So yeah, I had this drafted weeks and weeks ago and I kept thinking I would rewrite it to not be just bullet points. I decided the bullet points work fine. See the title for my conclusion (after working really hard to like AsciiDoc…).

AsciiDoc Advantages

• Comments.
• No need for HTML in markup document.
• Video iframes already parented.
• Add arbitrary classes to arbitrary elements.
• Citations are <cite>

AsciiDoc Disadvantages

• (Currently) only supported externally in Hugo.
  • AsciiDoc document header attributes/metadata (front matter) not supported in Hugo.
  • Chroma not set up to highlight from AsciiDoc.
• Not supported in GitHub pages.
• Not supported for README on SourceHut.
• More verbose around code blocks (linenums?).
• code elements space differently with and without linenums.
• Requires extra characters for curly quotes.
• I prefer Markdown tables to AsciiDoc tables for writing and plain text reading.
• Limited tooling
  • Vim support limited to syntax
  • No automatic formatter (at least in ALE
  • Various plugins available: vim-ft-asciidoc, vim-asciidoctor, vim-asciidoc; none “feature-complete”

Get Java 8

Most of what I’ve seen online says to use Oracle Java 8, but as far as I can tell, WildFly 11 runs fine on OpenJDK. Also as far as I can tell, you only need the headless version of OpenJDK. Most of the installation information is available in the WildFly docs.

• Arch Linux: unneeded (the AUR package takes care of this dependency)
• CentOS 7: sudo yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk-headless

Get WildFly 12

Arch Linux

1. git clone https://github.com/nstickney/wildfly-aur
2. cd wildfly-aur && makepkg -si

CentOS 7

1. cd /opt
2. sudo curl -L http://download.jboss.org/wildfly/12.0.0.Final/wildfly-12.0.0.Final.tar.gz -o wildfly.tar.gz
3. sudo tar xzf wildfly.tar.gz
4. sudo ln -s /opt/wildfly-12.0.0.Final /opt/wildfly

Create the WildFly user and group

On Arch Linux, the steps below are taken care of by the installation scripts. These steps are required on CentOS 7 (and probably other distributions).

Last updated 2018-03-03

Install Docker Community Edition

I am working on a clean CentOS 7 VM clone, so I don’t need to remove old versions, but I do need to set a new hostname.

• echo docker-centos7.stma | sudo tee /etc/hostname
• sudo hostname -F /etc/hostname

From the Docker Docs.

1. sudo curl -L https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/docker-ce.repo -o /etc/yum.repos.d/docker-ce.repo
2. sudo yum update
3. sudo yum install device-mapper-persistent-data docker-ce lvm2
4. sudo systemctl enable docker

Note that sudo systemctl is aliased to sctl in my bashrc.

Last updated 2018-03-02

VirtualBox guest machine setup

• Name: “CentOS7”; Operating System: “Red Hat (64-bit)”
• Base Memory: 1024 MB
• Create a virtual hard disk now, VDI, fixed size
• Shared Clipboard: “Bidirectional”; Drag’n’Drop: “Bidirectional”
• Boot Order: Optical, Hard Disk (deselect Floppy)
• Enable extended features and all processor acceleration
• Enable 3D Acceleration
• Remove IDE storage device, add optical drive to SATA controller
• Disable audio and USB
• Change network card to preferred network and select Paravirtualized Interface
• Set up shared folders:
  • C:/Users/xxxxx/Downloads -> Win_Downloads, auto-mount, permanent
  • /home/xxxxx/Downloads -> Lin_Downloads, auto-mount, permanent

OS installation

1. Install from minimal installation disk (1708)
2. Set disk partitioning to Standard Partitions and automatically create partitions, then change swap and /boot to 512 MB each and set / as large as possible
3. Set hostname , turn on networking
4. Set root password
5. Create user, with administrator privileges
6. Reboot, log in as “stick”, sudo yum update, reboot

Security

Secure SSH

sudo vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Learn something new every day

Ok, fine, I knew some of these already, but I’m no Vim Wizard. Thanks to Coderwall. If you’re interested, my vim configuration is available.

Undo, redo

• u: undo
• U: undo entire line
• Ctrl + R: redo

Move the cursor

• b: move backward one word
• w: move forward one word
• (: move backward one “sentence”
• ): move forward one “sentence”
• {: move backward one “paragraph”
• }: move forward one “paragraph”
• ^: move to beginning of line
• $: move to end of line
• fX: move to the next occurrence of X on this line
• FX: move to the previous occurrence of X on this line
• gg: move to beginning of file
• G: move to end of file

Note that a sentence is a sentence-ending punctuation followed by two spaces, at least according to StackOverflow and a paragraph is a block of text separated by blank lines.

Reposted from the Arch Linux forums, my March 2011 screenshot set:

Clean:

Busy:

FVWM Config
Conky Config
.Xdefaults
.bashrc

FVWM with xcompmgr; background from NASA. Conky, rxvt-unicode, and the usual*.

*It’s a new usual. Yes, I’ve run Fedora for the last eight or so years, but I’ve just switched to Arch Linux in the last month or so and I love every minute of it.

First, empathy, the new default chat client, does video. But to make it work seamlessly with your friends who use GoogleTalk on Windows, you’ll need all the gstreamer plugins. Here’s how to get them:

sudo yum install gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-* -x *devel -x *docs

Second, Google Earth is a pretty sweet program. But to make it run on 64-bit linux, you need some compatibility stuff added in. Here’s how to get it working, courtesy of bigjim-network

After reading several articles about Chrome on Lifehacker this week, I decided it was time to try Google’s browser again. And I think I might keep it.

I’ve been a die-hard Firefox user since way back when it was called Phoenix (that was before Firebird) and I can’t stand browsing the web without my beloved AdBlock. But Chrome is changing things; it does (almost) everything Firefox does!

• AdBlock: Now on Chrome. “Blocks ads all over the web.”
• AutoPager: Works in Chrome. “Automatically loads the next page of a site inline when you reach the end of the current page for infinite scrolling of content.”
• Find-As-You-Type: There’s an extension for that. “Find text or links as you type.”
• FlagFox: Better on Chrome. “Displays country or region name, Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and WOT information for the websites you’re visiting.”
• Ghostery: Coming soon to Chrome. “Alerts you about the web bugs, ad networks and widgets on every page on the web.”
• Greasemonkey: Mostly good in Chrome. “Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.”

Really the only thing I’m missing is FireGPG, but with Thunderbird 3 and Enigmail, I’m good to go for email and encryption… so yeah, Chrome it is. Can you say way faster, and 100/100 on Acid3?

So, I didn’t know this, and I’ve been installing TrueCrypt from source every time I update my system, but via a comment on this guide page I found out that RealCrypt is a rebranded version of TrueCrypt that’s available in the RPMFusion repository. Hello, encrypted files (with no compiling required).

Just thought I’d share the knowledge since it’s Data Privacy Day.

This post brought to you by writer’s block. If you’d like, find the Skribit box in the sidebar on the right and give me something to write about!

You’re reading this blog, which means that you’re using the internet. Which means your data is insecure. If you don’t believe me, here’s some evidence. Read it, and you’ll want to lock yourself in an internet-free box for the rest of time… until you get bored with no Twitter. If you want more information, two books I’m reading through that cover the topic pretty extensively are Googling Security by Greg Conti and Steal This Computer Book 4.0 by Wally Wang

Get it now!

Back in June I tried out Opera 10 and nine other browsers, eventually coming to rest back on my favorite, Firefox, despite the fact that Opera performed much better on the Acid3 test. Yesterday, after finding Fedora packages (repod, no less!) of Chromium, I had to try it. Just for fun, I also pulled Fedora’s package of Arora, an ad-blocking browser recently reviewed by Lifehacker.

• Chromium, which I’ve been waiting to try out, is definitely the best browser of the three. It renders fastest (runs way fastest), gets 100/100 on the Acid3 test with a couple of small errors, and is generally pretty sweet. However, I have two big issues. First, extensions. See my treatment of Firefox below. Second, the “Other Bookmarks” button that’s ridiculously huge and can’t be removed. Google, what are you people thinking?! Everything else in Chrome’s interface is beautiful - small, icon-type functional buttons placed well. But you have a text button that’s more than an inch long on my small screen, and I can’t change the name, hide the button, or replace it with an icon. Stupid.

Just a quick blurb of good reading today in honor of Cyber Securityhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif Awareness month (via the Official Google Blog)….

• First, update all your software. Seriously. Run updates on everything.
• If you’re using IE, stop right now and go get a better browser. I use Firefox (since Chrome Just Doesn’t Work™ on Fedora yet… actually, I just found this article that says it does, so I’ll be trying this), and Mozilla has a pretty nifty little utility to make sure your plugins are updated as well.
• Mac users, ya’ll aren’t immune. (No, I don’t know what you should do about it, I just wanted to make sure you knew.)
• And neither are us Linux geeks. If you’re a “sloppy Linux admin,” you’re leaving yourself (and your people) at risk.
• If you really want to be secure, here’s a set of guides from the NSA for securing a lot of common operating systems.
• Last thing - remember, there are other ways of having your security compromised that don’t involve having your computer hacked. People can find out a lot from Facebook.

I discovered yesterday after deciding to check in on the state of Fedora 11 on aluminum MacBooks that they have the trackpad working now! And it doesn’t even require any editing of fdi policy files, it Just Works(TM). You may recall my dismay at Fedora 11’s poor showing when I first installed it, but with the touchpad working it was too good to resist. So I promptly pulled out my Fedora 11 netinstall CD and went to work. It’s nice to be able to use my printer again and feel more secure with full-disk encryption. The reason I made the trip over to Derek Hildreth’s excellent guide was that I saw an article on Phoronix which, while proving Ubuntu 9.04 and Fedora 11 neck-and-neck in performance, extolled the virtures of Fedora 11’s etx4 filesystem and newer kernel. So I’m back with Fedora 11 on my MacBook, and while Ubuntu was nice, I’ve been using Fedora since Fedora Core 4 and it just feels like home.

After posting my short review of Ubuntu 9.04 a couple of days ago, I felt that I had not done justice to it, nor to the effort I’ve poured into learning it. This post will attempt to both provide interested parties (myself included) with a complete reference, and chronicle my missteps in a (hopefully temporary) migration to Ubuntu.

First, set up your partitioning. I’ve been dual-booting Fedora 10 and Mac OS X on my MacBook for a pretty good while, so this was already done. If your MacBook has only OS X, you’ll want to follow the guide here to set up dual-booting with BootCamp, or if you’re sure Ubuntu is for you, then follow this guide to set up for single-booting. As I mentioned, I had Fedora 11 in a separate partition already, so I didn’t need to do any partitioning. At this point, be sure that you install rEFIt in OS X for dual-booting. If you want Ubuntu (or whatever you’re putting on your MacBook) to boot by default, uncomment the “legacyfirst” item at the end of refit.conf.

After a dismal showing from Fedora 11 on my MacBook, I downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 last Friday. It is slick; they’ve got a lot of stuff working very well on the MacBook 5,1. I have a few gripes about Ubuntu so far, but I am using it until somebody figures out how to get multi-touch functionality for my MacBook in Fedora 11. So, here’s the good:

• Wireless works, out of the box. Even in the LiveCD.
• Trackpad works for single-touch right out of the box (like it did in Fedora 10); making multi-touch work only takes a few minutes following the guide.
• Firefox is a stable version.
• Sound is fixable.
• While flash and pulseaudio aren’t perfect, they’re a lot better than in Fedora.

And now, the bad:

So far, after a day of use, I’m completely unimpressed. Fedora 11 fails to even recognize the trackpad on my MacBook; while in Fedora 10 I couldn’t enable multi-touch options, at least the trackpad worked! Also, the default browser is Firefox 3.5.4b, which is still beta - and I get that this is Fedora, so it’s supposed to be the bleeding edge and all - but seriously, Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is not ready to be a default browser. GMail doesn’t even load correctly!

Get to the download page! Do it now!

A good subtitle for this post might be, “Why I’m still using Firefox.”

I’m not happy with Firefox’s performance; it should not, under any circumstances, take up 1GB of ram and another of swap space. That’s ridiculous. I suppose the colossal list of extensions I have running might be half the problem, but after playing around with nine other browsers today (Opera 9 isn’t listed below), I’m pretty sure Firefox is the best thing around for me. If anyone can tell me how to get the functionality of the AutoPager and Adblock Plus Firefox extensions in Opera, I’m pretty sure I’ll switch, but until then… no dice. Below are my oh-so-objective comparisons after trying them all out today, ranked by score on the Acid3 test. If a browser didn’t beat my current Firefox on the Acid3, I didn’t even continue to test it.

I’m all for getting things done as efficiently and thoroughly as possible, so when I saw this post on Lifehacker, I immediately installed the Wolfram Alpha Google extension in Firefox. It’s a great idea - two very different and very useful search engines, with the results on one page. One slight concern is that the Wolfram Alpha results take forever to load, but I can live with it.

Via Slashdot, I stumbled upon several articles answering that question. So here’s my answer.

I started using Linux in mid-2003. I had received $2000 to build a computer for Christmas 2002 (and nothing else, either for Christmas or my birthday, that year) as I was at the point in high school where I really needed one and interested in learning how to put my own together. Knowing that I could spend an extra $100 on slightly better hardware if I didn’t pay for Windows 2000, I obtained a copy from a friend… yes, illegally. Convinced over a six-month period that Windows 2000 was too much work, and that it was probably a good idea to go along with existing copyright law whether I thought it was good or not, I started to seek alternatives. A classmate gave me a copy of Slackware, but text-based installation was a little intimidating. Finally, a friend who was a Linux administrator at the local community college gave me SuSE 8.1… and it was great! Now, by great I mean it worked, and I embarked on the long quest to figure out how to do all the things I was using Windows for. I had already been using Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, so that was easy enough, but what about the games??? No dice. Wine? Needs 3D acceleration. That means getting graphics card drivers… and I had a Radeon. Not an auspicious start, as those of you with ATI cards probably know, but after months of fiddling with it and getting deep into the command line, my interest shifted. The rest is history. When Novell bought SuSE, I bought Fedora 4 Unleashed and switched distros. I’ve used SuSE 8.1, 8.2, and 9.0; Slackware 11.0, and Fedora 4, 6, 7, 9, and 10. Can’t wait for 11!

I’ve spent the last few days helping out some old friends with their four Windows XP computers (all from Dell) and it amazes me the amount of stuff I needed to do. My friends wanted me to wipe three of the four computers and see what I could do to speed up the fourth (I couldn’t wipe it as it actually belongs to their church and too many people use it for me to have talked to each of them about what they actually needed backed up). Here’s a consolidated list of the things I did and wished I could have done to each of the computers.

This post brought to you by the Linux Foundation’s “We’re Linux” video contest. And flying penguins.

Here are a couple of screenshots from my home computer; they show my personal desktop configuration. I don’t run a desktop environment, since I don’t need most of the things they provide. My window manager is FVWM2, which is very lightweight, standards compliant, and extremely configurable. FVWM configuration is not for the faint of heart, since it requires creating and editing a text file, but that same early learning curve also makes the infinite personalization possible.

[EDIT 29 Jan 2009:] I just figured out something very important. Upon completion of the “Firefly” series on Hulu.com, I pop in my DVD of Serenity, and… nothing. VLC won’t open it, neither will xine, nothing. Having used libdvdcss in the past, I immediately go to yum and try to install it, but it isn’t there. Afer searching teh blagoweb for several minutes, I finally find, in a comment on this post, that the repo at rpm.livna.org is still up to serve one package that RPMFusion refuses to carry. Guess what that package was? The first long command in this guide now installs the livna repository and libdvdcss.[/EDIT]

We are rapidly approaching the point where your phone is your computer.

Here’s your future:
The 5x optical zoom, 10-megapixel digital camera is built in.
Video playback (which means audio, duh) is built in.
Instant messaging is built in.
Internet browsing is built in.
Mobile gaming is built in.
“eBooks” are built-in.
Video capture is built in.
Video conferencing is built in.
Once you pair your earpiece with the phone, it automatically, and wirelessly, connects whenever it is turned on.
When you set your phone down on your desk, it will automatically, and wirelessly, start charging.
Once you pair your external keyboard, mouse/trackball, display, and speaker system with the phone, they will automatically, and wirelessly, connect whenever you set your phone down on your desk.
Once you pair your car to your phone, keyless entry, remote ignition, and other “car key fob button” functionality will be right there in your phone.

I’ve just figured out that BOINC is included in Fedora. I’ve been installing it manually and it’s right there in the repos. Hooray less work!

Now, if you’ve never heard of BOINC, it’s a distributed computing program which allows your unused processor cycles to be pressed into service for any one of several worthy projects doing anything from looking for a cure for cancer to looking for alien life. My personal favorite is the World Community Grid; it runs several other projects, mostly medical, alternatively. BOINC is great because it runs on everything - Linux, Mac OS, Windows, even the PS3!

I love this stuff. The background is from Stratification, edited to reflect that this is no ordinary Mac. Yes, I blurred out the names… but that’s the only editing done on this screenshot. Enjoy. I’ll post an explanation of my desktop software sometime in the future.

Update to this post about installing Fedora 10 on a brand-new MacBook…

To make the sound work, at least from the headphone jack, I had to run this command, from a guide Naresh put up on his blog…

echo “options snd_hda_intel model=mbp3” >> /etc/modprobe.d/sound

This sets the soundcard model option for the sound server. I then followed this guide to get PulseAudio running by changing one line of the pulseaudio config file /etc/pulse/default.pa, adding tsched=0 to the end of the line load-module module-hal-detect. It also directed me to install a bunch of PulseAudio packages, some of which don’t exist and others I didn’t need. The command I ended up running is below. I’m not sure if all of these packages are necessary; most of them were already on my system. In any case, sound works now. Out of the headphone port.

I own four computers. Three of them actually work. All three run Fedora 10.

In preface to my earlier post about Fedora 10 on my MacBook (yes, I know that prefacing something that’s already happened is backwards, but I’m doing it anyway), here’s a guide to installation and post-install configuration of Fedora 10 for my uses. YMMV. Note: all commands meant to be performed as root.

1. Get Fedora.

2. Install Fedora. I always separate my /home directory on its own partition and use a 2GB swap partition.

That’s right, folks, I’m running Fedora 10 on my shiny new MacBook 5.1… and you can too!! Here’s how to do it.

1. Partition your harddrive with BootCamp. My harddrive is 160 gigs (yes, I bought the cheapest MacBook since it was all I could afford), so I shrank the Mac OS X HFS+ partition to 40 GB and left the rest for “Windows.” Note: don’t actually install Windows, just exit BootCamp once the partitioning is done.

Sloppy-Focus (Focus-Follows-Mouse). If Apple implemented that one feature, I’m pretty sure I’d recommend Macs to everyone. But all indications are that Focus-Follows-Mouse without Autoraise isn’t coming any time soon, since for some reason the Apple UI doesn’t recognize a difference between focused and foreground. Steve Yegge (no, I don’t know him, I just found the article in my search for some way to get sane behavior from my new window manager) has a very informative article on his blog about the subject. To solve this problem, I will be turning to linux when I get a chance over Thanksgiving. Pre-emptive Fedora FTW!

Since I spent a fair amount of time yesterday configuring a Gateway T-6330U that became worthless inside an hour of use, and I’ll be looking for the same application set on whatever computer I buy today to replace it, here are the “killer apps” that I use every day.

-> Firefox (duh). Yes, I regularly try Opera, Safari, and IE, but the plugins always bring me back.
-> Adobe Flash Player. Too many websites use it for me not to have this installed.
-> Java Runtime Environment. Anyone say AJAX? Web 2.0?
-> Greasemonkey