Linux

The Steam Survey found that Linux is a 1% share of the market. A rare breed. According to NetMarketShare the overall Linux desktop and laptop adoption is 1.79%. With a share that is a bit more than half of all users, I guess gamers aren’t as geeky as I thought. Or Windows just has a stranglehold on the gaming market. I’m not a huge gamer but I’ve got a few favorites that I play from time to time and they work great on Ubuntu 20.

Many things are beautiful or impressive but impractical. A beautiful thing that I’ve been casually following is the Ashahi Linux project to bring Linux to the Apple M1 platform. Progress is being made but there are some stumbling blocks with the graphics drivers. The skills and dedication of the people involved are impressive. The idea of creating a virtual machine to intercept the calls to the subsystems and mimic them without looking at the source is brilliant.

As part of my ongoing evolution of my server create scripting, I’m adding YouCompleteMe to the mix. Code completion is a really nice thing to have and YCM does it very well. This is a more complicated plugin to install as it depends on a language server so it can work asynchronously and must be compiled when installed. The first thing is to ensure that the prerequisites are installed: rob@ub01:~$ sudo apt-get install cmake llvm After that, edit the .

Over time, I’ve improved on my server create script by allowing for the inclusion of some configuration files that I find useful. To do this, I created a new Github repo for my dotfiles based on some inspiration by Mastering Vim. I’ve been using Vim for quite some time, but this book had some good ideas to make my usage even better. Among them, the idea of creating a Github repo for dotfiles.

As I was reading through some random stuff on Linux, I came across an interesting project called Lightstream. As the description says, this is a project that continuously replicates Sqlite databases to S3 compatible buckets. That seemed pretty interesting. Sqlite is more performant that most people think and really reduces the complexity of an application. If you don’t have to manage a database server and all of the networking configuration that goes with a database cluster, you can focus on building the app and not yak shaving to get a database set up.

FOSDEM has many interesting presentations. I watched this interesting and informative session by Sanja Bonic and Janos Pasztor that discussed using ContainerSSH to create a honeypot to observe system attackers. I’d not heard of ContainerSSH before and it’s a really interesting tool that creates a container and connects an SSH user to it. The honeypot example was a nice illustration of what you can do with it but there are some other interesting use cases as well for eduction and ephemeral system provisioning.

I enjoyed this article describing the history of the venerable Linksys WRT54G. I had one of these running OpenWrt for years. It was extremely reliable and flexible. It was fun to hack around on it and I used the VPN quite freqently to get to files at home when I was travelling. Although I moved on years ago and now have an Eero with far superior speed and coverage, that ugly Linksys box was a great piece of hardware.

As I’ve written before, I’m interested in the Apple M1. I’m due for a new work computer so maybe I’ll get one sooner than later. It seems that progress is being made (or at least a start is being made) on Linux on the M1. The Registry has an article about the Asahi project. It’s a crowdfunded effort to get Linux working on the M1 by Hector Martin who has quite a history with Linux ports to closed systems.

If you create a cloud virtual machine and run it for anything more than a few minutes, it quickly becomes apparent how much nefarious activity goes on. You will get hit with brute force attacks on all of the known ports (and some unknown ones) pretty much continuously from the first minute. I don’t know that there is much that cloud hosts can do about this. They have known IP ranges and I would assume that attackers constantly troll those known ranges.

I wrote a tutorial on installing Nextcloud in the Hetzner Cloud that was just published on the Hetzner Community. Nextcloud is an interesting solution if you want to host your own file sharing space. Combined with the solid prices on Linux hosting at Hetzner, you can get a pretty capable solution for personal or small business for just a few Euro a month. The process is pretty simple since Nextcloud has a Snap package.