Today I updated the packages, then rebooted, then the machine got stuck at

[Started] Accounts Service

Seriously, I have had no issues with my laptop recently. And this makes me nervous. It will be troublesome if I have to boot into the Arch Linux LiveUSB. But luckily, searched online, and someone mentioned to change to another TTY with Ctrl+Alt+F2.

Wheew. I still can log in with the command-line. And then I noticed that, the issue must be NVidia driver related.

In the previous post (1 year ago), I mentioned the hibernation issue. I believed that it was related to the NVidia graphic card. Related forum can be found here.

But these few days, I notice that whenever I shut down the laptop, it will show the systemd messages. Previously, if I did suspend my laptop, then resume, then shut down will show only black blank screen, until the power off. I believe that the graphic card issue is being fixed with the recent update.

Due to the changes of the career, I invested on Dell Vostro 5459, after a long survey. I chose it because it is compatible to Linux. The compatibility to Linux meaning that, all the hardware devices are accessible by Linux. Besides that, it has the NVIDIA graphic card, which allows me to use GPGPU to do my research and study. Moreover, I can play high quality 3D graphics games.

Ubuntu

So, the laptop I bought was pre-installed with Ubuntu. And, I was impressed by the Ubuntu first boot video, which can be found here.

This is not a new stuff. You can get some tutorials from Internet. And it is very interesting when I did this, because I learnt new things. The following procedures are based on what I remembered. So, it may not be 100% accurate, since I am a forgetful person. 😅

What I did was reading the Arch Linux Wiki page. Then, followed the instructions as much as possible, and do some trials and errors. Remember to backup everything necessary. And try this at your own risk.

These days, I decided to migrate my Arch Linux from 32-bit to 64-bit. There are several reasons that make me to make such decision.

Firstly, in Arch Linux official site, there was an announcement that Arch Linux will drop 32-bit. And in the wiki page, it mentioned that Arch Linux user should use 64-bit if the processor supports.

Secondly, new distros such as KaOS and Evolve OS only support one architecture 64-bit. That means 32-bit is considered less targeted.

Recently I found that, even the packages in the AUR are renamed, the AUR helper such as yaourt also cannot solve. When I prepared to ask for some solution in the Arch Linux BBS, I just think that it is possible to solve it myself. Finally, I come out with the following script,

[code language=“bash”] #!/bin/bash # # @author Allen Choong # @date 2014-09-04 # @version 0.0.1 # # This script is to identify the installed AUR packages, to check whether they are still # available in the AUR. This is because some packages are renamed or removed.

Due to a recent Q&A from DistroWatch.com, I am considering the advantages of using the scheduled-release or fixed-release distros, especially Debian which is famed of its stability. The following is the quote from DistroWatch.com,

Rolling releases do tend to have their downsides though. For instance, it is difficult for third-party developers to create software for rolling-releases as a rolling-release distribution is a moving target. It is difficult to target and support an operating system which is changing on a regular basis.

These days, want to compile old projects. Firstly, I compiled all my code using Arch Linux. Then I decided to install my project to a LiveUSB, so that I need not to partition or use virtual machine on the target computer.

So I planned to use KNOPPIX.  I tried Linux Mint in VirtualBox, since it is based Debian, but failed to compile my code due to the CEGUI version is not the latest as Arch Linux.

I have a habit to backup the files. As a result, using the yaourt (Arch Linux pacman helper), I have saved a lot of files in a directory. From time to time I need to clean up the directory manually by deleting old files, because the size is increasing gradually.

So, I finally wrote a script to clean the old files in the directory.

It is available here.

One of the reasons, I recently consider to switch from Arch Linux to Debian which is famous in stability. However, I am very reluctant to do so, because of the greatness of simplicity in package management of Arch Linux, especially creating packages in AUR. Debian, though famous, there is much manual work in packaging such as preparing the “control” file (may be there are some other tools I not yet explored, because I used Ubuntu and Linux Mint before for only a short period). Besides that, Debian does not have the repository like AUR. Installing the packages such as TrueCrypt and XnViewMP in Debian is not as easy as Arch Linux. That is why I am hesitated to migrate.