Of late, I’ve been hearing a lot of (good) things about Immutable Linux Distributions, from friends, colleagues and mentors. It has been something on my plate for some time, to explore. But given the nature of the subject, it has been delayed for a while. Reasons are simple; I can only really judge this product if I use it for some time; and it has to be on my primary daily driver machine.
[Read More]apt-offline version 1.8.6 was released almost 3 weeks ago on 08/February/2025
This release includes many bug fixes from community users.
apt-offline (1.8.6-1) unstable; urgency=medium
* Error out if we cannot initialize the APT lock.
Thanks to Matthew Maslak
* check for checksum and handle appropriately (#217)
Thanks to Dan Whitman (Github:kyp44)
* Honor the --allow-unauthenticated option.
Thanks to João A (Github: Jonybat)
* Retry when server reports 429 Too Many Requests occurs.
Thanks to Zoltan Kelemen (Github: misterzed88)
* Also support file:/// url types.
Thanks to c4bhuf@github
* Honor user specified extra gpg keyrings
-- Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@debian.org> Sat, 08 Feb 2025 20:46:24 +0530
Finally, TIL, what can all be the reason for systemd services to hang indefinitely. The internet is flooded with numerous reports on this topic but no clear answers. So no more uselessly marked workarounds like: systemctl daemon-reload and systemctl-daemon-reexec for this scenario.
The scene would be something along the lines of:
rrs 6467 0.0 0.0 23088 15852 pts/1 Ss 12:53 0:00 | | \_ /bin/bash
rrs 11512 0.0 0.0 14876 4608 pts/1 S+ 13:18 0:00 | | | \_ systemctl restart snapper-timeline.timer
rrs 11513 0.0 0.0 14984 3076 pts/1 S+ 13:18 0:00 | | | \_ /bin/systemd-tty-ask-password-agent --watch
rrs 11514 0.0 0.0 234756 6752 pts/1 Sl+ 13:18 0:00 | | | \_ /usr/bin/pkttyagent --notify-fd 5 --fallback
The snapper-timeline service is important to me and it not running for months is a complete failure. Disappointingly, commands like systemctl --failed do not report of this oddity. The overall system status is reported to be fine, which is completely incorrect.
There surely is need for better tooling on the BTRFS File System side.
While migrating my setup from one machine to another, this is one issue I came to be aware of, only today, when my backup tool (btrbk) complained about it. Following the pointers, I see the below snippet in btrfs-subvolume manual page.
A snapshot that was created by send/receive will be read-only, with different last change generation, read-only and with set received_uuid which identifies the subvolume on the
filesystem that produced the stream. The usecase relies on matching data on both sides. Changing the subvolume to read-write after it has been received requires to reset the
received_uuid. As this is a notable change and could potentially break the incremental send use case, performing it by btrfs property set requires force if that is really desired by
user.
Note
The safety checks have been implemented in 5.14.2, any subvolumes previously received (with a valid received_uuid) and read-write status may exist and could still lead to
problems with send/receive. You can use btrfs subvolume show to identify them. Flipping the flags to read-only and back to read-write will reset the received_uuid manually. There
may exist a convenience tool in the future.
Fixing the Received UUID: flag meant running the below:
apt-offline version 1.8.4 has been released.
This release includes many bug fixes but the important ones are:
apt-offline (1.8.4-1) unstable; urgency=medium
[ Debian Janitor ]
* Update standards version to 4.5.0, no changes needed.
[ Paul Wise ]
* Clarify file type in unknown file message
* Fix typos
* Remove trailing whitespace
* Update LICENSE file to match official GNU version
* Complain when there are no valid keyrings instead of missing keyrings
* Make all syncrhronised files world readable
* Fix usage of indefinite articles
* Only show the APT Offline GUI once in the menu
* Update out of date URLs
* Fix date and whitespace issues in the manual page
* Replace stereotyping with an appropriate word
* Switch more Python shebangs to Python 3
* Correct usage of the /tmp/ directory
* Fix YAML files
* Fix usage of the log API
* Make the copying of changelog lines less brittle
* Do not split keyring paths on whitespace
[ Ritesh Raj Sarraf ]
* Drop the redundant import of the apt module.
Thanks to github/dandelionred
* Fix deprecation of get_bugs() in debianbts
* Drop the unused IgnoredBugTypes
* Set encoding for files when opening
* Better error logging when apt fails
* Don't mandate a default option
* Demote metadata errors to verbose
* Also log an error message for every failed .deb url
* Check hard for the url type
* Check for ascii armored signature files.
Thanks to David Klnischkies
* Add MIME type for InRelease files
* Drop patch 0001-Drop-the-redundant-import-of-the-apt-module.patch.
Now part of the 1.8.4 release
* Prepare release 1.8.3
* Prepare release 1.8.4
* debian packaging
+ Bump debhelper compatibility to 13
+ Update install files
[ Dean Anderson ]
* [#143] Added support for verifying InRelease files
-- Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@debian.org> Sat, 12 Feb 2022 18:52:58 +0530
After a hiatus of 6 years, it was nice to be back with the ThinkPad. This blog post briefly touches upon my impressions with the current generation ThinkPad T14 Gen2 AMD variant.
It took 8 weeks to get my hands on the machine. Given the pandemic, restrictions and uncertainities, not sure if I should call it an ontime delivery. This was a CTO - Customise-to-order; so was nice to get rid of things I really didn’t care/use much. On the other side, it also meant I could save on some power. It also came comparatively cheaper overall.
[Read More]Why is it so hard to have a proper download manager in today’s day ? We had it in the previous decade. Or do tech giants self-proclaim that the world lives only in their cloud.
At one point, there used to be great download managers for all major web browsers, either in-built, or external. Then came the latest trend with Chrome and Firefox, where they make it difficult to have an external download manager work proper. On either one’s extension store, I find it difficult to see a proper download manager.
[Read More]I’ve mostly had the preference of controlling my data rather than depend on someone else. That’s one reason why I still believe email to be my most reliable medium for data storage, one that is not plagued/locked by a single entity. If I had the resources, I’d prefer all digital data to be broken down to its simplest form for storage, like email format, and empower the user with it i.e. their data.
[Read More]Laptop Mode Tools version 1.74 has been released. This release includes important bug fixes, some defaults settings updated to current driver support in Linux and support for devices with nouveau based nVIDIA cards.
A filtered list of changes is mentioned below. For the full log, please refer to the git repository
* With 4.15+ kernels, Linux Intel SATA has a better link power
saving policy, med_power_with_dipm, which should be the recommended
one to use
* Disable defaults for syslog logging
* Initialize LM_VERBOSE with default to disabled
* Merge pull request #157 from rickysarraf/nouveau
* Add power saving module for nouveau cards
* Disable ethernet module by default
* Add board-specific folder and documentation
* Add execute bit on module radeon-dpm
* Drop unlock because there is no lock acquired
Description: Tools for Power Savings based on battery/AC status
Laptop mode is a Linux kernel feature that allows your laptop to save
considerable power, by allowing the hard drive to spin down for longer
periods of time. This package contains the userland scripts that are
needed to enable laptop mode.
.
It includes support for automatically enabling laptop mode when the
computer is working on batteries. It also supports various other power
management features, such as starting and stopping daemons depending on
power mode, automatically hibernating if battery levels are too low, and
adjusting terminal blanking and X11 screen blanking
.
laptop-mode-tools uses the Linux kernel's Laptop Mode feature and thus
is also used on Desktops and Servers to conserve power
TLDR; Since most of the articles on the internet were either obsolete or broken, I’ve chosen to write these notes down in the form of a blog post so that it helps me now and in future, and hopefully others too.
All this time, I have been using the Raspberry Pi for my HTPC needs. The first RPi I acquired was in 2014 and I have been very very happy with the amount of support in the community and quality of the HTPC offering it has. I also appreciate the RPi’s form factor and the power consumption limits. And then, to add more sugar to it, it uses a derivative of Debian, Raspbian, which was very familiar and feel good to me.
[Read More]