The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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Mega Comrade: Apr 22, 2004; Listen buddy, we all got problems!

If you have your own server to host it then owncloud is a decent alternative.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 10:52

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# ? Jun 5, 2024 20:42

spankmeister: Jun 15, 2008

Spideroak.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 10:54

RevKrule: Jul 9, 2001; Thrilling the forums since 2001

enthe0s posted:

This worked!
code:
* * * * * /home/myusername/myscript.sh >> ~/output.txt 2>&1
* * * * * /home/myusername/tail -n 2500 ~/output.txt > ~/recent500.txt
* * * * * cat /home/myusername/recent500.txt > /var/www/index.html
I didn't even know there was a root crontab, but I imagine it's as you said RFC2324, it was most likely breaking because of a password request. Huge thanks to you and fatherdog!

Just for my own curiosities sake. It looks like you want to run this every minute but it's very order of operations specific. Have you thought about turning this into a one line cron and/or combining it into one script that's run rather than 3?

# ? Feb 3, 2015 14:03

Gucci Loafers: May 20, 2006; Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?

Just to make sure I am getting this correctly, /dev/sda is a device, /dev/sda1 is a partition. When latter is mounted (mount /dev/sda /<directory>) this mounts the partition and makes it available as a file system.

Curious, wouldn't everything still work with limitations if you didn't mount the partition? If added another drive such as /dev/sdb with partition /dev/sdb1 wouldn't you have some kind of access?

# ? Feb 3, 2015 17:26

wooger: Apr 16, 2005; YOU RESENT?

spankmeister posted:

BSD is about 5 years behind on Linux for Desktop, maybe more.

At least. Plus linux is about to take a drastic leap forward in desktop tech when Wayland becomes mainstream, perhaps later this year.

I tried PC-BSD for a bit earlier this year. Suspend didn't work, it didn't detect my monitor's resolution or let me fix it, and the update system broke. I get the sense that there's just noone using it, I posted on their official forum asking for help, and got nothing.

CaptainSarcastic posted:

I was thinking 5 years might be a bit too much, but having run some desktop BSD relatively recently I am pretty much in agreement. I ran PCBSD 9.2 as my main desktop for a while, and while I haven't tried the latest release yet (10.1.1 just came out today), I really doubt it would hold a candle to a good Linux desktop. I have pretty decent Internet, and the updates on PCBSD were so huge and so slow that it really detracted from the experience.

In all fairness, maybe PCBSD is unfair to use as an example, but it is the BSD most directly aimed at the desktop to my knowledge.

OpenBSD is honestly the best BSD desktop experience, especially for laptops, provided you don't need Nvidia drivers.

Largely becuase the devs actually use solely OpenBSD on their laptops day-to-day, and therefore find and fix bugs that show up, make suspend and power saving features work. Even they don't have SSD trim support yet though.

FreeBSD gets more funding and far more server use, but as a desktop it's much worse, as some horrible proportion of devs don't even run it on their own desktops / laptops - they use it in a VM on Macbooks. Suspect this is related to Apple eating most of their core team a while back.

I recently saw Jordan Hubbard, former head of FreeBSD & OS X lead, giving a talk where he lauded the BSD tech in his Macbook - as though FreeBSD is somehow capable of the same stuff on a laptop. They seem happy enough for someone else's proprietary OS to be successful.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 17:27

Takes No Damage: Nov 20, 2004; The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.; Grimey Drawer

spankmeister posted:

BSD is about 5 years behind on Linux for Desktop, maybe more.

What about something like antiX? Looks like it does a standard HD install from the live CD, but it's still Debian based so I can apt-get what I need without having to manually enable modules or whatever like the super tiny distros.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 17:31

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

spankmeister posted:

Spideroak.

Closed-source, not encrypted, worse than Dropbox in terms of UI. Why do people recommend this?

# ? Feb 3, 2015 17:34

wooger: Apr 16, 2005; YOU RESENT?

Takes No Damage posted:

What about something like antiX? Looks like it does a standard HD install from the live CD, but it's still Debian based so I can apt-get what I need without having to manually enable modules or whatever like the super tiny distros.

Might help if you give us the hardware specs.

Likely your best option is something like crunchbang: Debian stable based, minimal install with a nicely configured openbox GUI.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 17:36

Tigren: Oct 3, 2003

Suspicious Dish posted:

Closed-source, not encrypted, worse than Dropbox in terms of UI. Why do people recommend this?

You've got to elaborate on this when their description is

quote:

SpiderOak is a zero-knowledge encrypted data backup, share, sync, access and storage service. Online and multi-platform with 2GB of storage free for life.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 17:42

RFC2324: Jun 7, 2012; http 418

A while back, someone mentioned that the RHCSA/RHCE book from Jang was due out in January, but I have not been able to find it. All I have been able to find is one due out in July, by some other dude(van Vugt).

Can someone point me in the direction of a good study guide along these line that is out now/soon?

TIA

# ? Feb 3, 2015 17:50

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

Tigren posted:

You've got to elaborate on this when their description is

The same thing Dropbox says about their encryption:

quote:

Even if your phone goes for a swim, your stuff is always safe in Dropbox and can be restored in a snap. Dropbox secures your files with 256-bit AES encryption and two-step verification.

Which is that it is indeed encrypted, but Dropbox stores the keys on their servers with your username, so Dropbox employees can still access your files.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 17:52

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

Suspicious Dish posted:

The same thing Dropbox says about their encryption:

Which is that it is indeed encrypted, but Dropbox stores the keys on their servers with your username, so Dropbox employees can still access your files.

I thought the whole draw of Spideroak was client-side encryption and keys?

https://spideroak.com/engineering_matters

quote:

SpiderOak's encryption is comprehensive � even with physical access to the storage servers, SpiderOak staff cannot know even the names of your files and folders. On the server side, all that SpiderOak staff can see are sequentially numbered containers of encrypted data. In this way, we are not capable of betraying our customers.

The secret that keeps your data accessible to you alone is your SpiderOak password, which is never transmitted to SpiderOak in its original form. This means you alone have responsibility for remembering your password or 'Password Hint' (which you can create to help you remember.) If the password is forgotten, there's nothing anyone can do to make the encrypted data readable to you again.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 18:09

wooger: Apr 16, 2005; YOU RESENT?

tonberrytoby posted:

I am looking for a Dropbox replacement in terms of linux compatibility.
I currently have Dropbox started through init, use it as a directory and I have an encfs partition running on it.

Is there another one that is good and offers something like this. Or at least a directory mode with full client side encryption.

I think syncthing (opensource implementation of bittorrent sync) might be it for the convenience aspects of dropbox - there are nice enough phone apps, it's multi platform, it works fine for me.

All it needs is a decent web GUI and some more bug ironing.
Not sure if it solves file sharing uses of dropbox at all, haven't looked at it, but I know bittorrent sync kind of does.

For backup stuff which I know some people are using dropbox for, you might be better off with any number of self hosted or paid systems, from some open source amazon s3 frontend, to backula, to tarsnap.

Suspicious Dish posted:

Closed-source, not encrypted, worse than Dropbox in terms of UI. Why do people recommend this?

I understood that spideroak does have proper, verified working client side encryption, and are working to open source as much as possible. Crucially, they at the very least don't do the Dropbox "encrypted by us so we can hash and de-duplicate everyone's stuff, look at it, detect and remove copyrighted content" evil, cos they can't .

It is very clunky though.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 18:15

Thalagyrt: Aug 10, 2006

RevKrule posted:

Just for my own curiosities sake. It looks like you want to run this every minute but it's very order of operations specific. Have you thought about turning this into a one line cron and/or combining it into one script that's run rather than 3?

There's also a potential race condition in there. If two of the jobs kick off at the same time, the second job would be reading from the first job's file while it's truncated, which would result in bad data for the later step's output. It really should be one script.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 18:15

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

Thermopyle posted:

I thought the whole draw of Spideroak was client-side encryption and keys?

https://spideroak.com/engineering_matters

I swore I remember some article about them changing it because too many people complained they couldn't recover their files after they forgot their password.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 18:28

Takes No Damage: Nov 20, 2004; The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.; Grimey Drawer

wooger posted:

Might help if you give us the hardware specs.

Likely your best option is something like crunchbang: Debian stable based, minimal install with a nicely configured openbox GUI.

Remoted in to grab the system summary and it's actually running decent ATM, wonder if I just had a crappy network connection yesterday somehow? Anyway it's still pretty pokey, I'll look into crunchbang as well. This oldass Dell laptop has:
Intel Pentium M 2.00 Ghz CPU
1.5G ram (somehow it has a 1G stick under the keyboard, and I put another 512Meg stick in the back slot)
Currently running Lubuntu 14.04

# ? Feb 3, 2015 20:04

RevKrule: Jul 9, 2001; Thrilling the forums since 2001

Thalagyrt posted:

There's also a potential race condition in there. If two of the jobs kick off at the same time, the second job would be reading from the first job's file while it's truncated, which would result in bad data for the later step's output. It really should be one script.

This is exactly my other thought. If you don't want to actually create a script, here's a couple quick single liners.

code:

* * * * * /home/myusername/myscript.sh >> ~/output.txt 2>&1 && /home/myusername/tail -n 2500 ~/output.txt > ~/recent500.txt && cat /home/myusername/recent.txt > /var/www/index.html

The && tells it not to move forward if the previous command doesn't exit properly. You can replace the && with ; if you want to just move to the next command.

Here's another more simplified option

code:

* * * * * /home/myusername/myscript.sh | tail -n 2500 > ~/output.txt && cp ~/output.txt /var/www/index.html

This is reasonably simplified. We're taking the output from myscript.sh and piping it through tail to get the last 2500 lines. From there we're taking the file created and copying it to /var/www/index.html. When you cat and single redirect, all you're doing is a copy.

That && is still unsightly and we can pare this down even further

code:

* * * * * /home/myusername/myscript.sh | tail -n 2500 > /var/www/index.html

We're doing all three lines from your original cron in one neat single line. We're running myscript.sh, then piping it through tail like before but this time, we're just redirecting the output directly to /var/www/index.html rather than copying or catting a file . Best of all, your order of operations is totally intact so you never end up with contention or errors.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 20:11

karl fungus: May 6, 2011; Baeume sind auch Freunde

How do the various other obscure OSes compare to Linux? Solaris, Haiku, etc.

I guess in terms of performance, and the software available to them. Obviously they would be way more limited, but it's fun to think about.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 20:35

RFC2324: Jun 7, 2012; http 418

karl fungus posted:

How do the various other obscure OSes compare to Linux? Solaris, Haiku, etc.

I guess in terms of performance, and the software available to them. Obviously they would be way more limited, but it's fun to think about.

Solaris is obscure?

# ? Feb 3, 2015 21:29

spankmeister: Jun 15, 2008

karl fungus posted:

How do the various other obscure OSes compare to Linux? Solaris, Haiku, etc.

I guess in terms of performance, and the software available to them. Obviously they would be way more limited, but it's fun to think about.

Solaris is an oldskool Unix so it's not obscure at all.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 21:33

karl fungus: May 6, 2011; Baeume sind auch Freunde

I meant from a general desktop user's perspective.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 21:37

RFC2324: Jun 7, 2012; http 418

karl fungus posted:

I meant from a general desktop user's perspective.

Solaris isn't a desktop OS anyway.

OpenSolaris was, and was also pretty obscure, until Oracle took control of it and killed it.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 22:24

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

RFC2324 posted:

Solaris isn't a desktop OS anyway.

OpenSolaris was, and was also pretty obscure, until Oracle took control of it and killed it.

They tried. Look up Project Glass.

Nexenta was also originally an attempt to storm the desktop with a Solaris kernel.

As it turns out, a lot of Linux software isn't actually so portable these days...

# ? Feb 3, 2015 22:35

RFC2324: Jun 7, 2012; http 418

evol262 posted:

They tried. Look up Project Glass.

Nexenta was also originally an attempt to storm the desktop with a Solaris kernel.

As it turns out, a lot of Linux software isn't actually so portable these days...

Oracle Linux is still the funniest thing ever to me.

"Lets clone RHEL, lock down the kernel so people can't try to work with it, and charge money!"

# ? Feb 3, 2015 22:43

wooger: Apr 16, 2005; YOU RESENT?

Takes No Damage posted:

Remoted in to grab the system summary and it's actually running decent ATM, wonder if I just had a crappy network connection yesterday somehow? Anyway it's still pretty pokey, I'll look into crunchbang as well. This oldass Dell laptop has:
Intel Pentium M 2.00 Ghz CPU
1.5G ram (somehow it has a 1G stick under the keyboard, and I put another 512Meg stick in the back slot)
Currently running Lubuntu 14.04

Ubuntu is pretty light, I wouldn't bother reinstalling to be honest, unless you want debian as the base instead. Any further 'lightness' you can get by configuration.

# ? Feb 3, 2015 22:46

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

RFC2324 posted:

Oracle Linux is still the funniest thing ever to me.

"Lets clone RHEL, lock down the kernel so people can't try to work with it, and charge money!"

OEL is also open. What do you mean "lock down the kernel"?

# ? Feb 3, 2015 23:14

spankmeister: Jun 15, 2008

RFC2324 posted:

Oracle Linux is still the funniest thing ever to me.

"Lets clone RHEL, lock down the kernel so people can't try to work with it, and charge money!"

Actually Red Hat had to "lock down" their kernel patches because of Oracle stealing their poo poo.

# ? Feb 4, 2015 00:07

RFC2324: Jun 7, 2012; http 418

evol262 posted:

OEL is also open. What do you mean "lock down the kernel"?

Based on what I have read up til now, the kernel itself is not open, so you can't recompile to add things you want. The alleged reason is to make sure that it is a more secure OS that way.

I could be mistaken, I haven't bothered actually trying the OS. If I want Linux, I am going to be going CentOS/RHEL for servers(depends on if personal/enterprise decision I am making) or Kubuntu/SuSE/maybe Fedora for a desktop.

# ? Feb 4, 2015 01:56

Lysidas: Jul 26, 2002; John Diefenbaker is a madman who thinks he's John Diefenbaker.; Pillbug

RFC2324 posted:

Based on what I have read up til now, the kernel itself is not open, so you can't recompile to add things you want. The alleged reason is to make sure that it is a more secure OS that way.

That seems like a gross violation of the GPL. Oracle's legal team is good, but I don't think they're that good.

# ? Feb 4, 2015 02:07

RFC2324: Jun 7, 2012; http 418

Lysidas posted:

That seems like a gross violation of the GPL. Oracle's legal team is good, but I don't think they're that good.

Can't they just pull a OSX and change it just enough that its no longer under the GPL?

# ? Feb 4, 2015 02:33

Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

RFC2324 posted:

Can't they just pull a OSX and change it just enough that its no longer under the GPL?

The whole point of the GPL is that derived works are still GPL.

# ? Feb 4, 2015 03:18

ExcessBLarg!: Sep 1, 2001

Lysidas posted:

That seems like a gross violation of the GPL. Oracle's legal team is good, but I don't think they're that good.

Linux GPL violations are a fairly academic topic anyways. Lots of companies violate Linux's license and the kernel committers can't really be pressed to do much about it. That's why the SFLC's litigation efforts have been based on BusyBox violations to bring distribution of both BusyBox and Linux into compliance.

Oracle flagrantly violating Linux's license would probably get challenged eventually. But OEMs do really questionable stuff with Linux, particularly on Android, and meh. China pretty much ignores the license outright. Doesn't help that Linus's approval of binary modules makes for much ambiguity, whereas the GNU interpretation of the GPL is quite clear for C-language software.

# ? Feb 4, 2015 03:20

Celexi: Nov 25, 2006; Slava Ukraini!

I tried solaris but it doesn't seem like they keep their firefox updated

# ? Feb 4, 2015 04:00

Powered Descent: Jul 13, 2008; We haven't had that spirit here since 1969.

RFC2324 posted:

Can't they just pull a OSX and change it just enough that its no longer under the GPL?

Apple started with BSD instead of Linux when making OS X, probably because BSD licenses generally allow you to make derived works and keep them closed and proprietary. The GPL pretty much exists to forbid that.

# ? Feb 4, 2015 04:37

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

ExcessBLarg! posted:

Doesn't help that Linus's approval of binary modules makes for much ambiguity, whereas the GNU interpretation of the GPL is quite clear for C-language software.

Not really. Shims are unambiguously fine. Linus' opinion doesn't matter to lawyers, and this has been discussed ad-nauseum

# ? Feb 4, 2015 06:25

General_Failure: Apr 17, 2005

I got question. Be afraid.

I just dumped the home directory from a no longer used notebook running Windows Vista to an external USB hard drive.

What I would like to do is this:

Be able to plug it into the desktop (this) which is running ... uhm... lubuntu 14.10 x64 ...I think. Who doesn't chop and change bits of distributions?

No big deal? Right! But I want to be able to share it over the network in a way that it can be accessed somehow by the Android based set top box for playing media and another Android based tablet for sorting through the mess and organizing it.

Again, seems pretty simple to do via an SMB share. I already do it with other directories.

But I don't plan on having this drive connected all the time. Is there a way to do this without causing some horror like dangling symlinks or various other things that Linux gets stroppy about?

Old hand *NIX person but I really, really hate networking.

# ? Feb 4, 2015 08:38

jaegerx: Sep 10, 2012; Maybe this post will get me on your ignore list!

Lookup autofs

# ? Feb 4, 2015 08:55

midnightclimax: Dec 3, 2011; by XyloJW

What's a good app for managing photos? Shotwell? Also I tried to do some resizing using GIMP, and felt like the quality suffered (decreasing size, pictures seemed blurry) compared to Photoshop. But maybe I'm just seeing things.

# ? Feb 4, 2015 12:35

covener: Jan 10, 2004; You know, for kids!

ExcessBLarg! posted:

Doesn't help that Linus's approval of binary modules makes for much ambiguity, whereas the GNU interpretation of the GPL is quite clear for C-language software.

Those are just opinions on what constitutes a derivative work. I don't think the authors of projects, licenses or license FAQ's have any real say in that. When push comes to shove, it's only really useful as a yardstick in honoring someones wishes about how their work is used.

# ? Feb 4, 2015 14:12

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# ? Jun 5, 2024 20:42

Experto Crede: Aug 19, 2008; Keep on Truckin'

Tab8715 posted:

Just to make sure I am getting this correctly, /dev/sda is a device, /dev/sda1 is a partition. When latter is mounted (mount /dev/sda /<directory>) this mounts the partition and makes it available as a file system.

Curious, wouldn't everything still work with limitations if you didn't mount the partition? If added another drive such as /dev/sdb with partition /dev/sdb1 wouldn't you have some kind of access?

No, because file systems handle data in different ways and mounting it lets Linux know how to insert data correctly into the partition.

You no doubt can try and force a copy of data into just /dev/sda1 but I imagine it would gently caress the contents of that partition.

# ? Feb 4, 2015 14:49

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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