Birds Like Wires

Headless servers? I’m a Debian, or more recently an Ubuntu, person. But way back when my old operating system of choice became untenable, I had to make a decision; use the Windows desktop I supported at work, or find another option. The Linux desktop back in 2003 wasn’t somewhere I wanted to be and I found myself wishing there was some other operating system with UNIX underpinnings, maybe a nice Bash shell, but with a really polished user interface…

I’ve been a Mac user since then and have watched as desktop Linux has slowly closed the gap between its commercial rivals. Though Windows 10 is one of the more polished releases in years, it’s not without its problems and there are so many great distributions of desktop Linux these days it’s hard to ignore the pull of open source life.

I’m a goal-oriented sort of person, so I looked at why I found myself booting my Mac into Windows more often these days. One reason is driver support for some capture hardware I use. The other is Elite Dangerous. I’d wanted to investigate the Wine compatibility layer to get this working, but my first solo attempt ended badly. There are some great instructions out there, but after making my own way through them I like to slim things back as far as possible, so this is what I came up with.

Here’s the part where I realise that I hadn’t taken a peek inside the SLP2 plug in that last video.

As I think I mention more than once, there’s more going on inside this version; or rather the end result is just the same, but it’s using more components.

With huge external drives being far more affordable these days I usually have one hooked up permanently to my laptop dock for Time Machine. But I don’t need all that space dedicated to backup, so it gets chopped up into a backup partition, an encrypted APFS storage container and a bunch of 20 GB partitions which hold a bootable macOS backup, plus a couple of recent macOS installers – just in case I end up having a really bad day.

However, in common with many Mac users I’m sure, I can’t be dealing with all that clutter on the desktop or Finder sidebar when so many partitions are mounted. What a mess! Luckily, /etc/fstab is still a thing you can use in macOS Mojave, so there’s a quick and easy way to prevent these emergency-use volumes from mounting automatically.

First of all, plug in the drive and let everything mount, then fire off a diskutil list in Terminal. You’ll see all of your drives and their identifiers. In my example the external drive shows up as disk2 with various partitions being disk2s1, disk2s2, etc.