misc. Linux notes

Things I’ve learned today that I’ll probably need to know later, after I’ve had a chance to forget them:

1. GNOME 3 was designed by idiots for idiots.  They’ve tried to make it completely drool-proof, and in the process made it unusable by anyone with half a clue.  Use xfce instead.
2. To make suspend work on 2.6.35 kernel (or newer?): put acpi_sleep=nonvs on kernel command line.  Necessary for many laptops, but not all.  Definitely necessary on the Sony VPCEB17FX.  https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16396 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=641789
3. To find the UUIDs of your partitions: blkid
4. To display the LUKS header of an encrypted partition: cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sda6
5. To boot a Fedora live CD such that it all gets loaded into RAM, and the CD is ejected:  add live_ram to the kernel command line.