Driven by technology, haunted by perfectionism
I returned from holidays only to find out that re-running an Ansible playbook against a system that has been running unchanged since the beginning the year, only been receiving software updates via openSUSE Leap s usual channels, suddenly triggered weird unhashable type errors. Here s a minimum playbook that will probably work for you, but doesn t for Continue reading Ansible/Jinja dictonary and…
Primarily as a reminder to myself, here s a small script droppable into ~/bin that allows switching between two custom Linux screen resolutions, that is, resolutions the X server does not necessarily already know about, from the command line. My use case? A virtual machine within virt-viewer and switch between my laptop s internal display and an Continue reading Quickly switch between two custom…
Microsoft Edge, since some time now based on Google s Chromium, supports a similar mechanism to configure (not enforce!) default preferences through a file called initial_preferences. But when it comes to configuring the default search engine, neither Microsoft s documentation nor their downloadable Microsoft Edge policy templates are of any help. In fact, I couldn t find a Continue reading…
It is a bit tricky but not impossible to emulate MMC/SD card storage in a virtual machine controlled by libvirt. Ok, let s do the FAQs first. Why would anyone emulate a MMC/SD card in a virtual machine?! Of course because some real device has MMC/SD card-kinda storage and you want to test an installation Continue reading Emulating MMC/SD card storage as /dev/mmcblk0 in a libvirt guest
In a Unix/Linux context, the term automount is often interpreted as the automatic on-demand mounting of devices or remote filesystems as soon as a controlled path is accessed: the actual mounting is deferred to the moment the path is first accessed. Or in other words: only when it is needed. But what if we want Continue reading Automatic mounting of known removable media with systemd in…
Not saying that you fell for clickbait but this is going to be a quite opinionated piece that didn t go anywhere next to the scrutiny a LWN article would have gone and merely represents a summary of my findings on this particular topic so far. Let s go back to the beginning of the 2000s: Printing Continue reading How Apple (and Avahi) effectively killed CUPS printer discovery for enterprise Linux…
In theory, an Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) s workings such as the APC SmartUPS 750 in connection with an attached PC are trivial: when power fails and battery capacity runs low, the PC is shut down. When power returns, the PC is turned on again. In reality, there can be confusing messages such as UPS Rbt Continue reading APC SmartUPS 750, apcupsd and power failure: what exactly happens,…
Many of us are used to installing additional Virtualization software-specific tools in virtual machines in order to get seamless Copy Paste, higher screen resolutions think VMWare tools or the VirtualBox guest extensions . So does Qemu, the working horse behind most libvirt-powered virtual machines these days, with the Qemu guest agent . But did you Continue reading Executing arbitrary commands in…
On my development laptop I could install Windows inside a libvirt/KVM VM without problems. When I tried the same on a different KVM host, Windows would refuse installation with the error message Windows can t be installed on this device , inspite of the two VMs having absolutely identical settings. When comparing the two hosts I found Continue reading SeaBIOS 1.14 breaks Windows installation on…
As seamless as the upgrade from openSUSE Leap 15.2 to 15.3 may have been for ordinary users, I stumbled across some pitfalls in the Autoyast parts. The thing is, I had no issues with my rather simple Autoyast control files for public VMs but the one for my VM host caused some trouble. Admittedly it Continue reading AutoYast issues during the upgrade from openSUSE Leap 15.2 to 15.3