Re: free software to paid work

[Paul Sutton]

On 30/03/2019 21:44, Jan Claeys wrote:
> On Thu, 2019-03-28 at 09:25 +, Paul Sutton wrote:
>> In an effort to reach out to people and recruit much needed help for
>> contributors to free software,  I just wondered if there were any
>> examples of where  people have gained either full time work or full
>> time education places as a result of contributing to free software.
> 
> There are many thousands of examples of people who got certain jobs
> because of their open source and free software contributions (maybe
> Linus Torvalds is one of the best-known examples), but of course it is
> never a guarantee.  This obviously applies to companies that have their
> own open source projects, but some other companies & organisations
> (including some that are non-IT in some cases) will also value the
> experience you gained.
> 
> For full time education places, do you mean something like a
> scholarship?  That would be useful in places where university
> educations are expensive, of course, but I don't know if there exist
> any such scholarships right now.  Maybe someone else knows more about
> this?
> 
> 

Thank you for this,  very useful as a starting point, and useful to help
argue that contributing to free software can lead to something.

Paul

-- 
Paul Sutton
http://www.zleap.net
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zleap/
gnupg : 7D6D B682 F351 8D08 1893  1E16 F086 5537 D066 302D

Re: free software to paid work

[Jan Claeys]

On Thu, 2019-03-28 at 09:25 +, Paul Sutton wrote:
> In an effort to reach out to people and recruit much needed help for
> contributors to free software,  I just wondered if there were any
> examples of where  people have gained either full time work or full
> time education places as a result of contributing to free software.

There are many thousands of examples of people who got certain jobs
because of their open source and free software contributions (maybe
Linus Torvalds is one of the best-known examples), but of course it is
never a guarantee.  This obviously applies to companies that have their
own open source projects, but some other companies & organisations
(including some that are non-IT in some cases) will also value the
experience you gained.

For full time education places, do you mean something like a
scholarship?  That would be useful in places where university
educations are expensive, of course, but I don't know if there exist
any such scholarships right now.  Maybe someone else knows more about
this?


-- 
Jan Claeys

Re: Free software

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 22 July 2017 07:25:27 rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:

> On Friday, July 21, 2017 11:49:04 PM Gene Heskett wrote:
> > Not hardly, the vesa standard, and the cards that support it cannot
> > do more that 15 frames a second, at nowhere near the resolution we
> > need, which these days is 1920P @ 60 fps. You can buy $90 monitors
> > at wallies that can do that today.  I just did 90 days ago.
>
> Why do you need 1920P @ 60 fps?  I thought you were referring to the
> needs of your machine shop, but, clearly, the next paragraph
> contradicts that...
>
Why so? I get the 1920P ok, and thats nice with ageing, diabetic 
eyesight.  Its the fps that suffers in this case. Watching htop while 
its running the machine for very long, and theres plenty of cpu to 
spare. The slow fps is clearly the fault of the usb2 pinhole all the 
data that is not gpio related, has to get thru before it gets to the 
hdmi interface and the monitor.

hdparm pretty much detects that, here is a terabyte drive plugged into 
the usb plugs:

pi@picncsheldon:~ $ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda3

/dev/sda3:
 Timing cached reads:   866 MB in  2.00 seconds = 433.15 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  78 MB in  3.01 seconds =  25.94 MB/sec

Note the nearly 20x slower reads when it has to go thru the usb2 sized 
pinhole. The sd card fares even worse but throws an error:

pi@picncsheldon:~ $ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/mmcblk0p1

/dev/mmcblk0p1:
 Timing cached reads:   BLKFLSBUF failed: Operation not permitted
824 MB in  2.00 seconds = 411.42 MB/sec
BLKFLSBUF failed: Operation not permitted
 Timing buffered disk reads:  40 MB in  1.92 seconds =  20.87 MB/sec
BLKFLSBUF failed: Operation not permitted

I want to see those results from a rock64..  I'll expect something more 
like this:
root@coyote:~# hdparm -tT /dev/sda1

/dev/sda1:
 Timing cached reads:   3330 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1664.90 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 534 MB in  3.01 seconds = 177.48 MB/sec

About 8.5x faster.

> > Define accelerated Ric. That 1920P @ 60 fps is nominally twice as
> > fast as the human eye can discern. I can be quite happy at 30fps,
> > interlaced, and I do not have a machine that cannot do at least
> > that, except an r-pi 3b, and I'm waiting to see if there are any
> > show stoppers in the 4Gb of ram you get with a rock64, which ships
> > with an even faster cpu, and claims no usb2 speed i/o bottleneck
> > which is currently killing the pi on my bigger lathe.  The pi's
> > video is maybe 7 fps, slow enough to be a bother, but it runs the
> > machine with only an occasional stumble for 4 or 5 milliseconds.  It
> > has not functionally damaged a workpiece yet. (knock knock)

I put the swap on the r-pi out to a hard drive, so the sd card might last 
a little longer. But it made no difference in apt's speed doing major 
updates since both paths have to go thru that usb2 pinhole. The rock64 
claims to eliminate that, so I'll be most carefully watching their forum 
in the weeks after it ships.
Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 

Re: Free software

[Joe]

On Sat, 22 Jul 2017 07:25:27 -0400
rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:

> On Friday, July 21, 2017 11:49:04 PM Gene Heskett wrote:
> > Not hardly, the vesa standard, and the cards that support it cannot
> > do more that 15 frames a second, at nowhere near the resolution we
> > need, which these days is 1920P @ 60 fps. You can buy $90 monitors
> > at wallies that can do that today.  I just did 90 days ago.  
> 
> Why do you need 1920P @ 60 fps?  I thought you were referring to the
> needs of your machine shop, but, clearly, the next paragraph
> contradicts that...

That's 1080P. 1920 is the horizontal resolution, the standard is named
for the vertical resolution. A monitor has a lot less work to do than
the rendering software which is producing the picture, and the video
card it runs on.

> 
> > Define accelerated Ric. That 1920P @ 60 fps is nominally twice as
> > fast as the human eye can discern. I can be quite happy at 30fps,
> > interlaced, 

But that's the point of interlace, to refresh at twice the full picture
rate, with alternate sets of lines. 60Hz is around the minimum
necessary for flicker-free viewing, 50Hz is nearly good enough, and
30Hz interlaced gives you two half-pictures at 60Hz.

Interlace causes jitter on stationary pictures, but is best for showing
smooth movement for a given bandwidth, so computer systems generally
produce non-interlaced pictures, and broadcast TV is interlaced. A
computer system producing moving video should be working interlaced for
cleanest motion, but generally isn't because the static parts of the
screen display would show jitter.

Many modern TV receivers will interpolate the interlaced signal to give
'complete' pictures refreshing at 60Hz, and some even
standards-convert to higher refresh rates, though at the cost of some
motion artefacts.

-- 
Joe

Re: Free software

[rhkramer]

On Friday, July 21, 2017 11:49:04 PM Gene Heskett wrote:
> Not hardly, the vesa standard, and the cards that support it cannot do
> more that 15 frames a second, at nowhere near the resolution we need,
> which these days is 1920P @ 60 fps. You can buy $90 monitors at wallies
> that can do that today.  I just did 90 days ago.

Why do you need 1920P @ 60 fps?  I thought you were referring to the needs of 
your machine shop, but, clearly, the next paragraph contradicts that...

> Define accelerated Ric. That 1920P @ 60 fps is nominally twice as fast as
> the human eye can discern. I can be quite happy at 30fps, interlaced,
> and I do not have a machine that cannot do at least that, except an r-pi
> 3b, and I'm waiting to see if there are any show stoppers in the 4Gb of
> ram you get with a rock64, which ships with an even faster cpu, and
> claims no usb2 speed i/o bottleneck which is currently killing the pi on
> my bigger lathe.  The pi's video is maybe 7 fps, slow enough to be a
> bother, but it runs the machine with only an occasional stumble for 4 or
> 5 milliseconds.  It has not functionally damaged a workpiece yet. (knock
> knock)

Re: Free software

[Ric Moore]

On 07/21/2017 11:49 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:


Or use a $29 nvidia card and the Nouveau driver, which card does the job
quite nicely for what we need. 
Again, what YOU need isn't what the OP had in mind, as he's not running 
an RT kernel to drive a CNC rig. He was deciding how to get the most out 
of his nVidia card, not the least. :) Ric


--
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html

Re: Free software

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 21 July 2017 21:59:17 Ric Moore wrote:

> On 07/19/2017 09:05 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > The NVidia drivers have a huge problem if they are asked to co-exist
> > with any system that depends on real time IRQ response.
>
> Which are thankfully few and far between.

Admittedly a small niche in the market.  But we could be a piece of 
making American great again if bot shoved out the buss door and 
flattened in the mad exodus of technical excellence to the Chinese 
mainland.

> You could probably just use 
> a VESA driver and some S3 Virge video card to get the same performance
> and resolution that you need.

Not hardly, the vesa standard, and the cards that support it cannot do 
more that 15 frames a second, at nowhere near the resolution we need, 
which these days is 1920P @ 60 fps. You can buy $90 monitors at wallies 
that can do that today.  I just did 90 days ago.

> But, anyone else who needs accelerated 
> graphics will use the nvidia supplied driver.

Define accelerated Ric. That 1920P @ 60 fps is nominally twice as fast as 
the human eye can discern. I can be quite happy at 30fps, interlaced, 
and I do not have a machine that cannot do at least that, except an r-pi 
3b, and I'm waiting to see if there are any show stoppers in the 4Gb of 
ram you get with a rock64, which ships with an even faster cpu, and 
claims no usb2 speed i/o bottleneck which is currently killing the pi on  
my bigger lathe.  The pi's video is maybe 7 fps, slow enough to be a 
bother, but it runs the machine with only an occasional stumble for 4 or 
5 milliseconds.  It has not functionally damaged a workpiece yet. (knock  
knock)

> Thank you Gene, you just 
> proved the case that if you want to put a $300 video card in a
> head-lock and punch it repeatedly in the face, use the Nouveau driver.
> :) Ric

Or use a $29 nvidia card and the Nouveau driver, which card does the job 
quite nicely for what we need. And save that $300 for insulin. Good 
enough, don't need any better, and can't see the diff if it is better.  
Thats called optimizing ones use of the resources.

Now if you put a 3500 hp turbojet engine in a 1978 Honda Civic, take it 
to the flats in search of a new land speed record, and it folds up like 
the coors can it is, don't say I didn't try to warn you.  But if you do, 
let me know, and I'll come to Bonneville to watch. I haven't been there 
since 1982 but I was early, and the salt still had 5" of water on it, so 
nothing to see but the Utah road machinery, trying to blade the white 
mud smooth.

And after that lesson in economics, I hope this finds you mobile and in 
better health.  Take care my old friend.

Cheers Ric, Gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 

Re: Free software

[Ric Moore]

On 07/19/2017 09:05 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:


The NVidia drivers have a huge problem if they are asked to co-exist with
any system that depends on real time IRQ response. 


Which are thankfully few and far between. You could probably just use a 
VESA driver and some S3 Virge video card to get the same performance and 
resolution that you need. But, anyone else who needs accelerated 
graphics will use the nvidia supplied driver. Thank you Gene, you just 
proved the case that if you want to put a $300 video card in a head-lock 
and punch it repeatedly in the face, use the Nouveau driver. :) Ric



--
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html

Re: Free software

[Joel Rees]

On Fri, Jul 21, 2017 at 3:46 AM, Doug  wrote:
>
> On 07/20/2017 06:32 AM, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>> On Wednesday, July 19, 2017 09:27:16 PM Gene Heskett wrote:
>>>
>>> Doug is correct. Every shop had a subscription to SAM's and toward the
>>> end as many as 9 or 10, tall 4 drawer fileing cabinets to keep the stuff
>>> in if the subscription was for all of the stuff.
>>
>> Ahh, Sam's was a good clue (for me)--I think the series was called Sam's
>> Photofacts.
>>
>>
>>
> You can look it up on the Internet. Just put Sam's Photofact into
> your browser!
>
> (I remember it as Photofacts, just like rhkramer, but the 'net
> has it as singular.)

Well, a couple of filing cabinets full would be plural, wouldn't it?

-- 
Joel Rees

One of these days I'll get someone to pay me
to design a language that combines the best of Forth and C.
Then I'll be able to leap wide instruction sets with a single #ifdef,
run faster than a speeding infinite loop with a #define,
and stop all integer size bugs with my bare cast.
http://defining-computers.blogspot.com/2017/06/reinventing-computers.html

More of my delusions:
http://reiisi.blogspot.com/2017/05/do-not-pay-modern-danegeld-ransomware.html
http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/p/novels-i-am-writing.html

Re: Free software

[David Wright]

On Thu 20 Jul 2017 at 08:59:08 (-0400), Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Thursday 20 July 2017 07:32:04 rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:
> 
> > On Wednesday, July 19, 2017 09:27:16 PM Gene Heskett wrote:
> > > Doug is correct. Every shop had a subscription to SAM's and toward
> > > the end as many as 9 or 10, tall 4 drawer fileing cabinets to keep
> > > the stuff in if the subscription was for all of the stuff.
> >
> > Ahh, Sam's was a good clue (for me)--I think the series was called
> > Sam's Photofacts.
> 
> Yup.

I looked them up and found they had, for example, a manual for
the Ferrograph Series 3. Would that be a badge engineered
Ferrograph manual or a different publication¹? I had manuals
for the Series 2 (hardbound) and Series 7 (comb-bound) machines
that I/we possessed. They had full alignment instructions,
circuit diagrams etc.

In the UK I had no difficulty with getting manuals and circuit
diagrams from the likes of Quad, Leak, Radford, Tandberg, to name
but a few. I just wrote to them and they sent them back, gratis.
That seemed to be the norm back then (fifties through seventies).

¹ie like the entirely original Haynes manuals for cars.

Cheers,
David.

Re: Free software

[Doug]

On 07/20/2017 06:32 AM, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:

On Wednesday, July 19, 2017 09:27:16 PM Gene Heskett wrote:

Doug is correct. Every shop had a subscription to SAM's and toward the
end as many as 9 or 10, tall 4 drawer fileing cabinets to keep the stuff
in if the subscription was for all of the stuff.

Ahh, Sam's was a good clue (for me)--I think the series was called Sam's
Photofacts.




You can look it up on the Internet. Just put Sam's Photofact into
your browser!

(I remember it as Photofacts, just like rhkramer, but the 'net
has it as singular.)

--doug

Re: Free software

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 20 July 2017 07:32:04 rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:

> On Wednesday, July 19, 2017 09:27:16 PM Gene Heskett wrote:
> > Doug is correct. Every shop had a subscription to SAM's and toward
> > the end as many as 9 or 10, tall 4 drawer fileing cabinets to keep
> > the stuff in if the subscription was for all of the stuff.
>
> Ahh, Sam's was a good clue (for me)--I think the series was called
> Sam's Photofacts.

Yup.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 

Re: Free software

[Nicolas George]

Le primidi 1er thermidor, an CCXXV, Ben Finney a écrit :
> By analogy: I am not capable of maintaining the house I live in, let
> alone of making significant improvements.
> 
> Yet I benefit from the fact that anyone sufficiently motivated can learn
> to do so and they don't need permission from the people who made the
> house.
> 
> If anyone who wanted to improve the house I live in were prevented from
> doing so without the express permission of the people who made the
> house, you're damned right I would complain.
> 
> I may have no intention of ever doing so myself, but I want a wide-open
> market of people who can do so if I ask, who have learned because no law
> stops them from doing so.

This is a very fine analogy, I will remember it.

For reference, in France, for public buildings designed by prestigious
architects, we have exactly that problem. The architects consider
themselves rtists rather than engineers. As a result, you get
buildings with the stairs to the previous and next floor at opposite
ends of a corridor (everybody takes the lift for two floors, obviously)
and naked concrete in a library.

Furthermore, when the people who actually use the building want to make
changes, the architects invoke their so-called intellectual property to
block it. They had to sue just to be allowed to add an invisible varnish
on the concrete to prevent the dust from ruining the books.

In fact, I think this issue is becoming more mainstream, especially with
hardware: "right to repair" is something very present in the news
nowadays.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George


signature.asc
Description: Digital signature

Re: Free software

[rhkramer]

On Wednesday, July 19, 2017 09:27:16 PM Gene Heskett wrote:
> Doug is correct. Every shop had a subscription to SAM's and toward the
> end as many as 9 or 10, tall 4 drawer fileing cabinets to keep the stuff
> in if the subscription was for all of the stuff.

Ahh, Sam's was a good clue (for me)--I think the series was called Sam's 
Photofacts.

Re: Free software

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 19 July 2017 19:04:33 Doug wrote:

> On 07/19/2017 05:44 PM, Joel Rees wrote:
> > This is another aspect of "closed source" gratis technology that is
> > often swept under the rug.
> >
> > It used to be, for instance, that a TV in the US had a full diagram
> > of working parts in the back case, so that the TV could still be
> > fixed even if the manufacturer suddenly wiped their books and
> > disappeared.
>
> Not at all true! As a sideline I was a TV serviceman in the 1960s.
> There usually was  a drawing of the tube numbers and positions
> somewhere in the set--more usually on an inside surface of the
> wooden box. There certainly was no schematic diagram.
> However, it was almost always possible to obtain real service
> information including schematic diagrams of the circuits from
> a paid service, the name of which escapes me now. (The pages
> always included useless ones for record players and such that
> nobody ever heard of!)
>
> --doug--almost 80!

Doug is correct. Every shop had a subscription to SAM's and toward the 
end as many as 9 or 10, tall 4 drawer fileing cabinets to keep the stuff 
in if the subscription was for all of the stuff.

Doug is chasing me, I'll be 83 in October. But by 1962 I had a 1st phone, 
and put it to work in 1964 by getting a job as transmitter operator at 
KOTA-TV in Rapid City.  Never really left broadcast engineering until I 
retired from the CE position after 18 years in that office at WDTV here 
in WV, at nearly 67 yo, in 2002.  Very little went out to be repaired, 
if I could get the parts, I could fix it.

Pretty good for a guy with an 8th grade (State of Iowa version, USA) 
education. :)

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 

Re: Free software

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 19 July 2017 18:16:16 Ric Moore wrote:

> On 07/19/2017 12:33 AM, Doug wrote:
> > All the wonderful Linux programmers
> > have had YEARS to modify it and make it better than what
> > Nvidia provides, but it seems that they haven't succeeded.
> > I am very happy with my Nvidia cards and Nvidia drivers.
> > What the devil is everybody bitching about?
> >
> > And, of course, doesn't it make sense that the company that
> > invented and produces and sells a product ought to know more
> > about how to operate it than a bunch of "de-engineers?"
>
> Amen. I paid large dollars for my dual nVidia card setup driving four
> monitors quite nicely with the nVidia supplied driver. And, over the
> many years, read nothing but complaints about AMD/Intel video which
> has provided many a evil chuckle. I agree, it comes down to if owners
> of nVidia products are complaining and everyone else minding their own
> business. More than likely the ONLY reason nvidia pays Linux users any
> attention at all is for NASA contracts. If I were them, I'd tell us to
> go to hell. Ric

The NVidia drivers have a huge problem if they are asked to co-exist with 
any system that depends on real time IRQ response.  This generally 
included computers used for machine control. When a major screen redraw 
is needed, its not uncommon for the NVidia driver to lock the machines 
resources up for 400 milliseconds.  If at the time this occurs, the 
machine is 3 milliseconds from turning a corner, which if it doesn't 
turn, will put the cutting tool in heavy contact with the part, wrecking 
the part and likely breaking the tool, with a potential cost of $40 to 
$400 for the tool, and several hundred more for the wrecked part, which 
has to be started from scratch with a new piece of metal.

The nouveau driver doesn't do the extended machine hogging and there may 
be times when the backplotted video might be half a second behind the 
machine because of that, but linuxcnc itself knows exactly where the 
machine is millisecond by millisecond. And the machine does precisely 
what I wrote the code to tell it do do.

So we don't badmouth the nvidia cards, but we've zero use for the nvidia 
drivers. I have nvidia video in 3 of my 4 metal carving machines, and 
the nouveau driver runs all 3 quite satisfactorily. With down right 
boring power fail to power fail stability.

The 4th machine is a 3/4 ton Sheldon lathe thats nearly 70 years old. But 
with only 2 axis's to track, an r-pi 3b is getting the job done quite 
nicely.  The r-pi's video sucks dead toads thru soda straws, so I am 
looking at a rock64 board with 4Gb of dram, no USB-2 data pipeline 
bottleneck and dual mali gfx processors but its not shipping till the 
first of the month & I'll give it a couple months to sort out the infant 
mortality problems new boards always have. That, and getting a stretch 
built with an RT-Preempt kernal.  Stretch will finally ship with a 
working gtk3 editor so we can make some even prettier gfx for linuxcnc.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 

Re: Free software

[Joel Rees]

On Thu, Jul 20, 2017 at 8:04 AM, Doug  wrote:
>
> On 07/19/2017 05:44 PM, Joel Rees wrote:
>>
>>
>> This is another aspect of "closed source" gratis technology that is
>> often swept under the rug.
>>
>> It used to be, for instance, that a TV in the US had a full diagram
>> of working parts in the back case, so that the TV could still be
>> fixed even if the manufacturer suddenly wiped their books and
>> disappeared.
>>
>>
> Not at all true! As a sideline I was a TV serviceman in the 1960s.
> There usually was  a drawing of the tube numbers and positions

Thus, the working parts. Except it was not just the tubes, it usually
included whatever an independent technician could get as a "part".

> somewhere in the set--more usually on an inside surface of the
> wooden box.

Yeah, in the back [of the] case. :-/

> There certainly was no schematic diagram.

What do you call a schematic diagram, then?

> However, it was almost always possible to obtain real service
> information including schematic diagrams of the circuits from
> a paid service,

SAMS was one of the services which provide more detailed
schematic diagrams. Their existence owe no small debt to the
fact that "intellectual property" rights of inventors of
usually-not-all-that-new art were not allowed by the law then
to take precedence over the rights of the inventors of prior art,
nor of the community that gives birth to art over the existing
state-of-the-art.

And there's another word whose legal definition seems to have
changed: state-of-the-art seems to now mean to lawyers
something it cannot logically mean to those who practice the art.
Too many salescrew-turned-lawyers, maybe.

> the name of which escapes me now. (The pages
> always included useless ones for record players and such that
> nobody ever heard of!)

Funny. I often used those useless diagrams for record players
that I guess you never heard of. Maybe it was because I used them
in the seventies, not the sixties? ;-)

For those who are missing the allegories, source code is somewhat
the parallel of those diagrams, and we don't have them now except
in very rare cases.

And, where those diagrams kept still-usable electronics out of the
landfill for a few more years, lack of the source code results in a lot
of waste in the current economy, contributing to pollution and other
things that don't, ultimately, help the economy.

-- 
Joel Rees

One of these days I'll get someone to pay me
to design a language that combines the best of Forth and C.
Then I'll be able to leap wide instruction sets with a single #ifdef,
run faster than a speeding infinite loop with a #define,
and stop all integer size bugs with my bare cast.
http://defining-computers.blogspot.com/2017/06/reinventing-computers.html

More of my delusions:
http://reiisi.blogspot.com/2017/05/do-not-pay-modern-danegeld-ransomware.html
http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/p/novels-i-am-writing.html

Re: Free software

[Doug]

On 07/19/2017 05:44 PM, Joel Rees wrote:


This is another aspect of "closed source" gratis technology that is
often swept under the rug.

It used to be, for instance, that a TV in the US had a full diagram
of working parts in the back case, so that the TV could still be
fixed even if the manufacturer suddenly wiped their books and
disappeared.



Not at all true! As a sideline I was a TV serviceman in the 1960s.
There usually was  a drawing of the tube numbers and positions
somewhere in the set--more usually on an inside surface of the
wooden box. There certainly was no schematic diagram.
However, it was almost always possible to obtain real service
information including schematic diagrams of the circuits from
a paid service, the name of which escapes me now. (The pages
always included useless ones for record players and such that
nobody ever heard of!)

--doug--almost 80!

Re: Free software

[Joel Rees]

FTR

On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 5:46 PM, Fungi4All  wrote:
>
>>> From: dmcgarr...@optonline.net
>>> To: Gene Heskett , debian-user@lists.debian.org
>>> [ important stuff, check the archives]
>>> Cheers, Gene Heskett
>> I thought I put this to bed, but apparently not.   
>>
>
> You thought well because if we are clarifying the description
> of reality we can not utilize the grocery store logic of choice. Either
> one final thought convinces everyone that it is correct or there
> still is room for discussion.

... or we decide we are tired of discussion, which sometimes is not a
good thing.

> I have no beef with nvidia in specific,
> they are just as bad as any for-profit organization, so it is not
> specific.
>
>> I"ve stated my case. Let"s drop it here!

You have a lousy attitude. You get to air your armpits, but no one
who disagrees with you does.

> But this is the problem, you can not be one sided in having
> the authority to end a conversation.  If Nvidia one day decides
> it is not profiting from their little monopoly and decides to
> fold its gc production and r, they have the "legal right" to
> destroy all knowledge produced and owned by them.  The
> work and findings of hundreds of people developing nvidia
> products is in the hands of one entity (stock-holders).
> The state gives them the right to conduct this atrocity of
> destroying knowledge and deny society access to it, even
> when it has no value for them anymore.

This is another aspect of "closed source" gratis technology that is
often swept under the rug.

It used to be, for instance, that a TV in the US had a full diagram
of working parts in the back case, so that the TV could still be
fixed even if the manufacturer suddenly wiped their books and
disappeared.

> I believe society has the right to criticize this mutual practice
> by state and owner of knowledge.  Any industry is a school for
> society and it exists due to lack of alternatives for society.
> This is what we are talking about, I think.  Internalizing the
> logic of the capitalist and its puppet the state, the logic of
> market, into our conversation as "logical" is a product of
> propaganda and demagogues of the media and other
> "institutions".  A society must be able to survive having
> alternatives past capitalism.
>
> [...]

Again, just for the record, politics itself may be off topic, but we
have to give each other a little leeway where politics intersects
with the license which allows us to cooperate peacefully in this
community.

-- 
Joel Rees

One of these days I'll get someone to pay me
to design a language that combines the best of Forth and C.
Then I'll be able to leap wide instruction sets with a single #ifdef,
run faster than a speeding infinite loop with a #define,
and stop all integer size bugs with my bare cast.
http://defining-computers.blogspot.com/2017/06/reinventing-computers.html

More of my delusions:
http://reiisi.blogspot.com/2017/05/do-not-pay-modern-danegeld-ransomware.html
http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/p/novels-i-am-writing.html

Re: Free software

[Ric Moore]

On 07/19/2017 12:33 AM, Doug wrote:

All the wonderful Linux programmers
have had YEARS to modify it and make it better than what
Nvidia provides, but it seems that they haven't succeeded.
I am very happy with my Nvidia cards and Nvidia drivers.
What the devil is everybody bitching about?

And, of course, doesn't it make sense that the company that
invented and produces and sells a product ought to know more
about how to operate it than a bunch of "de-engineers?"



Amen. I paid large dollars for my dual nVidia card setup driving four 
monitors quite nicely with the nVidia supplied driver. And, over the 
many years, read nothing but complaints about AMD/Intel video which has 
provided many a evil chuckle. I agree, it comes down to if owners of 
nVidia products are complaining and everyone else minding their own 
business. More than likely the ONLY reason nvidia pays Linux users any 
attention at all is for NASA contracts. If I were them, I'd tell us to 
go to hell. Ric



--
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html

Re: Free software

[Ric Moore]

On 07/18/2017 09:38 PM, Felix Miata wrote:

but state and local governments have been following the federal
government's lead, producing many constitutionally impermissible regulations for
many decades, and getting away with it because of prohibitive legal and time
expense involved in contesting impermissible regulation.


When you purchase a mortgage, they demand you buy insurance to cover the 
loss of the asset. Insurance companies will mandate certain specs for 
construction in order to make the property as safe as possible. Ergo, 
you have many agencies that can mandate that certain industry standards 
are met for safety reasons. This is a good thing. There is nothing 
unconstitutional about it, you agreed to an expected level of 
construction safety when you applied for the mortgage. Otherwise you 
might wake up with the roof in your bed, like in less developed 
countries.Ric



--
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html

Re: Free software

[rhkramer]

On Tuesday, July 18, 2017 09:38:16 PM Felix Miata wrote:
> Actually in the USA that's false, at least WRT a property owner doing his
> own work, but state and local governments have been following the federal
> government's lead, producing many constitutionally impermissible
> regulations for many decades, and getting away with it because of
> prohibitive legal and time expense involved in contesting impermissible
> regulation.


Explain more, please.

Are you saying that the local zoning authorrity can't do things like:

   * require building permits
   * require that work be done by licensed (electrical or plumbing 
contractors)
   * comply with various building codes

If so, in what sense are those impermissible regulations, or, on what basis 
could they be contested?

Re: Free software

[Fungi4All]

> From: dmcgarr...@optonline.net
> To: Gene Heskett , debian-user@lists.debian.org
>> Cheers, Gene Heskett
> I thought I put this to bed, but apparently not. 

You thought well because if we are clarifying the description
of reality we can not utilize the grocery store logic of choice. Either
one final thought convinces everyone that it is correct or there
still is room for discussion. I have no beef with nvidia in specific,
they are just as bad as any for-profit organization, so it is not
specific.

> I"ve stated my case. Let"s drop it here!

But this is the problem, you can not be one sided in having
the authority to end a conversation. If Nvidia one day decides
it is not profiting from their little monopoly and decides to
fold its gc production and r, they have the "legal right" to
destroy all knowledge produced and owned by them. The
work and findings of hundreds of people developing nvidia
products is in the hands of one entity (stock-holders).
The state gives them the right to conduct this atrocity of
destroying knowledge and deny society access to it, even
when it has no value for them anymore.
I believe society has the right to criticize this mutual practice
by state and owner of knowledge. Any industry is a school for
society and it exists due to lack of alternatives for society.
This is what we are talking about, I think. Internalizing the
logic of the capitalist and its puppet the state, the logic of
market, into our conversation as "logical" is a product of
propaganda and demagogues of the media and other
"institutions". A society must be able to survive having
alternatives past capitalism.
This is why communities as debian and linux are under attack
by capitalists of all sorts so they can blackmail society not to
be able to survive without them.
So whose side are you on boyz? Autonomy, or dependency?

> --doug

You can put it to rest now if you like. I suspect you might not.
But should this conversation be open to everyone? Should
stockholders and executives of large corporations participate
freely? What if they hire professional writers and debaters
to participate and advocate their interests?
(AK)
PS Before you (anyone) go off topic and criticize my email
practice (common practice here to escape the issue) please
refer me to a safe and anonymous way of participating on
the list because I trust protonmail more than many people
on this list to record my connection. Protonmail still has no
pop or imap. I prefer using ascii as well in writing and
reading, but we do not live in a free world.

Re: Free software

[tomas]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 11:33:14PM -0500, Doug wrote:

[...]

> I thought I put this to bed, but apparently not.

That's because the way you write suggests that you didn't
"get" a couple of things which are very dear to many folks
around here (note I say "suggest". I can't know for sure.
A communication problem can be at any end or... in the
middle :)

> The complaint was about NVidia software. Well, there has
> been for some time a "FREE" program. How come it's not
> satisfactory for so many users of Nvidia cards?

That's because there are two "free". An old saw puts it
like "free as in beer" vs "free as in speech". To adapt
it to more modern terminology, I'd say "free as in Facebook"
vs -uh- "free as in Debian" ;-)

> All the wonderful Linux programmers have had YEARS to
> modify it and make it better than what Nvidia provides,
> but it seems that they haven't succeeded.

But how? Nvidia *refuses* to publish documentation on its
hardware. Only painstaking reverse engineering is possible
(which the shrinkwrap EULA forbids: thanks heavens, this
can be ignored in most civilised jurisdictions).

Given that, the results of the Nouveau project can only
be called impressive.

> I am very happy with my Nvidia cards and Nvidia drivers.
> What the devil is everybody bitching about?

That's nice for you. Note that I'm by no means implying you
should (have the moral obligation of, or whatever) change
that. I'm just trying to offer you an insight into how
some of us tick. Mutual understanding can only help, no?

> And, of course, doesn't it make sense that the company that
> invented and produces and sells a product ought to know more
> about how to operate it than a bunch of "de-engineers?"

Sometimes. Sometimes not. Case in point: at my $DAYJOB, I
am (among others) responsible for the care and feeding of
a small program I wrote a couple of years ago. Since this
program's users are in a department on its financial way
down, bug fixing for this program doesn't get allocated
too much resources. I'm not *allowed* to fix bugs (which
I know annoy its users!). I try to do some minimum under
the radar out of respect for the users.

In a nutshell: whenever the customers (those who pay) and
the users (those who suffer) are not the same, you'll get
conflicts of interest, and the company's aim won't be to
deliver the best program possible. The wonderful engineers
in the company can't put "all their art" at your service.

Your vision of Nvidia is too idealized. The engineer in
there is just human, pressed between constraints, and
most probably overworked. Or outsourced.

Cheers
- -- tomás
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux)

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Re: Free software

[Doug]

On 07/18/2017 10:53 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:

On Tuesday 18 July 2017 20:18:07 Ben Finney wrote:


Teemu Likonen  writes:

Doug [2017-07-18 13:25:34-05] wrote:

My point is that most of the folks who complain about code not
being free to modify are not capable of modifying it, so why do
they complain?

What has not being capable got to do with it? I am losing that capability
slowly but surely, too many circles around this star we call the Sun
being the main reason. I have outlived all the enemies I used to have,
and poor short term memory lets me forget about any recently acquired
ones.


Free software has the advantage that it does not depend on just one
company and its interests. A free software community can maintain
code longer and can port it to different platforms. The community
benefits even if only some people actually modify the software.

By analogy: I am not capable of maintaining the house I live in, let
alone of making significant improvements.


That blows me away, Ben. I have read enough of your keyboards output to
know there is not one darned thing keeping you from learning to do what
you deny being able to do.


Yet I benefit from the fact that anyone sufficiently motivated can
learn to do so and they don't need permission from the people who made
the house.

If anyone who wanted to improve the house I live in were prevented
from doing so without the express permission of the people who made
the house, you're damned right I would complain.


So would I, by whatever means gets the attention.


I may have no intention of ever doing so myself, but I want a
wide-open market of people who can do so if I ask, who have learned
because no law stops them from doing so.


Free software includes that same freedom for software: Everyone is
free to learn about it, and try to improve it, and share their work
with others who want it.

Because everyone has that freedom, we don't all have to exercise it.
But we must defend it for everyone, and look with suspicion on anyone
– even those who sell video cards – who tries to deny us that freedom.

Extremely well stated Ben, thank you.

Cheers, Gene Heskett

I thought I put this to bed, but apparently not. The complaint was
about NVidia software. Well, there has been for some time a
"FREE" program. How come it's not satisfactory for so many
users of Nvidia cards? All the wonderful Linux programmers
have had YEARS to modify it and make it better than what
Nvidia provides, but it seems that they haven't succeeded.
I am very happy with my Nvidia cards and Nvidia drivers.
What the devil is everybody bitching about?

And, of course, doesn't it make sense that the company that
invented and produces and sells a product ought to know more
about how to operate it than a bunch of "de-engineers?"

I've stated my case. Let's drop it here!

--doug

Re: Free software

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 18 July 2017 20:18:07 Ben Finney wrote:

> Teemu Likonen  writes:
> > Doug [2017-07-18 13:25:34-05] wrote:
> > > My point is that most of the folks who complain about code not
> > > being free to modify are not capable of modifying it, so why do
> > > they complain?
> >
What has not being capable got to do with it? I am losing that capability 
slowly but surely, too many circles around this star we call the Sun 
being the main reason. I have outlived all the enemies I used to have, 
and poor short term memory lets me forget about any recently acquired 
ones.

> > Free software has the advantage that it does not depend on just one
> > company and its interests. A free software community can maintain
> > code longer and can port it to different platforms. The community
> > benefits even if only some people actually modify the software.
>
> By analogy: I am not capable of maintaining the house I live in, let
> alone of making significant improvements.
>
That blows me away, Ben. I have read enough of your keyboards output to 
know there is not one darned thing keeping you from learning to do what 
you deny being able to do.

> Yet I benefit from the fact that anyone sufficiently motivated can
> learn to do so and they don't need permission from the people who made
> the house.
>
> If anyone who wanted to improve the house I live in were prevented
> from doing so without the express permission of the people who made
> the house, you're damned right I would complain.
>
So would I, by whatever means gets the attention.

> I may have no intention of ever doing so myself, but I want a
> wide-open market of people who can do so if I ask, who have learned
> because no law stops them from doing so.
>
>
> Free software includes that same freedom for software: Everyone is
> free to learn about it, and try to improve it, and share their work
> with others who want it.
>
> Because everyone has that freedom, we don't all have to exercise it.
> But we must defend it for everyone, and look with suspicion on anyone
> – even those who sell video cards – who tries to deny us that freedom.

Extremely well stated Ben, thank you.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 

Re: Free software

[Felix Miata]

Doug composed on 2017-07-18 19:42 (UTC-0500):

> The local government has the right  to prescribe
> what you can do to the house! 
Actually in the USA that's false, at least WRT a property owner doing his own
work, but state and local governments have been following the federal
government's lead, producing many constitutionally impermissible regulations for
many decades, and getting away with it because of prohibitive legal and time
expense involved in contesting impermissible regulation.
-- 
"The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/

Re: Free software

[Doug]

On 07/18/2017 07:48 PM, Ben Finney wrote:

Doug  writes:


On 07/18/2017 07:18 PM, Ben Finney wrote:

Doug [2017-07-18 13:25:34-05] wrote:

My point is that most of the folks who complain about code not
being free to modify are not capable of modifying it, so why do
they complain?

If anyone who wanted to improve the house I live in were prevented from
doing so without the express permission of the people who made the
house, you're damned right I would complain.

Well, complain!

I take it, then, that now have enough satisfactory answers to your
question above and don't need to ask “why do they complain” about
software freedom in future?


Yes, absolutely!

Re: Free software

[Ben Finney]

Doug  writes:

> On 07/18/2017 07:18 PM, Ben Finney wrote:
> >> Doug [2017-07-18 13:25:34-05] wrote:
> >>> My point is that most of the folks who complain about code not
> >>> being free to modify are not capable of modifying it, so why do
> >>> they complain?
> > If anyone who wanted to improve the house I live in were prevented from
> > doing so without the express permission of the people who made the
> > house, you're damned right I would complain.
> Well, complain!

I take it, then, that now have enough satisfactory answers to your
question above and don't need to ask “why do they complain” about
software freedom in future?

-- 
 \ “I turned to speak to God/About the world's despair; But to |
  `\   make bad matters worse/I found God wasn't there.” —Robert Frost |
_o__)  |
Ben Finney

Re: Free software

[Doug]

On 07/18/2017 07:18 PM, Ben Finney wrote:

Teemu Likonen  writes:


Doug [2017-07-18 13:25:34-05] wrote:


My point is that most of the folks who complain about code not being
free to modify are not capable of modifying it, so why do they
complain?

Free software has the advantage that it does not depend on just one
company and its interests. A free software community can maintain code
longer and can port it to different platforms. The community benefits
even if only some people actually modify the software.

By analogy: I am not capable of maintaining the house I live in, let
alone of making significant improvements.

Yet I benefit from the fact that anyone sufficiently motivated can learn
to do so and they don't need permission from the people who made the
house.

If anyone who wanted to improve the house I live in were prevented from
doing so without the express permission of the people who made the
house, you're damned right I would complain.

Well, complain! The local government has the right  to prescribe
what you can do to the house! You can't even build an INSIDE
stairway to the attic that is not some specified width, with
steps a specified spacing and depth. (Islip Town, New York.
My son's house. His existing stairway is 6" too narrow, and he cannot
modify it in any way without it making it conform exactly to code, which
would be a major modification to the house.)

--doug


I may have no intention of ever doing so myself, but I want a wide-open
market of people who can do so if I ask, who have learned because no law
stops them from doing so.


Free software includes that same freedom for software: Everyone is free
to learn about it, and try to improve it, and share their work with
others who want it.

Because everyone has that freedom, we don't all have to exercise it. But
we must defend it for everyone, and look with suspicion on anyone – even
those who sell video cards – who tries to deny us that freedom.

Re: Free software

[Ben Finney]

Teemu Likonen  writes:

> Doug [2017-07-18 13:25:34-05] wrote:
>
> > My point is that most of the folks who complain about code not being
> > free to modify are not capable of modifying it, so why do they
> > complain?
>
> Free software has the advantage that it does not depend on just one
> company and its interests. A free software community can maintain code
> longer and can port it to different platforms. The community benefits
> even if only some people actually modify the software.

By analogy: I am not capable of maintaining the house I live in, let
alone of making significant improvements.

Yet I benefit from the fact that anyone sufficiently motivated can learn
to do so and they don't need permission from the people who made the
house.

If anyone who wanted to improve the house I live in were prevented from
doing so without the express permission of the people who made the
house, you're damned right I would complain.

I may have no intention of ever doing so myself, but I want a wide-open
market of people who can do so if I ask, who have learned because no law
stops them from doing so.


Free software includes that same freedom for software: Everyone is free
to learn about it, and try to improve it, and share their work with
others who want it.

Because everyone has that freedom, we don't all have to exercise it. But
we must defend it for everyone, and look with suspicion on anyone – even
those who sell video cards – who tries to deny us that freedom.

-- 
 \ “All television is educational television. The question is: |
  `\   what is it teaching?” —Nicholas Johnson |
_o__)  |
Ben Finney

Re: free-software phone: neo900

[Brad Alexander]

I agree. I hope they succeed As a long time N900 owner, I would love to
upgrade my existing unit with a new motherboard and new, more powerful
processor.


On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 1:05 AM, Pete Ley peteley11...@gmail.com wrote:

 green greenfreedo...@gmail.com writes:

  Something that might be of interest to Debian users: the neo900, at
  http://neo900.org, is intended to be a successor of the Nokia N900,
  with significantly improved specifications and features, as well as
  full free software support (excluding PowerVR 3D acceleration).  It is
  even (as of this writing) planned to have Debian GNU/Linux as the
  bundled OS.
 
  Comments?

 This sounds pretty cool. I hope they pull it off in the end, but I might
 wait for it to drop in price. 6-850 EUR is a bit hefty for my
 pockets. I'd like to see some kind of reduced-specs version that cost a
 little less. For instance, I don't need a barometer in my phone. I could
 also do without the front facing camera or even the 5MP if it meant a
 price reduction.

 And with a highly configurable system like Debian GNU/Linux, I wouldn't
 mind having similar specs to the original N900 for a smaller price
 tag. I fully commend the project for trying to advance free software in
 the mobile world; that said, part of the idea for me is options. :)

 /mytwocents


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Re: free-software phone: neo900

[Pete Ley]

green greenfreedo...@gmail.com writes:

 Something that might be of interest to Debian users: the neo900, at
 http://neo900.org, is intended to be a successor of the Nokia N900,
 with significantly improved specifications and features, as well as
 full free software support (excluding PowerVR 3D acceleration).  It is
 even (as of this writing) planned to have Debian GNU/Linux as the
 bundled OS.

 Comments?

This sounds pretty cool. I hope they pull it off in the end, but I might
wait for it to drop in price. 6-850 EUR is a bit hefty for my
pockets. I'd like to see some kind of reduced-specs version that cost a
little less. For instance, I don't need a barometer in my phone. I could
also do without the front facing camera or even the 5MP if it meant a
price reduction.

And with a highly configurable system like Debian GNU/Linux, I wouldn't
mind having similar specs to the original N900 for a smaller price
tag. I fully commend the project for trying to advance free software in
the mobile world; that said, part of the idea for me is options. :)

/mytwocents


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Re: free-software phone: neo900

[ken]

On 11/04/2013 08:54 PM green wrote:

Something that might be of interest to Debian users: the neo900, at
http://neo900.org, is intended to be a successor of the Nokia N900,
with significantly improved specifications and features, as well as
full free software support (excluding PowerVR 3D acceleration).  It is
even (as of this writing) planned to have Debian GNU/Linux as the
bundled OS.

Comments?



I notice that, like the OpenMoko, there's no camera(s)... or did I miss 
mention of it?   Having a camera is one of the main reasons I relented 
and bought a smart phone in the first place.  I use it quite often to 
take photos and videos.  We might have to wait for patents to expire so 
some hardware moves into the public domain before certain features 
become viable for open hardware systems.


Is there a microphone?  Again, an important piece of hardware, useful 
for a lot of applications and purposes.  If it's a phone, we'd fully 
expect there to be a mike, but these days stuff like that should be 
explicitly listed.






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Re: free-software phone: neo900

[Tony van der Hoff]

On 05/11/13 10:53, ken wrote:
 On 11/04/2013 08:54 PM green wrote:
 Something that might be of interest to Debian users: the neo900, at
 http://neo900.org, is intended to be a successor of the Nokia N900,
 with significantly improved specifications and features, as well as
 full free software support (excluding PowerVR 3D acceleration).  It is
 even (as of this writing) planned to have Debian GNU/Linux as the
 bundled OS.

 Comments?

 
 I notice that, like the OpenMoko, there's no camera(s)... or did I miss
 mention of it?  

From http://neo900.org/specs:
VGA front camera
5.0 MP camera, autofocus

snip

-- 
Tony van der Hoff| mailto:t...@vanderhoff.org
Buckinghamshire, England |


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Re: free-software phone: neo900

[green]

ken wrote at 2013-11-05 04:53 -0600:
 Is there a microphone?

The N900 is a phone and has a microphone.  The neo900, also, is a
phone and has a microphone.


signature.asc
Description: Digital signature

Re: free-software phone: neo900

[jeremy jozwik]

On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 5:54 PM, green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:

 Something that might be of interest to Debian users: the neo900, at
 http://neo900.org, is intended to be a successor of the Nokia N900,
 with significantly improved specifications and features, as well as
 full free software support (excluding PowerVR 3D acceleration).  It is
 even (as of this writing) planned to have Debian GNU/Linux as the
 bundled OS.

 Comments?


someone invited me to the group on google+ this morning. have to say im
intrigued.

Re: free software for video production

[Camaleón]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2012 14:21:01 -0400, Kjetil brinchmann Halvorsen wrote:

 I have been looking some at Khan academy:  http://www.khanacademy.org/
 and I am impresses!

The site seems good but you are impressed by what exactly? :-?
 
 So the question: What are out there of free software for video
 production in that style, that is, as if simulating a blackboard,
 writing with a pen (multiple colours) on that, while speaking, and then,
 
 the video is there!  Also, making  a video of what is happening on the
 screen, while speaking!
 
 ???

I think you are referring to two different things:

1/ First, the application that allows the user to write down as if it was 
doing a hand writing papercraft. The GIMP can be used for this and I 
guess any other aimed to desktop publishing (e.g., Scribus, Inkscape...).

2/ Second, the way to record the user actions and make a video which can 
be done by using a screencast program and there are many in linux for 
this (e.g., istanbul, xvidcap, wink, recordmydesktop...).

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón


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Re: free software mini pc

[Andrei POPESCU]

On Sb, 10 mar 12, 11:01:27, Joel Rees wrote:
 
 As for your requirements, I've been looking and hoping for longer than
 you, and now I think it's expecting too much. Think about cars at the
 beginning of the last century. My father used to tell me about his
 buddies who used hand-operated windshield wipers. (He was a teenager
 between WWI and WWII.) As much as we would rather have off-the-shelf
 stuff, that is not the state of the industry.

Not sure if you are talking about my requirements or the OP's, but if 
this one had a DVB-C(2) tuner I'd buy one
http://www.asus.com/Multimedia/Digital_Media_Player/OPlay_TV_Pro/#specifications
(my TV already has DVB-T, which I can't use anyway)

This one
http://www.asus.com/Multimedia/Digital_Media_Player/OPlay_HD2/#specifications
is also great, but:
- the USB3 port is slave
- no Gigabit Ethernet

Looking around the internet it seems at least with the HD2 you get root 
telnet access, so I'm guessing it shouldn't be to hard to install Debian 
on it :D

Kind regards,
Andrei
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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Miles Fidelman wrote at 2012-02-27 16:57 -0600:
 Perhaps not quite the answer you're looking for, but yours might be
 a situation that calls for looking at something other than Debian,
 or even Linux.  I'm thinking particularly that FreeBSD and NetBSD
 run on LOTS of hardware platforms, provide reliable open source
 platforms, and run pretty much anything that runs on Debian.
 Depending on what you're going to be running, that might give you
 some additional options.

Thanks, I will keep FreeBSD and NetBSD in mind also; perhaps using Debian's 
kfreebsd port.


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Stefan Monnier wrote at 2012-02-27 19:48 -0600:
  I need a fanless mini PC; it will run Debian.  It will be used in a
  production environment.  I need good Linux support to facilitate fast
  deployment and low maintenance.  Avoiding non-free software really helps in
  that regard, so I consider non-free firmware barely tolerable, while
  out-of-tree kernel modules and things like ndiswrapper are definitely
  unacceptable.
 
 FWIW, I just got a Zotac Fusion mini-ITX board.
 From what I can tell, all the hardware is fully supported by stock
 Debian testing, with the only non-free package I needed is the
 firmware-linux-nonfree needed for the GPU to work (using the `radeon'
 Free Software driver).

Thanks for your input.  The Zotac ZBOX systems always seemed cheap to me, 
not so with your Fusion board?  I might look into this some more.


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Re: free software mini pc

[Joel Rees]

(You just sparked another rant.)

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Andrei POPESCU
andreimpope...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Jo, 16 feb 12, 08:43:20, Joe wrote:

 Hardware compatibility happens in the MS world because the boot is on
 the other foot, in that manufacturers have no choice but to engineer
 their products to work with Windows, and modify them if problems are
 found. No such incentive exists (yet) for Linux compatibility.

 It would be enough for hardware manufacturers to stick to the relevant
 standards, but more than often they implement them in various different
 ways or simply ignore them and then release Windows drivers that

sort-of

 work
 around the issues.

But not really.

Unless you consider MSWindows-only-the-version-you-bought-maybe stable.

I have a Lenovo S100 which has some nice MSWindows-only features which
require drivers for, oh, wow, last year's version of MSWindows. And
didn't really work fully then. (And don't ask me about the QuickStart
that needs a kernel update but can't find the server.)

The problem is not the OS. It's the ridiculously hard level of
(business) competition being engaged in, to try to capture the pipes
for the coming century. It's very similar to what killed the railroads
at the beginning of the last century.

Too many people want the patent on the bridge that the whole world has
to cross, but don't want the responsibility of maintaining that
bridge.

As for your requirements, I've been looking and hoping for longer than
you, and now I think it's expecting too much. Think about cars at the
beginning of the last century. My father used to tell me about his
buddies who used hand-operated windshield wipers. (He was a teenager
between WWI and WWII.) As much as we would rather have off-the-shelf
stuff, that is not the state of the industry.

If you don't want to believe me, imagine you won the lottery, then go
check how much money and how much time and how many employees it would
take to set up a company to build and support the device you want.

(The venom beneath the surface is not towards you. It's towards
Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and, to a certain extent, Google, among
others. And I guess I could have been a bit more brief and just said,
yes, your expectations are a tad high for current reality. But if your
boss says, Then Windows, ..., tell him he's living in a dream world.
Look for a little more DIY and a little more hands-on time keeping it
free and running.)

--
Joel Rees


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Re: free software mini pc

[Joel Rees]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 1:05 AM, green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:
 Miles Fidelman wrote at 2012-02-27 16:57 -0600:
 Perhaps not quite the answer you're looking for, but yours might be
 a situation that calls for looking at something other than Debian,
 or even Linux.  I'm thinking particularly that FreeBSD and NetBSD
 run on LOTS of hardware platforms, provide reliable open source
 platforms, and run pretty much anything that runs on Debian.
 Depending on what you're going to be running, that might give you
 some additional options.

 Thanks, I will keep FreeBSD and NetBSD in mind also; perhaps using Debian's
 kfreebsd port.

If you are willing to look at the BSDs, don't forget to check openBSD.
(My thoughts are that those require a higher level of time investment
than you seemed to be interested in, but it is a different kind of
time investment, so they are worth looking at.)

--
Joel Rees


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Re: free software mini pc

[Steven Rosenberg]

On 02/15/2012 11:01 AM, green wrote:


So to recap my original post, the basic requirements are:
- fanless mini PC
- it will run Debian
- production environment (reliability is important)
- good Linux support to facilitate fast deployment and low maintenance,
- avoiding non-free software (non-free firmware, out-of-tree kernel modules,
ndiswrapper)

and I mentioned also:
- many devices with only partial mainline Linux support
- unable to find itemized information about Linux kernel support
- some devices ship with Linux (often Ubuntu) and use a custom kernel

My original post did not mention this explicitly, but I would be pleased to
find a manufacturer/vendor that is interested in supporting Linux users, and
provides devices with 100% functionality using 100% free software.  Perhaps
that sounds a bit less demanding, while still being very closely related to
the original.


Somebody else mentioned Logic Supply - http://www.logicsupply.com/ - 
They do build-and-test with Ubuntu on some of their mini-ITX systems, 
and I don't think they'd be offering that service if things didn't work 
well:


http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/ubuntu_linux_systems

I bet if you called them they'd let you know in detail what they do in 
terms of testing a system with Ubuntu. You might want to ask if they'll 
build and test a system for you with Debian. Couldn't hurt to ask, and 
they might just do it.


My uneducated look at the market now says that fanless Intel Atom is a 
better bet than ARM in terms of actually finding hardware you can load 
up and use.


Eracks is another vendor than might work for you.

Here is an Eracks Atom-based system that they'll ship with a variety of 
distros (not sure if it's fanless):


http://eracks.com/products/Desktops/LEAF

This fanless Eracks system ships with Ubuntu, but they say they'll do it 
with other OSes as well (and they offer them in the dropdowns for most 
of the boxes on their site):


http://eracks.com/products/Shallow%20Depth/FLAT

From what I can see, these smaller vendors (i.e. they're not Dell), 
especially those that specialize in Linux and BSD systems (like Eracks, 
ZaReason and System76) are willing to work with you to get you the right 
box, and they will be there to support you after the sale.


But we all know that this is Linux (and/or BSD, if that's your 
pleasure), and it's hard to find guarantees in terms of one distro or 
other working with the hardware (and continuing to work years into the 
future). There's bound to be a degree of chance involved in purchasing 
hardware -- hell, I have computers that ship with Windows that can 
barely run it (and have terrible drivers), and I've had plenty of 
problems with an iMac that shipped with OS X 10.7.


Accept that there may be some fiddling involved, and you'll be closer to 
getting this problem solved.


Here is a ZaReason system that is not fanless, but is closer:

http://zareason.com/shop/Ion-Breeze-5660.html

The fanless requirement is tough, but I think something from Logic 
Supply will work for your use case. Might as well call/e-mail them and 
get some detailed answers.



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Re: free software mini pc

[Steven Rosenberg]

On 02/17/2012 12:14 PM, green wrote:

green wrote:

The Fit-PC3 requires non-free fglrx for radeon hardware?


Stefan Monnier wrote at 2012-02-17 10:10 -0600:

No.  The Free `radeon' driver should work just fine for those AMD Fusion
GPUs.


Hey, that is great news; thanks.  I was not aware of the free radeon driver.
I have found the support matrix page:
  http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
and will do some more research on the Fit-PC3.


After a very unsatisfactory few months using fglrx, I went back to the 
free radeon driver for my ATI Technologies Inc M880G [Mobility Radeon HD 
4200] chip. It's been working great for at least a year and a half.



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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Steven Rosenberg wrote at 2012-02-27 12:02 -0600:
 Logic Supply

 Eracks, ZaReason and System76

Thanks for your comments, and especially for mentioning the other vendors 
each of which have some interesting products available.


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Re: free software mini pc

[Miles Fidelman]

Perhaps not quite the answer you're looking for, but yours might be a 
situation that calls for looking at something other than Debian, or even 
Linux.  I'm thinking particularly that FreeBSD and NetBSD run on LOTS of 
hardware platforms, provide reliable open source platforms, and run 
pretty much anything that runs on Debian.  Depending on what you're 
going to be running, that might give you some additional options.


Miles Fidelman

--
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In practice, there is.    Yogi Berra



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Re: free software mini pc

[Miles Bader]

Richard Owlett rowl...@pcnetinc.com writes:
 Back in the 70's DEC had an enclosure for the LSI-11 irreverently dubbed
 the Hitachi.
 Five sides were cast aluminum with large fins o get rid of ~100 watts of
 heat. The sixth side was a heavily gasketed piece of cast
 aluminum.

Are you sure it wasn't The Hibachi ...?  That would make an awful lot
more sense!

-miles

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Apologize, v. To lay the foundation for a future offense.


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Re: free software mini pc

[Richard Owlett]

Miles Bader wrote:

Richard Owlettrowl...@pcnetinc.com  writes:

Back in the 70's DEC had an enclosure for the LSI-11 irreverently dubbed
the Hitachi.
Five sides were cast aluminum with large fins o get rid of ~100 watts of
heat. The sixth side was a heavily gasketed piece of cast
aluminum.


Are you sure it wasn't The Hibachi ...?  That would make an awful lot
more sense!



They didn't hire me for my spelling ability ;/


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Re: free software mini pc

[Stefan Monnier]

 Of course, the manufacturer distributes the GNU/Linux version of the
 product with a proprietary driver which is hell to get working on
 anything else than that specific Xorg+kernel combination.
 I like to avoid that head-banging experience and the associated why did I 
 ever purchase this garbage.

So do I.  FWIW the Fit-PC3 seems much more promising in this regard,


Stefan


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

green wrote:
 The Fit-PC3 requires non-free fglrx for radeon hardware?

Stefan Monnier wrote at 2012-02-17 10:10 -0600:
 No.  The Free `radeon' driver should work just fine for those AMD Fusion 
 GPUs.

Hey, that is great news; thanks.  I was not aware of the free radeon driver.  
I have found the support matrix page:
 http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
and will do some more research on the Fit-PC3.


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Re: free software mini pc

[Joe]

On Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:14:50 -0600
green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:

 Stefan Monnier wrote at 2012-02-15 20:25 -0600:
  
  If your machine is supported by the stock kernel, all these
  problems are pretty much absent: you can expect to simply aptitude
  upgrade for the next ten years.
 
 This is *precisely* why I prefer to purchase devices with full kernel 
 support.
 
 The question is, how can I be reasonably sure before the purchase?
 In many cases the information is unavailable or difficult to find.

Because it mostly doesn't exist. If you were given one of these machines
and an Internet connection, how much time would you expect to need
before you were willing to issue a guarantee, on which other people
would base purchasing decisions, that *everything* worked as expected?

For how long would you issue the guarantee, given the slight but
non-zero chance that something is dependent on a bug which has security
issues, which might therefore change even in Stable?

When you do settle on something, will you test it exhaustively and
document the results on the Net? Because that's where the information
comes from which you're looking for at the moment, and you can help
future Debian users if you do. We'll get no help from manufacturers,
until they get desperate enough to scratch around for the last few
percent of potential customers.

Hardware compatibility happens in the MS world because the boot is on
the other foot, in that manufacturers have no choice but to engineer
their products to work with Windows, and modify them if problems are
found. No such incentive exists (yet) for Linux compatibility.

-- 
Joe


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Re: free software mini pc

[Andrei POPESCU]

On Jo, 16 feb 12, 08:43:20, Joe wrote:
 
 Hardware compatibility happens in the MS world because the boot is on
 the other foot, in that manufacturers have no choice but to engineer
 their products to work with Windows, and modify them if problems are
 found. No such incentive exists (yet) for Linux compatibility.

It would be enough for hardware manufacturers to stick to the relevant 
standards, but more than often they implement them in various different 
ways or simply ignore them and then release Windows drivers that work 
around the issues.

Kind regards,
Andrei
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Re: free software mini pc

[Mark Neidorff]

On Wednesday 15 February 2012 2:01:22 pm green wrote:
 Mark Neidorff wrote at 2012-02-14 17:45 -0600:
 
 When you purchased the server on which you run Lenny, did you know for sure
 that the installation would go smoothly and all hardware would work
 correctly?  What if today you needed another system on which to run Debian
 and knew that you did not have time to troubleshoot any hardware problems?
 You could get the same as what you have now, but what if it is no longer
 available?  Wouldn't it be helpful to find a vendor that provided a
 hardware table for each system with information about Linux mainline
 kernel versions, drivers, and firmware?  Like, this SATA controller is
 supported since Linux v2.6.29 with the ahci driver.  So in that case you
 could look at their site, compare with the kernel version in Debian
 stable, and know with reasonable certainty that this hardware will just
 work with Debian stable.  Or that you need to consider a kernel in
 backports, etc.
 

Yes.  I knew because, for a server, I bought slightly behind the curve.  For 
the server, I knew that I didn't need the latest and gretest, so I was able to 
look at hardware that had been on the market for about a year and check 
compatibility easily. Then the install just worked.

IMO, in getting the latest and greatest can be as much of an ego thing as a 
productivity thing.  Question is:  what are your specific needs going to be?  
That will determine the power and features that you need.


 Many vendors mention various versions of Windows on their hardware pages,
 but nothing about Linux.  So as a consumer, do I just blindly assume that,
 although the vendor apparently does not care enough about Linux to even
 mention it, that it will all just work?  Or those that mention Linux,
 but no kernel versions: will the kernel in Debian stable work?  Or those
 with Linux drivers available for download, do I need to maintain
 out-of-tree drivers (remember I mentioned a maintenance burden)?

Here's another way of looking at the same thing.  Other M$  require that 
hardware goes through a certification process before it gets the works 
with... sticker.  They have a roll-out scheudle of once every few years.  Is 
that what you want?  That costs the consumer $$$.  Are you willing to spend 
for that?

 
 Now, because of the implication that hardware (as with your server, Mark)
 will all just work with Debian (and that my post/research is just
 silly/trolling), I will quickly mention nvidia, fglrx, and ralink wireless,
 all problematic a while back.  I have had a Thinkpad T61 with a PSTN modem
 for 4 years, it has never worked (Debian amd64); I hope to try again when
 I upgrade to wheezy.  Okay, so now someone might say well, of course
 video, winmodems, and wireless will cause some trouble sometimes.  These
 mini-pcs... any of them have onboard video hardware?  Or come with
 wireless hardware?
 
 And someone might say that many of the problems had in the past are
 resolved, and quite possible so.  So if I need a functional device now, do
 I need to just purchase one and shelve it for a few years before assuming
 Linux will work?  I understand that Linux has a history of better support
 for older hardware, and that is reasonable, but would that need to be so
 (as much) if vendor support was better?  And the Intel GM965 video on my
 T61 still does not quite work correctly for 3d applications, even after 4
 years.

True, audio and video devices have been less than perfectly supported in 
linux.  Look at why.  Video hardware goes through benchmark testing.  The 
ed's choice hardware does the best on the benchmarks and sells the best.  
So, the hardware is built to work best ON THE BENCHMARKS, but not necessarily 
in the real world.  So what linux faces is hardware that is tweaked to do well 
on benchmarks on a different OS.  This has lead to hardware manufacturers not 
releasing their code to linux, bucause they would reveal how they make the 
hardware look good on the benchmarks.  Audio is continuously being worked on.  
It is another difficult area for similar reasons.
 
 Okay, I could look through the specifications carefully and research eg.
 the wireless hardware, but what about when vendors change the chipset
 mid-model?

Yep.  that is always a problem with buying the latest and greatest.

 
 Am I being demanding here?  I want an absolutely functional Linux on a
 device, and I am willing to pay for it (I have mentioned no limit, though I
 do have a budget).  For those assuming I am needing tens or hundreds of
 whatever mini-pc I choose, no.  I only need a single mini-pc system.  More
 later, perhaps.  It is not for my own use, but at a location where tech
 support is not available, and where the system will quite likely be in use
 for 5+ years.

One question.  Do you expect the device to continue to be 100% functional when 
the infostructure around it will change over the next 5+ years?  That is not 
reasonable.  

 
 So to recap my 

Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Joe wrote at 2012-02-16 02:43 -0600:
 On Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:14:50 -0600 green wrote:
  The question is, how can I be reasonably sure before the purchase?
  In many cases the information is unavailable or difficult to find.
 
 Because it mostly doesn't exist. If you were given one of these machines
 and an Internet connection, how much time would you expect to need
 before you were willing to issue a guarantee, on which other people
 would base purchasing decisions, that *everything* worked as expected?

You suggest that it would take an unreasonable amount of time, then later you 
suggest/request that I do for the sake of other Linux users.  Either way 
(read on)...

 For how long would you issue the guarantee, given the slight but
 non-zero chance that something is dependent on a bug which has security
 issues, which might therefore change even in Stable?

I understand that Linux is a moving target.  But is it really so difficult to 
just say that yes, we tested this device with Linux kernel version whatever 
and tested the following items?

There are several 100% free Linux distributions available (I have looked at 
Parabola and BLAG); just running one of those and testing would do the trick, 
correct?

 When you do settle on something, will you test it exhaustively and
 document the results on the Net?

If possible, I will do so.  Of course, one reason this discussion started is 
that I do not feel that I have extra time to deal with hardware troubles, but 
I will do my best to at least document what works, and more if possible.

 Because that's where the information comes from which you're looking for at 
 the moment, and you can help future Debian users if you do. We'll get no 
 help from manufacturers, until they get desperate enough to scratch around 
 for the last few percent of potential customers.
 
 Hardware compatibility happens in the MS world because the boot is on
 the other foot, in that manufacturers have no choice but to engineer
 their products to work with Windows, and modify them if problems are
 found. No such incentive exists (yet) for Linux compatibility.

So although niche markets exist and there are niche manufacturers to fill (at 
least some of) those markets, you suggest that none exists to fill this one.  
As I have said previously: I would be satisfied, but disappointed, to be told 
that no, there is no vendor providing a reasonable guarantee of mainline 
Linux support.  Your message has come closest so far to doing that; thanks.


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Stefan Monnier wrote at 2012-02-15 20:19 -0600:
 The same should hold for the Fit-PC3 (tho you may want to check their
 forums first, since support for some particular features like the IR
 interface or the watchdog may not all be supported by the current
 kernel).  While they don't guarantee that the stock kernels supports all
 the hardware, they do care about GNU/Linux support and provide fairly
 good information on the forums about the available support, so you can
 make up your mind before actually buying the unit.

The Fit-PC3 requires non-free fglrx for radeon hardware?
http://www.fit-pc.com/wiki/index.php/Fit-PC3:_Installing_Linux_Mint_12
http://www.fit-pc.com/fit-pc3/docs/fit-PC3-specifications.pdf


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Re: free software mini pc

[Andrew McGlashan]

Okay, just a few cents from me.

I don't think you can ever rely on a machine having full main line 
kernel support one day, still having it 3 or 4 years down the track.


The drivers change, some disappear too -- there is never going to be any 
guarantees.  The same goes for all sorts of packages that you might run 
as well.


I had some small ARM machines which worked very well on Lenny, but they 
are terrible on a very similar Squeeze install.  As newer distros come 
about and the Linux kernel gets larger and larger, there are all sorts 
of reasons why an older machine won't be suitable without going for a 
very custom setup with lots of thinning out of the kernel.  Too much 
work to do that.


In history, I remember a P133 machine being quite powerful and it was 
at the time, try running anything recent on such a machine today and 
you'll be so let down.  You get more RAM on a portable tablet these days 
or even a basic smart phone, forget about the processing power, hahaha.


Your ideal solution would be great, but it isn't likely to be fulfilled 
and if it ever is, then I wouldn't think you'll get all that much 
longevity from it.


Okay, now I'm going to do a simple car analogy thing -- not that 
related, but hey, bear with me.  My first Holden Commodore was a VS 
Series II model.  When I got that car, I was advised to buy the newest 
Commodore I could afford (I already decided on a Commodore).  After a 
few years it suffered a transmission problem and it was too expensive to 
fix, so I replaced it with a VT Series II.  In time I ended up with my 
current car, which is an MY10 VE.  At every point, the newer car was 
much better than the previous car in so many ways -- even though it was 
still the same basic range of vehicle.  I suggest you might take the 
same approach with computer hardware, buy the best you can afford that 
meets as many of your aims as possible today, understand it won't last 
forever and plan for a replacement later, you are sure to find so much 
better value down the track.


Heck, I may as well take this a little further.  My Galaxy S i9000 
mobile cost near $800 and now a brand new replacement of the exact same 
model is available under $400, but the S2 is so much better and under 
$600 with double the warranty [proper legitimate AU stock, not imported 
from overseas with limited warranty and support].  Sure, my i9000 is 
still good, but if I was to be buying a phone right now, I wouldn't go 
past the S2 ... of course I have dreams for the S3 or maybe the Galaxy Note.


Anyway, back to the main point of this thread.  I hope you find a 
suitable device that matches your criteria as much as possible, or even 
fully.  But don't count on it lasting for more than a few years without 
you pulling your hair out, hoping for a faster, better and far more 
efficient device.


Oh and the raspberrypi with 1GB at $35  hmmm I don't think so. 
Looks like a nice toy, but far too low in the memory stakes today at 
256MB for $35.


Cheers

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AndrewM

Andrew McGlashan
Broadband Solutions now including VoIP


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Mark Neidorff wrote at 2012-02-16 04:38 -0600:
 On Wednesday 15 February 2012 2:01:22 pm green wrote:
  When you purchased the server on which you run Lenny, did you know for sure
  that the installation would go smoothly and all hardware would work
  correctly?
 
 Yes.  I knew because, for a server, I bought slightly behind the curve.  
 For 
 the server, I knew that I didn't need the latest and gretest, so I was able 
 to 
 look at hardware that had been on the market for about a year and check 
 compatibility easily. Then the install just worked.

I don't really get how you check compatibility easily.  Are there any 
particular resources you use?

 IMO, in getting the latest and greatest can be as much of an ego thing as a 
 productivity thing.

True, but irrelevant.  I do not care about latest and greatest, unless 
fanless is considered as such.

 Question is: what are your specific needs going to be?  That will determine 
 the power and features that you need.

Okay.  Basic desktop use, fanless.  100% supported by free software.  
802.11g, ethernet, 2.5 inch bay and SATA port, USB, audio with microphone 
port, video out.  Fairly solid hardware.

  Many vendors mention various versions of Windows on their hardware pages,
  but nothing about Linux.  So as a consumer, do I just blindly assume that,
  although the vendor apparently does not care enough about Linux to even
  mention it, that it will all just work?
 
 Here's another way of looking at the same thing.  Other M$  require that 
 hardware goes through a certification process before it gets the works 
 with... sticker.  They have a roll-out scheudle of once every few years.  Is 
 that what you want?  That costs the consumer $$$.  Are you willing to spend 
 for that?

It probably depends on how much it costs.  A manufacturer could probably only 
guarantee support for a particular kernel version, and that does not seem so 
difficult to me.

 True, audio and video devices have been less than perfectly supported in 
 linux.  Look at why.  Video hardware goes through benchmark testing.  The 
 ed's choice hardware does the best on the benchmarks and sells the best.  
 So, the hardware is built to work best ON THE BENCHMARKS, but not necessarily 
 in the real world.  So what linux faces is hardware that is tweaked to do 
 well 
 on benchmarks on a different OS.  This has lead to hardware manufacturers not 
 releasing their code to linux, bucause they would reveal how they make the 
 hardware look good on the benchmarks.

Okay, thanks for the explanation.  But yet there are audio and video devices 
that do work with 100% free software.  So the hardware is out there.

  Okay, I could look through the specifications carefully and research eg.
  the wireless hardware, but what about when vendors change the chipset
  mid-model?
 
 Yep.  that is always a problem with buying the latest and greatest.

What?  If the chipset changes mid-model, then identifying that device will be 
forever more difficult, regardless of whether it is recent hardware.  This is 
one reason why I feel it is difficult to guarantee support *before* I have 
the device in my hands, versus testing it *after*.

  It is not for my own use, but at a location where tech support is not 
  available, and where the system will quite likely be in use for 5+ years.
 
 One question.  Do you expect the device to continue to be 100% functional 
 when 
 the infostructure around it will change over the next 5+ years?  That is not 
 reasonable.  

The desktop I intend to replace is more than 5 years old and it is still 
capable of running squeeze.  It has an Abit KR7A-133R motherboard (reviewed 
2002-04-12) and a AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (introduced 2001-11-04).  Both 
available over 9 years ago.  The only hardware changes that might be more 
recent are PCI wireless and a PATA hard drive.  It also has much of what I 
mentioned above: ethernet, USB, audio, video out, 802.11g (may be more 
recent)--but not fanless, SATA, or 100% free software support.

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/motherboards/article.php/1008771/ABIT-KR7A-133R-KT266A-Motherboard-Review.htm
http://techreport.com/articles.x/3086/1


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Stefan Monnier wrote at 2012-02-16 08:10 -0600:
  The question is, how can I be reasonably sure before the purchase?  In many 
  cases the information is unavailable or difficult to find.
 
 Agreed, it's a serious problem.  E.g. for fit-pc2 I actually forgot to
 mention that the video driver is not well supported by stock kernel and
 Xorg since it's the infamous gma500.  It's actually reasonably well
 supported by the KMS code now (since Linux-3.0, more or less) but there's
 still basically no hardware acceleration support.

I seriously considered a fit-PC2 until I learned about the trouble with 
GMA500.
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportComponentsVideoCardsPoulsbo/

 Of course, the manufacturer distributes the GNU/Linux version of the
 product with a proprietary driver which is hell to get working on
 anything else than that specific Xorg+kernel combination.

I like to avoid that head-banging experience and the associated why did I 
ever purchase this garbage.


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Andrew McGlashan wrote at 2012-02-16 11:16 -0600:
 I don't think you can ever rely on a machine having full main line
 kernel support one day, still having it 3 or 4 years down the track.

In another message, I just mentioned the desktop to be replaced, which has an 
Abit KR7A-133R motherboard and AMD Athlon XP 1900+ processor, both available 
over 9 years ago.  This computer is still capable of running squeeze quite 
comfortably.


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Re: free software mini pc

[Joe]

On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 09:53:36 -0600
green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:


  Your message has
 come closest so far to doing that; thanks.

You're welcome, I wish I could offer more hope, but as users of an
operating system most people have never heard of, we get to suck it and
see.

Whichever way you go, I recommend keeping a recent version of Knoppix
handy. A lot of hardware troubles are due, not to missing or inadequate
software, but to limitations in hardware detection in standard Debian.
Knoppix is rightly famous for its hardware handling, and the Debian
installer developers will never have the time to apply the kind of
effort that Herr Knopper expends on this.

A lot of the time, Knoppix will run a 'difficult' bit of hardware, but
using mainstream modules that the Debian installer has not seen the
need for. It is (mostly) then a matter of tweaking the Debian
installation to match.

Joe


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Re: free software mini pc

[Joe]

On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 04:16:09 +1100
Andrew McGlashan andrew.mcglas...@affinityvision.com.au wrote:

 
 I had some small ARM machines which worked very well on Lenny, but
 
 In history, I remember a P133 machine being quite powerful and it
 was at the time, 

I had one of the first ARM computers, an Acorn Archimedes running a 4MHz
(!) ARM1 with half a meg of RAM. I remember upgrading to a 12MHz ARM3
and being rather impressed, and also upgrading the RAM to 4MB and
installing a 40MB (yes, 'megabyte') MFM hard drive. The joy of escaping
from floppies! Mind you, the OS was in ROM, so you had the desktop up
within two or three seconds of power-on.

In its 4MHz incarnation, it was (briefly) the fastest PC around,
beating the 16MHz 386 machines of the day.

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Re: free software mini pc

[Dom]

On 16/02/12 20:16, Joe wrote:

On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 04:16:09 +1100
Andrew McGlashanandrew.mcglas...@affinityvision.com.au  wrote:



I had some small ARM machines which worked very well on Lenny, but

In history, I remember a P133 machine being quite powerful and it
was at the time,


I had one of the first ARM computers, an Acorn Archimedes running a 4MHz
(!) ARM1 with half a meg of RAM. I remember upgrading to a 12MHz ARM3
and being rather impressed, and also upgrading the RAM to 4MB and
installing a 40MB (yes, 'megabyte') MFM hard drive. The joy of escaping
from floppies! Mind you, the OS was in ROM, so you had the desktop up
within two or three seconds of power-on.

In its 4MHz incarnation, it was (briefly) the fastest PC around,
beating the 16MHz 386 machines of the day.


I had one of those Archimedes machines too, great to program, especally 
when the original Arthur OS was replaced with the first RISC OS.


Just one small correction, the Archimedes was originally fitted with an 
ARM2 chip. The ARM1 was mostly used in the prototype development 
systems, such as the ARM Co-processor for the BBC micro - which I was 
lucky enough to get my hands on for a while. It was fun to see the 
normal BBC Computer 32K message replaced with Acorn OS 4096K :-)


It cost around 4000 UKP in those days for the 4MB version.

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Re: free software mini pc

[Andrew McGlashan]

On 17/02/2012 4:31 AM, green wrote:

Andrew McGlashan wrote at 2012-02-16 11:16 -0600:

I don't think you can ever rely on a machine having full main line
kernel support one day, still having it 3 or 4 years down the track.


In another message, I just mentioned the desktop to be replaced, which has an
Abit KR7A-133R motherboard and AMD Athlon XP 1900+ processor, both available
over 9 years ago.  This computer is still capable of running squeeze quite
comfortably.


Yes, but a proper desktop machine is a completely different beast.

I still think there will be some major improvements in performance cost 
and efficiency in the tiny PC area to come...


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AndrewM



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Re: free software mini pc

[Arnt Karlsen]

On Tue, 14 Feb 2012 23:26:04 +1100, Alex wrote in message 
CAAvq_=djugEM768Y4M=_Ve16dBWuo=XvB=wesqajpw9nog8...@mail.gmail.com:

 On 13 February 2012 00:57, green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:
 
  So the Trim-Slice is not supported by mainline kernels?
 
 
 As others said, the main issue is the Tegra 2 is a nvidia chip

...that doesn't work with nouveau?  Uh-oh. 

 and CompuLab are reliant on nvidia in order to get things working.
 
 I haven't tried upgrading the kernel since I got the original unit.
 Performance was ok with the original but generally it seemed to be
 well below what you would expect given the specs of the Tegra 2.
 
 There was an interesting article about the Trim Slice posted a few
 days ago, I don't know if you saw it:
 http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2012-02-12-21-43_playing_with_the_trim_slice.html
 
 To repeat Christofer's question though, what's the problem with a
 non-standard kernel? I get the feeling that these ARM computers that
 are coming out are going to be reliant on customised kernels for some
 time. If the customisation of the kernel can be managed in a
 standardised way, then it shouldn't be a problem.
 
 Cheers,
 Alex
 
 


-- 
..med vennlig hilsen = with Kind Regards from Arnt Karlsen
...with a number of polar bear hunters in his ancestry...
  Scenarios always come in sets of three: 
  best case, worst case, and just in case.


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Alex Hutton wrote at 2012-02-14 16:59 -0600:
 Fair points. I guess you would need to go with an Atom or other x86
 system which would have a more mature architecture, rather than ARM.

Yes, x86 seems to be the architecture of choice at this point, with regard to 
reliability.

 For my personal needs I'm thinking of desktop usage, so I'm not
 thinking of a mission-critical application, and ultra-reliability is
 not a necessity, though it is desirable :).

I am making reliability a requirement in my purchase.  Reliability is 
actually significantly more important to me than most of the other 
specifications.


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Mark Neidorff wrote at 2012-02-14 17:45 -0600:
 I've stayed on the sidelines of this thread because the original post sounded 
 to me like trolling.  But, after the posts that I have read, you seem quite 
 serious.

Trolling?!  Apparently I failed to clearly express myself in the original 
post.

 Have you looked at mini-itx systems on ebay for inspiration?

I have looked primarily at mini-itx systems during my research.

 I have one now running Lenny as my server. It is rock solid.  It just sits 
 there, silently, and runs and runs and runs.  Everything just worked on 
 installation.

It is great that your server has worked so well for you.


 I'm still not 100% clear on what is standing in your way.

When you purchased the server on which you run Lenny, did you know for sure 
that the installation would go smoothly and all hardware would work 
correctly?  What if today you needed another system on which to run Debian 
and knew that you did not have time to troubleshoot any hardware problems?  
You could get the same as what you have now, but what if it is no longer 
available?  Wouldn't it be helpful to find a vendor that provided a hardware 
table for each system with information about Linux mainline kernel versions, 
drivers, and firmware?  Like, this SATA controller is supported since Linux 
v2.6.29 with the ahci driver.  So in that case you could look at their site, 
compare with the kernel version in Debian stable, and know with reasonable 
certainty that this hardware will just work with Debian stable.  Or that 
you need to consider a kernel in backports, etc.

Many vendors mention various versions of Windows on their hardware pages, but 
nothing about Linux.  So as a consumer, do I just blindly assume that, 
although the vendor apparently does not care enough about Linux to even 
mention it, that it will all just work?  Or those that mention Linux, but 
no kernel versions: will the kernel in Debian stable work?  Or those with 
Linux drivers available for download, do I need to maintain out-of-tree 
drivers (remember I mentioned a maintenance burden)?

Now, because of the implication that hardware (as with your server, Mark) 
will all just work with Debian (and that my post/research is just 
silly/trolling), I will quickly mention nvidia, fglrx, and ralink wireless, 
all problematic a while back.  I have had a Thinkpad T61 with a PSTN modem 
for 4 years, it has never worked (Debian amd64); I hope to try again when I 
upgrade to wheezy.  Okay, so now someone might say well, of course video, 
winmodems, and wireless will cause some trouble sometimes.  These 
mini-pcs... any of them have onboard video hardware?  Or come with wireless 
hardware?

And someone might say that many of the problems had in the past are resolved, 
and quite possible so.  So if I need a functional device now, do I need to 
just purchase one and shelve it for a few years before assuming Linux will 
work?  I understand that Linux has a history of better support for older 
hardware, and that is reasonable, but would that need to be so (as much) if 
vendor support was better?  And the Intel GM965 video on my T61 still does 
not quite work correctly for 3d applications, even after 4 years.

Okay, I could look through the specifications carefully and research eg. the 
wireless hardware, but what about when vendors change the chipset mid-model?

Am I being demanding here?  I want an absolutely functional Linux on a 
device, and I am willing to pay for it (I have mentioned no limit, though I 
do have a budget).  For those assuming I am needing tens or hundreds of 
whatever mini-pc I choose, no.  I only need a single mini-pc system.  More 
later, perhaps.  It is not for my own use, but at a location where tech 
support is not available, and where the system will quite likely be in use 
for 5+ years.

So to recap my original post, the basic requirements are:
- fanless mini PC
- it will run Debian
- production environment (reliability is important)
- good Linux support to facilitate fast deployment and low maintenance, 
- avoiding non-free software (non-free firmware, out-of-tree kernel modules, 
ndiswrapper)

and I mentioned also:
- many devices with only partial mainline Linux support
- unable to find itemized information about Linux kernel support
- some devices ship with Linux (often Ubuntu) and use a custom kernel

My original post did not mention this explicitly, but I would be pleased to 
find a manufacturer/vendor that is interested in supporting Linux users, and 
provides devices with 100% functionality using 100% free software.  Perhaps 
that sounds a bit less demanding, while still being very closely related to 
the original.

The response I expected to that original post, and would even have expected 
to the question in this previous paragraph, is that no, unfortunately there 
are no/few significant vendors that are interested in Linux users to this 
extent.  I would be satisfied with this answer, though disappointed, and 

Re: free software mini pc

[Stefan Monnier]

 So to recap my original post, the basic requirements are:
 - fanless mini PC
 - it will run Debian
 - production environment (reliability is important)
 - good Linux support to facilitate fast deployment and low maintenance, 
 - avoiding non-free software (non-free firmware, out-of-tree kernel modules, 
   ndiswrapper)

My Fit-PC2 is running stock Debian, and vrms tells me that the only
non-Free code it has installed is firmware-ralink (well, it also
mentions some non-DFSG packages which the FSF considers as Free).
The wireless chip was not well supported by the stock kernel when I got
it, but I haven't needed it very often and the few times I've needed it
it worked just fine (including WPA Enterprise).

The same should hold for the Fit-PC3 (tho you may want to check their
forums first, since support for some particular features like the IR
interface or the watchdog may not all be supported by the current
kernel).  While they don't guarantee that the stock kernels supports all
the hardware, they do care about GNU/Linux support and provide fairly
good information on the forums about the available support, so you can
make up your mind before actually buying the unit.

You can actually buy them with some GNU/Linux pre-installed.

IOW it's one of the companies I've found to be most supportive of using
GNU/Linux on their devices.  I'd love to hear of others, especially if
they're even more clearly supportive of Free Software, since I like to
vote with my feet,


Stefan


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Re: free software mini pc

[Stefan Monnier]

 not a necessity, though it is desiable :).  A custom kernel that
 doesn't work is obviously going to be a problem, but if it works well
 enough then it would be fine for me.  But I guess it does make a

The problem is: what will you do with your machine three year down
the road?  Will you have to keep looking for some guy who keeps a custom
kernel up-to-date, or will you have to rely on an old version of the
kernel, and hence suffer from various minor problems as the user-space
code starts to rely on new features your kernel does not provide?

If your machine is supported by the stock kernel, all these problems are
pretty much absent: you can expect to simply aptitude upgrade for the
next ten years.


Stefan


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Stefan Monnier wrote at 2012-02-15 20:25 -0600:
  not a necessity, though it is desiable :).  A custom kernel that
  doesn't work is obviously going to be a problem, but if it works well
  enough then it would be fine for me.  But I guess it does make a
 
 The problem is: what will you do with your machine three year down
 the road?  Will you have to keep looking for some guy who keeps a custom
 kernel up-to-date, or will you have to rely on an old version of the
 kernel, and hence suffer from various minor problems as the user-space
 code starts to rely on new features your kernel does not provide?
 
 If your machine is supported by the stock kernel, all these problems are
 pretty much absent: you can expect to simply aptitude upgrade for the
 next ten years.

This is *precisely* why I prefer to purchase devices with full kernel 
support.

The question is, how can I be reasonably sure before the purchase?  In many 
cases the information is unavailable or difficult to find.


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Re: free software mini pc

[Alex Hutton]

On 13 February 2012 00:57, green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:

 So the Trim-Slice is not supported by mainline kernels?


As others said, the main issue is the Tegra 2 is a nvidia chip and
CompuLab are reliant on nvidia in order to get things working.

I haven't tried upgrading the kernel since I got the original unit.
Performance was ok with the original but generally it seemed to be
well below what you would expect given the specs of the Tegra 2.

There was an interesting article about the Trim Slice posted a few
days ago, I don't know if you saw it:
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2012-02-12-21-43_playing_with_the_trim_slice.html

To repeat Christofer's question though, what's the problem with a
non-standard kernel? I get the feeling that these ARM computers that
are coming out are going to be reliant on customised kernels for some
time. If the customisation of the kernel can be managed in a
standardised way, then it shouldn't be a problem.

Cheers,
Alex


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Alex Hutton wrote at 2012-02-14 06:26 -0600:
 There was an interesting article about the Trim Slice posted a few
 days ago, I don't know if you saw it:
 http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2012-02-12-21-43_playing_with_the_trim_slice.html

Thanks, I had not seen that yet.  Reading that certainly suggests that the 
Trim-Slice is not ready for a production desktop system yet!

with custom kernel, assuming that blog is correct:
- slow transfers and frequent bus resets
- power saving not fully implemented
- DVI port trouble at high resolutions
- unstable wireless driver

 To repeat Christofer's question though, what's the problem with a
 non-standard kernel? I get the feeling that these ARM computers that
 are coming out are going to be reliant on customised kernels for some
 time. If the customisation of the kernel can be managed in a
 standardised way, then it shouldn't be a problem.

I am *not* looking for disposable hardware.  I am *not* interested in 
purchasing a maintenance burden.  I need *rock-solid* *long-term* Linux 
reliability on *rock-solid* hardware.  Will Compulabs continue to provide 
updated custom kernels a year or more from now?  I doubt it, considering that 
the custom kernel they provide for their product now does not work (strictly 
speaking).

Frankly, I am surprised that comments here suggest apathy and even hostility 
toward (that is, questioning the value of) a search for a strictly free 
software device, especially considering Debian's social contract and the 
purpose of reducing maintenance requirements.  Do you or others here enjoy 
purchasing a system on which Linux does not work correctly until months 
later, if ever?


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Re: free software mini pc

[Tom H]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 10:34 AM, green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:

 I am *not* looking for disposable hardware.  I am *not* interested in
 purchasing a maintenance burden.  I need *rock-solid* *long-term* Linux
 reliability on *rock-solid* hardware.  Will Compulabs continue to provide
 updated custom kernels a year or more from now?  I doubt it, considering that
 the custom kernel they provide for their product now does not work (strictly
 speaking).

 Frankly, I am surprised that comments here suggest apathy and even hostility
 toward (that is, questioning the value of) a search for a strictly free
 software device, especially considering Debian's social contract and the
 purpose of reducing maintenance requirements.  Do you or others here enjoy
 purchasing a system on which Linux does not work correctly until months
 later, if ever?

:)

The perceived hostility is an artifact of your own aggressivity;
basically I want this, I don't want that, I refuse to compromise
on this.

If the DFSG or an equivalent philosophy gets in the way of my
installing Linux and using it easily, I ignore the DFSG.

I also reject your premise (as I've understood it) that the packages
in main are more stable than the packages in the non-main repos - and
I'm sure that the developers who maintain the latter packages would
prefer that you be more respectful of their work.


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Tom H wrote at 2012-02-14 11:18 -0600:
 On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 10:34 AM, green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:
  Frankly, I am surprised that comments here suggest apathy and even hostility
  toward (that is, questioning the value of) a search for a strictly free
  software device, especially considering Debian's social contract and the
  purpose of reducing maintenance requirements.  Do you or others here enjoy
  purchasing a system on which Linux does not work correctly until months
  later, if ever?
 
 :)
 
 The perceived hostility is an artifact of your own aggressivity;
 basically I want this, I don't want that, I refuse to compromise
 on this.

Probably my refusal to compromise is from past experiences with troublesome 
hardware on systems that needed to work ASAP.  And a significant portion of 
those was related to non-free, out-of-tree kernel modules.

 I also reject your premise (as I've understood it) that the packages
 in main are more stable than the packages in the non-main repos - and
 I'm sure that the developers who maintain the latter packages would
 prefer that you be more respectful of their work.

Hey, sorry.  I am just trying to express the reason for my feelings, not 
trying to bash anything.


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Re: free software mini pc

[Tom H]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 12:56 PM, green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:
 Tom H wrote at 2012-02-14 11:18 -0600:
 On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 10:34 AM, green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:
 
  Frankly, I am surprised that comments here suggest apathy and even 
  hostility
  toward (that is, questioning the value of) a search for a strictly free
  software device, especially considering Debian's social contract and the
  purpose of reducing maintenance requirements.  Do you or others here enjoy
  purchasing a system on which Linux does not work correctly until months
  later, if ever?

 :)

 The perceived hostility is an artifact of your own aggressivity;
 basically I want this, I don't want that, I refuse to compromise
 on this.

 Probably my refusal to compromise is from past experiences with troublesome
 hardware on systems that needed to work ASAP.  And a significant portion of
 those was related to non-free, out-of-tree kernel modules.

 I also reject your premise (as I've understood it) that the packages
 in main are more stable than the packages in the non-main repos - and
 I'm sure that the developers who maintain the latter packages would
 prefer that you be more respectful of their work.

 Hey, sorry.  I am just trying to express the reason for my feelings, not
 trying to bash anything.

You were wondering why there hadn't been a more dynamic response to
your post and I just gave you my answer. I'm even happy for you to
call me apathetic for my attitude! :)

I forgot in my previous email to thank you for bringing up these
products because I've been asked to set up a Mac Mini as an intranet
server and I'm going to look at the boxes that have been mentioned in
this thread possibly to make a counter proposal. I'd previously only
glanced at Acer's Revo and Veriton offerings.


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Re: free software mini pc

[Alex Hutton]

On 15 February 2012 02:34, green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:
 I am *not* looking for disposable hardware.  I am *not* interested in
 purchasing a maintenance burden.  I need *rock-solid* *long-term* Linux
 reliability on *rock-solid* hardware.  Will Compulabs continue to provide
 updated custom kernels a year or more from now?  I doubt it, considering that
 the custom kernel they provide for their product now does not work (strictly
 speaking).


Fair points. I guess you would need to go with an Atom or other x86
system which would have a more mature architecture, rather than ARM.
For my personal needs I'm thinking of desktop usage, so I'm not
thinking of a mission-critical application, and ultra-reliability is
not a necessity, though it is desiable :). A custom kernel that
doesn't work is obviously going to be a problem, but if it works well
enough then it would be fine for me. But I guess it does make a
difference to something that might be mission-critical because the
changes to the kernel are not likely to be widely tested or reviewed
so it's a definite risk, even if it's a small one, that there are
undetected bugs or security flaws present. However that's just an
uninformed view on my part, I don't really know anything about linux
kernel development and how robust the system is against bugs that
might be introduced with the sort of customisation that Compulab are
doing.


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Re: free software mini pc

[Mark Neidorff]

On Monday 13 February 2012 5:04:04 pm green wrote:
 David Goodenough wrote at 2012-02-13 11:31 -0600:
  On Monday 13 Feb 2012, green wrote:
   Is Tegra 3 supported by Linux?  Are any of the Tegras supported by
   Linux? While I have found nothing definitive, everything I have found
   suggests not.
  
  If you look at the linux-arm mailing list, or the kernel changelogs you
  will find lots of references to the Tegras.
 
 Okay, perhaps the kernel does support some Tegras, and perhaps some day the
 Trim-Slice will run mainline Linux.

I have been reading about getting debian working on an ARM system 
(raspberrypi) and it seems that they do some custom work with the boot process 
to get it going.  I don't pretend to understand what they have done, but their 
plan is to put out a customized distribution for their ARM processor based 
device.

I've stayed on the sidelines of this thread because the original post sounded 
to me like trolling.  But, after the posts that I have read, you seem quite 
serious.  I'm still not 100% clear on what is standing in your way.  Have you 
looked at mini-itx systems on ebay for inspiration?  I have one now running 
Lenny as my server. It is rock solid.  It just sits there, silently, and runs 
and runs and runs.  Everything just worked on installation.  I added a tiny 
case fan(which is very quiet) to it, but there is really no need for it.

Have you looked into this form factor?

Mark


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Christofer C. Bell wrote at 2012-02-13 16:54 -0600:
 Maybe they mean the system halts but doesn't power off.  Would that be an 
 issue?  Having to manually cut power?

Um, maybe the thing that people aren't getting here is that I am interested 
in *purchasing* a device.  (I am not out to throw mud in faces, just shopping 
for what I want.)  What I want is what I have already mentioned, 100% free 
software and maximum reliability (so everything just works; yes, and powers 
off too).  I have not given any spending limits at all, so suggestions have a 
blank check to work with.

If no device fits my requirements, fine.  In that case I will not be 
purchasing one.  I just would like to know now, *before* I make a purchase.


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Bruce Ferrell wrote at 2012-02-12 18:56 -0600:
 http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/fanless_systems

Thanks for the link, they have some nice looking systems.  Unfortunately I 
was unable to find any mention of Linux kernel support status.

 They have a FEW system they have marked as unusuitable for use with Linux.  
 On checking as to why, they observed that they didn't do a clean shutdown 
 on with Ubuntu 10.04... Which was a know issue with that particular 
 distro/version.  I did my own testing and found them to be totally suitable 
 for my environment. YMMV.

So they just try booting Ubuntu and if it works, then claim Linux support?

YMMV is exactly what I want the supplier/manufacturer to guarantee *against* 
(within reason).  Surely other consumers feel the same way?


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Andrei Popescu wrote at 2012-02-12 17:10 -0600:
 On Sb, 11 feb 12, 20:09:00, green wrote:
  - Trim-Slice H (custom kernel)
 
 I was almost going to order one of those, but eventually gave up because 
 SATA is implemented with USB to SATA Genesys Logic GL830. I admit the 
 custom kernel was also not an incentive.
 
 Maybe CompuLab will release a device based on Tegra 3 soon?

Is Tegra 3 supported by Linux?  Are any of the Tegras supported by Linux?  
While I have found nothing definitive, everything I have found suggests not.

 OTOH the Raspberry PI should be able to do most of what I really need 
 (HDMI playback  internet radio), so I'll probably get one as soon as 
 they include a case.

Sounds great, but probably not adequate for desktop use.


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Re: free software mini pc

[David Goodenough]

On Monday 13 Feb 2012, green wrote:
 Andrei Popescu wrote at 2012-02-12 17:10 -0600:
  On Sb, 11 feb 12, 20:09:00, green wrote:
   - Trim-Slice H (custom kernel)
  
  I was almost going to order one of those, but eventually gave up because
  SATA is implemented with USB to SATA Genesys Logic GL830. I admit the
  custom kernel was also not an incentive.
  
  Maybe CompuLab will release a device based on Tegra 3 soon?
 
 Is Tegra 3 supported by Linux?  Are any of the Tegras supported by Linux?
 While I have found nothing definitive, everything I have found suggests
 not.
If you look at the linux-arm mailing list, or the kernel changelogs you
will find lots of references to the Tegras.

David
 
  OTOH the Raspberry PI should be able to do most of what I really need
  (HDMI playback  internet radio), so I'll probably get one as soon as
  they include a case.
 
 Sounds great, but probably not adequate for desktop use.


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

David Goodenough wrote at 2012-02-13 11:31 -0600:
 On Monday 13 Feb 2012, green wrote:
  Is Tegra 3 supported by Linux?  Are any of the Tegras supported by Linux?
  While I have found nothing definitive, everything I have found suggests
  not.

 If you look at the linux-arm mailing list, or the kernel changelogs you
 will find lots of references to the Tegras.

Okay, perhaps the kernel does support some Tegras, and perhaps some day the 
Trim-Slice will run mainline Linux.


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Christofer C. Bell wrote at 2012-02-13 15:33 -0600:
 On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 10:11 AM, green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:
  Bruce Ferrell wrote at 2012-02-12 18:56 -0600:
   http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/fanless_systems
 
  Thanks for the link, they have some nice looking systems.  Unfortunately I
  was unable to find any mention of Linux kernel support status.
 
   They have a FEW system they have marked as unusuitable for use with Linux.
   On checking as to why, they observed that they didn't do a clean shutdown
   on with Ubuntu 10.04... Which was a know issue with that particular
   distro/version.  I did my own testing and found them to be totally 
   suitable
   for my environment. YMMV.
 
  So they just try booting Ubuntu and if it works, then claim Linux support?
 
 Their testing methodology isn't outlined in the post here.  The only
 inference we can make is that does the system shut down cleanly under
 Ubuntu? is one of the tests run.  The units marked not suitable for
 Linux failed that test.  There is no other information on what
 testing is done aside from the above.

So I can not trust that mainline Linux actually supports the device.


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Re: free software mini pc

[Christofer C. Bell]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 4:47 PM, green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:
 Christofer C. Bell wrote at 2012-02-13 15:33 -0600:
 On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 10:11 AM, green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:
 
  So they just try booting Ubuntu and if it works, then claim Linux support?

 Their testing methodology isn't outlined in the post here.  The only
 inference we can make is that does the system shut down cleanly under
 Ubuntu? is one of the tests run.  The units marked not suitable for
 Linux failed that test.  There is no other information on what
 testing is done aside from the above.

 So I can not trust that mainline Linux actually supports the device.

What do you mean by mainline Linux?  If you mean a stock, vanilla
kernel, Debian isn't using mainline Linux, either.  If you mean a
Debian kernel, then there's no telling if it will work or not without
either trying it or contacting the company and asking.

I would be surprised if it didn't work, to be honest.  The things that
generally give Linux trouble are normally graphics cards, wireless
networks, and sound.  I don't know what they mean by fails to cleanly
shut down under Ubuntu.  Maybe they mean the system halts but doesn't
power off.  Would that be an issue?  Having to manually cut power?

Your best bet is to contact them and ask.

-- 
Chris


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

On 2/11/2012 8:09 PM, green wrote:
 I need a fanless mini PC; it will run Debian.  It will be used in a
 production environment.

Alex Hutton wrote at 2012-02-11 22:56 -0600:
 I share your sympathies. I really hate fan noise! There are ARM
 computers that run at 5 watts, and can be passively cooled but can
 they be used as a 'desktop'?

That is an interesting question for me; I know that the requirements I have 
set are modest, but it will be a small step down from the specifications of 
the desktop system currently in use.  But it certainly will not be used 
heavily, and swapping on SATA SSD Flash will probably perform a bit better 
than 7200 RPM drives in use now.

 So my next plan is to build a 'beowulf cluster' out of ARM computers

Wow, that sounds like a fun project.

 The Trim Slice kernel has been updated since then so some time I am going 
 to upgrade and see how it can perform.

So the Trim-Slice is not supported by mainline kernels?

 If you have specific questions about the Trim Slice I'll try to help.

Thanks.


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Re: free software mini pc

[The_Ace]

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 7:27 PM, green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:

 On 2/11/2012 8:09 PM, green wrote:
  I need a fanless mini PC; it will run Debian.  It will be used in a
  production environment.

 Alex Hutton wrote at 2012-02-11 22:56 -0600:
  I share your sympathies. I really hate fan noise! There are ARM
  computers that run at 5 watts, and can be passively cooled but can
  they be used as a 'desktop'?

 That is an interesting question for me; I know that the requirements I have
 set are modest, but it will be a small step down from the specifications of
 the desktop system currently in use.  But it certainly will not be used
 heavily, and swapping on SATA SSD Flash will probably perform a bit better
 than 7200 RPM drives in use now.

  So my next plan is to build a 'beowulf cluster' out of ARM computers

 Wow, that sounds like a fun project.

  The Trim Slice kernel has been updated since then so some time I am going
  to upgrade and see how it can perform.

 So the Trim-Slice is not supported by mainline kernels?

  If you have specific questions about the Trim Slice I'll try to help.

 Thanks.


Doesnt thin clients  LTSP qualify for this ?
I have 2 WYSE S50 Thin client terminals running LTSP on stock debian kernel
with my laptop acting as the 'server'.
WYSE S series comes with its own version of linux with a GUI but it can
network boot LTSP just fine.
I believe there are some other Thin clients that has Wireless cards built
in as well (S50 does not).

I was able to get the same S50 with a wifi dongle added to work over wifi
but that was noticeably slow as that had to be booted with a trimmed down
linux os (knoppix in my case) off a USB thumb drive to get the wifi network
connected. As the device has only 128mb memory, this was not suitable for
actual work. i did it merely as an exercise than anything else.

It works fine with LTSP (with ethernet cable connection) and even packages
like LibreOffice works with very little 'slowness'. However apss that
requires Direct 3D access (tux paint in this case) did not work. I dont
know if its a case of mis configured Xorg settings or if the S50's graphics
system simply does not support it. IT has AMD Geode CPU/GPU.

For general Home office/office/school lab environments, its perfectly
usable as a production system.

Regards,
Mihira.
Regards,
Mihira.

Re: free software mini pc

[keitho]

I'm glad to see this thread, because I hadn't heard of the Raspberry Pi
before- way cool!

But I'm curious about the original query- what's the need for such an
ultra-quiet machine? I too hate fan noise, but even when run hard I have
to _try_ to hear my laptop fan. Is there a special reason you need a
machine that's fanless other than noise level, or are you doing something
stealthy?

Keith

 On 12 February 2012 15:06, green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:
 Stan Hoeppner wrote at 2012-02-11 21:15 -0600:
 On 2/11/2012 8:09 PM, green wrote:
  I need a fanless mini PC; it will run Debian.  It will be used in a
  production environment.

 Hi,

 I share your sympathies. I really hate fan noise! There are ARM
 computers that run at 5 watts, and can be passively cooled but can
 they be used as a 'desktop'?

 I've been thinking about that question a lot. The main difficulty is
 that I frequently use Iceweasel and it requires a lot of memory (or,
 at least, it does the way I use it), so these computers with 1
 gigabyte of RAM aren't really going to cut it.

 What I could do is use one of these ARM computers as a thin-client and
 use vnc or xwindows forwarding to run Iceweasel in the cloud
 somewhere. The problem with that is, for me, since I live in
 Australia, I'm going to need a cloud that is hosted in Australia due
 to the latency. But cloud hosting in Australia is nowhere near as
 affordable as it is overseas, this is due to economies of scale and
 Australian hosting is always going to be more expensive.

 So my next plan is to build a 'beowulf cluster' out of ARM computers,
 and use that as my desktop. You've probably heard of Raspberry Pi?
 Well that's a pretty nice system, and costs on $35, draws 3.5 watts,
 but has only 256meg of RAM. I'm sure, in the not too distant future,
 there'll be system's like this, at a similar price, with at least a
 gig of RAM. Then I could buy 10 of them, for $350, and I'll have a
 system with 10 gigabytes of RAM and drawing 35 watts. Plus a network
 switch of course.

 Anyway, getting back to the original post. I actually bought a Trim
 Slice. One of the first ones they rolled out. Unfortunately I haven't
 been able to spend much time playing with it, although I was using it
 as a VNC client for a while, plugged into a TV. It did ok. The Trim
 Slice kernel has been updated since then so some time I am going to
 upgrade and see how it can perform. Actually my Trim Slice lacks a
 couple of hardware features, for instance the power light doesn't come
 on and the system cannot power-off unless you pull the plug out. I
 actually need to send my TS back to CompuLab for that because it is a
 problem with the first systems they produced.

 If you have specific questions about the Trim Slice I'll try to help.

 Cheers,
 Alex




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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

kei...@strucktower.com wrote at 2012-02-12 08:28 -0600:
 But I'm curious about the original query- what's the need for such an
 ultra-quiet machine?

Reason 1: no cleaning.  A system with a fan requires cleaning.  Frequency 
of cleaning depends on the environment.  The desktop that this will replace 
is in a somewhat dusty environment.

Reason 2: I have seen (slightly) more fans fail than hard disks.  So this 
second reason suggests that a fanless system is slightly lower maintenance in 
the long term.

Reason 3: yeah, noise.  Really this is not a big deal, but quietness is nice.


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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

On 2/11/2012 8:09 PM, green wrote:
 I need a fanless mini PC; it will run Debian.  It will be used in a
 production environment.

 Doesnt thin clients  LTSP qualify for this ?

For my situation, this would result in maintaining 2 devices rather than 1; 
not really a reasonable option.

 WYSE S series comes with its own version of linux with a GUI but it can
 network boot LTSP just fine.

I will certainly look at the WYSE devices, but neither thin client devices 
nor a custom Linux kernel are of interest.

Thanks for your input.


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Re: free software mini pc

[Richard Owlett]

green wrote:

kei...@strucktower.com wrote at 2012-02-12 08:28 -0600:

But I'm curious about the original query- what's the need for such an
ultra-quiet machine?


Reason 1: no cleaning.  A system with a fan requires cleaning.  Frequency
of cleaning depends on the environment.  The desktop that this will replace
is in a somewhat dusty environment.


To expand on the OP's reply:
If the unit is fan-less, it may also be a sealed unit.
Consider the case of humid /or corrosive atmosphere.

Back in the 70's DEC had an enclosure for the LSI-11 
irreverently dubbed the Hitachi.
Five sides were cast aluminum with large fins o get rid of 
~100 watts of heat. The sixth side was a heavily gasketed 
piece of cast aluminum. Internally it was not fanless, but 
it was definitely sealed against external nastiness ;/ IIRC 
it was intended for industrial environments including 
electro-plating.






Reason 2: I have seen (slightly) more fans fail than hard disks.  So this
second reason suggests that a fanless system is slightly lower maintenance in
the long term.

Reason 3: yeah, noise.  Really this is not a big deal, but quietness is nice.



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Re: free software mini pc

[Andrei Popescu]

On Sb, 11 feb 12, 20:09:00, green wrote:
 - Trim-Slice H (custom kernel)

I was almost going to order one of those, but eventually gave up because 
SATA is implemented with USB to SATA Genesys Logic GL830. I admit the 
custom kernel was also not an incentive.

Maybe CompuLab will release a device based on Tegra 3 soon?

OTOH the Raspberry PI should be able to do most of what I really need 
(HDMI playback  internet radio), so I'll probably get one as soon as 
they include a case.

Kind regards,
Andrei
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Re: free software mini pc

[Bruce Ferrell]

On 02/12/2012 07:29 AM, green wrote:
 kei...@strucktower.com wrote at 2012-02-12 08:28 -0600:
 But I'm curious about the original query- what's the need for such an
 ultra-quiet machine?
 Reason 1: no cleaning.  A system with a fan requires cleaning.  Frequency 
 of cleaning depends on the environment.  The desktop that this will replace 
 is in a somewhat dusty environment.

 Reason 2: I have seen (slightly) more fans fail than hard disks.  So this 
 second reason suggests that a fanless system is slightly lower maintenance in 
 the long term.

 Reason 3: yeah, noise.  Really this is not a big deal, but quietness is nice.
I was tempted to remain quiet, but here is the vendor I use for this calls of 
thing.

http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/fanless_systems

They have a FEW system they have marked as unusuitable for use with Linux.  On 
checking as to why, they observed that they didn't do a clean shutdown on with 
Ubuntu 10.04... Which
was a know issue with that particular distro/version.  I did my own testing and 
found them to be totally suitable for my environment. YMMV.


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Re: free software mini pc

[Stan Hoeppner]

On 2/11/2012 8:09 PM, green wrote:
 I need a fanless mini PC; it will run Debian.  It will be used in a 
 production environment.
[...]
 Comments appreciated!

What type of comments, exactly, are you looking for?  You've got 6
systems listed, 3 apparently meeting all your criteria--you listed no
red flags for those 3 anyway.

So what exactly are we supposed to be commenting on?

-- 
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Re: free software mini pc

[green]

Stan Hoeppner wrote at 2012-02-11 21:15 -0600:
 On 2/11/2012 8:09 PM, green wrote:
  I need a fanless mini PC; it will run Debian.  It will be used in a 
  production environment.
 [...]
  Comments appreciated!
 
 What type of comments, exactly, are you looking for?  You've got 6
 systems listed, 3 apparently meeting all your criteria--you listed no
 red flags for those 3 anyway.

Sorry, I guess that mail was not quite ready when I sent it.

How about this:
- Norhtec MicroClient JrMX (only mentions Linux, no other information)
- fit-PC2 (custom kernel, GMA500 issues?)
- Trim-Slice H (custom kernel)
- D2Plug (no information: d2plug only mentioned once in plugwiki)
- Aleutia devices (only pre-installs Ubuntu, no other information)
- Linutop 3 (uses Ubuntu rescricted modules)

 So what exactly are we supposed to be commenting on?

Basically like, hey, here is a link for Linux mainline status on the 
D2Plug.  Or a suggestion for a different device.  I have searched and 
searched and have found lots of products but so far nothing with *real* Linux 
(mainline) support.

Thanks lots.


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Re: free software mini pc

[Alex Hutton]

On 12 February 2012 15:06, green greenfreedo...@gmail.com wrote:
 Stan Hoeppner wrote at 2012-02-11 21:15 -0600:
 On 2/11/2012 8:09 PM, green wrote:
  I need a fanless mini PC; it will run Debian.  It will be used in a
  production environment.

Hi,

I share your sympathies. I really hate fan noise! There are ARM
computers that run at 5 watts, and can be passively cooled but can
they be used as a 'desktop'?

I've been thinking about that question a lot. The main difficulty is
that I frequently use Iceweasel and it requires a lot of memory (or,
at least, it does the way I use it), so these computers with 1
gigabyte of RAM aren't really going to cut it.

What I could do is use one of these ARM computers as a thin-client and
use vnc or xwindows forwarding to run Iceweasel in the cloud
somewhere. The problem with that is, for me, since I live in
Australia, I'm going to need a cloud that is hosted in Australia due
to the latency. But cloud hosting in Australia is nowhere near as
affordable as it is overseas, this is due to economies of scale and
Australian hosting is always going to be more expensive.

So my next plan is to build a 'beowulf cluster' out of ARM computers,
and use that as my desktop. You've probably heard of Raspberry Pi?
Well that's a pretty nice system, and costs on $35, draws 3.5 watts,
but has only 256meg of RAM. I'm sure, in the not too distant future,
there'll be system's like this, at a similar price, with at least a
gig of RAM. Then I could buy 10 of them, for $350, and I'll have a
system with 10 gigabytes of RAM and drawing 35 watts. Plus a network
switch of course.

Anyway, getting back to the original post. I actually bought a Trim
Slice. One of the first ones they rolled out. Unfortunately I haven't
been able to spend much time playing with it, although I was using it
as a VNC client for a while, plugged into a TV. It did ok. The Trim
Slice kernel has been updated since then so some time I am going to
upgrade and see how it can perform. Actually my Trim Slice lacks a
couple of hardware features, for instance the power light doesn't come
on and the system cannot power-off unless you pull the plug out. I
actually need to send my TS back to CompuLab for that because it is a
problem with the first systems they produced.

If you have specific questions about the Trim Slice I'll try to help.

Cheers,
Alex


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Re: Free software

[Lorenzo Sutton]

On 25/01/2012 10:42, Stayvoid wrote:

Hello!

I want to install Debian.
Does it contain any non-free software? How to check it?

Is there a way to use Debian without non-free software?



http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html




King regards.





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Re: Free software

[Stayvoid]

 The main branch is only free software...
Are you sure about that?
How to check that?
Where can I look through the package's license?


King regards.


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Re: Free software

[Julien Claassen]

Hi!
  Yes you can exclude all non-free software. If you install Debian, I don't 
know, where it will be, but I'm very sure, that excluding non-free software is 
the default. Later on you can decide, what you want. You can always edit

/etc/apt/sources/list
  There you might see lines - roughly - like this:
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian squeeze main contrib non-free
  It was my personal choice to also add the contrib and non-free branches. 
The main branch is only free software, same goes- I think - for the contrib 
branch.

  Kind regards
 Julien

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Such Is Life: Very Intensely Adorable;
Free And Jubilating Amazement Revels, Dancing On - FLOWERS!

==  Find my music at  ==
http://juliencoder.de/nama/music.html
.
If you live to be 100, I hope I live to be 100 minus 1 day,
so I never have to live without you. (Winnie the Pooh)


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Re: Free software

[Julien Claassen]

Hello!
  Yes I am sure about the main branch. One of the main ideas of Debian was to 
be a distribution of free-software only. I don't know, if they already 
introduced the non-free branch with the first version, but that's precisely, 
why it is there as a seperate branch, to make sure, that people, like 
yourself, can choose.
  I think you can find interfaces on debian.org to search the package database 
and info about specific packages. I have rarely used those though, since I 
could always use my own system for all the research necessary.

  Kind regards
  Julien

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Such Is Life: Very Intensely Adorable;
Free And Jubilating Amazement Revels, Dancing On - FLOWERS!

==  Find my music at  ==
http://juliencoder.de/nama/music.html
.
If you live to be 100, I hope I live to be 100 minus 1 day,
so I never have to live without you. (Winnie the Pooh)


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Re: Free software

[Andreas Rönnquist]

On Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:24:03 +0300
Stayvoid stayv...@gmail.com wrote:

  The main branch is only free software...
 Are you sure about that?
 How to check that?
 Where can I look through the package's license?
 

Its policy [1] - 
Every package in main must comply with the DFSG (Debian Free Software
Guidelines). 
See [2].
If a package not complying to this is found in main, It should be
reported as a bug.

best regards
/Andreas

[1] - http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-main
[2] - http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines


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