linux

Some VPS providers, e.g. Azure provide you with 2 disk drives for your VPSes. One, of very limited size, system disk, and the other one, spacy but with not guarantees that the data survives reboot. Basically it means that you can have a small VPS, with a small amount of RAM but large temp disk space. Why this could be useful ? Imagine tasks with lots of mem requirements but that not need to be extra fast, where swapping is allowed. [Read More]

Recently I’ve started working on changing my default development workflow. I’m evaluating vagrant as a main env manager, and then docker for extra speed. In short, my vagrant up boots up new dev box and then couple of docker containers. What I’ve found is that there is not really a plethora of GUI-enabled vagrant boxes, so I’ve created one ! If you want to use it, go: vagrant init cyplo/ubuntu-gnome-utopic-gui vagrant up I will write about the whole setup later, as I’m not yet sure what approach is best for me. [Read More]

Eagle is still the first choice when it comes to Open Hardware electronics design. That’s a bit unfortunate because the software itself is proprietary. Sometimes you need to run it though. For example to migrate projects over to non-proprietary software ! Say, you’d like to run new Eagle 7.1 under Ubuntu ? Try repos. Repos have the old major version 6 only. The harder to get proprietary software the better, I suppose. [Read More]

I’ve spent quite some time recently trying to get a laptop running Gentoo boot from an encrypted partition with LVM. I thought that this might be useful for someone else, so here you are: First things first: I’m assuming you’ve followed Gentoo handbook and are operating from within livecd’s shell. You’ve done the regular luksFormat + lvm stuff and you’ve come up with a layout similar to this one: dagrey ~ # lsblk NAME SIZE TYPE MOUNTPOINT sda 55. [Read More]

Update from 10 years into the future ! It’s 2023 and the repo is still going strong, using lots of Nix and friends tho and also hosted elsewhere - edited the URLs. All my dofiles live here now. Removed the links from the article below as they don’t work anymore. Hi ! Just letting you know that I’ve been working for some time on structuring my dotfiles and finally published them to github. [Read More]

Hey, remember my search for the new laptop ? It’s finally over ! I found that Clevo, Taiwanese custom laptop manufacturer, has recently added 13'3 FullHD laptop base to their offerings - W230ST. And to my surprise - there is a Polish importer which allows pretty neat specs calibration for you. Game on you say ? Indeed. What I like about it: Haswell-based, so all the new tech is here, same as in the newest MacBooks up to 16GB RAM, I have 8GB installed for now and it works pretty good 2x mPCIx mSATA capable slots nice copper cooling inside FullHD matte display 4x USB HDMI typing on its keyboard, just clicks with me survived OHM2013 camp - not scared of humidity and hot air What I do not like so much: Haswell-based, so Linux support is not that great yet, everything seems to be working okay, however power consumption is off the limits. [Read More]

I’m experimenting with service separation by having each service run in its own operating system, all of the sharing hardware though. Why ? Separation seems to be the only secure approach to running any software. Check Joanna’s blog out. I went with VirtualBox on Debian 7 host, with, well, Debian 7 guests. First I’ve prepared template VM by creating a new VM and just proceeding with install. Then I tried spawning some clones of that, but having it done manually takes quite some time and is error prone. [Read More]