost track of some of the things going on, like docker, flatpak, and so on. Which is actually a good thing: Linux has gotten so good, I no longer need to know how to administer my Linux system. I can just use it.

    I currently run Debian on my server and intend to switch my desktop to Debian as well. Haven’t gotten around to it…been busy. I also have to figure out how best to set up the nvme drive I have for it - GPT partition tables? Do I need a FAT32 partition? Etc.


  • Basically you need the mdtools package. I use Debian, but Ubuntu is based on Debian, so it should be pretty similar. It’s likely mdtools will be installed, but if not, apt install mdtools as root should do it.

    The one thing I strongly, strongly, strongly recommend, after a harrowing week or so a few months back: Do not use the entire disc for the raid arrays. Partition each disk with a single Linux partition, then use those partitions as the array. If you use the entire disc, you run the risk of losing the array if the BIOS thinks those drives are messed up, which is what happened to me. I was able to recover, fortunately, but it was EXTREMELY stressful, and I was to the point where I was starting to figure out what I had lost.

    When you issue the command to build the array, such as:

    mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=5 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 --spare-devices=1 /dev/sdf1

    Keep a copy of that command somewhere so you know how you created it, in case you ever need to recreate it.

    I also kept copies of the output of /dev/mdstat, blkid (for the RAID drives and partitions), and mdadm --examine for each drive, just in case. Doing this probably means I’ll never need it, so that’s a good tradeoff.

    And, as always, RAID is not a backup. In my case, my array is small enough that a single drive can back it up (which wasn’t the case when I original built it ~5 years ago), so I have a large drive in my desktop machine that backs up the array every night.

    It’s pretty straightforward though. Install Ubuntu on a drive that isn’t part of the array and get that working, which should be pretty easy. Partition the array drives like I said above (use gparted or other tools, which will be installed with Ubuntu). Issue the mdadm command similar to what I wrote above, note your partitions will very likely be different. Do not overwrite your Ubuntu partitions with it. That is Bad.

    mdadm will create a /dev/md0 or /dev/md127. Some versions do one or the other. It’ll tell you.

    After mdadm finishes, do a mkfs.ext4 /dev/md0 (or md127) to create the array assuming you want to use ext4.

    Add a line like this to your fstab: /dev/md0 /mnt/media ext4 defaults 0 1

    Reboot and go.

    There are a bunch of more detailed guides out there, I’ve just given the high level steps.


  • And the critics of Columbus WERE RIGHT! He was vastly underestimating the size of the earth. If North America hadn’t existed and it had just been one big ocean, he and the expedition would have perished in the middle of nowhere. Of course, the size had been calculated before his expedition (the actual values turned out be extremely close to what had been calculated), so he should have known better. There’s a reason he had trouble getting funding for his expedition…

    I’m still somewhat frustrated that our history classes taught (maybe still do, I’ve been out of high school a long time) that all the naysayers thought the earth was flat.