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Blocklist-Update.sh

Blocklist-Update.sh is a script that I wrote to manage blocklists from bluetack etc to be used in conjunction with Transmission torrent downloader in Linux/MacOS. The script can be taylored to work with Qbittorrent as well, but the placement of the blocklists means you'd have to redirect the blocklist to go somewhere locally manageable as Transmission uses its own blocklist directory in .config. I believe there are about 10 lists there now. It works well for my needs. It can be ran weekly using crontab in standard user profile.  To download:  blocklist-update.sh To download the others:  Github
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BUSY WEEK AND MANJARO BROKE, HOW I FIXED IT. ALSO, PROBLEM FINDING DRIVERS IN UBUNTU 18.04.

Hi everyone! Been a busy week. At first, I was coming up with plenty of ideas of things to write about, plenty of ideas for new features to add in to my scripts, but things just didn’t go quite as planned. While I did get some work done, I was interrupted by all the machines in the house that were updated becoming paper weights literally before my eyes. The culprit turned out to be an upstream Mesa update from Arch Linux. Mesa deals with video graphics and uses Wayland as a dependancy. Wayland is the new and future successor to x-server. X-server is the X11 system that gives you a graphical experience within Linux.

X-server has a process that can actually run in the background without you even being in the desktop and so this is why it is recommended, when installing or unstalling drivers via command line or tty, that you issue the command stopx. X can even have a negative impact on Lightdm performance as well. After issuing all of the updates I rebooted my machine to only be greeted with the message that fsck found my drive clean and nothing else would work. I could not bring up the desktop or log in for conflicting files with Mesa/nvidia. Many Manjaro and even Arch users are having troubles with the current changes with xorg and older drivers. One Arch user was told in a forum to basically either revert back to nouveau which breaks all the time, or cease updating indefinitely. This situation is not ideal.

Enter Wayland updates. After Wayland was added, many people saw an improvement right away. This is because a dependancy was broken when the incomplete mesa group was updated. Arch is known for being a group of snotbags to new users who do not have their unrivaled amount of experience and so it is hard to get answers in the usual places, however, the Arch wiki is very well updated. I was able to salvage my system by merely getting to that failure to boot on fsck and hitting the F2 key. I was then dropped into a TTY which is a terminal interface. Once I logged in with my usual name and password, I was given access to the mirrors, configuration files and pacman’s own built in downgrade function. After having reverted my mirrors to stable, I was then able to downgrade the most recent packages and get my system booting again, I went further to add Mesa to the list of ignored packages for the time being. This isn’t ideal, you don’t really want to leave packages in the ignore list indefinitely. I believe in having an up-to-date system, however, I do still want my system to behave like it normally does.

To revert changes back to the normal, stable branch of Manjaro, boot your device to where it fails to boot and then type the F2 key on your keyboard. Once you’ve done this, type in your login information and proceed to run the following commands in order:
sudo pacman-mirrors -aS stable
sudo pacman -Syy
sudo pacman -Suu
and that should be it. This should show you a progression of what it is doing to revert your packages back to their previous, stable states. This doesn’t work with all programs, and programs that you just want to downgrade can not be downgraded the same way. Infact, downgrading can only occur if you are in at least the Testing branch(more on this topic later).

In other news, I did install Ubuntu 18.04 to test it out on a machine, but was unable to find or install drivers on a system I know needed the drivers, I then went on to test this on a completely separate machine only to be hampered by the same results. It is my belief that this may be a bug or maybe it is just me. One thing I do know, I found the rest of the system fascinating, however, it is currently impossible for me to test and review it more thoroughly at this time. Once the new 18.04.1 release comes out officially, I will try to make time to do just that. Also, a small article diving more into window managers coming soon, the premise is that I am working on my scripts again, one thing I need to do is add compatibility with more window managers in Ubuntu’s version and thus, this is necessary.

UPDATE: It turns out that for most legacy users, updating tomorrow to the new stable version of Manjaro might not be the best idea, at least not right away. Packages like Opera and the new Whisker menu can be upgraded by manually typing sudo pacman -Sy package after updating mirrors to unstable right now. I think this may make it to stable tomorrow though. Everything to do with Mesa and Wayland, avoid it like the plague.



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