I wasn’t gonna make a post today, because nothing broke and it wasn’t that exciting. But what the hell.

Anyway, there’s still a couple things wonky, probably from the mishaps yesterday and the day before. The main thing is just a “failed to delete autoinstaller.sh” error on the script that runs when I do a “switch user”, so I wonder if I broke something non-essential when I killed the PIDs yesterday…

It was also prompting me for a password whenever I tried to make it go to sleep, which would wake it up and basically make it impossible to put in sleep mode. But it think I fixed that somehow. Or maybe it only works when I press the sleep button. I have to test if it still happens when I simply close the laptop, which is what I had been doing after a switch user. So yes, that means I would come back to it later and it wouldn’t be asleep, and would prompt me for a password after signing back in and loading the desktop.

I didn’t even get to doing the security stuff today. I started off this morning by making a list of all the configurations that I’ve tweaked manually. It’s a small list, but it will probably grow, and that will help me if I ever break something but also it’ll help me keep track of all my changes so that I can easily undo them later if I want to, or remember what to do if I ever need to manually rebuild my system.

Then I played around in System Monitor, got a page exactly how I liked it, saved it as an export file for backup, and set it as my default page to open to. I learned about some of the metrics I was unfamiliar with, like PSI for instance. Now I want to get a vertical second display and just have System Monitor up on it all the time 😩

After that I went through my notes from yesterday and typed up a document with all the steps I took for the configurations, in case I ever have to do them again. That took up most of the day, honestly. Some of the commands are starting to feel more familiar. Ones that come up a lot at least, like journalctl, systemctl, cat, ps aux, grep, and nano. Some still look like gibberish to me though.

I spent most of the evening trying to figure out those two problems I mentioned, and made another document for more troubleshooting commands.

And then I finally got around to changing my username, which I did through the GUI because sudo usermod didn’t work. So it didn’t update the /home directory, which saves me some work updating pathways but it’s kind of annoying cause that means they’ll just stay under the default username, even though the ownership updated to the new one.

That’s mostly all I did. Just fun boring stuff that didn’t break anything and didn’t seem to justify making a third post. But I’m making one anyway.

Now, tomorrow for sure I’ll get to the security stuff!

So far that list includes setting up secure boot, locking the bootloader if it’s not already, password protecting UEFI, encrypting the swap space (if it’s not already and if I can do so without wiping my drive), configuring my firewall, setting up dnscrypt-proxy, and TPM! And then after that there’s some software stuff like AppArmor, ClamAV, LMP, a rootkit hunter, an NGFW, and a locally-hosted password manager.

I’m not sure if any of that’s redundant but if so I’ll find out while I’m reading about it. It seems like a lot, though. It would be overwhelming if I wasn’t excited about it. Maybe I should adjust my expectations though, cause it might take me a week just to set it all up. I still need to set up borg too, for backing up /home/ so I can exclude it from rsync…

And then after that there’s more to do, but I’ll be able to start shifting away from initial setup to exploring different kinds of software and actually using my system.