Home Machine Refresh
or
Full Disk Encryption and Me
Did some neat stuff over the last few weeks and didn’t want people to think I was dead — I’ve just been hella busy.
First, I’ve finished my transition back to Fedora from Ubuntu. I’d always been a little hesitant about Ubuntu because of the stigma associated with it but I found it to be incredibly well put together and a top notch development environment — and found that moving to Fedora was more a matter of utility than preference due to how dm-crypt / LUKS configuration worked in the installer. I probably could have pre-worked the partitioning and re-installed ubuntu during the refresh, but opted not to.
Not to say that F25’s encrypted LVM setup was glitch-free. It was painful and it took hours to get a deviation from the default options to install due to a bug in how pre-existing EFI partitions are [not] detected by it — which was easy compared to Ubuntu’s strange, strange tendency to mount (and fail to unmount) the drives you’re trying to rewrite the partition tables to. Absolute madness.
Overall, I’m very pleased with the end result. My machine has a dead man switch for the bootloader and an additional key required to mount anything. Due to the configuration in use, if I lost the key or deadman switch even a large intelligence agency would likely be unable to recover the data in a usable state.
I’m back in myi3 environment because it’s comfortable to me, but, I am eyeballing awesomeWM. Not sure yet if I want to make the switch as I’ve just started to explore compositing managers in i3 and have made some neat eye candy for the new setup.
MFG-provided GPU drivers
I didn’t test Fedora’s proprietary graphics driver support because I’m so burned out on that game.
A Super Cool Tool for Reading RFC’s
Found a neat tool that should be, but, alas, is not in the Fedora repos, and I have no idea why after using it. By bfontaine, it’s aptly titled rfc.
https://github.com/bfontaine/rfc
This is going to be immensely helpful in quoting RFC’s nobody knows I read for fun and profit even though I repeatedly cite them.
And here’s a screenshot of the existing rig:
Current Desktop – 2017-07-13
Obviously quite alot more polish to go as the logo from lightdm is being superimposed onto my background, and I’m not sure why, and it’s annoyingly right on top of my carefully positioned skull and crossbones, which is an absolute necessity for my wallpaper..Not to mention font rendering, while really quite good, is still a little raw for what I like.
I’m using the i3-gaps branch of i3 with i3blocks as a drop-in replacement for i3bar, with (currently) xcompmgr as a compositing manager until I can find one that isn’t exclusively for wayland and also isn’t unstable.
SURRO PROJECTS
As for SURRO projects, I’ve been picking away at Ivory Tower a bit considering a full re-write as a break from Examplar so I don’t burn out.
-CP