See How to Shutdown Ubuntu with the PC Power Button. Basically edit /etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh and as the first command use e.g.:
shutdown -h now; exit 0;
VirtualBox VBoxManage for autostart
I have a script tact:/etc/vbox/register-autostart.sh which will register a VirtualBox VM for auto-start. It required other config in /etc/vbox the details of which I don’t remember, but I think it’s done now anyway… there’s more information in Starting virtual machines during system boot.
online "$machine" && {
report "halting machine '$machine'...";
ssh "$machine" sudo poweroff;
report "waiting a moment...";
sleep 8;
};
run VBoxManage modifyvm "$machine" --autostart-enabled on;
run sudo service vboxautostart-service restart;
New word: ennui
Today I learned: ennui: boredom, basically.
mdadm bitmap removal
I’m not certain, but I think the write-intent bitmap on my RAID5 array was slowing down my system without any real advantage. So I deleted it, like this:
# mdadm --grow --bitmap=none /dev/md0
Adding weekday to Date column in Dolphin in KDE on Debian GNU/Linux
cd /usr/share/i18n/locales cp en_AU en_JJ vim en_JJ
Change metadata:
title "English locale for John Elliot V" language "John's English"
And prefix d_fmt with:
d_fmt "<U0025><U0061><U0020>
Then:
sudo localedef -f UTF-8 -i en_JJ en_JJ.UTF-8
Then:
vim /etc/environment
add add:
LC_TIME="en_JJ.UTF-8"
Up-Goer 1984
Do you see what I did here? :)
- Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
- Who controls the past controls tomorrow. Who controls the present controls the past.
- Fighting is not fighting. To be free is to not be free. Not knowing makes us strong.
- The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.
- If you want to keep something hidden, you must also hide it from yourself.
- It was a bright cold day one month, and the time was ten and three.
- If you want a picture of tomorrow, imagine a foot kicking a human face—for ever.
- We will meet in the place where there is only light.
- But if thought breaks talking, talking can also break thought.
- Two-think means the power of holding two thoughts against each other in one’s mind at the same time, and accepting both of them.
- Until they start thinking they will never fight, and until after they have fought they can not start thinking.
- Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party wants power only to its own end. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested only in power, real power. What real power means you will understand one day soon. We are different from the people in control in the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who seemed like us, were scared and spoke two ways. The bad people and the other bad people came very close to us in their ways, but they never had the no-fear to see their own reason. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had taken power without want and for a small time only, and that just around the corner there lay a happy place where humans would be free and the same. We are not like that. We know that no one ever takes power with the want of giving it away. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not start an office in order to save a turn over; one makes the turn over in order to start the office. The point of pain is pain. The point of hurting is hurting. The point of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
rsync: unexpected remote arg
So I was getting a baffling “unexpected remote arg” error from rsync today. Eventually I figured out the problem was that my argument “–executability” had become “– executablility”, I think due to a copy and paste problem where I copied some shell script code from Vim in a Konsole terminal into another Vim in another Konsole terminal. Traps for young players! If you get baffled by this error try putting an ‘echo’ in front of the command and then resize your terminal window to see if that affects things…
Enabling TRIM in Debian fstab for ext4 file-system on Samsung SSD 960 EVO NVMe M.2
So I was trying to find why in my Debian 9 system my SATA drives are called SCSI devices, and I was reading Why my SATA drive is identified as a SCSI device in Device Manager where I read:
The Intel Rapid Storage driver version 12.6 (Released in March 2013) and newer versions classify all drives as SCSI devices for uniformity. This (and later) versions of the driver also allow for TRIM support (Allows for management of data blocks no longer in use) in SSD drives in RAID 0 arrays and other flexibility in operation of storage devices.
So I’d never heard of “TRIM” so I searched for that and found the Wikipedia Trim (computing) article, but Why SSD TRIM Support is So Important and How to Enable It caught my eye, because, “important” you say?
So that article about the importance of TRIM was for Windows, so I searched again and found How to properly activate TRIM for your SSD on Linux: fstrim, lvm and dm-crypt which suggested things were a bit complicated for LVM (and MD RAID?).
I ended up reading How to set up SSD raid and TRIM support? which sent me to Re: Best way (only?) to setup SSD’s for using TRIM which argued that perhaps TRIM configuration wasn’t necessary at all.
It was then I realised that I probably don’t care about TRIM on my MD RAID SSD drives, but I probably do on my M.2 SSD, which isn’t using MD RAID, but which gets massive tgz files written to it and deleted from it every day. So some more searching and I found Samsung SSD 960 EVO NVMe M.2 Review: Ultra Fast, Affordable Storage which said TRIM was supported:
Supporting features: TRIM (Required OS support), Garbage Collection, S.M.A.R.T
So then I found Enable TRIM On SSD (Solid-State Drives) In Ubuntu For Better Performance which showed me how to enable TRIM in /etc/fstab. So the relevant fstab line was:
# /data/fast was on /dev/nvme0n1p1 during configuration UUID=87bcc5fa-9261-404b-8bc7-a214f4651b49 /data/fast ext4 noatime,discard 0 2
Note the ‘discard’ option, that’s where the magic happens.
So I unmounted and remounted the partition,
root@tact:/home/jj5# umount /data/fast root@tact:/home/jj5# mount /data/fast
And dmesg indicated the discard option had been applied:
[34783.251592] EXT4-fs (nvme0n1p1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: discard
Now I guess we wait and see if my performance issues improve…
Automatically sync all folders in Thunderbird
So I found this:
Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Config Editor…
mail.server.default.check_all_folders_for_new = true
Binding WinKey+R to Search and Launch in KDE
So I’m still used to pressing WinKey+R (AKA Meta+R) to bring up a command prompt. I added the Search and Launch widget to my default panel in KDE Plasma, then right-clicked on it and selected “Search Settings…”. From there I could bind an appropriate keyboard shortcut.