That’s good Slackware, don’t you waste that Slackware.

When they dropped reiser the lug broke up mostly along Debian or gentoo lines. It was hard to switch to Debian. You just can’t freely disconnect and connect things like in Slackware. You can’t just rpm2tgz some package and see if it works.

You can’t top the level of troubleshooting knowledge gained from using that distro.

About the only thing a Slackware user can’t tell you is how the system got installed. He just hit enter a bunch of times.

I think I recognize that system by the monitor glare, where’d you take the picture?

Get an Apple, thinkpad or dell.

The main thing that determines if a computer can be repaired is parts availability. Those three have great parts availability almost universally.

If you wanna run macOS you need a Mac. The t480 is a good recommendation for thinkpads, but don’t worry about ssds or ram yet, just get the one with the processor and display you want (it’s the midrange 8th gen ones). I don’t know the dell world enough to make a recommendation but someone will do so.

Use the gentoo and arch wikis to check what problems people have out of the box with whatever model you’re looking at.

People will say you need amd. This is either paranoid or based on recent events. Neither apply to you.

People will say to get a framework or some equivalent. They’re expensive and a moral/ethical statement. This doesn’t apply to you.

1. 1. Make a backup. Use the windows backup utility for this, it’s real good. After that, look at what it backed up and make sure it didn’t miss anything.
2. 2. Plan out what you wanna do. There’s a lot of posts in reply to this thread that suggest different ways of doing things. If you plan what you want and investigate how to do it you will fail less.

What do you wanna do?

Even more important, a huge multinational like Microsoft can be forced in court to provide the support they sell under threat of legal action that would cripple their profitability in the region. Olafs computer service will just turn its pockets inside out, flip around the shingle to closed and leave the national drivers license agency in a lurch.

On some level the companies that sell and support systems government relies on have to be treated as nation states themselves in order to maintain normalcy, which both parties “want”.

It doesn’t matter what you pick, there’s so much to learn and so much grass is greener thought process going on that barring a irl group to conform to or workplace requirement you’re gonna try a million different things before you figure it out.

If you use mint, the step you need to pay attention during and read instructions for asks if you wanna “install alongside windows”.

Just make sure you recognize the drive/partition you want to use and if you don’t, take note of the way the installer describes them and figure out which one is which.

If you decide to go with bazzite I can check out how that one presents the choice too.

If you want to know what choice to pick at some point in the process, tell me your windows version and Linux distribution and I’ll mock it up in a vm and see what happens.

There’s no need to do all that. Here’s how to do it the old way, which works perfectly and will not cause you a problem:

Turn off bitlocker

If you’re gonna dual boot off the same drive, shrink your windows partition in disk manager so there’s enough space for Linux.

Boot your Linux install media

Go through the process like normal, but be sure to choose where you want to put Linux. In a lot of em the option to pick is “install alongside windows”.

It just works.

You will have a problem sometimes where a windows update deletes the bootloader that lets you pick between Linux and windows, resulting in you booting straight into windows with no choice. People say a lot of things about how to prevent this, but the better solution is to know how to fix it. Your distribution will have instructions just search “fix grub”. Usually the solution is to boot a usb and run some command. The command is slightly different depending on the distro.

A person I know has it written in sharpie on her recovery usb.

Eventually your friends will puke on the kitchen floor. Rather than try to keep it from ever happening, just keep a mop and bucket in the closet like a normal person.

Anyway if you have any questions lmk.

That was very funny.

European governments will do this thing where they pass some law that says they have to take bids from local vendors for systems, olafs computer service will put in a bid with some free software system, the government will take them up on it, spend a bunch of money trying to integrate it into their existing systems with varying degrees of success then parlay abandoning it for their majority provider in exchange for avoiding cost increases or some free support/equipment.

I think Germany’s done it twice now.

From the uc side, open a serial connection, send data. On the host side, prepare a place for received data. On the host side, walk through the received data until the thing you’re looking for is found, then execute some action (in your case a python script).

You don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing. People saying “define a threat model” are right.

Figure out what you’re trying to accomplish.

Hi.

I have been through a drawer full of old drives of mine and a different drawer full of other people’s old drives that need tested/securely erased/parted out this summer so my instructions might be a little more “foolproof” or seem to have extra steps but here’s how you do what you wanna do:

Plug up the drive

Run “lsblk “ to show all the drives and their file systems. Use the information shown to both recognize your target drive and determine what partitions and file systems are on the drive. Once you recognize your drive, take note of its device name in the format /dev/sdx.

Run “ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/ |grep sdx”, but replace sdx with your drives device name. This will list the drives in the system named for their model and serial numbers and show what devices in your operating system they correspond to. Piping the output through the grep command with “sdx” will only return the one that is your target drive. Take a picture of this with your phone or something. It’s probably too long to remember.

Now do the same thing but in /dev/disk/by-uuid, so “ls -l /dev/disk/bu-uuid | grep sdx”. This will show you the uuid of the file systems on the partitions of your target disk. Uuids are unique identifiers for file systems and will be important later.

Now you need to figure out what the different file systems on your target drive are. This part’s easy, just make a directory in your home folder, it doesn’t matter what it’s called. “mkdir nostromo”. Then make a set of directories in it corresponding to the different file systems you saw in the output of the uuid command. “Cd nostromo” “Mkdir sdx1 sdx2 sdx3 etc”. Do a quick “ls” just to make sure you made the right directories. Refer back to your picture of the uuid output to be sure you made directories for em all.

Now you’re just about to go into the file systems of the drive and confirm what they are and make a plan to extract the payload, but first take a minute to make some assessments about what you have without actually getting your hands dirty: look at the output from lsblk. You can run it again no problem. How many partitions are there on the drive? How big are they? When a partition shows about 100MB in lsblk it’s probably a boot partition. If it shows about 1KB it’s probably a container for other partitions and you don’t need to worry about it. If it’s about the size of your ram or smaller then it’s probably a swap partition (although I think Ubuntu doesn’t use these by default).

Now let’s go in and see what each one is. Start at the lowest numbered one and “mount /dev/sdxN nostromo/sdxN”. You might have to use sudo to do that. Then “ls nostromo/sdxN/“

If you see stuff like “initrd “ or “kernel” it’s probably the Ubuntu boot partition and you won’t have anything to worry about in there. If you see “/root” and “/home” and “/bin” then that’s the Ubuntu root partition and thats pretty promising!

Lather, rinse, repeat till you know what all the file systems of your drive are. Some advice: don’t worry about the 1k container partitions. They’re just there to get past the four primary partition limit. If you mount your old systems swap partition, you won’t be able to browse it with “ls”. Just confirm its swap by running “cat /proc/swaps” and looking for the one you just mounted. Unmount it with “umount /dev/sdxN” just like you mounted it.

Once you have an idea of where your files are, unmount the file systems you’re not worried about with “umount /dev/sdxN” and get ready to find your files on the partition(s) they’re in.

Go into the nostromo/sdxN folders that correspond to the file systems with files you wanna get with “cd nostromo/sdxN” Make a folder called “old” with “mkdir old”. Make sure you’re in the nostromo/sdxN folder you wanna be in with the “pwd” command. If it returns the one you expect then you’re good. Move everything in there into the “old” folder with “mv * old/“. That will error out when it tries to move the “old” folder into itself but now the contents of that drive are in the old folder.

From here you can use terminal or gui tools to move files from the directories in the “old” folder to however you want it organized in the root of the file system. Maybe you want a folder called “recovered” with unsorted swaths of information inside it. Maybe you wanna painstakingly sort things out by media type. The file system is your oyster. When using gui tools sometimes you’ll be asked if you wanna move or copy the files. Move is what you want.

Lather rinse repeat for all the file systems you think have stuff you care about.

Once you found and moved your files, look again tomorrow. You might find more!

After you’re absolutely sure you got em all, delete the old folder with “rm -r old/“.

Once you’ve done that for all the old file systems with files you want on em, see if you can’t consolidate them together in one file system. If you can then delete the file systems and partitions you don’t need and expand the one you plan on using.

Once you’re ready, use the saved partition as a data drive by adding it to your /etc/fstab using the uuid from earlier. A perfectly acceptable mount point is /mnt/data. That will make sure your operating system knows how to find it and mount it every time the computer boots up.

Hey just a heads up, the permissions you needed weren’t “7”, but “+x”. +x is execute permissions. “+x” is a user or groups ability to execute the file or (browse the) directory. The number is an expression of some user or groups ability to read, write and execute all in one convient character. It’s calculated by adding together the numerical values of read, write and execute permissions when read is 4, write is 2 and execute is 1.

So with all of them enabled you’d add up all three numbers and come up with 7, full permissions. R+x is 5 and r+w is 6 etc. there are eight different possibilities.

The reason it’s done that way is from long ago, before acls, when data about files had to be stored in simple ways on tiny file systems. The permissions for a file were half a byte, and stored not as “0-7” but as three bits. If the first one was a “1” you could read, if the second one was the same you could write and so on.

e: the whole point of saying this post was that knowing all i just wrote, a person can decypher old and new discussions on their problems that use language like “the execute bit” or “set the read bit”.

What you are doing: adding the unstable repository to your Debian system. Debian has three levels of software stability, stable, testing and unstable.

Stable does what is says on the tin. It’s stable, but older. Testing is gonna be the next major version when it’s deemed stable enough to be called stable. Unstable is for trying out new shit and seeing what breaks. It has the most recent packages and the most problems.

Stable and testing will be named after different characters from Toy Story, unstable will always be named after the character “Sid” from Toy Story.

In the context of what you’re trying to do, you are fucking up.

Yt-dlp can (and should in most cases) update itself by using the command “yt-dlp -U”. But it will only update itself that way if you manually install it from the git page.

You can do this by downloading it and putting it somewhere in your users $path. This is just like putting a program folder in windows in c:\program files and making a start menu entry manually, except you won’t make the start menu entry because your shell will always look in $path to see if it can run what you just typed. If you’re familiar with Macs, it’s literally like copying the program to your applications directory.

There’s instructions how to manually install on the yt-dlp git.

You should do yt-dlp this way unless you have a good reason to use the Debian repos or pip.

E: once you get yourself straightened out, make sure to add “yt-dlp -U” to all your scripts before they actually run. It keeps you from getting the wrong quality profile or downloads from failing or whatever.

Switch to x11 and use xscreensaver will fix that problem.

A cron job that runs when you want it to instead of the unattended updates metapackage.

Why are you doing this?

If you don’t know why you are trying to get personally identifying information off the internet then you can’t evaluate weather you should trust the third party you’re considering contracting the job to.

If you don’t know why you’re trying to get personally identifying information off the internet then you can’t even evaluate advice people give you about it.

Dual boot install first and make sure it’s working good for your needs. Power management and mic in asahi isn’t there.

The computer will be pretty good under asahi and blow everything else out of the water under macOS.

If you don’t already know it, go ahead and learn macOS.

If you’re worried about the ssd being slow, make an install medium and flatten and reinstall macOS with after filling the ssd with bits from dev/random.

Locate the service manuals or some kind of tear down. Confirm that the process will be within your capability. Order some thermal compound. Disassemble the laptop until you remove the heatsink from the cpu. Clean the old cpu and heatsink with isopropyl until it’s as clean as can possibly be. Apply new thermal compound. Reassemble laptop.

this might be the service manual for the alienware

A1502 could be a lot of laptops, use the emc number or serial to find out which one or just look for the MacBook Pro NN,n number in the about option under the Apple menu. It doesn’t matter which one you have, they’re all really easy to work on and well documented.