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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • IIRC, within RHEL it goes fedora (next major) -> centos stream (next minor) -> RHEL (current major.minor).

    With Debian and its derivatives (e.g Ubuntu) this means that Debian-unstable corresponds to fedora, Debian-testing corresponds to CentOS stream and Debian-stable corresponds to RHEL. (Roughly of course).

    Ubuntu is based off of some flavor of Debian and is therefore downstream of it: Debian (unstable I think) -> Ubuntu -> Ubuntu LTS.

    But as far as which version has the newest packages then sure, your list is correct.





  • They’re making a new browser engine from scratch in an open way, absolutely amazing!

    I do have several questions:

    Why would they use BSD instead of GPL? If you care about open-source so much, why would you make it possible for a company to run away with your fancy new engine?

    Why are they creating a new browser, when even firefox has to struggle to keep some semblance of market share? I get that not every project needs to aim to be “the biggest”, and that even a smaller project (in terms of users), can be fun. It’s just that writing a browser engine that can handle the modern web seems like an almost Sisyphean task; which makes me wonder what their motivation(?) is.

    Why the FLOSS are they using closed-source proprietary discord as their main communication channel?





  • You can also do the following to prevent unwanted writes when something is not mounted at /mnt/thatdrive:

    # make sure it is not mounted, fails if not mounted which is fine
    umount /mnt/thatdrive
    
    # make sure the mountpoint exists
    mkdir -p /mnt/thatdrive
    
    # make the directory immutable, which disallows writing to it (i.e. creating files inside it)
    chattr +i /mnt/thatdrive
    
    # test write to unmounted dir (should fail)
    touch /mnt/thatdrive/myfile
    
    # remount the drive (assumes it’s already listed in fstab)
    mount /mnt/thatdrive
    
    # test write to mounted dir (should succeed)
    touch /mnt/thatdrive/myfile
    
    # cleanup
    rm /mnt/thatdrive/myfile
    

    From man 1 chattr:

    A file with the ‘i’ attribute cannot be modified: it cannot be deleted or renamed, no link can be created to this file, most of the file’s metadata can not be modified, and the file can not be opened in write mode.
    Only the superuser or a process possessing the CAP_LINUX_IMMUTABLE capability can set or clear this attribute.

    I do this to prevent exactly the situation you’ve encountered. Hope this helps!






  • It’s probably best to limit yourself to a used laptop.

    Reading and writing code is nothing more than reading and writing text, and for that you don’t need a fancy gpu or screen.

    What I would recommend you look for in a laptop is

    • an SSD instead of an HDD
    • more cpu cores (at least 4 cores)
    • more memory (RAM) (at least 8GB, preferably 16GB+)

    More memory and cores will help you with compiling and running your code.

    And make sure you take regular backups! You never know when your disk will fail.

    Also make sure to check linux compatibility before you buy. Laptops used to be a pain (10+ years ago), and it’s gotten a lot better, but it’s not always perfect. Just search for “[brand] [model] linux” or try to find the model on the archlinux wiki.



  • Exactly, ansible is basically imperative, where write the steps declaratively.

    Whereas nixos is more like a compiler that compiles to a working linux install.

    If I added the software myprogram and a config file at /etc/myprogram.conf, that’s pretty easy in both. But if I needed to to then remove those it gets different .

    With nixos it’s at easy as removing the two lines that add the program and the config file; after the next “compile”, the file is gone and myprogram is no longer available in the PATH.

    With ansible you need to change the relevant step to use apt remove instead of apt install and to change the config file step in a step that removes the file.

    Don’t get me wrong, ansible is still better than writing a lot of bash scripts, especially if you don’t have people with a lot of shell experience.

    But tools like nixos and guix are on a whole other level.