Max Milton maxmilton

Achieving warp speed with Rust

Arch Linux tweaks

This is a collection of the tweaks and modification I've made to my Arch Linux installation over the months. These may be applicable to other distros, but please check first before doing anything. I also included Arch Wiki references for all the procedures I mentioned. My recommendation is not to blindly follow this gist but to always check with the Arch Linux wiki first. Things move fast and by the time you're reading this my gist may be out of date. Lastly, the golden rule: never execute a command you don't understand.

Installing the KDE Plasma desktop

My current DE of choice is KDE's Plasma. I find it just about perfect.

There are various ways to install it on Arch. The most popular one is to install plasma and plasma-applications, but I don't like doing that because it comes with too many programs I'll never use. I, instead, install the base plasma group, remove the few extra packages that come with it, then I finish off by installing a few KDE apps that don't come with th

Improve Fonts

Newest

Make your Arch fonts beautiful easily! This is what I do when I install Arch Linux to improve the fonts.

You may consider the following settings to improve your fonts for system-wide usage without installing a patched font library packages (eg. Infinality):

Install some fonts, for example:
sudo pacman -S ttf-dejavu ttf-liberation noto-fonts

Pure ESM package

The package that linked you here is now pure ESM. It cannot be require()'d from CommonJS.

This means you have the following choices:

Use ESM yourself. (preferred)
Use import foo from 'foo' instead of const foo = require('foo') to import the package. You also need to put "type": "module" in your package.json and more. Follow the below guide.
If the package is used in an async context, you could use await import(…) from CommonJS instead of require(…).
Stay on the existing version of the package until you can move to ESM.

Building a Secure Arch Linux Device

Locking down a linux machine is getting easier by the day. Recent advancements in systemd-boot have enabled a host of features to help users ensure that their machines have not been tampered with. This guide provides a walkthrough of how to turn on many of these features during installation, as well as reasoning for why certain features help improve security.

The steps laid out below draw on a wide variety of existing resources, and in places I'll point to them rather than attempt to regurgitate full explanations of the various security components. The most significant one, which I highly encourage everyone to read, is Rod Smith's site about secure boot, which is the most comprehensive and cogent explanation of UEFI, boot managers and boot loaders, and secure boot. Another incredibly useful resources is Safeboot, which encapsulates many of the setup steps below in a Debian application.

	declare module 'polka' {
	import { Server } from 'net';
	import { IncomingMessage, ServerResponse } from 'http';
	import Trouter from 'trouter';

	export interface IError extends Error {
	message: string;
	code?: number;
	stack?: string;
	status?: number;

	#!/usr/bin/env bash

	set -Eeuo pipefail
	trap cleanup SIGINT SIGTERM ERR EXIT

	script_dir=$(cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" &>/dev/null && pwd -P)

	usage() {
	cat <<EOF
	Usage: $(basename "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}") [-h] [-v] [-f] -p param_value arg1 [arg2...]

	#include <stdio.h>
	#include <cpuid.h>
	#include <stdint.h>

	int cpu_supports_cet_shadow_stack() {
	uint32_t eax = 0, ebx = 0, ecx = 0, edx = 0;
	__cpuid_count(7, 0, eax, ebx, ecx, edx);
	return (ecx & (1 << 7)) != 0;
	}