Linux

Before Google+ shut down, I had a post on there giving a brief overview of git bisect, which a lot of people found useful. Unfortunately, I forgot to save it and move it somewhere else before the shutdown deadline. As a result, I am going to redo it here and spice it up a bit. One caveat before I start: there is great official documentation for git bisect, from which I have taken quite a bit of information. If I say something that contradicts what the documentation says, assume the documentation is right. ...

I have been a big fan of Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 as I need Windows for school but I am so used to the command line for remoting into my server and automating various tasks locally. For those of you who do not know, WSL 2 uses a Linux kernel under the hood (which I customize here) and all of the various distributions that you can run are basically containers on top of it. ...

Recently, I stumbled upon a talk that Alistair Delva, a Google engineer, gave at the 2018 Linux Plumbers Conference around Cuttlefish, an Android Virtual Device (AVD) that is used to validate the Android platform virtually (i.e. without a separate device). This is something that is really cool because it makes it easy to follow along with upstream Android development and see what changes they are making under the hood, all from adb shell. Cuttlefish boots in around 20 seconds on my machine and swapping out kernels is as simple as adding two command flags which I will go over later. If you are running Cuttlefish locally, you can even view it with TightVNC. ...

Recently, I built a computer for school that I installed Windows 10 Pro on (link to the current specs if you are curious). I was a little bummed about leaving Chrome OS because I was going to lose my local Linux development environment; however, Windows Subsystem for Linux is a thing and it has gotten even better with WSL 2, as it is actually running a Linux kernel so there is full Linux compatibility going forward. I also learned that it is possible to replace the Linux kernel that Microsoft ships with your own. This is a mini guide for what I uncovered because there is not a ton of information around for how to do this. ...