Data Science

  • 260 Posts
  • 688 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I was just guessing based on the SwapWindow name. That you copied definition doesn’t help me understand what it’s supposed to do.

    I’m surprised that [Super] + [Tab] and [Alt] + [Tab] aren’t exactly what you’re looking for because System(WindowSwitcher) seems like the name of something that would do exactly what you’re after.

    I haven’t installed COSMIC, so I can’t test it all out myself right now. But it feels like something that should exist as you described.










  • I find that books and resources on basics are hard to find motivation to get through. I don’t have a problem researching for an hour or two when I’m stuck on something that I want to accomplish, but that same information would be impossible for me to focus on if there’s no immediate motive to read it. Knowing that some information might generally come in handy later is often not enough for me to stick with it. So I don’t think people really mind helping people with “basic” questions, but their availability can unreliable.

    That said, there are a lot of good suggestions in both threads you started and if you can stick with any of them it will probably be a big boost for your comfort level in using Linux.

    I heard all the praise about man command and you never know if you’re working offline.

    Now you can open man pages in your favorite text editor with all the associated navigational conveniences!

    I’ll check out nala, could be a good learning tool, thanks!

    A lot of people who try nala never switch back to apt, I hope you find it more pleasant to use.




  • Nice article.

    why bother? Why I self host

    Most of this article is not purely about that question, but I dislike clickbait, so I’ll actually answer the question from the title: Two reasons.

    First of all, I like to be independent - or at least, as much as I can. Same reason we have backup power, why I know how to bake bread, preserve food, and generally LARP as a grandmother desperate to feed her 12 grandchildren until they are no longer capable of self propelled movement. It makes me reasonably independent of whatever evil scheme your local $MEGA_CORP is up to these days (hint: it’s probably a subscription).

    It’s basically the Linux and Firefox argument - competition is good, and freedom is too.

    If that’s too abstract for you, and what this article is really about, is the fact that it teaches you a lot and that is a truth I hold to be self-evident: Learning things is good & useful.

    Turns out, forcing yourself to either do something you don’t do every day, or to get better at something you do occasionally, or to simply learn something that sounds fun makes you better at it. Wild concept, I know.

    Contents

    Introduction
    My Services
    Why I self host
    Reasoning about complex systems
    Things that broke in the last 6 months
    Things I learned (or recalled) in the last 6 months

    • You can self host VS Code
    • UPS batteries die silently and quicker than you think
    • Redundant DNS is good DNS
    • Raspberry PIs run ARN, Proxmox does not
    • zfs + Proxmox eat memmory and will OOM kill your VMS
    • The mystery of random crashes (Is it hardware? It’s always hardware.)
    • SNMP(v3) is still cool
    • Don’t trust your VPS vendor
    • Gotta go fast
    • CIFS is still not fast
    • Blob storage, blob fish, and file systems: It’s all “meh”
    • CrowdSec

    Conclusion


  • It can be exhausting to know just enough to see results that aren’t quite what you’re after, but not quite know enough to refine it to get what you want. And you’re supper close to it. Here’s some things to fill the gap (and correct a misunderstanding or two):

    gives me a list of over 2000 rows inside of the terminal that i cant apparently search or sort

    The dpkg -l command can be postfixed with a search pattern:
    dpkg -l lib* will return all packages with names that start with lib

    ||/ Name                                 Version                           Architecture Description
    +++-====================================-=================================-============-===============================>
    ii  libaa1:amd64                         1.4p5-46                          amd64        ASCII art library
    un  libabiword-3.0                       <none>                            <none>       (no description available)
    ii  libaccountsservice0:amd64            0.6.55-0ubuntu12~20.04.7          amd64        query and manipulate user accou>
    ii  libacl1:amd64                        2.2.53-6                          amd64        access control list - shared li>
    ii  libaio1:amd64                        0.3.112-5                         amd64        Linux kernel AIO access library>
    ii  libalgorithm-diff-perl               1.19.03-2                         all          module to find differences betw>
    ii  libalgorithm-diff-xs-perl            0.04-6                            amd64        module to find differences betw>
    ii  libalgorithm-merge-perl              0.08-3                            all          Perl module for three-way merge>
    ii  libamd2:amd64                        1:5.7.1+dfsg-2                    amd64        approximate minimum degree orde>
    ii  libamtk-5-0:amd64                    5.0.2-1build1                     amd64        Actions, Menus and Toolbars Kit>
    ii  libamtk-5-common                     5.0.2-1build1                     all          Actions, Menus and Toolbars Kit>
    un  libansicolor-perl                    <none>                            <none>       (no description available)
    ii  libapparmor1:amd64                   2.13.3-7ubuntu5.3                 amd64        changehat AppArmor library
    ii  libappindicator3-1                   12.10.1+20.04.20200408.1-0ubuntu1 amd64        Application Indicators
    ii  libappstream4:amd64                  0.12.10-2                         amd64        Library to access AppStream ser>
    un  libapt-inst1.5                       <none>                            <none>       (no description available)
    un  libapt-pkg                           <none>                            <none>       (no description available)
    un  libapt-pkg5.0                        <none>                            <none>       (no description available)
    ii  libapt-pkg6.0:amd64                  2.0.10                            amd64        package management runtime libr>
    un  libarchive-tar-perl                  <none>                            <none>       (no description available)
    un  libarchive1                          <none>                            <none>       (no description available)
    ii  libarchive13:amd64                   3.4.0-2ubuntu1.2                  amd64        Multi-format archive and compre>
    un  libarcus3                            <none>                            <none>       (no description available)
    ii  libargon2-1:amd64                    0~20171227-0.2                    amd64        memory-hard hashing function - >
    

    dpkg -l ?lib* will return all packages with names that have lib in the second third and fourth character positions.

    ||/ Name                     Version                  Architecture Description
    +++-========================-========================-============-====================================================
    ii  glib-networking:amd64    2.64.2-1ubuntu0.1        amd64        network-related giomodules for GLib
    ii  glib-networking-common   2.64.2-1ubuntu0.1        all          network-related giomodules for GLib - data files
    ii  glib-networking-services 2.64.2-1ubuntu0.1        amd64        network-related giomodules for GLib - D-Bus services
    un  glib-networking-tests    <none>                   <none>       (no description available)
    un  glibc-doc                <none>                   <none>       (no description available)
    ii  klibc-utils              2.0.7-1ubuntu5.1         amd64        small utilities built with klibc for early boot
    un  zlib1                    <none>                   <none>       (no description available)
    ii  zlib1g:amd64             1:1.2.11.dfsg-2ubuntu1.5 amd64        compression library - runtime
    

    Then I tried to be smart and do man dpkg -l to see if that has any options on how to use it better, and instead i got another huge text file that i cant search or navigate through properly

    Yeah, man pages are overwhelming at times. There are ways to navigate them in the terminal, but I would have to look that up because I pretty much never do that. It’s easier for me to just look it up online or open the text in an editor. Looks like you had the same idea with trying man dpkg -l | nano and man dpkg -l | vscode and you were so close to the end goal of reading the man page in a text editor!

    Here are two ways you can make it work:

    For both methods you will need to drop the -l so just use man dpkg.

    Method 1:

    Use the > operator to redirect the output of man dpkg to a file: man dpkg > dpkg.man
    (note that the file name after the > operator above can be anything you want the name of the file to be. I chose dpkg.man because it seemed like it would be easy to remember for me.)

    Then open the file using nano or vscode:
    nano dpkg.man
    code dpkg.man
    (note the name of the package for vscode is code)

    Method 2:

    Use the | operator to send the output of man dpkg to a nano filebuffer:
    man dpkg | nano

    Then open file that was saved when nano returned an error message. In your case:
    nano nano.12608.save
    code nano.12608.save
    (This second method feels a bit janky but it works.)

    Since you were talking about using apt-get and apt to manage packages, I’ll suggest nala as a more beginner friendly alternative that is more verbose and explicit about what it is doing. Give nala a try.

    I hope this helps and that you can return to learning how to get things done using Linux with renewed resolve now that you’ve had some time away from it.

    Keep asking questions! You’re probably learning more than you realize already.