AuthorFabio Scaccabarozzi

Ever since 2002, I experimented with Linux. After some time spent on Slackware and Mandriva, I found Gentoo, I've been using it since then and I acquired a lot of knowledge on the internals of the distribution. I have created and mantained a custom liveCD targeted to power users and systems engineers, with a lot of tools usually not included in standard distributions and exotic filesystems. I'm currently working as a senior system administrator in Zurich, Switzerland.

Window manager for Linux: Switching to Sway and customizing it

Recently I’ve been embarking on a quest to find the best window manager for Linux. I finally switched to Sway this week, and here’s my experience. The problem with my current window manager Two weeks ago, the release of KWin 5.19.0 brought the hope of finally fixing the KDE Wayland experience.I finally went back to AMD (X5700 XT) and for months now, I’ve been dealing with...

Playing with fitbit apis

Last year in September I had a serious health accident.Apparently after years of being decently fit, my body decided that enough was enough, and it would shut itself down with a not-so-great timing. This sparked some interest in the small portable computer I’ve been keeping at my wrist for the last 5 years. I more-or-less monitored some basics daily for that time, but never put serious...

Escaping BTRFS bugs

Hi all! Today I’d like to share a small yet valuable trick I had to learn while dealing with problems in the btrfs filesystem.I switched to the filesystem about 8 months ago to better manage space allocation and shutdown times, as it should be quicker to recover upon errors. So far the filesystem performed admirably considering its reputation, but today I hit a nasty bug in the (behold)...

LiveCD updates

Hi all!

A new release is finally out for the liveCDs!

Notable changes include:

4.2.6 kernel + reiser4 patch and btrfs delayed references patch (necessary for balance to work)gcc-4.9.3glibc 2.22-r1linux-headers 4.3added F2FS supportadded miscellaneous forensic tools (initiative coming from my new job in the eDiscovery branch)

See the full Changelog for additional details.

Reasons why I killed systemd

This won’t be another rant-post about the neverending systemd vs openrc war.I am writing to mostly state the reasons why I killed systemd in favor of openRC, the Gentoo-sponsored init alternative. Having binary logs is useless If you have ever had a server fail, especially during boot, then you already know where this is headed. If you don’t, in short: you want the logs to be readable...

Website refactor

Hi all! After struggling for a (very long) while with nanoc, I was able to make many small improvements to the site structure. “Scripts” section has disappeared in favor of a more generic “Coding” one, divided by language.Lots of cleanups went into JavaScript and CSS (which is now written in SASS). Site layouting was changed to slim for better readability and...

How-to: RAID1 with MD on two identical disks

Being the first guide of this kind, I’d like to talk about a fresh experience I just had with this server. I was running an unusual setup: two disks, one of which contained the OS on a 40Gb partition, and a ZFS pool where I mounted the home partition, libvirt folder etc (960Gb + 1Tb on second disk). The server didn’t have any backups, so in case of fatal failure of the disk containing...

Two years later

Hi all! It’s been more than two years since the last post.Some of you may have thought the project was dead. Well, it was in fact suspended.There are multiple reasons, the top one being the lack of time to properly follow the project. It takes a while to build and mantain the releases and the process is not error-free at all (rather, quite the opposite). Furthermore, for some time the...

New release: 2011-03-06

Hi all! The new release if finally out! It’s been almost an year since the latest release. The long time since the last update brings some interesting news for you: kernel 2.6.37.2 with reiser4 patchesgcc-4.5.2, glibc-2.13-r1, linux-headers-2.6.36.1NTFS kernel module has been disabled in favor of external ntfs3g to avoid conflicts (ntfs3g has much much wider NTFS support than in-kernel...

News for the release

Hi all! As some of you may have noticed, we’re almost at the middle of November and there’s no new release available. The problem is that the reiser4 patches have not yet been ported to 2.6.36, and applying the 2.6.35 patchset fails miserably at compile time. Of course, I can’t blame anybody for this. Reiser4 work is being volunteered by Edward Shishkin and the 2.6.36 release...