State of Linux Gaming Winter ’22/’23

Linux has been my Desktop operating system for the last 20 (yes, twenty) years. But for gaming, I always had a Windows installation as a dual boot solution. Back in October ’22, the Windows installation on my computer broke. From one day to the other, it just didn’t boot anymore and I was not able to fix it. Since I knew that my favorite game runs very smoothly on Linux, I figured I’d give it a shot and try to use Linux not just for work but also for gaming. Here’s how that went.

How to create a table of contents in a github markdown formatted file (with sed)

I recently wrote a lengthy README.md file in a github repository and wanted to include a table of contents at the top. I could not find a way to do this with a native tag. I tried to quickly solve it with grep pipe sed, failed horribly, did in vim instead and hated having to do that. I could obviously have done it with a bash script, some grep pipe cut and variables and all that. But I somehow “wanted” to get it done in just one command. The result is the most visually obnoxious (or beautiful?) command I ever had to create.

Debugging sporadically encountered “SSH encountered an unknown error” in ansible runs

Half way through setting up continuous deployment with jenkins and ansible, I sporadically spotted “unknown errors” with ssh connections when ansible tried to run things on a series of hosts. Searching for “SSH encountered an unknown error during the connection” obviously revealed a LOT of results but nothing that really helped. So I had to dig deeper and eventually found the problem.

Live migrating busy (kvm) VMs in a ganeti cluster

Migrating a VM from its primary to secondary node is usually a very simple task for ganeti. But with busy machines, it sometimes, apparently, does not work. Here’s what helped me solve this situation.

Migrating VMs from a libvirt setup to a ganeti cluster

Until recently, I worked with a rather basic setup of virtual machine hosts. Simply a couple of servers that ran their individual set of VMs. In case of an outage of one of the nodes, all the nodes’ VMs were also affected. That needed change, so I looked at and found ganeti to be something that might help to provide redundancy for the VMs without introducing too much voodoo. Here’s how I migrated the 140 VMs from 17 machines into one cluster.

Creating a photobook from a loooot of images (the linux and android way) pt. 2

With our first kid, me and my wife created new photobooks about every 3 months. Once the second kid arrived, we could not make that happen (everyone who has kids will understand …). He is almost 14 months old now, we have not created a single book yet and I am tasked with creating a photobook from the horrible amount of 25 thousand files. And of course, not only did we not create a photobook for a over a year, we also did not create the “good” folders …

Creating a photobook from a loooot of images (the linux and android way) pt. 1

One of the things you do as a young parent is to take tons and tons of pictures of your kids. And then, since you cannot and will never look at all of them digitally, but you also don’t want to forget about all those moments you captured, you create photobooks with some of the best of those pictures. Problem is, you don’t really have the time to organize and sort them. Still, doing this quickly becomes very important once you experience how fast things go by, so here’s my “best practice” and some helpers that get me from “a looooot of files” to “a photobook” in a reasonable amount of time.

Unexpected find of the day: scp -3 (secure copying files between servers)

Sometimes you find things are possible that you have worked around year after year. Like this little scp switch I encountered today.

Truely impressive and awesomely easy – xbmc on a raspberry pi (using raspbmc)

Since my old xbmc running media centre pc broke and I had to get a replacement, I recently bought a raspberry pi. For those who haven’t heard of that: It’s a computer as small as a tissue pack that only costs like 30 Euros which – according to many many people on the internet and also my colleagues at work – is capable of playing HD video. Honestly, I didn’t believe it, but for 30 bucks? Let’s try and see …

Extracting multi-archive pkzip files

A friend of mine received photos from a photographer who seems to have a really limited email account. To “bypass” the attachment size limit, he used pkzip to create a zip file consisting of multiple smaller files. Since my friend doesn’t know much about computers (and did not have pkzip installed in his windows machine), he failed to extract the pictures and just in case anyone should ever again come across having to extract a multi-archive pkzip file, here’s what to do (in linux) …