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Thread: Razor's Linux Progress

  1. #16
    Moderator anon's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Instab View Post
    then you should change the topic. playing with a graphics card driver doesn't teach you anything about linux or unix in general. in fact, if you wanna get into *nix, turn the desktop off
    Instab posts with Lynx, sends e-mail with Pine and watches movies with mplayer -vo fbdev

    If by any chance your video driver experiments break the system enough to prevent the display server from starting up, putting these in your kernel command line is the equivalent of booting Windows in VGA mode:

    Code:
    nosplash nomodeset nodri=yes vga=normal xforcevesa xconfig=forcevesa
    "I just remembered something that happened a long time ago."
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  2. #17
    >because it's an rpm macro.
    wew, I thought it was just plain old sh/bash all the way because I saw $ instead of %. Thanks for pointing that out.
    %{?_smp_flags}
    https://henrich-on-debian.blogspot.i...ldpackage.html

    What does this ?_smp_mflags do? A RPM macro is like a special type of variable for packaged installers?
    Just go through this when you have some free time. It will make things a lot easier.
    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_t...lo_RPM_package

    Now let's fix that driver.
    You mentioned somewthing about compositing, KDEWin. What about it? What should I try?
    1 try looking for a vsync setting in the graphical interface provided by kde for kwin;
    2 try the solution from the gentoo wiki { https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/NVidia/...L_applications }
    3. if this doesn't work revert the change and try the ones here while jumping the multi monitor one ( I assume you don't have multiple monitors for whatever reason, if indeed you have multiple monitors try that first ) { https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...screen_tearing }

    I'm fairly confident one of one of these solutions should work.

    Instab posts with Lynx, sends e-mail with Pine and watches movies with mplayer -vo fbdev
    >not links
    >not mutt
    >not mpv -vo caca
    This is definately not helping Razorman
    Last edited by Instab; 07.01.18 at 05:06. Reason: merged
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  3. Who Said Thanks:

    Master Razor (12.01.18)

  4. #18
    What is the best way to backup a linux os? In Windows we had System Restore which was limited and not very helful in critical situations. Thus, we had to use external apps such as Acronis/Clonezila. Is this true for linux as well?
    This is important in case I screw up that driver, like anon said.

    Can dd be used to backup a live os? say current running os backup to bak_file ? something like this
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  5. #19
    Moderator anon's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by sbfretard View Post
    >not links
    >not mutt
    >not mpv -vo caca
    This is definately not helping Razorman
    The joke here was that Instab is old-school

    Quote Originally Posted by Master Razor View Post
    Can dd be used to backup a live os? say current running os backup to bak_file ? something like this
    Yes, but it's not really a good idea to do a sector copy of a file system that is currently mounted, not to mention the resulting image would include all free space and could only be really restored to a partition of its exact same size.

    The simplest solution would be to tar the file system root, with exceptions made for /dev, /proc, /sys, mount points and a few others. Whenever you need to restore the backup, you can boot with init=/bin/sh (unless you really fucked things up, in that case use some Linux live CD), reformat the system partition, mount it, untar the backup, sync, unmount and reboot. squashfs could also be used instead of tar, to achieve a better compression ratio. I guess there is also Clonezilla... and the classic Ghost 12 supports ext2 and ext3, but not ext4.

    For differential backups of "normal" data, rsync to some off-site storage.
    "I just remembered something that happened a long time ago."
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  6. #20
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    Quote Originally Posted by Master Razor View Post
    What is the best way to backup a linux os? In Windows we had System Restore which was limited and not very helful in critical situations. Thus, we had to use external apps such as Acronis/Clonezila. Is this true for linux as well?
    no, on unix (and linux and whatever else is unix-like) you don't have any of the obstacles known from windows. you can simply use an archiver of your choice as long as it preserves the file properties and you can do that with a running system. for an actual example see anon's post above.
    you could also use your filesystem's native dump program. for example if you have xfs it would be xfsdump. but it depends on the filesystem so have a look at what's offered by the one you're using. this has the additional advantage that you don't have to care about excluding special files or something like that.

    Quote Originally Posted by Master Razor View Post
    What does this ?_smp_mflags do? A RPM macro is like a special type of variable for packaged installers?
    only for rpm unless other package managers have added it meanwhile.

    Quote Originally Posted by anon View Post
    The joke here was that Instab is old-school
    in some ways
    but first and foremost pragmatic. most of the system work and admin stuff can only be done properly from the terminal. with the backup issue above you have a good example already.
    unix (and linux and whatever else is unix-like) does indeed let you do pretty much what you want from the terminal without complaints. that might be new to windows users, can be risky but also very powerful if used wisely.

    squashfs could also be used instead of tar, to achieve a better compression ratio.
    tar has no compression itself. it does however allow you to specify an external compression program which is then used by tar to compress the result on the fly. instead you can also pipe the output into a compressor of your choice. an example of the manual way with bzip2:
    Code:
    tar -cvf - file1 file2 folder3 | bzip2 -vf9 > test.tbz
    you can replace the bzip2 part with any compressor that supports stdin input. and to confirm anon's prejudices, this is how it was done before tar had the option to handle an external compressor itself
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  7. Who Said Thanks:

    anon (08.01.18)

  8. #21
    no, on unix (and linux and whatever else is unix-like) you don't have any of the obstacles known from windows. you can simply use an archiver of your choice as long as it preserves the file properties and you can do that with a running system. for an actual example see anon's post above.
    you could also use your filesystem's native dump program. for example if you have xfs it would be xfsdump. but it depends on the filesystem so have a look at what's offered by the one you're using. this has the additional advantage that you don't have to care about excluding special files or something like that.
    Say I want to backup an entire disk, would dump do the same thing as dd? From what I remember, a dump simply copies files, and is not used as full backup.

    @anon
    So the bottom line is I have to use a live linux disk, use dd, make a backup, and when the time comes, restore it by formatting the disk and restoring the image.
    Another thing comes to mind.. when using dd, does the host os matter? I mean I use SUSE, would it matter if I make a backup using uBunntu live disk and then restore it using a SUSE live disk (for example)?
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  9. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by Master Razor View Post
    Say I want to backup an entire disk, would dump do the same thing as dd? From what I remember, a dump simply copies files, and is not used as full backup.
    that depends on what you mean by "full backup". if you mean including partition information then no, dump or tar or something alike won't include that. which gives the significant advantage that you're independent. for example you can restore your backup onto anything as long as you have enough space. different filesystem, different os, different disk ... no problem.
    dd on the other hand is not only much slower but also limits you significantly. it is only a good idea if you want to create a physical clone of a partition or disk. for example for forensic analysis or something like that. for "normal" backups however it's not a good choice.

    So the bottom line is I have to use a live linux disk, use dd, make a backup, and when the time comes, restore it by formatting the disk and restoring the image.
    Another thing comes to mind.. when using dd, does the host os matter? I mean I use SUSE, would it matter if I make a backup using uBunntu live disk and then restore it using a SUSE live disk (for example)?
    i wouldn't recommend dd at all for the reasons mentioned above.

    let's say you wanna move your system to a new disk. here's one way to do it:
    - create a backup of you system partition with dump
    - store that dump on a second disk or partition or wherever you want
    - partition your new disk
    - create a filesystem on your new disk or partition
    - restore the dump from the other device
    - if necessary change some fstab entries or whatever else changed because of the new disk
    - apply the bootloader to the new disk
    - boot with new disk
    - done

    if you don't want to use an older backup but just copy your stuff to the new disk right away you can do that on the fly. instead of storing the backup somewhere just pipe it into the restore program.
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  10. Who Said Thanks:

    Master Razor (09.01.18)

  11. #23
    Quote Originally Posted by anon
    The joke here was that Instab is old-school
    I missed the joke but you have to agree that watching videos in ascii is way more old-school than a framebuffer.

    @MasterRazor, I only backup dotfiles and a few files which I encrypt with gpg ( symetric ) and store on one of the various "won't last for long" uploader services like the old pomf.se ( which is now dead ) and a usb stick so I don't have much advice to give. LVM, btrfs has snapshots and I most I've seen most people on the internet use rsync and tar.
    Last edited by sbfretard; 07.01.18 at 20:41.
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  12. #24
    Moderator anon's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Instab View Post
    to confirm anon's prejudices
    Oh, no, it's nothing like that! I meant it in a good way. I mean, on 2011, I pasted a joke that mentioned DG/UX in our IRC channel and you said you'd used it. And that's awesome

    Anyway, I was thinking of gzipping the tar, although looking back at my previous post, I didn't mention that anywhere! However, Razor mentioned having a multi-terabyte NAS, and I'd expect backups of a desktop system to be relatively small, so not compressing is also an option.

    Some thoughts about dd...

    • It creates 1:1 sector copies, so which OS you run it from doesn't matter.
    • It has a nonstandard syntax and doesn't say please, so make sure you really know how to use it. They don't call it "data destroyer" for no reason.
    • It's slow, shows no progress indicator by default, and will give up at the first read error it encounters. Speed may be improved by tweaking the 'bs' (block size) parameter. Historically, you'd be in trouble if the target's size in bytes was a prime number, because then dd would fail to copy the last block, but this is a non-issue now. Anyway, if you really need to make raw disk images, see if ddrescue isn't a better alternative for you.
    • Any partition you image with dd can then be mounted as a virtual disk using the loop device, no additional software is required!

      Code:
      # Mount a Windows system partition as read-only
      mount -t ntfs-3g -o loop,ro,norecover windows.img /mnt/windows
      # Mount a floppy disk image as read-only
      mount -t vfat -o loop,ro floppy.ima /mnt/vfloppy
      # Let's guess what this does!
      mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro whatever.iso /mnt/vcdrom
      # Mount an image as read-write and autodetect the file system
      mount -o loop,rw image.img /mnt/image
    • Netcat gives any program that supports pipes network abilities. This has little to do with dd directly, but since just a few days ago I used a crossover cable and piped dd's output to nc to turn my laptop into a makeshift external disk (no other storage was available), I thought it was worth a mention.
    "I just remembered something that happened a long time ago."
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  13. Who Said Thanks:

    Master Razor (12.01.18) , Lucius (08.01.18)

  14. #25
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    Quote Originally Posted by anon View Post
    Oh, no, it's nothing like that! I meant it in a good way. I mean, on 2011, I pasted a joke that mentioned DG/UX in our IRC channel and you said you'd used it. And that's awesome
    my remark above wasn't serious but if you meant it that way ... even better
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  15. #26
    @anon
    That's.. good to know but I don't know how to use dd yet, and I need some practice. It's a struggle to backup and even restore it.
    From what I've managed to find out, suse does not have dump or retore. I don't know why, yet.

    Isn't there anything with a gui interface, similar to acronis or something? Something simple just to get me going.

    1 try looking for a vsync setting in the graphical interface provided by kde for kwin;
    The setting export KWIN_TRIPLE_BUFFER=1 worked! Thanks for that.

    New issue. I installed VMWare Workstation for Linux. All my Windows virtual machines run extremely slow, about 200% slower than in Windows. I suspect the graphics card is to blame because HDD usage is below 50%. What could cause this? I didn't change any settings and just imported the VMs from Windows.
    Last edited by Instab; 12.01.18 at 05:39. Reason: merged
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  16. #27
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    Quote Originally Posted by Master Razor View Post
    suse does not have dump or retore. I don't know why, yet.
    as mentioned before, their name depends on the filesystem and that doesn't depend on the os. so just check how the versions for your specific filesystem are called.

    Isn't there anything with a gui interface, similar to acronis or something?
    as mentioned a couple of times as well, system stuff on unix = terminal. and even if there was a gui it'd very likely kill most of the unix advantages.
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  17. #28
    Moderator anon's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Master Razor View Post
    Isn't there anything with a gui interface, similar to acronis or something? Something simple just to get me going.
    Clonezilla is pretty good. It guides you every step of the way and even tells you which commands it's about to run, in case you want to save time later or script your backups. I have also heard good things about "Ghost 4 Linux" but never tried it myself.

    New issue. I installed VMWare Workstation for Linux. All my Windows virtual machines run extremely slow, about 200% slower than in Windows. I suspect the graphics card is to blame because HDD usage is below 50%. What could cause this? I didn't change any settings and just imported the VMs from Windows.
    Well, here are some things you can try.

    • Check the logs for the existing virtual machines in question to see if there's any interesting information
    • Create a virtual machine from scratch and see if it the same problem occurs
    • Set the virtualization type to "binary translation only" or "hardware virtualization only" and see if it makes a difference
    "I just remembered something that happened a long time ago."
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  18. #29
    I created a new virtual machine and tried to install Windows 7 on it. In one hour it didn't even get passed 10% (Windows 7 file copy progress). I'm starting to suspect the HDD now. However, from my google searches, I don't think there is any native I/O utility available for linux, at least none for SUSE. So, without such an utility, how to get the I/O usage?
    Nevermind, I had to install iotop. No application is writing anything.

    L.E. 1
    I forgot to mention that these WMs are located on an NTFS partition. Could this be the cause? Will try on linux's partitions. I said linux partitions because I have no idea what partitions are they... Running fdisk -l returns:
    Code:
    Disk /dev/sdc: 111.8 GiB, 120034123776 bytes, 234441648 sectors
    Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    Disklabel type: gpt
    Disk identifier: DELETED
    
    Device        Start       End   Sectors  Size Type
    /dev/sdc1      2048    337919    335872  164M EFI System
    /dev/sdc2    337920   4546559   4208640    2G Microsoft basic data
    /dev/sdc3   4546560  88438783  83892224   40G Microsoft basic data
    /dev/sdc4  88438784 234440703 146001920 69.6G Microsoft basic data
    What does Microsoft basic data means?



    L.E. 2
    I copied the VMs from the NTFS disk to my linux disk and they worked! Same performance.
    Just to be clear, in my system I have 3 disks: 1 SSD linux, 1 SSD windows NTFS, 1 data drive NTFS.
    Running VMs from NTFS is very slow, but running them from linux disk works fine.
    Why is this?!
    Last edited by Master Razor; 14.01.18 at 06:12.
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  19. #30
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    Quote Originally Posted by Master Razor View Post
    NTFS partition
    this is actually two things. there's the partition type and the filesystem.
    ntfs is a filesystem so technically an "NTFS partition" doesn't exist.

    with all common operating systems you first have to partition a disk or whatever data device you have. by that you not only declare a size but also the partition type. there're a lot of different partition types and if you partitioned the disk with windows that type is likely different from what you get if you do that with an other operating system.

    Code:
    Device        Start       End   Sectors  Size Type
    /dev/sdc1      2048    337919    335872  164M EFI System
    /dev/sdc2    337920   4546559   4208640    2G Microsoft basic data
    /dev/sdc3   4546560  88438783  83892224   40G Microsoft basic data
    /dev/sdc4  88438784 234440703 146001920 69.6G Microsoft basic data
    What does Microsoft basic data means?
    it means fdisk identified the partition type as "Microsoft basic data". or in other words a windows partition.

    Running VMs from NTFS is very slow, but running them from linux disk works fine.
    Why is this?!
    because the partition type as well as the filesystem your disk had is not native to linux. it does support foreign partition types and filesystems to some extend but as usual the native stuff works best.
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