Tag: Linux Installation

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Joystick Server Reinstall

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow8472, and today I am rebuilding Joystick, Button Mash’s twin Rocky Linux server. Let’s get started!

Project Goals

This is a revival of my photo scanning project, first and foremost. I need to get it working, and while I will afford myself some time to experiment with doing it right, it’s more important I get it done. Once I have it working better than Button Mash, I can move my production flag over to Joystick and remodel Button Mash “properly.”

And by “properly,” I mean rootless Podman access to a network attached storage. I have explored NFS (Network File System) extensively, but Podman does things with userspace that NFS doesn’t support. I may need to be open to an alternative or using root. SSHFS lays a file system over SSH, but

Installation

I did my usual stuff when installing Linux. I remembered ahead of time that Joystick doesn’t work with Ventoy, so I flashed a USB (Balena Etcher) large enough for the full 10 GB image I downloaded. I did a clean install over its previous Rocky Linux installation. I also adjusted Joystick’s boot order so Rocky 9.4 loads by default. The system is dual booted with Linux Mint, where I did an apt update/upgrade.

Booted to Rocky, I enabled Cockpit web interface for remote management, a feature I selected for installation with the system. I created a limited user for running Podman, enabled lingering on it, got Cockpit logged into it as a “remote host,” and disabled normal password interactions. I pulled Podman containers for Caddy, Nextcloud, MariaDB, Redis, BusyBox, and Vaultwarden, and gave each a directory with a start.sh and a mountpoint. I excluded Pi-Hole and Unbound from my planned lineup because those functions are now handled by our router and would have required messing with special ports.

Troubleshooting

NFS fought me hard though. It didn’t help that Cockpit’s terminal kept glitching out on me. I noticed this behavior on ButtonMash’s Cockpit as well. Rebooting and refreshing didn’t do anything, but I found a control by navigating my browser away and back. I eventually got to thinking about what other parts it might be, and I came up with a bad version of Firefox, or Wayland. I ran Firefox over SSH on a machine still running Xorg server; it was Wayland.

And at this point, my workstation had a record bad meltdown, which ate my remaining blog time. Be sure to read about it next week!

Takeaway

Projects get interrupted. Something comes up and grand plans wait in the background. I’m tired of server doing just that, but it’s happened again.

Final Question

My longest enemy remains: Rootless Podman vs. Network Storage. How do I do it? I look forward to hearing from you in the comments below or on my Socials!

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Study Month: Third Rocky Linux Server

Good Morning from my robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and this February is a study month where I am not sticking myself to hard, weekly goals – though I am aiming for a cluster by the end of the month. Let’s get started!

I downloaded Rocky Linux 9.3 minimal .ISO and flashed it to a USB stick – overwriting an old Rocky Linux 8 installation media. Normally I would use my Ventoy multiboot USB, but Ventoy froze while loading last week before it got to the .ISO selection screen.

The Rocky Linux installer is probably my favorite. It’s non-liniar, so I can go back and change things before finalization without fear of wiping my other settings. My target drive had Debian already installed, and another drive has Linux Mint, which I do not want to overwrite. I confirmed my target drive at least four ways before proceeding. The networking tab let me assign the static IP I want with no undue hassle. Here, I also assigned it the name of Joystick.


I’m keeping this installation as slim as possible to focus on learning clustering. Cockpit (web admin page) is a must-have, but I’m not even putting Podman on this new installation until I believe it is needed. The eventual plan is to keep ButtonMash on as home server until I have RedLaptop and Joystick cooperating in a cluster. Then I’ll move ButtonMash over to that cluster with the possible need to migrate to Rocky 9.x in the process. For this week though, the cluster software I’m researching, Red Hat Cluster Suite, is proving difficult to find the package name[s] for.

I also need to keep a radar for another major goal of this project: an open source image board. I need a tags system, a way to pair two scans to display the backs of some photos, and an album system wouldn’t be bad.

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Unboxing: System76 Thelio Mira

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!

Some weeks ago, I helped my father, Leo_8472, spec up a Thelio Mira from System76, and it arrived this weekend. The first thing we did after unboxing yesterday (as of posting) was open it up and look inside the case. While everything appeared to be there, the system is very self-aware when it comes to airflow – having a dedicated duct from the side to the back for the CPU and an all around crowded feel inside the case. If you’re considering one of their systems, I’d recommend not opting to assemble your first one yourself.

We became concerned when the graphics card appeared to be the later-released budget variation on the NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti one we thought we ordered. Leo found his receipt listing parts we remembered, and we set it up by my server stack for initial setup and taking inventory.

It shipped with PopOS installed – on a recovery partition with self-contained installation media. The installer appeared normal, but it skipped over/I didn’t notice it asking for installation drive, time zone, or host name – the later two of which we provided later.

When we ordered, Leo was very interested in Bluetooth, but I couldn’t find it. One of the first things he did after logging in after initial updates was find and test it. I installed SuperTuxKart to test it with his hands-free headset. He even beat a few races.

Other stuff we loaded up: Firefox data from Mint (4 tries to get right), FreeTube, Discord. I installed KDE as a desktop environment for when I need to use the computer, and chose SDDM for a login manager, and we had fun picking out themes. We found this black hole login splash screen I hacked to display mm/dd/yyyy instead of its default dd/mm/yyyy.

Over this process, we verified hardware with a few commands: lsblk (hard drive size), lspci (GPU, failed), free (RAM size), neofetch (installed special, wasn’t insightful towards GPU). Eventually, we confirmed the correct graphics card from within KDE’s System Settings>About this System.

Unfortunately, the system destabilized before we finished moving in. Leo documented the failure and we contacted support. I further noted that it still failed colorfully under the default “Pop” theme.

To do: copy over MultiMC, enable SSH, NFS mounts/automounts.

Takeaway

Even though it wasn’t immediately plug and play, I’m thankful for the time I’m spending with my father working on this system.

Final Question

Have you ever bought a system designed for Linux?

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My Sister’s Computer Hates Me!

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am starting a series on installing Linux on my sister’s desktop. Let’s get started!

The Plan

My sister has expressed an interest in digital privacy and switching to Linux. She showed interest in installing Linux on her computer this week, and I just got a pair of new SSD’s on sale while shopping for my Arch installation, so I’m using one of those for this installation.

To the best of my experience, PopOS has been the distro of choice to use in terms of compatibility and privacy – by that I mean it has access to the Ubuntu library while System76, the company that makes it, advertises itself as being more privacy aware. While I’ve had problems with it in the past, they weren’t too difficult to sort out. It has a straightforward installer, and then their website has a selection of commands to install a preferred desktop environment. In short: it’s my favorite distro for beginners.

Hardware Installation 1

My sister left me a note inviting me to start work at my convenience, only for a Windows update to pop up while her system was unattended. I got her message before it was obscured, but I still found the irony funny.

For reference, I am working with a 1TB SATA SSD. About as soon as I had the case open, I was scavenging the technology pile for a SATA cable and a power connector from the supply I replaced a while back. The computer screws I found gave me too much trouble attaching it to her computer’s bracket, so I left it loose, later securing it with electrical tape several hours and “learning moments” later.

PopOS Install 1

Computer motherboards have what’s known as firmware, often referred to as BIOS, though recently replaced by UEFI. For the rest of this post, BIOS refers to the old, limited firmware exclusively. My sister’s computer boots with UEFI, and it was displaying on her WACOM graphical tablet where I missed it for playing around with HDMI connections on the graphics card so I could override boot to a USB drive with the latest PopOS install media.

I forget how, but the tablet-monitor went unnoticed until it was the sole output with the installer. I took special care to make sure I was installing to the blank drive, and not over her Windows installation. This was especially important because the system already had a 1 TB hard drive. After that, I put on the KDE desktop environment.

A minor, still-unresolved nuisance was the main monitors constantly being swapped. You can swap cables, or physical devices. Somehow, they always end up swapped. I also noticed some sort of U/I ghosting and horizontal line flickering I solved by removing the WACOM tablet entirely (it was mirrored to one screen – possibly both directions).

I finished up my first day arguing Minecraft into working (barely). I installed MultiMC and GraalVM, only for her modded world to require Java 8 (not an option at present for GraalVM). I was able to link up OpenJDK 8, which came preinstalled. I had to duck back into Windows to disable fastboot so Linux could mount the Windows drive and she can play the same world in either operating system using a symbolic link (shortcut) there. Despite Minecraft only launching around 1 in every 30-50 attempts, we were able to leave her world running “overnight” – which turned out to be only a few minutes after walking away. We found Linux in a mess in the morning. Very little worked, but it all pointed to hard drive failure. It wouldn’t even boot after requiring a forced shutdown. We ended up trying a SATA cable from an old church office computer in our stock – praise God, it cleared up the issue! It still didn’t solve Minecraft from arguing with video drivers:

java: ../nouveau/pushbuf.c:730: nouveau_pushbuf_data: Assertion `kref' failed.

or throwing SIGSEGV errors I haven’t begun to investigate yet.

All this time, I was thinking about how GRUB (Grand Universal Boot Loader) was never able to see Windows, like in the other systems I’ve dual booted. To my dismay, I found PopOS was running in legacy BIOS mode, where Windows was in UEFI mode. The two will never be able to see each other. A reinstall was in order.

PopOS Install 2

Dual booting is no joke if you don’t know what you’re doing. If it were my system, I’d have just taken the hit and accepted the need to select an operating system at the firmware-level. But no, I want an intuitive menu my sister can use. Unfortunately, this meant reinstalling in UEFI mode. To help with that, the folks at r/TechSupport pointed me to Ventoy and instructions on how to set it up with a GPT (General Partition Table for UEFI) instead of an MBR (Master Boot Record for BIOS).

I used my new Ventoy USB to reinstall PopOS, being sure to select the NVIDIA drivers version of the install disk image and choosing the more KDE-native display manager sddm over GDM3 when prompted.

UEFI is a pain to dual boot.

GRUB did not come installed this time. I tried installing grub-efi, but was never able to get it to work correctly, even after installing something for it to /dev/sdX. After much reading, I concluded that a simpler alternative to GRUB may be more suited to this application as the last of my stamina for the week depleted.

Takeaway

I thought this would be a nice, little side project done in a couple hours with a tough issue here or there. WRONG!

Final Question

Have you ever had a project fight you every. step. of. the. way?

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