IBBoard

As of January 2008 I now use Linux for all of my computer use at home. I used a virtual Windows machine for some System.Windows.Forms development for WarFoundry for a while, but even that doesn't get used these days.

Despite its reputation as an unfriendly system I've managed to get quite a few additional features set up in Linux that are very useful and either wouldn't be available in Windows without extending the resource hogging or else would probably be charged for. That's not to say that it all went perfectly smoothly, but the majority of changes and installs are smooth and automatically handled.

Additions to my work/play environment

I've made a few additions to my work environment, adding new and interesting features each time. The following are brief write-ups of my experiences with them, as I get a chance to write them.

• Snapper and btrfs disk usage on openSUSE Tumbleweed - how I started to snapshot my root partition to help with system rescues, and how to understand the output of Snapper and btrfs to work out where your disk space is being used!
• Using Conky and Tilda to replace sensors and terminal screenlets

The following are old write-ups that are unlikely to be relevant to modern distributions, but may still have helpful snippets in them.

• Full read-write support for Windows NTFS partitions under Linux (thanks to NTFS 3G drivers)
• Quicker booting from GRUB to the GDM
• Replacing GKSu with a consolehelper solution so that your application can request root privileges using the same dialog as the distro-standard administration applications.
• Using a Netgear WG111 USB wireless adapter and its RTL8187 chipset in Linux with WPA for real security to your network.
• Running Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat on Wine - how to get the original Warhammer computer game installed and running through Wine

Bug fixes and problems

Sometimes I come across issues that don't seem to have very good resources to resolve them, or where a search returns lots of questions but no answers. When I finally resolve issues in that category then I will try to include solutions here.

• Fixing CentOS 8's "package is excluded" when trying to install a third-party RPM from a repo that just won't show up in "dnf" (even though other packages from the same repo do show up)
• Theming Gnome 3.0 (now outdated)
• Fixing the The type or namespace name `Gtk' could not be found error in Monodevelop
• Making exaile start as the media player for the multimedia button on my keyboard.
• Serving files from Apache on a FAT32 partition with SELinux. This lets you edit the files from Windows and Linux while you dual-boot, but SELinux causes problems because FAT partitions aren't correctly labeled for website files.