Posts tagged with "linux"

Well, it lasted 18 months, but I’ve changed Linux distro again. I really thought I had settled on Fedora KDE - I really liked it.

The whole point to running Fedora was that I didn’t have to fix much with the OS, it just worked - until it didn’t. I have two main computers, a Framework laptop, and a stationary desktop computer, and they both got the same problem at the same time - the screen turned black after login if using Wayland, and I couldn’t find a way to fix it. Xorg worked decently, but both computers required re-installation. But the the whole point of running Fedora was that I shouldn’t have to deal with things like this. It should be noted that I was still on Fedora 40, and 41 had been out for three months.

A year and half ago I ended a two year experiment using Windows as my daily driver OS. In short, I felt WSL had too many wrinkles that annoyed me. I switched back to Linux and it was like coming home after being away for too long.

Since then I've tried a number of distros and desktop environments, and I believe I have finally settled on Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition. Getting there took some time though, I tried a number of alternatives, and this is my condensed experience:

I’ve been running Connman instead of NetworkManager for a week since it is supposed to be more lightweight. Lightweight is good.

However, I had really weird problems with DNS, where some hosts wouldn’t resolve.

$ ping outlook.office365.com
PING outlook.office365.com (40.101.40.226) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 40.101.40.226 (40.101.40.226): icmp_seq=1 ttl=238 time=44.7 ms
64 bytes from 40.101.40.226 (40.101.40.226): icmp_seq=2 ttl=238 time=44.6 ms
64 bytes from 40.101.40.226 (40.101.40.226): icmp_seq=3 ttl=238 time=44.8 ms
^C
--- outlook.office365.com ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 44.625/44.755/44.890/0.267 ms

$ ping smtp.office365.com
ping: smtp.office365.com: Temporary failure in name resolution

We use Outlook 365 at work, please don’t judge me.

I have a Lenovo X1 Carbon that has a 14 inch screen with a 2560x1440 resolution. While not quite Retina Display quality, it still has enough pixels to make everything on the screen appear tiny with a regular 96 DPI setting. Trying to fix this in browsers by increasing font sizes breaks quite a few sites, while custom DPI settings works better.

Firefox

Open about:config and set the property layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to the desired value, in my case 1.3.

Last fall, we moved the Qwaya Facebook ads tool from a single host on Rackspace to a clustered Docker based environment on AWS. This is the first blog post of hopefully more that I’m writing to remember what we did. I’ve planned two more posts, one on how we handle CI and one on container orchestration.

Why Docker?

The task at hand was not “Move to docker”, it was “get out of single host hosting”. The old deployment consisted of some quite complicated Fabric scripts that was run from an arbitrary developers laptop. The source code repository did not match the deployment setup, so there was a lot of remote copy commands running around. I know that this is a very common way of deploying applications, but it brings a number of problems. For example, there are no build artifacts, making repeatable builds harder, and if the build fails halfway in you will have a broken system.

Setting up the integriy.st OpenVPN on NetworkManager is easier than the official docs describe. Instead of manually entering all the data, you can use the client.ovpn file included in the .zip downloaded.

When creating the OpenVPN connection, select “Import a saved OpenVPN configuration …”.

Then select the client.ovpn file. You probably want a better connection name than “client” so make one up and fill it in. Enter your username and password, save and connect.

Following along the Deploying Rails book, I stumbled immediately when vagrant up hung showing;

Waiting for VM to boot. This can take a few minutes.

even though the server in fact had booted ok.

I found a solution in the mailing list from a Stefano Pallica:

Boot in GUI mode:

:::ruby
config.vm.boot_mode = :gui

Login to the server when booted.

Edit /etc/rc.local and add the following before exit 0:

:::bash
/etc/init.d/networking restart

Worked for me.

I’ve switched back and forth a lot to try to find a todo list solution that works for me. Gina Trapani’s todo.txt is the latest one, and while not perfect I do find it useable.

I have two zenity scripts mapped to keyboard shortcuts that allows me to quickly add and check off todo’s:

At least in the server world, Linux has won.

Here in Sweden, Microsoft has an inexplicable stronghold, even in the server room. The last time Craig Larman, Valtechs Chief Scientist, was here he noted that nowhere did he see as large proportion of server side windows as in Sweden - and Denmark.

I don’t know what makes swedes pay for stuff others get for free. Perhaps the high taxes have made us used to money disappearing?

I’ve tried a few tools to do screencasts, my favorite so far is Wink.

Notable features:

• Easy to use
• Manual capturing
• Insertion of text into images
• Multiple export formats