linux

I use Devuan with sysvinit because I do not normally have boot time problems, but I found myself with some and this is how I fixed them.

I use a 1GB tmpfs on my Linux system, which causes problems with some installs which write their temporary files to /tmp. Here's a way to somewhat gracefully set TMPDIR for every user logging in:

I wanted a nice way to simply see whatever statistics I could gather from my GPU — ye olde PNY XLR8 1070 slightly-pre-overclocked model, which I bought used and which has been surprisingly solid so far — and for some reason the information I want to see isn't in the default output from the nvidia-smi command included with the nvidia driver, and I don't get anything in lm-sensors. Noodling around a bit led me to the idea of using the --query-gpu option, which lets you pull any specific information you want, as long as you are willing to deal with it in CSV format. I was, and here we are.

Without getting [too] technical (and probably operating "above my pay grade") the ZFS ZIL is a place where synchronous writes are done, and you can move this to a separate zpool, which is called a SLOG. One SLOG can store the ZIL for multiple zpools. While most writes by most applications are asynchronous, some are not, and file metadata writes are synchronous. Putting the ZIL for a HDD (or even an array) on a SSD lets your zpool provide the IOPS performance of your SLOG, while also avoiding fragmentation and reducing seeks through ordered writes.

If you have a very old nvidia card, you will want to use the FOSS nvidia driver (nouveau) as it is likely the only thing that will work for you. But realistically, if you have nvidia graphics on your system, you will want to use the binary driver. This is a quick guide to that. The nvidia driver is in the non-free repo, so make sure you have that added to your sources.list. Then you can do the following various things (as root, or sudo as necessary)

Anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with Linux audio knows about the pulseaudio daemon, and its long history of causing problems with Linux audio in the name of solving them. What it gave us was per-application volume control, but what it took away was reliability. The good news is that there is now a superior replacement for pulseaudio which also replaces JACK in the bargain, called pipewire.

I have recently made the switch as a Linux user from LUKS, LVM and ext4 to ZFS, ZFS, and ZFS. I started it with Ubuntu, which conveniently offered me an encrypted root on zfs option which worked very well for me in general. However, every time I had to interface with systemd it felt like a chore, when what I really wanted was the old school UNIX feel I got from Slackware. And now I've converted to Devuan 4 "Chimaera" on ZFS, which is based on Debian 11 "Bullseye", which is as close to that as I'm willing to get given the amount of work I want to do. In the process, I've had to mount my old zfs filesystems on my new system gracefully, and this is how I went about that.

This is based on a number of documents, beginning with OpenZFS Debian Bullseye Root on ZFS. There are some notable changes. View the original document and follow along:

One of my favorite features of modern filesystems is the sparse file, where "empty" portions of files are unallocated, so they don't consume any space. This allows oversubscription of disk blocks, so long as you never actually complete fill all of the files at once. But one common problem of sparse files is that they tend to grow, and there is often no way to solve this problem in place. But there is, with ZFS.

If you want to "upgrade" a computer with a HDD to using a smaller disk, usually a SSD, you will need to come up with a way to shrink your windows partition. There are some for-pay software packages which do this for you, but no OSS tool which will do it with a simple click. There's a slightly meandering sequence of steps necessary to get everything working correctly. Your best allies are the gparted livecd, and a USB to SATA (probably) adapter to let you hook both disks up to your system at once. This process should work for basically any version of Windows from 2000 on, but I used it specifically with Windows 7.