Hell yeah, schizo-chad!

Yeah! I forgot about revdep-rebuild! Now that you remind me I do remember being worried about having to rebuild modules, forgetting about it, having to boot frlm live and chroot, and what not going back to Gentoo. I had almsot completely forgotten about it because it is so smooth sailing now.

I started using Gentoo many years ago, and took a break from it for a few years. It has some overhead to maintain. Two years or so ago I went back to it and, no joke, it is so much simpler now. Dist-kernel, dracut, refind just sorted everything. I felt like I was cheating. I don’t have to write my own custom initramfs for my custom needs? Stuff just solves it? And compilation errors and conflicts even when running a bunch of keyworded packages: gone! What is going on?

Still, huh? Yeah, that is why I stopped using it too.

How does OTR work on it nowadays, or have XMPP moved to some other encryption?

This is such an important thing to learn when using linux. If you want to be able to rescue your setup and not just reinstall: live usb!

To do a rescue on a system that does not boot, then you may also have to enter your environment and fix things, you do that by chroot. I always forget what steps are necessary, so I always look it up in the gentoo handbook: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Full/Installation#Chrooting It is the same principle with any live media.

Look into a distro that you might like, and find a “live usb” of it, often it is the installation media itself. How it works is basically it is a linux already installed on a disk image you transfer to the usb, and tell the computer to boot from it. Instructions on all this usually comes with the live usb media. Then you usually get a “try it out” or “install” option, or it just leaves you at a pre-configured desktop. Click around, install stuff, browse the web, get a feel for it.

Gives you a shell where you basically are sudo for every command.

What do you mean? This

remoteuser@server$ nc -l -p 4444 > /dev/input/event0


localuser@laptop$ cat /dev/input/event0 | nc server 4444

doesn’t work?

I don’t use .desktop files that much… But I guess xfce is X and not wayland. Check the DISPLAY env var for your user and set the same in your script there or run the binary with that env var.

Is there a common reason for exposing a MongoDB instance publically?

How long since you ran ‘apt update’? I have envountered issues where the local apt cache is stale, causing it to contain packages which are old and removed from the upstream repo. You need to update your cache and try to install again.

Windows XP had been out for quite a while, and I did not want to use it. Staying on 98SE was not going to be possible forever. Ubuntu was quite new, I had recently started uni, and some friends helped me get started. There was one thing that absolutely amazed me: package repository. Just the concept. Windows at the time, to install stuff was finding random pages, sifting through ads, locate download button, hope it is not a virus. Linux had it solved. So far superior it there was no way I’m going back after that.

Do you have to use Teams?

Well, I just wanted it as a secondary browser when troubleshooting firefox.

Nowadays the worst thing appears to be compiling chromium with X and Wayland support.

Then go for it! Gentoo is a wonderful option for that goal.

Are you looking to learn linux more or have a easy living experience, or what is the goal? If you want to get to know linux, learn how to compile a kernel, make your own initramfs and such, then: absolutely! If you want a stable easily maintainable system, then… maybe not. Like it is possible, and Gentoo is very stable, but if you are just starting, then you may make choices that do break when you upgrade. With some experience, this will go away, but expect some downtime in the beginning.

TL;DR: yes

Just from a quick view of the repo, the simplest way to do it would be to look at the playbook.yml and copy all roles you want for a host into a new playbook, say myhost.yaml. Copy not only the roles but all the other keywords as well. Then you go to the inventory and add your hosts where you to execute the playbook against. Then you change the hosts key value in the playbook you made from all to the hosts you added to the inventory.

That is, add your hosts to the inventory, create playbooks for for them and run. That is the easiest. Read up on how to do groups and organizing your inventory to improve it from there.

I do something similar. “Last time I used windows it was Windows 98…”