Penultimate Day 2023

I guess I was busy this year. I messed around with bash scripts a lot; writing them, modifying them, and even abandoned a few.

When I first changed my GitHub access to use SSH, I couldn’t get it working right, so I put it aside for a while, and eventually set up a local Gitea server (October 2022). This past October, I found some information that finally made GitHub usable for me again. Since my scripts repository hadn’t been touched in well over a year, I deleted all of it, and pushed some of my current scripts to it. I’m not putting all of my bash scripts on GitHub, only some that I think might be useful to others. A lot of my scripts are specific to my personal computing environment.

In the past few months, I’ve been messing around with tar as a means of archiving my financial records and my scripting projects. Now I have several incremental backups running every day. I was kind of surprised at how easy it is to work with and setting up the incremental backups was relatively painless.

Speaking of backups, I did a lot of work on my backup script based on Joe Collins’ script. I set it up mount the USB backup drive if it’s not automatically mounted. I needed that capability on my Debian i3 machines until I found a utility that would automatically mount USB drives. For a few machines where I take regular snapshots, I have it set up to recognize if the correct backup drive has been attached. I also replaced the original nested if statements with case statements for better efficiency.

Another small project of mine was to write a couple of scripts to work with downloaded ISO files. When I download an ISO from a distro’s web site, I also down its SHA checksum. My verify-iso script verifies that the checkums match. The write-iso script writes the ISO to a thumbdrive using the dd command. The scripts lists the available files and the writing script lists available removable media that can be written to.

I’ve been expanding my use of i3 on Debian. I have several laptops and a couple PCs running it on Debian 11 which I plan to upgrade to Bookworm. On the Bullseye system, I originally used Bumblebee Status as my status bar, and I’ve replaced it with Polybar. I have one laptop with an external monitor attached to play around with i3 on multiple monitors.

My son bought my wife a new computer for Christmas, and I had the pleasure of setting it up. It wasn’t nearly as painful as it used to be when I built them. Even copying her files over went rather well. Her Windows 10 computer had been acting up a lot for a while. It was slow and would often lose its network connection and the connectinons for everything else on that switch. A couple of months ago, I started setting up Linux Mint on one of my better machines, getting ready for the day her Lenovo finally died. The new machine is working well for her. It’s running Windows 11 Home which is adequate for her needs and works well in my network environment.

i3 on Bookworm

I’ve been planning to upgrade my Debian systems since Bookworm was released earlier this summer. Of course, I plan to maintain i3wm on those systems that already have it, and I spent a lot of time researching what I needed to be done to accomplish that.

Drew Grif’s (JustAGuy Linux) video and scripts were very beneficial in helping me get i3 up and running on Debian 11, and I was thrilled wihen he came out with a video where he installed several window managers on Debian 12. I cloned his scripts from his GitHub repository and studied them, but found a ittle difficult to separate the the i3 specific files from the rest. I’m not really interested in the other windown managers, although I may install all of them in a VM or on hardware, to check them out.

What I ultimately decided to do, was to take my current install script and update it to install i3 on Bookworm. I added the appropriate Polybar file, and make the necessary adjustments to the i3 configuration files. Then I upgraded one of my test laptops, a Dell Latitude E-6500, installing Debian 12 on the root partition and keeping the home partition. It took some work, but I got Polybar working with it, and it’s running great. I’ve since updated my local i3-Debian repository, so I think I’m ready to try it on another system. This time I’ll probably do a clean install and then restore my home folder from the backup.

I was able to install Polybar on my HP Elitebook laptop which is working out great. I’m not sure if the current version of Polybar actually supports applets in the taskbar , but I have them loaded by my i3 autostart script after Polybar has loaded, and it seems to be working okay. The Elitebook is a production machine and will probably among the last to be upgrade.

It’s strange that I can’t find Polybar in the Debian 11 repositories on the other systems running Bullseye. That’s not a big deal since the Bumblebee-Status bar works well on those systems, and they’ll all be upgraded to Bookworm before too long.

Drew Grif’s videos and repositories:

• i3-gaps Installation using shell script on Debian Bullseye minimal. – YouTube
• GitHub – drewgrif/i3gaps-debian
• Speed Challenge: Install 5 Customized Window Managers on Debian Bookworm – YouTube
• GitHub – drewgrif/bookworm-scripts
• GitHub – drewgrif/dotfiles: current configuration files

Progress with i3wm

I’ve been getting more familar with the i3 Window Manager over the past few months and learning a lot. I got scratchpads working now. You’d think I would have done assigning applications to workspaces down, but I haven’t really looked at it yet. I don’t have very many actual applicatons installed on that laptop, so it hasn’t been a necessity. But I need to do it just for the experience if nothing else.

The installation on my laptop was based on a Youtube video, and I’ve found that I’ve had to install things that the video failed to mention. For instance, it took me a long time to get the wireless working, mainly because Network Manager isn’t installed. I pretty much have my network configuration hard-coded in configuration files, and the wireless card now has a different name than before. I also needed to install Picom to get transparency in my terminal emulator.

Since then, I’ve found more i3 installation turials and I’ve one that looks pretty good. It’s based on a minimal install of Debian, which works well for me. The creator of the video has scripts on GitHub that I’ve downloaded, and made appropriate changes. I guess I’ve been a little bit lazy as I haven’t set it up in a VM yet. The same creator has a similar set up for OpenBox which I need to set up in a VM before I put it on hardware.

In the meantime, I’m still working with my original i3 installation on an HP 850 G3 laptop. Recently, I replaced Terminator on it with Kitty and reconfigured my scratchpads. So far I’m really liking Kitty. It has a lot more capability than I’m going to need on this laptop, but I think it’s better suited for a tiling window manager like i3 than Terminator. At least that’s been my experience so far.

I don’t know if I’d be able to use as my daily driver on my main computer, but I can see it for special purpose systems. I like how i can have several workspaces and scratchpads. I’ve really gotten to like using workspaces and keybindins on my Cinnamon desktop, it’s not nearly as configurable and versitile as i3. Having scratchpads that I could toggle would be great. I’ll have to install some GUI apps on the 850, just to see how well they work. Maybe flatpaks would be a good option.

Penultimate Day 2021

The refurbished computer I switched to in January has been working great. I upgraded the memory to 16GB and evenually moved the OS to Mint 20.2. I see that 20.3 is still in Beta, but I’ll probably wait at least a couple of months before upgrading. I’ll probably run it on one the laptops for a while first.

I had intended t use the M91 for vitual machines but I haven’t done anything along those lines. I did, however, move the KVM /QEMU pool on the G3 into my home directory so I’m not creating VMs on the SSD.

I spent a lot of time working on scripts, tweaking and improving them. There really isn’t much to say about that.

I haven’t been messing around with the Debian 11/i3 laptop as much as I’d envisioned, but I’m starting to get the hang of it. I have a lot to learn.

Breathing New Life

I’ve been seen a lot of YouTube videos lately touting the benefits of window managers, so I figured I’d dip my toes into the water.

I have an old Gateway E475M laptop with a 1.8 GHz Duo Core CPU and 4 GB of RAM. Sometime last year I had done an OEM install of Linux Mint 18.3 and had planned to loan it to a friend so he could check it out as an alterntive to Windows 10. Nothing came of it and it sat on shelf for about a year. A couple of months ago, I fired it up and set it up on my network to use for testing scripts and what have you.

Needless to say, it was a bit under-powered for the Cinnamon desktop. I started thinking about what lightweight distribution to put on it and decided that I’d try something running a window manager.

I installed the i3 edition of Manjaro. Despite having seen several videos on i3, I was kind of lost, being unfamiliar with the keybindings and all. Then, after leaving the system alone for a while, a screensaver apparently kicked in and it went into a suspend mode, I wasn’t able to find a combination of keys to bring it back to life.

Next, I installed Debian 10 using the net installer and set it up without a desktop environment. I installed OpenSSH Server and a few basic utilities with the intention of using it as a console to manage other systems on the network. Running it from a tty was working out pretty well.

About a week ago, I saw a video on the OldTechBloke – YouTube channel about the Bensen Labs distribution that used the Openbox floating window manager. That looked like a good starting point for exploring window manager. A floating window manager seems to be closer to my workflow than a tiling window manager.

I downloaded the Lithium ISO from BunsenLabs Linux and put it on one of my Ventoy flash drives. Lithium didn’t seem to work with Ventoy, so I put in on another flash drive using Mint’s USB Image Writer. That didn’t work either. The installation stopped and gave me an error about not being able to detect the CD-ROM. This is apparently a problem with the Debian installer although I’ve never encountered the problem before when installing Debian.

On the Bunsen Lab’s site, I found instructions for writing the ISO to a flash drive using either cp or dd. After copying the ISO image to the flash drive, I tried again. It detected the flash drive as a CD-ROM but hung up during the network configuration when I tried to use the wired connection. I turned on the wireless and tried again. I normally try to avoid using a wireless connection for installing an operating system but, in this case, it worked very well.

I updated the system, set up SSH, and copied Bash scripts over. I played around with it for a while and started to get the feel of a floating window manager. I’m going to take my time and learn how to use it. Revisiting the videos on Openbox will be a good start as will reading the documentation. I’ll have to resist the temptation to just jump in and expect to get it right away.

I know that using a floating window manager will be a bit different from a regular desktop environment, but I can adapt. I’m not sure that a tiling window manager like i3 really suits how I use my computers. I use the terminal quite a bit but I still use GUI applications for much of what I do. I generally don’t work on a lot of different things all at once where I’d be frequently switching between tasks.

On my man system, I usually have two work spaces open, one with a browser on one monitor and LibreOffice on the other. On the second work space I have a terminal and my text editor of choice (Atom), each on their own monitor. Occasionally, I’ll open a third work space to bring up a virtual machine. I’m not really a multitasker, a nasty habit I gave up years ago.