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I ran into a little bit of an issue over the past several days…my battery life was horrendous.  Or at least it seemed that way compared to what it was under Windows.  Linus is notorious for having worse battery life (one of the few downsides to running it) on laptops, and the best explanation that I’ve been able to find is that the kernel is made to support such a wide variety of hardware, that it may be supporting things that you don’t need.

I remembered vaguely doing something about this during my last install, but it had been a while, so I had to research again to figure out what to do.  There’s a really simple tip that will help greatly – my battery life (as measured in Gnome) went from a little under 3 hours to almost 7.  Not quite the 9 hours I had under Windows, but a huge improvement nonetheless.

Here’s what I did:

Continue reading Extending Battery Life In Fedora 23

There really isn’t much to write about this one – it’s just a post-install guide.  This laptop has been out for over a year now, and the newer kernels support pretty much everything.  Going back to my previous post about Fedora on this machine, there isn’t nearly as much to fix. I know this is a little late…especially with Fedora 24 coming out in a little over a week, but nonetheless here it is.

In my previous post I outlined my reliance on Windows lately, and it really got me to thinking, so I decided to switch my laptop back to Fedora.  My original reasoning was to use Windows on the laptop to have access to Lightroom for my (very amateur) photography needs, but I realized over the past year I rarely edited photos on it, as I prefer the large screen on my main machine.

Before my list of tasks, I’ll go through some of the changes.  After that, a good deal of this will be pasted verbatim from my post from last year, maybe with a few notes added.

Continue reading Fedora 23 Post-Install Guide for the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (3rd Generation)

So a few nights ago I updated my Thinkpad to Fedora 23.  It went pretty well.  I might still do a clean reinstall when I have some time, but that’s really only because I’m a little bit neurotic about clean installs…not because of performance.  I followed the instructions here, and they are pretty easy.

I’ll try to sum them up here, along with an explanation of the (few) problems I had. Continue reading Upgrading to Fedora 23 – It’s Easier Than Ever

So I wanted to get a backup situation going for my two main Linux machines (my Thinkpad and my home-built rig).  I’ve been looking at a lot of options.  I’ve settled on deja-dup (more below).  The first thing that came to mind is a system that I can install a plugin for on my FreeNAS box called “bacula.”  You can find additional information about it here.

I started putzing around with it, but it’s really a little overblown for what I need it for.  It’s pretty complicated.  And most of the instructions I found online either didn’t relate to the FreeNAS plugin (web GUI based) or were incredibly, incredibly old.  So that one is out the window.

Continue reading Been a While…Let’s Look at Deja-Dup

(Image source: xkcd)

Linux folks have been clamoring for a long time – sometimes for good reason, sometimes not – about the “year of the Linux Desktop.”  While this sentiment isn’t clearly defined, from what I have read it could be loosely interpreted as “the year in which Linux use as an every day operating system really started to take off.”  I’m not sure really how you would measure that.  After all, even if Linux as a desktop OS grew 300% in a year, I would imagine it would still fall well behind the number of Windows systems in use.

But, still, I think it’s an interesting statement.  After reading a few threads on Reddit (especially in r/Linux), I have a few thoughts on the issues surrounding this.

Continue reading Windows 10, Steam, and the Year of the Linux Desktop

What does it mean?

Found an interesting thread on reddit where one person described sudo as Super User Do and was corrected by someone else, saying it was Substitute User Do – in the sense that the substitute user is one whom has permission to do root-ish activities.  I know that the sudoers file determines what rights (in most cases, all) the sudo user has available to them, but I honestly never thought about it being “substitute” instead of “super.”  I also thought that “su” simply elevated you to “super user.”

In case you’re new to this, the difference between “su” and “sudo” is that “su” elevates you to root, and stays in that setting until you type “exit” at the bash prompt:

turngren@linux$ su
password: *************
root@linux# command <as root
root@linux# another command <as root
root@linux# exit
turngren@linux$

Sudo, on the other hand, only works for the following command:

turngren@linux$ dnf update
(message that root needs to perform this)
turngren@linux$ sudo dnf update <performs as root
password: ***************
turngren@linux$ lsblk <performed as regular user

So I did some quick googling, and I’m finding plenty of sources that go both ways.  I wonder which is technically correct?

The Fedora 22 Update Process

This process was a lot easier than I was anticipating.  On my Thinkpad, I just chose to reinstall a few weeks ago.  But last night, I actually used Fedora’s “fedup” utility on my main machine, and it worked excellently.  I just had to reinstall Chrome and I was good to go.  Oh, and when I started up Steam it asked me where my local data was…I panicked briefly, but simply pointed it to the sata drive I have in the PC and it went back to normal immediately. Continue reading Fedora 22 Update