Linux & Open Source

Windows Removed

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A while back I mentioned a return to Linux in a Dual Boot situation on my Laptop. The motivation here, primarily, is that it’s a perfectly good laptop, and Windows 10 is “end of life” and going away. Also, frankly, I miss using Linux more. I ran Linux on my last laptop before it was eventually replaced.

I’ve takent he next step and completely removed Windows.

I’ve done this for one reason, which is mayt not fix, but it might. I have, occasionally, been getting random system freezes. I never got this in Windows. My “theory” here is as follows:

  • My laptop has two physical drives, one is one of the newer M2 whatever drives that looks like a long ram stick chip, the other is an old school 3.5″ SSD. It seems really fucking weird to call an SSD “old school” like that, but whatever.
  • The SSD probably isn’t lose, but I have always felt like it fits a little loose inside the bay. I even have a piece of folded paper crammed inside to help give it some cushon to sty in place.
  • I am worried that the SSD is slipping out a bit and causing issues.
  • Also it’s possible the SSD is failing, but I doubt it.

Whatever the case, my ultimate goal was to move Linux to the original M2 drive and replace Windows, and I’ve completed that task. It was surprisingly painless, but not without hiccups. I was alos pretty nervous at first that I would hose up the laptop’s boot ability. As such, I wanted to give a general rundown of the process.

Just for a baseline of relevant points. With Windows my laptop:

  • Had 1 original M2 Drive with Windows on it, in Linux, this shows as “sdb”
  • Ad added SSD with 2 partitions, one with the Linux Mint file system, “sda3”
  • One Parition mapped as /home labeled “sda2”
  • A handful of other smaller patitions on both drives
  • Boot was set up for UEFI Enabled, Secure Boot Disabled

My first step was getting rid of the Windows File System. I simply opened “Disks” in Mint, and deleted the Windows Partition and the Recovery partition on sdb. This ended up being unecesary, but I did it anyway. Just for the sake of my sanity, I also rebooted to make sure I could still boot to Linux Mint. I also made a note that “sda” is 240GB and “sdb” is 256GB.

I then downloaded Clonezilla and write it to a USB drive to boot from. This ended up beingn the most complicated step. All of the tools I usually use to make writable USB drives from ISO files, Yumi, Rufus, Ventoy, all seem to only work from Windows. I also didn’t have my Yumi USB drive handy to just put the ISO there and boot.

I came across this command but it didn’t seem to actually boot.sudo dd bs=4M if=/path/to/file.iso of=/dev/sdX status=progress oflag=sync

It’s possible this did work, but I’ll touch at that later.

Ultimately, I discovered, that simply “right clicking” the .iso file, had a menu option to “Burn to Bootable USB”.

So I did that.

I also found that in order to boot from USB, I had to enter the BIOS, and turn off UEFI boot in favor of Legacy boot.

I booted to Clonezilla. I started to do a partition to partition clone but there didn’t seem to be an obvious way to clone sda3 (the file system) into the free/empty space of :”sdb”. So instead I just did a full disk clone of sda into sdb.

On reboot, I discovered that, I needed to reenable UEFI in order for things to work. After changing it back, I was in, Linux Mint booted just fine.

Next step was to clean up the duplicate partitions and resize each remainign parition to consume their respective drives. Actually my actual next step was to verify which copy of Mint I was running. I was going to drop some place holder test files, then reboot the machine and putz with the BIOS boot order. It turns out, I got lucky and I was already in the “new” copy on sdb. I was able to verify this because when I opebned Disks, the “old/original filesystem” partition, was not active. I simpley deleted it.

I also deleted the extra copy of “Home” that I had created on sdb.

Just for my own sanity, I did another reboot. Everything worked fine, and my home files mounted properly as expected. I now had the file system on the M2 drive sdb, and my home folder on the second drive of sda.

So now, I was ready to resize the partitions. Resizing the Homes drive was easy, I, once again, opened Disks, then did a resize and now it’s 240GB total.

The Filesystem was a bit less easy. Weirdly, I could, in the active file system, expand it to consime the 16GB or so at the “end” of the disk where the extra space now was (the new drive was 256GB vs the old SSD which was 240). What I couldn’t do was “pull it forward” to consime the 140GB or so that used to be the “home” partition.

So I went otu and downloaded a copy of Gparted this time, burned it to my USB stick, and rebooted. Now I was able to reize the file system to consume the entire remaining drive space.

This also meant toggling UEFI off and back on again.

Just for shits and giggles, I also decided to see what would happen if I enabled secure boot, which just entered into a weird boot loop. So I disabled that again, and finally, booted back into my now fully set up file system.

I can’t vouch for if it actually fixed my freeeze up issue yet. That may just be me over using it. I did also pick up some new memory for it, bumping it up to 16GB from 8GB, and also at a slightly faster clock speed.

Weekly Wrap Up

Wrap-Up: Lets Try to Be Positive Edition

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It’s been a hot minute since I really posted. To be blunt, I am pretty much just endlessly frustrated lately over the state of everything. Particularly the state of politics here in the US. I mean, I knew it would be shitty. I didn’t think it was going to be THIS relentlessly shitty, this quickly.

Lets take a peek inside the background at some journal topics here…

Or not. Lets try to, I dunno, be positive I guess. Whats been going on lately that is not awful.

Learning

Like last year, I started doing some leader-led training courses after work a bit. Its been, less rigorous than the ones last year, and mostly consisted of doing a Udemy course. This year’s topic so far has been AWS, or Amazon Web Services. Which probably powers like 75% of the internet or something. I am actually not sure why it was being offered because I am not sure we even use AWS at work, I think we mostly use Azure, but then, I am not part of that side of the business, so I actually have no clue what we use.

The Azure courses were full though.

As for AWS. The training specifically was to prep for the Amazon Cloud Practitioner certification. I probably should go take it. I am pretty confident I would pass it easily. The only part of the entire course I stumbled on was the weird, added later, 6-point diagram thingy. I can’t even remember the name of it. Like a lot of training of this nature, the whole course felt a bit like a sales pitch for AWS. But this particular section, which the class says was added later to the exam, felt very very very much like sale pitch nonsense.

Sales jargon and bull shit terms are my kryptonite. I can listen to and absorb some technical this and that about EC2 and S3 Blocks all day long. But this 6 points of whatever, fuck I just instantly glaze over. Don’t feed me “feel good” buzzword crap, please. Ever.

I also started doing a bit of Cybersecurity stuff (again) through some work access to something called Immersive Labs. I have no idea if its any good, so far I have just been doing basics, because it was required for work, but I seem to have full access, and it feels like something I should dig into more.

Back on the cert issue. I should go take the exam. I never did take the exams for CCNA or Pentesting for the courses I took last year. I don’t personally give a shit about certs. It shows you paid money to take a test somewhere. Feels very much in the vein of “feel-good jargon”.

Whatever the case, I have kind of wanted to better understand AWS in general for a while, and the course, overall did a great job of it. Most of it’s tools are well beyond anything I would probably ever need or use, but there were a few that were interesting.

First is the basic EC2. These are essentially their “on-demand servers.” These are not nearly as mysterious as I thought, and once you spin one up, you can log in and do all the normal Linuxey backend stuff one would expect. My thought was, of course, I could migrate my current web stack to AWS from Digital Ocean. I’m not sure I would really save anything for all that effort through. I do not have the need for some crazy highly flexible scalable environment. I’m not concerned about performance really. I’m just running a few WordPress instances against a basic database. At best, I would probably break even on my current spend for a bunch of migration work while supporting Amazon more, which I am already leaning more and more against.

Second was S3 Buckets. This is data storage in the cloud. I’ve considered using it for my backups a few times. It seems useful for some complex cloud app or systems. Even with Glacier storage, which is not on demand retrieval and is the cheapest, I would end up spending more than my current spend there. Right now I have a Microsoft Office 365 Family Plan and a bunch of segmented syncs off my NAS. That gives me 6 TB for around $70/year, AND Office for everyone in my family. That’s a great deal. Rough estimates in the calculator on Amazon, with only my current usage, puts me breaking even with Glacier.

Lastly, and the one I am more likely to use is Amazon Lambda. This one is really interesting, and it seems to just be, a way to run scripts int he cloud. I’m not sure I would use it a lot, but I could definitely see writing some simply monitoring/notification scripts and sticking them in there running once an hour or so. You get a ton of free runs per month too, which means it probably would cost me nothing int he end.

The Fediverse

Something that has stemmed from all the crazy stupid nonsense in the world is pushing more to move to use Federated social media more. I set up a Pixelfed account, which so far is mostly just reposted toy photos from IG. I have been poking around some Lemmy instances a bit. I am trying to use my Mastodon account a bit more. And BlueSky. Though that is less independent and federated.

Being more active in the Fediverse does not have to preclude not using mainstream social media. I do kind of plan to try to just, I dunno, focus less on just endless angry news. Not to say I am going to stop paying attention, just, more, add more attention elsewhere, also. Balance the awful with the good, or something.

I honestly just, hate what seems to be happening with Social Media. I hate that the mindset is that “Social media was a mistake” and “Facebook etc are evil.”. They really are, but also, it was not always this way. Social Media is good, and can be good, but they (social media companies) get too much out of making everyone fucking mad and miserable. I want to go back to giving a shit about family and friends on Facebook. I want to follow local news without brain-dead idiots filling the comments.

Oops, I am ranting a bit. Let’s be positive.

Language

I don’t have a ton to say about my language learning, but I did want to mention it. I feel like I have crossed some sort of threshold. I am not amazing at it, but I find lately I have a much much easier time understanding Spanish, and in a fairly passive way. I also was inspired a bit by a Reddit post, and have gotten way way more aggressive with lessons. There is a lot of repetition at the point I am.

A lot.

Muchos

I have been getting a little too bored with it. My current strategy is to finish the first bubble in a section, then do the first story, then skip ahead to the exam. I don’t need 5-6 more bubbles to prepare for that exam. I got it. This has actually been working pretty well. Especially because the repetition isn’t limited to within a single lesson section, it extends beyond to future lessons.

I am not doing it as aggressively as the Reddit post person did. They did one of these per day. I am doing one of these ever 2-3 days. I have done some other languages, but I have been working on this course for too long.

I also feel like I am retaining it better, because I am less bored.

Other

I have not been up to a lot much else. Like I said, the mess of everything just kind of saps my give a shit, which is frustrating. When I have not been doing class, I have been playing Infinity Nikki, or Fortnite, and we have been rewatching all the Marvel movies. Most of that is more Lameazoid topics.

I have avoided it (somehow) but everyone in my house has been sick for the past few weeks as well. Kind of sucks because it means the shop is closed. This is a slow time of year for that anyway, at least one of the other local businesses in the area there said they close for January usually anyway. Also, the bulk of the sales for the shop are on ebay anyway. The bulk of the space is for managing ebay items, the shop portion is just a nice “bonus”.

I’ve also been fitting in a lot of serious hardcore Bookmarks sorting. I kind of touched on this recently I think, I mentioned setting up Link Ace, which I have already dropped, for now. I’m just creating my big link list Digital Garden now instead. It works fine, it’s easily searchable. Another nice benefit is I am being reminded of a lot fo things I bookmarked to “look into later”. I have a nice sorted pile of ‘to-do projects” that I had completely forgotten about now. I can ignore them in a whole new way this way.’

Politics and News

Social Media is Dead, Long Live Social Media

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And other Hyperbolic click baity headlines.

Two articles today.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/mastodon-becomes-nonprofit-to-make-sure-its-never-ruined-by-billionaire-ceo/

And

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Unprecedented-growth-Facebook-blocks-links-to-Instagram-alternative-Pixelfed-10237928.html

Basically, Mastodon, the Federated Open Source client for microblogging is shifting itself to be a not for profit company. John Mastodon os no longer in control. Or, he won’t be. These things apparently take a few months to do. Tangentially related, its picture centric counterpart Pixelfed, has experienced unprecedented growth. I saw one post where a Pixelfed instance was no longer allowing Instagram importing and Facebook is apparently blocking links to Pixelfed.

Both of these moves are very good for the internet as a whole, but they also feel very much sparked by Facebook’s recently policy changes. Basically, as part of its push to bown down to the incoming administration, Zuck has shown his true colors and rolled out a new policy that fact checking is no longer a thing on Facebook. Instead it will rely on “user notes.” At the same time, and more maliciously, they also changed their policies around hate speech, with specific exceptions around calling out LGBTQ people as being mentally disabled. Basically, you can’t get banned anymore for hate speech against the LGBTQ crowd.

This pretty much aligns with the plans of the incoming administration to start stripping away people’s rights as rapidly as possible, starting with transgender folks, probably pushing through on gay marriage and gay rights, and eventually layering on top a good helping of removing women’s autonomy from US society.

With the destruction facts and reality on Twitter, and now Facebook, basically, propaganda and lies are set to take over. We already saw it on Twitter.

This change isn’t the only anti-LBGTQ thing happening on Facebook. They renamed (one report said removed, one renamed) some of the Pride themes on Messenger to be more generic (Example, I want to say the lesbian pride was now “rustic sunrise” or something). I also saw some people suggest they had had various pride based badging removed from their username and profiles.

I do feel like its a bit more though, than just the new policies. But I am sure that is a lot of it. I don’t use Instagram really anymore, the algorithm has destroyed my interest in that platform, but I follow the Instagram subreddit. In the past few months, there have been a massive influx of accounts and people being randomly banned from the platform by the new AI based moderation system. It doesn’t really tell why either. Just the vague, “violation of site policy.”

So, it does seem there are still ways to get banned, but just not for LGBTQ hate speech.

Not to be overtaken by Twitter and Facebook, WordPress, has also been making a huge stink for its users lately. Its much less in the came of hate speech, but more in the area of, “Their CEO is just being a weird, petty whiney bully.” There is some sort of feud going on between WordPress and something called WPEngine, which is apparently a popular WP host, but I had never heard of it before this recent events. Like I said, it all seems very petty. Like the log in form for WordPress had a checkbox that said, “I am not affiliated with WPEngine for a bit. When people complained it was changed to “Pineapple on Pizza is good.” There have been other similar incidents.

I have been mostly ignoring it from apathy, but lately, it feels like WP just wants to bring in and potentially monetize the shit out of everything, and its got me seriously considering changing my blog platform, despite that I am hosting the software on my own VPS. I have been looking at doing some sort of static site system for a while, its starting to really feel like its time to be serious.

Windows

Windows 10 End of Life

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I got a notice today on my secondary Desktop about Windows 10 going out of support later this year. Microsoft really wants people to upgrade to Windows 11.

Like, a lot.

I mean, I get it, and I have no problem with updating. I use Windows 11 at work, I use it on my main desktop. Aside from the annoyance that the Task Bar can’t be docked on the side or top, I don’t really notice.

But I can’t, not on this PC, due to…. Reasons…? Windows 11 is essentially just, Windows 10 under the hood, it seems really weird that I can’t update this machine. Its most likely due to age. But this kind of leads me to another point.

This PC works just fine.

Its just my previous desktop, off to the side. It does everything I need it to do, just fine. It could even do more than I need it to do, just fine. I mostly use it to run Docker Containers and to host files. I occasionally use it to run a second Fortnite instance to play Bot Matches. It has gobs of memory for doing whatever task I throw at it, I have considered getting a better GPU for it to do AI stuff with it (it already has a very nice GPU, just not, AI nice).

Probably, at some point, I will just blow it out and load Ubuntu on it. I will lose my Fortnite ability probably, but I am kind of done with that anyway. I have already been slowly winding down my use needs that are Windows dependant there. I need to figure out the process of transferring my Docker containers over first. I may test things out using my Laptop first, which already runs Linux.

Which is another set of contention here. I went ahead and just replaced Windows 10 on my 10 year old Laptop. It still, ran just fine. I primarily use it for writing and coding, but I do play some games on it too. Thankfully, Steam has made great strides in getting Linux support in the gaming world.

But its not just my laptop. All 3 of my kids and my wife have laptops. My son has a desktop as well. Only one of these laptops is Windows 11 compatible. I have no idea on my son’s desktop. But all of these PCs work plenty fine.

I know I keep pushing this, “It works fine” point, but part of that is because the Windows 11 “requirements” really feel like a weird appeasement to PC makers to try to “encourage people to upgrade hardware.” I feel like these people are greatly overestimating just how often people buy new hardware. I had a neighbor at my old place with a Windows XP machine he would ask me to work on sometimes. The reality is, an XP machine would work just fine for what he needed.

PC power basically just, plateaued in usefulness a decade or so ago. It kind of feels like why there is such a big push for AI crap as well. “Get the new PC with an NPU! Get AI locally somit can make stuff up without the cloud!”

I could put Linux on some of these machines, but I already get grief over having to occasionally fix things on my family’s laptops as it is, I don’t really need that extra layer of grief AND a learning curve. I know its all much easier now, but like the upgrade cycle, its a “regular people” thing. Its a “Why doesn’t this scanner software work” thing, or a “why can’t Install my SIMS game” thing.

Though I will say this, for my case. Linux Mint runs 1000x better than Windows 10 did. I do get occasional weird lock ups though, which is annoying. Seems to be some sort of memory issue with Firefox because it happens if I get too ambitious with tabs, which I very often do. Its fine fine, then suddenly, the shole system is unresponsive.

But it also helps that I know how to use Linux already. I have been using it on some level now for like 25 years. I failed to install it the first time while at college in the early 2000s. But I have used it since. And prefer it.

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