Dion Starfire

You’re probably wanting [ -z "${VAR1}" -a -z "${VAR2}" ]. Note in bash that there are minor differences in how [ ] and [[ ]] tests are handled. You can pull up a handy cheat sheet of the operands on most distros by running man test, though you’ll need to read through the CONDITIONAL EXPRESSIONS section of man bash if you want to see the minor differences of the single vs double square bracket commands (mostly whether locale applies to string order, as well as whether operands are evaluated in numeric comparisons).

All legit. At the end of the day, both the commands that go through systemd and the direct cat something >/proc/… or cat something >/sys/… are all doing the same thing - telling the kernel to do some procedure.

There’s some settings stuff in /proc and /sys that you don’t want to tweak without knowing the effects, as they could break things in hard to fix ways, but for stuff like beeping or changing sleep states, the worst you’ll do is lock up your computer and need to reboot. And even that is rare unless the hardware really doesn’t like a particular sleep state.

That’s because the person who had the solution removed their comment history, but the person who said thank you didn’t.

This is clearly humor, but for anyone wondering what the actual connection is, it’s that Mark Shuttleworth, the billionaire founder and CEO of Canonical (the company that maintains Ubuntu), is from South Africa. He liked the word, and decided to name his new Debian fork after it.

I was thinking something similar. I use Arch because it’s easy and user friendly for me. I also come from a history of using Slackware in the mid-90s, to Gentoo in the mid-00s, to Arch in the mid-teens. So whenever anyone asks how I got to where I am with Linux, I generally recommend that they don’t follow the same path of pain, and start on something that’s actually user-friendly like Mint or Ubuntu.

Originally the machines were going to use human brains for processing, but apparently the explanation was deemed too technical, so they changed it to some mumbo jumbo about power, which also let them use the nickname Coppertop.

A partner of mine has an above-range microwave with the worst implementation of this that I’ve ever seen. When you mute the button beeps, it mutes the entire microwave. Food finished cooking? Silent. Manual timer set? Hope you’re looking to see when it hits zero. There’s no way to silence the buttons without muting all alerts completely.