I've been using ChromeOS as my main development machine for a while now. At first I logged in under my personal gmail and used Crouton for development, but after Crostini I decided to separate out my work and personal items. Here are a few things that still bother me and why I might go back to a full linux environment: …

I've noticed that particularly in Ubuntu Xenial, an apt-upgrade to mysql 5.7 fails. A standard re-install doesn't work for me so I've resorted to more extreme methods to get my install working. This is only suitable for development, mind you. Please do not attempt in production without full backups and supervision. …

Often times I find myself using ssh to get to a server in order to get a file. The problem is that my local machine doesn't have its own publicly accessible IP address. So I end up ssh'ing into the remote server, creating the file I need (e.g. database backup) and then exiting only to run scp from my local machine …

More for my own reference and in preparation of me completely gutting my system, I'm posting the contents of my .xmodmaprc file which swaps the left control and alt-keys. This allows me to use my linux laptop more like I used my mac, with the command key. Many distributions now let you swap this from a setting but if …

If you've got files hidden around your system and you don't know where they are, you can use a quick command to track them down and sort them with the largest first. Handy when trying to prune your old files or free up space on your hard disk. Try this: 1sudo du --max-depth=1 /home/ | sort -n -rs

I've been back on Mac OSX for over a year now, using it for all my daily activities from email and web surfing to programming and device syncing. Something has been eating at me though and I find myself pining for my old linux desktop. Since buying a new rig for kicks is out of the question, I instead dug up a beat up …