Ubuntu Studio 22.04
Upgraded a ROG Asus laptop to Ubuntu Studio 22.04 and made the change from xfce that was the DE of choice on US 20.04 to KDE Plasma which is the default DE on 22.04. I’m learning. I have nuked and paved this distro thrice in my efforts.
Updating My Auto-install Scripts
With each cycle of install I am writing scripts that will automatically do the work of the install for the next install. I did this for 20.04 and am surprised at the increase of profenciency I have gained in scripting and automation in the last 3 years. I eventually, will put this distro on a new desktop that I hope to build in a couple of months; so this painstaking has a goal.
Volunteered to maintain a package for wine
One of the windows apps I like to have on my laptop is a ballistics app called ChairGun Pro. It does calculations on the flight characteristic of projectiles and integrates that data into optics that are used on rifles and such. Well, it took about 4 hours to figure out how to get the abandoned software to run on Linux in wine. So, I decided to share my workarounds with anyone else who might like to run this app.
I’ve been running Visual Studio Code for a considerable time. It’s like cheating for compiling firmware for a 3d printer. My “go to” is still vi/vim for coding and such. But I have to say, my heart skips a beat every time I do an upgrade from the CLI and VSC is in the mix. Who thought it was a good idea just to put the single word “code” in the notifications?!?
Set up a TrueNAS, finally, for my home network. Previously, I had been using nextcloud, and it worked fine, but I wanted something more straight forward. So, I took the old nextcloud linux box and converted it to a TrueNAS box with the same drives I used for nextcloud. I’m working on setting up another box to host TwinGate for access into the network to access the NAS.
Debian 12 is out, already since June. So it is that time of the year where I upgrade all Debian machines to the newest release. Though this time I decided to try out Debian with Gnome 43 and installed it on my main laptop.
I think it is the best Debian release till now even though in my case the Gnome experience gives me mixed feelings. Gnome Software is slow, Bluetooth was sketchy, Plymouth is installed by default but does not work and still those systemd service messages that only happen on the Gnome desktop when shutting down and taking ages. Wayland works usually without problems. I can notice that Gnome works better here with Wayland than it ever worked with X. Still some problems are there. Telegram as flatpak does not use native window decorations. Mpv installed from the repos has also no native window decorations.
KeePassXC looks out of place. Debian still cannot use Qt5 themes by default without having to run some obscure commands that even myself as a seasoned Debian user have no clue why.
Other than that Gnome was never so fast, elegant, light and very responsive. Yes I wrote light. It is the first time I actually enjoy the animations and did not switch them off. I am still relatively new to Gnome. I never used it more than a couple of weeks. Let’s see how it will go this time.
Debian is really one of my last refuges from the modern tech in Linux like containers, immutable stuff etc. A classic community driven distribution that gives you the whole package for desktop, workstation or server. You all CentOS and RHEL people should give it a try.
Yes, Gnome software works, even updates are now automatically applied albeit with bothering reboots that resemble Windows, I know Fedora Workstation does the same. I even installed Firefox as flatpak, wow, it just works! Then I installed a bunch of other stuff as flatpak, mostly desktop focused software. Not bad. But Debian wants you to set that up, it is just installing one package but still, come on Debian!
I fixed Bluetooth and some of the smaller issues and I am happy so far with Debian Bookworm running the Gnome desktop and I am a heavy Xfce user.
But I will say it. The real or total beginner will still have issues with the nature of Debian’s vanilla setup. It is still not polished enough. Some of that is Gnome’s fault but a lot is Debian’s. Of course for Linux veterans that is not a real problem but still you just cannot install it and just work, you have to fiddle with it.
Now this got longer than expected. I hope you enjoy my little review. I am thankful to all Debian developers. Debian 12 is the best release ever! I mean it.
I have been using Debian 12 on both of my laptops since it came out. Perfectly happy with it. Funny story. Fedora totally nuked it’s self and I had to install something, so I thought is try Debian, it it’s just stuck.
Upgraded to MX 23 on my work system from MX 21. Been running MX on this system since 2020, but always went with the MX Fluxbox Edition. Nothing against MX Fluxbox but I decided this time to move to MX 23 XFCE Edition. Wow, I have spent very little time in XFCE through the years, and I have to say that I’m enjoying the experience. The MX installer has seen lots of enhancements, and from the installer I was able to preserve and remount my btrfs Raid 1 Array where I have my /home without any issues. I rebooted after the install, and had a fresh install of MX 23 XFCE with all of my /home customizations and files in place. Even syncthing just started syncing files after I installed it as if it was the same system no need to reattach to my other connected computers. Since it is my work system I like having MX on it because there are fewer changes and upgrades to new versions since it is based on Debian Stable. At home I run Fedora, but honestly that has been great too, because every upgrade to a new version of Fedora Workstation or Server has been painless.
Been doing that off-and-on for the past couple of weeks, and been hitting roadblocks. Didn’t wanna spend too much time on it as I got other tasks, but it’s been on my mind.
During a recent hurricane, I noticed that some of my music was reporting a playback error on remote requests. I thought “When I get home, I’ll look into this.” What I discovered is that one of my 12TB drives in my media server was not mounting and would not mount nor be recognized. Rebooting didn’t help – even from a complete power down.
I opened the box and touched all of the drives – sure enough one of them was room temperature. I wish I had cleaned the connections and tried the drive again – but instead I jumped straight to my “last ditch effort” trick for my first attempt at its resurrection. I pulled the drive and put it in the freezer for a few minutes (I know this is very controversial but it has worked innumerable times for me.)
When I reinstalled the drive, it came right up and all of my media was intact. A file system check showed no errors. A smartctl short test showed the drive to be without errors. No reports of overheating as the Lifetime Max for that drive was 38C. It’s almost a new drive – only 7,000+ hours on it (installed about 40 weeks ago). Perhaps the power cable was corroded and not allowing contact. But because I jumped straight to the “Wim Hof” method, I’ll never know if it were merely a loose cable.
It’s been about 3 weeks and the drive continues to spin and hasn’t failed again. The temps are solid at 35-36C. Weird.
I also installed Ubuntu 23.10 using the TPM for full disk encryption. I had to enable secure boot and restore the factory keys, and clear the TPM in the BIOIS first because apparently it was in “Lockdown Mode”, but after that it installed fine.
My week has been good. Tried out different distros, like Devuan and Void, but ultimately went back to NixOS on all my laptops. Also getting NixOS on my home server again to run Nextcloud, Jellyfin and The Lounge IRC! All connected together via Tailscale as well.
I had a go at something that I had wanted to do for a long while. I wrote an email auto-responder for a company. There were a couple of hurdles with the email coming in encrypted and then needing to be filtered and finally scraped for keywords so that the repsonder would know how to… well, respond.
I then packed this data into a mysql database with insertion and response timestamps. Plus I pooled the text of the responses in a database so that others can come in behind me and customized it as needed.
Besides getting to do this project, the best part for me: I wrote it in bash.
I’ve upgraded my system to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. I have some small problems, but in general it works fine. I’m combining file-server, hypervisor and desktops in one HW system.
My server is the default (minimal) install of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Of course I should have used Ubuntu server, but I’m lazy. To get the server functionality I’ve added a hypervisor; the latest Virtualbox 7.0.15 and the advanced filesystem; OpenZFS 2.2.2 to stores all my data and VMs.
All my desktops are in VMs and I have the following main desktop VMs:
Social Media (Xubuntu 24.04 LTS) to run my Email, WhatsApp; FB-messenger; Skype; Transmission and KDE-Connect. The only OS with open ports! Host OS and all other VMs are closed for inbound traffic…
Banking (Ubuntu 16.04 ESM) encrypted by Virtualbox, used EXCLUSIVELY for banking, to be used for another 2 year;
Multimedia (Ubuntu 24.04 Unity LTS), maybe I switch to Budgie, because it seems slightly more reliable. In the past I used Ubuntu Studio 20.04, but I avoid any KDE flavor, due to somewhat worse reliability
Experiments and App try-out (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS), the only desktop that mighty get somewhat contaminated by the try-outs and experiments. But rolling back the VM using OpenZFS can avoid it.
My jukebox (Windows XP Home), installed and activated in March 2010, it survived 2 VBox owners; 3 desktops and 4 CPUs! It plays the wma copies of my LPs and CDs with WoW and TrueBass effects.
Just in case I need it; (Windows 11 Pro).
Every VM gets the access to the data on the server it needs. I’m lazy, so I use Virtualbox shared folders, but if you are fanatic about it, you could use Samba (Windows networking) for sharing data. I often run 2 Linux VMs and occasionally 3. In case of Windows 11, I only have space for 1 Linux VM, e.g Xubuntu for Social Media.
The 2019 hardware was very cheap ($349). It has a Ryzen 3 2200G, the 2nd slowest Ryzen ever; 16GB DDR4; 512GB nvme-SSD (3400/2300MB/s) and I reused a small sata-SSD and HDDs.
The VM are very responsive, because they are run mainly from a 4GB (lz4 compressed) memory cache (L1ARC) and partly from nvme-SSD. Xubuntu (4 cores) boots in <7 seconds and Windows XP (1 core) needs 25 seconds. The other Ubuntu VMs boot in less than 12 seconds, while Windows 11 (4 cores) needs anything between 35 and 60 seconds dependent on the content of the memory cache.
In 2023 the 2 HDDs (1TB and 500GB) failed after 10 power-on years, so I bought a new 2TB HDD, the first part of my mid-life upgrade. After 5 years it is time to complete the mid life upgrade to 32GB DDR4 and a Ryzen 5 5600G(T).
I’ve been playing around with OpenMediaVault on my file server (duh) and OpenSuse Tumbleweed on my laptop. Aside from some weirdness with setting up VPNs, there’s no reason a rolling distro should be this stable.
