tech likely 2023.51

An experiment in personal news aggregation.

tech likely 2023.51

(date: 2023-12-24 14:00:48)

Console

date: 2023-12-24, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog

Console

I’ve been trying to get used to sway as my window manager. Recently I realized that my dmenu wouldn’t list games like openarena. No surprise there: /usr/games/bin is not part of PATH and so it doesn’t get shown. I wondered how to get it there, and then I found that many people log in from the Linux console without a session manager or display manager. That is, they login from the console, get a login shell, and that shell then starts the window manager.

This is what I see on the first virtual console:

Debian GNU/Linux 12 melanobombus tty1

login: _

If I log in, fish starts and one of the startup files it executes is .config/fish/conf.d/sway.fish which starts sway but only when logging in from tty1. You can switch between the consoles using Alt-F1 to Alt-F6. Once sway runs, you can switch back to the remaining virtual consoles using Ctrl Alt F2 to Ctrl Alt F6.

# If running from tty1 start sway
set TTY1 (tty)
[ "$TTY1" = "/dev/tty1" ] && exec sway

Since this script uses exec, sway replaces fish. No big deal. But I still get to setup PATH.

So now I was staring at the login prompt of the console… and I don’t know about you, but I could use a larger font!

I tried to go the console-setup route but that doesn’t help:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

This allows me to change the console font.

And once my script runs, I can repeat that:

setupcon

But at that point I’m already logged in!

In theory, there’s a systemd service that is supposed to handle it:

$ systemctl status console-setup
● console-setup.service - Set console font and keymap
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/console-setup.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (exited) since Sat 2023-12-23 14:45:03 CET; 18min ago
    Process: 496 ExecStart=/lib/console-setup/console-setup.sh (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   Main PID: 496 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
        CPU: 3ms

And yet… it does not! Why is that? Examining /lib/systemd/system/console-setup.service I find that it runs /lib/console-setup/console-setup.sh and that does some complicated stuff to try and determine whether to run setupcon or not. I guess in my case doesn’t?

Oh well, there’s always the option of using kernel parameters!

I created a one line file called /etc/default/grub.d/font.cfg to set a console font. This way the default setting in /etc/default/grub is overwritten, too. No more quiet splash! I like to see the output scroll by as the system boots.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="fbcon=font:TER16x32"

To activate it:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure grub2

Rebooting the system, I noticed that things still didn’t seem to work for the initramfs which ends up asking me for the password to decrypt my disk. So what I needed was to get the new config into the initramfs, too.

Based on the current kernel I’m running:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-6.1.0-15-amd64

I think it works, now!

#Administration

@landley had some pointers:

Ramfs, rootfs and initramfs, Kernel Documentation
The problem. (Why “root=” doesn’t scale.), part 1
Tech Tip: How to use initramfs., part 2
Programming for Initramfs., part 3
mkroot, “a tiny system builder that creates a kernel that boots from initramfs in 300 lines of bash”
mkroot walkthrough, an outline for a talk introducing mkroot

https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2023-12-23-console Save to Pocket

date: 2023-12-24, from: Pointers gone wild blog

Every once in a while, I see people mention “dark patterns” in UI design. Patterns that are actively trying to deceive users, either to maximize engagement, to click some ad, or to get them to perform an action they didn’t want to perform. An obvious example would be some huge pop-up ad which can be […]

https://pointersgonewild.com/2023/12/24/toxic-by-design-human-scale-vs-asymmetric-social-media/ Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2023-12-24, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)