I seem to have a lot of suggestions to share with friends about managing disks on a linux livecd. Here are some of the tips I’d like to share. See the table of contents above for a breakdown of the topics discussed. Some disk related topics are out of scope for this article, as they deserve their own blog post. The topics not covered include partitioning, setting up a boot loader, using LVM2 or ZFS, that sort of thing.
You want to use sudo -i or su - to log into root. sudo su anything is superfluous, because you probably should be using sudo -i or sudo -s, which are roughly equivalent, depending if you want to simulate a login (su - or sudo -i) or not (su or sudo -s).1 When to use su -? You want to log into root using the root password. Typically you must be in the wheel group (check your PAM configuration).
Disclaimer: Dvorak, fancy keyboards, whatever, does not replace good lifestyle habits such as computer breaks, good desk ergonomics, and balancing one’s computer life with gasp real life. Dvorak and fancy keyboards can make your life better, but they cannot completely address RSI problems alone. Since sometime 2013 I have faced pain, numbness, and tightness in my hands due to computer overuse. At first I chose to ignore it, but it got so bad I’d take days if not weeks off from prolonged computer use.
Sometimes I find myself setting up servers on networks with less than ideal network configuration. Most home internets use dynamic IP addresses, which requires extra work to ensure I know the IP address to use when logging into the network from the internet. Another concern is how unreliable home networking gear can be, especially with users tweaking settings without fully appreciating what they’re doing. As a result, I’ve devised an alternate solution to ensure I can always log into boxes hosted on home internet connections.
For a couple months now, I have noticed that running dmesg -w on my workstation does not appear to print out new kernel messages. In other words dmesg --follow “hangs”. Additionally when running tail -f /var/log/kern.log to monitor new dmesg messages picked up by sysklogd (part of syslogng), the latest messages do not come through until sysklogd periodically “reopens” the /dev/kmsg kernel message buffer. Why is this a problem? This is a problem because I use the dmesg log to monitor important hardware related messages such as the kernel recognizing a USB device or diagnosing bluetooth/wifi issues.
Zathura is a fantastic PDF viewer. It also supports Postscript, DjVu, and Comicbook archive. In particular it supports using mupdf for the backend, so it’s rather fast (unlike poppler, used by evince and friends). Here is a screenshot of Zathura: Figure 1: screenshot of zathura Now that I’ve introduced Zathura. I want to talk about a problem I had recently. I wanted to print a document a couple weeks ago, but found whenever I issued a :print command in Zathura, the program would crash.
During these interesting times, I figure it would be a good idea to describe how I’ve been keeping myself busy, bugs I’ve fixed, and some of the daily tasks/routines that keep my day structured. For context: I moved house on the weekend of March 21st, which is a couple weeks before the Covid-19 fiasco became a front-and-center concern for my geographical region. I am finishing my undergrad in computer science — this is my last semester.