Rubenerd

Much electronic ink has been spilled extolling the virtues and horrors of Linux’s new de facto manager systemd. As you could probably gather from my post on the subject, I’m in the camp of the people who started the Debian Fork site earlier this year:

We are Veteran Unix Admins and we are concerned about what is happening to Debian GNU/Linux to the point we decided to fork the project.

And why would you do that? Some of us are upstream developers, some professional sysadmins: we are all concerned peers interacting with Debian and derivatives on a daily basis.

We don’t want to be forced to use systemd in substitution to the traditional UNIX sysvinit init, because systemd betrays the UNIX philosophy.

We contemplate adopting more recent alternatives to sysvinit, but not those undermining the basic design principles of “do one thing and do it well” with a complex collection of dozens of tightly coupled binaries and opaque logs.

I’d also add that systemd is emblematic of a larger shift from *nix to Linux-centric design. For those of us running BSD, Solaris and other *nix servers, it’s a regrettable (if not entirely unpredictable) trend. That said, I wouldn’t want systemd on my FreeBSD boxes anyway, so touché.

But back to the point of this post. After threatening a fork, and with more high profile defections from the Debian project, it’s happened:

Devuan will derive its own installer and package repositories from Debian, modifying them where necessary, with the first goal of removing systemd, still inheriting the Debian development workflow while continuing it on a different path: free from bloat as a minimalist base distro should be. Our objective for the spring of 2015 is that users will be able to switch from Debian 7 to Devuan 1 smoothly, as if they would dist-upgrade to Jessie, and start using our package repositories.

Jokes about the name aside, I’m cautiously relieved. We’ll have to see what kind of response this gets to assess its long term viability, but I wish them all the best.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Assuming your builders type is qemu, you may have seen this:

Qemu stderr: Could not initialize SDL(No available video device) - exiting

One solution in the Packer json was to disable graphics:

qemuargs: [ "-nographics" ]

Alternatively, start it headless:

"headless": "true"

If you’ve set the following, you’ll be able to VNC remotely instead. When porting back to Xen, change your /etc/ttys so you can use the serial console as well.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Building a Packer image (how’s that name for terrible Google juice):

==> qemu: Error launching VM: Qemu failed to start. Please run with logs to get more info.

So how do we run with logs? From Debugging Packer:

Packer has detailed logs which can be enabled by setting the PACKER_LOG environmental variable to any value

So in that case:

export PACKER_LOG=1

You can also define a logfile instead:

export PACKER_LOG_PATH="/var/log/packer"

No need for nasty GUI-based bootable memory key generators or other convoluted 15 step processes, you can just dd MemTest86’s USB image:

#!/bin/sh
key="/dev/sdb" ## TRIPLE CHECK this drive location first
curl -OL "http://www.memtest86.com/downloads/memtest86-usb.tar.gz"
tar xzvf memtest86-usb.tar.gz
sudo dd if=memtest86-usb.tar.gz of=${key} bs=10240 conv=sync

And for the obligatory caveats:

• Triple check the destination for your key. Easy hack, run dmesg immediately after plugging in your key. I won’t be held responsible for lost data.
• memtest86+ may have an equivilent generic bootable image, I haven’t checked. Last time I tried to, it required converting an ISO which I’m not interested in doing.
• As an alternative, many live bootable Linux distros also have memtest86+ in their boot options.

The gang on ATP #91:

Marco: Git needs a million frontends on it to make it usable [..] even the git commands you use on the command line are front-ends to five other commands doing what you want it to do.

John: Git is not a great example of a user interface.

Marco: [..] version control and distributed version control are already complicated problems. Add to that the creator of Linux making the one he wants to use; Git is exactly what you would expect that to be!

Once again, the scourge of 1920×1080 ruins a perfectly epic desktop background, for those of us using proper 1920×1200 resolution screens. I suppose it could make do for a MacBook Air, though.

By ArtOfKillian. Makes me think I should finish watching this series after all.

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What, no testimonials?

Sometimes I generate RSA and ECDSA keys for the randomart. Here, we have a vulture. We’ve also had a boot and a camel.

location: sydney
---
|      ...   .    |
|      ++   . .   |
|   . o...   o .  |
|.   o  o . . o . |
|o. .    S . . .  |
|.E.      .  ..   |
|          .o.    |
|        ..o..    |
|         ooo..   |
location: sydney
---

From The Register’s Cloud section. Along with brown paper packages tied up with string, this is one of my new favourite things.

Sometimes I generate RSA and ECDSA keys for the randomart. Here, we have a camel. We’ve also had a boot, and a vulture.

---
|                 
|              o .|
|      . .    . ++|
|     . o o    +.E|
|  . + . S o. o ..|
|   = o o .. o   .|
|  . . .  . o     |
|       .. . .    |
|       ..  .     |
---