Re‑flash Android to Sony Xperia from desktop Linux
I recently purchased a second device to install Sailfish OS on. The documentation recommends installing the latest compatible Android baseband version - which essentially means re-flashing Android - before installing SFOS. Olf's excellent guide goes into more detail here, esp. for my XA2 Ultra (H321...
Flashing Sailfish OS ‑ USB trouble
I got me a used XA2 Ultra (model no. H3213) that already had SFOS installed - albeit an old version, 3.0.something, so I wanted to reflash. On Linux, this requires fastboot, part of android-tools on ArchLinux,and a script (provided with the image download) to do all that over a USB connection. Howev...
A collection of Forum Posts I Don't Want to Sink into Oblivion
Sometimes I get a creative kick when writing a reply on some forum, and then I feel a little sorry to think that this "gem" will soon be forgotten and unfindable. So I decided to copy-paste some of these outbursts to a dedicated page. It's a little narcissistic. The typical Internet user The interne...
Dist‑upgrade Debian from oldstable to stable
(before LTS support runs out) I have now dist-upgraded several times, always from (old)stable to stable. Originally written for a Jessie => Stretch upgrade, this text still applies for Buster => Bullseye and likely so on into the future. So just replace "jessie" and "stretch" in this text wit...
Upgrade PostgreSQL Database (Cluster) from one Major Version to Another
Context I'm in the process of finally upgrading my Debian install from oldstable (buster) to stable (bullseye). My DAViCal installation uses PostgreSQL for its database backend. Strangely, I have two versions of PostgreSQL (9.6 and 11) and I purged the older one (without deleting the databases, than...
Setting up a ThinkPad x250 with Linux
Two chapters in this article are Debian-specific, the rest is more or less Archlinux-specific. It never grew into the device-specific alround tutorial I envisioned and has been partially superseded by this article. The ThinkPad itself is in daily use. No regrets there! BIOS Update The latest BIOS ...
Create restricted user on Linux, home directory on encrypted partition
Premise Create a user that has the sole task to run some daemon that also needs to store files on disk. Starting and stopping daemon, as well as accessing these files, needs to be possible via ssh. Otherwise it should be locked down as far as possible. Let's call the user sandy from now on. There al...
Getting email off my web server with msmtp (and PHP)
Sometimes I want to get a message from my server, e.g. diagnostic stuff from services (SMART daemon, fail2ban), or if someone tries to contact me on my website, and I want it sent to one of my email addresses which is not maintained on that server. I used to use sSMTP for this, but it seems to stop ...