This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

gerdesj,

Start off with Gentoo to get the hang of the basics. Switch to Arch because compile times and heat burns. Try Linux from Scratch for a laugh, giggle and move on, but with a new found respect for distro maintainers.

What’s your use case? If it involves AAA games then that will narrow things a bit but if you simply want a bit of docs n that and, internet browsing and a spot of email and realtime sound and CAD then we’ll need a broader chat.

Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, Mint - those would be my starters for 10 in no particular order. Pick yours and your hip angle. I personally run Arch (actually) and Gentoo. I don’t recommend them as a dip your toe in the water job 8)

Feel free to dive in, the water is lovely.

Alright, I'm gonna "take one for the team" -- what is with the "downvote-happy" users lately?

Title. “lmao internet points” and all, but what is the point of participating in a community that sees assumptions and other commonly non-harmful commentaries/posts as “bad” this easily? Do folks in here are really that needy of self-validation, even if it means seeking such from something completely insignificant like...

gerdesj,

How should someone who expresses an opinion - that receives downvotes - request feedback?

gerdesj,

Blimey there’s a name from the past. I remember painting a Citadel Miniature (white metal job) of a demon of Slaanesh. That would have been around 1986-7ish. Four armed thing and looked bloody nasty! That was before Warty-Forty really took off.

I moulded a little skull out of Milliput, with a tiny snake running in through the base and out of an eye socket. I separated a foot from the base and lifted it up a bit and stuck the skull under it. White metal is quite soft but you have to be careful. I spent quite a while modelling “grass” and such. The grass went from a dead looking green/brown around the demon to normal in a sort of circle of ruin.

Nowadays my eyesight can barely see a 00 brushes’ bristles, let alone let me use one.

gerdesj,

Did anyone really think that making UEFI systems the equivalent of a mini OS was a good idea

UEFI and Secure Boot were pushed forcibly by MS. That’s why FAT32 is the ESP filesystem.

If I had to guess, a brief was drafted at MS to improve on BIOS, which is pretty shit, it has to be said. It was probably engineering led and not an embrace, extinguish thing. A budget and dev team and a crack team of lawyers would have been whistled up and given a couple of years to deliver. The other usual suspects (Intel and co) would be strong armed in to take whatever was produced and off we trot. No doubt the best and brightest would have been employed but they only had a couple of years and they were only a few people.

UEFI and its flaws are testament to the sheer arrogance of a huge company that thinks it can put a man on the moon with a Clapham omnibus style budget and approach. Management identify a snag and say “fiat” (let it be). Well it was and is and it has a few problems.

The fundamental problem with UEFI is it was largely designed by one team. The wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI is hilarious in describing it as open. Yes it is open … per se … provided you decide that FAT32 (patent encumbered) is a suitable file system for the foundations of an open standard.

I love open, me.

gerdesj,

Me too. I just ran time tree across my home directory a few times. Native console (ie C-A-F3) - 54 seconds, Konsole - eight seconds.

Waveterm is still installing (Arch AUR). The fan has a Gentooesque sound to it as a suspiciously complicated thing gets built. Oh God … electon … terminal shaking … golang … fans whining … lap melting … the Old Ones are stirring.

The deps for this thing are many. " I watched Firefox builds on Gentoo glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate". OK, its now arrived and my laptop case is making ping noises as it cools.

It takes 10 seconds or so to start up. Look pretty. Accept license agreement (wtf). Now what? Hmm lets try typing in that box. OK. time tree. Go back to Lemmy to type the last two paras of this comment, get bored and uninstall waveterm.

gerdesj,

I’ve been a KDE lover since 2.0 or so. I recall compiling it from a tarball for a laugh and it mostly working, which was quite a surprise. I think I had Slackware installed at the time on my desktop and KDE 1.x on it.

Anyway, 23 or so years later … I’m looking forward to 6. Things have changed a bit 8)

gerdesj,

Ooh, don’t mind if I do. Luckily I happen to have a tame VMware cluster and rather a lot of laptops (“mwaaa, mwaaa, won’t run Windows 11”) to play with.

One of my employees has actually expressed an interest in Linux as a daily driver, which has only taken 23 years. I’m looking for my corp standard distro and I don’t think Gentoo or Arch are going to do the job. I’m leaning towards Fedora at the moment but there’s no rush, I only get one chance to bring the kids into the light, despite being the MD 8)

Is the Linux Foundation Certified System Admin (LFCS) worth it?

I’ve been a software engineer for 10 years now but want to work with Linux more in a professional setting (not to mention the number of layoffs in the the dev industry has me thinking a backup plan might be a good idea). I have been using Linux exclusively on my personal machine for about 15 years now so I’m not too worried...

gerdesj,

Employer here (UK)! I’m probably not normal being the MD and running Arch (actually) on my gear. I had to switch from Gentoo because I kept on burning myself.

For me, something like the LFCSA is something I respect because it is practical. Back in the day I did something similar (Novell I think). I’ve also grabbed a VMware … whatever … and that was a memory test and a waste of money. Who cares if you can quote the maximums?

When I’m hiring, I want to see application and knowledge and not a plethora of industry “quali-wankery”! You can always search for facts but knowing how to apply them is what I want to see.

Be flexible but do try to develop what sort of direction you want to take. What floats your boat out of dev ops, sysadmin etc?

You could also consider self employment/consultancy. I sort of fell into it 23 years ago …

gerdesj,

What on earth is a TempleOS?

I own an IT company. We are some sort of base metal partners with MS. I remember a huge box of “Select” CDs turning up back in the day. Nowadays we get demands for customers. ie we should be making more cash for MS. Its all one way - take, take. take.

I’m not a massive fan of owning a company and working for another one. So I don’t. MS are receding into the rear view window.

Wanting to improve my Linux skills after 17 months of daily driving Linux

I’ve been daily driving Linux for 17 months now (currently on Linux Mint). I have got very comfortable with basic commands and many just works distros (such as Linux Mint, or Pop!_OS) with apt as the package manager. I’ve tried Debian as a distro to try to challenge myself, but have always ran into issues. On my PC, I could...

gerdesj,

“I’ve been considering installing Arch the traditional way, on my X220, as a way to force myself to improve.”

I use Arch and so does my wife (she has no idea). The wiki is legendary because it is well used (I’ve written a few bits myself). I’ve used Gentoo for quite a while too but you will find compilation times a bit of a bore.

I own an IT company - I am the MD. I use Arch actually! (and so does my wife)

gerdesj,

A discarded Windows laptop is ideal for use with Linux. That’s what this Managing Director of an IT company has been doing for over a decade. My desktop PC is a customer cast off from a good five years ago. I slapped in an ageing Nvidia el cheapo card to get two monitors running. My laptop is a cast off from one of my employees - I simply opened it up and moved my M.2 card into it.

I do run ESET on my Linux gear to show solidarity and to show that Linux really is rather more resource friendly than Windows. I login to AD and I use Evolution with Kerb to access Exchange for email. I have the same “drive mappings” to the same file servers too and so on and so forth.

I used to teach word processing, spreadsheeting and databases n that for UK govt funded courses, I’ve written a Finite Capacity planner for a factory in Excel (note the lack of In-). I still find people who have no idea how decimal tab stops work or how to efficiently use styles. I can confidently inform you that Libre Office is just as good as MSO. They both have their … issues but both work pretty well.

Kids are easy. Adults are a pain! KDE has a lot of educational games ready to go out of the box.

gerdesj,

Windows’s package managers are MS only (ish). msiexec is a bit of a convoluted pain compared to apt, yum, pacman or even portage.

When you update a Linux box, everything is updated not just the OS. That is not the case on Windows where each browser, pdf viewer etc has its own updater service or not.

I’ve been doing IT software monkeying for several decades for many companies, some of which you will have heard of. Trust me: the Windows model is not the best. It certainly should not be a reason to fear Linux.

Most distros have a “Politely notify that some updates are available, would you mind awfully if I install them?” … cracks on in the background and then suggests a reboot only if the kernel was updated.

That is not a Windows experience.

gerdesj,

No. Those tools are tried and well tested. Yes there may still be bugs lurking but simply rewriting in Rust does not guarantee safety. I do hope that this: doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html doesn’t get used in that repo.

That said, I’ll take a look in say five years and see how they are getting on.

What's the difference between package manager and why are there so many?

Are they so different that it’s justified to have so many different distributions? So far I guess that different package manager are the reason that divides the linux community. One may be on KDE and one on GNOME but they can use each other’s packages but usually you are bound to one manager

gerdesj,

Gentoo has alternatives to Portage too.

gerdesj,

So you “make config” once and then you just tweak it from time to time! I used to run make config until I discovered xconfig (when X was xfree86) and settled on menuconfig.

I was still using menuconfig on Gentoo until around five years ago. OK I still have one or two Larry’s lying around doing useful stuff but generally I just copy the old kernel config to the new one and compile away with genkernel.

make config did take a while back in the day. You literally run through the entire kernel’s options one by one: y/n/m for drivers. I haven’t done that since 2.0.x days. Then you forget to sort out lilo and reach for the boot floppy. No I don’t miss those days.

gerdesj,

They will if enough people whine about it.

In the old days (I’m 50+) tumbleweed drifted through ~/ apart from my drivel and I’d have a folder for that so /home/gerdesj/docs was the root of my stuff. I also had ~/tmp/ for not important stuff. I don’t have too much imagination and ~/ was pretty clean. I was aware of dot files and there were a shit load of them but I didn’t see them unless I wanted to.

This really isn’t the most important issue ever but it would be nice if apps dumped their shit in a consistently logical way. XDG is the standard.

gerdesj,

On a desktop/laptop system you soon notice when things like your touchpad loses multi touch support and USB sticks no longer work because your kernel mods no longer match the “old” kernel!

needrestart and co are really handy. When lsof first came out, I remember finding a recipe similar to the one posted and “mind blown”!

gerdesj,

I run an awful lot of MS email for a lot of customers. My own company (literally mine) uses Exchange on prem and I pass all access through HA Proxy. My customers mostly use M365 but one is still on GroupWise (I have known GroupWise for roughly 25 years)

I’ve seen browsers come and go. My first one was telnet on a VAX through a X.25 PAD and a string of connections via the US (I’m UK) to CERN. First graphical browser was Mosaic on Win 95. I think Mosaic became Internet Explorer - MS don’t really innovate - they buy it.

Edge is basically Chromium with knobs on. Chromium is Chrome with knobs removed (sort of!) I can exclusively reveal that Firefox works fine with all version of OWA and Exchange on-line, because that is what I personally use and so do many of my staff and customers.

If you have snags with your uni email then there is something specific there and not your browser choice. Edge doesn’t do anything special for OWA it’s just yet another Google browser.

gerdesj,

Try installing a User Agent switcher into your browsers and then fake your browser ID. FF works fine with Teams, Exchange and M365 - I have been an IT consultant installing or using all of that lot for over two decades.

I too have a favourite browser. It used to be FF up to about 15 years ago (v2 or so) then Google were cool and I went all in on Chrome. I then went Chromium. I actually started out with telnet but that’s another story.

A couple of months ago I finally dumped Chromium and co and went back to FF. Biggest win for me was a slightly less opinionated SSL experience. That needs some explaining:

I run a lot of IT and that means a lot of SSL certs. Mostly I use Lets Encrypt if I can as well as the usual suspects. Sometimes a site does not need SSL at all. Googles browsers are very VERY opinionated about this: “Thou shall not use thy browser password manager with self signed SSL certs”. FF has a slightly less opinionated “Thou canst TOFU and thy password manager will work”. I spend a lot of time pissing around with uploading CA certs to group policy objects and copying them to /usr/local/share/ca-certificates and getting the machines to trust them. On Arch we use /etc/ca-certifictes etc and so on and so forth. I also have to deal with Teams - FF works better now than Cr browsers

I’ve returned to FF after a very long time and I don’t regret it at all. I run Arch actually!

Did we kill Linux's killer feature?

A few years ago we were able to upgrade everything (OS and Apps) using a single command. I remember this was something we boasted about when talking to Windows and Mac fans. It was such an amazing feature. Something that users of proprietary systems hadn’t even heard about. We had this on desktops before things like Apple’s...

gerdesj,

Never used Flatpak or Snap in nearly 30 years of using Linux. I might one day but not yet.

I don’t use Fedora these days but your package manager will probably have some hooks. Add one to update your Flatpaks when it has finished its main job.

gerdesj,

I once named a load of servers for a helicopter company in the UK with elements. The cluster nodes were copper, silicon, etc. The cluster itself was called iron. The volumes were labelled fe_function.

It worked - it was easy to read and the bits that implied “cluster” were grouped appropriately. All the other servers had random elemental names unless they were associated in some way, in which case the group would be used. The engineers (real engineers with oil or distressingly nasty lubricants in their veins) loved it - it made sense, without being too quirky. It was very legible.

When those systems were hoicked out and replaced, the usual nonsense was applied: 2 char country code + 2 char site code etc etc ad nauseam. Followed by my absolute pet hate: 01. Oh so you might need 99 domain controllers? Yes you might, but not on one site.

Let’s face it, it is mostly AD admins who don’t get hostnames. I blame MS - their docs and blogs strive to be … authoritative or at least look so. An entire generation (possibly two) of sysadmins have been sold up the river by MS and their wankery.

Why do people still recommend Thinkpads for Linux when there are Linux-oriented manufacturers now?

I’ve noticed in the Linux community whenever someone asks for a recommendation on a laptop that runs Linux the answer is always “Get a Thinkpad” yet Lenovo doesn’t seem to be a big Linux contributor or ally. There’s also at least six Linux/FOSS-oriented computer manufacturers now:...

gerdesj,

I tend to use other people’s cast-offs at work. Win 10 slow? JG gets an upgrade! I whip the SSD or M.2 or whatever I’m using out of the old one and pop it in the “new” one.

gerdesj,

Great job. The Arch layer is missing the word “actually” 😜

gerdesj,

I’ve been a happy customer since 1.2. I even stuck with it through 4.0 which was a little traumatic 8) I like choice - lots of it and KDE delivers that in spades.

gerdesj,

You can easily schedule it yourself but I wouldn’t. I have used sfc /scannow about 10 times. It did fix an issue once - a VM repeatedly locking up doing Windows updates.

gerdesj,

My wife uses Arch (actually). She calls it the internet, when she really means Facebook. She knows it isn’t Apple but it gets a bit vague after that!

The last time I had to fire up the Mesh Central client to sort something out on her desktop from work was around three months ago. Every couple of weeks I ssh into it, update it and schedule a reboot for 03:00.

gerdesj,

I’ve spent over 25 years with Linux. With multiple distros and a lot of that with Gentoo and Arch. At work I specify Ubuntu or Debian, for simplicity and stability. I always used to use the minimal Ubuntu, because it was tiny with no frills. For quite a few years I managed a fleet of Gentoo systems across multiple customers - with Puppet. Those have quietly gone away. I’ve dallied with SuSE (all varieties), Mandrake, Mandriva, RedHat, Slackware, Yggdrassil and more.

Arch is surprisingly stable and being a rolling job there are no big jumps. When I replace one of our laptops, I simply clone the old one to it and crack on. I used to do the same with Gentoo - my Gentoo laptops went from an OpenRC job with dual Nokia N95 ppp connections around 2007 to through to around 2018 with systemd and decent wifi when I switched to Arch to allow the burns on my lap to heal. I still have a Gentoo VM running (amongst friends) on the esxi in my attic.

It was installed in 2006 according to some of the kernel config files. I left it for way too long and had to use git to make Portage advance forwards in time and fix around a decade of neglect. It would have been too easy to wipe and start again. It took about a fortnight to sort out. At one point I even fixed an issue following a forum post I made myself years ago.

Anyway, Arch is pretty stable.

gerdesj,

USE please.

Each to their own.

gerdesj,

Mmmm … RedHat with KDE = Mandrake. I still mostly exclusively use KDE.

gerdesj,

Define stable! Both are non rolling distros so that means that you have the upgrade jolt every few years. I have several VMs that started off life as Ubuntu LTS around 16 so from 2016 and are still running but now on 2022.04. Those are servers so relatively simple - web, PHP, Samba, DBs, etc. PHP is a pain to fix up. Ubuntu doesn’t have the rather neat slotting feature that Gentoo has so you get to do quite a lot of detective work to put it back together again. Debian is similar - again I have several systems that I manage that have gone through at least three or four Toy Story names.

Arch is rolling so there is no break and continue point. There have been some packages that have broken or been broken but not the entire system and that suits me. The QA is surprisingly good from the devs. Arch really isn’t the bugbear, nightmare super ricer thingie that it is sometimes painted out to be. I find it a very thoughtfully put together distro with an awful lot of moving parts that are well integrated and a great toolset. Choice is paramount and delivered in spades without the micro management that Gentoo requires.

It also helps that I have been doing this stuff for well over two decades so some challenges are no longer the challenge they once were.

gerdesj,

It is great to have choice. I remember buying a CD with OpenBSD (the one with a yellow pufferfish logo) back in the late 90s/00s and giving it a whirl. I broke my work PC somewhat with it but at the time I worked on a help desk and we used VT200 emulators to access “RMS”. I still had a term but graphics was out of the question! I could never get the modes right. I worked like that for six months. Everyone else had DOS and Win 3.114WG and they thought I was being deliberately edgy. I had a hell of a time working out how to map PF1-4 (DEC Vax) to local keys.

I now run around 30 odd pfSense boxes across the UK. They run FreeBSD, with a frisson of PHP n that on top. My office cluster has six internets - two at 1Gbs-1. The two boxes are Dell servers with a lot of NICs (12 each) I will shortly be swapping out a few for 10Gb NICs. They are rock solid and just crack on and do the job. There are several packages that make life so easy: ACME - SSL certs; HA Proxy - proxy lots of sites with one IP; OpenVPN - we run a lot of them.

However, pppd on BSD is single threaded which means that on an APU2 you max out at around 300MBs-1. Linux pppd is multi-threaded and does better (about 400Mbs-1 on the same hardware. Not exactly the end of the world. The real problem was sticking to APU2!

Anyway. Run what you like - you have choice and choice is good.

gerdesj,

I run Debian on all of my Home Assistant boxes, apart from one where I am trying out HassOS. I also have a test Proxmox two node cluster at work with multiple SAN volumes. Proxmox is Debian based. Sadly, it isn’t very iSCSI friendly - you can’t do snapshots. I’m looking at possible VMware replacement options here.

Am I threatening Debbie and Ian’s distro? I personally consider Ian to be a bit of a hero. He created Debian, and the world + dog has used it everywhere.

Everywhere.

Them Raspberry Pi thingies are certified (well bits are) for space. It used to be called Raspbian but the OS on a RPi is still Debian with knobs on.

gerdesj,

One of my staff runs Tumbleweed. I will get around to evaluating it one day.

gerdesj,

There is a lot going on there so I suggest divide and conquer. Shut down Caddy and configure something like nginx or apache with a simple static index.html page with a single word in it. Does that work? Start really simple, so open port 80 as well as 443 and add ssl only once you have proven http works OK.

gerdesj,

Best of luck. Let us know how you get on

gerdesj,

I can see that you have bound nginx to port 80 on both IPv4 and 6 - the two Listen directives.

  • Can you get to it locally via IPv6 as well as IPv4?
  • Can you get to it via IPv4 externally?

Let’s get right down to basics:

  • ping -6 google.com - from the web server, does it work?
  • ping -6 google.com - from your PC/laptop.phone, does it work?
  • test-ipv6.com

I’m on GMT+1/BST/UTC+1 so its a bit late now. I’ll pick up tomorrow pm

gerdesj,

As well as a link local address you should also have one or more globally routeable ones too. Hopefully you have at least one of those set up in DNS with a AAAA address. Therefore you should be able to put the address of your web server into your browser and off it goes. In theory IPv6 should be preferred by your browser, so even if both an A record and a AAAA record resolve for the name, IPv6 should kick in.

A quick check would be:


<span style="color:#323232;">$ host mywebserver.example.co.uk
</span>

That should return an IPv4 and an IPv6 address. The IPv6 address is the same for internal and external - there is no distinction, which can be surprising if you are used to IPv4 and NAT. The final bit of the equation is that your internet router needs to allow access “from all to globally routeable ipv6 address of the web server”.

gerdesj,

You don’t need to put the IPv6 address into your browser. The host command shows that you have got DNS sorted - try:

$ dig @9.9.9.9 myserver.now-dns.net AAAA

That should return an IPv6 address and the @9.9.9.9 means: use the Quad9 DNS server - 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 will also try external DNS servers - CloudFlare and Google. Hopefully that’s naming sorted out.

Now to actual access. Your router will (probably), by default, block all inbound connections. I’ve just had a look at your screenshot and it has a menu entry: “Port forwarding IPv6”. IPv6 doesn’t need port forwarding really but I suspect that is how you allow access. I am now guessing. There is such a thing as IPv6 NAT and something called NPT (Network Prefix Translation) which is not for the faint of heart!

Have a look around in that menu a screen shot might help.

It might help if you tell us where you are (very roughly - country and perhaps city), your ISP and router model. I can get you to the point of all of this working but there are rather a lot of unknowns. I can see that your router offers Dutch or English so I will guess you are from the Netherlands.

gerdesj,

That is for ping. ICMP v6 REQ: REQ means request and is a NAT type of terminology. A firewall rule allows some form of inbound traffic - here ICMP ping inbound (REQ), and then creates a state entry which allows the corresponding return traffic (RESP or response) - pong!

ping can be useful to determine connectivity and that rule will not open you up to anything nasty.

Your router seems to have been designed by someone who gives a shit about security, which is a good sign.

gerdesj,

That IPv6 forwarding page is strange. IPv6 does not need forwarding.

Anyway, I am trying to find a manual for your router. A Google search shows that it is probably NL localized and probably Asian manufactured for NL ISPs. Are you able to get a manual from your ISP? Their website looks just like one of ours - no help at all. I have also tried searching on the model and not much comes back.

I’m off on holidays for a few days. I’ll be back on dinsdag/tuesday (08/08/2023).

gerdesj,

Don’t forget System Rescue - www.system-rescue.org

Formally Gentoo based. Ideal for testing virty infrastructure, fixing systems, recovering data of broken systems and resetting passwords on Windows. You can of course use it to install Arch.

gerdesj,

You are using an account from l.w which is the largest instance in the lemmyverse so if you create a community, there is a good chance people will notice. You could also spin up your own instance but that isn’t for the faint of heart but you could sponsor one or hire someone to run one for you. You can run accounts on as many instances that will have you and they can be named whatever you like.

My real point is you have real options that don’t end with a walled garden dictating what you can and can’t do. It is a bit rough around the edges but give it time.

There is absolutely no reason why there isn’t an Arabic first instance or web of instances. Start off small and see what happens. Get a community setup on your instance and post about it. Don’t be discouraged if progress is slow. Inertia is rife in all walks of life. People in general are a bit crap! The fediverse is no different, especially because it is all rather new to a lot of people.

Arabic and Islam (there I’ve said it) are often conflated, so please keep the faith (hah!) and either find or develop your community as you want it.

Fediverse - effort required and a really crap colour scheme!

Good luck 8)

gerdesj,

So that might be Matty and Miya Meiikaalayinen. Dealing with diacritics from a language that has none is a bit tricky.

Am I even close?

What are some good PDF editors for Linux tablets?

I’m specifically looking for something that can both add text and works well with a stylus + tablet (specifically a surface pro). The best I’ve been able to find is Okular, but it’s been very finicky for me, especially while editing text. Is there anything better, or does what I’m looking for just not exist yet?

gerdesj,

For me Okular is the dog’s. If you have snags with it, why not file some bugs? There are several links here: okular.kde.org/contact/

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • random
  • uselessserver093
  • Food
  • aaaaaaacccccccce
  • test
  • CafeMeta
  • testmag
  • MUD
  • RhythmGameZone
  • RSS
  • dabs
  • KamenRider
  • TheResearchGuardian
  • KbinCafe
  • Socialism
  • oklahoma
  • SuperSentai
  • feritale
  • All magazines