Some Notes on the Machines

Grub Customizer is a great GUI configurator for GRUB, currently the most common boot loader for ix86 and AMD64 hardware. The Customizer has issues compiling on some setups, especially later versions of gcc. Here’s what I found to do:

1. Download grub-customizer-4.0.6.tar.gz, unpack.
2. ccmake .
3. Resolve any missing libraries et cetera. ccmake . again until nothing missing.
4. Look for these files:
   ./CMakeFiles/grub-customizer.dir/flags.make
./CMakeFiles/grubcfg-proxy.dir/flags.make
5. Add -std=gnu++11 as first item to CXX_FLAGS in both files.
6. cmake .
7. Again resolve any missing libraries et cetera. cmake . again until nothing missing.
8. make
9. sudo make install

This project:

http://www.x2go.org

appears very good.

If you need to reset the root password on a Linux box running the GRUB boot loader:

1. During boot, hit Tab, and GRUB should permit you to see the boot option lines.
2. Edit one of them. Replace ro quiet splash with rw init=/bin/bash.
3. Boot without saving the line permanently. The system will send you directly into single-user mode as root, from where you can run ‘passwd’ to change it.

This one compiles vanilla source as it installs, handles conflicts very carefully, retrieves very recent versions of many useful things including ‘curl’.

http://www.toastball.net/toast/

/etc/rc.local no longer automatically exists in many Linuxes. This was a script run at boot before any user logins, after setup. If your Linux distro uses ‘systemd’, a relatively new boot system, this may be your situation; but the functionality is still useful in many special circumstances. If it’s yours, create a file named /etc/systemd/system/rc-local.service containing the below, and a new bash script called /etc/rc.local will run just as desired! Do be sure to set your new /etc/rc.local as executable, or you will regret it :-)

/etc/systemd/system/rc-local.service

[Unit]
Description=/etc/rc.local Compatibility

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/etc/rc.local
TimeoutSec=0
StandardInput=tty
RemainAfterExit=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

There is a great GUI for ACL (access control lists, fine-grained permissions) for Linux:

http://rofi.roger-ferrer.org/eiciel/

Try the initialization/setup steps here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman-key

Here is a product, free for commercial and non-profit use, which does the job of VSS under Linux:

http://www.r1soft.com/tools/linux-hot-copy/

Lots of good instruction-sets here:

http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/category/linux/

If you do most of EasyLife first, the “dependencies” are handled for you.

If you cannot mount a drive in Linux, it is very possibly because of a stale or partially-configured RAID set. If the drive in question is /dev/sde, use mdadm -x from root to delete /dev/sde from any RAID set currently extant (in Fedora, it’s Disk Utility, under Applications, System Tools).