linuxPIPEpower @ linuxPIPEpower @discuss.tchncs.de

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Joined

2 yr. ago

It is a question I've spent a lot of time trying to work out. Can't speak to docker.

Some of the specifics of Keeps and Dontkeeps depend on details of your system. You have to find out where the distro, DM and other apps keep the following:

Dontkeeps:

• trashes
• temp files
• file indexes .. IMHO these dont backup properly if you leave them in and will prevent you from completing the task
• device files

Keeps:

• list of installed packages --- explicit and deps separate if possible
• config files: /etc, ~/.config, ~/.* on a case by case basis... I say remove the obvious large temp dirs and keep the rest by default for simplicity
  • for the system configs I've had a tool called etckeeper running for a while because it was highly recommended but I've never actually restored from it...
• personal documents and other files such as typically kept in the home directory
• /root occasionally has something you need

Ways to investigate:

• use a disk usage utility to find out where your storage is being used up ... It'll help you find large Dontkeeps
• watch for recently modified files
• dirs and files that are modified all the time are usually temp dirs. But sometimes they have something useful like your firefox profile.

Most backup solutions are ONE of the following:

1. User files
2. System files

Don't spend too much time crying about needing two solutions. Just make your backup today and reach perfection later.

Remember: sync isn't backup. Test your backup if you can (but its not as easy as it sounds). Off site your most precious files.

I have also been confounded by the situation.

It is even worse when you are on the secondary market. The company's product pages are broken. Trying to compare across different release years is way harder.

I assumed the reason for this had to do with the production systems and supply chains. They can get a certain number of x parts at y price from a factory located in a given location. You get enough parts in proximity to each other and you make it a model.

Its one thing for a small company to have enough components to have only a few models but with the volume dell or HP moves, they would need to really invest in suppliers or actually make the components themselves.

I dont imagine the marketing people have come up with all the options, they're just the ones who have to try to sell want they're given.

I've not used Guix but I don't think any distro has anything close to number of desirable available packages as arch--- so be prepared for that. My ventures into debian, suse and fedora were made quite annoying by having to work around the many missing packages. Including user-facing applications, dependencies and background programs. I never quite got down with distrobox, maybe that's the cure.

this chart on wikipedia gives the impression that Debian has more packages but that's not the way it feels when you are looking for something. Maybe they have a lot of dot matrix printer libraries from 1992 or something which bring the number up.

Arch includes a lot of not-at-all-free packages (which it is impossible to distinguish in pacman or other tool as far as I can find), orphaned, new packages that haven't yet made it into other repos, and packages where no attempt has been made to submit them to other repos.

On arch I have virtually never had to go outside the repos for packages. It's very hard to give up once you are used to it. (Even though it's better to use properly libre/free stuff and other benefits of a more curated approach like security, stability and quality.)

The other benefit of being in highschool is many people have loads of time to spend.

I honestly don't know if there is any advice I can give to someone with a fulltime job and care giving responsibilities that would be convincing.

Ya just having the button always visible would make me 90% satisfied. Its just trying to make things "smart" but not being able to plan for all contingencies which makes it annoying. Would be better to have the option to hide it sometimes like how the Downloads toolbar icon can be either way.

I found an add-on a while ago that put a permenent button, but only for certain languages which the add-on also supported. It had some weird behavior but surely improvement. Its on a different computer I don't have access to right now to tell you which one. It was from a related/forked project to the Translations.

That's weird.... I wonder what's getting in the way.

No Chinese works as well as any other language for the actual translation. Here is the example link:

I have found the same issue for various European languages. It's just today I was trying to read some Chinese stuff so that's the example I picked.

I can't manage to find a list of currently supported languages from Mozilla though certainly there must be one. It seems like some Asian languages were added to the non-mainline releases earlier this year. I am using Developer on linux and it has way more languages than the original 10 or so Translations rolled out with. I also see Japanese, Greek, Arabic, Korean and a few Cyrillics in there using non-latin alphabets. So they seem to have overcome whatever the barrier was. :)

I don't know why Mozilla is shy of promoting this feature; it's so killer.

It felt strangely like an initiation.

don't mystify

might make sense to notify the educational institution she was said to be attending.

I've been seeing a lot of posts about how nobody can get through the AI filters when applying for jobs.

These are the people who get through the filters.

but the advice is that instead of pointing, tell a riddle

Since I started learning enough about computers that I have a reason to be hanging out in forums and issue trackers I've really changed the way I think about tech problems.

From feedback given to me, and to others, and from general posting guidelines, I learned to be more systematic about looking for answer. Going through the process of writing out in full what happened can clarify things. I often start writing a question, never to post it because it gets solved half way through. Assemble the logs. Check the environment isn't wonky somehow. Upgrade everything. Check the docs. Check the latest release notes. Verify the details.

I've always been comfortable with the software side of computers but I have a lot more confidence lately because of all this. But I never would have been able to learn it on my own. Equally important as the thinking is that I know I can lean on community members to help me get through those cognitive bottlenecks. By reading the vast archives of prior discussions and problem solving, and occasionally asking my own, or even answering if possible, I'm getting smarter at my areas of interest every year.

But I wasn't born knowing that, nor was it kept from me. I got socialized into a certain way of doing and thinking things that is appropriate to these situations. There is no reason why any newcomer would arrive so socialized. So you need to bring them through the process.

Must point out that this essay was published in 2006. World of Warcraft was big 2002-2006 yes? So @jnod4 is mistaken about having grown up on the good old days.

Also mistaken, as you point out, that any such experience can be generalized to the rest of a generation.

I'm not much of a gamer at any stage of life but I feel like there is a ton of modding going on and there are certain games that are very well known for it. I'm sure there are opportunities to get into stuff for younger people.

Tho I do agree with the general sentiment that slick interfaces and anti-hacking legislation really does us all a disservice.

one of the major benefits of going to school is you can learn stuff your parents don't know or can't teach.

In your country, when you were a child, how many parents out of 1000 knew more than a computer teacher about computing?

You are advocating for a world where only the children of the educated can become educated.

because zsh I swapped out ~ -> $HOME. In addition to some permission denied that you always get finding over the home dir, I get these weird hits:

 sh

    
find "$HOME" -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script "/path/to/target/dir" {} +
/home/user/.konan/dependencies/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-gcc-8.3.0-glibc-2.19-kernel-4.9-2/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib64/libatomic.so
/home/user/.mozilla/firefox/xxx000xx.someprofile/chrome/dir/file.css


  

lib atomic is something I've heard of vaguely but certainly not anything I use. I couldn't identify any way this file was doing anything outside the ~/.konan dir.

the CSS files there were a few different ones in a couple different Firefox profiles. it's the user customization. But I don't think it should have anything to do with the directory I was asking for.

If I give it a bit more of a hint, telling to look in ~/.config specifically, now I get some (but not all) the links I expect.

 sh

    
find "$HOME/.config" -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script "/path/to/target/dir" {} +
/home/user/.config/dir02
/home/user/.config/dir01/subdir/file
/home/user/.config/dir01/subdir2/file2

  

And suggesting it searches in the .konan dir where it found lib atomimc, it now doesn't find anything.

 sh

    
find "$HOME/.konan" -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script "/path/to/target/dir" {} +

  

Could be all kinds of things getting the way. Different versions of relevant tools, filesystems/setups, permissions...

Ventoy is just soooo fucking useful.

Idk which has worked best. Currently it is running on a debian derivative called "sparky" for no particular reason. As I said, bluethooth magically started working so I'm not changing anything.

I really strongly recommend you prioritize a popular distro as a novice user. When you have problems, it will be a lot harder to get help if you are using something obscure. People who are using more common distros won't be able to know if your problem could be due to some oddity of your distro. So they will be more reluctant to offer solutions.

Mint is a really good first choice. And you should just try the thing I suggested about booting from USBs and seeing if networking and other basics work properly.

Only proceed to something like sparky if nothing else works.

The good news about having a device from 2018, is there should be no (few) surprises. Other people will have tried things already. It's a similar benefit as choosing a popular distro.

You are thinking too hard I think in the wrong direction. Use Mint unless you have a strong feeling/need for something else. In which case, use that. Choice of first distro is not really that important. Pick a popular one and if it's wrong for you, you'll figure it out.

What you haven't mentioned is any research you have done regarding hardware support/compatibility for your specific device. I searched the specs you listed and it came up with some netbooks like CB012DX. I actually have an older, shittier version of this device running a debian derivative. (Mint is also in the debian family FYI.) And I've had fun installing various linuxes on even older, shittier chromenetbooks over the years.

Assuming yours is in this ballpark, I have one really important piece of advice for you. Before you think anymore about it, download ISOs of your top 1 or 3 distro choices, flash them to USB and attempt to boot. These super cheap devices cut corners on components. It is not unlikely that you will have some hardware that either doesn't have open source drivers, or has some sort of theoretical support that will be too esoteric for you to implement at your current skill level. It is quite common on these devices that everything works fine except networking or something like that. So you might be able to exclude some of your choices based on that. Try to find a distro that works reasonably well out of the box.

You should find the various names your device goes by

As you have probably read, booting from a flashed USB is non-destructive of you normal system (unless you choose to format your disk or something of course). Assuming you have no issues booting, try out all the hardware features you have like: trackpad (different kinds of click, drag, zoom etc), ethernet, wireless (2.4 + 5ghz network), bluetooth, speakers, headphones, external input device, external displays, fingerprint scanner, touch screen, all keys and buttons, cameras, mics, sensors, keyboard lights. Any external devices you like to use: mice, keyboards, dongles, should also be included. I suggest making a list and systematically checking each item.

You can use this amazing tool called ventoy to flash one USB boot drive to have multiple distros available. You can even keep a windows ISO on there. It will even let you reserve a portion of the disk for persistent storage. Ventoy substantially improves this whole process so you don't have to have 10 different USB disks floating around. It is well designed and straight forward to use.

So on my current netbook, I was lucky that networking has been no problem. people with a slightly different model have to use an external wifi dongle (and not all wifi dongles are compatible with linux). I have never gotten anything form the speakers, but they might have arrived broken, apparently it's pretty easy to blow out the speakers and I didn't test while ChromeOS was still installed. Using an arch-based distro, the touch screen worked but now in Debian it doesn't. I don't really care about that. I really wanted Bluetooth to work and I couldn't for the longest time til one day it just magically solved itself and I haven't reinstalled since then because I am not sure I'd be able to re-solve it.

The other piece of advice has to do with storage. Depending what software you run, it can require a bit of space. 64gb could be gone quickly. This will be somewhat controversial (for good reason) but I always end up devoting the full eMMC to the system partition and having a permanently mounted SD card for /home, user storage and maybe even some of the system temp directories. This goes against common advice because SD cards are more prone to failure. So you need to have a good backup plan or just accept the risk. But if you run out of storage space on your system drive you can get yourself into the kind of mess that requires reinstalling.

In terms of both storage and RAM/CPU use, you will want to be extremely judicious of you application use. Firefox is a beast on any operating system.If you like to have a bunch of hungry tabs going on, you can't really optimize the OS.

frustrating to learn to find

So when you are pointed at a mega threads that is 2k posts long over 10 years, where you are told the answer is, how do you attack it? LearnEd one.