Sebastian Wiesner

System engineer for satellite mission planning. Gnome. Rust. Arch.

#archlinux #systemd

LWN recently covered a comprehensive guide about discoverable GPT disk images by Lennart Poettering.

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#archlinux #secureboot #dracut #sbctl

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I started playing around with secure boot, with the ultimately goal of setting it up on my laptop. I experimented in a libvirt/qemu VM and to my surprise a custom secure boot setup is rather easy (the Secure Boot page on the Arch Wiki suggests quite the contrary), thanks to dracut and a fairly recent tool named sbctl which just recently had it’s first release.

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#systemd #luks #dracut #archlinux

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Installing Arch on a LUKS-encrypted dsik traditionally required a few careful configuration steps to configure the proper root device for booting; if any of these steps was omitted or done wrongly the system would fail to boot. With systemd and dracut however a LUKS-encrypted Arch system can boot safely and reliably without any configuration:

  • Dracut builds a unified EFI kernel image including microcode and a generic initrd with systemd and cryptsetup.
  • systemd-boot automatically discovers unified kernel images installed by dracut and automatically adds them to the boot menu without explicit boot loader configuration.
  • At boot systemd automatically discovers and mounts the root file system following its DISCOVERABLE PARTITIONS specification.

The following commands demonstrate a fresh Arch installation from the Arch installation media into a libvirt VM. Installing to a pristine physical machine or a different virtual machine provider should require only minimal changes; adapting an existing system may be more difficult and require more work.

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#archlinux #systemd #homed

Observations from using systemd-homed for a couple of days:

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#emacs

Please reproduce this issue in emacs -Q.

This is a sentence you will often read when you report bugs in Emacs packages; it's often a quick reply from a developer and goes with no further explanation or even the slightest clue on what you’re supposed to do. If you ever found yourself in that situation then this post is for you: I’ll explain what it means to “reproduce a bug in emacs -Q”, how to do that properly, and why developers ask you for this.

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#emacs

Emacs isn't just an editor, it’s an entire Emacs Lisp interpreter and environment. We can use Emacs Lisp not only to extend and customize our beloved editor, but also to write entire programs and applications. Nic Ferrier’s [elnode][] server is the most ambitious Emacs Lisp application of this sort, but we can start at a smaller scale and try to write our shell scripts and tools with Emacs Lisp.

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#emacs

Emacs Lisp offers an autoloading mechanism to load libraries on demand. Typically this is used to make interactive commands available to the user without entirely loading the corresponding library upfront. This article explores how autoloads work and how Emacs Lisp packages use autoloads to improve load speed.

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#haskell #python

In a past version of this blog I used Pandoc to convert Markdown to HTML. It's by far the best and most powerful markdown converter, but it has one, albeit little weakness: Its syntax highlighting is based highlighting-kate, which is less good and supports less languages than the Python library Pygments, the de-facto standard highlighter used by Github and others.

It's easy to implement custom highlighting thanks to the great API of Pandoc, with just two functions in Text.Highlighting.Pygments.Pandoc:

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