linux

Without getting [too] technical (and probably operating "above my pay grade") the ZFS ZIL is a place where synchronous writes are done, and you can move this to a separate zpool, which is called a SLOG. One SLOG can store the ZIL for multiple zpools. While most writes by most applications are asynchronous, some are not, and file metadata writes are synchronous. Putting the ZIL for a HDD (or even an array) on a SSD lets your zpool provide the IOPS performance of your SLOG, while also avoiding fragmentation and reducing seeks through ordered writes.

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.

If you want to "upgrade" a computer with a HDD to using a smaller disk, usually a SSD, you will need to come up with a way to shrink your windows partition. There are some for-pay software packages which do this for you, but no OSS tool which will do it with a simple click. There's a slightly meandering sequence of steps necessary to get everything working correctly. Your best allies are the gparted livecd, and a USB to SATA (probably) adapter to let you hook both disks up to your system at once. This process should work for basically any version of Windows from 2000 on, but I used it specifically with Windows 7.

Once upon a time, a Marvell developed a product called the Sheevaplug to drum up interest for their "Kirkwood" ARM-compatible CPU line. This was a complete linux system hidden in a wall wart, whose design they gave away as a reference. This led to a number of Sheevaplug-based devices hitting the market, including the PogoPlug, a line of cheap NAS devices which are all based on the Sheevaplug design with various single-core Marvell CPUs. They are now discontinuing not only that line but also the service for the same, so the devices are cheaper than ever before right now, and this is a great time to pick one up — I got one for $13.

I needed a quick version of lspci for looking at some linux systems without pciutils, so I threw this one together in a couple of minutes.

It's very simple, it doesn't tell you what the devices are, but it does tell you what kind of devices they are and what their PCI ID is. Then you can go look that up online to figure out what they are. It wouldn't be a horrible stretch to add support for the pci.ids file, but it wasn't necessary for my purposes.

I just got a nice Samsung EVO 850 SSD, and therefore got the chance to remove two spinning disks from my PC. But in order to make this happen, I had to move Windows to the SSD I had in my PC already. So I mounted the new SSD and formatted it ext4, and transferred Linux without a hitch. Then I booted up and used gparted to transfer Windows to the old SSD I'd just vacated, and it wouldn't boot. I thought these problems were over? I used my Linux install (with vmware player) to fix the problem just as I had used it (with gparted) to copy Windows from one volume to another.