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#1 Re: Off-topic » lol! » 2017-11-09 23:31:05

I for one welcome our new AI Over Lords!  You see, all algorithms are created equally.  Some are just more equal than others...

lazlo

#2 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » More Nouveau woes. » 2017-10-29 18:49:23

marcdraco,  I have fought many battles with the nouvea driver for nvidia cards.  I use a lot of opencl and cuda apps on my systems so I alway install the binary drivers from Nvidia.  Assuming you want to do the same:

The first thing I always do is edit /etc/default/grub and change

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="modprobe.blacklist=nouvea"

then

root@system# update grub
Generating grub configuration file...
Found linux image: Foo
Found initrd image Bar
done

This stops the nouvea driver from being loaded at boot time from the initrd image.  After a I have rebooted I can then install the binary nvidia drivers. 

If you are getting blank screens and/or stdout stops responding/updating during boot and are fine with keeping the nouvea drivers I would instead try changing /etc/default/grub like this (note that I have not done this with devuan, only gentoo so things might be different or not work at all):

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nouvea.modeset=0 vga=0x367"

and then run update-grub.  Note that setting the "vga=" to 0x367 should set your console resolution to 1920x1080 in 32bit color.  If you need other resolutions you can search the internet for your desired settings.

I hope that helps,

lazlo

#3 Off-topic » A/2017 U1 = First Detection of Interstellar Body » 2017-10-27 23:16:19

lazlo
Replies: 11

I think this is way, way cool.  Humanity has finally detected an object moving through our solar system that we know (with a very high degree of probability) is not of local origins.  A quick quote from the article:

CNEOS wrote:

The CNEOS team plotted the object's current trajectory and even looked into its future. A/2017 U1 came from the direction of the constellation Lyra, cruising through interstellar space at a brisk clip of 15.8 miles (25.5 kilometers) per second.

The object approached our solar system from almost directly "above" the ecliptic, the approximate plane in space where the planets and most asteroids orbit the Sun, so it did not have any close encounters with the eight major planets during its plunge toward the Sun. On Sept. 2, the small body crossed under the ecliptic plane just inside of Mercury's orbit and then made its closest approach to the Sun on Sept. 9. Pulled by the Sun's gravity, the object made a hairpin turn under our solar system, passing under Earth's orbit on Oct. 14 at a distance of about 15 million miles (24 million kilometers) -- about 60 times the distance to the Moon. It has now shot back up above the plane of the planets and, travelling at 27 miles per second (44 kilometers per second) with respect to the Sun, the object is speeding toward the constellation Pegasus.

It's things like this that make up for all of the "Poetterings" in our world.

Here, enjoy a link:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 … 104523.htm

lazlo

#4 Re: Off-topic » CloudFlare is offering $100,000 in bounties to invalidate patents. » 2017-10-09 19:15:42

Project Jengo is still on at Cloudflare.  They posted an update report a few weeks ago and are paying out the first round of of bounty money as well as shipping t-shirts.  Since I first posted the link above they have invalidated or are in the process of challenging 5 of the patents in question.  They have also uncovered more then 30 other patents that they are offering bounties for invalidating.  Here is the link:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/project-jen … -for-more/

lazlo

#5 Re: Installation » Anyone tried installing in Linode as custom distribution? » 2017-08-10 19:52:20

I have never tried to set up an install on Linode.  Since /proc/mounts will only show what is mounted then it seems that the cdrom of devuan isn't mounted.  Perhaps you can find the location you need to specify with blkid or lsblk.

Hope that helps,

lazlo

#6 Devuan » After Ascii: A Devuan wishlist. » 2017-07-26 16:55:27

lazlo
Replies: 15

It took a lot of effort from many different people to get Devuan Jessie release.  We are all very thankful for the time invested in the project and for the work now being done on Devuan Ascii.  Looking beyond Ascii there are a few things that I would to see implemented although it might take a really long time before any work can be done on them.  So I thought it would be a good idea to post my small wish list and ask what (if anything) is on yours?

1.)  I would like to see an officially maintained Devuan container image server for lxd but I know it will be a long time before lxd is officially included in Debian and will not be in Devuan until Beowulf or beyond.  Of course, in the short term I would settle for a good Devuan images being maintained on https://us.images.linuxcontainers.org/.  I have thought of trying to do it, but I don't confidence that my skills are up to the task.

2.)  I wish there was a section on the Devuan website that was devoted to "The Best of..." where people would write informed, useful reviews and howto's of the most commonly used software from the Devuan PopCon data.  Any relevant information in these articles could then be fed into Devuan wiki as needed by those of us with lesser talents.

3.)  I want a Devuan release codenamed Vulcan.

Live long and Prosper...

lazlo

#7 Re: Devuan » Can Devuan survive and face the development of Debian? » 2017-07-20 04:55:17

fungus wrote:

If a system has no bugs, no requests to change or improve anything, the perfect system, it will rank 200 in the distrowatch list.  It would be considered a dead
project and abandoned.  A good system in their logic is one that has too many bugs and every little step on clearing out 1% of them is a point release.

So much for indexing and rating scales marketing people devise.

Devuan 2 the final release smile

I think that I didn't explain the ratings system well enough.  A Distrowatch rating is based on the number of unique IP addresses visiting a vendor's website each day.  These numbers are averaged for each of the selected time frames, so that (as of this post) www.devuan.org has averaged 251 unique IP address visits a day over the past 6 months.  The reason there is a correlation between news articles/point releases/press releases and the Distrowatch rating is a bit obvious once it is explained, but if you don't read the "fine print" on distowatch.com my last post may be taken in the wrong way. 

For example let's look at Gentoo.  They very rarely announce anything in the press and they have rolling release style so it's extremely rare for them announce a new version.  On the other hand, anyone who uses Gentoo knows how important their forums and wiki are to keeping a system running smoothly.  So they get a lot of traffic without press releases and news articles being writen about them. 

Next look at the number 1 ranked distro, Mint.  I could use Mint blindfolded and with one arm tied behind my back.  Someone new to linux who has been told "Start with Mint, explore from there" will need to be looking up all sorts of stuff.  Since Mint is Ubuntu based, Ubuntu also gets some of Mint's traffic to their website (i.e. visits to wiki.ubuntu.com) as well as all of their own traffic.  Even Debian gets some traffic from Mint and Ubuntu users looking up information on wiki.debian.org and that's in addition to all of the Debian specific traffic. 

So my point is really that while Devuan may never be ranked number 1 on distrowatch.com it already has as much daily traffic to it's main site as Gentoo does on theirs.  Devuan's web traffic will only grow over the long term and a lot of those visitors will at least install devuan to try it out.  Some will like it, some won't.  Some of those people that do like it and keep using it will also contribute code.  The same is true for users of projects based on Devuan.  That will lead to more users which will lead to more code which will lead to more users...and so on.  And that is the momentum I spoke of in my first post.

lazlo

#8 Re: Devuan » Can Devuan survive and face the development of Debian? » 2017-07-19 00:01:55

I am sure Devuan will be around for the long run.  It already has a lot of momentum and is gaining more as time goes on.  You can see this on the list of the 100 most popular distros on Distrowatch.com.

As of today Devuan is ranked:

61 over the past 12 months
42 over the past 6 month
22 over the past 3 months
43 over the past 30 days
40 over the past 7 days

The trend so far is that Devuan gets small bumps in popularity every time there is news story about a security whole or stability flaw that gets marked as "won't fix" on the systemd bug tracker.  Devuan has naturally gotten large bumps in popularity when it has announced any form of "point release" or when a large project announces that it will be built from or based on Devuan. 

The "point releases" have stopped since 1.0 was announced and the number of businesses and distros building on top of Devuan is not large yet.  In my opinion both of these will start contributing a lot more when a beta of ascii is formally announced.

EDIT:  Oh, and on the 6 month list (which is the default list view) Devuan is more popular than Kubuntu, Ubuntu Gnome, Red hat, or Alpine Linux.  It is right below Gentoo which at this time is Number 41 on the list.

lazlo

#9 Re: Forum Feedback » Certificate expiry? » 2017-07-07 00:47:00

While I don't anything about the current setup used by these forums or www.devuan.org I did read an interesting blog post about https certificates today.  I don't know if it will be of any use to I thought I'd throw it here just in case.

https://letsencrypt.org//2017/07/06/wil … -2018.html

lazlo

#10 Off-topic » When you can't tell the difference between Windows and systemd » 2017-07-06 02:36:04

lazlo
Replies: 31

There is a lot I could say about this news article, but I'll let it speak for itself.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/0 … _accounts/

I will say "Thank You!" to everyone involved with Devuan, from the dev team all the way down to the forum staff and my fellow users.  With out all of your efforts GNU/Linux would be on a dead end road to over complexity, mediocrity, insecurity, and instability.

lazlo

#11 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » caja automatically opens some thumbdrives but not others [SOLVED] » 2017-06-30 23:49:27

In the past I have had flash drives that misbehaved, however it was a different scenario.  After using dd to copy an iso image to a drive MS Windows would no longer read, mount, format, or partition the drive until I zeroed the sectors with dd in linux.  It is a rare occurrence and it may have been this same issue GNUser had or a related one.  I have never been a fan of auto mounting usb drives in any OS for the same reasons I never liked "Boot From Floppy" as the default BIOS option in the old days.  It's a good way to get a malware infection if you have ever lost sight of the flash drive.  So in linux, I turn off auto mounting of everything by force of habit. 

My best guess in this case is that there is either:

A.)  An incompatible partition table as Greenjeans mentioned

or

B.)  Some sort of minor corruption of data in the partition table.  While it may not be enough to cause a loss of data in robust environment like Devuan, it might keep the system from auto mounting the drive or stop Caja from auto running the file browser. 

It is also possible that there was a hidden autorun.inf somewhere on the drives that the manufacturer placed there to run their proprietary software, as Golinux suggested.  I don't know if such a file would have much effect in linux even if you have wine installed.  It would have to point to an executable program of some type and if the drive had been previously formatted it would be missing. 

I do not think that left over information in the boot sector is the cause because wipefs won't erase data according to this excerpt from it's man page:

wipefs does not erase the filesystem itself nor any other data from the
       device.  When used  without  any  options,  wipefs  lists  all  visible
       filesystems and the offsets of their basic signatures.

Which brings us to gparted...should it be removing the old partition data by either doing the same thing wipefs does or by calling wipefs?  Or should it just be overwriting the partition table and file system as it seems to be doing?  If it is the former, this points to a bug.  If it is the latter perhaps it needs a call to wipesfs in order to prevent this issue in the future.

lazlo

#12 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » caja automatically opens some thumbdrives but not others [SOLVED] » 2017-06-30 01:49:47

GNUser wrote:

lazlo: You nailed it!

0. I plugged in a thumbdrive that caja wasn't automatically opening, then...
1.

sudo umount /dev/sdb1

2.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb

3. I went into GParted and when I chose sdb it complained about there being no partition table--presumably because it was overwritten with zeros by the dd command--so I went ahead and created an msdos partition table.
4. Still in GParted, I created an sdb1 partition with fat32 filesystem.

Then I removed the thumbdrive and plugged it back in, and... CAJA AUTOMATICALLY OPENED IT!

I tried cheating with a different thumbdrive, hoping that skipping the time-consuming dd step and going straight to creating a new partition table would be enough, but no luck with that.

While I will continue to wonder where exactly was the problem, thanks to you we have a fix. Thanks a lot! This has bothered me for a long time, since long before Devuan.

OK, since that actually worked, (yes, I am a bit surprised) then in order to narrow down what the issue is the next thing I would try is:

wipefs -a -f /dev/sdb1
wipefs -a -f /dev/sdb

and see if it has the same results.  If so you may have found a bug in gparted.

Thanks for letting me know that dd worked!

EDIT:  After giving it more thought I realized that if wipefs doesn't do the trick you could probably just run dd like this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb count=512 bs=4K

That would just wipe the first two megabytes of space on the drive which would contain the boot sector and the partition table.  If that doesn't work you can speed up the drive over wite with:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=8M

lazlo

#13 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » caja automatically opens some thumbdrives but not others [SOLVED] » 2017-06-29 22:21:16

OK, so what happens when (as root) you:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb

and then run gparted?  I am thinking that *maybe* something is not being over written or not writing correctly to the usb drives that have the issue.  Honestly though, I don't expect it to do any good.

EDIT:  Could it be bad sectors close to the beginning of the drive preventing a vital bit of information from updating the status of the device somewhere below the caja mount process?  Or maybe it's a slight difference in the low level hardware that communicates between the block layer and the flash chip of the usb drive itself?  I know it's grasping at straws, but I hate a puzzle I can't solve.  I'll be thinking about this forever if I don't find a good solid reason for it.

lazlo

#14 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » caja automatically opens some thumbdrives but not others [SOLVED] » 2017-06-29 20:10:22

Just a shot in the dark here, but could it be an artifact of removing the systemd dependencies?  It was almost a year ago that systemd started automounting usb drives:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/2 … ount_tool/

I am not sure how to test this for systemd stuff though,  I will say that when using usb drives on my distros that still have systemd I always unmount the usb drive via command line before I try to make any changes like formatting or repartitioning or using dd.  If I don't I always run into trouble of some sort.  Of cource that also means I need to replug the usb drive or manually mount it when I am done.

Hope that helps in some way.

lazlo

#16 Re: Other Issues » newbie question, as I am » 2017-06-24 18:34:01

GNUser wrote:

BTW, don't worry too much about style at first. Just get the scripts to work. As you learn better ways of doing things, you can edit your scripts to make them prettier and more robust. This is called "refactoring" and is a good practice.

I was given this same advice long ago and it's some the best.  As I have gotten older I have also found it handy to keep a text file in my home folder that I call "bash-fu" and it contains almost all of the scripts I have written along with the comments.  If my middle aged brain can't remember what it wrote a few years back I can just peek inside my bash-fu file and find what I need.  I can then copy, paste, and re-factor as needed.

lazlo

#17 Re: DIY » My "Slightly" Customized Devuan Menu Icon » 2017-06-07 11:09:06

OK, I admit it...I stoled your Button and added it to the Tux image from the crystal icons pack.  It's now my new avatar for the forums.

Edit 2:  I had to flip the image of Tux 180 degrees horizontally so that the highlights and shadows were better aligned.

lazlo

#18 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » SSD Drive » 2017-06-07 10:44:55

Would you please post the output of the following commands from the troubled system?

lsblk
cat /etc/fstab
cat /etc/mtab

If you are using lvm please include:

sudo pvs
sudo vgs
sudo lvs

Please add what partitions you want to mount as well as when (ie. at boot) and where you want them mounted.

Hopefully that will give us everything we need to know to help you find the problem.

lazlo

#19 Re: Installation » No Internet (wlan0) after boot of PC » 2017-06-07 10:18:52

Try changing the "iface wlan0" line to:

iface wlan0 inet dhcp

Leave the rest like it is.

Edit:  I think that should do it.  I think the reason Debian is overriding /etc/network/interfaces is because it is using NetworkManager.

lazlo

#20 Installation » Text Based Install: Wifi passphrase is unobscured. » 2017-05-30 21:54:59

lazlo
Replies: 1

I am not sure if this is a bug or if it is working as intended.  When I started an install of Devuan Jessie on my laptop I had to use the text based installer because my touchpad wasn't working (Yes, I am looking at you Synaptic Multi-touch proprietary software blob!).  When the net-install.iso found my wifi card (by the way, awesome job with that) it asked which wireless AP it should connect to and asked what kind of encrytion to use.  It then asked for the secret passphrase for the AP and I was able to see the passphrase in plain text in the installer.  Honestly, I was expecting that passphrase to be obscured like all other passwords in the installation process.  For me it's a small thing but it could be a big deal for someone else so thought I should ask if it's a bug.

lazlo

#21 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Has anyone here installed nextcloud from source successfully? SOLVED! » 2017-05-29 22:04:09

EDIT:  At first I was thinking that this could a $PATH issue, but we are talking about a library not an executable program.

In my VM there is no lib64 listed under /usr or /usr/local.  There is a /lib64 right off of / though.  Perhaps nextcloud expects the file to be there?  There must be a config file or a line of code that tells nextcloud where to install and/or look for it's libraries. I have no clue where that would be.

I hope that helps,

lazlo

#22 Re: News & Announcements » Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 Stable LTS is here!!! » 2017-05-26 12:43:03

From another thread:

golinux wrote:

Like Debian until 2020 and possibly beyond

lazlo

#23 Off-topic » CloudFlare is offering $100,000 in bounties to invalidate patents. » 2017-05-25 23:57:30

lazlo
Replies: 2

A "Patent Troll" sued CloudFlare for infringing on some overly vague software patents.  CloudFlare decided to put them out of business by offering bounties to anyone that can provide the prior art that legally invalidates these patents.

Here is a link:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/patent-trol … ect-jengo/

lazlo

#25 Re: Intergalactic Communities » SPANISH devuan install guide, instalacion en español » 2017-05-21 16:48:26

I thought I would give my opinion on the point you have made, @mckaygerhard.

LVM:

I didn't really use LVM at first because it seemed too complex and there were ways of partitioning disks that I thought were easier.  However I have come to love LVM over the years for a few reason I'll list here. 

1.) Virtualization:  I use VM's to test out new distros of linux on my desktop and on my home server to isolate the parts of my system that face the internet.  You can use LVM for the file system of a VM or LXC container and tools like libvirt, virtualbox, and LXD will use create and destroy file systems as needed for each VM.  The performance of a VM filesystem on LVM is much closer to native performance than a VM in an image file because there is less overhead.

2.)  Ease of Management:  Using LVM to layout my partitions allows me to have a 256GB SSD acting as a cache for my 3TB of spinning HDDs in my desktop.  The performance is wonderful compared to only HDDs and the cost is far less than 3TB of SSDs. 

On my home server I have 2 256GB SSDs and 3 1TB HDDs.  I used mdadm to create a RAID1 with SSDs (md0) and a RAID0 with the HDDs (md1).  I have LVM set up with a 2 VGs one on md0 (called ssd_r1) and one on md1 (called hdd_r0).  Then I put LVs for /, /boot, and /home on ssd_r1 with LVs for swap, /tmp, /var, /srv and all of the VM filesystems on hhd_r0. 

This means that the SSDs hold the data that I want to access quickly as well as the data doesn't change very often.  The HDDs get the data that changes often and involves a lot of writing to the filesystem.  This helps me prolong the life of my SSDs while still getting the most performance out of my hardware.  It isn't just theory.  It's a single, very practical solution to multiple problems.

Swap

On my desktop I have 12GB of RAM and 12.5GB of swap.  On my home server I have 32GB of RAM and 33GB of swap.  I have this much swap allocated for two reasons.  First is that in the very unlikely event of a crash the systems will be able to write out a full memory dump in case it needs to be analyzed.  Second is that I have a lot of RAM because I use a lot of of RAM.  Since my disks are so big, using about 1% of that space for swap is not a problem and it helps keep a lot of data in memory.

Separate Partitions

You are right, separating your data into more than one file system is not needed.  That does not mean it isn't a good idea though.  Anyone who has worked with computers long enough can tell you that any part of the data stored on a device can become corrupted.  This includes not just the data written as files, but the the filesystems and partitions too. 

Dividing your data across multiple partitions is a good way to guard against some of this failure.  It also means some of your partitions can be backed up, restored, mounted, unmounted, fsck-ed or more without disrupting the system as a whole.  Some users might not care about that at all.  Others won't care about it until it's too late to be of use.  Others among us have learned lessons the hard way over the years and care about it before we even start installing an OS.

The Unwritten Message

Please, forgive me if I get this part wrong.  It seems to me that the unwritten message in your post is that Devuan is a linux distro that is meant to be used by one type of user.  This is could not be farther from the truth.  All linux development is about choice.  All usage of linux is about choice.  Debian chose to ignore this truth and we are here because of that.  Devuan is about choice.

If you choose not to use the default options that is fine.  However please do not ask others to be have their choices limited.  One of the goals of Devuan is to be a distribution that other distros are built from.  This will only be possible if there are a great many ways to do things in Devuan.  More options = More Developers = More Choices = More Users!

lazlo

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