Linux Fu: Easy Kernel Debugging

November 22, 2023 by Al Williams 2 Comments

It used to be that building the Linux kernel was not easy. Testing and debugging were even worse. Nowadays, it is reasonably easy to build a custom kernel and test or debug it using virtualization. But if you still find it daunting, try [deepseagirl’s] script to download, configure, build, and debug the kernel.

The Python program takes command line arguments so you can select a kernel version and different operations. The script can download the source, patch the configuration, build the kernel, and then package it into a Debian package you can boot under qemu. From there, you can test and even debug with gdb. No risk of hosing your everyday system and no need to understand how to configure everything to run.

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Linux Fu: Customizing Printf

October 24, 2023 by Al Williams 13 Comments

When it comes to programming in C and, sometimes, C++, the printf function is a jack-of-all-trades. It does a nice job of quickly writing output, but it can also do surprisingly intricate formatting. For debugging, it is a quick way to dump some data. But what if you have data that printf can’t format? Sure, you can just write a function to pick things apart into things printf knows about. But if you are using the GNU C library, you can also extend printf to use custom specifications. It isn’t that hard, and it makes using custom data types easier.

An Example

Suppose you are writing a program that studies coin flips. Even numbers are considered tails, and odd numbers are heads. Of course, you could just print out the number or even mask off the least significant bit and print that. But what fun is that?

Here’s a very simple example of using our new printf specifier “%H”:

printf("%H %H %H %H\n",1,2,3,4);
printf("%1H %1H\n",0,1);

When you have a width specification of 1 (like you do in the second line) the output will be H or T. If you have anything else, the output will be HEADS or TAILS.

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Linux Fu: Deep Git Rebasing

October 17, 2023 by Al Williams 22 Comments

If you spend much time helping people with word processor programs, you’ll find that many people don’t really use much of the product. They type, change fonts, save, and print. But cross-references? Indexing? Largely, those parts of the program go unused. I’ve noticed the same thing with Git. We all use it constantly. But do we? You clone a repo. Work on it. Maybe switch branches and create a pull request. That’s about 80% of what you want to do under normal circumstances. But what if you want to do something out of the ordinary? Git is very flexible, but you do have to know the magic incantations.

For example, suppose you mess up a commit message — we never do that, of course, but just pretend. Or you accidentally added a file you didn’t want in the commit. Git has some very useful ways to deal with situations like this, especially the interactive rebase.

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Linux Fu: Build A Better Ls

September 8, 2023 by Al Williams 27 Comments

Ask someone to name all the things they can find in a room. Only a few will mention air. Ask a Linux command line user about programs they use and they may well forget to mention ls. Like air, it is seemingly invisible since it is so everpresent. But is it the best it can be? Sure, you can use environment variables and aliases to make it work a little nicer, but, in fact, it is much the same ls we have used for decades. But there have always been moves to make better ls programs. One of them, exa, was recently deprecated in favor of one of its forks, eza.

One thing we liked about eza is that it is a single file. No strange installation. No multiple files to coordinate. Put it on your path, and you are done. So installation is easy, but why should you install it?

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Linux Fu: The Old School Terminal

August 23, 2023 by Al Williams 40 Comments

Maybe you have a vintage old-school computer. Maybe you have a replica. Maybe you just want to run SIMH and relive the glory days of CP/M or VMS. The problem is, it looks kind of silly to have CP/M running in your beautiful X11 terminal window full of 3D animations, opacity effects, and special fonts. You could buy an old CRT monitor. That would be cool, too, because on a modern screen, you don’t get scan lines and all the crummy artifacts that go along with an electron beam and phosphor display device. Or you can grab retro-cool-term.

Even if you don’t have an old computer, the program will work fine to simply run your shell for everyday use. Confound the youngsters when they see your terminal with scan lines and CRT jitter updating the latest packages.

What Is It?

If you want a shell in a GUI, you used to use xterm, although most people use something more modern. I use Konsole, but some like RXVT or whatever terminal your distro favors. Cool-retro-term is just a replacement for this. By default, it only opens a shell prompt.

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Linux Fu: Easy And Easier Virtual Networking

June 14, 2023 by Al Williams 15 Comments

One of the best things about Linux is that there are always multiple ways to do anything you want to do. However, some ways are easier than others. Take, for example, virtual networking. There are plenty of ways to make a bunch of Internet-connected computers appear to be on a single private network. That’s nothing new, of course. Linux and Unix have robust networking stacks. Since 2018, though, Wireguard has been the go-to solution; it has a modern architecture, secure cryptography, and good performance.

There’s only one problem: it is relatively difficult to set up. Not impossible, of course. But it is a bit difficult, depending on what you want to accomplish.

How Difficult?

You must set up a wireguard server and one or more clients. You’ll need to pick a range of IP addresses. You might need to turn on routing. You have to generate keys. You might need to configure DNS and other routing options. You’ll certainly need to modify firewall rules. You’ll also need to distribute keys.

None of these steps are terribly difficult, but it is a lot to keep straight. The wg program and wg-quick script do most of the work, but you have a lot of decisions and configuration management to keep straight.

Browse the official “quick start,” and you’ll see that it isn’t all that quick. The wg-quick script is better but only handles some use cases. If you want really limited use cases, there are third-party tools to do a lot of the rote work, but if you need to change anything, you’ll still need to figure it all out.

That being said, once you have it set up, it pretty much works without issue and works well. But that initial setup can be very frustrating. Continue reading “Linux Fu: Easy And Easier Virtual Networking” →

Linux Fu: Making Progress

May 24, 2023 by Al Williams 12 Comments

The computer world looks different from behind a TeleType or other hardcopy terminal. Things that tend to annoy people about Unix or Linux these days were perfectly great when you were printing everything the computer said to you. Consider the brevity of most basic commands. When you copy a file, for example, it doesn’t really tell you much other than it returns you to the prompt when it is done. If you are on a modern computer working with normal-sized files locally, not a big deal. But if you are over a slow network or with huge files, it would be nice to have a progress bar. Sure, you could write your own version of copy, but wouldn’t it be nice to have some more generic options?

One Way

The pv program can do some of the things you want. It monitors data through a pipe or, at least through its standard output. Think of it as cat with a meter. Suppose you want to write a diskimage to /dev/sdz:

cat diskz.img >/dev/sdz

But you could also do:

pv diskz.img >/dev/sdz

By default, pv will show a progress bar, an elapsed time, an estimated end time, a rate, and a total number of bytes. You can turn any of that off or add things using command line options. You can also specify things like the size of the terminal if it should count lines instead of bytes, and, in the case where the program doesn’t know what it is reading, the expected size of the transfer.

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