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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I have used yast to configure the network before (not on this host), and it works.

    I quickly looked at the yast log, and there were errors looking for wpa-supplicant. I -think- it’s because my colleague installed this VM months ago, did not configure it, then went on vacation. Now the SUSE “no license” grace period expired, and the host has no access to the repositories.

    If that’s the cause, there are two issues: 1. why does it want to install wpa-supplicant if there’s no wifi (maybe it’s a wicked dependency), and 2. why does it fail silently, concluding the config operation as if it ran ok


  • Yast had the search and nameservers information in, and it even loaded them back when reopening yast (which surprised me, I expected it to read/store from resolv.conf itself). I work with SAP HANA, SUSE is also the supported OS for it (I’ve a SUSE sysadmin certification).

    I commented about yast being a gui that failed (silently) doing something simple that shouldn’t need a gui; I didn’t say SUSE isn’t reliable.



  • No, the SUSE demo license had expired before he configured it for the first time, so there was no repo access.

    He did everything right in yast, but according to the yast log, it was trying and failing to get wpa-supplicant, although this is a VM with no wifi whatsoever. Yast “finished” the configuration with no errors, but failed to place the required entries in resolv.conf and hosts.

    It’s just one example of a useless gui trying to make simple things complicated.


  • Linux is not a company fighting for profits and market share, with software developers paid to work according to the company’s strategy.

    You want something in Linux that nobody cares to develop? Decelop it yourself or gtfo.

    A few hours ago I was helping a GUI-oriented colleague to get network working in a SUSE test installation. He had configured it in yast (a GUI admin interface), but he couldn’t get to the internets.

    I logged in, got me a command line:

    ip a s (it had an inteface with an IP, and it was up).

    ip r s (it had a default route to the world)

    ping 8.8.8.8 (it worked)

    host google.com (didn’t work, it’s always dns)

    vi /etc/resolv.conf (added search and nameservers, there were none).

    problem fixed (also suggested him to check his /etc/host, as domainame wasn’t set either).

    Why on earth do I want a gui to make simple things complicated - and silently fail while trying to do it? (yast couldn’t find wpa-supplicant, although this is a VM with no wifi).

    IMO, administering Linux through GUI tools is dangerous, because you probably don’t know, or don’t want to know, exactly what the tool is doing. It makes Linux as “inexplicable” as Windows.







  • jsveiga@sh.itjust.workstoLinux@lemmy.mlWhat exactly does systemd do?
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    1 year ago

    What does exactly systemd do?

    It mostly causes heated discussions and a feeling of nostalgia for simpler times.

    When your computer finishes loading the kernel, you have to tell it what to do next. There are dozens of systems and services that have to run (once or keep running) for everything to work. Mounting your disk partitions, bringing the networking up, starting the GUI, initializing all kinds of services, etc.

    Once upon a time most (all?) distros used sysVinit, adapted from Unix’s System V to do that. It was simple and very easy to understand and setup: Very basically the init program would call scripts by alphanumerical order (passing “start” to scripts starting with S and “stop” to ones starting with K). You’d place these scripts in /etc/rcX.d, X being a number, the runlevel (and you had just a handful of runlevels, like halt, reboot, single user, gui, etc). Want to run something between starting the network and bringing up sshd? Just create a script in /etc/init.d and link it to /etc/rcX.d naming it SNNmyscript, with NN being a number between the ones in SNNnetwork and SNNsshd. Want to disable a service? Change its script name from S… to K… Change startup sequences? Just change the NN.

    Beautiful. But although it worked perfectly for most of us, it did have deficiencies. An obvious one is that it ran these scripts sequentially. Even if your computer was using 0.1% of its power to run each of them, you’d be waiting for each one to run in a single queue.

    So a very nice and polite guy came up with systemd. Instead of simple scripts running sequentially, you could now create “unit files”, describing each “thing to do”, for what “targets” (similar to runlevels) that thing is needed, which scripts to run to make that thing happen, and which previous things should have been done before this thing (dependencies). With this, your computer can fire up multiple startup scripts (and stopping scripts) at the same time, only making sure to queue stuff so dependencies are met. For example, you don’t need to wait for sshd to start your database server, but you do need networking before you mount shared disks.

    That made boot times much better, but at the cost of complexity and maintainability (and here come heated discussions…).

    The problem is that not everyone wanted that tradeoff, but systemd was shoved down everyone’s throat as most (all?) distros adopted it.

    So init freedom is a reaction to that, offering you the option of multiple init systems (there are more than just sysVinit and systemd).

    No offense to all the other init systems, but I’d stick with sysV if you’re really after simplicity and backwards compatibility with most older systems (and the old ways), or systemd, because it became the de facto standard, it’s faster and more modern.

    Should you care? If you have to ask this, then no.

    If you had to craft your own init scripts and configurations, and had a ton of legacy scripts, or maybe were building very simple barebones systems, or very complex, always changing startup scenarios and targets or runlevels, or want to exercise your “freedom” just for the heck of it, then you could care.

    If you’re a distro hopper (i.e. are more dedicated to “use Linux” than to use applications which run on Linux), having tried 5 different init systems may be one more thing to brag about in distro hopper meetings.

    If you’re getting into Linux to learn Linux administration for career purposes, systemd is what you’ll find in commercial systems.

    If you’re after an OS to just be an OS (i.e. just run your programs), just pick a well supported (community) and mainstream one, it will most likely come with systemd, and you’ll probably never need to touch systemd. My wife (not technical) has been using exclusively Linux for 15+ years, and I can assure you with 100% certainty that she doesn’t know which init system is there, or what is systemd or sysV.

    If you’re new to Linux, curious and want to learn all you can about it, I’d say there are many other interesting and useful things in Linux to learn and care about before you go down this rabbit hole, summoning some nice nostalgic but outdated tech from the dead.


  • When you say “login screen” is it graphical or the console?

    If it’s graphical, can you drop to the console (ctrl+alt+F1 ?) and try to login there? And with a brand new user (create one without the ssd) or root? Just to check if it’s something triggered by a user config pointing to the drive.

    Also, is your fstab using UUIDs or /dev/sdXn?

    After the hang, if you boot without the ssd, can you then find any errors in the message log from the previous boot?


  • Haha, I guess many dog owners just can’t see it how it is; probably an addiction to the lopsided unconditional “love”. I used to comment something similar back in Reddit, just to see the flood of downvotes and outraged dog owners.

    Same reaction to supporting the idea that some breeds are generally more dangerous and/or more aggressive. “Oh, my MY pitbull is a sweetie!!” (adding this here just to test :D )





  • Dogs were hardwired by selective breeding to worship their owners. Not long ago they at least were loyal companions. You got one off the streets, fed it leftovers, washed it with a hose, it lived in the yard, and it was VERY happy and proud of doing its job. Some breeds now were bred into painful disabling deformities just to look “cute”, and they became hysterical neurotic yapping fashion accessories. Useless high maintenance toys people store in small cages (“oh, but my child loves his cage”) when they don’t need hardwired unconditional lopsided “love” to feed their narcissism.


  • Spaces are not the end of the world, but very annoying:

    On a bash command line, they make it harder to handle a list of files returned by a command as argument to another.

    On the command line (lin or win), they require escaping or quoting when used as arguments or script/executable names.

    On many programs, if you cut&paste the complete path to the file (for example in a network drive), you can click on the path and it will access the file, but spaces in filenames or directories breaks that (and it’s not bad programming, the program simply can’t guess where the link ends).

    When you mention the name of the file in a documentation or message, it may lead to misintepretation, and it’s just fugly:

    “You can find more information in the attached document file.pdf”.

    What is the name of the file? it can be “the attached document file.pdf”, “attached document file.pdf”, “document file.pdf” or “file.pdf”.

    Also when mentioned in a text, the file name may end up split in separated lines or even pages, and will more likely be subject to autocorrect.

    When copying the file name in a text, in most environments you can double-click to select the whole name, but it doesn’t work if it has spaces.

    Now, if you never ever type or copy/paste a file name, and only ever access files through a graphical interface, then it makes no difference.

    But then you start getting to comfy and if anything goes, why not non-ascii chars too? And that opens a different can of troubles.



  • if I’m not going to do it, someone else will happily do it

    This “justification” works for everything, from parking on the disability park spot to genocide.

    Having said that, my first task at a new job in '94 was “you see these three workers counting, stacking and feeding the product into the packing machine? You’ll design a stacker to replace them”. “ah, three workers three shifts, so you’re saying my first task is to make 9 people jobless?”. “yup, but we’ll replicate it to other lines, so…”.

    Someone would do it anyway.