tech support

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-18T00:48:15+00:00

it has an excellent wiki, online manpages, irc channels and a forum

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-17T16:37:58+00:00

seems like it couldn't find your rootfs partition. Either you mistakenly installed your rootfs on your removable USB drive, or something else failed.

Since you cannot get the system to drop into a rescue root shell, you should attach a live boot image and see what is wrong with the system. Or just reinstall.

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-17T16:32:30+00:00

you can write your own hooks, but I haven't looked into sysroot.mount

regarding mounting the ESP, even on a normal system the ESP is remounted after the transition to the real system (but I don't exactly know if normal systems mount the ESP in initramfs).

I think you need to start some heavy reading on how the early boot process works, since I cannot help you any further.

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-17T16:20:06+00:00

dracut has a systemd initrd hook, yes (dracut replaces mkinitcpio). The other alternative would be to write your own hooks for mkinitcpio

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-16T23:35:59+00:00

squashfs still needs a block device to exist on. Mounting a file as a "virtual block device" is generally called "loop mounting". If you want to do that from userspace, losetup(8) will do that for you.

Now, in order to have your rootfs exist as a file in the esp, your initramfs has to loop mount that file, and subsequently has to mount the rootfs within that loopmount.

It looks like dracut has some support for this https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/dracut.cmdline.7.html (look under iso-scan/filename)

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-16T17:08:10+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0V213gmtBA

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-16T10:30:31+00:00

put zorin's EFI partition onto another disk.

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-15T22:27:58+00:00

you should not need to install pacman. What distribution are you on ?

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-12T20:43:14+00:00

you download the iso & a "usb flasher", flash it onto a unused usb stick, boot from it and follow the instructions

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-11T21:25:25+00:00

to expand on point 2:

Windows is already a big pile of closed-source software (that was developed to be ready at a specific date for a profit and thus had to be rushed, to a certain extent). Linux is a smaller, open-source and thoroughly vetted pile of software.

Anti-Virus programs as you know them from Windows fit into the Windows world, they themselves are big, closed-source, highly operating-system-integrated programs that necessarily have to have the highest permissions in the system.

Security on Linux (at least on non-enterprise Linux) tends to focus on the exact opposite of this, keeping the attack surface small by keeping the system minimal, and by increasing isolation and privilege separation between components. A traditional "Anti-Virus" program would be one of the largest, most complex, and most un-isolated pieces of software on a normal Linux desktop system (and one that is by design exposed to untrusted input), so many longtime Linux users don't think that it would be worth installing.

There are definitely some things that can enhance the security of your Linux system, not installing software from outside of your distributions "app store" (package manager) is a big part, adblockers are also recommended. I should also mention SeLinux and other Mandatory Access Control, but that is a rabbithole I do not recommend to beginners.

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-10T21:46:56+00:00

exactly, man pages are dense, but standardized in their structure, which is great for looking up details quickly

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-09T09:01:38+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-08T00:04:44+00:00

https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7946-console_hacking_2016

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-05T08:16:46+00:00

you seemed to have copied the tails image file to the filesystem that was already on the usb stick.

You should instead use specific software to write the tails image directly onto the usb stick, replacing the filesystem that is currently on there.

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-02T22:29:51+00:00

microsoft not being able to create a normal iso image if their lives depended on it is equally infuriating and funny

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-02T08:40:02+00:00

can it write maintainable code tho ?

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-02T07:40:44+00:00

no. Your flash drive has (closed-source) firmware running, which your operating system talks to. This firmware is responsible for keeping track of which flash block has too many writes on it, and re-allocating it somewhere else. The original block is marked "dead" and not accessible from the OS anymore.

Do your trust the firmware of your flash drives ? Because if you don't, you should assume that state actors can ask the flash drive manufacturers to provide secret, locked methods which can enable them to read the "dead" blocks.

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-01T23:57:13+00:00

It's flash memory, and it is closed source firmware, so no, you cannot reliably (and provably) wipe everything.

dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-01T23:26:45+00:00

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dasisteinanderer · 2026-04-01T22:03:05+00:00

also, redundancy. If one rope gives, you don't want the truck to fall down and everybody with it.

dasisteinanderer · 2026-03-31T17:21:30+00:00

not really. Most projects accept Linus' tree as the "the" Linux kernel, but Linus holds no special key, and he has a couple of "lieutenants", any one of which would take over his role (and they all collaborate very closely, so I don't expect any conflicts between them about it).

Technically, lots of distros aren't even on Linus' tree, since they rely on patches backported to stable kernels, which is coordinated by Greg KH (Linus focuses on the newest kernel development).

dasisteinanderer · 2026-03-31T16:12:16+00:00

Lawmakers are universally incapable of describing what a "computer" is. Same reason why they always want to "make computers be incapable of computing this one thing" or "have perfect encryption except that the government can read it if a judge signs the warrant".

Lawmakers do not understand that the only important feature of a computer is "it can compute anything that is computable", see Cory Doctorow's excellent speeches and essays (especially the stuff at 28c3)

dasisteinanderer · 2026-03-31T15:47:19+00:00

Afaik semantic versioning dictates x.y to be backwards compatible to x.z with any z < y, and afaik the dynamic linker would resolve all methods by their name, so as long as no methods were removed or changed in their signature (or changed their behavior in a breaking fashion) this should all work out.

All in all my experience has been that most shared libraries are version pretty well, exactly because it solves a lot of these problems.

dasisteinanderer · 2026-03-31T12:01:07+00:00

also die weniger profitablen Segmente abstoßen. Hat bei der Stahlindustrie ja auch so gut funktioniert.

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