Tag Archives: archlinux

A subjective review of CachyOS installations

Computers, , ,

I’d seen the name CachyOS popping up before but only when I saw it is ArchLinux based and optimized for speed my curiosity put it on top of my wish list.

Tried it on one computer, installation was pretty smooth although I didn’t like their default KDE based installer which felt sluggish. After installation I tested Cinnamon and Gnome desktop and I was impressed by its snappy performance.

Tried it on another computer, a considerable slower computer, and on that one the CachyOS installer kept failing during partitioning and formatting. I tried the text based installer and the GUI based installer several times, tried ext4 instead of the default btrfs, and even pre-formatted but it kept failing with errors that didn’t make sense to me. And I didn’t want to spend more time on it. After this setback I went for a plain Arch Linux installation on the very same computer and that went fine.[1]

Conclusion :

Pros (subjective, personal) :

  •  Fish shell as default
  •  Has aliases for ls with eza (the successor of exa)
  • Feels snappy
  • Output of eza shows the icons as it should (Unlike all the recent installations I did among other with Debian, Linux Mint (Ubuntu and Debian based flavors) and I believe also plain ArchLinux.

Cons : None yet.

Here’s the list of aliases it comes with.

alias .. ‘cd ..’
alias … ‘cd ../..’
alias …. ‘cd ../../..’
alias ….. ‘cd ../../../..’
alias …… ‘cd ../../../../..’
alias apt ‘man pacman’
alias apt-get ‘man pacman’
alias cleanup ‘sudo pacman -Rns (pacman -Qtdq)’
alias dir ‘dir –color=auto’
alias egrep ‘egrep –color=auto’
alias fgrep ‘fgrep –color=auto’
alias fish_vi_dec ‘fish_vi_inc_dec dec’
alias fish_vi_inc ‘fish_vi_inc_dec inc’
alias fixpacman ‘sudo rm /var/lib/pacman/db.lck’
alias gitpkg ‘pacman -Q | grep -i “\\\\-git” | wc -l’
alias grep ‘grep –color=auto’
alias grubup ‘sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg’
alias hw ‘hwinfo –short’
alias jctl ‘journalctl -p 3 -xb’
alias la ‘eza -a –color=always –group-directories-first –icons’
alias ll ‘eza -l –color=always –group-directories-first –icons’
alias ls ‘eza -al –color=always –group-directories-first –icons’
alias lt ‘eza -aT –color=always –group-directories-first –icons’
alias mirror ‘sudo cachyos-rate-mirrors’
alias please sudo
alias psmem ‘ps auxf | sort -nr -k 4’
alias psmem10 ‘ps auxf | sort -nr -k 4 | head -10’
alias tarnow ‘tar -acf ‘
alias tb ‘nc termbin.com 9999’
alias untar ‘tar -zxvf ‘
alias update ‘sudo pacman -Syu’
alias vdir ‘vdir –color=auto’
alias wget ‘wget -c ‘

[1] And that made me wonder : Surely an existing ArchLinux installation can be converted into a CachyOS installation 🙂

Testing Galene videoconference server software

Internet, , , , ,

During the Covid-19 pandemic Jitsi-Meet was one of the more popular software among some people for videoconference calls. However, Jitsi-Meet is not very secure. If people choose a very simple room name and no password then it can happen that suddenly strangers join your video call. Self-hosting and maintaining Jitsi-Meet is also not super easy.

Galene is different because it comes with the feature to create users, and users can have operate privileges to create invite links for other users. The invite links can be time limited.

I’ve tested self-hosting Galene and I was happy to see that it ran pretty well on moderate hardware (VPS with 1 GB RAM, with a swap file. Using Debian Linux as OS).

The question remains how many calls and users it can handle very well.

Galene has community provided packages for Yunohost, Arch Linux (AUR) and FreeBSD. A drawback of Galene is that it appears to be a one person project but there’s many one person projects and software can be forked when a project becomes dormant for some reason.

Off-topic : On the same VPS I’ve also installed Prosody with Yunohost and after getting the DNS settings right, as suggested by Yunohost, video-calls with Conversations IM app worked out of the box. Very cool! Thank you people at Yunohost!!! :)))