I’ve made another new laptop purchase in the past couple months: I bought a refurbished 2020 MacBook Air from Apple.com. It has a 10th gen i3 Intel processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. I bought it to replace my struggling 11 year old MacBook. I bought a Lenovo Yoga 7i, but was struggling to get comfortable with it for my web development work. I made the call to get the Mac so I could directly migrate both my work computer user and my personal computer users, with the plan to use it for development and use the Yoga for other stuff.
Continue reading post "Purchase: New laptop, MacBook Air"linux posts
Purchase: New laptop, Lenovo Yoga 7i
Last month, I finally bought a new laptop with plans to replace my aging 2009 Macbook as my primary computer. It is a Lenovo Yoga 7i, purchased from MicroCenter. It is a switch from Mac, which has been my primary OS for pretty much since I’ve been using computers, but it has touch screen and I hope to switch to the open world of Linux.
Continue reading post "Purchase: New laptop, Lenovo Yoga 7i"Custom logic for unattended upgrades reboot
The Ubuntu / Debian unattended-upgrades package has an option to automatically reboot as needed when it upgrades packages. It will do this without user input, at a chosen time. However, it doesn’t allow for any conditions beyond need and time. I found a need for more nuance recently, so I had to disable the built-in functionality and set up my own script on a cron job.
Automatically deal with conf changes using unattended-upgrades
For Ubuntu servers, I use the unattended-upgrades package to automate keeping the system and packages up to date. I recently noticed some of Cogneato’s servers showing packages needing to be updated for multiple days. When I looked in unattended-upgrades.log (in folder /var/log/unattended-upgrades/), I found the message “WARNING Package something has conffile prompt and needs to be upgraded manually”. Basically, there was a change to a configuration file and it didn’t know how to handle it.
New server setup at Cogneato
I’m kind of excited that we moved the first site onto a new server setup at Cogneato. I had worked off and on on the setup for months before we finally went forward with it. It brings a new OS, new host, new software, and a number of other changes to our previous setup.
Continue reading post "New server setup at Cogneato"Server upgrade: Ubuntu 20.04
I upgraded my server from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04 this weekend.
Continue reading post "Server upgrade: Ubuntu 20.04"I was able to get wi-fi working on my recent Ubuntu install, but not with the built in wi-fi.
Continue reading post "#2464"I installed Ubuntu on my Windows tablet this weekend.
Continue reading post "#2461"Raspberry Pi: playing with BerryBoot, RetroPie, and OpenElec
Played with my Raspberry Pi a bit more this weekend. I bought another micro-SD card and installed BerryBoot, a bootloader / OS installer sort of like Noobs, on it.
I installed RetroPie, a project that is built on top of Raspbian but with numerous emulators and a special interface that can be operated by a gamepad. It seems like it would be cool to condense all of my video game systems and even my oldest Mac (an SE) into a tiny box. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do much with it since I have to figure out how to get games onto it. It doesn’t have a web browser or other normal Linux stuff accessible from its special interface.
I also installed OpenElec, a media center. It has a dedicated interface meant to be operated by a remote control, though since I don’t have one of those, it operates a bit slowly by mouse. It has various media applications that can be installed from its interface, basically one for each of any online services. I installed quite a few and watched some old commercials on GetTV.
I’m thinking maybe I’ll eventually get a second Raspberry Pi to use as a media / gaming center. It’s easy to dual boot them using BerryBoot. It would be cooler if I could figure out a way to more easily switch between them, rather than rebooting. opensource++