Tanguy Ortolo

Installing an operating system

When you want to install a new operating system, the first thing to do is to get an installer medium, which usually involves two steps: downloading an image, and writing it to a medium. There are two major types of media usable for that purpose: optical discs and USB sticks. There used to be a third one, floppy disks, but it is no longer used, and it was conceptually very similar to USB sticks.

Read more A desktop file managers failure: writing an USB stick image

Floating and tiling window managers

In the X Window System, the window manager is that piece of software that places your windows and allows you to move them, resize them, hide them, etc. If your windows have titles on top of them, with buttons to close them or reduce them, it is thanks to the window manager. There are two major types of window managers:

Floating window managers

They are the most usual window managers, that allow you to place an size your windows freely on the screen, in a way where they are independent of each other, possibly overlapping, just as you would be able to place sheets of paper on your desk.

Tiling window managers

They are a more elitist type of window manager, that adjust the size and position of the windows so there is no overlapping and no space lost between windows, thus tiling the screen.

Floating window management

Tiling window management

The frontier between these two types is not very tight, because some floating window managers have limited tiling features, and almost all the tiling window manager have floating modes for programs that are not adapted to tiling.

For what it is worth, here is a report on my experience with three tiling window managers. Perhaps it may help people that are still hesitating to switch to tiling window management?

Read more Tiling window managers

The title of the next James Bond movie! Or will that be the next OpenBSD release song? ;-)

When you start using Linux' logical volume manager, one of the first question you have to answer is: what name will you give to your volume group? The usual answer is: vg1, vg2, etc. Although it does not bear any specific meaning, this naming convention is simple and seems functional enough.

In fact, this is a bad idea, which can have nasty consequences on the long term. Here is why: one day, your computer will eventually give out. To save your precious data, you will remove its drives and plug them into another computer. If you are using LVM with the same naming convention on that second computer, you will then get a name conflict, which will prevent you from seeing the volume group you want to recover.

The solution is to name volume groups uniquely across all your computers, and if possible other people's. An elegant way to achieve this is to use your host names as a basis. For instance, on a machine called “Piñacolada”, you would name a single volume group “pinacolada”, or two volume groups “pinacolada1” and “pinacolada2”. Or perhaps “vg-pinacolada0” or whatever, you get the idea.

I had to play a bit with MySQL, saving and restoring databases with mysqldump and mysql. These two tools have one severe discrepancy, which I would like to comment here because I think it is an excellent example of what not to do when designing tools to be used together.

Read more MySQL save/restore: an example of what not to do