Back To Budgie
AMD64 Ubuntu back on my desktop
As I mentioned in DeskNet Restarted, I was thinking there’d be a two port KVM on my desk, while the quad port remained in the lab setup behind me. I assumed the second port would be a twin to Titan, the little HP G5 Windows 11 machine, and that this would finally be that Qubes desktop I’ve wanted for years. But some urgent somethings came up …
Attention Conservation Notice:
Muttering about my home lab. If you’re not sitting in the midst of a pile of weird random multi-OS hardware, you may require the assistance of a translator. Telegram was the root cause requirement of this (mis)adventure.
Motivation:
Do you recall that Telegram Is Russian Intel? Sadly, it is also still widely used in the Ukrainian diaspora(!) despite our best efforts to pry people away, and it’s lingua franca for the cryptocurrency world. So here in mid 2025 I find myself with two reasons to again have this service.
So there was nothing to do but overnight the two port KVM, which I vow will not remain in this rats nest for long …
And I moved Titan to its hideout next to my desk …
And then it was time to install Ubuntu Budgie 25.04
The latest Budgie offers a default install of ZFS, which I dearly love … but I do NOT love how it’s used. This is reminiscent of the impenetrable bird’s nest Proxmox creates. And it did not leave any space free for caching external volumes. This is ZFS for people who fear/hate ZFS.
So I tinkered with my dfm script a bit, and we’ll see if it’ll respect the minemineallmine dataset I made.
Infuriating Motivation:
And here’s the cause of all this mischief - you can NOT install Telegram in an ARM64 Linux VM. If you are a Mac user, your choices are to let that thing on your host OS (NO WAY IN HELL!) or you can do something else for virtualization. This was the least cost/least hassle solution for me.
Oh, both Google and ChatGPT will offer solutions. Three of them. But by the time I got down to “clone this Github and build from scratch” I had no confidence that what was offered would really compile. It became an exercise in cutting my losses.
Conclusion:
I’m forced to use Telegram, no escape from it, at least not immediately. I will begin slowly extracting folks from that world, but given the nature of both requirements, this is a permanent state of affairs.
So this is how it is, small virtual machines on a tiny physical system, with fail closed VPN configurations, because life is like that in 2025. And it had to be an AMD64 machine, because while ARM is maturing nicely, there are still some things that are just too much to ask.
It’s been a while since I mentioned Paranoia: Pathlogical Or Professional? I bring it up because this is one of those situations where I feel as if the world is out to get me. I know that’s pathological … and thusly I remain … mostly professional. I think.