Some Notes on the Machines

This notice can be seen at shutdown of recent Linux. The only thorough solution this writer has seen, is to use the ‘watchdog’ service to get rid of hanging processes. You’ll need to compile, perhaps using ‘yay’, on Arch and derivatives:

yay -S watchdog
sudo systemctl enable watchdog.service
sudo systemctl start watchdog.service

Flatpak appears currently the best supported. Many apps and tools can be loaded through it. The Snap system is not at this writing satisfactorily supported under Arch Linux, but it alone appears to contain PowerShell.

To use Flatpak under Arch, first you’ll need to install the Flatpak system:

pacman -S flatpak

and then you’ll want to download a .flatpakref file from flathub.org. Once you have that, run this:

flatpak install *.flatpakref

and the install will commence, it will install runtime prerequisites as needed.

From the extraordinary Mike Hunsinger:

Today I learned something fascinating. You can run linux as a Windows Subsystem w/o using a vm or dual-boot. All you have to do is run PS as admin, execute this:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

reboot when prompted and then you can use the windows store to install just about any Linux distro you want.

This article describes folks running Linux GUI apps talking to Windows-native X Windows. Ponderworthy hasn’t tested this yet, but the following X server looks like a very worthy candidate:

sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/

Per the Forum as of this writing, try each of these twice if needed:

sudo pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring manjaro-keyring

sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux manjaro

sudo pacman-key --refresh-keys

So you have an NFS server share known to be working, and you want to mount its share(s) on your Linux client machine. Here’s a summary. We’re using NFS4.

1. So we start out thinking that we have an NFS server 10.11.11.10. We verify it’s ready for connection, if we run this command from the client:
   showmount -e 10.11.11.10
   and receive one or more NFS folder shares, e.g.:
   /Media 10.11.11.0/255.255.255.0
2. We need a place to mount the share on this machine. So:
   mkdir /Media
3. Next we try it manually:
   mount -t nfs 10.11.11.10:/Media /Media

4. Now let’s make sure all of our NFS4-related services are enabled and running on the client.

sudo systemctl enable nfslockd.service
sudo systemctl start nfslockd.service
sudo systemctl enable nfs-idmapd.service
sudo systemctl start nfs-idmapd.service

4. We now make sure that permissions allow users of the client read/write access to the share. There are two problems here. The first is to make the shared folder and all contents read/writable by all designated users. The second is to make this happen across systems, i.e., from server to clients.

So first we set the shared folder and all contents chmoded g+rwXs, chgrped to a sharing-designated group, on the server side. We then create a new user group on both server and clients, perhaps named “sharedfiles”, add all selected users to that group on clients and server, make sure the GID is the same for the group name on all of the machines, and then reboot them all.

The GID is a numerical indicator for the group, which is more important to the local OS than the name of it. As part of the above we do need to make sure the GID is the same for our new user group, across all machines, or else the OSes will not recognize the equivalency. On each of them then, after the group is created, we do this:

groupmod -g 20000 sharedfiles

A list of current groups and GIDs is available here:

cat /etc/group

You’ll notice that 20000 places the new group long after all of the others in general. This is intentional, to avoid conflict with existing configurations.

5. Then we set up automount. We do this by adding the following line to the end of /etc/fstab:

10.11.11.10:/Media /Media nfs noauto,x-systemd.automount,intr,rsize=4194304,wsize=4194304,x-systemd.device-timeout=10,timeo=14,x-systemd.idle-timeout=1min 0 0

Items:

• NFS by itself is normally a very strong connection at a very low level, which means that unless an NFS mount is handled with care by other facilities, a client machine can freeze up very hard if its server becomes unreachable, rather different than SMB on Windows. There are at least three different methods to do this well. The above uses a facility within systemd, which this author found much easier to handle than the other two he found. If your Linux system does not use systemd, you should use one of the others, e.g., autofs, which is a layer unto itself.
• The option “intr” is instead of “hard” or “soft”. It makes NFS transactions explicitly interruptible, which helps prevent corruption if the server goes down.
• rsize and wsize can vary a lot. The number is in bytes. The above is a recent report on gigabit; if you’re on a lower-speed network you should use a correspondingly full order of magnitude smaller pair of numbers, e.g., the commonly reported rsize=8192,wsize8192.

If you have access to the console and the machine runs GRUB or something similar, reset of a password is easy. Just interrupt the boot before kernel load (hit the Tab key if it really is GRUB you have there), edit the kernel load line, and add the following to the very end:

init=/bin/bash

Then boot that kernel load line (F10 in GRUB) and the machine will come up in single-user ‘bash’ shell, and you can run ‘passwd’.

There is a per-user font installation procedure, but we’ll do this system-wide just in case. This procedure presumes that you are using a modern fully-fledged Linux desktop which includes a font server.

1. First we create a folder for manual font installs, and give it the right permissions.
   sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/manual-installs
sudo chmod 0555 /usr/share/fonts/manual-installs
2. Copy all of your .ttf, .otf, etc., files, into the folder, and give them all the right permissions. We’ll say that you downloaded a file named Fonts.zip to Downloads in your home directory, and unpacked it.
   sudo cp ~/Downloads/Fonts/* /usr/share/fonts/manual-installs
sudo chmod 0444 /usr/share/fonts/manual-installs/*
3. Update the font cache.
   sudo fc-cache

Here’s a great set of steps:

http://www.fosslinux.com/1387/how-to-install-microsoft-true-type-fonts-in-solus.htm

In essence it’s two interactive commands, first one, then the other:

sudo eopkg bi --ignore-safety https://raw.githubusercontent.com/solus-project/3rd-party/master/desktop/font/mscorefonts/pspec.xml

sudo eopkg it mscorefonts*.eopkg;sudo rm mscorefonts*.eopkg

Increasingly, nslookup is not installed by default in major Linux distros. On Arch-based and Debian-based distros, it’s in package dnsutils,

‘atop’ seems to have some extraordinary depth.

http://linux.die.net/man/1/atop