I wasn’t gonna make a post today, because nothing broke and it wasn’t that exciting. But what the hell.

Anyway, there’s still a couple things wonky, probably from the mishaps yesterday and the day before. The main thing is just a “failed to delete autoinstaller.sh” error on the script that runs when I do a “switch user”, so I wonder if I broke something non-essential when I killed the PIDs yesterday…

It was also prompting me for a password whenever I tried to make it go to sleep, which would wake it up and basically make it impossible to put in sleep mode. But it think I fixed that somehow. Or maybe it only works when I press the sleep button. I have to test if it still happens when I simply close the laptop, which is what I had been doing after a switch user. So yes, that means I would come back to it later and it wouldn’t be asleep, and would prompt me for a password after signing back in and loading the desktop.

I didn’t even get to doing the security stuff today. I started off this morning by making a list of all the configurations that I’ve tweaked manually. It’s a small list, but it will probably grow, and that will help me if I ever break something but also it’ll help me keep track of all my changes so that I can easily undo them later if I want to, or remember what to do if I ever need to manually rebuild my system.

Then I played around in System Monitor, got a page exactly how I liked it, saved it as an export file for backup, and set it as my default page to open to. I learned about some of the metrics I was unfamiliar with, like PSI for instance. Now I want to get a vertical second display and just have System Monitor up on it all the time 😩

After that I went through my notes from yesterday and typed up a document with all the steps I took for the configurations, in case I ever have to do them again. That took up most of the day, honestly. Some of the commands are starting to feel more familiar. Ones that come up a lot at least, like journalctl, systemctl, cat, ps aux, grep, and nano. Some still look like gibberish to me though.

I spent most of the evening trying to figure out those two problems I mentioned, and made another document for more troubleshooting commands.

And then I finally got around to changing my username, which I did through the GUI because sudo usermod didn’t work. So it didn’t update the /home directory, which saves me some work updating pathways but it’s kind of annoying cause that means they’ll just stay under the default username, even though the ownership updated to the new one.

That’s mostly all I did. Just fun boring stuff that didn’t break anything and didn’t seem to justify making a third post. But I’m making one anyway.

Now, tomorrow for sure I’ll get to the security stuff!

So far that list includes setting up secure boot, locking the bootloader if it’s not already, password protecting UEFI, encrypting the swap space (if it’s not already and if I can do so without wiping my drive), configuring my firewall, setting up dnscrypt-proxy, and TPM! And then after that there’s some software stuff like AppArmor, ClamAV, LMP, a rootkit hunter, an NGFW, and a locally-hosted password manager.

I’m not sure if any of that’s redundant but if so I’ll find out while I’m reading about it. It seems like a lot, though. It would be overwhelming if I wasn’t excited about it. Maybe I should adjust my expectations though, cause it might take me a week just to set it all up. I still need to set up borg too, for backing up /home/ so I can exclude it from rsync…

And then after that there’s more to do, but I’ll be able to start shifting away from initial setup to exploring different kinds of software and actually using my system.

    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyzOP
      1·
      5 hours ago

      Heheh, I’ve spent over a week tweaking configs and getting everything the way I want it, which isn’t totally necessary, but I’m picky and I want to start from a solid base and not have to change anything later when it’s all cluttered and more convoluted. Plus I’m enjoying the process of learning the ins and out of the operating system, and the best way to do that is to play around.

      I’ve also been installing various packages and getting those set up, auditing my system’s security, bootlogs, running services, etc… I still have my work cut out for me but I’ve peppered the dull stuff with fun stuff.

      I’ve also been learning bash commands from scratch so that’s been… fun… and today I even wrote my first scripts and created anacron jobs to run clamscan, maldet, rkhunter, and aide!

      But yeah I’m not quite to the “actually start using my system as a tool” part yet, but that’s gonna be so exciting! I’ve installed some cool software like jupyterlab and logseq and other stuff that I can’t wait to play around with!

      How does timeshift compare with rsync and kup? So far my backups look like this: I get a list of all my installed apps with pacman -Q (maybe I need to try yay -Q too now that I think of it) and make a tar archive of my KDE config dotfiles, then I use rsync to get a snapshot of most of my system. I haven’t used grysnc yet for the GUI but I installed it so I’ll try it next time. I also installed borg/vorta to make a deduplicated image of my home directory. Does timeshift have any advantages over that system?

      A month? I’m almost disappointed that I like Endeavour so much, because there are so many other distros I want to try. But I’m getting my bases settled, and then I’ll try others in VMs and make live ISO USBs of the ones I like.

      Is there a pacman version of apt list --upgradable? Or does it not need one because it already lists everything and then asks you to confirm before proceeding?

      And what’s the advantage of flatpaks? I just removed all the ones that came on my system, and I uninstalled flatpak, deleted all the remnants in my directories, and userdeled the flatpak system user. What is dependency hell? The package manager seems to resolve them quite eloquently.

      I don’t think I’ll ever relive the euphoria of my first day on linux, and least up until the part where my KDE session crashed and I panicked and almost broke things even further before figuring out what I needed to do and then fixing it. That was my trial by fire that forced me to learn how to use the terminal.

      But yeah, all my life I thought I hated computers, but it turns out I just hated Windows (and Mac, I hated Mac even worse than Windows). Actually, computers are awesome. I fucking love computers. I just had to get on Linux to realize that…

    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyzOP
      1·
      6 days ago

      Yeah, I actually spent days 4 and 5 troubleshooting errors in the bootlogs, and some problems with polkit not letting me put my computer to sleep.

      Still haven’t fixed everything, but I did solve the main issue which was “failed to delete autoinstaller.sh” by adding an -f to the ExecStart line in systemd’s cleanup.service

      But I also successfully changed my username, /home/directory, group name and ownership without breaking anything! Fortunately I decided to do it while my system was still fresh so I didn’t have many custom scripts to edit

  • onlinepersona@programming.dev
    8·
    8 days ago

    This is an interesting read. Thanks 🙃

    BTW, I don’t know if you want to do everything via the command line but there are GUIs for some of your tasks. Specifically, TimeShift for backups. And for notes, I can recommend Logseq

    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyzOP
      2·
      6 days ago

      Thanks!

      I’m planning on installing some GUIs like Vorta and Kup. At first I was going to avoid the CLI altogether, but after a KDE update broke my system on day 1, I had to use the terminal and now I’m addicted! Learning how to use it is really opening my eyes to how the system works, so now I’ve decided I’ll do everything via CLI at least once before using a GUI.

      Logseq looks interesting. How does that compare to Trullium?

      • onlinepersona@programming.dev
        1·
        5 days ago

        It’s good that you enjoy the CLI. It definitely will teach you a lot!

        I’ve never used Trullium, but I know that Trillium is for chatting. In any case LogSeq is a non-hierarchical note taking app. Popular proprietary alternatives are notion and obsidian. It’s like a personal wiki. When you create a tag with #someTag it creates the “someTag” note as well and shows the reverse links kall pages with that tag). The same can be achieved with [[Another Page]] then “Another Page” is created.

        It’s very useful for journaling or quick note taking that links everything together.

        • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyzOP
          2·
          4 days ago

          That sounds really cool! That’s exactly what I was hoping/expecting trillium to be, but I couldn’t find that one on the AUR so logseq it is then!

  • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    8 days ago

    Obligatory: Your choice of Linux distro is awful. I don’t know which one it is you’re running, but someone will rip on you for it either way.

    Other than that, great to have you onboard. Some tidbits:

    • Seconding that other person’s recommendation of timeshift
    • I’ve been a linux user for decades and never quite figured out sleep mode. Haven’t bothered putting much effort into solving it, so that’s mostly on me
    • At least back in the day, changing ones username was just a matter of editing /etc/password, /etc/shadow, and /etc/groups, and optionally moving your homedir as well. Maybe it still works this way? Make backups if you wanna try it.
    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyzOP
      2·
      6 days ago

      I use Endeavour, btw. I have yet to hear someone shit on it.

      I’m already planning to use kup and vorta for backups.

      It seems I can enter sleep mode from my login screen, but I have to be careful not to jiggle my mouse at all while clicking “sleep”. So I’m going to make a rule to disable mouse wakeup. And if I want to make it sleep from the lock screen I have to add a rule to polkit, which is kinda lame but whatever.

      And I initially changed my username in the settings but I still had to run “sudo usermod -d newname -m newname” to update the /etc/passwd and home directory, which I had to do from an alternative admin account. Then I did a “groupmod” and “chown” to update my group name/ownership.

      I almost panicked at first though cause all my folders were empty, but it was just a shell of my old directory. I had to manually edit the shortcut pathways to the new directory and all my files were there!

      Then I did a “grep -i /home/oldname” to find any leftover places, but it was mostly present in .local/share/ for app configs, .cache/ for things like “recently used”, and my backups folder. Just a few places I need to look at today to make sure everything is fine.

      Oh, and if you have any custom scripts, services, cronjobs, or symlinks containing absolute paths, you need to manually edit those too! But my system is still pretty fresh so I don’t…