💾 Archived View for tilde.pink › ~maria › log › 2021-07-03_achievements.gmi captured on 2022-06-11 at 20:52:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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achievements

Soonish there's the new job starting. It's a good thing. So they sent me the hardware in advance. The job is full remote. One demand: the disk must be encrypted. And since we're talking devops here, I opted for Archlinux.

3 days later I made it. The Dell XPS 13 was working nicely. Didn't care that much about the infrared camera and the fingerprint sensor, but I have sound, wifi, bluetooth, camera, a working window manager and login manager. All on the encrypted disk, encrypted with LUKS2. About 80% of my installation time I spent on getting the disk password to work. Why? Because first I had the boot partition on the disk, the encrypted disk. GRUB didn't work. It can't open a LUKS2 boot partition at this time. Little did I know that I also missed the correct disk driver module for nvme disks in my initramfs. That I figured out after debugging the whole booting process. GRUB is very bad at that. However systemd-boot isn't. Eventually I worked my way through all the efi management, set up systemd-boot, looked at dmesg and realized that the disk didn't register at all. FML

From there it was almost smooth sailing. Disk password query unlocked the linux, it booted, and I only had two more hickups. First was a typo in my .xinitrc filename, which didn't boot i3-wm but the weird x-server test with 3 instances of xterm. And if you know i3-wm, you'll know when I say, it could be i3-wm with a fucked up config. Eventually I fixed that, too.

The last hickup was with the sound. Of course I have an external monitor. One with a speaker. ALSA can't switch devices on the soundcard. Or at least I can't switch it on ALSA because ALSA is complicated piece of a computer scientist and god knows who thought this was a great interface. It took me a few hours to remember there was something called pulseaudio. And then I was finally good.

The disclaimer about this is, I haven't really set up a full linux on a laptop since '14 and then it barely worked. Nothing worked. I was in a different place back then. With more experience today I was able to understand many of these things. That and the incredible wiki of Archlinux helped a lot. It's not a newbie friendly distro, but once you figured out all the small problems, I guess linux is a much saner place for you.

I honestly missed living in linux world!