mdadm: How to Remove a Drive From a RAID Array

📅 December 22, 2020
What? Why is this drive still insisting that it is a part of a RAID array?

If you use mdadm, you might have encountered a situation where, even though you entered the correct commands to fail a member drive and remove it from the array, another computer or the same computer still recognizes it as a part of the old array.

This is normal because mdadm member drives contain superblocks that contain RAID information. If a computer still sees a removed drive as part of a RAID array, it is usually because the superblock was not removed from the drive.

Here is how to do that.

Ho, Ho, Ho with xsnow!

📅 December 15, 2020
With Christmas and snowy weather this time of year, why not add some gaudy festive decoration to your carefully crafted clean and minimal Linux desktop?

xsnow is a program that displays falling snow animations on top of your Linux desktop wallpaper complete with stars, wind gusts, accumulating snow, shooting stars, and Santa in his sleigh!

Lexar 64G JumpDrive M45 and Linux

📅 December 7, 2020
“Aww…look at da wittle USB stick. It’s sooo cute!”

USB sticks have improved greatly in the past years. Now, they support USB 3.1 with triple-digit read/write speeds depending upon the model.

Needing a new USB stick, I tried the Lexar 64G JumpDrive for its small size, fast speeds, and metal construction. Is it compatible with Linux? What is its performance like?

Here are my results with this little storage-capacity wonder with Linux Mint 20.