Yesterday I was struggling a bit with a bash script I was writing. I needed to stop it from running flat out through every loop, and I wanted to see what certain values were at key points in the script.
Yes, I know I could use “read” to pause the script and “echo” to print values, but that leaves a lot of mess that I need to clean up afterwards… so I went looking for something else I could try.
You can have extensive debug statements, which are enabled with a --debug flag or environment variable… but again, messy.
You can run bash -x ./myscript.sh – and, indeed, I do frequently do that… but that shows you the commands which were run at each point, not what the outcome is of each of those commands.
If my problem had been a syntax one, I could have installed shellcheck, which is basically a linter for Bash and other shell scripting languages, but no, I needed more detail about what was happening during the processing.
Instead, I wanted something like xdebug (from PHP)… and I found Bash Debug for VSCode. This doesn’t even need you to install any scripts or services on the target machine – it’s interactive, and has a “watch” section, where you either highlight and right-click a variable expression (like $somevar or ${somevar}) to see when it changes. You can see where in the “callstack” you are and see what values are registered by that script.
Shellcheck shows me problems in my code…But Bash Debug helps me to find out what values are at specific points in the code.
In some work environments, you may find that a “Man In The Middle” (also known as MITM) proxy may have been configured to inspect HTTPS traffic. If you work in a predominantly Windows based environment, you may have had some TLS certificates deployed to your computer when you logged in, or by group policy.
I’ve previously mentioned that if you’re using Firefox on your work machines where you’ve had these certificates pushed to your machine, then you’ll need to enable a configuration flag to make those work under Firefox (“security.enterprise_roots.enabled“), but this is talking about Linux (like Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, etc.) and Linux-like environments (like WSL, MSYS2)
Late edit 2021-05-06: Following a conversation with SiDoyle, I added some notes at the end of the post about using the System CA path with the Python Requests library. These notes were initially based on a post by Mohclips from several years ago!
Start with Windows
From your web browser of choice, visit any HTTPS web page that you know will be inspected by your proxy.
If you’re using Mozilla Firefox
In Firefox, click on this part of the address bar and click on the right arrow next to “Connection secure”:
Clicking on the Padlock and then clicking on the Right arrow will take you to the “Connection Security” screen.Certification Root obscured, but this where we prove we have a MITM certificate.
Click on “More Information” to take you to the “Page info” screen
More obscured details, but click on “View Certificate”
In recent versions of Firefox, clicking on “View Certificate” takes you to a new page which looks like this:
Mammoth amounts of obscuring here! The chain runs from left to right, with the right-most blob being the Root Certificate
Click on the right-most tab of this screen, and navigate down to where it says “Miscellaneous”. Click on the link to download the “PEM (cert)”.
The details on the Certificate Authority (highly obscured!), but here is where we get our “Root” Certificate for this proxy.
Save this certificate somewhere sensible, we’ll need it in a bit!
Note that if you’ve got multiple proxies (perhaps for different network paths, or perhaps for a cloud proxy and an on-premises proxy) you might need to force yourself in into several situations to get these.
If you’re using Google Chrome / Microsoft Edge
In Chrome or Edge, click on the same area, and select “Certificate”:
This will take you to a screen listing the “Certification Path”. This is the chain of trust between the “Root” certificate for the proxy to the certificate they issue so I can visit my website:
This screen shows the chain of trust from the top of the chain (the “Root” certificate) to the bottom (the certificate they issued so I could visit this website)
Click on the topmost line of the list, and then click “View Certificate” to see the root certificate. Click on “Details”:
The (obscured) details for the root CA.
Click on “Copy to File” to open the “Certificate Export Wizard”:
In the Certificate Export Wizard, click “Next”Select “Base-64 encoded X.509 (.CER)” and click “Next”Click on the “Browse…” button to select a path.Name the file something sensible, and put the file somewhere you’ll find it shortly. Click “Save”, then click “Next”.
Once you’ve saved this file, rename it to have the extension .pem. You may need to do this from a command line!
Copy the certificate into the environment and add it to the system keychain
Ubuntu or Debian based systems as an OS, or as a WSL environment
As root, copy the proxy’s root key into /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/<your_proxy_name>.crt (for example, /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/proxy.my.corp.crt) and then run update-ca-certificates to update the system-wide certificate store.
RHEL/CentOS as an OS, or as a WSL environment
As root, copy the proxy’s root key into /etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors/<your_proxy_name>.pem (for example, /etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors/proxy.my.corp.pem) and then run update-ca-trust to update the system-wide certificate store.
MSYS2 or the Ruby Installer
Open the path to your MSYS2 environment (e.g. C:\Ruby30-x64\msys64) using your file manager (Explorer) and run msys2.exe. Then paste the proxy’s root key into the etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors subdirectory, naming it <your_proxy_name>.pem. In the MSYS2 window, run update-ca-trust to update the environment-wide certificate store.
If you’ve obtained the Ruby Installer from https://rubyinstaller.org/ and installed it from there, assuming you accepted the default path of C:\Ruby<VERSION>-x64 (e.g. C:\Ruby30-x64) you need to perform the above step (running update-ca-trust) and then copy the file from C:\Ruby30-x64\mysys64\etc\pki\ca-trust\extracted\pem\tls-ca-bundle.pem to C:\Ruby30-x64\ssl\cert.pem
Using the keychain
Most of your Linux and Linux-Like environments will operate fine with this keychain, but for some reason, Python needs an environment variable to be passed to it for this. As I encounter more environments, I’ll update this post!
The path to the system keychain varies between releases, but under Debian based systems, it is: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt while under RedHat based systems, it is: /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt.
Python “Requests” library
If you’re getting TLS errors in your Python applications, you need the REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE environment variable set to the path for the system-wide keychain. You may want to add this line to your /etc/profile to include this path.
Hello, welcome to my personal knowledgebase article 😁
I think you only get this if you have some tool or service which hooks WinSock to perform content inspection, but if you do, you need to tell WinSock to reject attempts to hook WSL2.
According to this post on the Github WSL Issues list, you need to add a key into your registry, in the path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WinSock2\Parameters\AppId_Catalog and they mention that the vendor of “proxifier” have released a tool which creates this key. The screen shot in the very next post shows this registry key having been created.
A screenshot of a screenshot of the registry path needed to prevent WinSock from being hooked.
I don’t know if the hex ID of the “AppId_Catalog” path created is relevant, but it was what was in the screenshot, so I copied it, and created this registry export file. Feel free to create your own version of this file, and run it to fix your own issue.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WinSock2\Parameters\AppId_Catalog\0408F7A3]
"AppFullPath"="C:\\Windows\\System32\\wsl.exe"
"PermittedLspCategories"=dword:80000000
As soon as I’d included this registry entry, I was able to access WSL OK again.
Over the last week, I discovered a new tool for my arsenal called Architectural Decision Records (ADR). They were first written about in 2011, in a post called “Documenting Architecture Decisions“, where the author, Michael Nygard, advocates for short documents explaining each decision that influences the architecture of an environment.
I found this via a Github repository, created by the team at gov.uk, which includes their ADR library, and references the tool they use to manage these documents – adr-tools.
Late edit 2021-12-14: I released (v0.0.1) my own rust-based application for making Decision Records. Yes, Decision Records – not Architecture Decision Records… because I think you should be able to apply the same logic to all decisions, not just architectural ones.
Installing adr-tools on Linux
Currently adr-tools are easier to install under OSX rather than Linux or Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) (I’m working on this – bear with me! 😃 ).
The current installation notes suggest for Linux (which would also work on WSL) is to download the latest release tar.gz or zip file and unpack it into your path somewhere. This isn’t exactly the best way to deploy anything on Linux, but… I guess it works right now?
For me, I downloaded the file, and unpacked the whole tar.gz file (as root) into /usr/local/bin/, giving me a directory of /usr/local/bin/adr-tools-3.0.0/. There’s a subdirectory in here, called src which contains a large number of files – mostly starting _adr or adr- and two additional files, init.md and template.md.
Rather than putting all of these files into /usr/local/bin directly, instead I leave them in the adr-tools-3.0.0 directory, and create a symbolic link (symlink) to the /usr/local/bin directory with this command:
cd /usr/local/bin
ln -s adr-tools-3.0.0/src/* .
This gives me all those files in one place, so I can refer to them later.
An aside – why link everything in that src directory? (Feel free to skip this block!)
Now, why, you might ask, do all of these unrelated files need to be in the same place? Well…. the author of the script has put this in at the top of almost all the files:
#!/bin/bash
set -e
eval "$($(dirname $0)/adr-config)"
There are, technically, good reasons for this! This is designed to be run in, what in the Windows world, you might call as a “Portable Script”. So, you bung adr-tools into some directory somewhere, and then just call adr somecommand and it knows that all the files are where they need to be. The (somewhat) down side to this is that if you just want to call adr somecommand rather than path/to/my/adr somecommand then all those files need to be there
I’m currently looking to see if I can improve this somewhat, so that it’s not quite so complex to install, but for now, that’s what you need.
Anyway…
Using adr-tools to document your decisions
I’ll start documenting a fictional hosted web service project, and note down some of the decisions which have been made.
Initializing your ADR directory
Start by running adr init. You may want to specify a directory where you want to put these records, so instead use: adr init path/to/adr, like this:
Initializing the ADR in “documentation/architecture-decisions” with adr init documentation/architecture-decisions
You’ll notice that when I run this command, it creates a new entry, called 0001-record-architecture-decisions.md. Let’s open this up, and see what’s in here.
The VSCode record for the choice to use ADR. It is a markdown file, with the standard types of data recorded.
In here we have the record ID (1.), the title of the record Record architecture decisions, the date the choice was made Date: 2021-01-19, a status of Accepted, the context on why we made this choice, the decision, and the consequences of making this decision. Make changes, if needed, and save it. Let’s move on.
Creating our first own record
This all is quite straightforward thus far. Let’s create our next record.
Issuing the command adr new <sometitle> you create the next ADR record.
Let’s open up that record.
The template for the ADR record for “Use AWS”.
Like the first record, we have a title, a status, a context, decision and consequences. Let’s define these.
A “finished” brief ADR record.
This document shouldn’t be very long! It just describes why a choice was made and what that entails.
Changing decisions – completely replacing (superseding) a decision
Of course, over time, decisions will be replaced due to various decisions elsewhere.
You can ask adr to supersede a previous record, using the “-s” flag, and the record number.
Let’s look at how that works on the second ADR record.
After the command adr new -s 2 Use Azure, the ADR record number 2 has a new status, “Superceded by” and the superseded linked document. Yes, “Superceded” is a typo. There is an open PR for it
So, under the “Status”, where is previously said “Approved”, it now says “Superceded by [3. Use Azure](0003-use-azure.md)“. This is a markdown statement which indicates where the superseded document is located. As I mentioned in the comment below the above image, there is an open Pull Request to fix this on the adr-tools, so hopefully that typo won’t last long!
We’ve got our new ADR too – let’s take a look at that one?
Our new ADR shows that it “supercedes” the previous record. Which is good! Typo aside :)
Other references
Of course, you don’t always completely overrule a decision. Sometimes your decision is influenced by, or has a dependency on something else, like this one.
We know which provider we’re using at long last, now let’s pick a region. Use the -l flag to “link” between the referenced and new ADR. The context for the -l flag is “<number>:<text for link to number>:<text for link in targetted document>”.
The command here is:
adr new -l '3:Dependency:Influences' Use Region UK South and UK West
I’m just going to crop from the “Status” block on both the referenced ADR (3) and the ADR which references it (4):
Status block in ADR 0003 which is referenced by ADR 0004Status block in the new ADR 0004 which references ADR 0003
And of course, you can also use the same switch to mark documents as partially obsoleted, like this:
adr new -l '4:Partially obsoletes:Partially obsoleted by' Use West Europe region instead of UK West region
Status block in ADR 0004 indicating it’s partially obsoleted. Probably worth updating the status properly to show it’s not just “Accepted”.
If you forget to add the referencing in, you can also use the adr link command, like this:
adr link 3 Influences 5 Dependency
To be clear, that command adds a (complete) line to ADR 0003 saying “Influences [5. ADR Title](link)” and a separate (complete) line to ADR 0005 saying “Dependency [3. ADR Title](link)“.
What else can we do?
There are four other “things” that it’s worth doing at this point.
Note that you can change the template per-ADR directory.
Create a directory called “templates” in the ADR directory, and put a file in there called “template.md“. Tweak this as you need. Ensure you have AT LEAST the line ## Status and # NUMBER. TITLE as these are required by the script.
A much abbreviated template file, containing just “Number”, “Title”, “Date”, “Status”, and a new dummy heading called “Stuff”.And the result of running adr new Some Text once you’ve created that template.
As you can see, it’s possible to add all sorts of content in this template as a result. Bear in mind, before your template turns into something like this, that it’s supposed to be a short document explaining why each decision was made, not a funding proposal, or a complex epic of your user stories!
Be careful not to let your template run away with you!
Note that you can automatically open an editor, by setting the EDITOR (where the process is expected to finish before returning control, like using nano, emacs or vim, for example) or VISUAL (where the process is expected to “fork”, like for example, gedit or vscode) environment variable, and then running adr new A Title, like this:
We can create “Table of Contents” files, using the adr generate toc command, like this:
Generating the table of contents, for injecting into other files.
This can be included into your various other markdown files. There are switches, so you can set the link path, but your best bet is to find that using adr help generate toc.
We can also generate graphviz files of the link maps between elements of the various ADRs, like this: adr generate graph | dot -Tjpg > graph.jpg
If you omit the “| dot -Tjpg > graph.jpg” part, then you’ll see the graphviz output, which looks like this: (I’ve removed the documents 6 and 7).
digraph {
node [shape=plaintext];
subgraph {
_1 [label="1. Record architecture decisions"; URL="0001-record-architecture-decisions.html"];
_2 [label="2. Use AWS"; URL="0002-use-aws.html"];
_1 -> _2 [style="dotted", weight=1];
_3 [label="3. Use Azure"; URL="0003-use-azure.html"];
_2 -> _3 [style="dotted", weight=1];
_4 [label="4. Use Region UK South and UK West"; URL="0004-use-region-uk-south-and-uk-west.html"];
_3 -> _4 [style="dotted", weight=1];
_5 [label="5. Use West Europe region instead of UK West region"; URL="0005-use-west-europe-region-instead-of-uk-west-region.html"];
_4 -> _5 [style="dotted", weight=1];
}
_3 -> _2 [label="Supercedes", weight=0]
_3 -> _5 [label="Influences", weight=0]
_4 -> _3 [label="Dependency", weight=0]
_5 -> _4 [label="Partially obsoletes", weight=0]
_5 -> _3 [label="Dependency", weight=0]
}
To make the graphviz part work, you’ll need to install graphviz, which is just an apt get away.
Any caveats?
adr-tools is not actively maintained. I’ve contacted the author, about seeing if I can help out with the maintenance, but… we’ll see, and given some fairly high profile malware takeovers of projects like this sort of thing on Github, Docker, NPM, and more… I can see why there might be some reluctance to consider it! Also, I’m an unknown entity, I’ve just dropped in on the project and offered to help, with no previous exposure to the lead dev or the project… so, we’ll see. Worst case, I’ll fork it!
Working with this also requires an understanding of markdown files, and why these might be a useful document format for records like this. There was a PR submitted to support multiple file formats (like asciidoc and rst) but these were not approved by the author.
There is no current intention to support languages other than English. The tool is hard-coded to look for strings like “status” and “superceded” which is hard. Part of the reason I raised the PRs I did was to let me fix some of these sorts of issues. Again, we’ll see what happens.
Lastly, it can be overwhelming to see a lot of documents in one place, particularly if they’re as granular as the documents I produced in this demo. If the project supported categories, or could be broken down into components (like doc/adr/networking and doc/adr/server_builds and doc/adr/applications) then this might help, but it’s not on the roadmap right now!
Late edit 2021-01-25: If you don’t think these templates have enough context or content, there are lots of others listed on Joel Parker Henderson’s repo of examples and templates. If you want a python based viewer of ADR records, take a look at adr-viewer.
TL;DR: Linux is usually awesome, but it doesn’t work for my niche case.
Why was I in the market for a new computer?
October 2019 my beloved (but 7 year old) Acer V5-171, “Minilith” (so named because it was smaller than it’s predecessor, a 17″ monster of a black slab that was named “Monolith”) started exhibiting signs of having a dead battery. I replaced the battery with an 3rd party replacement, and while it charged OK for a few runs, it stopped charging all together (I could get a maximum of 5% charge), so I put the old battery in, and it started working better. Huzzah. All was going well until around 6 months ago when the hard drive failed, so I replaced it with an SSD, and that gave it a new lease of life… and this month, well, it just wouldn’t boot reliably. I finally decided that it was time to let it go and play with Timmy the dog at the farm, and replace it with something newer.
The back of “Minilith”, my 7 year old Laptop.
Minilith’s Keyboard and Screen
Fortunately, this co-incided with a small win on the company social Prize Draw of a reasonable sized pay out, enough to consider looking at the Ex-Demo staff sales list made available to me by dint of my employer.
Making my choice.
There weren’t a lot of options, to be fair, but one item stood out to me. A Stylistic Tablet Computer. I’d previously had an Asus Transformer TF300T – a tablet-come-computer which had a detachable keyboard. I’d loved that, even though it didn’t really do what I wanted it for (and, I think I’d paid quite a bit over what it was worth, really)… but what I really wanted to do was have a tablet I could use for computing… Hence, the Stylistic.
Image of the tablet view of the Stylistic V727 computer from a German blog.
Fujitsu are in a bit of an odd place, at least in the UK (I’ve not looked elsewhere) for personal computers – we sell quite well (apparently) to business, but we moved out of the “selling to the public” market probably around 2010, and so it was pretty hard to gauge how well this laptop performed. Oh, and of course, being a “Linux Enthusiast”, I wanted to be able to run Ubuntu, Fedora or others on it.
Because it was an internal sale, and I wanted to test Ubuntu on it before I bought it, I was able to get the sales team to let me evaluate it before I bought it.
It arrives!
It arrived as the tablet and keyboard, with a dock for setting it on your desk. I tested it with Windows, where the dock worked well, but the keyboard by itself didn’t so much. You see, the keyboard is an optional accessory, and had been sold with the laptop, all good thus far. Except what you also need to get, when you get the keyboard, is the case. The case gives you the sturdy back to give the “laptop” a frame. It’s basically the hinge that the top-heavy screen needs to keep itself upright.
A screen capture of the Fujitsu Stylistic V727 from the datasheet. Note this image shows the optional keyboard and the optional case.
The sales team were very understanding, and found a case to ship to me as well, but it wouldn’t come for a few days, so I was left to try out the rest of the hardware.
What do you get for your money?
The processor is an Intel i5-7Y57 dual core CPU with four threads, running at 1.2GHz.
It has 8GB of RAM and a 256GB m2 SATA drive.
The 12.3″ touch-or-pen (included) enabled screen has a maximum resolution of 1920×1280 pixels. The surface of the tablet is considered a WACOM tablet, and the pen can be sensed from a reasonable distance away. There are two buttons on the side of the pen, which turns a tap on the screen from a “normal” left click to a right click, or a center click.
On the rear is a fingerprint sensor.
From a network perspective, the WIFI supports 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.2, and under the battery there is a LTE module onboard (although, I’ve not tested that).
On the side is a USB3.1 A connector, and a USB C connector (the specs sheet I linked to above suggests there is a single USB 3 and a USB 2 interface, but I doubt the USB C is USB 2).
There is also a MicroSD slot, which is detected by the booted OS as an MMC device, but it is not detected as a bootable device.
There’s a combined 3.5mm audio in and out jack, which I’ve not tried and a power socket.
There are two cameras, a 5 megapixel front-facing camera and an 8 megapixel rear facing camera with a flash.
The detachable keyboard has an integrated touchpad. It’s all good, and compared to my poor Acer V5, it’s a massive step up ❤
When you add in the desk dock (where, to be fair, it’s spent most of it’s time since I got it), the connections also then include Gigabit Ethernet, a Display Port interface, a VGA port and three USB 3 A interfaces, and a power socket.
The OS Comparison starts
Windows first
I booted it in Windows, and found it really rather responsive, especially once I’d reinstalled Windows without all the customizations the demo team had put on…
My previous install of Windows on Minilith had been the Home edition, and I’d found the semi-constant nagging to install games and the like rather annoying. I’ve had a couple of Windows 10 Professional installs at work, and, while those builds came with their own fair share of corporately mandated bloat (after all, their threat models are somewhat different to mine) they usually felt more slim than the Windows 10 home install I’d had, so when I saw this had Windows 10 Professional, I was looking forward to seeing something a bit leaner… and I wasn’t let down. All the hardware worked fine, I had the fingerprint reader working, no worries and the dock was great.
Docking and undocking is relatively seamless, although the first try was a bit tricky, I’ve got used to it. I had two screens attached via my work-supplied Fujitsu PR08 DisplayLink adaptor, plugged through the dock, and again, that all worked fine.
I could use the pen in the tablet mode really well. It makes selecting items on the screen easy, and if you don’t want to use the virtual keyboard, in some cases, it pops up a handwriting recognition box, although the time I showed this to my wife (where I’d been using it successfully for some time), it didn’t recognise half the words I wrote… but I’m sure that’s just my dreadful scrawl, and not the tablet’s fault!
Even using the tablet without the pen worked really well. Tapping the screen is a left click, and a long press on an area is a right click, similar to how Android handles left-and-right clicks in RDP and VNC sessions. The keyboard has several “modes” – a reduced character set, a thumb typing set or a full keyboard. The reduced set has a control key and an escape key, but no alt, windows or arrow keys. I didn’t try the thumb typing set (this thing is 12″ across!) but the full keyboard is an “ISO layout” 75% keyboard (I discovered by matching the image to this website!) which means I still get my Control, Alt, and Windows keys.
Next, Ubuntu
I booted from a USB stick that had the Ubuntu 20.04 installer on it. Ubuntu booted fine, allowed me to repartition the Windows partition into approximately half the drive, and install away. During the install, I was asked to provide a password to setup the SecureBoot keys, and instructed that it’d prompt me for it on the next reboot. Most of the hardware worked fine. Dock, keyboard, Wifi, Bluetooth… all good. The fingerprint sensor wasn’t detected, and still isn’t, but I’m OK with that, it was always just a nice-to-have. The install worked fine, and yes, on reboot, I got a blue screen asking me to set up my “MOK” (which, I guessed eventually, was the SecureBoot setup). I realised that the SecureBoot install stage of the Linux install copies a private key to the UEFI space, and on the next boot, it spots there’s a key there and asks you to unlock that private key, so it can install it into the boot keys. All good!
I was working away on it with the tablet in the dock. I tried using it with the detachable keyboard, but it was a bit tricky to use without the rigid back, so I kept it in the dock. The pen works a treat too.
The problem came when I tried to use it as a tablet.
You see, where Windows has a selection of keyboard layouts for their “On Screen Keyboard” (OSK), the Gnome one only lets you use this layout:
While this is passable for tapping stuff into a URL bar in your browser, entering a password for logging in, or typing simple statements into dialogue boxes, there are some key things it’s missing. The first (for me) is a Control, Alt or Super (Windows) key. This means I can’t do any programming, of any sort, in Tablet mode. Note, this just works on Windows, and is possible on Android with an extended keyboard called “Hacker Keyboard”. There are also no cursor keys, which seems like it’s less important, but it makes editing things you’ve typed (or mistyped) MUCH harder.
“Well, OK then, let’s have a look around and see what our options are?”
I’d heard good things about “OnBoard”, a predecessor to Gnome OSK, but because OSK is registered as “The” on screen keyboard, and runs as a system process, and OnBoard is a user process, Gnome OSK pops up any time you want to do on screen keyboard things, even if you’ve got OnBoard loaded. Ahah! I found an extension which blocks Gnome OSK… except that stops it from being able to be used for logging in.
You see, that whole “system” versus “user” process thing I mentioned before. The Gnome lock screen is considered a system process, not a user one, which means that if you’ve disabled Gnome OSK, then you can’t put your password in, but equally, if you’re typing in a box with OnBoard, change focus and change back again, up pops Gnome OSK.
Breaking down and turning it around.
I should confess, I didn’t spend a lot of time wondering about this. I booted a Kubuntu environment instead, and found that this really didn’t work for me either (although I now don’t remember what stopped me from liking it – I might have to revisit this!) By this point, I’d spent several hours “messing” around with this, and I just wanted to give something a try. So I booted back into Windows.
I gave the on screen keyboard another try. It worked great. I tried doing some sketches in Paint 3D (the replacement for Windows Paint) with the pen, and it was very easy (so much so, I need to work out how to use it for my next design call with work!)
All the familiar tools I use in my work or personal environment are there.
VSCode. Check.
A usable shell (via Windows Subsystem for Linux). Check.
File synchronization (via Syncthing). Check.
Web browser (Firefox). Check.
Audio recording software (Audacity). Check.
Image editor (GIMP). Check.
Voice chat for the podcast software (Mumble). Check.
And the fingerprint reader works… so I stuck with Windows 10.
The only last catch, whether it was Windows or Linux? There’s no HDMI or VGA out without the dock… so I need to start looking into “cheap” display adaptors that I can use for presenting things, whenever we get back to “normal” and I can start attending and speaking at conferences again.
What about the case?
Oh yehr, so a few days after I get the computer, the case turns up. It attaches to the back of the computer with tape, and feels like leather (although, I’m sure it’s not leather). It definitely makes it feel like a “quality” product 😀. It’s a little bit more tricky to drop into the dock, but it makes it feel like a Laptop when you’re using it like one. The detachable keyboard is interesting. I’ve used it in the car, waiting for children to finish activities, and it’s fine, because it goes flat. I’ve detached the keyboard from the screen to just do tablet-y things with it, and that’s fine too.
So in summary
I think if I didn’t want it to be a tablet as much as a computer, I’d have been fine.
If you want a Windows Tablet that turns into a Laptop, it’s fine. If you want a low-profile desktop computer (in a dock) that can become a laptop, it’s fine.
But until Gnome or one of the other flavours gets a handle on how to do a reasonable on-screen keyboard… I don’t think I’ll be using Linux on here (because it’s also a tablet) for the next few months… and I think that’s going to be OK.
All of that said, if you use any Linux distributions with a tablet style mode, and you’ve got a working OSK, please contact me (via one of the links at the top of the site) to let me know what and how you did it, and I’ll give it a try too!
I recently got a new laptop, and for various reasons, I’m going to be primarily running Windows on that laptop. However, I still like having a working SSH server, running in the context of my Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) environment.
Initially, trying to run service ssh start failed with an error, because you need to re-execute the ssh configuration steps which are missed in a WSL environment. To fix that, run sudo apt install --reinstall openssh-server.
Once you know your service runs OK, you start digging around to find out how to start it on boot, and you’ll see lots of people saying things like “Just run a shell script that starts your first service, and then another shell script for the next service.”
Well, the frustration for me is that Linux already has this capability – the current popular version is called SystemD, but a slightly older variant is still knocking around in modern linux distributions, and it’s called SystemV Init, often referred to as just “sysv” or “init.d”.
The way that those services work is that you have an “init” file in /etc/init.d and then those files have a symbolic link into a “runlevel” directory, for example /etc/rc3.d. Each symbolic link is named S##service or K##service, where the ## represents the order in which it’s to be launched. The SSH Daemon, for example, that I want to run is created in there as /etc/rc3.d/S01ssh.
So, how do I make this work in the grander scheme of WSL? I can’t use SystemD, where I could say systemctl enable --now ssh, instead I need to add a (yes, I know) shell script, which looks in my desired runlevel directory. Runlevel 3 is the level at which network services have started, hence using that one. If I was trying to set up a graphical desktop, I’d instead be looking to use Runlevel 5, but the X Windows system isn’t ported to Windows like that yet… Anyway.
Because the rc#.d directory already has this structure for ordering and naming services to load, I can just step over this directory looking for files which match or do not match the naming convention, and I do that with this script:
#! /bin/bash
function run_rc() {
base="$(basename "$1")"
if [[ ${base:0:1} == "S" ]]
then
"$1" start
else
"$1" stop
fi
}
if [ "$1" != "" ] && [ -e "$1" ]
then
run_rc "$1"
else
rc=3
if [ "$1" != "" ] && [ -e "/etc/rc${$1}.d/" ]
then
rc="$1"
fi
for digit1 in {0..9}
do
for digit2 in {0..9}
do
find "/etc/rc${rc}.d/" -name "[SK]${digit1}${digit2}*" -exec "$0" '{}' \; 2>/dev/null
done
done
fi
I’ve put this script in /opt/wsl_init.sh
This does a bit of trickery, but basically runs the bottom block first. It loops over the digits 0 to 9 twice (giving you 00, 01, 02 and so on up to 99) and looks in /etc/rc3.d for any file containing the filename starting S or K and then with the two digits you’ve looped to by that point. Finally, it runs itself again, passing the name of the file it just found, and this is where the top block comes in.
In the top block we look at the “basename” – the part of the path supplied, without any prefixed directories attached, and then extract just the first character (that’s the ${base:0:1} part) to see whether it’s an “S” or anything else. If it’s an S (which everything there is likely to be), it executes the task like this: /etc/rc3.d/S01ssh start and this works because it’s how that script is designed! You can run one of the following instances of this command: service ssh start, /etc/init.d/ssh start or /etc/rc3.d/S01ssh start. There are other options, notably “stop” or “status”, but these aren’t really useful here.
Now, how do we make Windows execute this on boot? I’m using NSSM, the “Non-sucking service manager” to add a line to the Windows System services. I placed the NSSM executable in C:\Program Files\nssm\nssm.exe, and then from a command line, ran C:\Program Files\nssm\nssm.exe install WSL_Init.
I configured it with the Application Path: C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe and the Arguments: -d ubuntu -e sudo /opt/wsl_init.sh. Note that this only works because I’ve also got Sudo setup to execute this command without prompting for a password.
Here I invoke C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe -d ubuntu -e sudo /opt/wsl_init.shI define the name of the service, as Services will see it, and also the description of the service.I put in MY username and My Windows Password here, otherwise I’m not running WSL in my user context, but another one.
And then I rebooted. SSH was running as I needed it.
