User Blogs

If you have a very old nvidia card, you will want to use the FOSS nvidia driver (nouveau) as it is likely the only thing that will work for you. But realistically, if you have nvidia graphics on your system, you will want to use the binary driver. This is a quick guide to that. The nvidia driver is in the non-free repo, so make sure you have that added to your sources.list. Then you can do the following various things (as root, or sudo as necessary)

Anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with Linux audio knows about the pulseaudio daemon, and its long history of causing problems with Linux audio in the name of solving them. What it gave us was per-application volume control, but what it took away was reliability. The good news is that there is now a superior replacement for pulseaudio which also replaces JACK in the bargain, called pipewire.

I have recently made the switch as a Linux user from LUKS, LVM and ext4 to ZFS, ZFS, and ZFS. I started it with Ubuntu, which conveniently offered me an encrypted root on zfs option which worked very well for me in general. However, every time I had to interface with systemd it felt like a chore, when what I really wanted was the old school UNIX feel I got from Slackware. And now I've converted to Devuan 4 "Chimaera" on ZFS, which is based on Debian 11 "Bullseye", which is as close to that as I'm willing to get given the amount of work I want to do. In the process, I've had to mount my old zfs filesystems on my new system gracefully, and this is how I went about that.

This is based on a number of documents, beginning with OpenZFS Debian Bullseye Root on ZFS. There are some notable changes. View the original document and follow along:

One of my favorite features of modern filesystems is the sparse file, where "empty" portions of files are unallocated, so they don't consume any space. This allows oversubscription of disk blocks, so long as you never actually complete fill all of the files at once. But one common problem of sparse files is that they tend to grow, and there is often no way to solve this problem in place. But there is, with ZFS.