Your favorite linux projects for weekend

Create a dotfiles repo in git. Gives you a way to track changes to your .bashrc or .zshrc

With extra bonus: write an installer script that symlinks the files to the correct place. Use Ansible, plain old Bash, or Python depending on your preference.
- Or GNU stow.
- rcm
  
  https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm
  
  rcm will do symlinking for you and is pretty awesome. Been using it for this purpose for years
- I'm waffling between that or just setting up a bare git repo. Am prepping a VM or two to explore the pros/cons of each approach and to dive into the implications.
  
  It's funny - this project idea seems to free bubbling up everywhere this past week. I'm sure I'm seeing the consequences of search algorithms, but on Lemmy, it's nice to see what is a definite and pleasant coincidence.
That is the next item on my to-do list. I've already installed my own gitea container to run at home. Yes, I could use a public repo (set private) but I wanted I learn how to do this and besides, I wanted to cast a wider net for which files to store but not worry about inadvertently publishing something with passwords embedded...
I didn't really see the benefit of this besides having a snapshot or backup of my home folder for my use case (I don't have that many config/text files that needs tracking), but I can recommend chezmoi for those interested.

If you're not using your pihole as a recursive DNS server that is a natural next step that ties neatly into where you've already gone. Wireguard can also easily run next to it if you want a lightweight VPN for when you're away from your network.

Thanks for sharing these feature. I run pihole but knew nothing about this. As my move my implementation to new hardware I'll definitely be adding this.
Nice read, thanks for the insight.
Thanks for this topic, definitively something my pihole will get!

Paperless-ngx. It's a document management system for home users or small companies. Pretty cool if this is something you need. If you spend a lot of time filing away documents, you definitely need this.

Just keep in mind it will take a bit of effort to add and categorize your stuff. 😄 I've had Paperless installed for two months now but can't get around to actually moving my stuff into it.
- You are so right! That is the painful part that no one talks about! Took me a few days to get paperless-ngx working, because I had wrong firewall and port settings preventing docker containers communicating with each other. Once solved that I was proud and relieved - started scanning and categorizing - but in hindsight that was nothing compared to the amount of work to move stuff to it. I finally accepted that I will just have to keep doing that when I feel like it… which for the past months has been “never”. I now only put new docs in, but the older stuff is still sitting in nas folders.
is it easy to export its contents to a different app
- They have an exporter and a REST API. So yeah.
What are the benefits over just putting documents in a git-annex repository?
- Retrieval. Indexing everything thoroughly is a bit of a faff but once you put in the work, finding that one invoice from two years ago becomes very easy. If that's not a factor for you, git will work too.

If you have uncapped bandwidth you could run a syncthing relay server. Syncthing rocks as a file sync option and I host my own.

relays.syncthing.net/

Ooh...this is interesting. I'm going to look into setting this up. Thanks!

Might be worth hosting Gitea/Forgejo

I made a home inventory management software, because I don't have much space in my flat, so I track every single piece of the compressed pile of boxes; with qr codes on them.

It's a very simple app but you should have a printer to print qr codes for the boxes.

The documentation lacks some detail, so ask anything about it, if you want to try it.

https://github.com/fxdave/DavidHomeVentory

EDIT: yeah I didn't update the readme. The installation may not work. So tell me if you want to give it shot.

It looks like this in action btw:

My weekend project will be install mint for my first flurry into Linux.

I'm going to set it up for some light gaming and media streaming.

Running on a Dell Latitude 4980, long term hoping to learn enough to set up a home jellyfin server.

Welcome to the Linux community!
- Thanks. Finally after Mint didn't recognise my network adaptor I tried Manjaro (everything worked great, but I don't think I'm ready for Arch) so ended up on Pop_OS .... everything works so I'm going to stick with this for now.

searxng

Do what I do. "Oh shoot, Jellyfin stopped, now I have to remember how to tell Arch to clear out its cached packages" (it's pacman -sc if you're me and you're reading this in the future)

This is me... In general with Linux. So I have a whole section of my Obsidian vault dedicated to troubleshooting and setup steps for my server projects. It's saved me hours of research already. Stupid brain...

I'm learning about i3 and xfce on arch (my daily driver). I'm not linux expert, but I've been really enjoying figuring things out after switching from ubuntu to arch. This weekend I'm getting the icons for network manager applet and clipman working on the whisker panel, and then removing the i3bar.

Well, at least that's rhe goal. I don't have much free time, so tbis will mkst likely be a month project, not a weekend. :P

Already done with mine. Setup obsidian-livesync and configured it on all my devices. It'll be my first time trying out a markdown note app.

This is great! I'm definitely going to try this out, nice work.
I just setup the remotely save plugin with my Nextcloud instance. It apparently can do version control too.

There's so much you could do.

have a reverse proxy for your services, as containers
connect then through netbyrd or nebula if you want the FOSS route (or headacalescale)
set up an IDPS, such as fail2ban, snort, etc
Set up a backup job, there's many projects that does this well - check out Borg and kopia.
since we're on linux, try out different shells. Zsh or fish are pretty popular and pretty to look at.

Using Ubuntu as a daily driver, due to a class requiring some kind of Linux software (options were WSL, which gave me a weird error, VM, or full install).

Never have I tried to actually use desktop Linux as my primary work computer for more than a couple days.

I have an old mini PC that I'm going to use with proxmox to share some of the load from my nas. Today I setup tailscale and for it working with unbound DNS so I can use my domain when connected.

It's endless!

Currently working on a replacement for BirdCAGE. It was a pretty cool project, that was unfortunately based on some pretty hacky code (not the dev's fault, he based it on BirdNet-Pi) and subsequently has been abandoned.

MVP is up and running, just polishing and adding features. Still no GUI just yet, right now it's just presisting the data locally (recordings with detections, spectrograms, and a database of detections) and submitting the results to Birdweather which you can use as a basic UI until I get around to it.

It's been a great learning experience.

Do you have a project page I can keep track of? I have some spare Pi-compatible machines.

Looking at BirdWeather the only node on Vancouver Island is 200km from me. Would be a fun thing I could stick outside my house, we have lots of bird traffic here. Just today I saw robins, crows, ravens, eagles, swans, geese, ducks, and gulls and I was only barely paying attention.
- I haven't made the repo public just yet, but I'll reply to you here when it is. Hopefully early next week.
  
  Though for the record the current scope is to deploy on x86 docker and listen to remote rtsp streams.
  
  I did just disparage the code of BirdNet-Pi somewhat, but it's a vetted and solid solution on pi-compatible hardware.

I was going to try to set up Ampache so that I could access my entire music library at work.

I'm going to be building out a third wireless access point with OpenWRT to get better wireless coverage in the house.

I've been wanting to set up neko for a while now and i finally can next week when i get some free time

Host your own Gitea server and then version control your own RPI configs on the RPI. I mean... save them elsewhere also, but it's yet another thing you could do with that awesome little device.

https://github.com/cdot/Xanado

Scrabble web app

This weekend is getting Foundry VTT up with a reverse proxy and certs for voice/video chat. Spinning up a new VM in proxmox and getting HAproxy configured for it (it’s used for the rest of my services).

Homebridge (or Home Assistant) and smarten up your home, then add Node-Red for fancy coding of your devices