Disable terminal bell in WSL

Windows Subsystem for Linux is pretty nifty, but Windows has a very rudimentary terminal interface compared to most modern Unix implementations; though I do have high hopes for the new Windows Terminal project. One particularly annoying issue is that there is no way to directly disable sound, this can be a particularly annoying issue when using tab completion or backspace.

The easiest solution to this lack of functionality is to disable the bell in the Linux shell by modifying the readline(3) configuration in /etc/inputrc or ~/.inputrc.

# do not bell on tab-completion
set bell-style none

Linus Torvalds on GPLv2 vs. GPLv3

I just came across this Q&A session with Linus Torvalds regarding the GPL, I was aware of his opinion, but I’ve never heard him talk about it in detail.

Go by Example

I learn well by seeing an example and figuring out what’s going on rather than watching teacher led demonstrations or some other method. I’ve found Go by Example to be the closest thing to my favourite technical manual, the venerable Advanced Bash Guide. For me it’s a great quick reference to understand how apart of the language works when I first encounter it.

Password Best Practices

I’ve been doing a bit of research for a small project to update project management practices and to refresh my knowledge of 2019’s best practices.

This is a pretty decent high level summary of how to approach password strength.

Tienanmen Square on r/AskHistorians

There’s an interesting thread explaining some of the internal politics that were underneath the deadly Tienanmen Square protests 30 years ago in Beijing.

It’s worth a read, if only to better place what happened in the Chinese context.

I’m Inactive on Mastodon

I’m not much for social media, but on the off chance you want to connect with me, I do have a fairly inactive Mastodon account.

I may not reply immediately, but I do check in from time to time.

Using ssh-agent with Windows Subsystem for Linux

Update: I’ve since revised these instructions in this post.

This is fairly basic, but you never know what might be useful to somebody!

Due to the fact that WSL doesn’t bootstrap itself with a normal init/systemd process it can be a bit frustrating to work with SSH keys.

Thankfully the ssh-agent command is designed to set up an environment for key management without much hassle. The trivial method of doing this is to insert the following command into your ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile script:

# start ssh-agent
eval `ssh-agent`

This will initialize a socket to manage your keys and you can then use the ssh-add command as you would on a normal Linux system.

For completeness, stick the following in your ~/.bash_logout script:

# unset ssh-agent
ssh-agent -k

This will remove the socket and unset the environment so that your keys don’t remain loaded after you close your WSL session using exit or CTRL-D.