Maybe they mean four year uptime…

For very simple tasks you can usually blindly log in and run commands. I’ve done this with very simple tasks, e.g., rebooting or bringing up a network interface. It’s maybe not the smartest, but basically, just type root, the root password, and dhclient eth0 or whatever magic you need. No display required, unless you make a typo…

In your specific case, you could have a shell script that stops VMs and disables passthrough, so you just log in and invoke that script. Bonus points if you create a dedicated user with that script set as their shell (or just put in the appropriate dot rc file).

I think there’s a bias in the US against this sort of thing that doesn’t exist (or not to the same extent) in Europe due to the age of the cities/buildings.

In the US, a building from the 1700s is a historic artifact to be cherished, while in parts of Europe a building from the 1500s is just the local pub.

So, the US is often hesitant to modify these old buildings, but Europe seems to have more of a perspective of “it’s a building, not a museum, let’s give it new life by modifying it.”

This is just from the perspective of me, from the US — and I think these old/new buildings are really neat!

IIRC that was the release that cleaned up the make output substantially.

EulerOS, a Linux distro, was certified UNIX.

But OS X, macOS, and at least one Linux distro are/were UNIX certified.

IIRC Torvalds uses Fedora.

(Debian for me.)

Remote backup server would be my suggestion.

Configure it with a VPN to talk to your home network and set it up at a trusted friend’s or family’s place.

I do this with a raspberry pi and an external HDD that takes daily/weekly/monthly snapshots, with daily rsync. Works nicely for me.

I would be very surprised if such a fork would diverge from Linux. I would guess that this would be little more than a branch with (most likely) support for Russian hardware. Just my hunch.

A legitimate hard fork doesn’t seem particularly smart to me, but what do I know…

My headcanon for The Matrix’s “humans are batteries” is that it’s the machines’ perverse interpretation of this — killing the humans is off the table, and for whatever reason letting them live with no purpose to serve the machines is also disallowed. But giving their lives “meaning” in the form of a shitty (and thermodynamically dubious) “battery” somehow satisfies the rules.

It’s a very big stretch, I’ll admit…

I’m guessing it’s because the developers either have a different speciality that they focus on, are employed to support specific hardware, or both.

Duh, just read it back from /dev/random

You will recover the data, you just need to wait long enough.

That’s how I started using Linux — big book with CD, I think it was “RedHat Linux Secrets 5.4” or something. 2.0 or 2.2 kernel.

Honestly, it was fantastic. And almost all of it is still relevant today. (Some of the stuff on xfree86 and the chap/pap stuff not so much.)

But it gave a really solid (IMHO) intro to a Linux/*NIX system, a solid overview of coreutils, etc. And while LILO has been long replaced, and afaik /sys didn’t exist at the time, it formed a good foundation.

I’ll refrain from commenting on any init system changes that have taken place since then.

If you have a TV, you likely already have the receiving device. Antenna can cost, or you can play around with wire length and orientation.

It can be daunting to get into the hobby, there are a ton of niches.

To start: where are you? I’m in the USA, so that’s where my experience is.

License: required to transmit on the ham bands; you can listen without a license.

Range: are you looking to talk to people in your city/region? If so, a cheap “walkie-talkie” style (called “HT” in the biz — best avoid “walkie-talkie”) is a good place to start. These VHF/UHF (very/ultra high frequency) radios are affordable — something from Baofeng(~$30) or similar will work just fine, though they are often looked down on (I have one — for the price, it’s great). You will have the most luck if there is an active ham scene in your area, in large part because they may have a repeater, which can greatly extend your range. Many regions will have scheduled “nets” where you just go around and chat.

If you’re looking for the ability to chat with folks on the other side of the world, you’ll want to look into HF (high frequency). This is much lower frequency, thus longer wavelength, than the handheld VHF/UHF HTs. So…the antennas take up a lot of space. Mine is 52 feet long, in the attic. And the radios are much more expensive (more like $1k new). ICOM 7300, Yaesu FT710 are popular entry level units (but you also need power supply, cables, and antenna).

That said: if you just want to listen to HF, the antenna doesn’t matter as much at all, and you can use an SDR (RTL-SDR probably works?) for listening. You can probably also find a used shortwave radio that covers some of the HF ham bands.

As a long-time Debian user, I’d have to throw my vote behind Slackware for the title of most UNIX-y, which is I guess a bit different from most Linux-y.

Debian got me through grad school, but Slack got me through undergrad on a hopelessly underpowered old ThinkPad — Volkerding is a legend, and Slack will always be dear to my heart.

This happened to me when Debian switched from SysV to systemd. I am not the only person who experienced this (e.g., https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=147478 ).

This is not to say the systemd behavior is wrong, but it essentially changed the behavior of fstab. Whether this is Debian’s fault, Arch’s fault (per the above link), systemd’s fault, or my fault is a fair question. But this committed that most egregious of sins per our Lord and Savior Torvalds — it broke my userspace.

My favorite was when the behavior of a USB drive in /etc/fstab went from “hmm it’s not plugged in at boot, I’ll let the user know” to “not plugged in? Abort! Abort! We can’t boot!”

This change over previous init behavior was especially fun on headless machines…

The only flaw in Corel’s logic was that as soon as you’re running Linux, you lose all desire to run WordPerfect, and develop an irresistible need to align yourself with vim or emacs…

Just don’t try plugging it into a Raspberry Pi 5.

No data loss, but won’t work without changing your kernel. The other way around is much worse though — you can use an RPi5 to make a BTRFS drive which essentially only works on RPi5s.