Sensible people have a normal, relatively standard Fedora configurationand upgrade from one Fedora version to another through one of thestraightforward, fully supported methods . Neitherof those are true for me, at least for my office and home desktops. The officially supportedupgrade methods require taking your machine down for the durationof the upgrade, which is generally hours in my case, and I have anunusual system configuration (which goes beyond how updatingFedora kernels is a complicated affair for me ).So I normally follow a much more

Yesterday I was quite grumpy at Microsoft Teams on Linux for automatically startingitself when you logged in (without having you set it to do this),among other things. It may not be obvious why this is such a badthing, so today I'm going to cover the two levels of why this is aterrible idea (and why it's a worse idea on Linux and other freeoperating systems).

On the level of an individual application, automatically startingup on login, boot, unsuspend,

For reasons beyond the scope of this entry I'm going to need to useMicrosoft Teams to participate in online video meetings every sooften. Microsoft Teams has a 'public preview' for Linux ,available (only) as a RPM or DEB package as far as I know ( here ). BecauseI would rather download an app to a somewhat expendable system (mywork laptop) than go through the likely pain of getting videoconferencing working in some browser, I tried it. It did not goentirely well

If everything goes as listed in Ubuntu's 20.04 release schedule , Ubuntu 20.04LTS will be released April 23rd, and this release will start aroughly one year countdown on security updates for Ubuntu 16.04,which would stop a year later in April of 2021. Under normalcircumstances, we would spenda chunk of May bringing up 20.04 in our general Ubuntu installsystem , deploy some initial systems fortesting, and

I'm not really a fan of GRUB2 for avariety of reasons, but at the same time I have to acknowledge thata significant part of why it's so large and sprawling is simplythat good, flexible bootloaders for Linux have a complicated job,especially if they're designed to work for traditional BIOS MBRbooting as well as UEFI .However, if you haven't poked into this area it may not be obvioushow a bootloader's job goes from looking simple to actually beingcomplicated

A few years ago I wrote about how my home internet link hadgradually gotten fast enough that I could toy around with runningeven VMWare Workstation over remote X .At the time (and afterward) I thought that that was kind of nicein theory, but I never really tested how far this would go and howit would feel to significantly use remote X for real (even whenI missed various aspects of remote X ).Recently, world and local events have made for an extended period of working from home,

I often feel a little bit silly when I write entries about things like making bar graphs in Grafana or tags forGrafana dashboard variables because when Iwrite them up it's all pretty straightforward and even obvious. Thisis an illusion. It's all straightforward and obvious to me right nowbecause I've been in the middle of doing this with Grafana, and so Ihave a lot of context and contextual knowledge. Not only do I knowhow to do things, I also know what they're

Suppose, not hypothetically, that you have some sort of Grafana overview dashboard that can show you multiplehosts at once in some way. In many situations, you're going to wantto use a Grafana dashboard variable tolet you pick some or all of your hosts. If you're getting the datafor what hosts should be in your list from Prometheus, often you'llwant to use label_values() to extract the data you want. For example, suppose that you havea label field

Pretty much every programming language worth using has a standardlibrary or package for parsing command line options and arguments,and Python is no exception; the standard for doing it is argparse . Argparse handlesa lot of the hard work for you, but you still have to tell it whatyour command line options are, provide help text for things, andso on. In my own Python programs, I almost always do this setup ina separate function that returns a fully configured argparse.ArgumentParser instance.

My standard way of