DAPS in a Container

DAPS is OpenSUSE’s “DocBook Authoring and Publishing Suite” that is used to build documentation for SUSE and OpenSUSE. It actually requires A LOT of dependencies when being installed and for that reason alone, it’s actually better to run it in a container. This is my image and how I use it.

docker run -v ~/myproject/:/home/user jsevans/daps:latest daps -d DC-project epub

Command Breakdown:

docker run - Run the command in the container:

-v ~/myproject/:/home/user - Maps a local directory called ~/myproject to a directory in the container called /home/user. /home/user is the default directory that is used by the daps command, so it is best to map this directory rather than needing any extra command line components.

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What would you like to see most in minix?

I’m working on a couple of presentations and I wanted to share this nugget of joy with anyone who hasn’t actually read it.

Path: gmdzi!unido!fauern!ira.uka.de!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!zaphod.mps. ohio-state.edu!wupost!uunet!mcsun!news.funet.fi!hydra!klaava!torvalds From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: What would you like to see most in minix? Summary: small poll for my new operating system Keywords: 386, preferences Message-ID: 1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT Organization: University of Helsinki Lines: 20

Hello everybody out there using minix -

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Linux newbies shouldn’t dual boot

If you lurk around many Linux support forums, you are bound to see the regular post that looks something like this:

Hi, I’m new to Linux. I tried to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu, now I can’t use my computer at all because it has errors. Help!!!

Troubleshooting Grub errors is difficult enough. Troubleshooting Grub errors when you know very little about how any of it works or when getting help from strangers on the internet is even more difficult to nearly impossible.

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Proposing a new newsgroup: Internet History

I am thinking about making a formal proposal for one of two new
unmoderated groups. The group would either be comp.internet.history or
soc.history.internet. I think you can see where these two names could
possibly overlap.

The general idea of the new group is to discuss retro internet
technologies such as IRC, ftp sites, BBSs (telnet and otherwise), MUDS,
MOOs, and of course Usenet and others. We could also discuss the culture
that surrounded many of these technologies especially IRC and Usenet as
they were maturing. Many of use don’t consider these technologies to be
“retro” because we use them everyday and yet interest in them is waning
and in order for them to continue, fresh interest must be continually be
added.

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Why Stack Exchange is Broken (and Reddit too)

I’m going to begin this rant by saying that there are some things that that the Stack Exchange network is really good with: mainly, programming help.

However, it really sucks when it comes to providing help with a specific application where there is already a community. For the past year, I have been the #1 person to answer questions on tor.stackexchange.com. I’m not saying that to pat myself on the back; just to say that I have actually been doing this for a little while. However, I feel that many, if not most, of the questions should never have been there. Here’s what I mean:

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Announcement

From news.groups.newgroups:

This is an official communication from the Big-8 Management Board. Please note that followups are set to news.groups.

After a careful review of the Big 8 Management Board’s activity and process, all remaining members of the Big 8 Management Board opted not to consider re-election and instead have voted to install two new volunteers as the new members of the Big 8 Management Board. These two volunteers are:

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Advice for Newbies

I originally wrote this as a reply to a Reddit post but as I saved it, comments were blocked.

2867374530_5feabdfbce_bGive yourself little tasks and projects to do. Think of it as being like model kit building. You start with the easy kits like a plane with just a few pieces and as you get better you pick up new things like painting, sanding, and eventually making bigger better kits.

So, start with small things. For example, write a small program with a for-loop and get to know what all if the commands are really doing. This is your basic kit. Add in some variables. Add in user input, and keep going trying new things. Eventually, challenge yourself by learning how to work with a GUI. Sometimes your program will break. This isn’t a bad thing. It teaches you how to debug. What’s important is to take your time and experiment.

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Thoughts on LBRY

At the behest of people like Bryan Lunduke and DTLive on YouTube, I have started using LBRY more and last night I even uploaded a few test videos of my own. I would eventually like to put up some of my own tutorial videos.

With that said, LBRY has some serious issues. So, let’s be frank. LBRY has no rules against hardcore porn or if they do, they are not enforced. That’s fine, and I don’t care. It’s not hard to find porn on YouTube also. However if a porn channel doesn’t flag their own content as mature, then it will be in your search results and there’s no way right now to flag it yourself. The suggestions that I got in the help forum (aka the discord server) was to report it to the #report-spam room which I did. Will that result in these channels being told to reflag their content? Who knows. It seems a little iffy.

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Creating Onion Services on OpenBSD

OpenBSD is a new beast for me. I’m still learning, experimenting, and trying out new things. Yesterday I was able to create 3 onion services on it quite easily but it takes time to learn the correct order of operations and to learn how to find out why things don’t work when you think they should.

A word about OpenBSD

OpenBSD isn’t friendly to newbies. The developers, users, and management work to make the best and most secure OS that they can. When you work with OpenBSD, it is assumed that you have at least a moderate to advanced amount of Linux or Unix knowledge and experience before starting and that you know how to read documentation, man pages, etc. Don’t bother asking for help unless you’ve done your homework first. Here’s an unedited quote from a recent mailing list post:

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KDE vs XFCE vs Gnome

Chris Titus recently vlogged about an article showing that KDE 5.17 is now smaller than XFCE 4.14 in memory usage. The article says that in their tests, XFCE actually uses more RAM than KDE. I was very interested in this, but I couldn’t quite believe it and so I ran my own tests.

First of all, we need to compare apples to apples. I created an OpenSUSE VM using Vagrant with KVM/libvirt. It had 4 cores and 4192MB of RAM. This VM has no graphical interface at all. As soon as I got it up, I took the first “No X” measurement. After patching using zypper dup, I took the second “No X” reading. Every reading in this blog post was using the free -m command. I then shut down the VM and cloned it 3 times so each copy should be completely the same.

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