I bought a Lenovo about 2 years ago that I’ve been really happy with. I wanted something with a metal shell because I carry my laptop around sometimes and use it balanced on one hand, and my previous Dell (plastic) started flexing and having weird issues with the TouchPad as a result. The Lenovo has been solid. I’m running Kubuntu on it, but my plan is to go Debian at some point.

Yeah, I think you’re right. I forgot to add that there’s no mucking about with drivers and all of that, it really just works. Older scanners usually aren’t a problem with Linux, but Vuescan almost certainly supports them as well.

I paid for Vuescan. There are a ton of Linux scanning apps, but pretty much all of them require editing all pictures to some extent after the scan. Vuescan applies a useful set of defaults that work for most pictures, speeding up the work flow. I had over 4,000 pictures to scan so anything to simplify that was worth it.

That is, ummm, interesting. Can their installed system do anything, though? There are so many restrictions, it seems like it would be a difficult installation to daily drive.

And some of the justifications are really confusing. I realize some are probably typographical errors, but I can’t figure out what a few of them are saying at all. It reminds me of the people that invent their own lexicon and just expect everyone to understand what they are saying.

I have Kubuntu installed on my desktop, been using it for years. I had disabled snap Firefox and used a Deb version, but the other day I discovered that Kubuntu reinstalled the snap Firefox.

I’ve been planning to switch to Debian on my desktop, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. This little incident is reminding why I want to in the first place.

We haven’t rewritten the firewall code lately, right? checks Oh, it looks like we have. Now it’s nftables.

I learned ipfirewall, then ipchains, then iptables came along, and I was like, oh hell no, not again. At that point I found software to set up the firewall for me.

Found Dr. Tanenbaum’s account!

An interesting idea, but it might be overkill for a home setup.

Data and configurations.

If you have the space, software is nice because it’s easier to get the system going again, but the data (your files - music, documents, pictures) and system configuration files (/etc for example) are the most critical. If you have databases set up, learn about their dump commands and add that.

You don’t have to use the same method for everything. My pictures are backed up to another side in a second computer and to Amazon Glacier for $2/month (I’ll have to pay to download them if I ever need it, but I’ll gladly pay if I’m in that situation - those should only be needed if I have a major house fire or something like that). My weekly backups are my /home directories, /etc, /root, a database dump, and maybe one or two other important things.

I am not familiar with that. From a quick glance it looks like the new HURD. But I think even there you’re relying on the work of others.

The xz issue might not directly affect an anti-virus, so maybe in this specific case, it would work fine. But it wouldn’t be hard to come up with another library that would make the anti-virus moot. And even in the xz situation, doesn’t it affect systemd?

All bets are off when you can no longer trust low level software like this.

Also, the Ken Thompson Hack comes to mind.

I’d add that if one of the basic libraries is compromised, you can’t trust the anti-virus or really any other program on that system.

Well said. I originally compiled my own kernels because I thought it was something you just did to use Linux. I also compiled hundreds of them, probably. Now it’s stock kernel all the way. Not worth the effort and time and headache.

Slackware in the late 90s. 3.x version. “If you want to know how Linux works, ask a Slackware user” used to be the mantra back in the day.

I’ve been using Kubuntu on my desktop machines for at least a decade now. So, I’ve completely lost track of some of the things going on, like docker, flatpak, and so on. Which is actually a good thing: Linux has gotten so good, I no longer need to know how to administer my Linux system. I can just use it.

I currently run Debian on my server and intend to switch my desktop to Debian as well. Haven’t gotten around to it…been busy. I also have to figure out how best to set up the nvme drive I have for it - GPT partition tables? Do I need a FAT32 partition? Etc.

Basically you need the mdtools package. I use Debian, but Ubuntu is based on Debian, so it should be pretty similar. It’s likely mdtools will be installed, but if not, apt install mdtools as root should do it.

The one thing I strongly, strongly, strongly recommend, after a harrowing week or so a few months back: Do not use the entire disc for the raid arrays. Partition each disk with a single Linux partition, then use those partitions as the array. If you use the entire disc, you run the risk of losing the array if the BIOS thinks those drives are messed up, which is what happened to me. I was able to recover, fortunately, but it was EXTREMELY stressful, and I was to the point where I was starting to figure out what I had lost.

When you issue the command to build the array, such as:

mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=5 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 --spare-devices=1 /dev/sdf1

Keep a copy of that command somewhere so you know how you created it, in case you ever need to recreate it.

I also kept copies of the output of /dev/mdstat, blkid (for the RAID drives and partitions), and mdadm --examine for each drive, just in case. Doing this probably means I’ll never need it, so that’s a good tradeoff.

And, as always, RAID is not a backup. In my case, my array is small enough that a single drive can back it up (which wasn’t the case when I original built it ~5 years ago), so I have a large drive in my desktop machine that backs up the array every night.

It’s pretty straightforward though. Install Ubuntu on a drive that isn’t part of the array and get that working, which should be pretty easy. Partition the array drives like I said above (use gparted or other tools, which will be installed with Ubuntu). Issue the mdadm command similar to what I wrote above, note your partitions will very likely be different. Do not overwrite your Ubuntu partitions with it. That is Bad.

mdadm will create a /dev/md0 or /dev/md127. Some versions do one or the other. It’ll tell you.

After mdadm finishes, do a mkfs.ext4 /dev/md0 (or md127) to create the array assuming you want to use ext4.

Add a line like this to your fstab: /dev/md0 /mnt/media ext4 defaults 0 1

Reboot and go.

There are a bunch of more detailed guides out there, I’ve just given the high level steps.

In both directions…my employer would have a heart attack if I was doing work on my own machine like that (well, outside of a virtual desktop).

If you leave it alone, it’s practically always fine. But the urge to tinker is strong!

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I’m not saying it can’t happen, but I’ve been using Linux since the late 90s and have never had a problem with an incomplete write damaging the file system, or really anything else (except for a recent incident when a new motherboard decided to overwrite the partition tables on my RAID5 array, but that’s a different story). And I have UPSs on the server and desktop, and of course the laptop has a battery in it, so the risk of sudden power loss is extremely low.

The /tmp thing in RAM is interesting. I was reconfiguring my server’s drive the other day, because I didn’t originally allocate enough space to /var - it worked fine for years until I started playing with plex, jellyfin, and Home Assistant (the latter due to the database size). I was shocked to find /tmp only had a few files in it, after running for years. I think I switched the server to Debian in 2018 or 2019, but that’s just a guess based on the file dates I’m seeing. Maybe Debian cleans the /tmp partition regularly.

I can definitely see doing that on a server many people are using. For my personal server, I used to do that, but in the end I couldn’t find much benefit, and only headache (“ahhhh / is short on space because I forgot to clean up old kernels…”).