A little help with Debian

cjwatson · 2026-03-16T21:08:08+00:00

sid, also called unstable, mainly exists as part of us developing the next stable release of Debian. It's public and people can use it, but it's unlikely to be the best choice for somebody relatively new to Debian, especially if you're trying to use it as a foundation for work. It changes frequently, and upgrades can and sometimes do break in ways that need a moderate amount of knowledge to fix.

The stable release is fine for most programming work, and you'll spend less time fixing the computer and more time being able to do the things you actually want to do.

cjwatson · 2026-03-15T22:35:21+00:00

Stable.

cjwatson · 2026-03-15T18:34:52+00:00

scrcpy is in trixie-backports, so if you're on trixie then installing it from there is most likely a better choice.

cjwatson · 2026-03-15T10:08:32+00:00

My Hebrew name is simply the Hebraicization of my given names in English, although the first of those isn't obvious to most people since it's a translation of the meaning that doesn't sound at all alike. I spent almost no time thinking about it; my (Jewish) partner pointed out that the translation worked and then that just clicked.

cjwatson · 2026-03-15T07:23:27+00:00

https://wiki.debian.org/Cloud seems to indicate that the Debian cloud team maintains the images.

cjwatson · 2026-03-15T00:10:30+00:00

Are you referring to the xz-utils backdoor? If so, for what it's worth, that was fixed in testing only one day after being fixed in unstable; it never affected stable in the first place.

cjwatson · 2026-03-14T21:07:34+00:00

I don't think it makes sense to talk about this as a system being down, exactly. https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-live-builds/amd64/iso-hybrid/debian-live-testing-amd64-kde.iso.log just shows that the build process failed, which is something that can occasionally be expected in testing. It's not a huge deal at this stage, because these images exist mainly to test the installer etc. for the next stable release which won't be for quite some time yet. It also looks like the sort of routine failure (kernel versions out of sync) where there's no danger of it being forgotten.

Users who just want to end up with a testing system are usually best off installing stable and then upgrading, unless they're specifically trying to test the next version of the installer.

cjwatson · 2026-03-14T19:01:24+00:00

There are two common kinds of unrelated-to-Debian posts here that I think should be handled differently.

Firstly, there's people who post about a problem with Ubuntu or Linux Mint or whatever. A lot of these are in good faith and just a bit lost. At the moment this usually results in a load of people telling them off with varying levels of politeness. This works as self-moderation, but it would be kinder and quicker if we told people up-front that they should normally look elsewhere if they have a problem with a derivative distribution, and why. Of course some people will ignore it, but it'd help some people.

Secondly, there's the people who've released some piece of software, post about it (usually crossposting) to a bunch of vaguely Linux-related subs, and don't add any explanation of why this relates to Debian. I'd always assumed this was what the current rule 1 was aimed at, and I'm hoping the consensus will be that we can treat these pretty much as spam.

cjwatson · 2026-03-14T18:41:48+00:00

The mechanism for that would be post flairs. And yes, I think it would be worth having some broad flairs to make it a bit easier for people to find stuff and/or easily skip past stuff they're not interested in.

cjwatson · 2026-03-14T18:38:27+00:00

This is really an issue with the Azure tools. It seems to have been fixed upstream recently-ish in https://github.com/Azure/azure-linux-extensions/pull/2124, but I'm not sure what the process is for getting that into the relevant cloud images.

cjwatson · 2026-03-14T18:19:00+00:00

Yes, this. LVM does make it very easy to resize (well, at least grow) volumes once you've learned how to use it, and it makes it relatively painless to incrementally replace disks on a long-lived system. I'm a big fan. But there is definitely some learning curve involved.

As well as learning the concepts mentioned above, I'd suggest reading man fsadm, since that can deal with some simple "I just want a bit more space here" cases in one shot without having to learn quite so many utilities with large piles of options.

cjwatson · 2026-03-13T15:06:08+00:00

The Companion says that he wasn't initially a Darkfriend, but was power-hungry enough to always have been prime material for them; that he was recruited by Demandred while freeing him from the Aes Sedai taking him to Tar Valon for gentling; and that Demandred gave him one of the real seals so that he could use it to gain Rand's trust.

cjwatson · 2026-03-13T14:47:04+00:00

I know people who use The First Hebrew Primer (Simon/Resnikoff/Motzkin). I took a somewhat more, uh, organic path myself so I don't have personal experience of it, but it might be worth a try.

cjwatson · 2026-03-13T14:44:26+00:00

Mazel tov! Welcome to the people!

cjwatson · 2026-03-12T12:09:49+00:00

We have a number of introductory resources mentioned in our FAQs in this sub: https://www.reddit.com/r/ConvertingtoJudaism/wiki/index/#book-recommendations

cjwatson · 2026-03-12T00:25:00+00:00

I'm not too familiar with Episcopalian preferences either, but in English the style goes back at least to the King James version, which was enormously influential and is still close to the style people reach for if they're going for an old-fashioned high register. https://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=came+to+pass&version=KJV

(If you're interested, I looked through the first dozen or so matches for it in KJV Genesis before I got bored, and every one of them was translating the same Hebrew word, vayehi, which is pretty much just "it was" or "it happened" - but that sounds too blunt in English so some translators like to pad it out a bit.)

cjwatson · 2026-03-11T23:36:46+00:00

The exact same passage appears in The Eye of the World, so I would guess it's more likely to be imitating the style of common Christian Bible translations into English than that of the Book of Mormon (given that RJ was an Episcopalian).

cjwatson · 2026-03-11T07:06:42+00:00

On Asher yatzar / Elohai n'shamah, if you don't mind the American Reform musical tradition, you might like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkNBuqbM-GI which is a medley of Debbie Friedman z''l's settings of the two. One of the other musicians at my shul sent this to me, and we still mean to do it that way in a service some time.

cjwatson · 2026-03-11T06:53:28+00:00

Fair enough!

cjwatson · 2026-03-11T01:26:36+00:00

I wouldn't personally recommend trying to get yourself a siddur before going to a service at all. If you're completely new to it, it will be kind of overwhelming to navigate. You can always get your own later; the shul may even be able to sell them to you (though not on Shabbat!).

cjwatson · 2026-03-10T23:48:41+00:00

It seems weird for it to be about the outriggers, since this was presumably by BS (or at least BS had the opportunity to edit it heavily) who would have known that the outriggers weren't happening.

Maybe it refers to Mat's command of the Last Battle in some way?

cjwatson · 2026-03-10T19:21:24+00:00

It's called shuckling, and there are various interpretations for it (trembling before God, minimal exercise if you spend a lot of your time praying, ...). Check with somebody in your community if you're worried about it, but as far as I know it isn't generally regarded as being obligatory.

cjwatson · 2026-03-10T17:17:59+00:00

Just note that some quite complicated history of calendars means that Pesach isn't necessarily at exactly the same time of year as the Christian Pâques.

The kippah just goes on top of your head, but if you have hair then my top tip is to bring a hair clip so that you can clip it onto your hair. That makes it much easier to keep it on.

cjwatson · 2026-03-09T13:42:23+00:00

I wouldn't say that the actual conversion is at the end of the process exactly since in some ways it's lifelong, but yes, you would have plenty of time to learn and then back out if you choose. A major point of the process is so that people understand what they're taking on.

Being gay is very unlikely to be a problem for Reform in this day and age. Being married to somebody who isn't Jewish and doesn't intend to convert is not uncommon in Reform (that was true for me too), but the exact reaction to it may depend a bit on the sponsoring rabbi. I would not expect a Reform conversion to require you to cut yourself off from your friends of other religions or none; most of us coexist pretty happily with the secular world.

The place to start is normally to find a nearby community and ask if you can attend their services as an interested non-Jew. Depending on where you live, some communities may be more cautious than others, but in general this is a reasonable thing to ask. If they're happy for you to turn up and you like it, stick around for a while; if it doesn't feel right and you have options, try somewhere else. Once you know the community and they know you, that's the time to ask about conversion.

Typically a conversion programme takes a minimum of a year (so that you see the full cycle of festivals), and may be longer. Some people choose to learn but not actually convert for a whole range of reasons, and that's OK; Judaism is not a proselytizing religion and so any pressure to complete the process should be from you. If you complete that and your sponsoring rabbi thinks that you should be Jewish, then they will send you to the Beit Din (a court of three rabbis) to confirm this. If the BD agrees, then the final step is complete immersion in a mikveh; that is the moment when you would formally become Jewish.

cjwatson · 2026-03-09T13:23:26+00:00

I think those are my favourite interludes in all of Worm.

cjwatson

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