Linux

I recently enabled Kernel Livepatch on my Ubuntu 22.04.3 desktop system. Livepatch is intended for systems that you don’t want to reboot. It’s completely overkill for a desktop that I can reboot whenever I need to but I wanted to understand it better. Kernel Livepatch is part of the Ubuntu Pro offering that is free for a limited number of systems - five systems currently. That seems like a pretty smart play by Ubuntu to differentiate their offering a little bit and get a premium service into the hands of more users who might then go on to buy a package later.

I’m intrigued that the Linux kernel is moving beyond C and allowing Rust in the 6.1 kernel. It seems like a 30 year run of using C is long enough. Times change and the kernel has to change as well. I don’t know much about Rust, but this makes me interested in taking a deeper look. Writing really solid C code is notoriously hard even using modern techniques to avoid buffer overflows and the like.

I just finished the Developing Secure Software course from The Linux Foundation. It was a solid introduction to the basics of developing more secure software. It features a good overview of the tools and techniques that can be applied during all phases of the software development lifeycle. I had a solid understanding of some of the material (e.g., cryptography and GDPR) but it was a good refresher on those topics and got me thinking much more about the process of designing and developing secure software in general.

I bought a cheap USB WiFi Adapter for my Ubuntu 22.04 system. I used to connect via a WiFi bridge running on DD-WRT but I’ve got this new Internet router from Cox cable that wasn’t being very cooperative with that, so I decided to replace it. I probably should have done a little bit more research. I just looked at the product descriptions for something that had Linux listed and figured that should be good enough.

I’ve been using btop for monitoring system usage and statistics on Linux and MacOS. It’s much better than the built in resource monitors and seems to incur less overhead as well. Being able to use the command line to get insights into what processes are taking up resources is very handy. It works great on Ubuntu right out of the box (or, more accurately, sudo apt install btop). It also works on MacOS with brew install btop but the colors don’t work quite right on my system unless I set it to the TTY theme.

I upgraded my Linux Mint laptop to 20.3 today after my upgrade from 19.3 last week. It was very easy and took just a few minutes. I’ve only been using it for an hour, but so far, so good. The new theme looks sharp and I like the rounded windows. I haven’t tried the updated apps yet and might not have much cause to. I am intrigued that they named the new document manager Thingy.

I finally got to upgrading my Linux Mint laptop from 19.3 to 20.0. 19.3 is supported for another year, but it seemed like a good time to give it a try. The upgrade process is well documented and straightforward. Basically, make sure you don’t have pending updates, reboot, take a snapshot, disable 3rd party repos and run an upgrade check. If it comes out OK, run the upgrade. The whole process took about an hour end-to-end on my Lenovo X1 Carbon.

Reusing the last argument is something that I frequently do when working in bash. I’ve more or less committed the !$ history expansion to memory. This makes it really easy to do something like touch myfile.txt and then immediately edit it with vim !$. I learned about another way to do this using escape-dot today. It works the same way. It’s nice to learn new stuff but i’ll probably stick with !

The first run of the backup to iDrive Cloud took about 24 hours for about 90GB of data. That’s pretty slow. The good news is that I won’t have to do that very often and the subsequent run was less than an hour. By Speedtest, I should be getting a little over 9Mbs. So, the backup time roughly makes sense. An hour is fine for the incrementals so this should be OK.

I’m searching for a new backup solution. I got rid of my Synology NAS and want to have a cloud based backup. On my main Linux system, I’ve got about 90GB of data in my home directory that are at least somewhat important to me. The leading contenders are Borg and restic. They both seem good but restic has more flexibility with respect to backends so I’ll try that first.