Natural Born Coder

Author: doozer

  • Setting up a New Debian Server

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    I recently got a new server and I realized I don’t have a comprehansive guide for setting a machine up from scratch. This guide is particularly useful for setting up something like a VPS where you only have SSH access, it assumes you have installed a bare bones headless version of Debian and have root…

  • Making Google Drive work on Debian with Rclone

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    In an earlier article on setting up KDE Neon I mentioned that I was going to use KIO-Gdrive to access my Google Drive though Dolphin. That was a total failure due to a bug with the way KIO-Gdrive handles the token needed for access – it seems to forget the token every few operations. Digging…

  • Debian System Management

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    In an ideal world all the software I use would be installed from the Debian repositories and it’d be a single click to keep it all up to date. In reality it’s not that simple. The built in package manager does a pretty good job but there are pieces of software that can’t be installed…

  • Beginners Notes for Latex

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    This is just a random collection of notes about Latex covering hurdles I hit early on. Including SVG images Long story short, don’t bother, it’s not worth the hassle. In theory you can \usepackage{svg} but adding just that gave me a ton of errors mentioning xcolor names. Adding the line \PassOptionsToPackage{svgnames}{xcolor} to the preamble fixed…

  • Using ClassicThesis

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    I’m formatting a thesis at the moment and I’ve decided to use Classic Thesis as a starting point. From what I’ve read this is a choice that will divide the room. Some people seem to love the look and others hate it. I quite like the look of it, I certainly couldn’t do better myself,…

  • Setting up TexStudio

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    A short while ago I decided it was time to learn a little Latex as I want to produce some good looking documents. After many dead-ends I settled on using TexStudio to work with Latex. There’s no reason you can’t do just use a simple text editor but I prefer syntax highlighting and my spelling…

  • Beginning Tex / Latex / Lyx

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    Despite spending more years at universities than I probably should have I’ve never had the need to use Latex. It came up once when I was collaborating on a paper while studying computer science but my partner was doing most of the actual writing so I even managed to miss it then. In all the…

  • Replacing a drive in a ZFS array

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    I have a ZFS RAIDZ2 array in my main server and recently it suffered a drive failure. Naturally I was woefully under prepared for this occurrence so I rushed out and bought a replacement drive and got cracking with learning how to safely replace the drive. Background If you don’t already have one you need…

  • Manually Creating a ZFS Pool From Mismatched Drives

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    I recently suffered a drive failure on my main ZFS array. Naturally I wasn’t as prepared for this even as I should have been so I wasn’t 100% sure how to go about replacing the drive. I decided to press my old rack server into action to get some practice in before working on the…

  • Going a Bit Rusty

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    I’m sure I’m not the first to make a rusty pun but I couldn’t resist. I’ve coded professionally now for around 25 years but unlike many developers I don’t actually know that many languages well. My career to day has been almost exclusively Java starting back with version 1.2 (I learnt on version 1.1). I’ve…

  • Making a Logitech MX Master 3 Thumbwheel Work Under Linux

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    I have a Logitech MX Master 3 mouse which I absolutely love, it’s easily the best mouse I’ve owned (and I’ve owned a few) but as with many things Logitech it isn’t super well supported out of the box under Linux (Debian 12 in my case). For whatever reason Logitech pretty much acts like Linux…

  • KDE Plasma and Virtual Desktops

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    I was really surprised to find the out of the box KDE Plasma doesn’t seem to have virtual desktops turned on (or at least it’s set to a single desktop). I know Windows technically has this now but it’s still one of the things I love about Linux, the implementation is so smooth. To add…