• 3 Posts
  • 149 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 17th, 2023

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  • It sounds as you want to evaluate different Linux Distributions.

    DE/GUI is a good one, terminal commands is a bit useless since the vast majority of Linux systems use Bash as default.

    This is what I would look into on a new distro:

    UI - What DE or WM is it using, what is the default config like, and try to learn from that. How is the terminal prompt configured (the default Ubuntu and Debian prompts are terrible, I allways change them)

    Package Manager - how does it work, what software is available?

    Unique software - Does the distribution include some tools, applications or games I haven’t heard about? If so, what do they do, and how do they work.

    This gives me a feel for the distribution and how to use it.


  • I know PCs usually are a few years behind technology wise.

    I am an IT technician, and it takes a lot of confidence and ignorance to be this wrong.

    I’m kind of surprised they still don’t have bluetooth as standard.

    This explains so much about your earlier statement, you seem to think that there is a a standard PC, there isn’t.

    There are hundreds of manufacturers making PCs and PC parts.

    I have never seen a laptop in decades that lack Bluetooth, however there are still desktop motherboards you can buy without wifi or bluetooth, but this is not my reason for making this post…

    I am pissed because I don’t get why you wouldn’t just put the required Bluetooth into the PSVR2 PC adapter unit.







  • What education do you have in the area?

    The IT/Sysadmin sector does have a risk with knowing enough to be dangerous.

    Daily driving Linux is great to get used to the command line, but is different from running servers.

    If you have no experience with running Linux servers, I would be focusing on that part, rather than daily driving at this point.

    Running a server requires a bit of a different mindset to that of just using a desktop.

    You need to be far more restrictive about installing software on the server, be more cautios of reboots, and in general focus on stabillity.

    You also need to familiarize yourself with Debian/Ubuntu and Red Hat/Fedora based distributions, their package managers, apt and dnf, the general layout of the system, they are mostly similar, but they have their own flavours, especially when it commes to the config files.

    Learn the basics of vim, it will allways be installed on a server, I prefer nano but can use vim if needed.

    A big part of my job when I was a Helpdesk technician combined with a Linux sysadmin was storage, I had to set up VMs in vSphere and Nutanix and give them the correct ammount of storage, sometimes also expand the storage on a server, and work with mountpoints.

    Play around with LVMs, learn the concepts of PVs, VGs and LVs, learn how to expand them, how to move an LV from one PV to another inside a VG, learn how to mount them.

    Learn how to set a manual IP, this can change from version to version of a distribution.

    Learn to get annoyed at YAML files.

    Understand how to secure a system, I’ll admit that I never really had to do this as all servers I worked on was behind strong firewalls and not accessable from the internet, but I did my best with what I had.








  • Yep, LVM is basically a software raid 0, I used it when setting up Linux server VMs for years at my last job, as far as I know they are still running fine.

    The VM system backed up all VMs regularly, so I used LVMs as it made increasing the storage on a server easier for me.

    Since it is just a raid 0 that can span several disks and one disk failiure can bring it down I don’t want any irriplacable data on it, so games from Steam seems like an excellwnt idea.

    That also means that being able to just have a volume spanning several disks would be an easy and simple way to increase storage when space is running tight.

    I am an avid hobby photographer and I would never trust an LVM without some kind of added protection, I am looking to get a Synology NAS with minimum of four drives raided in raid 5.

    I have a very old Intel NAS with used drives that I used for many years, but I don’t trust it anymore, I keep it powered off as a cold backup.


  • That depends on your usecase.

    I have setup servers where I mounted extra drives on /srv/nfs

    When/If I switch to Linux I will probably mount my secondary drives to folders like

    /home/stoy/videos

    /home/stoy/music

    /home/stoy/photos

    /home/stoy/documents

    /home/stoy/games

    The ~/games will probably be an LVM since it contains little critical data and may absolutely need to be expanded to span several drives, though I would also be able to reduce the size of it and remove a drive from the LVM if needed.

    I’d make a simple conky config to keep track of the drive space used

    I’d just keep using the default automount spot for automounting drives.


  • What exactly did companies gain from making Linux distros switch over to systemd?

    If anything, the switch ment a loss of productivity as their staff needed to relearn stuff, not to mention loss of technical knowledge as there would be others who simply would not accept the change and leave the company when the change happened.

    This means increased costs, either due to retraining, or due to needing to hire new staff which is expensive.

    Meanwhile, I can’t see anything that would mean that companies would earn or even save enough money to make it worth the effort of making distros implement systemd.

    Ok so doing it for direct gain seems to be out, but you mention “corpo sabotage of opensource”, I can’t really see that either, a developer won’t move a successful Linux project to Windows, AIX, Solaris, Darwin or HP-UX just because of a move to systemd.

    So even indirect gain seems to be out, so “corpo sabotage” doesn’t really seem plausible.

    But, I may be wrong, please, tell us how exactly a move to systemd has benefited companies enough that it would make the effort and expense to make a distro move to sytemd, let alone a majority of distros, worth it.