Posts by starbreaker

starbreaker · Devuan

I've started using Deepsea, and for some reason using a Clearlooks-based theme seems to make GTK apps feel more responsive. Also, it's a nice, clean, utilitarian look. I like it.

starbreaker · Devuan

denk_mal wrote:

Maybe there is anopther solution. Using ARM CPU's instead of amd64 like apple do could be the right step.
No TPM, no Intel ME, no meltdown and spectre and faster with less power consumption.
I would not be surprised if Distributors like System76, Tuxedo and others would bring out such devices if Win10++ came to the market.

Well, if I haven't already had my midlife crisis I could buy a Talos II rig instead of a Harley.

starbreaker · Off-topic

dice wrote:

Had a bit of time to sit down and look into that web accessibility starbreaker, only one alert now saying no page regions, ill hopefully get a handle on that soon. Thanks again.

If you want to fix the "no page regions" issue, it should be a simple adjustment since you're already using the doctype for HTML5. I noticed that you're using a <div> element with a "header" class for your header; you could replace that with HTML5's <header> element. There's also a <footer> element. You could wrap your page content in <main>, and put your navigation inside <nav>.

PS: Mozilla still has their MDN documentation for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It's an excellent reference and I use it at my day job. https://developer.mozilla.org/

starbreaker · Off-topic

I don't know if you're interested in web accessibility, but here's what you see if you run your site through wave.webaim.org: https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https:/ … github.io/

starbreaker · Devuan

I'm fine as long as I can find refurbished machines.

starbreaker · Off-topic

When one of the first things I see on a website is "Praised be Jesus Christ", I immediately reach for the back button. Do you actually care about Linux, or are you just trying to use Linux to push Christianity?

starbreaker · Off-topic

TIL that cpupower-gui is a handy way to throttle clock speeds on my machines so that they aren't running quite as hot in the summer (they make good space heaters in the winter).

starbreaker · Off-topic

zapper wrote:

On a semi related note, corporations are dangerous without actual checks and balances.

The whole legal framework around US corporations is a mess, IMO.

Corporations should have a clearly defined purpose.
Once a corporation has carried out its purpose, it should disband.
Corporations should not be allowed to exist for more than 20 years.
Businesses incorporated within a state should only be permitted to operate within that state.
Businesses that operate across state or international borders should be required to incorporate at the Federal level.
Corporations should not be treated as legal persons, but as privately owned/operated government agencies.
Corporations should not have rights, but limited powers defined by law.
Corporations that overstep their boundaries should be summarily dissolved, and their assets confiscated to compensate non-executive workers for unexpected job loss.
Responsibility for corporate malfeasance should fall on the majority shareholders, board of directors, CEO, and senior management—and carry both civil and criminal liability.
Corporations should under no circumstance be protected by the First Amendment, let alone permitted to engage in advertising (aka private-sector psyops).
Intellectual property from defunct corporations should immediately enter the public domain.
Everybody involved in a corporation's operations should have a say in how the corporation is run.
Employees should not be fired without due process to prove cause.

starbreaker · Off-topic

Also, I just learned about using heredocs in bash scripts.

starbreaker · Off-topic

dice wrote:

that looks useful, do you use this in a script?

As a matter of fact, I do.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# atomgen: Atom feed generator for textblogs
# © 2021 Matthew Graybosch <contact@matthewgraybosch.com>
# available under GPLv3
# based on code by Len Falken
# http://len.falken.ink/misc/writing-for-the-internet-across-a-human-lifetime.txt

SETTINGS=${1}
FLAG=${2}

# $FLAG should be --full for a full text feed

# read settings file
. ${SETTINGS}

# find posts for processing
POSTS=$(
    find . -name '*.txt'                | \
    grep -v .git                        | \
    xargs ls -Stl --time-style=long-iso | \
    awk '{ print $8 }'                  | \
    sed 's/.\/public\///')

# begin atom feed
echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?>
<feed xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom\">
  <title>${TITLE}</title>
  <subtitle>${DESCRIPTION}</subtitle>
  <id>${DOMAIN}feed.xml</id>
  <link href=\"${DOMAIN}feed.xml\" rel=\"self\"/>
  <icon>${DOMAIN}icon.png</icon>
  <updated>$(atomdate)</updated>
  <rights>© $(date '+%Y') $AUTHOR, $LICENSE</rights>
  <generator>atomgen</generator>
  <author>
    <name>${AUTHOR}</name>
    <email>${EMAIL}</email>
    <uri>${DOMAIN}about.txt</uri>
  </author>";

#generate entries
echo "$POSTS" | while read -r FILE; do
    POST_DATE=$(tail -n 1 ${PUBLIC_DIR}${FILE} | cut -d' ' -f 2);
	  POST_TITLE=$(head -n 1 ${PUBLIC_DIR}${FILE});
	  POST_SUMMARY=$(head -n 2 ${PUBLIC_DIR}${FILE} | tail -n 1);
	  POST_CATEGORY=$(echo ${POST_TITLE} | cut -d' ' -f 1 | sed -e 's/\[//' -e 's/\]//' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')

    echo "  <entry>
    <title>${POST_TITLE}</title>
    <id>${DOMAIN}${FILE}</id>
    <link href=\"${DOMAIN}${FILE}\"/>
    <category term=\"$POST_CATEGORY\"/>
    <summary>${POST_SUMMARY}</summary>
    <author>
      <name>${AUTHOR}</name>
      <email>${EMAIL}</email>
      <uri>${DOMAIN}about.txt</uri>
    </author>
    <updated>${POST_DATE}</updated>";

    # pull content for full-text feeds
    if [ "$FLAG" = "--full" ]; then
        POST_CONTENT=$(tail -n +5 ${PUBLIC_DIR}${FILE} | head -n -5)
        echo "    <content type='text'>
$POST_CONTENT
    </content>";
    fi
    
    echo "  </entry>";
done

echo "</feed>";

starbreaker · Off-topic

I learned that if I wanted to trim the front matter and end matter off of a text file so I could insert the text into an Atom feed entry's <content> tag, I could use head and tail like so:

tail -n +5 $filename | head -n -5

Much easier than using sed.

starbreaker · Off-topic

golinux wrote:

FWIW, that website makes me want to puke. The list of "Corporate Sponsors" says it all . . .

Yeah, I'm not at all surprised that Pearson is one of them. Because a corporation that makes money off of overpriced certification exams sponsoring an organization that pushes credentialism is totally not self-dealing. Likewise IBM. Now that they own Red Hat it's obvious they want more GNU/systemd in the enterprise and on corporate desktops.

starbreaker · Off-topic

JSM wrote:

So, the Linux community should prepare to cope with a mass exodus of Windows users.

You first. Good luck teaching Eloi that if they want to use a Unix-like operating system and don't have a sysadmin to handle sysadmin stuff for them, then they will have to become their own sysadmins. Fortunately there are plenty of GNU/systemd distributions that try to be "user-friendly" by catering to Eloi who think that only Morlocks use the command line, and Devuan doesn't insist on being one of them.

starbreaker · Documentation

If you ever needed to backdate file, you can do it using the touch command with the -t flag and the --time=mtime option.

Here's an example.

$ touch -t 200101012358 --time=mtime foo.txt

This will create/update "foo.txt" in the current directory and set its modification time to 11:58PM on January 1st, 2001.

This might come in handy if you ever want to generate a RSS/Atom feed for a static website using a shell script. Read man touch for further details.

starbreaker · Desktop and Multimedia

I still play nethack. And sometimes I set up a docker container for a drunken round of Suicide Linux.

starbreaker · Off-topic

Here's another "desktop" shot. Same machine, but running Devuan in a framebuffer console without X11.

starbreaker · Off-topic

8.8GB/s on a ThinkPad T60. Not bad for 2007.

starbreaker@netzach:~$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=1M count=65536
65536+0 records in
65536+0 records out
68719476736 bytes (69 GB, 64 GiB) copied, 7.80361 s, 8.8 GB/s

starbreaker · Off-topic

Nothing fancy. I only run X11 when I want to use Firefox or the GIMP. I'm trying to do everything else in the console.

Devuan Ceres, X11, Openbox, GNU Emacs with vterm, redshift-gtk running in stalonetray

starbreaker · Off-topic

dice wrote:

nice playlist there starbreaker, me likey. Especially blue oyster cult and sisters of mercy.
Welcome to the forum

Thanks on both counts.

starbreaker · Documentation

golinux wrote:

Welcome to the forum starbreaker! Just one quick note about sources.list designations in Devuan. Since we are not always in sync with Debian releases, it is safer to use Codenames rather than Suite names. I not sure that "unstable" is filtered for banned packages so ceres might be safer. It's all explained on this page.

Thanks for the advice, I updated from "unstable" to "ceres" and did a full-upgrade. There weren't any changes, so I guess I was lucky.

golinux wrote:

Nice to see that you're using gemini and your sig is oh, so true.

That line was hilarious in 1987; today it's just tragicomic.

starbreaker · Installation

JSM wrote:

Hi
I installed Devuan today, Beowulf 3.1. I have 1GB of ram and use a 2GB swapfile.
Which desktop should I choose? Which one is for little ram?

Have you considered not using X11? You can build a useful desktop that runs in the text console without using a lot of RAM.

editor: emacs, vim, neovim, nano, joe
web browser: lynx, links2, w3m
gopher browser: lynx, bombadillo
gemini browser: bombadillo
email: mutt, alpine, nmh
irc: irssi, weechat, bitchx
music: cmus, mpd with mpc/ncmpc/ncmpcpp
file manager: shell, mc, ranger, nnn
usenet reader: tin
file sync: rsync, unison

Of course, if you have Emacs and are willing to spend enough time on your configuration, you can get Emacs to do everything.

starbreaker · Off-topic

Mostly rock and metal, with a bit of jazz.

starbreaker · Documentation

I just joined the forum after switching to Devuan. These are the notes I took during my installation. I thought I'd share them in case they help others.

***

I've been using Debian lately, but with a stripped down environment. For the most part I use a text console when logging in, and live mainly in Emacs. When I want to use Firefox, I have a X11 session with Openbox as my window mangler.

This being the case, Debian with its default systemd is overkill. However, Debian has a working console setup that provides UTF-8 support and lets me remap Caps Lock to Compose without using X11, so I want to keep it.

I'm hoping the migrating from Debian to Devuan will let me reproduce my text-mode setup without having to depend on systemd. If this post seems disjointed, it's because I wrote it as notes to myself documenting my installation so I can reproduce it on other machines.

Getting Devuan

I followed the instructions on this page to get the netinstall ISO image for Devuan 3.1 (Beowulf).

Afterward, I was able to prep a USB drive with the following command.

sudo dd if=Downloads/devuan_beowulf_3.1.1_amd64_netinstall.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M status=progress

Installing Devuan

The image I put on my flash drive supports both BIOS systems and UEFI systems, but I'm old-school so I'm sticking with BIOS. Since I don't dual boot with Windows, I don't need UEFI. I'll be installing on my desktop machine first. It's a Lenovo ThinkCentre M92P that was originally manufactured in 2012. I bought it from a refurbisher in 2017, added a SSD, and maxed out the RAM.

Setting language to English...

Setting country to United States...

Setting keymap to American (US) English...

The installer used DHCP on eth0. I'll want to go back and set a static IP of 192.168.1.100 since that's where my router expects to find this machine.

Setting hostname to [redacted]...

Setting domain name to [redacted]...

Not gonna write anything about my root password or user setup.

Setting time zone to [redacted]...

Using manual partitioning since I already have partitions and don't want /home to get nuked.

/dev/sda1 is /: 128GB, ext4, bootable, noatime
/dev/sda2 is swap: 32GB
/dev/sda3 is /home: 840.2GB, ext4, noatime

I'm going to use deb.devuan.org as my archive mirror. I don't need a proxy.

Since Devuan asked me to opt into package installation telemetry using popularity-contest instead of making me opt out, I decided to opt in.

For software selection I'm going with the following:

Console productivity
print service
SSH server
standard system utilities

I've turned off "Devuan desktop environment" because I want a bare-bones graphical environment built from selected packages. As I mentioned earlier, I want to live mainly in the console (and GNU Emacs) with only occasional forays into X11.

I'm going to stick with sysvinit as my init system. It works, and I'm not doing anything fancy so it's good enough.

GRUB is going into the master boot record on /dev/sda.

Installation is complete. Time to reboot and install additional packages...

First Boot

Though I have an ordinary user, I'm logging in as root first. I need to enable sudo for my ordinary user, and want to configure my console. I might as well do my package installation while I'm at it.

Console Setup

To setup the console, I need to enter the following command.

dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

encoding: UTF-8
character set: guess optimal
console font: TerminusBold
font size: 16x32 (framebuffer only)

Next is keyboard configuration:

dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

keyboard model: Generic 105-key PC (intl.)
keyboard layout: English (US)
key to function as AltGr: default
compose key: Caps Lock

Upgrading User Privileges

To upgrade my regular user, I ran the following command.

usermod -a -G sudo,audio,video,cdrom [username]

Running visudo on Devuan shows that anybody in group "sudo" will be able to use sudo to escalate privileges as needed. Adding my username to group "cdrom" allows me to rip CDs using abcde.

Yes, I still buy CDs because I like to own my music and because most musicians get paid fuck-all on services like Spotify, Deezer, etc.

Additional Packages

I'm adding the following to round out my experience.

build-essential
git
emacs
libvterm-dev
cmake
neofetch
offline-imap
maildir-utils
mu4e
abcde
mpv
fonts-noto
fonts-noto-cjk
fonts-noto-color-emoji
fonts-firacode
openbox
lxappearance
comixcursors-righthanded-opaque
materia-gtk-theme
papirus-icon-theme
stalonetray
redshift-gtk
quodlibet
firefox-esr
xscreensaver-gl
dict
dictd
dict-devil
dict-elements
dict-foldoc
dict-gcide
dict-jargon
dict-vera
dict-wn
fortune-mod
fortune-anarchism
fortunes-bofh-excuses
fortunes-debian-hints
fortunes-off
gawk
m4
anarchism
gawk-doc
m4-doc

I ended up installing "task-desktop" after all because my wife came up and asked me what I thought would happen if she needed to use this particular computer and XFCE (her preferred environment on GNU/Linux) wasn't available.

Which reminds me; I need to create a user account for her, too.

Disabling Graphical Login

Installing "task-desktop" also installed slim and enabled graphical login by default. That's not what I wanted, so this is how I fixed it.

service stop slim
update-rc.d disable slim

Setting a Static IP on eth0

Since my desktop doesn't use wifi and doesn't get moved (I missed out on LAN parties, LOL), there's no need for DHCP networking. Let's set up a static IP on the home LAN instead.

First, let's edit /etc/network/interface and delete everything after the "allow hotplug eth0" line. Then add the following to /etc/network/interface.d/eth0.

iface eth0 inet static
      address 192.168.1.100
      netmask 255.255.255.0
      gateway 192.168.1.1

Problems with GNU Emacs 26.1, eww, SSL, and MELPA

eww in GNU Emacs 26.1 can't access websites via HTTPS. Pulling package listings from MELPA is likewise a no go. I don't get paid enough to debug this, and Emacs 26.1 is old and busted anyway, so I might as well just upgrade to unstable.

This entails editing /etc/apt/sources.list.

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged unstable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://deb.devuan.org/merged unstable main contrib non-free

Next, run the following commands and say yes to all questions.

apt update
apt full-upgrade
reboot

N.B.: Only run "apt full-upgrade" when changing releases. Otherwise, "apt upgrade" is fine. I rebooted because the migration upgraded my kernel version from 4.19 to 5.10.

(This post originally appeared in my gemini capsule.)

The officially official Devuan Forum!

#1 Re: Devuan » Meet Chimaera's deepsea theme » 2021-07-15 19:17:33

#2 Re: Devuan » Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot » 2021-07-09 19:34:24

#3 Re: Off-topic » Easy website from github pages. » 2021-07-09 15:38:50

#4 Re: Off-topic » Easy website from github pages. » 2021-07-08 15:32:47

#5 Re: Devuan » Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot » 2021-07-06 20:20:21

#6 Re: Off-topic » Presentation of LinuC » 2021-07-06 20:14:33

#7 Re: Off-topic » Today I Learned » 2021-06-29 14:15:26

#8 Re: Off-topic » What will happen to Windows? » 2021-06-13 16:55:21

#9 Re: Off-topic » Today I Learned » 2021-06-07 20:22:12

#10 Re: Off-topic » Today I Learned » 2021-06-07 15:00:17

#11 Re: Off-topic » Today I Learned » 2021-06-07 14:38:27

#12 Re: Off-topic » What will happen to Windows? » 2021-06-07 00:23:40

#13 Re: Off-topic » What will happen to Windows? » 2021-06-07 00:22:09

#14 Documentation » [HOWTO] Backdating Files with the Touch Command » 2021-06-06 16:54:27

#15 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » What games do you play on Devuan?? » 2021-06-05 22:19:14

#16 Re: Off-topic » Show your desktop (rebooted) » 2021-06-04 21:51:11

#17 Re: Off-topic » post your interesting bashrc commands » 2021-06-04 14:18:22

#18 Re: Off-topic » Show your desktop (rebooted) » 2021-06-04 13:41:12

#19 Re: Off-topic » Music » 2021-06-04 13:33:50

#20 Re: Documentation » [Success Story] Installing Devuan 3.1 (Beowulf) » 2021-06-04 13:32:25

#21 Re: Installation » low memory installation » 2021-06-04 03:45:44

#22 Re: Off-topic » Music » 2021-06-04 03:31:55

#23 Documentation » [Success Story] Installing Devuan 3.1 (Beowulf) » 2021-06-04 03:17:13

Getting Devuan

Installing Devuan

First Boot

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