Danny's Space

I put together my desktop three years and two months ago. It's an ASUS Z97 mobo paired with a 4th generation i5-4590 cpu. I am glad to go for a 16 GB RAM because I'm still smiling at how fast this machine is now after using it everyday all this time. Yes I've purchased hard disks and replaced old ones but I'm still using the original solid-state drive. It's a Crucial 240 GB SSD. The whole package cost 37,000 in 2014. I am still using my ASUS Zenphone ZE551ML. I got this smartphone in 2014. It has intel atom quad cores and a 4 GB RAM. It has android. I had to replace my monitor last year. I am now using an AOC 22 inch IPS monitor with a Full HD resolution. I stopped using RAID and gained back storage space. I am enjoying a total of 10 TB in pooled storage after using logical volume management to put together 5 disks. 2 of the 5 are 3 TB disks and the rest are 2 TB disks. The mix is dictated by cost. The cost effective disk is still the 3 TB capacity. I am trying to g...

I just ran my weekly Arch update with $ pacman -Syu I updated my linux kernel from 4.14.15.x to 4.15.2.x. Libreoffice is now running version 6. systemd updated from 236 to 237. Pacman replaced the following packagaes with the ones in extra/repos. [2018-02-12 13:24] [ALPM] removed xineramaproto (1.2.1-3) [2018-02-12 13:24] [ALPM] removed xf86vidmodeproto (2.3.1-3) [2018-02-12 13:24] [ALPM] removed videoproto (2.3.3-1) [2018-02-12 13:24] [ALPM] removed scrnsaverproto (1.2.2-2) [2018-02-12 13:24] [ALPM] removed renderproto (0.11.1-3) [2018-02-12 13:24] [ALPM] removed recordproto (1.14.2-2) [2018-02-12 13:24] [ALPM] removed randrproto (1.5.0-1) [2018-02-12 13:24] [ALPM] removed kbproto (1.0.7-1) [2018-02-12 13:24] [ALPM] removed inputproto (2.3.2-1) [2018-02-12 13:24] [ALPM] removed fontsproto (2.1.3-2) [2018-02-12 13:24] [ALPM] removed damageproto (1.2.1-3) [2018-02-12 13:24] [ALPM] removed compositeproto (0.4.2-3) [2018-02-12 13:24] [ALPM] removed fixesproto (5.0+9+g4292ec1-1) [2018-0...

I am familiar with web servers. Boxes that you connect to in your LAN to get a web page. A very popular program that runs a web cache is Squid. What is new to me is that I can run Squid in my box so it serves the localhost and any programs that needs to connect to web resources. In any case, my desktop box can also function as a web server down the line if needed. In Arch, install Squid with the command # pacman -S squid. The configuration file is /etc/squid/squid.conf. The default cache directory is /var/cache/squid. The only item i really have to modify is the http_port. The default port that Squid uses is 3128. Now I want all traffic which goes through the default network interface to be redirected to Squid. This is called transparency. To configure Squid just add [intercept] in the line like so: http_port 3128 intercept. When you finish modifying the configuration file run a check with the command #squid -k check. Also, checking the logs can be very helpful. I got an ERROR: No f...

You will need a computer with an internet connection. You will have to download the installation media from the Download page of the Archlinux.org. It is better to download from the official site rather than a third-party mirror server. It is recommended that you checksum the download with the iso signature also downloadable from the Download page. I usually download using the magnet link (through torrent, using a torrent client) because it's faster and it's my way of giving back by seeding it for a while. I keep the latest .iso and the .iso.sig files in its own directory. Then do the checksum with # gpg --keyserver-options --auto-key-retrieve --verify archlinux-yy-nn-dd-x86_64.iso.sig The Straight Forward Easy Way We will use the dd command. It will overwrite the entire USB flash drive and any data will be deleted. You won't be able to write any data when using the installation media. You can zero out the USB flash drive if you want to reuse the device with # dd bs=512 if...

Once again Arch updates for webkitgtk breaks gnucash. Gnucash is an accounting / cash application i depend on for keeping track of my expenses. It's been moved from the official repos to the Arch User Repo or AUR. What this means for users is that responsibility for updates (including dependencies) passes solely to users. Any dependencies that gets updates must be rebuilt. The only problem with webkitgtk rebuilt is that it takes ages to build it. In my case it is 4 hours. First, check if your system has the tools. # sudo pacman -S base-devel git dev-tools --needed Prepare the filesystem on which you will build the package. # sudo mount -o remount,exec,suid /tmp # sudo mkdir /tmp/source/chroot -p # cd /tmp/source Create the chroot. # sudo mkarchroot chroot/root base-devel It's time to get the package sources. # git clone " https://aur.archlinux.org/package_name.git" # cd package_name_directory # makechrootpkg -T -r ../chroot/ The -T flag creates a temporary chroot dire...

Mozilla made a new version of Firefox browser available for download.

I encounter this pervasive and nagging bug in Evolution Mail's strange relationship with its co-GNOME app called Seahorse (although this app goes by the name of Password And Keys now in GNOME 3.26). I have a secondary email account and I want to use it for sending mail (smtp) temporarily (just in this case). So I finished composing my email and clicked send. Then it asked me for my smtp password and I thought that was odd because I have been receiving my email in the inbox for this account. It's unlikely a user would have a different password for login and another for sending email. But I found my password from my password manager and gave it the correct one ( copy and paste). And here it began, the Mail Authentication Failure window from Evolution continually asking for the password. I checked Seahorse for the password by entering a filter in the search bar. It has my password and it is the correct password. So what is happening here? I found this same problem in the Ubuntu fo...