Category: Linux

exiftool to playlist file

Assuming that you are currently in the subdirectory with music files, and those files are of type .ogg and you want to create a playlist file named _great.m3u which contains the names of the songs with “World of Warcraft” in the album name, this one liner creates such a file:

exiftool -p '$filename' -if '$album =~ /World of Warcraft/' *.ogg 2> /dev/null > _great.m3u

Assuming that you then wanted to add the files of type mp3 from the artist E.S. Posthumus, this one liner adds to that file:

exiftool -p '$filename' -if '$artist =~ /E.S. Posthumus/' *.mp3 2> /dev/null >> _great.m3u

Assuming that you then wanted to add files of type mp3 with the Genre of “Classical”, this one liner adds these to that file:

exiftool -p '$filename' -if '$genre =~ /Classical/' *.mp3 2> /dev/null >> _great.m3u

Assuming that you then wanted to add files of type mp3 with the Comment of “VIVA EL PRESIDENTE!”, this one liner adds these to that file:

exiftool -p '$filename' -if '$comment =~ /VIVA EL PRESIDENTE!/' *.mp3 2> /dev/null >> _great.m3u

exiftool is the wonderful utility written and maintained by Phil Harvey

-p '$filename' prints the file name. We later strip off the other stuff by redirecting stderr to null. That’s the 2> /dev/null part.

-if '$album =~ /World of Warcraft/' and -if '$artist =~ /E.S. Posthumus/' are matches against a regular expression. =~ says we are doing a match and the text between the slashes are what need to be present for the match to report true.

> _great.m3u overwrites the existing file, but then >> _great.m3u appends to it.

Care to guess who purchased the collector’s editions of some of the games so I could get a CD of the game music (or files from Steam)?

One thing (I don’t know that it’s a problem, really) is that Artist =~ /E.S. Posthumus/ will find the same file as Genre =~ /Classical/ so the same songs end up in the playlist twice. Maybe I just like E.S. Posthumus so much that I want their chance of being picked by the shuffler better than average. 😉

But if that’s not your bag, this will make a new file (with a new name) which contains only unique song file names:

sort _great.m3u --unique --output=_great-unique.m3u

If you happen to have your own Nextcloud with the Music Player app, you can import this _great-unique.m3u file directly into a new playlist.

Linode base to LVM conversion

In my last post, I whined that I couldn’t find a how-to on how to convert a Linode virtual machine to an LVM setup. Well, I’ve done it, so I should write this up, no?

I didn’t want the machine to have a swap partition; so there were three things to do:

  1. swapoff while logged on, inside the machine
  2. Edit /etc/fstab to delete the line for the swap drive
  3. Outside the machine in the Linode manager, delete the disk
    • So first I had to power the machine down
    • Then in the Linode virtual machine manager, I had to switch to the Storage tab
    • Now I can click on the swap drive and delete it.
      • I don’t know why, but WordPress is being stupid with lists, which it didn’t used to prior to the most recent “upgrade”. This sublist is supposed to be numbered, damnit. And this particular list item was supposed to be indented even further.

The next thing to do was to shrink the existing disk. I do not know if I could have just done that. I see a resize option in the Linode storage manager. It may be that they have cloud-init wired in, and using the resize button would also have run stuff inside the machine to make everything nice. That’s not the way I went. 🤷

In the Linode manager (at the upper level, where you can see all your virtual machines), there is a three-horizontal-dots menu button. (I don’t know what is the good name for this button. I like the three horizontal lines, stacked, menu buttons because I can call it a hamburger button, and people get the idea of a bun with a patty in between. But I digress.)

I clicked on the three-horizontal-dots menu button, and chose the Rescue mode menu option. This powers down my virtual machine and attaches it as storage to a rescue mode virtual machine (running Fennix). Then in the Linode manager, I used Launch LISH Console to spawn a new web page which is the remote console into the Fennix machine. Although I’m inside the Fennix machine, /dev/sda is still my virtual machine’s main disk. It is not mounted at this time, which is good. So then I ran the command to shrink /dev/sda with resize2fs /dev/sda 9G

So a very real problem with me writing this up is that I don’t have a history command to verify this is what I did. That history was recorded in the Fennix virtual machine which is destroyed after reboot. I’m pretty sure the command was resize2fs /dev/sda 9G but I don’t actually know. When I look stuff up now, it looks like resize2fs applies to the partitions inside a disk device rather than the device itself. But I’m pretty sure I did this.

Then, using the Linode manager, I did shrink the disk. So the next steps were:

  1. Reboot out of rescue mode (wait for everything to boot back up)
  2. Power down the virtual machine (wait for it to shut down)
  3. In the Linode manager of my virtual machine, resize the one-and-only disk to 9 GB
    • The base machine had used about 5 GB of the 25 GB allocated. This leaves another 4 GB free disk space, even prior to moving /var off to another disk.
  4. Then, I added four disks:
    • home
    • tmp
    • var
    • var/mail

Of course, when I added these disks, I had to pick the sizes of what I wanted each to be.

The next part of the puzzle wasn’t obvious either: how does Linode map these newly added disks to the virtual machine? The answer is that by default, it does not.

That’s over in the Configuration tab of the virtual machine manager. (Earlier documentation appears to have called this the Profile tab). Doing an edit of my virtual machine, I could pick the /dev/sdX and assign it to the disk I had created for my purpose.

Okie dokie, time to power up and do the LVM stuff.

Create the physical volumes: pvcreate /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde

Create the volume groups:

vgcreate vg_mail /dev/sdb
vgcreate vg_tmp /dev/sdc
vgcreate vg_home /dev/sdd
vgcreate vg_var /dev/sde

Create the logical volume groups:

lvcreate vg_mail -l 100%FREE -n lv_mail
lvcreate vg_tmp -l 100%FREE -n lv_tmp
lvcreate vg_home -l 100%FREE -n lv_home
lvcreate vg_var -l 100%FREE -n lv_var

So at this point, we have logical volumes, inside of volume groups (which have physical devices assigned). LVM makes this storage available at /dev/mapper

Format the new storage:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/vg_mail-lv_mail
mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/vg_tmp-lv_tmp
mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/vg_home-lv_home
mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/vg_var-lv_var

Now comes the tougher part, moving the new storage into production.

The process is to shut down the system to Init Level 1 (so that as little as possible is currently running), mount the new storage, copy the files over, rename the old storage out of the way, and then update the /etc/fstab to reflect the new storage mount point.

Inside the running virtual machine, I gave the command init 1

Now I have to use the Linode virtual machine manager Launch LISH Console to get logged into the running machine (Init Level 1 turns off the network).

mkdir /mnt/newvar
mount /dev/mapper/vg_var-lv_var /mnt/newvar/
cp -apx /var/* /mnt/newvar
mv /var /var.old

Okay, the contents of /var are now inside the LVM logical volume. Now to configure the system to mount that logical volume at the file system mount point /var

First, use blkid to identify the universally unique identifier assigned to the LVM volume. Perhaps blkid says your LVM volume is this:

/dev/mapper/vg_var-lv_var: UUID="epstein-didnt-kill-himself-605169120" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4"

Then, edit /etc/fstab to have the UUID entry for the mount point:

UUID="epstein-didnt-kill-himself-605169120" /var ext4 defaults 0 1

Do this for the other LVM volumes and then clean up. Before rebooting, you should try mount -a just to make sure there are no errors; because if there are errors mounting things, that’s going to make the reboot suck, badly.

Cleanup was to delete /mnt/newvar and to delete /var.old (and the other LVM mount points processed the same way).

Kind of hating cloud servers right now

How in the world am I supposed to create LVM (Logical Volume Management) disk layouts on a cloud VM with a single big disk? Before I start piling in data, I want to put /var/mail on it’s own partition.

Maybe it’s just that Google is stupid, and the answer is plain as day if I could find it.

Linode is annoying, because the pages I found said (in essence) “Don’t use LVM, use our attached disks at an additional $2 per disk per month.” Well, I could add a disk and then use LVM to configure it. But that means that I’m going to have a 25 GB /boot partiition and then hardly anything else over on the new disk. What it won’t do is keep the system from going comatose if some process starts spamming a log file and fills the disk. That’s stupid. And I’d be paying $2 a month, forever, for the stupidity.

I want to install LVM so that I have the option of adding another disk later, and it would be super easy. I’ve done LVM at work for years now, and it’s great. But at work, I get to install the machine from a boot ISO, and I get to go through every step of the install. Linode creates new virtual machines from images, where the disk is pre-configured. I don’t get to say I want /home on a separate volume (for example).

Every search I’ve done about LVM has two assumptions behind it: 1) there is a newly added virgin disk, or 2) during install, choose to partition the disk the way you want.

Nothing appears to address the situation where I’ve got a 25 GB disk with 20 GB free, and I’d like to move /home and /var and /tmp to /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sda3

I need to do pvcreate, but it errs out because I don’t have a newly added virgin disk.

I doubt this problem is particular to Linode; I suspect Rackspace and Vultr have the same problem – the preconfigured image is what you get; go kick rocks if you want something else.

It is frustrating, becasue I cannot be the first person on the planet to have thought of this or asked this question. But if the answer is obvious, I’m not finding it with Google search.

I’m not finding Rimworld to be very fun

It got an “Overwhelmingly Positive” score on the Steam store, and I bet for younger players it is great. But I’m old, so my brain does not move as fast as young peoples’ do.

This means I lose a lot. Half of the time I have two of my four man crew in the hospital (the room I set up to be my hospital). Pretty much as soon as people are healthy, the AI throws another rabid schnauser / deer / antelope at my crew.

The AI in this game is supposed to be really good (by reputation I have read). But for me, it never lets up and there aren’t any easier / lower settings I can set. It is simply unrelenting and oppressive.

I want to like this game; I’ve never played The Sims but I imagine this is like The Spacefaring Sims On Another Planet. It has goals and objectives – and it applies pressure to get there. So it’s not bad at all. I also really like that it has a Linux native version. The soundtrack is really good.

There are supposed to be quests in this game, where I send off people to accomplish whatever goal. I lose (or nearly lose) so many rabid animal fights (or malevolent humans) that I cannot afford to send people on the quest. So then I’m told I failed yet another quest.

But if the only thing that ever happens in this game is that my pawns* die often, then I’m going to be sad I spent the money on it.

I’ll try some more; but I hope fun shows up soon.

*that’s what the game calls them.

Putting an image on a Raspberry Pi

  1. Download a .raw.xz file
    1. In this case, it was https://download.opensuse.org/distribution/leap/15.4/appliances/openSUSE-Leap-15.4-ARM-KDE-raspberrypi.aarch64.raw.xz
    2. Yes, I also downloaded the .sha256 file and ran sha256sum against the downloaded image to make sure the image file was not damaged during transfer.
  2. Open a terminal session and become root
  3. Determine which device the SD card is
    1. In this case, it was /dev/sdc
  4. Copy the image file to the SD card
 xzcat /home/david/Downloads/openSUSE-Leap-15.4-ARM-KDE-raspberrypi.aarch64.raw.xz | dd bs=4M of=/dev/sdc iflag=fullblock oflag=direct status=progress; sync

LibreOffice is working better now (somewhat), and I don’t know why

Okay, so I had a theme that wasn’t installed correctly, which made automatic updates for all of OpenSUSE complain they wouldn’t work. I did a re-install of everything KDE, and the missing theme dependency no longer prevents automatic updating from working seamlessly. Cool.

But, I saw the full re-install of KDE “upgraded” LibreOffice. Sure enough, I’m back to running version 7.1

Well, at least I have version 6.4 on disk, and could pretty easily downgrade if needed. Might as well try it out and see.

At first blush, I didn’t appear to have the problem. But, I’d seen that before. I moved the window to the secondary monitor, and the problem returned. Not cool.

But this time, if I move the LibreOffice window back to my primary monitor, the problem vanishes; the window returns to normal. That used to never happen: once the window layout was corrupted, no matter where I placed it, it remained corrupted.

So I can use the current version LibreOffice – I just need to use it on my secondary monitor. I’m okay with that. If that’s the worst thing I have to put up with this month, I’m a lucky guy.

Actually, I just started doing some SharePoint work. Already, I have way worse going on, and it has nothing to do with LibreOffice or KDE or OpenSUSE. 😉

LibreOffice broken – it’s version 7 that is broken, and the problem is multiple monitors

What confused me before is that sometimes it appeared to work, but then it would break again. I finally figured out that it was sliding the window from one monitor to the other that invoked the broken behavior.

I went back to the earliest version of LibreOffice that is “official”, and it was still broken. I went and got the latest version of LibreOffice 6, and it is no longer broken.

LibreOffice has been painfully broken on OpenSUSE KDE for a couple months now

And the solution was to install libreoffice-gtk3

I’m rather surprised that it remained so painful for so long. If I were a new user, I’d still be broken.

I don’t know what it takes to figure out that this package should be in the “required” list. Perhaps I installed something else that added GTK3, and now that it’s there, the LibreOffice UI became significantly damaged? Perhaps LibreOffice sees some GTK3 component and then runs as if libreoffice-gtk3 is present?

The result is that every LibreOffice document would open with a split in the middle of the document, and, the main menu was gone.

I had found a document that said that perhaps KDE dark themes were to blame, or were out of date. Man I fouled some things up chasing that wild goose. I also lost some documents I had built, as tried to delete bad configuration files that seemed they might be the problem.

Anyway, if your LibreOffice looks like this:

And you want it to look like this (with File menu and everything):

install the libreoffice-gtk3 module.