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#601 Re: Off-topic » systemd's new feature (wtf?) » 2021-04-02 22:01:19

dice wrote:

back in 2000 i was working at dhl using wyse terminals.

Back in 2000 I had rather more free time than I do now. wink I was also recovering from a very traumatic experience with RPM dependency hell and exploring a custom package management solution for LFS. Sadly that one was lost to the sands of time along with the hardware.

Spock wrote:

Am I wrong?

I doubt it. The truth will reveal itself soon enough, but it sure looks like a container system to me.

#602 Re: Off-topic » Is this the future of Linux » 2021-04-02 21:52:15

Spock wrote:

I happened to see a site for bedrock Linux, which is not, in and of itself, a distribution

Bedrock is kinda cool, but I'm far too attached to the old-school distro concept to pay too much attention to it... yet. Right now it's still a bit of an experiment IMO.

Spock wrote:

So my question is:
Is the future of linux going to be about choosing a base distro and adding on top of it features from other
distro's .

Perhaps. Personally I suspect that the "future of linux" (at least as far as the big players go) is that systemd + containers + snap/flatpack/appimage/whatever-silly-packaging-system-is-easy-for-proprietary-devs is going to take over. That's what corporate interests are pushing for, and many "open source" orgs are already thoroughly compromised.

Once this happens, a "distro" will just be cosmetic configuration on top of systemd + gnome. Big-tech will have successfully eliminated the independent maintainer, replaced all the critical GPL system infrastructure with LGPL systemd, and undermined Free Software to the point that the remaining old-school hackers will have to return to whatever holdout distros remain - which probably means Slackware, Gentoo, and maybe Devuan*... Or move to BSD.

Yes, it's a pessimistic prediction, and I do hope I'm wrong. It sure looks like "embrace, extend, extinguish" is in full swing though, and right now I'd say we're well into step 2. Even Microsoft has realised that they can't fight FLOSS directly, and they've been buying out projects and developers all over the place. Soon most of the important components of GNU/Linux will be open-source community efforts in name alone. It's not a bazaar any more if all the stalls are franchisees.

*Devuan is great and all, but we're still heavily dependent on upstream Debian... These days I don't trust the Debian devs to resist the smell of money any more than Redhat.

#603 Re: Off-topic » systemd's new feature (wtf?) » 2021-04-01 16:41:59

Altoid wrote:

For fuck's sake, does the shit never stop flowing?

Apparently not. At least not where corporate agendas are concerned, and shit always flows downhill.

fsmithred wrote:

This "new" implementation sounds like it might be a useful addition for a couple of specific cases.

By which we mean embedded systems integrators, which along with IBM, Microsoft, and the US military, is where the bulk of Redhat's funding is coming from at the moment.

dice wrote:

Ive only just discovered "immutable operating systems"

I was doing this sort of thing back in ~2000, when you could fit an entire GNU/Linux OS on a 1.44MB floppy disk. It's doesn't need to be complicated, it doesn't need containers, and it sure doesn't need systemd.
Of course you could do it with systemd + containers + whatever other bloated over-engineered garbage the shareholders are into at any given moment, but then you end up with something that's non-POSIX, non-portable, not even remotely Unix-like, and can't be reasoned about by a human sysadmin without 10 layers of abstraction and 30 management utilities... Not real surprising that's the approach the systemd devs are pushing, is it?

Then again. it could be a prank. If it is, it's a good one, because this is exactly the kind of "feature" I expect from the developers involved.

#604 Re: DIY » Minimalism Tips » 2021-03-26 08:30:20

andyprough wrote:

You should warn someone before sharing commands like that.

Or, someone should think before copy-pasting commands from a forum.

greenjeans wrote:
yad --calendar --undecorated --button=gtk-close:0 --skip-taskbar --borders=5 --posx=-1 --posy=-1 --width=300 --on-top

Bloat!

$ cal
     March 2021     
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
    1  2  3  4  5  6
 7  8  9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31

See, I can play this silly game too tongue

#605 Re: Off-topic » My Ryzen 7 1700-X Cooling experience! » 2021-03-16 04:41:38

swarfendor437 wrote:

I purchased a Noctua AH-15

An excellent call. Noctua make the best air coolers available, both in terms of performance and quality. Their maglev fans are also all-around excellent, and IME will outlast pretty much anything else.
As an added bonus, the Noctua Industrial PPC series is one of the few aftermarket fan options that works properly with the BMC on Supermicro server boards while still being (relatively) quiet.

#606 Re: Other Issues » (Unattended-upgrades) Apparently I'm running Debian... Again. » 2021-03-15 08:59:56

dice wrote:

Sorry i couldnt be of any help.

No worries, and no apology needed. This was more a "(loudly) bring it to somebody's attention that this stuff is slipping through again" than a "how do I fix it". Fixing it is easy, it's the "making sure 'debian' doesn't keep slipping into our default configs and breaking things" bit that I'm after.

dice wrote:

Maybe file a bug report again ??

Yeah, I'll get to that just as soon as I get around to figuring out how to report bugs... Round tuits are in short supply right now.

#607 Re: Other Issues » (Unattended-upgrades) Apparently I'm running Debian... Again. » 2021-03-13 18:53:36

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

That's not how it works

Yes yes, perhaps I should have said "let the automation pull packages from Debian without checking them for functionality on Devuan." The result is the same.

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

So you do understand how to make unattended-upgrades work then?

Anyone who has a passing familiarity with sed can make unattended-upgrades work. Perhaps somebody should teach amprolla the same trick.
Likewise anyone who can search a bugtracker can realise that pulling down such packages from Debian without any squishy eyeballs on them is going to reintroduce bugs just like this one.

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

I think the community would appreciate a quick HowTo thread in the Freedom Hacks section

Frankly I suspect what the community would appreciate even more would be a little look into where that fix committed 4 years ago wandered off to in the first place.

On a completely off-topic note, you're extremely unlikely to see me in the "Freedom Hacks" sub, ever. The pretentious name alone is enough to keep me away.

#608 Re: Other Issues » (Unattended-upgrades) Apparently I'm running Debian... Again. » 2021-03-13 16:40:59

dice wrote:

I have never used unattended upgrades.

How many headless boxes do you administer? If you don't like needing to ssh into each one to apply updates, and want your machines to keep themselves up to date, mail you with results and schedule their own reboots for when there are no users logged in, unattended-upgrades is for you.

It's been in main at least as far back as etch, so it's not exactly exotic and I'm fairly confident I'm not the only one using it.

dice wrote:

Could the devuan 3.1 release notes shed a bit more light on this issue?

It sheds light on the grub menu problem, but this being a new (post point-release) install it already has that fix.

PRETTY_NAME="Devuan GNU/Linux 3 (beowulf)"
NAME="Devuan GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="3"
VERSION="3 (beowulf)"
VERSION_CODENAME=beowulf
ID=devuan
ID_LIKE=debian
HOME_URL="https://www.devuan.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://devuan.org/os/community"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.devuan.org/"

This is another problem of the same class all right though, i.e. rolling debian packages into the repos without checking them for debianisms.

#609 Other Issues » (Unattended-upgrades) Apparently I'm running Debian... Again. » 2021-03-13 14:06:51

steve_v
Replies: 21

Okay, let's install unattended-upgrades for a new-old headless Devuan box... This should just-work like it has for the last 20 years on Debian, right?

# apt install unattended-upgrades
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  python3-distro-info
Suggested packages:
  bsd-mailx default-mta | mail-transport-agent needrestart
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  python3-distro-info unattended-upgrades
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 86.9 kB of archives.
After this operation, 339 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 
Get:1 http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf/main i386 python3-distro-info all 0.21 [7,896 B]
Get:2 http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf/main i386 unattended-upgrades all 1.11.2 [79.0 kB]
Fetched 86.9 kB in 4s (21.9 kB/s)              
Preconfiguring packages ...
Selecting previously unselected package python3-distro-info.
(Reading database ... 49149 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../python3-distro-info_0.21_all.deb ...
Unpacking python3-distro-info (0.21) ...
Selecting previously unselected package unattended-upgrades.
Preparing to unpack .../unattended-upgrades_1.11.2_all.deb ...
Unpacking unattended-upgrades (1.11.2) ...
Setting up python3-distro-info (0.21) ...
Setting up unattended-upgrades (1.11.2) ...

Creating config file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades with new version
Processing triggers for man-db (2.8.5-2) ...

And fire those updates to make sure it works...

# unattended-upgrades -d
Initial blacklist : 
Initial whitelist: 
Starting unattended upgrades script
Allowed origins are: origin=Debian,codename=beowulf,label=Debian, origin=Debian,codename=beowulf,label=Debian-Security
Using (^linux-image-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^linux-headers-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^linux-image-extra-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^linux-modules-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^linux-modules-extra-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^linux-signed-image-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^linux-image-unsigned-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^kfreebsd-image-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^kfreebsd-headers-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^gnumach-image-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^.*-modules-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^.*-kernel-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^linux-backports-modules-.*-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^linux-modules-.*-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^linux-tools-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^linux-cloud-tools-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^linux-buildinfo-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*|^linux-source-[0-9]+\.[0-9\.]+-.*) regexp to find kernel packages
Using (^linux-image-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^linux-headers-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^linux-image-extra-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^linux-modules-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^linux-modules-extra-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^linux-signed-image-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^linux-image-unsigned-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^kfreebsd-image-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^kfreebsd-headers-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^gnumach-image-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^.*-modules-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^.*-kernel-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^linux-backports-modules-.*-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^linux-modules-.*-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^linux-tools-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^linux-cloud-tools-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^linux-buildinfo-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$|^linux-source-4\.19\.0\-14\-686$) regexp to find running kernel packages
pkgs that look like they should be upgraded: 
Fetched 0 B in 0s (0 B/s)                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
fetch.run() result: 0
blacklist: []
whitelist: []
No packages found that can be upgraded unattended and no pending auto-removals
Extracting content from /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades-dpkg.log since 2021-03-14 02:24:59

Huh. That's odd, I was expecting some updates...

Wait, what? Debian beowulf?

Oh look:

# grep -i devuan /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

*crickets*

# grep -i debian /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades     
//     site          (eg, "http.debian.net")
// derived from /etc/debian_version:
root@mpdsrv:/etc/apt/apt.conf.d# grep -i debian /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades 
//   l,label         (eg, "Debian", "Debian-Security")
//   o,origin        (eg, "Debian", "Unofficial Multimedia Packages")
//     site          (eg, "http.debian.net")
// derived from /etc/debian_version:
        // but the Debian release itself will not be automatically upgraded.
//      "origin=Debian,codename=${distro_codename}-updates";
//      "origin=Debian,codename=${distro_codename}-proposed-updates";
        "origin=Debian,codename=${distro_codename},label=Debian";
        "origin=Debian,codename=${distro_codename},label=Debian-Security";
//      "o=Debian,a=stable";
//      "o=Debian,a=stable-updates";
//      "o=Debian,a=proposed-updates";
//      "o=Debian Backports,a=${distro_codename}-backports,l=Debian Backports";

Ahh. I see. This again.

Look, I realise it's a small team and all that, but can we please at least try to get the name of the distro right?
A bootloader that still says "Debian" is kind of embarrassing, but harmless. Borking things like unattended-upgrades is going to get someone pwned.

Best of all, according to the bugtracker this was supposedly fixed in 2017. Yet here it is again.

#610 Other Issues » MPD + ALSA hardware mixer screweyness and negative values » 2021-03-13 12:04:51

steve_v
Replies: 0

Granted this is probably an MPD bug, but it's all crickets in their forum and IRC and as I'm running it on Devuan... Hey, why not?

To begin:
Bog standard Beowulf netinstall + MPD and deps. No bloat, no monitor, just a dumpster-special Pentium 4 SSF desktop, 1GB RAM, and an old Xonar DS I had laying around.

MPD generally works fine, so long as I use the software mixer or an ALSA softvol plugin. But software volume control over the range I need sounds like arse, and the card in question has a nice hardware mixer I would very much like to use.
Like is probably an understatement here TBH, the thing is hooked directly to an old-school dumb-as-rocks 350WPC (real, continuous RMS Watts mind you) power amplifier. That means no volume knob, nada, nothing but a power switch, 2 inputs and 2 outputs. I want that soundcard mixer working.

A random selection of other CLI media players work just fine with the hardware mixer, as does mopidy's alsamixer plugin. But it's mopidy, and that means dog-slow python-hell.

Here's a snip from a 0-100% volume ramp with mpc and the corresponding output from amixer:

volume: 60%   repeat: off   random: off   single: off   consume: off
  Front Left: Playback 232 [81%] [-11.50dB] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 232 [81%] [-11.50dB] [on]
volume: 62%   repeat: off   random: off   single: off   consume: off
  Front Left: Playback 233 [82%] [-11.00dB] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 233 [82%] [-11.00dB] [on]
volume: 62%   repeat: off   random: off   single: off   consume: off
  Front Left: Playback 233 [82%] [-11.00dB] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 233 [82%] [-11.00dB] [on]
volume: 63%   repeat: off   random: off   single: off   consume: off
  Front Left: Playback 234 [82%] [-10.50dB] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 234 [82%] [-10.50dB] [on]
volume: 65%   repeat: off   random: off   single: off   consume: off
  Front Left: Playback 235 [83%] [-10.00dB] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 235 [83%] [-10.00dB] [on]
volume: 65%   repeat: off   random: off   single: off   consume: off
  Front Left: Playback 235 [83%] [-10.00dB] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 235 [83%] [-10.00dB] [on]
volume: n/a   repeat: off   random: off   single: off   consume: off
  Front Left: Playback 2 [-111%] [-126.50dB] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 2 [-111%] [-126.50dB] [on]
volume: 68%   repeat: off   random: off   single: off   consume: off
  Front Left: Playback 237 [85%] [-9.00dB] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 237 [85%] [-9.00dB] [on]
volume: 68%   repeat: off   random: off   single: off   consume: off
  Front Left: Playback 237 [85%] [-9.00dB] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 237 [85%] [-9.00dB] [on]
volume: 69%   repeat: off   random: off   single: off   consume: off
  Front Left: Playback 238 [86%] [-8.50dB] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 238 [86%] [-8.50dB] [on]

And here's the full run.

See that glitch in the middle there where 84% takes a random holiday? That's potentially "I have no windows any more" levels of not-good, and it makes most MPD clients have kittens.

There's nothing unusual in my mpd.conf, and nothing weird in my /etc/asound.conf or ~/.asoundrc either, as those files are absent.
amixer output looks like this, again nothing odd except perhaps that the "Master" control is multichannel.

The Debian/Devuan MPD build is so fossilised upstream won't speak of it, so I went as far as to compile the latest (0.22.6) from source, with identical results.
I'm now back with 0.21.5 from the repos, and as the instructions on that one amount to "too old, go bug Debian about it", here I am.

Anyone have any ideas that aren't "Use softvol" or "Use mopidy"?

#611 Re: Off-topic » Digital minimalism. How many applications do you use daily » 2021-03-06 16:27:01

dice wrote:

you have given a list of types of programs, not the actual programs you use.

Indeed. Because:

dice wrote:

Same for the OP

It seemed that's what was being asked.

If you like:
Kwin/KDE
Dolphin
Firefox
Kmail
Kontact
KeepassXC
Filezilla
Jdownloader
Transmission-remote
Pidgin
KRDC
Libreoffice / Okular / FBreader
Gwenview & DigiKam
GIMP
Smplayer
Cantata & MPD
Easytag & Flacon
Kate
GCC, make, etc. scripted from Kate.
QCAD (I need .dwg compatibility that works)
Pre-Autodesk Eagle (I need the component libraries)
VirtualBox
Kcalc
Labplot
Lutris, WINE, DXVK etc. etc.

Konsole, bash, and all the CLI stuff therein.
All the other things I have forgotten but would miss immediately if I were to remove them wink

#612 Re: Off-topic » Digital minimalism. How many applications do you use daily » 2021-03-06 16:00:29

ruenoak wrote:

a quest for digital minimalism

A fools errand if you ask me, and sounding like something a (stereo)typical Mac-using hipster would pursue. But you do you. tongue

You seem to be targeting primarily large(ish) desktop GUI applications, so I'll leave out the server-side stuff and the multitude of small CLI tools I use daily... Also all the applications I have installed but only use once every six months.
I use my machine(s) for a whole lot more than web browsing/email/social media (it boggles my mind that the 99% seem to think that's what computers are for), so the list is fairly long. Even if I stick to only GUI apps.

That leaves, in no particular order:
Window manager of some kind.
Graphical file manager.
Web browser (two web browsers actually, so that I can keep one as a "clean" addon and customisation free testbed).
Mail client. Webmail is universally horrible, and running a whole web browser for the task is insanity.
Calendar, contact and task manager.
Password manager.
FTP / SFTP client.
Batch download manager.
Torrent client.
IRC and XMPP messenger.
Remote desktop client (RDP and VNC).
Document viewer / editor. In practice this means an M$ office compatible suite, a PDF viewer, and an ebook reader.
Spreadsheet application, possibly included in the above.
Image viewer / photo manager
Image editor.
Video player.
Dedicated music player, as I've yet to see a "media player" that handles a large collection in a satisfactory manner.
Music library manager / tag editor. No, I haven't found a "media player" that does this well either.
Text editor, with syntax highlighting and external scripting support.
GCC and friends.
General CAD application.
Specialised electronics/PCB CAD application (the two are in no way interchangeable).
Machine virtualisation software.
Scientific calculator.
Data visualisation and plotting suite.
A bunch of games, and some WINE.

That list is in no way complete, but it should cover most of the things I'd need at least once a week. Many GUI applications could be replaced with their CLI equivalents (or *nix tools and a dash of shell) and I'd be happy, but that does nothing for installed application-count.

ruenoak wrote:

can you refine them down even further

If I wanted to wear the hair-shirt of using inferior tools for the wrong job all day, I'm sure I could. There's a reason specialised tools exist, and that's because while swiss-army-knives do many things, they do none of them even remotely well.

I could use a web browser for email, and I could use google docs/office online/whatever SAAS scam is flavour of the month. I could probably even play music, watch videos and view documents in a web browser...
But it would suck, hard, and my productivity would go down the drain. vOv

#613 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Conky + sensors temp settings ? » 2020-11-23 12:13:57

dice wrote:

What is happening is /sys/class/hwmon1 and 2 keep switching in sensors.

I don't have equivalent hardware so I can't check (exact names will differ), but my approach would be either:
a) If hwmon1 and hwmon2 are handled by different drivers, go see how and when they are loaded. They'll be getting an index based on which module loads first, so if you can fix the load order they should always get the same name.
b) See if there's another usable source, such as conky's {acpitemp} object or a node in e.g. /sys/class/thermal.
c) Get the values externally. IIRC conky can call external binaries, so you should be able to use lm-sensors with something like:

${execi 10 sensors | grep "Package id 0" | cut -d'+' -f2 | cut -c1-7}

"Package id 0" is from the intel coretemp driver so your sensor name will probably differ, but it should still be easily grepable.

It shouldn't be difficult to search through the /sys/class/hwmon[x]/name files for the sensor you want in a bash script either, push comes to shove.

#614 Re: ARM Builds » Is a Devuan build for the new Apple M1 chip possible? » 2020-11-23 11:34:29

dice wrote:

you summarized in depth what i was struggling to put into my post.

Yours was more succinct. smile

TBH I just felt like a good rant, I'm getting kinda annoyed with all the "apple this, zoom that, steam the other thing" noise in FOSS channels at the moment.

#615 Re: ARM Builds » Is a Devuan build for the new Apple M1 chip possible? » 2020-11-23 11:11:25

dice wrote:

Back then the music industry i think got on board with apple to safeguard music royalties in a way by getting people locked into a device where you had to pay for music you may or may not like and even then the way it was loaded onto the device via syncing or what not was and is a shitty way to own a sound file IMO.

The record industry (not to be confused with actual artists) was and still is convinced that consumers should rent access rather than own content.

Apple took things a step further, and sold a device that was essentially useless without subscribing to the content service... A content service where it looks like you've bought something, but actually using it is encumbered with DRM and tied to a subscription tightly controlled by the manufacturer. Then they doubled down and said you're not even supposed to be able to replace the battery.

You don't really own anything on iTunes, and even if you import your own DRM-free audio files it will mangle them to prevent you copying them again.
The open-source community quickly broke these restrictions and allowed us to transfer audio files freely with open-source tools, but the anti-circumvention clauses in the DMCA mean releasing software like GTKpod today would be illegal.

This "you own nothing" attitude is becoming more and more pervasive, throughout multiple industries. Be it streaming services, unrepairable hardware, cars that report to the dealership, or walled-garden app stores, the intent is the same - corporations retaining control over products long after they have left the shelf, and milking customers long after they have left the store.
All under the banner of "Don't think, just buy. Leave everything to us. For just 4.99 (plus recurring payments) you can have all the shiny things you ever wanted... Until we decide to take it away."

Calm, fitter, healthier and more productive
A pig in a cage on antibiotics

tongue

The way I see it, we have three options here:

* Keep breaking the DRM and reverse-engineering the hardware, playing cat-and-mouse with manufacturers and risking litigation under the demented monstrosity that is US copyright law.

* Pursue legal means through right-to-repair and such - if the hardware is liberated, liberating (or replacing) the software becomes considerably easier. Freedom to repair also means less waste to landfill, less profit for big corporations and more support for small locally-run businesses. As a bonus, it would also make it easier to hack on your own gear.

*Refuse to buy such products in the first place, and support open initiatives instead. Use jitsi instead of zoom, buy from System76 or Raptor CS instead of Apple. Ditch Spotify and iTunes and get your music from Bandcamp. If some shiny-new-(i)thing doesn't allow you to be in control, don't buy it.

Disclaimer: I am a unashamed software freedom advocate, and an FSF member. I'm not a hippie, and I don't eat my toenails in public... But I sure do like my freedom, and I'll donate to the FSF long before I give a cent to apple or the RIAA.

Back on topic: If you (OP) want to spend your free time circumventing the anti-freedom measures apple has surely put into it's new laptops, nobody here will try to stop you.
Asking others to do so is asking them to spend time and effort indirectly supporting a company that is diametrically opposed to everything free-software stands for, and doing so might even be illegal in some jurisdictions. Personally I feel efforts would be better spent elsewhere.

#616 Re: ARM Builds » Is a Devuan build for the new Apple M1 chip possible? » 2020-11-22 13:33:18

dice wrote:

without apple we wouldnt have the hackintosh

Once, long ago, apple was a respectable company with some pretty nice hardware and a loyal hacker following.
That all changed with the ipod, when someone realised there was more money to be made selling pretty disposable toys and building vendor lock-in to keep people coming back.

#617 Re: ARM Builds » Is a Devuan build for the new Apple M1 chip possible? » 2020-11-21 13:50:42

Altoid wrote:

Why it is alluring to so many people?

TBH I expect they're the same people who care more about what colour their car is or how expensive it looks than they do about reliability or performance.
In the good old days we'd call it "more money than sense" and leave it at that.

What I don't get is why anyone with the motivation and good taste to install a relatively obscure GNU/Linux distro (and one aimed at veteran sysadmins to boot) would want to wear the hair-shirt of running it on the latest shiny-new-shit MacBook, Apple and homebrew hacking of any kind parted ways decades ago and they've been intentionally making life difficult for us for almost as long.

Altoid wrote:

I wonder if it would be the same if the Apple logo disappeared from their portable's lid and as a consequence, from 90% of movies that feature a laptop in a scene.

Anyone with a lick of sense should already know that nothing computer-related in a movie bears the slightest resemblance to reality, so I'm not sure it'd make much difference.

Personally I take some glee in being the only one with a large GNU-head on my laptop lid in a room full of fruit, almost as much as I do at having superior performance and battery life, as well as the dents to prove my machine doesn't disintegrate when breathed on.
Then again I'm kinda nonconformist by nature, so, vOv.

I can understand the appeal of getting away from x86 (TBF I don't mind it at all, I still work with the venerable 8086 regularly), but Apple isn't the only game in town, and more arm-based projects are appearing all the time.
I can't help thinking effort would be better spent supporting (and buying) systems that are designed with GNU/Linux and software-freedom in mind.

#618 Re: ARM Builds » Is a Devuan build for the new Apple M1 chip possible? » 2020-11-21 07:34:56

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

bootloader support as well, which will probably be a challenge because Apple will try to lock it out as much as possible.

I fully expect Apple to go out of their way to make running anything not endorsed by Apple as close to impossible as they can.

If the current pattern holds, hardware will be undocumented, driver sources unreleased, and boot restricted and encrypted.
Not only will the OS and bootloader have to be signed by Apple, but any applications you want to run will need to be cryptographically verified on every launch as well. Because "security".

If any replacement parts are available, they will be be coded such that third-party repair bricks the device, but that won't be a problem because they'll strong-arm their suppliers into denying anyone else parts to begin with.
Miserable thermal performance, needlessly fragile design, soldered-in SSDs and special screws will of course continue as normal, as will glued-in batteries and planned-obsolescence.

Honestly, given their recent perpetual and pervasive anti-consumer anti-freedom behaviour, I'm rather puzzled why anyone would want to run Devuan on Apple hardware. Why not just buy a better designed machine for a better price and run whatever you want on it without all the hassle?

On the topic of the new "M1" apple-designed SOCs specifically, if the price for HBM is non-upgradeable memory to go with all the other non-repairable non-upgradeable fruitiness, I think I'll pass.

#619 Re: Documentation » How to inspect 3rd Party .deb packages before installing! » 2020-11-12 00:03:49

swarfendor437 wrote:

I avoid posting the code here to discourage miscreants

Presumably just some variation on rm -rf /* or an obfuscation of such then. IMO if you execute commands from some random post as root without understanding what they do, you deserve what you get.
If I instructed you to set your PC on fire, you'd rightly ignore that as well, would you not?

swarfendor437 wrote:

opendesktop.org and all its offshoots (Pling.com, KDEdesktop, gnome-look.org all have themes which people may look at and install without deference to any PPA.

Themes are pretty much always installable without root privileges (and so cannot wipe the whole drive and can be tested with a throwaway account), rarely have any call at all to be packaged as a .deb, and are usually either human-readable to begin with or come with source code you can inspect.
Most theme engines have an explicitly non-executable format anyway, so if something is packaged as a .deb or an installer script, you'd be wise to ask yourself why that is...

In general, the only "safe" source for any precompiled binary software is the distro maintained repository, and that's exactly as safe as the maintainers are vigilant. Any "user contributed" stuff is usually completely unchecked, because when it comes to FOSS in general it's anticipated that the user can and will inspect the source code.

yeti wrote:

Instead of installing binary debs compiled elsewhere, build that stuff from its deb-sources on your target system or even better, do it on a throw away VM.

That is indeed the better option, not only do you get a chance to see the source, you also ensure the resulting binary is linked against the correct libs.
Personally I'd consider a VM overkill (though useful for building packages for other distros), fakeroot and the debian packaging tools do a pretty good job of ensuring you only need root for the final installation, so you can do all building etc. as a dedicated unprivileged user.

All those people who hose their systems messing with sources.list or installing .debs from random places could have avoided that pain by spending the 10 minutes to learn how to rebuild a package from source, it's not difficult.

#620 Re: Documentation » How to inspect 3rd Party .deb packages before installing! » 2020-11-11 10:50:00

Well this is one of the (many) reasons installing packages from random websites / PPAs / blindly pasting commands from blog posts is considered a bad idea. Doubly so if you do it as root... But then if you're installing random .debs as root you are entirely responsible for your own mess.

swarfendor437 wrote:

the file once extracted executed ‘Unix’ commands

Orly, "Unix commands"... As opposed to some other kind of commands, or is that just to sound extra scary?

On a more constructive note, a great many archive utilities can open .deb archives in memory, such as KDE's ark or the good old midnight commander. Personally I find browsing .debs with mc a lot nicer than using dpkg to print the contents, unless I want to pipe the output of course.

#621 Re: Installation » two questions, new to Devuan » 2020-11-11 10:34:10

Okay, there's so much horsehockey in this thread I just can't resist...

caieng wrote:

one must not type pulseaudio -check, or pulseaudio --D.    Those hash marks, i.e. hyphens, must be spaced and elaborated, exactly as shown.  WHY?

Long-form command-line switches have two hyphens, short form have one. This has been the defacto-standard for *nix applications since the dawn of time. Why? Because that's how it's always been, and because it makes parsing command-line switches in shell a lot easier.
This really is command-line GNU/Linux 101, and if you intend to use anything beyond easy-mode Ubuntu derivatives and clicky GUIs you're going to have to get used to it.

caieng wrote:

Devuan demands that every user insert a pound sign, " # " in a line of code in a configuration file

Yes, that's the standard comment character for shell, and therefore for *nix configuration files. Again, always has been and likely always will be.

On puseaudio issues in general, the reason Devuan sometimes needs the user to configure pulseaudio is because unlike certain other distros Devuan doesn't force you to use pulseaudio.
Yes, I'm sure it could be made to work out of the box for your setup... At the expense of not working out of the box for someone else, or of making it more difficult to run without pulseaudio altogether - which is also an entirely valid configuration.

caieng wrote:

Either an  OS is transparent, and works effortlessly, or it needs criticism.

And I suppose you were disappointed the installer didn't try to converse with you in really easy words as well?

Debian, and by extension Devuan, is not and never has been designed to "work effortlessly", that's not the goal.
The goal to be able to fulfil almost every conceivable role, on almost any available hardware. Hence the slogan: "The universal operating system".
This means that you will have to *gasp* configure it to your needs, because a default that "works effortlessly" on your desktop is almost certainly inappropriate for a supercomputing cluster or an embedded network appliance.

caieng wrote:

I wasted hours trying to find what was wrong with my computers, because of stupid mistakes.  I made them, and Devuan made them.  But, not reading the release notes, was not one of those errors.

Wasting time by not reading the available documentation is very much an error, unless of course you like wasting time.
If the release notes were not intended to be read, why do you suppose someone put in the effort to write them?

I'd be inclined to make the obvious comment regarding looking gift-horses in the mouth WRT free software and volunteer developers (not to mention unwillingness to put in effort yourself), but given your attitude so far that's likely a waste of perfectly good oxygen.

#622 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » [SOLVED] [hardware] Initramfs mdadm assembly woes, udev not triggered? » 2020-09-06 13:30:27

Marjorie wrote:

Horses for courses. If a drive is rated for 70C I'd not want to load it to run at that continuously.

I fully expect any drive to be able to operate at 100% load continuously, provided it's external environmental limits are maintained.
It's over to the manufacturer to ensure that internal components don't overheat in said external environment.

The manual does not say "never write more than 100GB/hr", nor does it say "use only in LN2 cooled enclosures". It just boasts about transfer speeds, and those are mostly lies anyway.
A drive that overheats under load even when more than adequately cooled is a pile of junk, end of story. Even with a plastic case, those SSDs more than likely would have survived had crucial spent the few cents to add a thermal transfer pad.

These were in a fan-cooled aluminium drive cage, and that cage was maintaining a ~25c environment. The case of the SSD itself couldn't have been much above that.
Other drives in the same cage, including an OCZ model from 2013 and possibly the cheapest Kingston ever made, have never exceeded 35c under exactly the same workload.

I wasn't writing to them at anywhere near the fictitious "up to 500MB/s" specification either, not even 1/4 that in fact.
All I was doing was moving 100GB-ish batches of ~5MB files to the drives and moving them off again. Not "typical desktop usage", but certainly nothing I wouldn't expect any old drive to handle.

In short, it's Crucial's (complete lack of) internal thermal design that killed these, not my usage.
They're literally just a plastic box with a bare PCB rattling around inside. No screws, no heatsinking, nothing. Not even a bit of extra copper on the board for thermal mass.
I own USB3 pen drives that have thermal pads on the chips FFS.

Marjorie wrote:

Maybe I should add disk monitoring

Smartd is good for many things, temperature included.

#623 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » [SOLVED] [hardware] Initramfs mdadm assembly woes, udev not triggered? » 2020-09-06 08:44:05

brocashelm wrote:

I actually own a couple of Crucial MX500s, and they've yet to disappoint me in the two years I've been using them.

MX is the mid-range line, and I haven't heard of any problems with them either.

brocashelm wrote:

Temperature spikes have never been an issue, and it's been a pretty bad summer in my area.

This was no spike, this was pegging at 60-70c continuously, and it only took about 50GB of sustained sequential write to get there.
I probably got ~5x drive capacity of write endurance total before the first one croaked.

brocashelm wrote:

HP is a shit brand

HP make pretty decent server-grade stuff, but their consumer products are total garbage, always have been.
That said, those SSDs were almost certainly OEM jobs, and good luck figuring out who really made them.

brocashelm wrote:

I might try out a Kingston SSD next time.

I have several (including a pair being thrashed as cache drives), and I have absolutely no problems to report.
Even the DRAM-less budget models seem to be okay, if understandably slow-as molasses. And yes, even the very cheapest have metal cases and thermal pads.
Just be aware that they're one of the (several) brands known to lie about performance, if stated speeds seem too good for the price, that's exactly what they are.

#624 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » [SOLVED] [hardware] Initramfs mdadm assembly woes, udev not triggered? » 2020-09-06 01:56:33

Okay, I think we can close this one. It's hardware.

The counterpart to that failed drive was taking 27s to initialise and appear on the bus. It's certainly not ideal for the initrd to spam scary errors instead of backing off and retrying, but it's not his fault either.

[rant]
Moral of the story: The Crucial BX500 series SSDs are utter crap.

Of that pair of SSDs, one is dead as a doornail (doesn't register on the bus), the other is clearly dying.
Both are less than a year old and still under warranty, but I'll be throwing them in the trash rather than returning them - the last thing I want is more of the same.
Both have history of hitting ~70c and thermal throttling under sustained write loads, despite the enclosure and the drives directly above them never breaking 26c.
The nasty plastic casing never even gets warm, and now that I've dissected one I see somebody at crucial thinks putting a thermal pad on the controller is a luxury. 70c is listed as max operating and they never exceeded it, but I'll bet a cookie heat is why they died.

Crucial, your budget SSD line gets a solid F from me. The Kingston A400 series is not only cheaper, it's also built properly and doesn't constantly try to cook itself.
I wanted budget SSDs for that filesystem, and expected budget performance. What I didn't expect was something so shitty it can't even sustain the already mediocre performance numbers without overheating.
FWIW, a BX500 reporting 70c writes at ~7MB/s.
[/rant]

#625 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » [SOLVED] [hardware] Initramfs mdadm assembly woes, udev not triggered? » 2020-08-31 23:25:43

fsmithred wrote:

You could try adding 'sleep 1' to /etc/init.d/eudev as indicated

I could, but all this is going on in the initrd before init starts or /etc/init.d is available...

I'll do the same to the initrd script that starts udevd and see what happens, but it'll have to wait a little as I can't really take this box offline right now.
It occurs to me that there were also some hardware changes which might have fallen in the "I just noticed it" window, and those could probably be reverted temporarily.

When I get a window long enough to risk borking the boot process and reverting backups without undue screaming, I'll have another poke about.

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