Arch

For christmas this year I got a 14600k as a upgrade for my cpu. In order to install this new cpu i need to update my bios to gain support for 13th and 14th gen cpus. I began by planing to use the gigabyte app center on windows for the update however after seeing it hang and fail to connect to it servers I lost faith in the ability for it to update safely. So I pivoted to installing it in the bios using a usb drive. I copied the update file to the USB and ran the update in the bios. 5 very nervous minute later the PC booted… into windows? Ok so i go into my BIOS and there is no linux boot entry. OK slightly worried now i grab a arch usb and cryptsetup open my main partition after adding and mounting the lvms. After mounting my fat32 partition at /boot. I have a partition left over one check later and i see that p2 should be /boot and p1 is /boot/EFI. I then ran grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg after rebooting my boot entry showed up.

For a few days i had been noticing my PC randomly freezing this had been happening on and off. However I could see in htop that both RAM and CPU had plenty of head room. My thoughts then moved to storage the only big change i had made to storage was mounting a partition of my hdd. I didn’t understand how this could have been the cause as the only thing using the hdd was a steam library i was using to free up space on my nvme. However my suspicions were confirmed when my pc started freezing during a 170gb ark install. When i check df i was confused to see that the hdd had an extra 150gb of useage. This confirmed that steam was using the hdd for more than storing unused games. So as a temporary fix I have unmounted the hdd until i need it.

I started by deciding that i wanted to install the EA games included with xbox game pass on my linux Install. I had used lutrus in the past but after a little investigation I discovered that heroic could also be used. Since I had never tried Heroic I decided to give it a try the install was simple although i would prefer if it did not use flatpack. I found this post which instructed me on how to download and use the EA App installer. I was able to lauch the app with the only issue being a tiny white floating window that if closed closes the EA App. After installing a game I was able to launch it through the EA app or i could set it up through Heroic. The only stipulation being I match the wine prefix.

For some time I have been looking for an effective system wide search for linux. While windows search has been getting worse for years spotlight on mac has shown that an effective search is possible and can be very beneficial. I was also hoping to replace rofi as the launcher that was installed when i use the ml4w scripts to setup my first arch rice. In this search I found rofi a minimal yet customisation search. After instantly setting up dark mode i setup file indexing and added some custom searches such as my gitea instance. The only downside that I can think of is the setting window really does not like hyprland however since that should be a very rare occurrence I am overall very happy with Ulauncher.

The setup was simple I deployed the panel in a docker container to a fresh docker host. I had to set the application url env to the public url not the private one. Then I installed the wings software on the same VM as the panel. I had to manually copy the config file from the panel. Everything else it automated with gitea actions. I made sure to change some of the files in the config files to my nfs share. Unfortuantly I then ran into a massive bug where I couldn’t start any server. I hope this is fixed soon.

I recently decided that I wanted to explore the entire hashicorp stack. I have been using vault and terraform since I moved to gitea for container management. However I decided that learning the entire stack would be interesting and teach me more about IaC and cloud services. I chose to do a install of all the software in a VM running arch that has 200GB of ballooning ram and 20 CPU cores at 3 GHz. It will run the containers in docker on the same server. I managed to install nomad and consul quickly however vault took a minute as the config file is just in /etc not /etc/vault.d. I then also had to add tls_disable = true to the config files which I am currently storing in gitea and deploying with gitea actions. I initialized vault with 5 keys and 3 minimum. I decided not to use my existing vault as I want to start clean and fresh. I installed vagrant and boundary-bin from the AUR and had to curl the binary for waypoint which is currently had coded to version 11.4 but i hope to make dynamic at some point. I then setup waypoint with waypoint install -accept-tos -platform nomad -nomad-host-volume=waypoint-data -nomad-runner-host-volume=waypoint-data-client. However I needed to set export NOMAD_ADDR=http://192.168.1.13:4646 first.

I recently realized that I was missing a major security tool on my main desktop. Apparmor this is a utility that limits what apps can access and view. I found this simple guide to follow(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9EoEJXZIfk) and it all went well. I am looking forward to setting up profiles for all apps in the future.

For a range of reasons including getting a new nvme I decided that I wanted to reinstall linux on my PC. While I could have chosen linux mint again I decided to try arch. I knew going into this that it would be a far more bare bones experience and force me to learn more about the desktop stack. I practised on a vm a few times to make sure I knew exactly what I was doing and even wrote it in a txt file. I chose to use lusk encryption and hyprland were the main choices as well as both the current and lts kernel as a back up. I however did not want to make a custom hyprland config so I decided to cheat a bit and use ml4w scripts after I installed hyprland and yay. So far I am very happy and believe I learnt a lot.