After a few earlier failed attempts, today I was successfully able to create an unprivileged LXC container on Debian Stretch for the first time. I had experience of using LXC's more user friendly cousin LXD before I moved to Debian but unfortunately LXD is not available on Debian yet. While LXC is more low level compared to LXD, if you just need a basic container, it's still pretty solid. The Debian wiki on LXC container is fairly straight forward and easy to follow, but still for someone who is a novice to both Debian and LXC, it is very easy to get lost. So I am writing this post so that it can be a good place to start if you need a very basic setup.

I have a wireless Bluetooth speaker that I use with my laptop running Debian 9 with Xfce. My laptop also has a primary speaker. So when I connect my Bluetooth speaker to my laptop, my laptop is actually connected to both the primary and secondary speaker at the same time. The laptop volume up/down keys will still be mapped to the primary speaker and if I wish to control the volume of the secondary speaker, I needed to open the Volume Control window from the Panel volume plugin, which was a pain if you had to do it every time.

One of the few software that I like to keep always updated to the latest version on my system is Libreoffice, because of the compatibility improvements with the other office suite each new version brings. And while Debian Stable provides a solid and stable base system, the libreoffice package becomes outdated with time. A lot of the guides on updating Libreoffice in Debian on the Internet speak about installing the latest binaries from the Libreoffice website. But the main shortcoming with this approach is that updating to the next version is again a manual task.

Recently I had to downgrade my main laptop from Debian testing to Debian stable (Stretch at the time of writing). Since I did not have a separate home partition, re-installation meant formatting the entire partition that would erase all my personal data and settings. But this time I did not want go over the pain of configuring everything from scratch, so I went ahead without formatting my root partition. After a few times of failures and analyzing the installation logs, I learnt the trick.

MediaWiki is a very popular free and open-source wiki software that powers some of the most visited wikis on the Internet including the Wikipedia. You can also host it in your own environment for your own wiki requirements or for your organization.

At my work, we use MediaWiki for our developer's wiki site. When I started working for a new product team sometimes back, I came to know about this wiki format for the first time and I didn't like it very much.