Posts about linux

Choosing Filesystems and devices for home server

With the release of openSUSE Leap 42.2 just 25 days away, I'm considering to move to it, from my current openSUSE 13.2 Harlequin. I had skipped Leap 42.1 Malachite not for any technical issues with Leap itself, but because I've been pretty tied up learning about Mac OS for work, and because I've been very happy with Harlequin anyway. But it'll reach end of life in Q1 2017 so it's time to upgrade, and I will go to the newest Leap release when it's out. The rolling release Tumbleweed is still not an option for me: not when I have an NVidia GPU and also want to play with CUDA and run VirtualBox VMs.

When I moved house back in 2013, I made a number of rushed decisions and among those was to accept the default filesystem suggestion from Harlequin's YaST installer: use btrfs for the /root volume, and XFS for /home. I also put both of these into LVM volumes on the computer's 128G SSD, with about 40G for /root, 8G for swap and the rest for /home thinking "It's LVM, so I can resize the volumes later if this doesn't work out." .... Well, yes, you can resize LVM volumes, but the filesystems contained within behave differently. It turned out that I wanted to grow /root by taking away some space from /home, but I hit a snag: XFS filesystems can't be shrunk, only grown. Bummer.

This time around I will take the opportunity of the upgrade to reformat my /home volume, but the questions are:

  • Which filesystems to choose from?
  • Which filesystem for /home is best?
  • Where to put /home?

Should I have my home on my fast, but pokey SSD, or should I move it to a slow(er) but expansive HDD? Come to think of it, what about tiered storage in general? (SSD, HDD, "cloud", backups, archives). How should I manage these volumes in a non-intrusive way?

So here are my thoughts and plans.

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Mounting LUKS/LVM from a LiveUSB

After upgrading work's openSUSE laptop from 13.1 to 13.2 today it would not unlock the LUKS-encrypted LVM, which is a problem since the entire SSD is encrypted (except for /boot). Bummer.

So, I had occasion to test my backup/recovery strategy and found that I had a few issues (of course I did!)

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Remote desktop access on SuSE: Cygwin, X, XDMCP and SSH? Nope. FreeNX!

MJL20080827 -- Update:  I Just realised that this is one of my top-visited pages and it's a totally disorganised and incongruent pile of... What's worse is, I've never updated it since the promised update back in March 2007!

Let me clear things up (and save you wading through the whole article): If you want remote access to your openSUSE desktop from a networked thin client, then forget about X11, XDMCP, VNC or tunneling X through SSH. Use the NX protocol. You'll need to do the following:

  1. Install FreeNX on your openSUSE host. Some (slightly outdated, but usable) instructions are in Chapter 9 of the openSUSE 10.2 Reference manual. If you're using openSUSE 11.0 or newer, get the latest FreeNX package from the openSUSE Build Service (there are one-click install buttons)
  2. Install an NX client on your remote terminal(s). Nomachine has free NX clients for Linux, Mac, Windows and Solaris (even some experimental ones for PlayStation 2 and Zaurus!). If your remote terminal is running openSUSE, you could alternatively get an open-source NX client from the build service (or ask yourself: I'm running X locally, so why don't I just use good ole SSH and X11?)
  3. Configure your NX client to connect to the openSUSE host, then log in and enjoy!

The upshot: I've done this with a FreeNX server and Nomachine's NX client for Windows XP, and it all "just works", except maybe for some font issues with older X clients like emacs (install extra font packages from nomachine to fix that), and some transparency effect issues I noticed in kwin4, probably to do with X11 extensions missing in the NX client. Not a big deal.

Read the rest of this article for the boring background and laughable false-starts in my quest for remote desktops in X... <blush/>

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Crashed Linux

This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 24 March 2006.

This is a pretty neat shot of the in-flight entertainment system on an Airbus A330 having a boot-up issue. Note, the kernel is Linux.


Crashed Linux

Originally uploaded by milliped.



This photo has a big rant in the flickr comments about whether or not it's a Linux crash. Well, what's a Linux crash? Most of the public Windows crashes do not involve the Windows kernel (except for blue-screens) but they get called Windows crashes. So, to be fair, this is a Linux crash, even if it appears that the kernel itself is fine.

New Printer “Just Works” in SUSE 10

This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 22 March 2006.

Well, here's a first for me: go to local Dick Smith's, buy a cheap printer, for my wife (HP Deskjet 3940, AU$66). Because I don't really care about printing from Linux, I didn't care if it works or not on that OS, just bought whatever Windows printer was cheapest.


Brought it home, plugged it into my PC (in Windows) and it works, after installing drivers and software and about 15 mins of setup time.


For the heck of it, I rebooted to Linux to see what would happen. Well lordy “New hardware detected: HPdeskjet3940” and an offer to set it up. After 5 minutes — just accepting all the standard options — out comes a test page, in colour, bi-directional and fast.


Neat. Linux is ready for me....

Linux distro woes

This post was originally posted at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 24 January 2006.

Well, my flirtations with gentoo didn't last too long. I'm now trying SuSE 10.0 out, which — yes — is an RPM-based distro!


So, why did I leave gentoo? I suppose that the "distro that doesn't get in your way" got in my way. With the arrival of our first baby, I'm rather short on the hours needed to learn how to configure everything in gentoo. While it's true that I could stand to learn a lot from getting it all to work, I can't afford to be hacking around getting pesky things like the scanner to go, or printing, or figuring out why I suddenly cannot burn a CD anymore. I need a "linux for dummies" that just works, and is more stable than winblows. Of course, if money was no object, I'd get myself a nice shiny new dual G5 Macintosh, but that's just for my dreams.


So, since Novel have decided to open up SuSE a bit more now, I'm trying it out. I downloaded the "Evaluation" version, rather than OpenSuse, since I'm not an OpenSource zealot, and frankly I'd like to visit web sites with flash animations. It has crippled xine/kaffeine and no DVDCSS, but I can live without movies for now until I get that sorted, or build from the source I have, or even (ick!) just boot to Windows (though I know of no free DVD players for win32 that expand a 16:9 movie to fill as much of my 4:3 screen as Kaffeine does).


So, it installed well, I now have working scanner, printer, cd-rw, dhcpd, cvs, mysql, java (yay!), apache, tomcat, kde. No Audacity or Rosegarden (important apps for me), no Eclipse (can wait). Slightly out-of-date jedit (4.1) and about 250MB of patches to upgrade to at some point, or not, since on dial-up I'm not exactly a cracker target...


I'm very happy with SuSE so far. It's as pleasant as I always thought it would be. YaST is nice too. Only problem: sometimes cdrecord bombs, still (!). Pisses me off, it worked once but not again, even as root. It can sit on the back-burner (oops) until after I've got my missing audio software installed


Major projects for linux are:


  • Record old music tapes to OGG and burn to data and audio CDs
  • Get nice video editing software (kino) working for baby and burn to VCDs
  • Java hacking (install Sun Java Studio sharchives)
  • Photo indexing and database, then archive to CDs
  • Produce a CD database
  • Get a working backup solution running

Obviously, I need to get cd-rw sorted as a priority... it's kinda central!