Happy Holidays

I haven't updated this blog in a while mainly because my wife has recently given birth to our son. Also because I haven't been trying out new Linux distributions in a while. My desktop computer has been running on Antergos Cinnamon for quite some time now and my laptop is on Ubuntu MATE 14.04.1 LTS.

I've got my hands full with the baby at the moment but I am playing around with Docker containerization shit so I will probably post some stuff about that in the future. Most likely early 2015. There are other plans I am finalizing on so...

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                < Merry Christmas, Happy New Year! >
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                        .--.
                       |o_o |
                       |:_/ |
                      //   \ \
                     (|     | )
                    /'\_   _/`\
                    \___)=(___/

Anyway, have a Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year. See you next year! And as always, happy Linuxing.

Making Arch Linux Simple With Antergos

Antergos caught my attention because it claims to be the easiest and fastest way to get an Arch Linux machine up and running. So I gave it a try and right now, it's my main OS (because I did something stupid and my Fedora install b0rked...and just as I was beginning to like Fedora...). I don't consider this a review per se, but here's my experience with Antergos since I installed it last Feb 20, 2014.

A note on VirtualBox installation in Fedora

I use VirtualBox ^[1] a lot. It's actually one of the first few applications I install after doing a fresh install of a Linux distribution. As I am currently using Fedora, I noted that it's best to do it like so:

    $ sudo yum install VirtualBox kmod-VirtualBox

kmod-VirtualBox is the kernel module for VirtualBox. If for instance, when logged in using, say, for example kernel 3.12.8-300.fc20.x86_64 and doing sudo yum install VirtualBox, then the kmod-VirtualBox-3.12.8-300.fc20.x86_64... will be installed along as a dependency. Now this is fine, as long as you are using the 3.12.8-300.fc20.x86_64 kernel, the kernel module for VirtualBox is useable. But then a new kernel update comes along, say kernel 3.12.9-301.fc20.x86_64 and you log out, reboot the computer and choose this shiny new kernel. Then once logged in, you run (assuming you do things from a terminal emulator, like I do) VBoxManage startvm 'my-virtual-machine' --type headless and the STDOUT spews forth an error telling you that kernel modules haven't been installed for the current kernel (or something like that).

That's where the meta-package kmod-VirtualBox comes in. So when there's a kernel update in Fedora, the specific VirtualBox kernel module will automatically be installed for that kernel. Then you can happily continue using VirtualBox in Fedora.

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^[1] VirtualBox package I used are in the RPMFusion third-party repository which needs to be activated before it can be used.

Fedora 20 Heisenbug Experience

Updated Jan 21 2014

I haven’t touched Fedora for a long time. Perhaps the last version I cared to try out was Fedora 16. Using it again has showed me why it's been that long — adding 3rd party repos was a bit cumbersome for me, coming from mostly an Ubuntu and Debian background.

For the last quarter of 2013, I was hell bent on using only Debian and its derivatives (except Ubuntu and its derivatives) as my main OS. The last I had installed was a rolling release based on Debian Sid, Semplice 5.1. Unfortunately, I only used it for a day because my mind kept nagging me that if I were to "roll", Arch Linux is the way to do it.

I succumbed and installed Arch Linux. I was using it for close to 15 days, too, until I broke my system attempting to dual-boot with, wait for it, Fedora 20! I didn’t want to go through installing Arch from scratch again so I decided to go with Fedora 20. And here we are.

Debian: From CLI to GUI

Debian's latest stable release has been out since last May 2013 and I'm very eager to make it the main OS on my computer.

I have used Arch Linux in the past and I liked its K.I.S.S. approach where everything is built from the ground up. But since I decided to limit my Linux explorations to Debian-based distros for now, Arch will have to wait. That's where I got the idea to do a minimal install of Debian and build it up from there.

USB Thumb Drives: Mounting, Unmounting and Re-mounting

One of my hobbies is Linux distribution hopping. If you don't know what that means, it's that I regularly browse DistroWatch for news about new Linux releases. If something catches my interest, then I download the ISO, try out its live session in VirtualBox, and then finally, if impressed, install it to one of the partitions in my PC. And if it's that good, then I use it as my main OS.

The medium I use most when creating the installation media is a USB thumb drive. It's usually a no-brainer; just plug-in the thumb drive and the OS does its thing and auto-mounts it. The next part involves unmounting the thumb drive so that I can use the dd command to write the ISO to the thumb drive. I don't use the right-click » "Unmount" via the File manager because I just like typing in the command line

    $ sudo umount /dev/sdb1

and unmounted goes my thumb drive. Now I can proceed with

    $ sudo dd if=/path/to/file.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M; sync

and after some time, it finishes and I know that the distributions installation media is freshly baked. But sometimes I want to check the contents of the USB thumb drive, so I usually pull-out the drive, put it back in again and let the OS auto-mount it. So I thought to myself, "Isn't there a way to mount the USB thumb drive via the command line after dd command finishes without me pulling out and plugging back in the drive?" Apparently there is. And the command, in Ubuntu, is udisks. And using it is easy, it's just

    $ udisks --mount /dev/sdb1

and the USB thumb drive is remounted. Apparently, this same command can also be used to unmount the USB thumb drive

    $ udisks --unmount /dev/sdb1

Note that there is no need for the sudo superpowers to use the command.

That's it! Hopefully this will be useful for somebody out there

elementary OS 0.2 Luna Experience

elementary OS 0.2 Luna announced the stable release on Aug 11, 2013. I heard about this Linux distribution (distro) when happened upon InfinitelyGalactic's Pear OS 7 review on YouTube and read the video description. So I downloaded the beta 2 ISO image for elementary OS 0.2 Luna and fired it up on VirtualBox. I played around with it a bit but dismissed it, saying too bad it's still in beta...it would have been a great main OS replacement for me (well, sort of). But since a stable version is out, then I immediately backed-up all my data and installed it on my desktop computer.

Firefox crashing on startup on Mageia 2

I use Firefox as my web browser of preference on my Mageia 2 system and today when I clicked the icon to start it, I was greeted with just the application bar briefly before it crashed. I tried restarting it and still the same thing happened but this time I noticed that the Adblock Plus was showing on the title bar before it disappeared.

Doing a quick Google on this behavior led me to a post that this happens when an add-on thinks it's compatible with the current version of Firefox. To fix this, I needed to run Firefox in "Safe Mode" and disable all add-ons.

The command to start in "Safe Mode" is:

$ firefox -safe-mode

And you will be greeted with a dialog box where you can tick the checkbox to disable all add-ons.

Once I restarted, Firefox worked fine.

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Firefox (ESR) version as of this post: 10.0.10
Adblock Plus version as of this post: 2.2

Mageia 2 and Razor-qt

Well, well, well...I finally managed to get Razor-qt desktop environment on my virtual Mageia 2 box!

After reading this post by user Linux and seeing the screenshots over at Razor-qt website I felt I just had to try it out.

Above is a sample screenshot with a few tweaks done to the panel.