aka @rotopenguin@mastodon.social

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I think the problem with xournal is that it cannot ask a file portal to give it access to two related files at once. “I want to let the user pick foo.pdf.xournal, and also give me access to foo.pdf”. So the next best thing is to give it the “access any damned file” permission, and let Xournal grab whatever it wants. You get the same problem with video players - you could take away their permission to open-any-file, but then they won’t be able to pick up a related subtitle file.





  • Linux bootloaders discover the correct linux volume by UUID (which is in the filesystem), or PARTUUID (which is in the GPT table). It’ll look at every drive, and when it sees the matching one it’ll look in that partition, find the kernel & initrd, suck them into ram, and launch the kernel.

    The main problem with moving drives around is - where is the EFI firmware looking for the bootloader in the first place? If you read efibootmgr, the efi data is pretty simple and very much tied to a hardware port. The EFI takes the most preferred bootloader entry, goes to that drive, and runs a file like “\EFI\grub\grubx64.efi”. If that file isn’t right there, the EFI isn’t going to look elsewhere for it.

    There is one bootloader name that EFI will pluck out of the blue and (smash the Fx key) offer to you as a boot option - “\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI”. Self booting usb installers use that, but you could use it too. Put all the other files that go along with the bootloader in with that boot folder, and rename the appropriate .efi to bootx64.efi.

    One thing that I’ve done on odd setups is to put rEFInd on the efi partition as the boot\bootx64.efi loader. It’ll do a pretty fancy job of detecting what’s bootable (may need an additional filesystem_driver.efi), or even chain into grub to finish the startup.