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The reason why I didn't choose a career in Computer Science…
Here you can find the previous diary's archives...
Let me congratulate with myself, I made it! 🍾
It has taken a gazillion of quasi-carbon-copy tutorials to make Dropbear working!
It is crazy, today to get the correct information from the Internet you must become a "Modernlogist": a person able to spot or recognize the right fragments across hundreds of incomplete, incorrect or inexact articles — all of them stating to be true — to recompose as a puzzle the right information you were aiming for!
A brief recap to show my last journey:
I am not good in Computer Science but I believe I am developing skills in Modernology!
I eventually solved this Halloween pebcak and now I am ready for newer ones...
Nonetheless this is a great achievement! I have been using my beloved Odroid-XU4 as stealth-box for more than a year so far, but it hasn't been very stealth though…
Well it is a small device that you access from another computer through SSH or VNC and it is connected to a different network.
In any place where you want to browse privately, 99% of the time is your work place. As a matter of fact I was once victim of a failed attempt to be fired using personal browsing as excuse, after that episode I understood personal browsing is tolerated till can be used against you. Thus I found strategy to have private browsing avoiding the use my phone on my hands.
I used several method across the years to achieve it: mirroring android, using a virtual machine, and recently a SBC. I found the latter better, even though I had my virtual disks on a removable flash memory.
Unfortunately encrypting these SBC are somehow complicated, but the famous LibreComputer ROC-RK3328-CC I bought has the advantage to boot from u-boot and using a stock Debian installation. So I spent a lot of time trying to encrypt / as in any standard Debian installation. You read this intro cause I got that achievement.
I am going to write this down but differently by the usual I am going to reverse my common approach, so I will publish before each section as separated gemlog and then create the intro, as last article, that will works as a collector:
Most of the content are ready or already tested, what I am struggling right now is Dropbear but I believe I found the solution:
Stack Exchange: Unlock LUKS device remotely - ipconfig: no devices to configure
Stack Exchange: Linux: How to find the device driver used for a device?
Stay tuned! 📻
I continued to tinker and tinker around this issue with the bootloader and, from my very limited pebcak perspective, it looks like the loader totally ignores the partition I cloned: GRUB is not read or found, the EFI partition I cloned missing.
I can figure out it is a pebcak but I can't understand where the pebcak lies:
`U-BOOT` although it created a standard environment to boot these pletora of SBCs from the other hand, it is a huge step back in terms of usability, it is a complicated stab that works at a very low level.
To complicate more the situation the customer service of LibreComputer is one the worst I ever met, rather than helping out they constantly have this bad attitude to reiterate my lack of knowledge:
You’re trying to do something which you do not have the fundamental knowledge for. We recommend that you get a fundamental understanding before trying to do what you’re doing.
I am pretty sure that on x86 eveything I've did so far would have worked smoothly.
I made my resolution: I won't buy anymore any ARM nor the future RISCV SBC, better spending 50 bucks more and buy a SBC with an Intel Atom chip and forget about these annoying issues.
I troubleshooted my partitioning very carefully, I tested one by one all the new emmc partitions, without and with filesystem, to notice if at any time the `bootloader` would going to break… and guess what? I was wrong! 🤦
Ok, it weren't the partitions, perhaps it was RSYNC!
Thus I mounted `/boot/efi` and `/boot` on `/mnt` to copy, with RSYNC, all the files and directories that are supposed to be split in order to have `/` encrypted. I rebooted the OS to see if was this step the culprit… and guess what? I was wrong! 🤦
At this point the only "critical point" left is the moment when you must update the `initramfs`… 🤔
Here I am again…
I haven't had time to update the diary but I have been blasted by pebcak without any mercy!
One that is really driving me crazy is related with a SBC I bought some months ago. I use these boards as "Stealth Box" so I can be connected to internet in incognito on my job workstation.
I have been using the Odroid-XU4 for this purposes with satisfaction however the limited amount of RAM is becoming annoying.
I have this LibreComputer ROC-RK3328-CC — that was already mentioned in this diary somewhere — that has 4GB and the advantage to boot from U-BOOT. The main point of U-BOOT is that is able to run GRUB, this implies that the OS works as a regular OS and it is not tied to any exotic configuration as the images provided for the Odroid-XU4, therefore I could encrypt / which is the very missing point to have a real "Stealth Box".
I already tested the SD, the eMMC module that I bought (and that's not compatible with my Odroid adpater 🤦), I tested that I can convert their Debian into Devuan, and everything went.
But where are the pebcak then?
The fact is that I already tried several time to prepare the partition scheme and to RSYNC the content from a partition to another, I also tested it cloning the partitions (with DD) but nothing worked out. The boot loader won't work even though if you reflash it.
Now I am not really that expert but I the image provided by LibreComputer creates a Debian image with two partitions /BOOT/EFI formatted in VFAT and / formatted in BTRFS. Now If you have ever installed Debian you should know that in order to start Debian from an encrypt / you need obligatory /BOOT (ext2) and /BOOT/EFI in clear. However there isn't any means to let u-boot working when I change so heavily the partition layout.
I exclude the partition layout is wrong because *chrooting* inside worked fine in all the methods I tested. At this point without any options I started to think their bootloader isn't expecting my partition layout.
I agree, monthly recap are boring but this month I have been quite proactive though, publishing even two articles:
Asus L410MA lid screen issue with XFCE4 on Debian 12
Four years of Gemini… And so what?
The latter article has also got a pseudo "Re:log":
2023-06-27 slondrlog: Gemini, the Devil's Advocate
Although I don't believe he/she got the true meaning of what I wrote, but I liked that article no matter what!
Anyway, pebcak are bastards 😈 and are always waiting the moment you lower your guard, so you must be a pebcak warrior ⚔️ to resist them and never let your guard down!
Infact I was mantaining my FreeBSD workstation and a lot of stuff got broken…
The first was Rclone, which I addressed on this article:
Installing FreeBSD 13 with VirtualBox over Windows 10 as Host (Part 3)
It got broken, actually got broken the workaround based on cmount:
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/13-1-beta-rclone-does-not-mount-remote-webdav-folder.84422/
No way to compile it, however looks like it was eventually fixed on FreeBSD:
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=258056
And as a matter of fact reverting to the original method: with Rclone + Fuse; I was able again to mount the remote webdav resource!
Pebcak defeated! ✝️
Then I needed to use Curtail which is a nice image compressor but It wouldn't start:
$ curtail
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/bin/curtail", line 42, in <module>
from curtail import main
File "/usr/local/share/curtail/curtail/main.py", line 22, in <module>
gi.require_version('Adw', '1')
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/gi/__init__.py", line 126, in require_version
raise ValueError('Namespace %s not available' % namespace)
ValueError: Namespace Adw not available
I opened a bug report and It was closed in thirty minutes! 😱
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=272263
Unfortunately the upgrade will land likely the next quarter, but…
Pebcak defeated! ✝️
Right now I am having an issue compiling Lagrange… 😩
And my old guide isn't working:
Compiling Lagrange on FreeBSD 13, the "Dirty And Quick" Guide!
I asked on the forum, but I will ask to Skyjake as well, perhaps I should become the Lagrange maintainer since it is stuck on version 1.7.3 with a lot of weird bugs…
Pebcak winning! 🏆
I'd like to have FreeBSD more consistent on the Desktop-space, unfortunately the third party applications are pretty prone to get broken from a version to another (I had issue with Shotcut in the past as well); with more people using FreeBSD as Desktop daily driver many errors would be spotted and fixed quickly. The official FreeBSD forum hosts 26,311 users, some of them are bots, the majority are devs or admin that use it only from a terminal, and the very minority as Desktop. I believe those numbers actually include all the people that use it as Desktop Daily Driver. The numbers are small but it is even more unbelievable that, with such limitations, the FreeBSD Team is able to delivery such a great operative system!
⚠️ My friend Cage informed me about Codium, the M$-less version of VS Code, so I moved onto this!
This has been something totally unexpected but after carefully re-check the code that was given to me, I found some errors, I made the fixing I needed and BOOOM 💥💥💥
Everything works as expected! And I continued improving the code without breaking it; I was so excited that I'd like to cry because the joy… 😭
Contingently I succumbed to dark side of the coding world… 🙀
And perhaps it is everything connected and I have basically made a deal with the Devil… 😈
As a matter of fact, I put on hold the good old Emacs in favor of… DOSCEV… ahem… VESCOD… Sorry… VSCode!
╭─────────╮ ╭ ╮ ║ ║ │ The embaressed face of │ ⠀║ (-_-"")⠀║ │ myself as watched from │ ⠀║ ║ │ inside the screen… │ ╰─────────╯⠀⠀╰ ╯⠀⠀
OMG!!! This editor is extremely good, I understood why is so successful all around the globe. Most important it works with schema as a charm through an extension made by RedHat!!!
Sure, this killed me twice!!! 💀
But once you made your way to the hell there isn't any good path to follow, you only decide the way you want to burn your soul down to the ashes… 🔥🔥🔥
[Desktop Entry] Type=Application Name=Visual Studio Codium GenericName=Integrated Development Environment Comment=Better implementation of VSCode Exec=/opt/codium/codium Icon=/opt/codium/resources/app/resources/linux/code.png Terminal=false Categories=Development;IDE;TextEditor; MimeType=text/plain;text/x-chdr;text/x-csrc;text/x-c++hdr;text/x-c++src;text/x-java;text/x-dsrc;text/x-pascal;text/x-perl;text/x-python;application/x-php;application/x-httpd-php3;application/x-httpd-php4;application/x-httpd-php5;application/xml;text/html;text/css;text/x-sql;text/x-diff; StartupNotify=true Keywords=Text;Editor;
Now I am officially a geek! 😼
I am writing this almost under desperation… My improvement with Speedata are going slower and worsen than ever… I don't understand anything, the developer is trying to help me but I get more confused every time more… 😭
The only good things I was able to achieve are:
[YOUR FAVORITE EDITOR] .config/autostart/Xfce\ Terminal\ Drop\ down.desktop [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Version=0.9.4 Type=Application Name=Terminal Drop down Comment=Drop down option Exec=xfce4-terminal --drop-down --tab -x /usr/bin/ssh-add /home/freezr/.ssh/vultr2_ed25519 OnlyShowIn=XFCE; RunHook=0 StartupNotify=false Terminal=false Hidden=false
Now at each login a tab will ask the ssh passphrase and it will close after.
From Friday recaps to Monthly recaps, this diary is getting worst… ☹️
In my defense I can confirm these have been intense weeks of pebcaks that really absorbed all my spare time available… 😖
I struggled badly in several areas, and I am going to start from the most recent down to the oldest…
sudo zpool import #will show you the pools available sudo zpool import name-of-the-pool
A picutre of the "mini USB to mini usb switch ON/OFF"
⚠️ YOU MAY NEED MORE PACKAGES TO INSTALL!
git clone https://gitlab.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-screensaver.git cd xfce4-screensaver sudo apt install libxklavier-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libgarcon-gtk3-1-dev x11proto-scrnsaver-dev devhelp ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc/ sudo checkinstall --fstrans=no
Uff… A lot of time without updating the "Pebcak's Diary"… 😅
Do not worry I have been doing plenty of them, more than my time available to write about, so do not desperate and be patience! 🙏
However this time I resolved a pebcak, involving Xfce4, that has been frozen my crapbook anytime the lid was closed/opened. The issue is a conflict between 'xfce-power-manager' and 'logind', as described here:
xfce4-power-manager - Frequently Asked Questions
…and even though I am having this issue on Devuan, which uses 'elogind', the fixing works the same.
xfconf-query -c xfce4-power-manager -p /xfce4-power-manager/logind-handle-lid-switch -n -t bool -s true
Once again the dark-side of the open-source is taking over the good-side, pushed by the all good intentions, but there is a saying in my country that goes:
«The road to hell is paved with good intentions!»[1]
[1] automatically translated
The dark-side of this week takes shape under the appearance of **flathub/flatpak**!
I already expressed my thoughts about flatpak here:
Compiling Lagrange on Debian / Devuan - Part 1
Now flatpak is raising over the scene because its twin: flathub. The latter has been like a demo/experimentation to showcase the goodness of this universal package manager, but has been also used as spearhead. So far has been totally cool! But only so far…
This week happened that suddenly I heard an episode of "Linux After Dark" (ep. 3*) released March 3, which was essentially a PR for flathub and flatpak, followed by another PR on March 9 by "Linux Action New" (ep. 283) where they referred to this announcement:
It is clear that one must read such announcement along the lines, and understand what it actually meant:
With false statements, I only highlighted a couple, the conclusions can be unavoidable wrong! The solution to solve all the problems that poor developers and poor end-users have been facing for "25 years" (cit.) is centralization!
Now centralization is the nemesis of free-software and open-source which are supposedly based on the "bazaar" model; unfortunately anywhere there is centralization any governance falls from the top and never from the ground. Perhaps the folks behind Flathub are honest in their intention, but what is going to happen when the majority of distro will drop any desktop applications because are, essentially, irrelevant for server and cloud activities?
Maybe at this point someone else will knock to their door and say: «You aren't good enough, I'll buying it! Take your millionaire checks and go away». Exactly has happened to another very honest GIT repository. Do you really want this happen?
I agreed that we need to find a way to make all the parties involved happy, but this is a process that requires clarity. For instance there are old projects that have been developed by many people in different time, where devs are just devs and do not hold any kind of copyright, what will be their treatment? And why single devs that make their shiny video-editor on top FFMPEG must be paid and FFMPEG not? What about the OS under the hood? Anytime money are involved the complexity raises, only one thing is certain the one that handle the transactions — which doesn't exclude that can be even another unaffilated company — will make money whatsoever.
Since centralization is bad anyway, I decided to drop flatpak and flathub definitely. It was certainly handy to manage software like Firefox or Zoom on my son's computer, it was nice get Lagrange the lazy way. But it is time stop using it, **N O W !**
My suggestion is to move on the BSD side, but I can understand that is challenging because the poor hardware and software support compared to Linux, but I would say this is the price you have to pay to preserve your freedom.
Meanwhile if you are using a Debian based distro and you want use the most recent version, the Debian Wiki provide simple instruction to use the binary version, which doesn't require necessarily the root permission:
I don't want make this a weekly recap though… But my time is limited as usual… 😑
After plenty of pebcaks working with ConTeXt, it has been suggested to me another tool, and I believe I found what I have been looking for:
It defines itself as:
Non-interactive Publishing Software
I believe this is structured the way I want, with clear separatio between content and representation, in a way that seems more intuitive that ConTeXt which is prone to the chaos because it is designed to be wild opened. I'll begin study this other solution, which is totally open-source and I guess based on TeX, for a new journey into the pebcakness.
----------
Meanwhile I got also the LibreComputer "Le Potato",that is stated being better for retro computing directly from the voice of LibreComputer itself:
Renegade is not really designed for retrogaming but rather server tasks. Le Potato has a faster GPU and cost less.
Images of Batocera — which I remember is my favorite one — are available here:
Batocera repo for LibreComputer SBCs.
Since Renegade can use eMMC I think I will convert it in my Speedata "portable"
server production! I need to understand if I can install any bsd on it, though… 🤔
Anyway further pebcaks are coming in, but this will be another story!
Eventually I bought a LibreComputer "Renegade" — Rockchip ARM Cortex-A53 (4GB) — which is based on the Firefly board ROC-RK3328-CC:
I already had a similar board before: the Pine64 Rock64 (4GB); that I bought for the same reason (cheap price) and I sold right after for the same issue I am having right now: poor OS support.
Looks like with this board I fell in the same situation… I bought it because it was me recommended and coincidentally, when I was looking for it, the board was on offer and therefore I bought without a second thought and it was a mistake…
The point is I that had better to buy something else a little bit expensive but better build and with better OS support.
Will I return the board?
Nope. For the price I get it is still a good deal worth to invest time on it!
What did I not like about it:
This is the point that I can't understand about this SBCs manufacturers that looks to me totally non-sense; 99% of theme doesn't sell their hardware with a tailored OS, if they provide it often is an ugly and bloated version of Ubuntu, but the majority rely exclusively on the community interest and effort…
Then I am not surprised when Raspberry PI even selling often under-powered hardware sells a thousand time more that the other vendors, the reason is they crafted an OS around their boards because computers are useless without an operative system. Eventually they got their own flagship OS which is still a derivative but is tailored to run specifically for their boards and this investment repays more than just leaving it on the hand of a bunch of volunteers — by the way thanks guys for making these boards usable!
Since my goal is to emulate there is an image of Lakka already available and tailored for the Renegade chip-set but it wasn't a win-win combination. Apparently Lakka uses an hold kernel and therefore the USB3 port doesn't work and WiFi driver is very buggy since the USB dongle is unable to recognize my own SSID, while has always worked perfectly on other boards and different kernels and OSs.
Using a recent version of Armbian luckily both USB3 and WiFi dongle worked fine, but the version of RetroArch available on Armbian (Debian) is not comparable with the one provide by Lakka, so I was still on stale… After several online searching I found on Github a script to install Retropie on the Rockchip RK3328:
https://github.com/MattA9K/RetroPie-Setup-for-ROCK64-PINE64
The script says it was tested on Ubuntu but I tried it on Armbian Bullseyes, and of course — after hours of compilation — it failed to install Retropie; it looks like the critical point is the MALI-FBDEV package missing. I bet this package is packed by Ubuntu but is not pushed back in upstream, I haven't checked for it yet but, if my guessing is right, I may try to manually installing that or using directly Armbian/Ubuntu to try out the script again.
Meanwhile Renegade Pebcak… 🥷
I recently tested various Email Clients — in my pebcak opinion Thunderbird is the best client out there — however is heavy and memory hungry as its cousin Firefox, but eventually finding a client that was snappy, light and feature reach led me to (Gnome) Evolution.
The latter marks all the boxes, if you install it (through APT) without recommended it is also fairly small. It does everything I need, it is fast and it consumes very few RAM — with system with 2 or 4 GB of fixed ram is important — it is became my second choice on under-powered computers (I love them).
For me an Email client is a solution to avoid to have opened another Firefox tab that will consume my ram after 10 seconds, and more important it is something that I want always available but out of my way. On many Linux Desktop Environment you have two choices to achieve that:
I opted for the second because a virtual desktop is another feature that consumes ram, however Evolution doesn't have a native "minimize-on-tray" function but I found a solution.
I installed "Alltray":
https://github.com/mbt/alltray
For what I understood this package works like a wrapper that encapsulates the real application and therefore minimizing it you can minimize your real target, it is a simple but well test trick, in my place of origin we would call it: "un barbatrucco" from the French cartoon Barbapapà:
I modified the Evolution launcher to start directly within Alltray this way:
alltray --show --borderless evolution %U
The options are pretty descriptive:
Is there any pebcak in this diary?
Do not worry there is always a pebcak… 😓
I setup my XFCE to hide the title bar when a window is maximized because I use a panel plugin that shows me the window control on the panel itself, unfortunately when I maximize the Alltray-Evolution combo I am actually maximizing Alltray and not Evolution, the result is that I have double windows control on the screen… It is not a blocking issue but it is a pebcak… 😩
📧 Use plain text email (vademecum]
The situation about EuTube is out of control in my house!
Kids love watching it, but in this story they are the victims, because the amount of crap tossed by EuTube is totally overwhelming… 😵
Endless amount of unfiltered, unverified, untruth videos are unleashed on the wild with the sole scope to create revenue for one of the most antipathetic IT corp: Boogle!
With the mirage of making easy money…
Relog :More OnlyFans BBC Paid Media Ads (by kevinsan)
…people are willing to upload the worst atrocities without caring about anyone, especially kids, even the kids of their own families apparently.
I decided that is enough! 😡
I won't wasting further time allowing the nefarious influence of Boogle pesting my house! As a matter of fact I will setup a Pi-hole® to fight back against EuTube and Boogle! Eradicating them from my internet connection!
Luckily a lot of content is also already available for Gemini as well, so I hope for very few pebcak coming in… 🙏
"Totally Legit" Gemini Search: "pihole" query results
My personal experience with the GhostPC (one day I will dedicate a gemlog to it) is doing globally well, but its very weakest points are correlated and are: the slow internet connection in conjunction with the web browser experience. So far I have been using the stock Firefox but it struggles a lot so I decided to try out a couple of alternatives. Let's review them:
🔥 🦊 🔥
Because the struggle on getting a used "SNES Classic Edition", I have been playing with my old "Raspberry Pi 2 B" and various Linux distros designed to provide emulation experience, no need to mention that all of those are based on RetroArch/LibRetro; eventually I decided to stick with one in particular.
Below are my comments starting from the one I found the least good for me down to the winner:
Batocera I choice you! 👍
Recently I am trying to learn using ConTeXt (kind of another TeX dialect) proficiently — this also means a gazillion of brand-new pebcaks coming in very soon — this typographical language has hundreds of commands and would be very useful having an editor able to play nicely with it.
The long standing editor customized for ConTeXt has been SciTE, which is also GTK and is good for me.
Unfortunately the documentation available has a really sad issue, that let me make a lot of pebcaks... 😩
The documentation about SciTE really stinks at Windozzz… 💩
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/673691/how-do-i-know-i-properly-setup-scite-for-context
It really pisses me off when free-software (as in freedom) is designed or documented with Windozzz in mind… 😩
Anyway even after resolved it, I did not find any real advantages in using this customized SciTE, based on my current knowledge… 🤔
I guess I had better to use TexWorks even though is a QT software… 😑
I have a semi-tip... If you live in the US than Goodwill sells electronic stuff as online auction, basically the auction are way more lower that E💩ay, however I haven't won yet because all of those end up with the price higher than the real value... This let me end to a one simple conclusion... those filthy scalpels (also) buy on Goodwill and then resell to E💩ay to a much higher price!
Therefore I developped a new hobby... Raising up the bidding of all these SNES Mini Classic I won't buy as revenge!
I call it:
PEBCAK REVENGE!!! 😈
Eventually, I — temporary — stopped with OpenBSD. The reason is this Asushit crapbook has such poor hardware compatibility with all the major BSDs that makes its use quite uncomfortable. I tested MidnightBSD and GhostBSD: same hardware issues; NetBSD loader wasn't even recognized…
It is a shame but it became annoying waiting — too much often — up to 20 minutes to be able to log in into the session… 😩
Especially because I have around 90 minutes weekly to dedicate to the capsule and even 10 minutes to access to a functional state are too much… And this laptop is meant and dedicated for such task, didn't have any choice… 😩
In terms of pebcak I tried to install Void Linux but it hadn't a lazy way to enable full/partial disk/partitions encryption thus I gave up almost immediately; also because others distros including some BSD operative systems make this operation pretty trivial.
Since I lost my patience to try anything else special on Linux I ended up installing Devuan (testing), and without any real surprise 99% of the hardware has been recognized, encryption easily achieved through the installer, tons of software available, default DE (XFCE), anything fancy like WindowMaker.
Linux is boring… 👎
This means a massive reduction of pebcaks to write in this diary from now on… 😢
Another year is gone and a lot of pebcaks good and bad happened and are going to happen again!
A good pebcak is the new "Pebcak [DOT] Club" domain has been activated and the capsule transferred on it... A bad one is I already paid for "GeminiSpace [DOT] Club" till 2025... ^^"
omg.Pebcak.club the new home of Cage & Freezr
This new year then will be in the wake of pebcaks; I would love had gotten a ".ZONE" domain but in the long run it would be very expensive!
What could I say in this regard? PEBCAK!!!
