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My Writing PC

A quick gemlog. I have setup my spare laptop as a writing PC. I installed a barebones archlinux (minimal profile). Because I couldn't be bothered I used the archinstall script. It's seriously stupid easy when using the script!

Archinstall Woes

If you're using archinstall the main hiccups I've faced are if I lose network connection (old laptop with a really shit 2.4gHz network card) and it needs to do a network call the script aborts and I have to restart. And I found I had to sometimes load the drives config twice (first time will break and restart the command) to setup my drives.

It's quick especially if you don't want to do much custom work. The most tedious part is setting up your partitions (which honestly is easier directly on the command line I've found). The only thing that this simplifies is if you wanted to encrypt your drive it makes things even easier!

My setup

I am really tempted to install more programs beyond the arch minimal but what I have installed beyond the base are:

amfora - for reading gemini
lynx - for a quick websearch if need be
openssh - for ssh connection to my server
terminus-font - so my consolefont can be bigger and clearer
tmux - so I can multitask
vim - for text editing

There of course are ~175 packages install according to "pacman -Q | wc -l" but most of those come from the base installation of the distro/linux.

Thoughts so far

Honestly, it is REALLY tempting to get an AUR helper installed, install a mastodon TUI, setup keypass and basically use this as a GUI-less linux installation. But for now I am going to try and JUST use this for writing. I didn't even install any audio support. If I didn't need a network config to connect to my server I'dve opted to skip that as well! (I don't really feel like USB transferring each file - plus I store my drafts on my server.

But I've found it very capable. I was able to get up and running super quickly. The only tricky part is I can't view images (right now? ever?) so attaching the "photo of a computer screen" image in the links section required verification on my phone that it works.

Transferring and image from my phone to my server to link on my laptop

This was a fun side quest. I took the photo, used termux to scp it to my server. Then using tmux on my writing PC ssh'd back in validated it and moved it into the current location. Then I navigated to that in Lagrange on my phone to make sure I can load it!

Adventure! But it shows that "I can do what I need to do, it may just require a bit of a sidequest to do it!"

Conclusion

I'll see how this goes. I am writing this from bed which is nice - since I am all cozy and I don't have to get ready for bed after I am done publishing :P Which when I am up late writing is such a pain.

Links

[image] Photo of my Linux Console (2.2MiB)

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