Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?

[Peter Humphrey]

On Tuesday, 12 December 2017 10:34:27 GMT Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Dec 2017 23:24:48 +, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> > > I more and more get the feeling that linux is standardising on the
> > > Gnome desktop, which I really just DO NOT get on with.
> > 
> > Nor I. it's second only to M$ in its arrogance.
> 
> I have three gnome packages installed on this KDE box. One is the tiny
> package that started this thread, and is GNOME only in name, the other
> two are dependencies of XFCE, which I also have installed.
> 
> I see no GNOME takeover, beyond the fact that many distros are choosing
> GNOME as their default desktop.

I didn't suggest it's taking over the world, just that it deliberately hides 
all useful configuration data from the user, just to save the devs from 
having to explain themselves.We know what you need better than you do, so 
just be a good boy and take your medicine.

Just like M$.

-- 
Regards,
Peter.

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?

[Neil Bothwick]

On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 20:11:47 +, Wols Lists wrote:

> The two big problems I really can lay at systemd's feet is that the boot
> occasionally fails and says "dumping you into plymouth console" but
> doesn't - this goes away with a reboot ... hey reboots aren't supposed
> to fix problems in linux!,

Isn't that the initramfs rather than systemd?

> and Windows has this infuriating habit of
> ignoring my command to shutdown, instead suspending to disk. As my
> Windows partitions automount in linux, this causes the mount to fail,
> and systemd won't boot the system. So I spend/waste half an hour trying
> to force Windows to shut down properly!

Can't you change this with fstab settings. I see a similar behaviour when
trying t mount NFS shares that aren't there, but it gives up trying after
90s and gets on with booting the computer.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Sure, we just route the main sensor through Data's cat.


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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?

[allan gottlieb]

On Mon, Dec 11 2017, Jorge Almeida wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 10, 2017 at 7:31 PM, Canek Peláez Valdés  wrote:
>>
>> Just my two cents. I will not answer any reply to my little contribution to
>> this thread;
>
> Good. I can't remember any intervention from you that I would miss.

That makes one of us.

As a gnome user I needed to use systemd when gnome-3 came about.  While
I have nothing useful to say pro or con about systemd, I strongly
believe Canek has contributed a number of helpful comments to this
group.

allan

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?

[Neil Bothwick]

On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 18:55:15 +, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> You seem to know systemd reasonably well - maybe you've got it
> installed and you're using it.  Please tell me whether my suspicion
> above (that systemd builds stuff into the system that is likely to be
> superfluous to a user, and possibly forces its use on its users) is well
> founded.

Of course it does, any collection of utilities is bound to include stuff
you don't need. This includes systemd as well as the likes of coreutils
and util-linux. The number of programs that you are forced to use after
installation is exactly zero, although most people that install systemd
do so because they want to use at least part of it, and are happy using
the parts they want. For example, I'm happy with systemd's network
management and time sync tools so I use them. I find systemd timers
unnecessarily complex for my needs so I stick with cron for that.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Top Oxymorons Number 38: Government organization


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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?

[Wols Lists]

On 12/12/17 18:55, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> You seem to know systemd reasonably well - maybe you've got it
> installed and you're using it.  Please tell me whether my suspicion
> above (that systemd builds stuff into the system that is likely to be
> superfluous to a user, and possibly forces its use on its users) is well
> founded.

If you want to "check things out", it's a lot easier to check out an
*init system built on systemd* than one built on SysVInit. Dunno about
OpenRC.

Yes, systemd itself is a lot bigger than init itself. Yes, systemd plus
service files is smaller (MUCH smaller) than the equivalent init plus
scripts.

The other big "problem" that many people moan about is that systemd
takes over things like system time, system name, cron, etc etc etc. But
having dealt with a whole variety of linux and unix systems, it's nice
to know that systemd has standardised where the host name is stored.
It's nice to know that how to set system time is standard across
distros. Cron? Well the whole point of systemd is to start services as
required, and cron merely starts services as required where "as
required" is defined by time, so why not merge the two?

The big problem, as I see it, with systemd is that if the boot fails for
any reason it dumps you into a rescue shell. I prefer the old behaviour
of dumping you into a running system with broken services. But given the
choice I'd much rather have neither! :-)

On my SuSE (systemd) laptop, I have a bunch of problems, of which
systemd is minor. The network won't resume properly after suspend
(nothing to do with systemd afaict), the video driver is broken and I
suspect that is what drives system load over 6 (on a dual-core system)
so response time is measured in minutes. The screen itself stops working
at random. All that I suspect is down to a broken i915 or whatever it is
Intel driver (which has a bad rep in the kernel - a nightmare seeing as
it seems to be the default Intel laptop video setup :-( etc etc.

The two big problems I really can lay at systemd's feet is that the boot
occasionally fails and says "dumping you into plymouth console" but
doesn't - this goes away with a reboot ... hey reboots aren't supposed
to fix problems in linux!, and Windows has this infuriating habit of
ignoring my command to shutdown, instead suspending to disk. As my
Windows partitions automount in linux, this causes the mount to fail,
and systemd won't boot the system. So I spend/waste half an hour trying
to force Windows to shut down properly!

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello.

On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 01:01:29 -0600, J García wrote:
> 2017-12-11 15:03 GMT-06:00 Alan Mackenzie :
> > OK.  But it's still there taking up RAM, and (more importantly) makes a
> > systemd system a broader target for attacks.  Whether a system has an
> > http server (or, for that matter, an SSH server), for whatever purpose,
> > should be for the system administrator to decide.  I suspect this isn't
> > the case for systemd's http server.

>  Too much suspicion, too much assumtions,

One doesn't get by in contemporary life without them.  My suspicion,
founded on the content of a normally reliable mailing list (this one) is
that systemd would (i) build into my system much that I don't want to
use; (ii) would force me into using some of that stuff.  openrc doesn't
have these attributes.

> $ equery  -N u systemd  | grep http
>  - - http   : Enable embedded HTTP server in journald

> $ grep -C 2 http $PORTDIR/sys-apps/systemd/systemd-235-r1.ebuild

> 42:http? (
> 43:>=net-libs/libmicrohttpd-0.9.33:0=
> 44-ssl? ( >=net-libs/gnutls-3.1.4:0= )
> 45-)


> 42:http? (
> 43:>=net-libs/libmicrohttpd-0.9.33:0=
> 44-ssl? ( >=net-libs/gnutls-3.1.4:0= )
> 45-)

> I prefer certainty, don't you?

If certainty were free of costs, or even cheap, then yes.

> It is actually more useful to check the software, than lose your time
> with so many words on this list.

No, it would take far too much time and effort to check out the
software, particularly for something I have no use for.

You seem to know systemd reasonably well - maybe you've got it
installed and you're using it.  Please tell me whether my suspicion
above (that systemd builds stuff into the system that is likely to be
superfluous to a user, and possibly forces its use on its users) is well
founded.

Thanks!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Re: [gentoo-user] OT: btrfs raid 5/6

[Neil Bothwick]

On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 12:18:23 +, Wols Lists wrote:

> > That means every write has to be encrypted 4 times, whereas using
> > encryption in the filesystem means it only has to be done once. I
> > tried setting encrypted BTRFS this way and there was a significant
> > performance hit. I'm seriously considering going back to ZoL now that
> > encryption is on the way.  
> 
> DISCLAIMER - I DON'T HAVE A CLUE HOW THIS ACTUALLY WORKS IN DETAIL
> 
> but there's been a fair few posts on LKML sublists about how linux is
> very inefficient at using hardware encryption. Setup/teardown is
> expensive, and it only encrypts in small disk-size blocks, so somebody's
> been trying to make it encrypt in file-system-sized chunks. When/if they
> get this working, you'll probably notice a speedup of the order of 90%
> or so ...

This isn't so much a matter of hardware vs. software encryption, more
that encrypting below the RAID level means everything has to be encrypted
multiple times.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

There's no place like ~


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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?

[Arve Barsnes]

On 12 December 2017 at 12:11, Wols Lists  wrote:

> Then there's ASCII - is that parity off? parity on? parity set?
> Then there's lines separated by  - or is that ? or is that  with optional trailing NULL>?
> And that's just the versions I know of and have met ...
>
> There's no such thing as "plain text", as anybody using samba or ftp
> between different types of system will testify to their cost with
> trashed and broken files that screwed up in transfer ... :-)
>
> Difference being that almost every single editor you could think up
transparently reads all of those without you having to think about it.

Re: [gentoo-user] OT: btrfs raid 5/6

[Wols Lists]

On 12/12/17 10:15, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> That means every write has to be encrypted 4 times, whereas using
> encryption in the filesystem means it only has to be done once. I tried
> setting encrypted BTRFS this way and there was a significant performance
> hit. I'm seriously considering going back to ZoL now that encryption is
> on the way.

DISCLAIMER - I DON'T HAVE A CLUE HOW THIS ACTUALLY WORKS IN DETAIL

but there's been a fair few posts on LKML sublists about how linux is
very inefficient at using hardware encryption. Setup/teardown is
expensive, and it only encrypts in small disk-size blocks, so somebody's
been trying to make it encrypt in file-system-sized chunks. When/if they
get this working, you'll probably notice a speedup of the order of 90%
or so ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?

[Wols Lists]

On 11/12/17 22:29, Neil Bothwick wrote:
>> I don't want a binary logging daemon either: that means having to learn
>> > a special purpose utility to be able to read its logs, and, in general,
>> > not being able to read that log from a remote machine.

> "journalctl" is just the same as "less /var/log/messages" so here's not
> much to learn unless you want to use the search features. Reading the log
> from a remote machine is easy, using either SSH or HTTP, whichever you
> prefer. My one complaint about the systemd journal is that there is not,
> AFAIK, a standalone reader. If I want to boot from a live CD, I can only
> read the logs if it is a systemd live CD, or I chroot into the original
> system. Unless someone knows different...

If the log isn't binary, what is it? Plain text? Well, I certainly can't
read it just by looking at the disk surface!

Yes, I know I'm being facetious, but there's no such thing as plain text
on a computer. And I'm well aware of five or six or more binary text
encodings - from the folowing list I think about the only one I haven't
used is EBCDIC ...

Okay, I said EBCDIC.
Then there's ASCII - is that parity off? parity on? parity set?
Then there's lines separated by  - or is that ? or is that ?
And that's just the versions I know of and have met ...

There's no such thing as "plain text", as anybody using samba or ftp
between different types of system will testify to their cost with
trashed and broken files that screwed up in transfer ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?

[Tom H]

On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 5:29 PM, Neil Bothwick  wrote:
>
> "journalctl" is just the same as "less /var/log/messages" so here's
> not much to learn unless you want to use the search features. Reading
> the log from a remote machine is easy, using either SSH or HTTP,
> whichever you prefer. My one complaint about the systemd journal is
> that there is not, AFAIK, a standalone reader. If I want to boot from
> a live CD, I can only read the logs if it is a systemd live CD, or I
> chroot into the original system. Unless someone knows different...

In an emergency, "strings system.journal | grep MESSAGE= | less" is useful.

It's too bad that there isn't a standalone journal reader but the
systemd developers live in a systemd world and assume that others live
in the same world. Anyway, a live CD of a systemd-based distribution's
always easy to retrieve and use.

Re: [gentoo-user] Make failed to compile: symbol __alloca not found...

[Joerg Schilling]

Raffaele Belardi  wrote:

> > Or dig into why the following happens, i.e. why is __alloca not
> > defined in glob_in_dir() ...
> > 
>
> I don't think it's glibc, here make compiles fine:

It is built into gcc, but you need the right include file that defines:

#define   alloca(x)   __builtin_alloca(x)

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:jo...@schily.net(home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sf.net/projects/schilytools/files/'

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?

[Neil Bothwick]

On Mon, 11 Dec 2017 23:24:48 +, Peter Humphrey wrote:

> > I more and more get the feeling that linux is standardising on the
> > Gnome desktop, which I really just DO NOT get on with.  
> 
> Nor I. it's second only to M$ in its arrogance.

I have three gnome packages installed on this KDE box. One is the tiny
package that started this thread, and is GNOME only in name, the other
two are dependencies of XFCE, which I also have installed.

I see no GNOME takeover, beyond the fact that many distros are choosing
GNOME as their default desktop.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

If at first you don't suceed, try the switch marked "Power"


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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?

[Neil Bothwick]

On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 01:01:29 -0600, J García wrote:

> It is actually more useful to check the software, than lose your time
> with so many words on this list.

Spoilsport!


-- 
Neil Bothwick

I cna ytpe 300 wrods pre mniuet!!!


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Re: [gentoo-user] OT: btrfs raid 5/6

[Neil Bothwick]

On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 00:20:48 +0100, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:

> My new drives are finally here. One of them turned out to be an OEM. -_-
> The shop says it will cover any warranty claims and it’s not a backyard
> seller either, so methinks I’ll keep it.
> 
> To evaluate LUKS, I created the following setup (I just love
> ASCII-painting in vim ^^):
> 
> ┏━┓
> ┃ tmpfs   ┃
> ┃ ┌─┐ ┌─┐ ┌─┐ ┌─┐ ┃
> ┃ │  1 GB file  │ │  1 GB file  │ │  1 GB file  │ │  1 GB file  │ ┃
> ┃ └──┬──┘ └──┬──┘ └──┬──┘ └──┬──┘ ┃
> ┃V   V   V   V┃
> ┃ ┌─┐ ┌─┐ ┌─┐ ┌─┐ ┃
> ┃ │ LUKS device │ │ LUKS device │ │ LUKS device │ │ LUKS device │ ┃
> ┃ └──┬──┘ └──┬──┘ └──┬──┘ └──┬──┘ ┃
> ┃V   V   V   V┃
> ┃ ┌─┐ ┃
> ┃ │  RaidZ2 │ ┃
> ┃ └─┘ ┃
> ┗━┛

That means every write has to be encrypted 4 times, whereas using
encryption in the filesystem means it only has to be done once. I tried
setting encrypted BTRFS this way and there was a significant performance
hit. I'm seriously considering going back to ZoL now that encryption is
on the way.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

A printer consists of three main parts: the case, the jammed paper tray
and the blinking red light.


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