pinky and finger
I was futzing around with the veritable finger here on Grenzland.
Yes yes, lots of jokes about fingering people. I feel this would have had a different name if the creator had gotten laid a bit more often. Or maybe that is WHY it's called that way in the first place.
The official story is that it was a program that did what people used their finger for on terminal screens: they were going down a list of the last logins to see when a specific user last logged onto the mainframe.
finger was supposed to be the electronic equivalent, allowing you a quick access to that and a few other bits of basic information (like name, phone number, and .plan, which was undefined enough it soon became an early form of social media).
Oh, right, and to finger someone also can mean to blame someone, or to rat someone out.
I guess that also makes sense. You could figure out who was the culprit of a security breach by getting the last logon time.
Anyway. It seems the developers of the GNU Coreutils did in fact think about the sexual connotations, and the implementation of the program contained in the package is called... pinky.
...
You know, it's a lightweight finger.
... yeah...
Anyway, I was getting frustrated with the BSD finger that gets installed when you ask Debian for finger, so I looked for ways to make the logon history actually show up as correct (it kept claming I never logged on to the system before when I was the one asking it for any finger information). Turns out I needed to install the fingerd daemon to manage that.
But in between I found pinky as a replacement. That is, sort of. It shows most of the finger information I wanted. The one thing it didn't show? The last login information, which was the thing the whole program supposedly was invented for.
runit on LFS
The last few weeks I have been going through the Linux from Scratch 12.4 book, the System V version of that. I only realized later that they discontinued the development of that earlier this year, meaning going forward the future versions will be systemd based. Which I find a bit of a pity, because I wanted to learn specifically, how Unix actually works, and what you need for it, without the endless complexities of systemd. I still remember systemd being introduced everywhere just after I got into Linux, and I just had gotten used to dealing with the normal Linux init process. And then this giant mess of complexity was dropped into my lap and I had to throw out all the knowledge I gained before. I was not happy. Over time I got used to working with systemd, but it still feels way more cumbersome and intrusive than I'd like. So anyway, many systems nowadays are using runit as an init instead. Ok, many systems nowadays are running with busybox as well, and that one has an inbuilt version of runit. But after I was finished with the original LFS book, and partway through BLFS (Beyond Linux from Scratch), I decided to deal with the init system.
It turns out this is easier to replace than I thought. Runit can be had on the author's website: [https://smarden.org/runit/]
runit should go into /sbin
runsvdir, runsv, chpst, svlogd, and sv should be moved to /usr/bin
runsvchdir and utmpset to /usr/sbin
The man pages in the man folder to /usr/share/man/man8
But the tricky part with runit are the scripts needed for the system to start up in the first place. Luckily there are some scripts under [https://github.com/inthecloud247/runit-for-lfs/] which mostly work. It also has a very good INSTALL document that helps with installing runit.
The repo is over 12 years old now, but outside some basic stuff (udevadm is installed in /bin instead of /sbin now) they seem to be working fine
You might want to check the 1 script in the /etc/runit folder if everything is alright. This is basically your startup script that runs everything the system needs to boot.
btw, there is another runit for lfs repository around that looks all nice and professional, and which purports to have a whole runit environment to use, but the author admit to having vibe-coded it, and when I tried it it showed. As in, it didn't. Run at all I mean.
bashblog
An attempt at a blog on my grenzland.club tilde page. I am using bashblog for it, which is basically just a bash script that creates a whole blog out of posts on your command line interface. I am using nano to write this right now for example. If this works as it should there soon should be a shiny new blog under this address.