My new opinion piece at Scientific American has just been published.
"Our refusal to aggressively cut greenhouse-gas emissions isn’t a problem for some distant uncertain future; it has become our present-day reality. It is time to disavow climate denial and accelerate building disaster resilience in our cities and homes.'
scientificamerican.com/article…
We’re Living in a Dystopian Climate Thriller. It's Time to Rewrite the Ending
Decades of warnings went ignored about the threats from climate change. With homes everywhere now burning, flooding and washing away, it’s time we start listening to scientists’ climate solutionsScientific American
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
Unknown parent • • •Georgiana Brummell
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Georgiana Brummell • • •Georgiana Brummell
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Georgiana Brummell • • •Georgiana Brummell
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Georgiana Brummell • • •-dsr- (hypoparenthetically)
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •You keep saying "cannot" when you mean "does not". It's not that the capability does not exist. It's that it is not set up and configured for this case. That can be changed.
Here are people you can complain to about this:
Systemd: mastodon.social/@pid_eins
Systemd issues:
github.com/systemd/systemd/iss…
Debian systemd: pkg-systemd-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org
Debian accessibility: pkg-a11y-devel@alioth-lists.debian.net
Issues · systemd/systemd
GitHub🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to -dsr- (hypoparenthetically) • • •-dsr- (hypoparenthetically)
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •I agree with your last sentence, but the project tries to take over everything, so I think it is fair for them also to take responsibility to implement a rescue mode with a screen reader.
Certainly other projects, like the Debian installer, have accomplished it.
Have you considered installing a rescue image as a boot choice? GRML has grml.org/grml-debootstrap/ which includes an ssh-in path.
grml-debootstrap(8)
grml.org🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to -dsr- (hypoparenthetically) • • •-dsr- (hypoparenthetically)
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to -dsr- (hypoparenthetically) • • •-dsr- (hypoparenthetically)
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •It depends on the encryption method you chose, but in general, if you have the encryption keys on the recovery media, you can use them.
Debian's most likely encryption method is LUKS. The way to copy the encryption header is
cryptsetup luksHeaderBackup DEVICE --header-backup-file FILE
and there's an explanatory article here:
lisenet.com/2013/luks-add-keys…
which includes steps for backup and recovery.
I hope that helps in future.
Lisenet.com :: Linux | Security | Networking | Admin Blog
Lisenet🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to -dsr- (hypoparenthetically) • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
Unknown parent • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
Unknown parent • • •Ric
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Ric • • •Ra (Freya) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Ra (Freya) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 • • •Ra (Freya) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Ra (Freya) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 • • •Ra (Freya) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Ra (Freya) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 • • •Ra (Freya) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Ra (Freya) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 • • •Cassandrich
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Cassandrich • • •Rain
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Rain • • •Lukáš Tyrychtr
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 likes this.
madomado
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •From a totally technical standpoint, I think it's pretty difficult to achieve some sort of a nice recovery mode. From what I know Windows would boot into a recovery partition (which does not always exist, so it doesn't always work). I don't think such implementation exists yet in the Linux world unfortunately (in some way systemd would need to fallback to a separate fstab or a separate target that instructs the system to mount and switch-root into a separate recovery rootfs).
Or you could try to include networking and other tools into the initramfs, but obviously that would greatly slow down system boot up times.
I am not so sure how practical the separate fstab thing is, I don't even know if that's supported by systemd currently, but I think that's the only way to have recovery mode implemented properly for both command line and graphical situations.
An alternative approach is to have the bootloader count the number of times the system has not booted up properly somehow, and automatically select a different target or kernel. But again obviously I don't think such implementations exist yet.
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to madomado • • •Cappy Ishihara
in reply to madomado • • •IIRC the Windows recovery partition is the ESP, so as long as the bootloader partition exists Windows may load.
Also fstab has an option to silently fail mounts, but you need to set a custom mount option (
nofail).systemd has a mount unit feature where you could just write a bunch of separate "services" that mount partitions on the disk, and even most distros depend on it because guess what, systemd actually generates these service files from... the fstab itself!
I think the main issue is probably just distros not having a fallback for failed mounts by default and expecting you to have an always-healthy disk. That and recovery mode being completely lackluster because it's a minimal RAM disk image.
Someone could probably implement a decent recovery mode, but people would be arguing on whether it's even necessary because "bloat".
systemd had and still has that issue with people thinking it's unnecessary and bloated.
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Cappy Ishihara • • •Cappy Ishihara
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •@madomado@fedi.fyralabs.com Well... Linux was always a monolithic operating system. systemd is not even actually monolithic as most people think. Funnily enough people only think systemd is a big bloated pile of mess because they look at the repo and see all the programs.
systemd-init is literally just a single program. Everything else is just a bunch of separate little pieces of almost-standalone software. Once you look into how systemd actually works, it's not actually even that big.
It's like coreutils, just a suite of tiny little programs working together and doing what it does well that speaks a common language.
That language just happens to be systemd sockets, because it's made by the systemd devs.
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Cappy Ishihara • • •Cappy Ishihara
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •@madomado@fedi.fyralabs.com
OpenRC, s6-init. Or you can do it the old-fashioned way and write an rc script in Bourne Shell.
You do you, people don't usually implement a11y features because it's most of the time an afterthought. It's not even a Linux/UNIX problem it's just able-bodied people forgetting we exist.
You don't even need to use "just" Docker for jails. In fact there's like a million OS-level hypervisor implementations that work just like BSD jails. Sometimes even better because the kernel itself has a thing called namespacing.
Bubblewrap for rootless jails, Flatpak makes heavy use of that.
You want something similar to jails? Ubuntu makes LXC, That already existed. Even systemd has their own thing, it's called systemd-machine. Guess who uses and maintains systemd-machines? Meta. And basically almost every mainstream Linux-based hypervisor distro has some support for LXC (looking at you, Proxmox and libvirt)
Docker/Podman is just an implementation of a standard that people use because it's easy to set up, it's a set-and-forget thing because OCI images are meant to be pre-configured to run a specific service.
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Cappy Ishihara • • •Moved to https://mk.absturztau.be/@Linux
in reply to Cappy Ishihara • • •But that would be something for another time.
Cappy Ishihara
in reply to Moved to https://mk.absturztau.be/@Linux • • •@madomado@fedi.fyralabs.com Linux was never really about options, tbh. It's about doing what works.
Hence why lots of distros use systemd. It's the better init at the time (at least better than sysv) and we all got stuck with it. It's why some of us stick with X11 (Looking at you, NVIDIA), because UNIX workstations have been using it for years at that point because XDMCP is a thing.
Cappy Ishihara
in reply to Cappy Ishihara • • •@madomado@fedi.fyralabs.com If you think the current way of doing things is bad. All you can do is (maybe possibly) take initiative, create an alternative, and then prove your version is better than the status quo.
Of course nobody has time to do that, so the status quo remains.
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Cappy Ishihara • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Cappy Ishihara • • •Mary
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Mary • • •Mary
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Mary • • •Dickson Tan
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Dickson Tan • • •Doggie BSc
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •I tried setting up a screen reader once to test my website and concluded that Linux is just not very usable for people who actually need a screen reader to use their computer
it took a lot of effort and getting through a bunch of very confusing setup to get it working at all, and then getting a voice better than barely-understandable was a whole another challenge
I feel like getting this working well and making the setup easy would require having some single organization work on improving every piece of the system to make it all coherent and easy to set up
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Doggie BSc • • •remmy
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •emergency.targetandemergency.service, (systemctl mask emergency.target emergency.service,) which will make your system keep booting instead. (Though then it becomes extra important to make sure that services requiring those mounts have explicit dependencies on them, so they don't get accidentally started and start doing things on the wrong filesystems.)🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to remmy • • •J. "Henry" Waugh
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •this is indeed not a great state of affairs
As someone who has used serial ports frequently for remote diagnosis of systems in various bad states (which would be set up in emergency mode), I wonder if braille devices that can behave like a VT100 terminal are still made
I imagine "nice termcap guis" would still be a pain, but at least the emergency mode tools don't use many of those that I've seen?
It strikes me that the design of PC hardware shares almost as much blame for this
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to J. "Henry" Waugh • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •lizzy
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to lizzy • • •Thestaroftheworlds
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •isn't the bigger problem that errors in fstab can brick your installation?
I mean it would be nice that any fstab error opened up the file in the event of failure and highlighted the line entry failure.
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Thestaroftheworlds • • •☃️karolherbst☃️
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •A bit late, but "x-systemd.automount" should work here by removing the disk from the global fs unit and creating a separate automount unit for it, which is allowed to fail without blocking things.
It basically postpones mounting until anything accesses the path.
It will however fail depended units needing files on that filesystem.
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to ☃️karolherbst☃️ • • •shironeko
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •"because nobody in Linuxland gives a shit about #a11y or your needs." -- has Debian rejected your patch to fix the issue and told you to screw yourself? What a bunch of dumbass!!
Joking aside, It's frustrating for sure, but no one is trying to get one over you or maximize shareholders' return. No one owe you anything for the free work they are doing.
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to shironeko • • •shironeko
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •shironeko
in reply to shironeko • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to shironeko • • •Tyler Spivey
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •1. Serial console on the motherboard, needs support from your motherboard and a cable. You also need to take your computer apart to install it. That's probably your best option.
I don't know if Linux can use a USB to serial adapter that early in the boot process. There's netconsole, but I don't think it supports input.
This would give you bootloader and console, no BIOS though.
2. Buy a real server board. They usually have some kind of remote management in them.
They're expensive and there are very few options, but you should get an accessible BIOS out of it.
3. Write your own thing and hook it into the initrd. If I was going to do this, I would try to have it bring up the network and start some kind of shell.
Getting everything I would need for sound would be too complicated. It might also interfere with things later in the boot process.
4. Capture card, hook it up to AI, or OCR.
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Tyler Spivey • • •Howard Chu @ Symas
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Howard Chu @ Symas • • •tuban_muzuru
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •Red Hat is working on this - everyone knows it's a mess, so they just hired in a blind coder
news.itsfoss.com/red-hat-acces…
Red Hat Hires a Blind Software Engineer to Improve Accessibility on Linux Desktop
Ankush Das (It's FOSS News)🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to tuban_muzuru • • •tuban_muzuru
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •tuban_muzuru
in reply to tuban_muzuru • • •He's got a presence on github:
github.com/tyrylu
tyrylu - Overview
GitHub🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to tuban_muzuru • • •Peter Vágner
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • •I am using single arch linux install from like 2012. Each time I get a new laptop I'll just boot off of live Arch Linux USB by looking up the boot menu keyboard shortcut in the manual of that laptop and OCR the screen once to find out which option is my USB device I have just connected. Every laptop I have used since 2012 had a sound working on the live media with included speakup.
When fully booted into the live USB I connect to the network prefferably via ethernet and use rsync to transfer my install into place regenerating initramfs at the end and adding linux kernel with its efi stub into the uefi partition to boot also setting uefi boot order by using efibootmgr.
I know I am not doing encryption since there is no accessible UI to enroll my own KSK into the bios or at least I don't know about it but I am otherwise used to do all of this on my own with no sighted help. And of course this is my primary system of choice. On those few additions that I broke something during an upgrade I have booted off the live medium again, chrooted into my broken system, fixed it and continued as normal. I must say I very much like this setup that I don't have to reinstall.
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 likes this.
tuban_muzuru
in reply to Peter Vágner • • •