Well, this blog is now in https://tech.iogirl.com, I adquired iogirl.com since i found the domain more relevant than girl.place. This blog was in linux.girl.place, and before that it was cat.princesa.company, and it even was zsh.li at 2019.

In my seek of the right domain I had moved the site many times, because first my philosophy was keep it simple, so I used the zsh.li domain, then I wanted to transmit more than just technical stuff, but something cute, feminine, so linux.girl.place, right now I wanted a dot com domain, these domains are very scarce and you will find very long domains nowadays.

I believe this is because I'm very influenced by my current major, accountancy, trying to valuate everything in economical aspects, Iogirl.com is a strong brand since is a short domain and transmits my relationship with technology too.

Also because I'm pretty interested in investment right now, another reason it's that I want to write about magical girl, I will do so in the domain girl.place

It had been a while since last time I wrote about technology. But this year I have been pretty active in technology. So here we go:

I just installed RHEL 9.3 as my main Desktop system, I got a developer individual subscription. Currently at moment of writing this text despite you are reading this thanks to Ubuntu and Debian, some months ago this site was still running on Centos, and back in 2016 this site was in a shared hosting that used Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Currently I just try to disconnect from the OS a bit, and use anything that has proven to be useful, currently I was having lots of issues with Debian and right now I'm working pretty nice in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I know that Red Hat is having issues with the community, and derivated distros are stopped to be binary compatible and they are more focusing in API compatible and I'm not sure about the future of these distros, so I think the most conservative and stable option is to use RHEL itself. If CentOS continued to be a RHEL binary clon as in the old days, I'd be using CentOS instead.

I believe this deserves a briew review, this is something unusual, at least to me, to see someone using CentOS, Rocky, Alma or Red Hat Enterprise as the main OS.

My decision is based only in practical reasons, I can install it in many devices and not worrying to much for version upgrades (RHEL supports last for 10 years). But also because Debian wasn't working to me as I was expecting it. I know that the issue might not be Debian but hey, Red Hat released this OS with this selected applications and it just works, and works well to me.

The experience is pretty similar to Fedora, I haven't used Fedora in years by the way, but you need complementary repos, RPMFusion, and Epel repos for extra packages and so you complete the installation. And now this distro is better than before thanks to snap and flatpack.

It reminded me when I used to download Fedora with Gnome 3, I knew a lot of things thanks to Fedora, how to use LVM, systemd, Gnome 3.

I mostly use the web browser, and a terminal.

It has been a while since the last time I used the pidgin Lurch plugin, the last time it was in Slackware.

1. Install dependencies

sudo dnf install git cmake libpurple-devel mxml-devel libxml2-devel libsqlite3x-devel libgcrypt-devel

2. Make the installation:

git clone https://github.com/gkdr/lurch/ cd lurch git submodule update --init --recursive make install-home

3. Now you can open pidgin and enable the plugin

The best, now you can also use it in finch, you have to reenable lurch there.

In both Pidgin and finch, you need to enable it in each conversation with the command /lurch enable, for more information type /lurch help in any conversation

When I first tried Qubes OS some months ago, it changed my view of security. Many people complains that is not very good for daily work, but I don't think that's have to be true.

I mean, I've using Slackware for some months, the more hard is something, the most creative you became. I'm impressed of myself due to my ability to solve problems.

I don't really know why I chose Slackware, the more I tried to explain, the more false looks for me. But I'm sure that I chose it because the DVD includes lots of useful utilities and windows managers.

With regards with Qubes OS, if you get used to security, then Qubes OS will be a good fit for you. But I don't know what to say, my way of understanding the world is incomprehensible for everyone. In my mind things really complex are too simple for me. By the other hand, frequently complex activities or plans of mine are empty of meaning.

But I think that there are simple things I liked about it: The main filesystem in the Virtual Machines are keep intact and changes are lost in each reboot, I really like how it it's isolated because there doesn't remain the system logs.
You can easy deleted a virtual machine and so easily control the metadata of your activity.

Actually I'm a bit obsessed in controlling the information because everything generates metadata. It's an obsessive-compulsive idea, but maybe I'm not wrong because the experts in security says to treat the information the same as radioactive waste.

Also I do like protecting the information, maybe I just care about information as few people in the world. I also love sharing information.

Does really people has an appropriate computer?

I would say that you should have at least 100G free for Qubes OS, 8G of RAM and a fast SSD. I use a raid with 3 hard disk and the start up process takes some time. I only suspend the computer instead of shutting down it in order to avoid stressing so much my hard disks. Qubes OS is making to suffer my hard disk. You can do many optimizations in the hard disk increasing the cache and delaying the writes.

I highly recommend a PSU because the last time my Qubes Os were ruined with an power outage in my house. The disposables machines uses lots of IO resources. I may say that the Anaconda installer is kind of tricky. It contains little bugs, so you will have to get dirty in the terminal.

Does really people think the more complexity, the more prone to failure?

Actually my Qubes OS system is working with 70 partitions of many kinds, loop devices, device mapper, and traditional, half of them mine, the other half are dependencies for Qubes OS. By the way, I only use 4 workplaces.

So don't be silly and do not create so much workplaces. Sometimes people are afraid of creating a third partition when right here we have tens of partitions.

Does really people know how to use Tor?

I was thinking that we don't need two Whonix installations since we can improvise the Whonix gateway with the Fedora template using a transparent Tor proxy. It's only a matter to modify the tor browser typing about:config and specifying the IP of the router plus the open port 9050. Finally disabling the extension that Start Tor. It's important to do in this way and not enabling the transparent proxy in Tor Browser since the transparent proxy cannot change the IP in each tab.

Does people really realize that more Templates means more updates?

Keep it minimalistic, because installing Qubes OS is like installing 5 operative systems, so it will increase the complexity of maintaining.

Does people really know about Fedora and Debian?

This question is relevant because some people rarely uses Linux, or more important, you may use Linux but don't know about both RPM or Deb package system. The RPM package system is special and sometimes needs kind of maintenance in matters such as expired package cache, or maybe the updates systems is locked.

Another considerations:

Moving files to dom0 isn't the most easy, but you can get used to the command to do it.

When I was using Fedora some months ago, there was a bug with the software raid, mdadm didn't start ; however this bug date from 2011 and it happened to me in 2017.

Check this Link

As this links says, I solved adding to /etc/mdadm.conf the following:

MAILADDR my.email@gmail.com

I thought that any Linux distro was pretty usable, but this year I changed my mind. Some days ago I installed Ubuntu in my netbook, and then I updated it and rebooted, after rebooting it was ruined, it was not able to start Xorg.

So I immediately reinstalled Ubuntu again and tried the same, but this time I disabled the automatic update and used the command line: apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. And in the next rebooting it was damaged in the same way.

However, notice that before updating my Ubuntu I could reboot it many times with any problem.

But there I have another bad experience:

Some months ago I installed Xubuntu in a Virtual Machine, and one day I tried to start it and it was not able to start up, I’ve tried Windows XP, Windows 8.1, Gentoo many times, Arch, Fedora, FreeBSD, and Ubuntu is the only Operative System that has ever been magically damaged.

But it is not only Ubuntu, I also have complain about Fedora, someone told me that after upgrading Fedora his system were ruined, but I could not believe it because I regard Linux as reliable. But that happened to me one time that I normally updated my Fedora.

You know that I don’t do any stupid thing and that I only use free drivers and also I don’t install unstable software. Indeed I had used Gentoo for 4 years with any problem.

That is the reason now I migrated to Slackware, Slackware is a distribution that never have had any problem with me, BTW have you noticed that Slackware has appeared in Mr. Robot recently?

Qubes OS

Also my Qubes Os was damaged, but that is interesting, Qubes OS is very easy to break because the complexity of it, it uses python scripts, virtualization libraries, so this system can be very easy broken. e.g an outage can damage a python library, and notice that python is a high level programming language that normally it is not needed to boot an operative system.

Did you know that my Qubes OS was in a raid 0 of 3 hard disks with XFS as filesystem?

As you may know, I'm using Qubes Os , and sincerely I think that Whonix can be too bloated. Whonix needs 4 virtual machines in Qubes OS in order to work:

sys-whonix	Is the Whonix VM running the Tor Network (backend)
whonix-gs	It is a Template VM for the Whonix frontend with Tor Browser.
whonix-ws	It is the Template VM for the Whonix backend
whonix-ws-dvm	It is the Whonix frontend

Even so, you also need to update dom0, Fedora and maybe Debian, thus, Qubes OS requires a regular update of 5 OS.

Once I uninstalled VLC of Whonix, and it uninstalled half of system, ruining it. Then I realized that the Qubes OS's Whonix is too bloated. Qubes Os needs a minimal Whonix only focused in running the Tor Browser.

Whonix depends in its own repository, I don't agree with centralization, there must be several repos you can choose, but then an eviden problem arises, that any of them can be compromised. Right?

So that, I had this problem: the Whonix repo expired when I needed to install very important updates , the repo was re-enabled several hours later.

I want you to know that we are depending so much in many people, the ideal is to create your own minimal "Whonix".

But it is more practical to use Tails in Qubes Os, since Tails uses a Transparent Proxy to Tor, so everything must be pass through Tor unless you got hacked. But everything will be lost after shutting down the Virtual Machine. So it's not that bad.

I recommend you to create your own LiveCD of any Linux or BSD with transparent Tor proxy instead using Tails, so that you don't have to depend on so many updates, however it is easier to remake a Tails iso than a self-build image.

You can use Gentoo for that purpose, so you will be aware of what exactly are you installing (and doing).

We do not believe in magic