systemd
Monday, February 2 2015
SystemD 2015
[16:47:22] matt [wronka.org]/Psi+ http://ma.ttias.be/whats-new-systemd-2015-edition/
Unix: Do one thing well.
SystemD: Why do one thing, when you could be doing other things as well?
I'm not a huge fan of SystemD, in fact, I was considering switching back to FreeBSD for my home workstations to avoid it. However, there were some points in the notes on the 2015 roadmap which might actually be useful for the specific usecase I have for GNU/Linux.
Booting a standard GNU/Linux distro with a read-only root (e.g. from NFS) is frustrating; it doesn't work well, and even though many of the caveats are documented around the Web, it seems like there's always something that doesn't quite work. FreeBSD, for what its worth, booted diskless quite nicely when I was comparing the two about two years ago. In the end, I went with USB boot images for each node at home.
Looking at the roadmap, the 2015 plan for SystemD seems to be moving towards a system which is better designed for read-only root by default, which would be neat, and hopefully mean once the system is configured, bitrot would be less of an issue.
[16:47:22] matt [wronka.org]/Psi+ http://ma.ttias.be/whats-new-systemd-2015-edition/
Unix: Do one thing well.
SystemD: Why do one thing, when you could be doing other things as well?
I'm not a huge fan of SystemD, in fact, I was considering switching back to FreeBSD for my home workstations to avoid it. However, there were some points in the notes on the 2015 roadmap which might actually be useful for the specific usecase I have for GNU/Linux.
Booting a standard GNU/Linux distro with a read-only root (e.g. from NFS) is frustrating; it doesn't work well, and even though many of the caveats are documented around the Web, it seems like there's always something that doesn't quite work. FreeBSD, for what its worth, booted diskless quite nicely when I was comparing the two about two years ago. In the end, I went with USB boot images for each node at home.
Looking at the roadmap, the 2015 plan for SystemD seems to be moving towards a system which is better designed for read-only root by default, which would be neat, and hopefully mean once the system is configured, bitrot would be less of an issue.
[17:52:56]
matt [wronka.org]/Psi+
"All SystemD developers have SSDs and no more spinning disks, nobody could/wanted to support this anymore."
Tuesday, January 27 2015
Debian Jessie
[02:19:21] matt [wronka.org]/Psi+ I recently switched my home boot image from an ever-out-of-date Ubuntu installation to Debian Jessie, which was at one point "almost stable" or "almost frozen" or something like that. Then SystemD broke loose and it's still clearly testing.
Things that don't work:
NFS doesn't mount on boot. I give-up. I can't get it to mount anything from the init scripts. The Internet suggests this is because of something left in /var/run/network, but since /var/run is tmpfs this is clearly out (also, I checked, the directory isn't there).
Running sudo clears afs tokens. I've seen one other reported issue, but no solution. cf. http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.user/489795
I can no longer get a gnome-session or gnome-settings-daemon running on top of spectrwm. I also can't figure out how to change the window manager for gnome, so it seems like I'm stuck with all of gnome, or none of it now. Why do I care? colord/colormgr is really the only reason why. The rest of the gnome environment is an exercise in frustration.
The most surprising thing that works? Qt now doesn't look like vomit when running in a 30-bit X display.
[02:19:21] matt [wronka.org]/Psi+ I recently switched my home boot image from an ever-out-of-date Ubuntu installation to Debian Jessie, which was at one point "almost stable" or "almost frozen" or something like that. Then SystemD broke loose and it's still clearly testing.
Things that don't work:
NFS doesn't mount on boot. I give-up. I can't get it to mount anything from the init scripts. The Internet suggests this is because of something left in /var/run/network, but since /var/run is tmpfs this is clearly out (also, I checked, the directory isn't there).
Running sudo clears afs tokens. I've seen one other reported issue, but no solution. cf. http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.user/489795
I can no longer get a gnome-session or gnome-settings-daemon running on top of spectrwm. I also can't figure out how to change the window manager for gnome, so it seems like I'm stuck with all of gnome, or none of it now. Why do I care? colord/colormgr is really the only reason why. The rest of the gnome environment is an exercise in frustration.
The most surprising thing that works? Qt now doesn't look like vomit when running in a 30-bit X display.