In two earlier episodes I have been talking about digiKam photo management software. I hope to come back to that topic in another episode in the future. But not today.

Today I will talk about what happened to me about two weeks ago. Maybe it was because I had used the hibernate state, which I rarely use, that caused my laptop to behave somewhat strange. So I decided to turn it off. It was my Lenovo Thinkpad T460p laptop, running Linux Mint Debian Edition.

So I turned it off the normal way with the soft button inside the operating system. But instead of power off I was shown a full terminal screen with a lot of text what it was doing. But it never came to the conclusion to turn off.

I have learned that in those situations, although tempting, that on Linux I should not force turn off with the physical mechanical power button. I have tried that before on another Linux laptop, and it was not a success, rather the opposite.

What I should do with Linux is to talk with electrodes directly to the central brain, or in other words, call the Linux kernel with help of a system request and by that sidestep the operating system.

A System Request is done with the SysRq key on the keyboard. In this situation I did the reisub key sequence with a system request:

If I hold the System Request key together with the Alternate Alt key, and when still holding them down, I type the letters r, e, i, s, u and b, one by one in a very slow pace, I take seconds between them. Then I release all keys and the machine reboots.

This was very successful for me and the laptop has since then worked as normal.

I use an external full size keyboard that has a System Request key.

But not all laptops has such a key any more. System Request can be reached also on all or most of those laptops with some key combination. But that key combination varies between manufacturers and models.

In the show notes I add a link to a How to geek article about reisub as well as to Wikipedia about System Request:

• How-To Geek: Cleanly Restarting Your System. Use the Magic SysRq Key on Linux to Fix Frozen X Servers, Cleanly Reboot, and Run Other Low-Level Commands

• Wikipedia: Magic SysRq key

We live in a time where everything is streamed; from our TV, radio, podcasts everything is fine until the internet goes down. Gone are the days of simply turning on the TV with a set top aerial. With this in mind, I set up an old Raspberry Pi 2 and connected it to use as a video and music server through a Samba share.

To complete this task you will need:

• A Raspberry Pi
• A micro-SD card
• An Ethernet cable
• An external hard drive (min 2TB recommended)

Step 1: Update your Pi software in the terminal:

Step 2: To allow us to share our files over a network we will install Samba:

Step 3: To find UUID and the file system of the drive, enter:

Ignore the line with fat32, this is your Micro-SD card.

Step 4: We need to mount this drive automatically whenever the Raspberry Pi is switched on. Firstly, we'll need to create a location to mount the external hard drive, we can do this by using the command:

Step 5: Now we need to edit the fstab to tell the Raspberry Pi to automount the external drive every time it is switched on

Insert the following line at the bottom of the page:

The above should all be on one line, pressing the tab key to create a gap between each piece of information.

Step 6: Now we need to set up which folders are going to be shared. I'll assume that we are going to make the whole of the external drive available over the network

At the bottom of the page add the following, note that you can call this anything you wish, just exchange the word external but you must include [ ]:

It's worth noting before we continue that I've set the option writable = yes, this means that you can add to or remove the contents of the external drive over the network. If you are not comfortable having this option then simply change it to writable = no. Now save and exit (ctrl + X), make sure that you answer 'yes' to save your changes.

Step 7: We will now set the Raspberry Pi to log in automatically on startup, if the user Pi isn't logged in then all of things we've just set up will not work. Type:

Navigate down to the line:

and add --autologin pi after getty to make the line:

Save and exit (ctrl + X) make sure that you answer 'yes' to save it.

Step 8: We can try it out our system and auto-login by using the command

Assuming that everything goes well, your system should be up and running. Try and find it on a computer through the file manager. I personally recommend saving the Pi location on Kodi for an easy to use solution for browsing your media on a TV.

I don't have shownotes for this one. Sorry for that.

Please refer to the transcript for more information.