Jason J.G. White / is on Nostr

A researcher and an advocate of information and communication technology accessibility for people with disabilities. Interests include
Philosophy: increasingly, contemporary ethics, political and legal philosophy, but also epistemology, philosophy of language, and beyond.
Law: public international law, human rights, constitutional interpretation.
Technology: accessibility standards and research, assistive technology, Linux, free/open-source software, social and legal issues in technology.

Last Notes

2024-06-20 20:03:49

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Thank you. I've just moved it to its own plain BTRFS subvolume, now that the whole system is BTRFS. Systemd-homed still manages the home directory (storage=subvolume).
For now, physical security is good enough that encryption isn't strictly needed, but I'll probably migrate it to a LUKS-encrypted BTRFS file system for the entire installation, or perhaps cryptfs, if that becomes available for BTRFS reasonably soon. Being a subvolume simplifies backup as well. Also, Bcachefs is going to be interesting, but I'll probably wait until it's no longer "experiemntal". I hope this discussion at least gives other people ideas.

2024-06-19 15:23:25

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Sorry - and, yes, I'm still experiencing that bug during shutdown. It seems to be this:
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/22901

2024-06-19 15:03:20

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Actually, the issue started with systemd 256 (Arch Linux). Logs show that it was unable to create various files while setting up the X11 session. I'm using systemd-homed, which might or might not be a contributor.
The Wayland session works, and, for the moment, I can tolerate some of the accessibility bugs. Let's see what happens with further updates to systemd and X11 packages.

2024-06-17 13:39:56

I'm using systemd-homed to manage my Linux home directory. By default, it stores the home directory in an encrypted BTRFS file system using LUKS, which is stored as a file in the underlying file system. Unfortunately, it takes a very long time to unmount when I shut down or reboot the machine. I found a bug report for this, and associated changes that were committed to systemd.
If the next version of systemd (recently released as version 256, and probably coming to Arch Linux soon) doesn't solve it, I'll have to investigate further. Perhaps I should encrypt the entire Linux file system and store the key in the TPM.
I don't want to have to type a password to decrypt the storage during the boot process, as I wouldn't have access to braille or speech output at that point.
#Linux #systemd #accessibility