data1701d (He/Him)

“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

  • 6 Posts
  • 194 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 7th, 2024

help-circle
  • You might be right. I was thinking of it in terms of a traditional distro, as I use vanilla Debian where my advice would apply and yours probably wouldn’t.

    From what I do know, though, I guess /etc would be part of the writable roots overlaid onto the immutable image, so it would make sense if the immutable image was sort of the initramfs and was read when root was mounted or something. Your command is probably the correct one for immutable systems.










  • I think distros at least do some stuff beyond repackaging the latest software, namely default configurations (or lack thereof).

    For instance, technically Debian has the packages to do SELinux, but it’s Fedora (and OpenSUSE, I think?) that actually come out the box with them.

    They are also continually improving, if slowly, their package managers to improve the experience of sourcing new software, as seen with work on apt and dnf.

    You are right overall that new distro releases have little meaning any more. If anything, I think they are a good method for managing the upgrades to new software; when a release comes out, breakages can be addresses all at once and solved for a couple of years, whereas rolling release requires a person to be vigilant and repair breakages more often. That is not to pan rolling - I use Debian Testing on my desktop. As much as I like newer software, though, I am thinking of staying on Trixie after it becomes stable, as I get tired of applying updates all the time and then something breaking that is incredible difficult to diagnose.



  • If ip a shows your NIC, I’d recommend checking your networking settings (you can do this via GUI in your DE’s settings) to see if everything is set correctly e.g is automatic DHCP enabled? (It seems so, based on the error messages. That’s just an example.)

    I had a situation the other day where my laptop ethernet port was being assigned to an oddball subnet that had no network connection. As it turned out, I had set the port to share internet in order to set up a Google TV (my dorm network requires a MAC address, but the TV had an old version where you couldn’t get the MAC address until after TV setup, which required a network connect) and had never reversed the setting.



  • I just discovered the source of all your problems by reading your previous post.

    The Surface Go 1 is a UEFI system. The Acer Aspire 5737z is a legacy BIOS system and thus can’t boot UEFI partitions. If your Aspire was a UEFI system, what you did probably would have worked just fine - no need for a special snazzy distro (no offense, NixOS users).

    I’m actually extremely surprised no one noticed this before me.

    From here, you have a few routes:

    • Flash the install to the drive, and try to downgrade it to a legacy BIOS system.
    • Reinstall Fedora and copy just your Gnome config over - from what I can tell, it’s just a few directories.
    • Buy a slightly newer device (maybe 2012/2013-ish at the earlist, probably originally designed for Windows 8.x) that support UEFI so you could just use the image.
      • Honestly, I am a bit conflicted on this option, as I don’t exactly like not reusing the Aspire. However, this may be the easiest way out, and maybe you could put the Aspire to use as a server in a home lab instead.
    • Try NixOS like others have been saying. Learning things is fun when you have the time - I don’t, and so stick with Debian.


  • Before I continue, you should probably specify your budget explicitly.

    With that said, almost anything older than a few years should do what you need to just fine. I have a Lenovo Yoga 710 from 2016 that works decent, and had an old Fujitsu Lifebook from 2010 that wasn’t too shabby as well. Heck, I once booted Linux off a cheap piano black Toshiba laptop originally made for Vista.

    Just choose a random old laptop and you’ll most likely be good.


  • Question: What are you developing?

    With that said, NixOS would probably be fine, if not better than fine. From what I can tell, I don’t think Guix would be a good idea - the packages appear out of date, according to their package manager. They’re still on Python 3.10.

    However, I might recommend Debian Testing to you for your purposes. Most of the time, packages are pretty recent, maybe a few months old at the most (sometimes just a few weeks), but you still get most of the stability of regular Debian. The only asterisk is when the freeze happens. I think apt may have gotten some updates as well.

    I’ve been using it on my desktop PC for over two-and-a-half years. I will say I have grown a bit weary of it, as it gets so many updates and software changes so fast. On my laptop, I went with stable and plan to switch or stable on my desktop once Trixie gets stable.

    In brief, Testing isn’t bad. I’d almost recommend a development VM.




  • Please specify:

    • What distribution
    • What architecture
    • What desktop environment
    • What you have done so far to try to resolve the problem (e.g have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the package?)

    Based on your host name, I’m assuming it’s Arch. From what I can tell from the terminal output, Ghostscript is missing (thus the libgs.so error). Maybe try reinstalling it with Pacman. Did you update your system and it somehow got autoremoved (I don’t know Arch that well)?