Dems can be off the hook when they stick the landing and not a moment sooner. Let's do this!

I thought I would next give a shot at writing about the boot process. Ever wondered what the various steps are that take a computer from powered down to full graphical user interaces?

Well the typical order goes something like

Firmware -> Boot loader -> Kernel -> initramfs -> Root Filesystem -> init -> Login/session management -> Desktop

So the first piece of this process is firmware. Firmware is embedded in the computer, and in most circumstances is invisible to an average user. Implementations vary, but its main responsibility is to handle the power on signal and start the bootloader.

Bootloaders are an interesting area of programming and come in many shapes and sizes. For desktop linux, the most common options are things like grub, which gives you a nice menu to choose your kernel and other launch options. Like many other bootloaders grub is installed into an area of memory accessible to most firmware. Grub has to know where the kernel and everything is, so it also keeps a configuration you can manage through grubmkconfig If you like project boards, you'll probably end up more familiar with uBoot which is a less resource intensive loader used in embedded. The bootloader is responsible for finding the Kernel and loading it into memory, along with passing in any needed arguments. This means it has storage drivers and is often reading info out of your /boot folder.

Now we get to the Linux kernel, the heart of our operating system. The kernel is responsible for setting up the root filesystem and creating the framework to run your userspace. The kernel also creates many volatile file structures that don't persist across boots. /proc /sys and /dev being some of the major ones. The kernel is composed of a variety of modules that can be loaded and unloaded for managing different systems and hardware. You can see what is being used on your system with the lsmod command. modprobe and insmod can be used to change some of the configurations currently loaded.

On desktop the most common setup is to use initramfs to begin the next step. That is a shortening of init RAM filesystem. This is a compressed file system that contains utilities for probing hardware and discovering hardware layout that are too complex to handle without specialized programs like RAID filesystems. Initrsmfs is common, but also not entirely necessary. If the kernel can find and understand the root filesystem it can mount it on its own. Even more complex systems can be launched without initramfs, typically through the use of a flattened device tree specifying much of the physical layout of the electronics and the settings needed to bring them up safely on a System on Chip.

Once it is prepared, the kernel or initramfs accesses the root file system and launches init. This program is a part of systemd on most systems, and it follows a tree of dependencies to choose what to start on your system and when. It is responsible for determining when a program is ready and its dependencies are available.

Next up is login/session management. Here is where I will do my best, because I am less certain of some of the terms here. Linux logins are generally shell based. A shell is a program that acts as an interpreter for commands for the kernel. Shells can be interactive or not, and will use different configurations for each. Getty is the classic program for starting shells, and stands for "Get TTY" Once a shell is started it will ask for authentication if it is a login shell, and then run through the commands in .profile to setup variables. Most users won't see this unless they open a terminal, instead entering their authentication into a graphical login like LightDM (Light display manager). That display manager will then start your graphical session!

A graphical session is similar to a login on Windows. When you select a user and enter a password on Windows you are starting "explorer.exe" under your user. On Linux on many new systems this is Wayland, with a compositor like Sway. KDE Plasma uses one called KWin instead, but they have similar responsibilities. On older systems the display is managed by XOrg, with different desktop environments and compositors on top of that. The display manager starts a "session" of your desktop environment, which then sets up your UI and hotkeys. Some desktop environments restore programs opened during your last session, but not all are as feature-full. The variety of desktop experiences offered in Linux is enormous and ranges from desktops similar to Windows with things like Cinnamon, to tiling managers like DWM, and bare bones options like Openbox.

From there you are in your graphical session, and are ready to use your computer! Learning which tools your PC uses can help you figure out where you want to tweak it for different tasks. For many daemons or system services, systemd is the right place to configure. For user programs you can use systemd with userctrl, or your desktop environment. Enjoy tweaking your configuration :)

EDIT: Mint -> Cinnamon, Mint is the distro, cinnamon is the DE

Two different recipes cooked in a freshly reseasoned dutch oven. The first is a simple campfire beef stew, the second is a set of sausages cooked using the lid of the oven over coals directly as a skillet. Both came out very well, the brownies unfortunately carbonized.

Why would the Mormons let them build a data center instead of reaching for the belt kopeng?

I was listening to this series on audio book in the shower when this occurred to me. 'Gadara' is a fantasy species of wolfpeople's word for enemies that are respected and even trusted. A worthy foe sort of thing.

The idea is that the predatory wolf people believe friends can betray you, but an enemy can be trusted to act in their own self interest if they show themselves to be an honorable sort. Each party to the relationship maintains their status as enemies and expects the other to kill them if given the opportunity, but also can work together against threats to both. Being a gadara to someone also confers a bit of protection with your gadara's allies. A gadara can vouch for each other, and have laid claim to the honor of killing the other. So vouching for a gadara is saying "I want to be the one to kill this one, please respect that and leave them to me."

So to bring this around, an understanding between individual tankies and anarchists where both parties understand their ideals are incompatible, but the other can be trusted to work against fash would be a pretty useful arrangement. If we don't look past each other to the greater threat of fascism we won't be around long enough to get to have our fight in the end.

There seems to be an issue federating images from Blahaj's piefed instance to other instances. Not just isolated to one user it would seem as others have commented here

https://lemmy.world/comment/21508940

Accessing from the permalink shows a full image, but accessing from other instances shows an incomplete image

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/56254663

Trump is really trying hard to make Robert Jordan look like a prophet 💀

Explanation: Trump has some really strange parallels to Elaida from Wheel of Time. Their ego, incompetence, and obessession with "restoring greatness" are close enough to be weird, but it only gets weirder when you think about Elaida bulldozing the warder grounds to construct her own palace and abducting kings to restore the towers influence

Trump is really trying hard to make Robert Jordan look like a prophet 💀

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/53828388

Hide Spike did a fun collab with dead by daylight creators making some fun tracks of clips and eventually making a recorded diss track with several popular streamers. I think this is the first track, where he used clips from JRM to make a fun dead by daylight song

Thought folks here might enjoy this as well. Silly song and music video made in collaboration with a Dead By Daylight streamer using lines from streams

Hi all. I was excited when I saw a new Dead by Daylight community was created and I've been trying to post daily to get it going. Its not my community, but I would love to have a thriving Dead by Daylight community on the Fediverse.

Some Dead by Daylight game content can be mature in theme, and I marked some posts as NSFW because I thought they might be a bit borderline, but I also noticed those posts I did mark as NSFW saw almost no interaction. Not even from the community owner. I suspect the issue is the NSFW flag and I second guessed and removed it, but I wanted to hear perspectives from others on that. Is violent game content worth marking NSFW? Should I just wait and see if anybody is bothered? Does marking things NSFW limit their growth a great deal?

I am pretty middle of the road when it comes to blocking, I don't block super often but do occasionally when I'm feeling it. In total over my time I've amassed something like 45 blocks, but looking at the list recently I realized that almost a third of those blocks are one user. I don't like their vibe, but they are a prolific poster and account creator. The last time I counted I had twelve blocks for their accounts, but is there a way to set up a block or filter that will keep up with them making accounts with the same name on dozens of instances?