Do you prepare for a power outage?

Discussion
141

Saltwater is water (H2O) that contains dissolved salt (NaCl). The salt molecules get pulled apart into separate sodium and chlorine ions which water attaches to. Oceans contain an average of 3.5% salt.

So the electrical seperation gives off chlorine gas (which is poison) ?
Plus the salt Na sodium, that is used in cooking as well as other things

There is discussion in our village if we can convert the sea water to fill our pools. I think not, as we would need to filter before use and then replace all the pipework. Too expensive. With our 40 year old system. But agree in principal that it would be better for the environment

As for electric… not sure

142

I saw on the news recently Adelaide South Australia had to fire up their desalination plant as their was insufficient rainfall over the winter period to fill up the reservoirs…

One of the major engineering feats of 19th Century Australia, was building a water pipeline from Perth (Mundaring Weir) to Kalgoorlie (some 700 km)… Mundaring Weir blocks off The Helena River - so it doesn’t really run at all - the outlet from the Helena into the Swan is not far from my place - it’s “full” but more from backfill from the Swan River down near me - about 5 km further east, the Helena is mostly dry…

It (pipeline to Kalgoorlie) kinda mostly follows Great Eastern Highway - and is visible for long stretches as one rides / drives East…

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143

We need to somehow capture that metre of rainfall in Cairns/Townsville and send it over to you blokes in the West.

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144

Pipeline 700 km … at what cost and how much lost through leaks ?

145

Power Outage – speak of the devil.

Where I live power outages are rare. Maybe once or twice a year and then only a flicker or maybe the power will be out for an hour or 2.
So last night I was doing an upgrade (or update) in place for LM going from
21.3 to LM 22.0. And bang, power outage for 2 1/2 hours.

Linux Mint will boot, but task bar is missing and the upgrade had not finish.I had a Clonezilla backup dated Jan 18. So I thought, no problem and I restored my system.

My system is on /dev/sda2, When I perform a backup, I copy both sda1 & sda2 (Uefi & root). Somehow I directed Clonezilla to restore to sdb1 & sdb2. Clonezilla did not restore sda1 to sdb1 because the partition sdb2 was smaller then the backup. Sda2 restored to sdb2 which was a small partition with some data that was lost, but no concern because it had backup data on it.

Linux LM boots fine now, but here is the problem. Sdb is HDD, sda is SSD, So again I thought no problem, I will restore LM to the correct place on sda2.

I ran the restore, then at the terminal I ran,
sudo apt update
sudo grub-install /dev/sda
sudo update-grub
and re-booted the PC. and the grub menu shows both LM.

I select Linux Mint on (dev/sda2), but the system boots to Linux on sdb2.
I am very confused.

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146

Hi Howard,
That means that inside the Mint on /dev/sda2 there is a file /boot/grub/grub.cfg
and inside that file there is a line that identifies the root filesystem to boot from
and that line identifies the wrong partition.

You can check if I am correct before you do anything
In the grub menu, choose the line for Mint on sda2, then press ‘e’…
You will get an edit menu
arrow down to a line that says … linux…
then look at root=xxxxxxx on that line.
It should point to sda2

If it does not, you have to find a way to boot into the Mint that is on sda2, and then do
grub-install
update-grub.

If you cant get that Mint on sda2 to boot… let me know…there are ways

There is also the issue of you using device names… sda, sdb, … If you have more than one disk, you cannot guarantee that hd0 will be sda and hd1 will be sdb every time you boot… they seem to be allocated in random order.
It is better to use UUID’s if you have more than one disk.
That may be part of your confusing situation

Regards
Neville

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147

Hi Neville,
I did as instructed and interesting I found, but not surprised the following.
This only part of the line;
“5.15.0-126-generic-root=UUID=dc901d4f-” … 374e. Did not think you needed to see the whole
UUID string. But what was not surprising was the UUID indeed pointed to /dev/sdb2. Not surprising because that is where the sysytem booted from.

What is surprising is why update-grub said it found LM on /dev/sda2, but did not store the location of it correctly.

PS. Not a critical problem, but more for learning. I can perform a fresh install of Linux Mint.

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148

So that is all correct… except it is the uuid of the wrong disk.

You can edit it and get a boot as follows

  • find the correct uuid of sda disk
  • go into the grub menu again, choose the correct sda2 linux, press ‘e’ … then use the editor to correct any wrong uuid’s, then boot… I think F10 will boot it using your edits.
  • when it boots, do grub-install and update-grub. That should fix the grub.cfg file.
  • reboot… it should work

Failing that, it is , as you say, a fresh install

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149

Sounds good, but a question.
Can I just go in and edit grub.cfg? I found it listed at /boot/grub.

I think I will have to do a fresh install and wipe the partition on /dev/sdb2, either that or assign the partition on /dev/sda2 to a new UUID. I believe I can do that with gparted. When I restore sda2 to sdb2 it carried over the same UUID. So now both sda2 & sdb2 have the same UUID.

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150

Yes you can… as long as you can either

  • boot into the correct linux, or
  • use a live usb and mount sda2 and edit the file

but
if you are in the correct linux… just do update-grub… that should fix the grub.cfg file

I thought you could not boot the correct linux.

Cheers
Neville

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151

That’s correct. Regardless of which Linux I choose on the grub menu, they both boot to the Linux on sdb2.

Update - I booted a live Linux. Formatted partition sdb2. Re-booted the PC.
And now the correct Linux on sda2 is now root.
Problem solved tho I do not understand why grub now picks up the correct partition.
I half expected that the PC would not boot at all.

After the format of sdb2, it got a new UUID. Now grub could only go to the partition with the UUID that was stored in it?

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152

Neither do I.
Maybe the Linux on sdb2 was on control of grub?
When you deleted it, did it boot with a grub menu, or did it perhaps do a uefi boot, because it could not find grub?

Perhaps you should do another
grub-install on sda, and
update-grub
just to be sure that you have a grub on the right disk

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153

In the time it took to read this discussion, I could have done a fresh install. Maybe twice. It reminds me of the interminable pipewire-pulseaudio discussion–just flush and reinstall. If a distro doesn’t give you the sound you want, use a different one. Endlessly available customization leads to endless tinkering when a flush and go is easier on the mind.

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154

That’s one thing I love about Linux. You can have an OS up and running in less then 30 minutes and that includes the download time for the ios.

I actually perform a fresh install for Mint 22.1. It believe it took less time to re-install then to upgrade from 21.3 to 22.0 to 22.1.

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155

Then how long would it take you to reconfigure your printer(s), configure your network, install your favourite apps, and setup the sound system?

Yes, a fresh install is sometimes the easiest solution.
When I do it, I dont overwrite the old version, I instsll it alongside the old, and that helps doing all the reconfigures.

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I timed it–10 minutes. The HP printer is recognized and set up automatically by most distros. The Canon needs a atp/dnf package processed. The computer is hardwired into the network, five minutes for the apps. Sound usually works, but I don’t really care about it. 90 percent of our distros meet my needs as installed.

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157

You are fortunate. I have to configure ancient printers and a local network. I never bother with sound… as you can see from that other topic, sound config is a nightmare.

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Hi Bill,
I have to concede that you were right this time.
A fresh install seems like the only solution.
I have no idea what happened to @Sheila_Flanagan 's MX , but it has multiple issues apart from the sound problem
Cheers
Neville

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159

I don’t feel qualified to offer Sheila solutions or suggestions, but my take is that she’d be better off with a distro that fills most of her needs right out of the box rather than building a large stable of apps. Maybe Fedora would work more easily for her?

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160

I thought I’d post my list of the apps required for my MX laptop. Each computer I own has its own folder in my Obsidian notebook where I list not only the specs, upgrades & Linux installs, etc. but a note just for the apps required to run my business and have everything I need for when I travel. This means I have to install these and set them up for any distro I use:

Anydesk
Teamviewer
Conky w/temperature display for watching since it overheats easily
Bitwarden
Ungoogled Chromium
Floorp
Webcam apps
Barrier/Input Leap
Betterbird
KDE Connect/SMS (setup my and Bill's phones)
Crossover (and get BFGs from old CO install)
Protonmail Bridge
ODOO
Steam
Heroic
Calengoo
LocalSend
Timeshift
Borg Backup

I know a personal laptop can usually find within the store or package manager the normal apps needed for daily use.

I have not only calendars that are synced with my and my husbands phones, I hate texting on a phone :upside_down_face: so I use the KDE or Gnome Gconnect apps to link our phones to my computer. This allows me to respond to text messages by typing them on my computer and get those many codes you receive via text to login to bank sites, etc. I can simply copy the code from the app and paste into the browser where I need it. Then I am also able to send pics from our phones directly to the computer via those Linux connect apps.

Additionally, since I RDP so much into my mom’s computer, which also uses an app to connect to her phone, from there I connect “virtually” to her phone so that I can do what needs to be done on it. That requires Anydesk and Teamviewer as many times the servers are bogged down on either of them and I need a backup to be able to gain access.

Then there are the accounting apps required for the business (ODOO). I use my Obsidian notebook for the customer database, and LibreOffice for all forms and spreadsheets, but the accounting software is necessary for bookkeeping and taxes as well as customer payments and inventory.

Then I use a password manager, two actually, but only one has a desktop app and that is Bitwarden, which then uses Authy to authenticate for security purposes. I also store secure notes in there.

Then if you know what a KVM is, that is where all computers share the same keyboard and mouse. That is what Barrier provides. Since I have three computers at my desk, Barrier allows me to move the mouse from one (where I may copy CLI from one’s terminal to another where I have this forum open in a tab, and paste it here quickly.) Same with those pesky codes for logins, even if I am logging in on one computer, I can copy the code from another and paste into the first. It requires an initial setup and getting the ISP for the server computer and input that on the client computers.

Then I use Protonmail for secure email. That requires a bridge that must not only be logged into both business and personal accounts, that bridge then connects with Thunderbird on some and Betterbird on other computers so that my calendars all sync via the bridge and email is displayed in each.

And I have a large collection of old casual games that can only run on Linux via either the Bottles app or Crossover by Codeweavers. Then of course the Steam app for other games must be setup and all games reinstalled on a new distro or reinstall of a current one. After a few reinstalls of a Linux distro, that got old and so I have most of them now on an external drive, but do have to point the new install of Steam to them.

And of course backups: Timeshift and Borg.

I hope that explains things better. I know it’s hard to comprehend all that is needed to fulfill the tasks of running a business, caring remotely for an elderly parent, and using your computer for personal tasks and fun. But the normal Linux apps just do not cover these use scenarios.

Sheila

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