Skip to main content

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
Post a Comment

ARCH LINUX UPDATE WOES

Arch Linux is one of the most up-to-date Linux distributions out there, and no doubt one of the most enigmatic with all of the Snaps vs. Flatpak arguments going on in the Linux world today. Ubuntu no longer compiles Chromium to be packaged on apt repositories anymore. For this piece of software your choices are limited to a snap package. In direct opposition with this, Linux Mint have decided to not allow Snapd or Chromium to be installed on their system through apt by default, but rather give users documentation links on how to go about compiling or installing Chromium through some other means on their systems instead. While this can be annoying, there is Arch Linux which still gives users a pre-compiled and easily installable version from their repos. Arch Linux is also fast and very privacy conscious as there is no software preloaded to track users, nor is there any other software than what the user might want on his or her system. While Arch Linux isn’t for beginners, there are a ton of Arch-based distributions and scripts available to automate much of the install and build process. ArcoLinux in particular is a wonderful distribution based on Arch which incorporates it’s developer’s own repositories and also pulls in packages from the AUR. Sometimes when installing these packages, or updating in general, one might run into a series of snags upon completion of downloading the relevant packages. These such snags might include: Error message stating that a file already exists on the system which conflicts with another package being downloaded (and these are usually safe to delete because the package probably provides the same function and the file isn’t owned by any other package currently on the system anyway.), Mirrors are out of date (Which can easily be rectified by running a script called reflector, more on that in a bit.), and last but not least, out of date keys. Arch uses keyrings much in a similar way Ubuntu would use them, however, Ubuntu seems to update those when installing other system-wide updates as they are never much of a problem for new users coming to Linux. Arch Linux on the other hand, has no way of automatically syncing these keys in the background, it’s left up to the user. Arch Linux is easy to understand once you get going, but getting through these hurtles is a real hastle. Luckily, in ArcoLinux, Reflector is ran almost continuously either every day or when one boots up the machine if enabled via Systemd service. To manually sort out these issues, however, a user would have to be semi-familiar with the terminal. In my own scripts I have a plethora of commands listed which do this work for you. Unfortunately, as there are now two repositories for these scripts, one will have to know where to find them. Also, it is a bit of good practice if you are running Arch Linux, to learn more about the system for yourself. I will leave a link to my scripts on here, but even they don’t account for such errors as files that already exist on the system. To combat this, one has to be there for the initial update process. This can hinder both terminal and graphical package management, so removing the file in question is paramount to successfully updating the system. Reading terminal output is important for this step. These files usually have a dot so on the end of them and to remove them, one has to remove the entire path to the file as listed in the terminal. Once complete, the downloaded packages can then be quickly installed. If you don’t update an iso or an installed system for months, these can sometimes come in three’s. As for the key issues, Arch Linux uses step-by-step commands in order to update, refresh, and sync keys in the init. Keys are what are used to validate software in repositories. If the software in a given repository has a valid key signature, the system will automatically accept the software. Key issues aren’t just a regular repo problem, but also are important when installing AUR packages as well.

Github

Gitlab

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NOSCRIPT CONFIGURATION FOR PALE MOON SPECIFICALLY

I wrote an article before about making Pale Moon more private. I covered a few of the settings and back end changes I make each time I install it. I mentioned Noscript, but I didn’t give any details about how I set it up. First though, you have to get the version already marked for your version of “Firefox” or in this case, Pale Moon. If you went to https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/noscript/ you would probably find the Pale Moon addons page devoted to the newest possible Noscript being marked specifically for Pale Moon. Other versions may work, but these are hybrid addons and the closer we get to Noscript 10, the less I trust it to work with Pale Moon specifically. I just opt to stick with 5.0.6. There have been people asking about what happens when Maone, the developer stops supporting the hybrid versions of Noscript, “Will it work with Pale Moon?” Why yes it will. Noscript blocks scripts, that’s its main function and it will do that as long as Java script exists on a page. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

SSD PARTITION ALIGNMENT

I was searching for more information regarding SSDs last night as that is what I now use, I found an interesting little tip that most users will never have to worry about, but people using Arch Linux, Manjaro or Windows that was cloned from another drive may want to consider checking this. The Partition manager within Linux normally takes good care to ensure that you have some free space to be used by the SSD in the event that a cell becomes worn out or corrupted. Also, Linux generally ensures that a proper amount of unallocated drive space is set aside preceeding the partition. However, on my own image of Manjaro, I discovered that this was not the case. The partition was “out of alignment”. To fix this situation, I found an article on  Lifehacker that went into instructional detail about how to solve this from a live environment or an image of Gparted . Gparted is a separate live environment of Linux that is based on Debian and uses Gparted as the main tool to manage...
Post a Comment
Read more

PALE MOON PRIVACY SETUP

I did a review of Pale Moon back when 27.6.2 came out in linux. I had mostly great things to say about the browser then and my feelings towards it have not changed. Pale Moon is a very useful tool for scowering the net. It has privacy at its core with a few implementations made by Moonchild, the lead developer, built in. I also mentioned the point that Pale Moon has a canvas poisoning feature in the backend, however, I wasn’t very clear about how to turn it on. I thought in this tutorial, I’d show with a series of screen shots, some of the useful settings and preferences that I change to make Pale Moon a bit more private. I also thought I’d take this time to rant a little more about some of the not so savory issues with Firefox which have recently come under scrutiny by various people in the the Linux world. First order of business, if you haven’t heard, Mozilla recently added an extension into their browser which gave people ads. That’s right, they were ads for a specific t...
Post a Comment
Read more