Slackware taught me appreciation for apt/yum dependency resolution.

It was a great learning experience, but I doubt I’d ever go back

Never actually tried LFS but I have done Gentoo from stage 1 (back when that was an option), so I’m going to use your statement as an indication I can skip LFS 😁

I was actually tempted to try learning nasm for funsies a year or two ago until I discovered it doesn’t support ARM processors 🥲

So if you want to use systemd-boot as the bootloader you have to (apparently) install the systemd-utils package. Or you can just use GRUB / efistub.

Edit: looks like groche beat me to it 😁

It’s probably been 4 years since I last had to rebuild my Gentoo, but I would be very surprised if there weren’t good OpenRC instructions. I built mine with systemd and Gentoo handbook instructions always felt like ‘Are you sure you don’t want to use OpenRC? Ok, here are the systemd steps I guess’

An obviously talented programmer is no longer working on a free project that very few people can meaningfully contribute to - that is a shame.

I can’t even get myself to learn rust, let alone make a GPU driver while reverse engineering blackbox hardware.

But how to get the OS to recognize it?

My approach for doing this in Gentoo with an encrypted /home is to configure dracut to make a slightly customized initrd.

Thanks to dracut modules, not too much configuration is needed - it prompts on boot for the password to decrypt, and then fstab is just configured to mount the decrypted uuid.

Someone else mentioned using multiple key slots, but I think this is your only real secure option.

Edit: on second thought, you may be able to get this to work in grub simply by adding rd.luks.uuid=xxx as a kernel boot parameter, and then having the decrypted /dev/mapper uuid in fstab for /home

A few decades ago I bought a used IBM as a *nix server, but it would lock up at nearly random intervals like you describe. Tried a different Linux distro… same issues. Tried BSD - same issues!

It wasn’t until after I learned of the 1999-2007 capacitor plague that I inspected the motherboard and saw that yes, several of the capacitories were bulging.

https://www.robotroom.com/Faulty-Capacitors-1.html

I mailed the motherboard to a servicer who replaced all the capacitors for a nominal fee. After that it was a rock solid system. You mention that this is recent hardware, but I would still suggest taking a peek at those caps.

Iirc the original steamOS was Debian based and you really had to be an experienced Linux user to use and enjoy it.

With the new steamOS (arch based?) it’s a much more streamlined experience and opens up the user base because of it

On my machine, the L2 cache is 256KiB

Is this a typo or are they running on a Pentium 3?

In the future, you should look into using LVMs for your partitions. I ran into a similar problem recently where my /var needed to be increased - I was able to run a simple lvextend -L+4G /dev/myvg/var --resizefs to grow my /var by 4 gigabytes.

Before I was using LVMs though I used a gparted live disk a lot

I’ve been a decades long Gentoo user, but now I’m experimenting with NixOS as I’ve gotten older and value my time more. The 12+ hours of compiling when there’s a chromium / QT update is no longer a badge of honor. I haven’t fully converted though, Gentoo binary packages are working as an acceptable stopgap

I’m using Gentoo with systemd and a customized kernel, and additionally I have the /usr partition LUKS encrypted. Because /usr is absolutely essential for systemd to function, I configured dracut to make a specially crafted initrd which activates the luks lvm and prompts for the password to decrypt and mount /usr on startup before systemd init tries to run.

About a year or two ago, some update to dracut or some other dependency (assumption) caused the dracut generated initrd’s to kernel panic. After multiple days of troubleshooting, I discovered that just copying forward an older initrd in /boot and naming it to match the new kernel, e.g. initramfs-6.6.38-gentoo.img , allows the system to boot normally .

So, my Gentoo is booting a kernel 6.6.something with a ramdisk generated in the 5.9 kernel era. I am dreading the day when this behavior breaks and I can no longer update my kernel 😳

This is the way (as in this is what I do). Every once in a while you’ll have to hard reset the laptop because Windows.

A thread on the site which shall not be named convinced me that a majority of the books are recently published and with above average to highly scored on reviews, so I bought it.

Why the Linux Firewalls book hails from 2007 is a strange outlier.

Not sure where you got the 25kb number from.

This tool is written in go and is a 7.8 MB compiled binary.