There are many ways to ask a Linux machine how it’s doing. I’ve collected a few of them, mostly for my own reference. I guess I’ll add more items as I run across new ones. General Info inxi -Fxxxz (neat output, but makes the system send me security “password required” alert mails because of attempts [...]
Introduction Trying to solve a 90 second wait-on-some-start-job on each boot situation, I found that there’s little info on how to tackle a problem like this out there. Most web pages usually go “I did this, hurray it worked!”, but where do you start solving a problem like this if none of the do-this-do-that advice [...]
Introduction After installing wireshark (and tons of packages it depends on) on a rather fresh and bare-boned Debian 8 (Jessie), I got the “A start job is running for sys-subsystem-net-devices-eth0.device” message for a minute and half on every boot. It was exceptionally difficult to find the reason, because so many packages were installed along with [...]
Introduction It all began when I noted that my media center Linux machine (Linux Mint 18.1, Serena) finished a TV recording a bit earlier than expected. Logging in and typing “date” I was quite surprised to find out that the time was off by half a minute. The first question that comes to mind is [...]
Background Archaeological findings have revealed that prehistoric humans buried their forefathers under the floor of their huts. Fast forward to 2018, yours truly decided to continue running the (ancient) Fedora 12 as a chroot when migrating to Linux Mint 19. That’s an eight years difference. While a lot of Linux users are happy to just [...]
Introduction These are my somewhat messy jots while setting up an APC Smart UPS 750 (SMT750I) with a Linux Mint 19 machine, for a clean shutdown on power failure. Failures and mistakes shown as well. Even though I had issues with receiving a broken UPS at first, and waiting two months for a replacement (ridiculous [...]
In short On an embedded ARM-based Lubuntu 16.04, I had LXDE’s logoff dialog window offering suspend as an option, and when that was chosen, the system got itself into some nasty state with network and keyboard off. The serial console was still active, and yet, I was better off without it. It turned out that [...]
As systemd seems to be here to stay (or at least I hope so), this is a post of random notes to self that I jot down as I explore it. It will probably grow with time, and become a mixture of basic issues and rather advanced stuff. Useful references man systemd.service and man systemd.unit [...]
Introduction August 2019 update: I’ve disactivated the service described below on my own machine, because in the end, the system didn’t recover properly from the condition it was supposed to solve. No solution, in the end. Having installed Linux Mint 18.1 (kernel 4.4.0-53) with overlayroot on a Gigabyte Brix BACE-3160 (see other notes on this [...]
Introduction These are my notes as I made Pulseaudio work on an ARM v7-based Embedded Lubuntu 16.04, which doesn’t support Pulseaudio otherwise. The goal: On a mini-distribution based upon Lubuntu, for use of others, make Pulseaudio work even though the Lubuntu desktop won’t start it. In fact, it’s supposed to run even without any X [...]