EDIT: I have a tale to be told below, but I found the simplest answer to getting mods installed on your Linux server. In your arkmanager.cfg file or in your "instance" config file just add the modid to the line of mods to load (ark_GameModIds) and then restart the server. This will inform you to use arkmanager to download the mods, but it will also just do it for you. That is the simplest method. Everything else is noise. Yes, it does pay to understand how it all works, but the path of least resistance is always the best. The developers did a good job of making this program and arkmanager is a great tool, however, when it is as simple as adding the mod the mod line in your…

All software these days is complex, especially in the open source world. In the open source world though, good luck on resolving the issues with help. No, I don't mean you can't ask for help. You can, just don't expect anything but the basics. And blog posts about your problem. The very worst these days. Everyone repeats what everyone else said and very little context about the issues that you can expect to find. Mostly junk. Blog posts are garbage. They are noise, period. This doesn't mean there aren't any good ones, but most of the time the blogs are garbage posts about open source. I'm going to give the example of the pihole. Everyone thinks this is great. It can block ads and help maintain your privacy. What happens…

I wanted to add a bind mount to a container so I could index the content for playback. This would allow the program in the container to index the data without the need to store it locally. The media is my music library. I want to be able play it while driving and while at work. This became a multistage process. First I had to mount the remote folder in my Proxmox host. Then I needed to provide that folder as a bind mount in the container where the program that needed the data that ran. The two steps are to use a secure method to talk to the remote computer. I used SSHFS to contact the server and mount the connection in the PVE host. I used the root…

I've used Linux for going on 20 years. It is a nice well rounded OS with a lot of support. The OS is settling in and there are a ton of features, programs, and well, policies. The latter is what is bothering me and I'm worried that it is getting too complex. This isn't to say that it wasn't complex but it is getting more so complex. It is hard to get an answer to a problem without a lot of research on the issue and the surrounding technologies. Then there are limits these days, such as the drive to forced use of flatpacks, appimages, and snaps. Canonical owns snaps and they are pushing to get everyone to use them. They have the biggest overall market share for distributions; albeit…

Note: FreeBSD 14 is due out in the middle of this year. Note: FreeBSD has a linux compatibility layer as well as support for wine. It has jails. Jails is a tool similar to containers. BSD does not support LXC as LXC means Linux containers. The video linked below walks you through downloading and the install FreeBSD and then XORG and then X11 with KDE Plasma. Since the video does this and since I already did it I have not included those steps. The install was near flawless, albeit somewhat dated in the installer's UX (user experience). As well since the video shows the person installing it into a container it does not cover configuring video hardware acceleration. I added that at the bottom of this guide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzIWXdcrK5I sudo does…

You can get FreeBSD (and maybe others) installed without graphics acceleration and that will still allow you go install and run KDE Plasma. However, the experience will be somewhat poor. What made me take note is that when I looked at KDE Plasma settings under Display and Monitor the refresh rate of the monitor was 0hz. When I was at a remote location I decided to run using x11 forwarding the settings program where I found the refresh rate properly set for that monitor, which was 60hz. In order to actually install the accelerated graphics you must install the appropriate drm-* driver. This is done with the following command. sudo pkg install graphics/drm-kmod This will download and install nearly 100 items pertaining to various graphics technologies, such as AMD, NVIDIA,…

Manjaro does not have proper support of printers out of the box. It seems they are working continually to limit what they are doing to produce a distribution. What I mean is that they are refusing to do things such as enable and start services as you install applications. They are requiring you to do this even if you have no idea what to do (or that you have to do it) to make it work. For instance, in installing CUPS they should enable and start it. It is that simple, period. If they tell you that some people want to do it differently then let them. Let them back out of the automatic setup. They can then configure the startup of the service to do it their own way.…

My proxmox has many containers that must restart every time I reboot the host computer. Each is set to start on boot. There's one container that starts, yet not all the services start. The mail container is the one in question. It is the first container that happens to start. Once it starts you can SSH in and reboot it in order to get the services to start. The question is, why didn't the services start? The container started. You could SSH into it which means it gets an IP address. Some services start but some don't. To keep the story short it looks like the cause is the boot time of the virtualized pfsense router. It took too much time for pfsense to start all the while the other…

Really rough draft. There are a number of issues and many have worked out various solutions, however no one has worked out that the smbpasswd has to be correct. sudo mount -t cifs -o username=xxx,password=yyy //jim@192.168.1.2 xxx sudo prompts for admin privs. mount is the command to execute. -t is parameter telling it to use cifs as the protocol, -o inputs the username and password and any other option. //jim@ip address (the address of the server), and xxx is the folder to mount it under. The key here is that you need to have the samba password correct also or it will generate that message. sudo smbpasswd -a jim Then give it the smbpassword and then repeat it to ensure that it is correctly typed. This is the password used…