[GTALUG] scanner under Windows under Linux?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

This message is also a test of the list.

CZUR makes interesting page scanners: 
We actually have a couple.

Until recently, all of their scanners' software only runs under Windows.
The latest one has support for Linux but is very expensive.

Can I easily run Window under Linux in a way that would drive these 
scanners?  I think that the Windows system would need control of the USB 
port to which the scanner is connected.

I seem to remember that long ago Sun/Oracle Virtual Box was the only 
VM that gave decent USB access to a virtual Windows.  I don't know the 
state of the art now.

Answering some of my questions (but not USB): 


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[GTALUG] Fedora 36's gnome display of notebook battery status

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

I like the battery status displayed as a percentage.
This is not the default.  Not a mainstream option

It used to be something you could get through the GNOME "Tweaks" program.
(That's a great tool for a few nice options.)
In Fedora 36, Tweaks no longer has that option.
Instead you can use the shell command
  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface show-battery-percentage true

That sure seems like a dumb change!
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[GTALUG] option pricing quirks on Dell's XPS 13 plus laptop

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

I just got an ad for this.  The XPS line from Dell is quite nice but also 
quite expensive.  To use marketing terms, "XPS" is the top "prosumer" line 
from Dell.  The top non-flashy line is "Precision". My main laptop is an 
older XPS 15 that I bought used.

You can configure an XPS 13 plus here:


- Ubuntu Linux 20.04 is an option!

- Note: "Ubuntu Linux", not "Ubuntu".  This seems to be against Ubuntu 
  branding strategy (unless that changed)

- Ubuntu Linux reduces the price from Win 11 home by $130 -- an 
  astonishingly large difference since Win 11 home probably costs Dell 
  almost nothing.  (Windows 11 Pro costs $110 more than Windows 11 Home.)

- these days, most notebooks have soldered RAM so you cannot upgrade the 
  RAM after purchase.  So (1) you have to buy with as much RAM as you 
  think that you will ever need, and (2) RAM can be priced rather high.  
  When I bought my XPS 15 three years ago, I replaced the 8G of RAM with 
  32G for well under $200: I love socketed memory.

- if you choose 32G of RAM, you cannot chose an i5 processor, you must 
  choose one of the two i7 options.  This is not a technical requirement: 
  the i5 chip can handle up to 64G of RAM (not an option)

- 16G costs $150 more than 8G.  You can only choose 8G with an i5.
  This has no basis in technical requirements.

- 32G costs $100 more than 16G. You can only choose 32G with an i7-128OP
  This has no basis in technical requirements.  But it adds to the cost of 
  32G since the processor upgrade from i7-1260P is $175.

- you can choose Ubuntu Linux only if you have chosen i5.  So you can only 
  have 8G or 16G of RAM with Ubuntu Linux.  These are not technical 
  requirements of Ubuntu Linux.  This seems odd since Linux models are 
  aimed at developers.

- Oddly, when you flip between Ubuntu Win 11 Home and either Linux or Win 
  11 pro, the i5 option's legend changes but there is no difference in the 
  processor.

- All display choice are very good but some are great.  OLED!  UltraHD!
  All but OLED are 500 nit!

Being a bottom feeder, I'm not going to buy any of these.  They start at 
$1669.
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Re: [GTALUG] inexpensive mini-PC with four 2.5G ethernet interfaces

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: James Knott via talk 

| Do you currently use pfSense?  I've been running it for over 6 years.

No.

I've used OpenWRT on wireless routers (when possible).

For my gateways I've always (25 years) used PCs with a Red Hat linux 
distro: RHL, CentOS, Fedora.---
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Re: [GTALUG] inexpensive mini-PC with four 2.5G ethernet interfaces

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: James Knott via talk 

| I wasn't referring to that.  I was referring to what I read in the ad, where
| it described the bundles of pfSense, OPNsense or nothing. While I favour
| pfSense, any bundled version may be older than current.  So, I'd just download
| it and copy to a USB  stick to install from.

I agree.

If you buy it without RAM or SSD (as I did, for reasons explained on
RFD), you don't get any OS preloaded.

The vendor clearly thinks that it is a feature to offer preloading.  I
wouldn't use a preload anyway.

Licenses are a different issue.  But no licenses are offered.---
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Re: [GTALUG] inexpensive mini-PC with four 2.5G ethernet interfaces

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: James Knott via talk 
| To: talk@gtalug.org
| Cc: James Knott 
| Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2022 13:49:45 -0400
| Subject: Re: [GTALUG] inexpensive mini-PC with four 2.5G ethernet interfaces

| Sorry, I thought my first post went only to Hugh.

Our mailman rewites the "From: " to point to the list but leaves the
comment part the same.  Notice the first line that I'm quoting.

This is stupid but necessary: various anti-SPAM algorithms essentially
force our hand.

This seems to have started 14 Jun 2016.
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[GTALUG] inexpensive mini-PC with four 2.5G ethernet interfaces

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

These should make good routers.

This deal will last until 2:00AM Saturday.  After that, the price will 
probably be a bit higher.

Beware: AliExpress.
I've ordered one but I cannot vouch for it.


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[GTALUG] another inexpensive refurb computer $300

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

https://forums.redflagdeals.com/the-source-asus-x509ja-ts31-cb-15-6-c-laptop-intel-i3-1005g1-256gb-ssd-8gb-ram-windows-10-slate-grey-refurbished-299-2549551/

Good: not a netbook
Bad: 1366 x 768 15.6" display
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Re: [GTALUG] File chooser [was desktops]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk 

| On 2022-06-13 14:35, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
| > 
| > | It's up there in annoyance with Gnome's modal dialogues, which limit all
| > | interaction with that one file chooser. You can turn them off.
| > 
| > How do you turn that off?
| 
| Tweaks -> Attached Modal Dialogs: Off

Tweaks -> Windows -> Attached Modal Dialogs: Off

Thanks.

Why would someone want it to be on?  What does it improve?

I guesss: if you bring an obscured window forward, you would want to
realise somehow that there was an outstanding modal dialogu.  Isn't
there a better way to accomplish this?
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Re: [GTALUG] May Meeting

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk 

| Oh how helpful.  The April and May meeting announcements just arrived
| on the list. :)

Yeah.  Several messages were flagged for moderation but the moderator
only noticed last night.
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[GTALUG] every time I log in to google or ebay from Fedora they think that it is the first time

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

When I log into google or ebay from my desktop, they think that I'm 
logging in for the first time from that device.

For ebay.ca, it is painless: I get a warning message in email "if this 
wasn't you...".

For google it is more annoying.  It wants a second factor authenticator.  
This amount to a message on all my android devices, none of which are 
close by.  I have to climb a flight of stairs!

Any idea why these sites think my desktop is new to them each time?

(I don't get this when I log in from an Android device.)
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Re: [GTALUG] cheap netbook: Lenovo IdeaPad 1

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Slackrat via talk 

| Leave That baby alone.
| 
| It seems to be a scam to get your email address.
| 
| I ordered one when someone posted he deal a few months back
| 
| I Got lots of emails about it "shipping soon" but it never came.
| 
| At least they never tried to charge my account for it.
| 
| Instead I got bombarded with spam until I stuck Lenovo in my GNUS KillFile
| 
| It serves me right in a way as I already have one piece of Lenovo Junk
| but thought it a nice item at the time.

Lenovo.com is reputable.  Sure, some things are imperfect (like
delivery dates).

All mailings from them should include methods of unsubscribing.  I
trust such links for companies I trust.
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Re: [GTALUG] cheap netbook: Lenovo IdeaPad 1

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: William Park via talk 

| I see $179.99, and it's cheaper than Chromebook!  OS is "Windows 11 Home S
| Mode".

Windows 11s is just Windows with training wheels.  You should be able
to trivially turn it into Windows 11.  Certainly that was true of Win
10s.

Perhaps machines delivered with Win 11s don't meet the specs for a
comfortable Win 11.  Apparently Microsoft is now or soon requiring a
minimum of 8G of RAM for Windows certification.

|  Can you install Linux on the machine?

Surely you can install Linux, but I haven't tried it.  There is a tiny
chance that some kind of peripheral is unsupported by Linux.  But
don't worry, Lenovo accepts returns with no penalty for something like
30 days (check the site).

I've had a few laptops with something not supported yet in the Linux I
tried (always Fedora).  Usually it was supported after all the updates
were applied.

There is usually someone in the community that has hit the problem
before you: google can usually find their story.
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[GTALUG] cheap netbook: Lenovo IdeaPad 1

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

We were talking about cheap netbooks for Linux last night.

This one is on sale from Lenovo for $180.  New; free shipping.


I'm in some kind of club with Lenovo that gets me this for $175.  Lenovo 
PRO?  EPP?  I don't know.

Going through Rakuten.ca will currently save you another 3%.  Sometimes 
it is 12%.

The display 11" is only 1366 x 768 pixels.  Too low res for me.

4G of RAM -- OK.

64G of eMMC -- OK for Windows or Linux, but pretty tight for dual boot.

AMD 3020e Processor (1.20 GHz, up to 2.60 GHz Max Boost, 2 Cores, 2 
Threads, 4 MB cache)

HDMI 1.4, 2 x USB 3.2 (Gen1)

This is probably more cost-effective than a Raspberry Pi 4 if the display 
and keyboard are useful.
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[GTALUG] tomorrow's meeting

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

What would a Linux open house look like today?
with Evan Leibovitch, Gordon Chilcott

See 
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Re: [GTALUG] File chooser [was desktops]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk 

| On 2022-06-12 12:18, Michael Hill via talk wrote:
| > 
| > Have you come across the file chooser behaviour where the search field
| > takes the focus instead of the filename field?
| 
| I have, and it's supremely annoying. I haven't found a solution that doesn't
| involve view source and calling rename(1) lots of times

I don't understand file chooser.  I use it superstitionsly.  And it
doesnt' work the way I want.

| It's up there in annoyance with Gnome's modal dialogues, which limit all
| interaction with that one file chooser. You can turn them off.

How do you turn that off?
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[GTALUG] desktops [was Default VNC in GNOME?]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

This is an interesting thread.  It is great to hear what works for other 
people.

| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk 

| And given all I want a linux desktop to do is display windows, let me
| minimize, maximize and resize the windows in a normal way, and be able
| to launch programs by hitting alt+f2 and typing the name, I tend to just
| stick with xfce which is nice and lightweight.  I don't want a file
| manager of any kind nor do I care to have menus for launching things. :)

I like Gnome, ignoring any load it adds to my machine.

GNOME has a nicely sparse desktop.  Good.

If I wish to run a GUI program, I just type the Windows key and start 
typing the name.  By the time I'm a few characters in, it shows me that it 
knows what I meant and I can type ENTER to start it.  Surely easier than 
ALT-F2 (I almost never type function keys -- too far from the home row).

I can cycle between GUI programs that are running using Windows-TAB.

I have started to use the file manager (GNOME Files, a Nautilus
descendent) in the last couple of years.  I've recently incorporated
its search capability into my workflow and find it more convenient
than locate(1) or especially find(1).

As far as the load GNOME adds to my machine: it seems to be in the noise.
Even on my netbooks.  Mind you, GNOME and Windows are miserable when
loaded on a hard disk.

On the surface, GNOME is simple.  Underneath is a bit of a mystery to me. 
It sure seems complicated. That makes me a little uncomfortable, but only 
when something doesn't work or doesn't work the way I expect.

I really like that Fedora comes out of the box in a pretty much
usable state.  I change a very few things.  I just don't waste
any effort creating the perfect desktop environment.

Conceptually, I dislike large complex code bodies.  But I feel stuck
with them.
- web browsers
- video drivers
- kernels
- desktop environments
- spreadsheets and word-processors
- database systems

I have a friend that turned his back on this and uses Plan 9.  I don't
have the energy for the simple life.

I suspect Lennart is trying to only use things that he understands.
I've mostly given up that requirement.
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Re: [GTALUG] free computer: Foxconn R20-D2, a small form-factor desktop

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk 

| - 1.5G HDD

That would be a 1.5T HDD.
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[GTALUG] free computer: Foxconn R20-D2, a small form-factor desktop

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

Foxconn is a big OEM -- they make a lot of Apple products, for example.  
This is one of the few things with their own brand.

Here's where I bought it (almost 12 years ago): 

You can see specifications and a picture there.

- almost 12 years old
- Atom D510 CPU (slow; 64-bit; one core; two threads)
  

- NM10 chipset 
  

- old-fashioned BIOS (no UEFI support)
- 3.3G RAM (cannot be expanded)
- 1.5G HDD
- DVD writer
- gigabit ethernet
- PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors (but you can use USB too)
- currently running CentOS 7
- one empty PCI slot (half-height, I think) (could hold a video card)

Serious limitations:
- USB 2 is the only USB supported (could add a USB 3 PCI card)
- only video output is VGA (probably supports up to 2048 x 1536 @ 60Hz)
- fan is noisy (always was -- isn't a sign of failure)
- no Windows license

Pick it up near York Mills subway station.
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Re: [GTALUG] trip report: upgrading to Fedora 36

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Michael Galea via talk 
| 
| On 2022-06-01 10:31, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
| > I just upgraded several systems to from Fedora 34 or 35 to Fedora 36 over
| > the last week. This process is mostly uneventful.  Here are some notes.
| ..
| 
| > 
| > - one system's grub could not see any new kernels so I could only boot
| >with the last f35 kernel.  I fixed this by doing a clean re-install.
| > 
| I'm hoping you mean a re-install of grub and not Fedora. I wouldn't call an OS
| reinstall "mostly uneventful"..

No, it was a complete re-install, preserving /home.

I agree, this was an event.

The correct fix was probably to clean out /etc/efi and re-install the
latest kernel.  But I didn't know that.

I'm not happy that:

1) Fedora changed what they put in ESP without a clear
   announcement and explanation

2) out of space on the ESP caused silent failure

(On the first UNIX system I used, we could hear when a filesystem was
full because log messages were printed on the console, a DecWriter
LA30.  The RK05 disk held just under 2.5 megabytes.
<http://gunkies.org/wiki/RK05_disk_drive>.  I may misremember some
details.)
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[GTALUG] trip report: upgrading to Fedora 36

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

I just upgraded several systems to from Fedora 34 or 35 to Fedora 36 over 
the last week. This process is mostly uneventful.  Here are some notes.

There are two ways to upgrade:

- use the GNOME "software" GUI and tell it to just do it.

- use the "dnf" technique
  

I like the dnf technique because I can see what's going on (and perhaps 
see what is going wrong, if anything).  Superstition.  The "software" 
program has worked fine when I've used it.

Another superstition: after step 1 in the dnf technique, I like to do
sudo dnf autoremove
This removes leaf packages that were installed due to dependencies but are 
no longer used.  Theory: those orphans may have no upgrade path; it is 
better to ditch them that to try to upgrade them.


I did run into three problems:

- one system's grub could not see any new kernels so I could only boot 
  with the last f35 kernel.  I fixed this by doing a clean re-install.

  Here's what I think went wrong (only a theory):

  + the latest kernel and a rescue kernel + initrd are installed in the 
ESP (/boot/efi).  This is new.  I didn't see it documented.

  + this requires more free space in the ESP than my system had

  + kernel installation silently failed!  Even when I tried to fix
things by installing kernels after the upgrade

  It looks like some others have hit this:




  Make sure that you have enough free space in /boot/efi.  300MiB should 
  be plenty -- those files currently take 130MiB on my system.


- On some systems, I use kernel driver modules from RPMFusion.  In 
  particular, the NVidia proprietary driver and the broadcom-wl driver.
  After update, they didn't work.  The fix:
sudo depmod
  It is listed as the first Common Bug on rpmfusion.org




- after the upgrade, some WiFi passwords were forgotten and needed to be 
  re-entered.  If you upgraded using WiFi, that connection's password was 
  retained.  I didn't do careful observations so I may be wrong.
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Re: [GTALUG] Sharing EFI partition for multiple distro?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: William Park via talk 

| Or, does distro need its own EFI partitions, like

As others have said, you "should" have only one ESP (EFI System
Partition).

Here are some odd-ball other considerations.

- I've heard that Windows cannot handle multiple ESPs on a disk.

- I once accidentally created a second ESP on a drive.  It worked but
  behaviour was a bit odd.  When I figured it out, I deleted one
  (copying stuff that wasn't already on the remaining ESP)

- You might decide to have an ESP on each disk of a multi-disk system.
  This could let you point the firmware at the disk to boot.
  This is generally not necessary: an ESP boot entry can point at a
  different disk.

- Certainly a bootable USB stick would have its own ESP.

- firmware setup pages are sometimes bad at configuring boot options.
  There is a chance that using multiple ESPs would not work with a
  particular firmware, or that it would actually make dual booting
  less awkward.

Summary: a single system-wide is usually the best choice.  There are
odd-ball cases where more ESPs might be useful.
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[GTALUG] Ventoy: use single USB stick for multiple installation images

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

"Ventoy" is an open-source tool that allows you to put multiple 
.iso files on a USB stick.  Has anyone tried it?




Why do I care?

When I want to install Fedora, for example, I fetch a .iso file and dd it 
straight to a USB stick.  The result is a bootable live Fedora system that 
can install Fedora to a disk drive.

This same procedure works for Ubuntu and a lot of other distros.

One downside is that I have a collection of USB sticks that each has a 
.iso file.  Each USB stick is mostly empty because .iso files are smaller 
than current USB sticks.

Ventoy might allow me to use a single USB stick for my whole collection.
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Re: [GTALUG] Removing snapd from Ubuntu

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Dave Collier-Brown via talk 

| In a life long ago, we'd have made /usr/bin/python a shell script, containing
| 
| echo "please run /usr/bin/python3"

Bikeshedding for fun:

#!/bin/sh
echo "$0: please use /usr/bin/python3 (or /usr/bin/python2 if you have 
to)" >2
exit 42

(Untested, leaving scope for follow-ups.)

Didactic explanation of additions:

#!/bin/sh
make sure that the system runs this with the correct shell.

$0
include the name by which the script was invoked in the message

(or /usr/bin/python2 if you have to)
admit that there are laggards and help them too

>2
this should really go to standard error since it is an error
message

exit 42
the script should fail: things have gone awry.
42 was chosen to be slightly distinctive.
1 would be more conventional.
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Re: [GTALUG] Removing snapd from Ubuntu

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Stewart Russell via talk 

| I just did the 22.04 upgrade thing, and it seems that Firefox will be held
| at v 99 if you don't have snapd. So beware of old/held packages as you
| update.

Wow.  But it makes some kind of sense.

The point of snap is to allow the packager to ignore changes in the 
environment: the package contains much of its environment.

If a distro decides to distribute a snap to reduce the maintenance
burden, why would they also distribute a non-snap version.  That just
increases the burden.

Software distributors that don't own a distro have a much more valid
reason for using snap: they have no control over changes to the
distro.

==> I see no upside in distros distributing things as snaps (unless they 
are just passing on a snap that someone else created)

Another downside of snaps: any bugs, including security bugs, in
shared libraries requires the distro to update the library AND the
snap publisher to rebuild the snap.  What are the chances of that
working out well?

| Another delightful thing I found is that Ubuntu took its very own special
| path in the "Sensible things to do in the Python 2 / Python 3" debacle:
| remove Python 2, but don't link python3 to python. Move fast and break
| stuff is very tiring when you're constantly getting beaten up like this.

Looking on this from afar: is there a right way to do this?  Is there
a conventional wrong way to do this?

From a purist standpoint, one cannot know what is meant by "python".

If code uses "python", maybe it requires manual intervention to
disambiguate what exactly was meant by it.

This python2 => python3 transition is a decade-long source of horror
and humour to a spectator.  It's a common story of bad engineering,
writ large.

Anecdote:

In the FreeS/Wan project, we changed the config file semantics.  At
the same time, we added a declaration to the config file to specify
which version the config file conformed to.  Good future-proofing, I 
thought.

A successor project ripped that declaration out.  So changes in config 
file semantics (rare or small) require manual intervention by the user, 
with no automatic warning.
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Re: [GTALUG] RISC-V

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Kevin Cozens via talk 

| On 2022-05-10 10:36, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
| > For example, on this page, if you pick the $53.35 "bundle", I think you
| > get a complete system with WiFi and 1G of RAM.  11.76 shipping.  But I'm
| > not sure because the description is poor.  Still, it is useful just to see
| > the brochure (just duplicated from SiPEED, I presume).
| ><https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003741287162.html>
| 
| That web page shows that it has WiFi but a few lines up it states that it only
| has 512MB of DDR3 RAM.

Aliexpresss is full of confusing pages.  Some intentionally so.

The Lichee RV is a slightly confusing product too.  This might be helpful:
  <https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/lichee/RV/RV.html>


- the processor board has a double M.2 connector, like a pair of NVMe 
  drives.  Both must be connected to something.

  It also has:
a TF card slot (think SD card).
a USB C OTG socket.
an SPI socket to connect a 1.14" LCD

- the "dock" (AKA "bottom board") has a pair of M.2 sockets for the 
  processor board.
  It has most of the things you would hook up.

Most pages have a selector box for "color" which is often not colour
at all.  In this case, the selection box is "bundle:".

If you click one of the boxes under "bundle:", you will be making a
selection.  To the right of "Bundle:", in grey letters, you will see
the name of that selection.  And you will see the price change.

If you click to the selection with C$53.35 price, you will see a
description "with wifi 1G".

Some of the bundle selections are not at all clear.  For example, the 
C$10.98 bundle says "with wifi 512M".  What could it be?  It is too cheap 
to include everything; the picture shows the dock; I presume that it is 
not a bundle and does not include the processor board.  But then why does 
it say "512m" when the memory is on the processor board?

There are many other listings that you can find on AliExpress.com if you 
search for Lichee RV.  I haven't looked for the cheapest (too much work) 
or the best (how would you be able to tell?).

Like I said, confusing.

Warning: if you search AliExpress, you will see links to listings with
low prices.  These prices are the lowest of all the "color" selections
and often are not what the "headline" says it is.
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Re: [GTALUG] RISC-V

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk 

| The only RISC-V I have is a WEMOS D1 Mini C3 —
| 
https://universal-solder.ca/product/wemos-d1-mini-c3-v1-0-0-esp32-c3fh4-genuine-lolin/
| . An impressive little thing, but still not up to running much more than
| MicroPython.

This is based on an ESP32-C3 which has a single 32-bit RISC-V core.
  

You may have others RISC V things about, for example embeded in disk drives.

You can get a RISC-V that runs some kind of linux for not too much
money.  The Sipeed Lichee RV has an Allwinner D1 which uses the
XuanTie C906 RISC-V 64-bit core.  Inexpensive but not very powerful.

You can buy these from AliExpress.com.  I don't quite understand the bits.  
You seem to have to buy the processor and a "dock".  Most units have 512M 
of RAM but some have 1G.

For example, on this page, if you pick the $53.35 "bundle", I think you 
get a complete system with WiFi and 1G of RAM.  11.76 shipping.  But I'm 
not sure because the description is poor.  Still, it is useful just to see 
the brochure (just duplicated from SiPEED, I presume).
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Re: [GTALUG] Installing Linux: Still a PITA, continued

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Evan Leibovitch via talk 

| Or maybe I'm not keeping track of chapters.

???

| Online help about how to partition a Linux system is as confused as ever,
| some saying a single partition will do for everything, and others saying
| that even a UEFI system needs a separate ext4 partition for /boot even if
| there is an existing EFI one already there.

Any distro's installer might make rules that are not intrinsic to
Linux.

I never create a /boot with Fedora.  /boot has to be on a
filesystem that is understood by grub2.  If you want to put / on a
filesystem that isn't of a type understood by grub2, you will need to
have a separate /boot filesystem.  I only use ext4 for / so I don't
have this problem.

What filesystems does grub2 understand?  It depends on how your distro
built grub and on the grub2 version.  I don't even know how to find out.
I didn't find it in the grub2 manual.  I know that ext4 is supported.
ZFS and NTFS(!) are supported too, with some oddities.  So your
favourite filesystem might well be supported.

With luck, your distro installer will demand /boot reside on a
filesystem understood by grub2: forcing you to create a viable
configuration.

Another layer of confusion: encrypted disks or filesystems.
"bitlocker" for Windows.  If your Windows came locked, you might want
to unlock it.  Confession: I think encrypted disks are a great idea
but I don't know how to do it.

| And then the final step (i thought) -- installing. I decided, after hearing
| from everyone here, that MX Linux KDE would be the best combination of
| things I needed and things I didn't. Downloaded the bootable image and used
| Rufus, where I had to decide if the bootable USB stick would be GPT or MBR
| (not obvious to a newcomer).

At least with Fedora and Ubuntu, Rufus is too complicated a solution.

If you make a raw copy of the .iso file onto the raw USB stick, it
will just work.  It is already in the form that can be booted from a
USB stick (or large DVD).

If it is booted using MBR, it will only install an MBR system; if it
is booted using UEFI, it will only install a UEFI system.

==> in your firmware setup screen, disable "legacy boot" (MBR support).

| All loaded, reboot, and  no graphics.

For that, you have to look for MX support.

You could try booting a (very painless!) Fedora or Ubuntu live USB
stick.

| Thankfully (I think), I was able to scp the X.org log file to another
| computer so I wouldn't lose it on the USB stick's live boot.

X.org?  Does that mean you are using X and not Wayland?

I guess that KDE / kwin isn't yet 100% on Wayland.  I've read that
about Ubuntu; not sure about Fedora.

| I attach it
| below, and ask assistance from anyone who can read these files so I can
| understand why it's dying. My graphics card is a fairly recent AMD RX 6500
| XT which works fine under Windows and is claimed to be supported by X.

Looking at the log, I didn't see any recognition of your video card.

The X log started at 13.531 seconds since boot.
X seemed to start shutting down at 16.008 seconds since boot.

It did try to use the frame buffer device (fbdev).  This is generic,
implemented by calling UEFI video commands.  At least that's how I
read
[13.567] (II) FBDEV(0): hardware: EFI VGA (video memory: 5120kB)

My uneducated guess is that the black screen is due to bad inference
of characteristics of the EFI VGA device:

[13.567] (II) FBDEV(0): Virtual size is 1280x1024 (pitch 1280)
[13.567] (**) FBDEV(0):  Built-in mode "current": 131.1 MHz, 80.3 kHz, 76.6 
Hz
[13.567] (II) FBDEV(0): Modeline "current"x0.0  131.09  1280 1312 1472 1632 
 1024 1028 1032 1048 -hsync -vsync -csync (80.3 kHz b)
[13.567] (==) FBDEV(0): DPI set to (96, 96)

Just using fbdev might be a good trade-off for an installer.  Handling
all sorts of video drivers is a distraction.

I did not see anything in the log that seemed to say why X was
shutdown.  It was not a crash.

| Or do I just give up on MX? A search on its forum appears to draw blanks,
| except for me to boot in failsafe mode which didn't change anything. Will
| this be better on another distro?

Most likely.  But which distro?  At least some are easy to try.

| One option is to boot a gparted live stick, partition as I want, install
| Linux VIA MX's CLI and pray it updates with current graphics drivers. But
| sheesh.

Perhaps.  I certainly don't know and would not make promises.

| One would think that given 20 years to improve the install experience, it
| can be more confusing than ever. Any help is appreciated.

Potentially every distro has their own installation mechanism.  In
fact, it is one of their main differentiators

All installation systems are full of potholes, including those for
Windows.

Ones that give you the most capabilities are also intricate and
confusing.

I have no opinion about MX.  I don't remember hearing of it before
your quest.
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Re: [GTALUG] From Slackware to which distro?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: William Park via talk 

| I have bad experience with UEFI.  You can't just move the disk to a new
| motherboard, and boot.

Is that the only bad experience?

UEFI firmware setup screens are not standardized.  Generally, all you
have to tell UEFI is the path of the .efi program to boot.

This is kept in the non-volatile RAM on the motherboard.

efibootmgr(8) lets you see a really low-level view of these settings.
You can manipulate them with efibootmgr, but the firmware setup page
is surely friendlier.

  $ sudo efibootmgr -v
  BootCurrent: 
  Timeout: 0 seconds
  BootOrder: ,0003,0001,0002,0009,000A,0007,0008,000B
  Boot* Fedora  
HD(2,GPT,f66e4ede-1301-47fd-af96-7f45aee7bc28,0x40800,0xb4000)/File(\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi)
  Boot0001* USB Floppy/CD   
VenMedia(b6fef66f-1495-4584-a836-3492d1984a8d,050001)..BO
  Boot0002* USB Hard Drive  
VenMedia(b6fef66f-1495-4584-a836-3492d1984a8d,020001)..BO
  Boot0003* Windows Boot Manager
HD(2,GPT,f7299bd6-0e7f-49a5-a41a-3873fa9f6ee3,0x20,0xb4000)/File(\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi)WINDOWS.x...B.C.D.O.B.J.E.C.T.=.{.9.d.e.a.8.6.2.c.-.5.c.d.d.-.4.e.7.0.-.a.c.c.1.-.f.3.2.b.3.4.4.d.4.7.9.5.}...a....
  Boot0007* USB Floppy/CD   
VenMedia(b6fef66f-1495-4584-a836-3492d1984a8d,05)..BO
  Boot0008* Hard Drive  
BBS(HD,,0x0)..GO..NOo.S.T.2.0.0.0.D.M.0.0.1.-.1.C.H.1.6.4A...>..Gd-.;.A..MQ..L.1.Z.4.E.9.W.4.B.
 . . . . . . . . . . . ....BO..NOo.T.O.S.H.I.B.A. 
.T.H.N.S.N.H.2.5.6.G.B.S.TA...>..Gd-.;.A..MQ..L.
 . . . . . . . .3.7.S.R.0.1.N.A.E.T.Y.8....BO
  Boot0009* ATAPI CD-ROM Drive  
VenMedia(b6fef66f-1495-4584-a836-3492d1984a8d,030001)..BO
  Boot000A* CD/DVD DriveBBS(CDROM,,0x0)..GO..NOo.h.p. . . . . . 
. .B.D.D.V.D.R.W. 
.C.H.3.0.LA...>..Gd-.;.A..MQ..L.2.3.C.0.0.F.0.0.5.8.
 .6. . . . . . . . ....BO
  Boot000B* Realtek PXE B03 D00 BBS(Network,,0x0)..BO

Each boot target has a 4-digit label.

Each Boot line says what each of those labels means.

The * means bootable (like * in fdisk output for an MBR drive).

HD(2,GPT,f66e4ede-1301-47fd-af96-7f45aee7bc28,0x40800,0xb4000)
designates the ESP of the SSD.

\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi is the path withing the ESP of the thing to
boot to start loading Fedora.

There is a similar line for Windows.  But it has UTF16 noise after the
path.

| For UEFI, I would need 2 partitions (/ and /boot/efi) at minimum.

Yes.

|  Some distro
| adds /boot and /home.  So, 4 partitions.  I don't know
| - if UEFI came about to support these multi partitions, or
| - if distro are simply taking advantage of GPT.

UEFI demands a FAT partition for ESP (/boot/efi).

No self-respecting OS would want to live on FAT, so you need at least a 
second partition.

Any partitions beyond that are up to you and the OS.  Nothing to do with 
UEFI.

GPT does make it slightly easier to have more than 4 partitions (no
extended partition nonsense; any partition could be made bootable).

| When disk fails, it rarely fails by partitions.  It fails as whole disk. 
|  So, partitioning isn't as useful as it sounds.

My disk failures are more often actually file-system failures.
Using several filesystems reduced the damage inflicted by such a
failure.

| All other disks are raw disks in raid1 multi-disk btrfs.  So, it uses
| /dev/sdc, /dev/sdd, ... as whole, not /dev/sdc1, /dev/sdd1, ...

I don't really understand everything about BTRFS.  I understand it can
partition the storage it manages, a bit like LVM.
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Re: [GTALUG] From Slackware to which distro?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: William Park via talk 

| OK, I'll probably go with Fedora-36/KDE when it comes out.

I use Fedora almost always.  I don't use KDE.  I don't know if Fedora 
users use KDE often enough to be sure that it is well-tested.

| I usually don't partition my disks.  I use the whole disk.  Boot disk is the
| only one that has (one) partition in MBR.  So, when Fedora talked about going
| UEFI exclusively, I looked elsewhere.  Now, they are dropping that idea.
|  https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=showheadline=14569

Why do you want MBR?  I switched to UEFI many years ago.  Generally it is 
a win.

Reading more carefully, I think that you mean that you have GPT 
partitioning on all your disks, with only one partition on all disks 
except for the one you boot from.  On your boot disk, you have a /boot 
partition and a single / partition for the rest of the disk.  /boot appears 
to be MBR to GRUB but GPT to the running system (a very useful hack).

UEFI Losses:

- more magic (i.e. a little more complex).  But fewer hacks.

- You can only run x86-64 OSes on an X86-64 UEFI. (With MBR you can boot 
  16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit OSes.)

- very old machines don't have UEFI.  (Surely your computer has UEFI 
  firmware.)

- you have to have an ESP (EFI System Partition) and it has to be VFAT so 
  it pretty much has to be a separate partition from the partition(s) 
  holding your data and system.  But it need not be very large -- 500M is 
  plenty.  This is much less of a burden than your /boot.


UEFI Wins:

- booting becomes less fragile

- supporting more than 4 partitions is less hairy

- allowing multiple OSes on one drive is a lot easier

- UEFI is a well-tested path, both for the hardware and the OS.

- considerable hardware no longer has an MBR option

- firmware updates can often be managed by Linux.

- many manufacturers provide diagnostics as .efi programs.

- Secure Boot.  Why not?


Partitioning:

I do a bit more partitioning than you do.

I have a separate /home.  That means that I can replace the OS and 
leave the users' files.

The only exception is on machines with tiny disks: partitioning a 32G eMMC 
on a netbook is almost guaranteed to strand precious space in the wrong 
partition.

Each OS that I intend to boot needs its own partition(s).  I often have 
dual boot Fedora / Windows, even though I rarely use Windows.  Sometimes I 
have two versions of Fedora, each on its own / partition.  Sometimes I 
have Fedora and Ubuntu.

I often have a swap partition.

Modern disks are so large that I often leave space unassigned to a 
partition.  That lets me decide what to do with it when I need it.  It 
should also contribute to the longevity of SSDs (effectively this is 
massive over-provisioning).
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Re: [GTALUG] Ubuntu review on Distrowatch

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

I'm too lazy to do the research, but I have a few tentative observations.

If you require Steam, my guess is that that should drive your choice.  It 
is likely a differentiator.  Consider installation, official support, 
community support.  That usually means choose a distro many other Steam 
users use.

My impression is that Steam work is done by the publisher only for the 
most "important" distros.  I assume that is Ubuntu.

If you want proprietary video drivers, my guess is that the same applies: 
choose Ubuntu.

If you want a simple life, pick a popular distro that wants to give you a 
simple life.  One that has the same view of simplicity that you do.  (KDE 
isn't simple.)

You probably want smooth upgrades or long version life.  Ubuntu LTS 
provides both.

I'm not an expert, but I think debian provides long version life but not 
so smooth version upgrades.

Fedora (my usual choice) provides pretty good version upgrades but 
relatively short support lifetime (roughly two six-month releases, and a 
few months grace period).  If you choose Fedora, staying one release back 
seems to reduce the fire-hose of updates.

Fedora is unfriendly to proprietary things.  I like that but you probably 
don't.  Steam may well be one of those proprietary things.  I have no idea 
if your AMD video card runs better with a proprietary driver.

I don't like Snaps or Flatpaks for the same reasons DCB doesn't like them.  
But they might just be what you need to install the latest versions of 
Firefox or Chrome or Chromium on an older version of a distro.  I don't 
think that it is safe to run old versions of those browsers.  The same 
considerations might apply to things like LibreOffice.

Old distros might not run on the newest hardware.  PC makers often come up 
with new stuff that demands new drivers.  Random example: a few months 
ago, my son bought a motherboard that had a 2.5 gigabit ethernet port; no 
distro image supported it; Fedora only supported it after kernel 
updates were applied (they had already been released).

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Re: [GTALUG] Back to basics: upgrading from Windows to Linux

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Kevin Cozens via talk 

| I have just used dd run under Linux when I have cloned drives in the past.
| YMMV.

Two problems I can imagine:

- the two disks will have partitions with identical UUIDs.  This isn't
  a good idea.  The symptoms might be subtle.

- if the geometry is different you might get a bad result.

  I generally find that disk sectors are 4k these days but 512 bytes on
  a USB disk.  I don't know what an NVMe SSD presents as its
  blocksize.  It might well be that Evan's USB thingee preserves the
  blocksize of the SSD.  I don't know.
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Re: [GTALUG] Back to basics: upgrading from Windows to Linux

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Evan Leibovitch via talk 

| Now for the personal angle.

| Some ago I installed Windows on a desktop I use a lot. It replaced Linux
| because that was incapable of running the one game I like playing. I even
| gave a talk to GTALUG about that move, about Windows Subsystem for Linux
| and the things I thought were better about the Windows desktop.
| 
| Turns out I was wrong. So very, very wrong. And now I can't wait to go back
| to my Linux desktop,

Why do you now feel you were wrong?  Or is that a subject for your next 
talk?

| But it's been a long time since I've done this so I have some remedial
| questions to ask from this group's wisdom ... to help me change from a
| Windows install to a dual boot, priority Kubuntu:
| 
|1. My motherboard takes a single M.2 SSD for my one and only drive. I
|have a larger M.2 card that I'd like to replace it with, cloning my
|existing setup to the new drive (in a temporary USB enclosure) then
|installing and shrinking the Windows partition in anticipation of the Linux
|dual-boot install. Can anyone recommend a good tool for doing the disk
|clone? Or am I better off to just fresh-install Windows on the new drive,
|and restore my data from the old one?

You've really got three independent steps: Windows partition shrink,
disk upgrade, and system upgrade.  You can probably do them in any
order but the order I listed them in has advantages.

- less data to copy
- fewer partitions to copy
- fewer systems to break.

A lot of after-market drives come with software to migrate Windows.
I've never used them, but I suspect that they work and are easy.

There are free (as in beer) programs to do that job too.  I've never
used them.

When I've done this, I've done it the brute-force way.  I don't want
to describe the tricky bits:, mostly involving UUIDs.

Here are steps that avoid brute force:

a) do a backup of what you care about.  Really.

b) shrink the Windows partition.  This results in less to copy.  So
   you might as well do it at the start.

b1) If you want to shrink it only modestly, leaving 50% or more of the
allocation, Windows has built-in tools to do that.

b2) If you wish to shrink more, you can boot a live Linux from a USB
stick and use gparted to adjust the partition sizes.
Be sure to reboot Windows after this step because Windows might
find and fix some loose ends left by gparted (this may no longer
be needed but better safe than sorry).

c) use the Windows cloning program to copy Windows to the new drive.

d) swap the drives (physically).  I expect that the new one can be
   booted from.

d) install the Linux of your choice.

|2. I want to have one partition for data that is visible regardless if I
|boot Linux or Windows. Previously the most reliable filesystem readable by
|bothwas FAT32. Should I still do that? Is Linux support for NTFS good
|enough now? Even better, can Windows be taught to read ext4?

VFAT is the most likely to work.  Some attributes get lost.

Linux NTFS probably works but I don't know that with certainty.

extX on Windows is probably more of a pain (not based on actual
experience).  It isn't mainstream so it probably has bugs.

|3. I've never used snap or flatpack before. Others have told me to
|install as much native (ie, .deb packages) as possible, use flatpack when
|it's the only option and uninstall snap. Any comments or caveats here? And
|why did app installation sources become needlessly complex?

That's partly based on religion.  I share that religion.

On the other hand, Canonical is the owner of Snap and pushes it hard.
So on a Ubuntu system you may end up needing to use Snap.  I think
that Ubuntu developers are moving core functions to Snap.

I've read in LWN that Chrome and Chromium are difficult and
unrewarding for distros to build and that Snap or Flatpak would be a
partial solution to this.

Generally Snap and Flatpak are supposed to be mostly invisible machinery.
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[GTALUG] Car chips [was OT: NYT article "How To Construct a Chip Factory"]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

4| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk 

| On 2022-04-08 19:46, William Park via talk wrote:
| > Why do cars need 2nm chips?
| 
| There's a surprising amount of processing power required in a modern car.
| Android Auto uses a tablet-class CPU, and Android Automotive (the lower level
| OS that does more than infotainment) is similar. Electric cars can have even
| more complex requirements.

There is definitely a push for AI in cars.  The closer to self-driving, 
the more processing power is needed.

Also: electronic features are a lot cheaper than mechanical features.  So 
there is a tendency to add as many of those as can be imagined.  Features 
seem to be what sell cars.

Also: processors are cheaper than wires.  So sensors need to talk to 
shared buses, not simple wires.  So each sensor needs something 
approaching a processor.

I understood most things about my early cars.  My recent car is another 
matter.  I'm pretty sure it has a lot of features that I haven't even 
imagined.  And it has a tablet-like control/display unit in the middle of 
the dashboard.  Much of the interface seems too complicated to operate 
while one is driving.

I guess I'll learn about the controls of my first self-driving car because 
I won't be distracted by driving it myself.

Simplicity is sophisticated.  It's hard to sell.  Apple tries sometimes.

Some AI that I'd like in cars:

When I'm driving, I can often tell something is wrong by the noise or 
vibration or smell.  AI could monitor all these signals and try to infer 
problems that might require attention.
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Re: [GTALUG] OT: NYT article "How To Construct a Chip Factory

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Ivan Avery Frey via talk 
| 
| The Huge Endeavor to Produce a Tiny Microchip
| 
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/technology/intel-chip-shortage.html?unlocked_article_code=CEIPuonUktbfqYhkTFUbCybJUNMnqBqCgvfeh706mnL6aSOVSC4H1OQSGZSJ9EqLZbZmY5F7-QWnc-J7Ee1lQu1unKgYNlZxSgKsr9zUlM1Ye3tlpcfpU28_ms-dVLx9-zSwNSzjcrt0mrOysUncb2f6SeeIhy1aUQVjp5didVyg2mVZhfuWV74ohaQtmKspFZt4RjwfZSSVvviOCx52PNqObR20-RBhEqgCGmmVxYjAnupGJAZCClvGT2d95HI8675fO9AQO6X_K30waUiPHYqWfATJsULH1t8BHho

Interesting.

As Moore's law progressed, a different law also applied: exponentially
fewer cutting edge fabs.  Simply put, each generation of fab got
exponentially more expensive (I don't have actual cost data).

It used to be that every chip vendor had its own fab.  But they got
exponetially more complicated and expensive and a new model developed:
fabless chip vendors and merchant fabs.

Example: most RISC vendors were fabless
Example: AMD spun off its fab as "Global Foundaries".
Example: fabs TSMC, SMIC.

I don't follow this closely but Intel's fabs may be the last that are
mostly producing their owners own chips.  Intel has tried to be a
merchant fab but I don't think that they have gotten much business.

I don't know much about linear chips.  Maybe the picture is different
there.

Intel's vertical integration used to be a plus.  They would develop
their next "node" (step in feature size or performance) ahead of
everyone else.  This seemed to be because they were willing to put
more money into manufacturing each chip (because they could get it
back) and also because each node was developed in parallel with the
design of the chips that would use it.  Perhaps six years ago their
node progression stumbled and now their manufacturing is only on a par
with TSMC in performance and it might be much more expensive (usually
due to higher defect rates).

It is very bad for the world that TSMC is almost the only game in town
for cutting edge processors.  Samsung is OK too.

Taiwan may be the next Ukraine.

There are a lot of suppliers of high-tech things needed for fabs.  Many
with no competitor.  Some are in Europe and some are in the US.  The
way US governments have been throwing around sanctions, you can bet
that PRC is trying to create local replacements.

Our world is partitioning before our eyes.
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[GTALUG] Open Source Archetypes

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

Evan pointed out this paper.

It is from Mozilla and it describes several different ways of organizing 
opens source projects.  Worth reading.


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[GTALUG] supply chain risks: a real example

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

Supply chain risks are important in open source: with so many 
contributors, how can one be sure that there aren't malicious components?

(Buggy components are also a threat.)

(Closed source has this problem too, with some variations.)

This is a scary real current example:


As I understand it, this malicious software tried to damage systems 
in Russia and Belarus.  That's terrible.  And it has had unintended 
side-effects:



(One could also argue that leaving important information in Belarus, with 
no recent backup, is a very dumb.)
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Re: [GTALUG] keeping my systems updated: Windows vs Linux

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Nicholas Krause via talk 

[I've cut out the quotation of my message since Nicholas' message
doesn't seem to respond to it.]

| I did this

What's "this"?

| a while ago, but I noticed that exes were about twice as slow
| as yum at the time.

What are exes?  Do you mean Windows .exe files?  Those are executable
files.  How do they compare with yum, a package management program.

yum has been replaced by dnf.  If you type "yum" on fedora, you get
dnf.  If I remember correctly, "yum" stood for Yelllowdog Updater,
Modified (Yellowdog Linux was a distro for POWER7).

dnf is mysteriously powerful.  At least mysterious to me.  It solves
dependencies using a SAT solver!

| It was even worse for apt, about 3 times.

Perhaps you are saying that apt is 50% faster than yum.
From other comments, it might be more than tis.

| Windows
| packaging in exes is not that fast is the problem.

Ahh.  I guess you don't know the name of the Windows package manager
but you are saying the packages are actually executables.  Odd!

I call the Windows package manager "Windows Update" -- that's the name
I invoke to get updates.

When I try to look at what is taking time with Windows Update, it is
kind of hard because of the way services are agglomerated.  It looks as
if one piggy thing is anti-malware.  Surely a decent cryptographic
signature system could eliminate the need for that.

| If we're talking speed,
| packaging in Arch wins. Even in a VM with 2GB
| of RAM and 2 cores. It was able to do the install portion of 500MB
| of software in 32-33 seconds. I believe that's 30 plus packages from
| memory.

Speed isn't my favourite metric.  Correctness, safety, and dependency
management seem pretty important.  Otherwise tar would be the winner.

I have no idea how well arch's package manager does on those other
concerns.  It might be great.

I mostly use dnf -- RPM packages.  You really have to trust the
packager since I think that the package's scripts are run as root.
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[GTALUG] keeping my systems updated: Windows vs Linux

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

I want to keep my systems up to date.  Not everyone does.

As I understand it, Windows Update does not update the Linux portion.
Yet another step to keep a Windows system safe as possible.  My drill:

- Run Windows update.  If it actually applied an update, you should
  run it again in case the update enables a subsequent update (you
  cannot tell by its cheerful declaration that your system is up to
  date).  Rinse and repeat.
  BTW, Windows Update seems unreasonably slow.  And prone to
  inscrutable failures.

- go to the Microsoft App Store and get updates.  Be careful, it too
  can prematurely say that your apps are up to date.

- ask the machine vendor's software if it has driver or firmware
  updates (Dell, Lenovo, HP, ...).  Sometimes I have to manually
  download and install firmware updates.

- for WSL: "sudo apt update" and "sudo apt full-upgrade"

- for each piece of third party software, ask it if it has updates.
  This includes FireFox.

My Linux drill:

- [Fedora] "sudo dnf update"
  [debian family] "sudo apt update" and "sudo apt full-upgrade"

- once in a while: "sudo fwupdmgr get-updates".
  If the vendor doesn't support the Linux Firmware project, another
  process is required (maybe involving Windows).

Linux sure wins here!
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Re: [GTALUG] two or three tricks for installing Linux as a second OS on a Windows box

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk 

| But you want a bash shell on windows anyhow, so WSL makes the perfect
| CLI on windows.
| 
| I even have samba setup, and never use it, I just scp.
| 
| winscp is a nice tool, but it's no match for a linux shell.

Without checking, I would guess that WinSCP is a few megabytes of disk
space but WSL is a few gigabytes.

I think that for the few times I use it, scp on PowerShell is OK,
saving disk space over WSL.

I do use WinSCP too.  (In the last couple of years I've even started
to use the Gnome Files program fairly regularly!)

For me the disk space for WSL effectively comes from Linux because I
don't generally have a Windows-only computer and I try to give most of
the space to Linux.  I haven't really found WSL very useful.
I understand that others do find it useful.
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[GTALUG] two or three tricks for installing Linux as a second OS on a Windows box

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

Most computers come with Microsoft Windows.  If you insist on buying a 
computer without Windows, you have less choice and may have to pay more.  
Besides, once in a blue moon Windows is useful.

To install Linux, you can either blow away Windows (easy!) or your can 
install Linux beside Windows.

If you want to install Linux beside Windows, you usually have to get 
Windows to relinquish some disk space.  (Alternatively you might be able 
to add another disk.)

Windows has a way of reducing the size of a volume but it is unwilling to 
relocate a structure that is in the middle of the volume.  So it is only 
willing to give up slightly less than half of the volume.

I use gparted (ntfresize is underneath) to shrink a Windows NTFS volume, 
because I always want to shrink in to less than 50% of its original size.
I do this from a live Linux flash drive.

Here are the tricks that are not so obvious:

- if Windows is using bitlocker, you need to turn that off in Windows.
  Otherwise gparted cannot do anything with the partition.

  Our newest computer came with bitlocker enabled (with no password).
  That's probably a good idea but not for us.

  After bitlocker is turned off, gparted can operate.

  Perhaps you can turn it on again after resizing.  I don't know.

  (On Windows: Settings: Privacy & Security: Device Encryption)

- By default, Windows assumes that it can leave the filesystem in an 
  inconsistent state when it shuts down.  It assumes that you'll boot
  Windows again when you power the system up.  Apparently this speeds 
  things up a little bit.

  This is very unhealthy if you are going to boot Linux next,
  especially if you are going to run gparted to muck with the NTFS 
  filesystem.

  You can fix this by going to Windows' Control Panel (which is something 
  different from Settings), Power Settings, and untick "turn on fast 
  startup (recommended)".  It is slightly tricky because you have to click 
  some option to allow you to change the fast startup option.  Sheesh.

- (old advice; may be obsolete; I don't wish to find out the hard way that 
  it is still needed.)
  After you have resized the NTFS partition, reboot to Windows.  Don't do 
  anything else with the disk in Linux first.
  Why: it used to be the case that gparted got something slightly wrong in
  the NTFS partition, something that a Windows boot fixed silently.
  After booting Windows, you can reboot to a Linux install medium safely.
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[GTALUG] Firmware Test Suite

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

UEFI firmware is quite complex and abstruse.  It is easy for a vendor to 
get it wrong.  As long as Windows seems to run, ship it.

I just discovered the Firmware Test Suite 


It acts as a lint for firmware.  It detects some violations of standards 
(such as ACPI).

Although it is a Ubuntu / Canonical project it can run on other Linux 
systems or even from a stand-alone bootable image.
To install it on Fedora: sudo dnf install fwts

Probably the only thing you can do with the result is fling it at your 
vendor.  It might also give a consumer insight into the quality of the 
firmware engineering.
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Re: [GTALUG] More pointless battles [was: I'm discarding an old notebook!]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk 

| AMD Turion 64 X2 - so, roughly half of a Raspberry Pi 4.
| 
| but it has a screen, keyboard, and you actually have it - unlike a Raspberry
| Pi 4

Good points.

I just saw this site: 
Note: prices are in local currency.  Pi supply issues seem to be extreme.

I would like to think that they are drawing down inventory for a Pi Day 
announcement.  That seems to be an unlikely reason when so many models are 
OOS.
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[GTALUG] More pointless battles [was: I'm discarding an old notebook!]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

I've been shamed / intrigued into doing a bit more hacking on this 
Acer Aspire 9300 notebook.

Spoiler: this was a waste of time.

A little over 5 years ago I had replaced the HDD with an SSD and put a 
then-current Fedora (24?) on it (no Windows).  It was unreliable (for 
reasons I have previously explained).

Now I've dragged out the old HDD and copied the Vista and Ubuntu 12.04 
installation from it to the SSD.  (Byte-for-byte, so the partition 
alignments are highly questionable.)

MS Vista boots.  It doesn't know how to update itself (End of Life).

Ubuntu 12.04 boots.  It doesn't know how to update itself either since it 
is no longer supported.  I fix that (somewhat) by hacking on 
/etc/apt/sources.list, replacing ca.archive.ubuntu.com with 
old-releases.ubuntu.com.  The newest update there was probably two years 
ago, but that's better than more than 5 years ago.

While doing Ubuntu updates, the machine crashed a couple of times.
Probably because it is using the nouveau video driver.  I wonder if I
can enable the ancient no-longer supported proprietary driver at this late 
date?  Even if I can, apparently that path dies after Ubuntu 14.04 so it 
isn't really a solution.

Back on Windows Vista, I tried updating Firefox.  A very slow process, but 
it seemed to complete (but not to the current version; possibly because 
Vista is no longer supported).  I ran Firefox's update again and got a 
blue screen (OS crash, not Firefox crash).

At this point, I saw very little upside and had wasted a lot of time 
getting this far.  I cannot run current Windows 10 or current Linux. So 
I've given up.  I've stripped the SSD, the RAM, the WiFi card, and the DVD 
drive.



Now I'm wasting time updating the three OSes on my Acer Aspire One 522, a 
netbook from 2011 (Fedora, Ubuntu, Win10). 

This is a very meagre machine: slow even in its day.  But it does run 
current systems.

When I got it, I upgraded the RAM from 1G to 4G.  Win 7 Starter was 
crippled to use at most 2G (silly Microsoft market segregation games).  
The screen had too little resolution to install Win 8, but full Win 10 
Home is happy (a free upgrade; it will use all 4G).

The netbook still has its original HDD.  Win 10 and Gnome both crawl 
unless they live on SSDs.  I intend to replace the HDD with the SSD from 
the scrapped notebook.

Just a few years separate the Acer Aspire 9300 and the Acer Aspire One 
522.  Yet the newer one is more usable now.  Still, the newer one is 
missing some modern conveniences: UEFI firmware and USB 3.x.

There is a significant difference between a 17" notebook and a 10.6" 
netbook.
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Re: [GTALUG] I'm discarding an old notebook!

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Don Tai via talk 

| Correction, no I don't have an Asus Eee PC running.It is broken, but a Dell
| inspiron 1011, Intel Atom 1.6Ghz

The Inspiron 1011 seems to also have been called the Inspiron Mini
10v.  It was probably introduced in 2008 (since that's when its CPU
was introduced), not 2002.

I assume that you didn't get the Nickelodeon Slime Edition of this
netbook.  That would be interesting.

In 2010, I remotely bought my son a Inspiron Mini 10 - 1012 (he was 
studying in Texas).  It had a 1366x768 pixel display!  It also had a 
Crystal HD Broadcom Media Accelerator, which turned out to be a bit of a 
bust.  But the real failing was that it overheated a lot.
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Re: [GTALUG] I'm discarding an old notebook!

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Anthony de Boer via talk 

| I have an even older notebook with a 32-bit Atom processor.

Are you sure that it is older?  The Atom was introduced in 2008, the
year after I bought my notebook.

The first Asus Eee PC preceded the Atom and used Intel Celeron M
procesors.

| It used to be
| useful, but after upgrading to the latest (Debian Bullseye) Firefox
| barely starts and is glacial enough to be totally unusable.  Older
| Firefox did run reasonably on that hardware, but software keeps assuming
| better hardware as it grows.
| 
| There may be roles like serial console or network debugger for a box
| like that.  Or stick with an older Linux contemporary to the hardware;
| sometimes bits of old software need an older libc or such and it can be
| handy to have a retro-system in reach.

Stop giving me excuses to keep it :-)

Browsers seem to continuously get hungrier but I actually think that
it is insane web developers who eat my systems.
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Re: [GTALUG] I'm discarding an old notebook!

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Don Tai via talk 

| That's sad. You could try running an external monitor.

An external monitor doesn't (normally) bypass the video card so it
doesn't bypass my driver problem.

| I'd give up on Linux
| and run Win.

That doesn't work either.  I mentioned earlier that installing Win 10
fails for unknown reasons.  It gets stuck in this loop:

- something went wrong, but don't worry, just give me an internet
  connection and I'll do updates.  That should fix it.

- time passes

The biggest problem is that NVidia stopped supporting the video controller
on Windows some time ago (before Win 10).  Just like on Linux.

The hardest problems, on Windows and Linux, are from NVidia.
- not releasing new video drivers
- not releasing sufficient specs to enable the open source driver to work
- (probably) a bug in the video hardware when system has more than 2G
  of RAM

| I still have a 2002 Dell netbook running WinXP specifically for Chinese
| social media QQ. No email or secure stuff. The only browser that I can find
| that still runs is Opera, which is also Chinese owned. The system is
| completely isolated, and I expect it to get hacked.

Wow.  The first thing I called a netbook was the Asus Eee PC from late
2007.  The same era as my Acer Aspire 9300 that we're talking about.
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Re: [GTALUG] I'm discarding an old notebook!

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Don Tai via talk 

| 15 year old notebook. Will no version of Linux work? That's sad. I have
| desktops much older than that that can run puppy Linux.

I can run it with the kernel option "modprobe.blacklist=nouveau".
Then the screen resolution is 1024x768 instead of 1440x900.  And that
option slows down the already slow machine.

The nouveau driver almost works.  But when it fails, it corrupts the
screen and eventually seems to lock up the machine.

As I said, I blame NVidia.  They lost interest in providing the
proprietary driver and they didn't provide specifications sufficient
for the nouveau driver to reliably function.
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[GTALUG] I'm discarding an old notebook!

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

I have an Acer Aspire 9300 that I bought in 2007.
I cannot get it to be useful.  The problem is (mostly) with drivers for 
the NVidia Go 6100 video.

- nVidia stopped supporting this in the proprietary Linux driver.

- nouveau is unreliable https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46557

- using the generic video driver just doesn't cut it.

Darn NVidia!  If they released specs, I think nouveau would work.  There 
seems to be some bug related to more than 2G of RAM (a lot in 2007).  But 
that's not the whole story.

Other than that, the machine is functional.

Oh: Windows 10 goes into a slow failure loop if you try to install it.
(The computer came with Vista.  Not safe to use these days.)

The machine would not be fast but it would be useable for many tasks if it 
worked!  It has a 64-bit AMD Turion processor.  This was before AMD bought 
ATI; the "chipset" was made by NVidia.
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[GTALUG] Tomorrow: Join 18 Readers at "[ONLINE] #34 Jenny Ren on Linux Performance Revolution" (fwd)

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

Papers We Love is a great idea for a meetup group.  It hasn't been very 
active during the pandemic.

This might be of interest to GTALUGers.



-- Forwarded message --
From: Papers We Love - Toronto 
Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2022 18:10:32 + (UTC)
Subject: Tomorrow: Join 18 Readers at
"[ONLINE] #34 Jenny Ren on Linux Performance Revolution"

A quick reminder that this event is coming up tomorrow. Are you going?

Ding Yuan added this event for Papers We Love - Toronto

What: [ONLINE] #34 Jenny Ren on Linux Performance Revolution

When: Wednesday, February 9, 2022, 6:30 PM ET


Where: 
Online event

Let's revive Papers We Love :-) Jenny Ren will discuss "An Analysis of 
Performance Evolution of Linux's Core Operations" 
(http://meet.meetup.com/ls/click?upn=yBf4llw5PeaY7leriFwBBpcdDwF5GMjZuOVJGeFGHWhm6-2B6F8TStgyy-2BUy9GP-2Ft9BAwj0P6UhaS1cGiqwWIGGg-3D-3D5lW1_2TvXW9olEOZQJUSgjFohZZ3vBgori70OQNQ3CwYJqcKt31FhClJP1ur30XTRhSFrxgodBHLXJ2HU6meL5y36tdUnoxDM0qtmNQYawMcMi46CNFMpqXnIgIcqOvVd8X-2FlUEl0vqMwvsGRB85Pjwmr0rxgYBiNn-2FAUm1uDcuSo0C5p-2BFhGCutwctxifb9mHocT24UZwcZrLKWpu40ISWFqiUYjXOoHvKRkekn85fLcoc0Xj0lmE3DMoDHGRTu1fa37
 And Jenny is the author of the paper! (You shouldn't need to read the paper 
ahe...

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Re: [GTALUG] [GTALUG-Announce] February Meeting Reminder

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| *Speaker:* D. Hugh Redelmeier
| *Topic:*  Gitlab fundamentals followed by Q and Discussion

The GTALUG executive uses several tools.  I hope to introduce those tools 
centred around git: git, gitlab (a public host for git trees), and markup 
(a simple text markup language for text).
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Re: [GTALUG] decent cheap ChromeOS tablet -- can run debian in a container

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Ansar Mohammed via talk 

| Depending on what you want to achieve,

Yes!

| IMHO you can get a used HP 10 inch
| tablet on eBay for $50 running Windows and flatten it with Debian.
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/324124770651
| Windows on 7-10 inch tablets are all over ebay.

Not a terrible idea, but there are problems with this particular
example:

- ebay.COM:
US$50, not C$50
unknown (to me) problems and expense  getting it across the border
unlikely to have a useful warranty (used, across border)

- specs: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c04553375

- 1280x800 resolution

- poor SoC

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/80274/intel-atom-processor-z3735f-2m-cache-up-to-1-83-ghz.html
SoC launched 7 years ago
intentionally crippled on launch
Intel's goal: compete against ARM but don't cannibalize x86
Microsoft's goal: compete against Android/iOS but don't
cannibalize existing Windows market.
surely 32-bit UEFI even though CPU can do x86-64.

- only one USB socket and that is only USB 2

Linux support is mixed for this kind of tablet (I have a Dell Venue 8
Pro of this generation).  Typically the SoC has very odd bits.  Like:
audio is hooked up in a non-standard and non-obvious way.  Like: UEFI
cannot access SD card (so you cannot boot from it).  I was defeated
when I tried to put linux on it back in the day.  I think that Linux
mostly works these days (I tried booting the Venue 8 off a live Fedora
stick a few months ago).

There was a tremendous blossoming of Windows tablets then
(Win 8.1 era).  Evolution could have improved them but instead it
killed them off (Intel and Microsoft threw in the towel).  Windows
tablets now are expensive and inferior.  This is what currently passes
as a good deal (yuck):
https://forums.redflagdeals.com/best-buy-microsoft-surface-laptop-go-12-4-i5-1035g1-4-64-emmc-499-99-2520226/

Currently, there are often reasonable deals on reasonable laptops with
touch.  But they start at over $400 new.  Ones that I've considered
start at about $700 on sale.

The Lenovo is not much more expensive than the HP (when you factor in
cross-border friction and used versus new) and has usefully better
capabilities. But the HP can probably run Linux natively rather than
in a container.

- USB 3.x with extras vs USB 2.0 (OTG?)
- 4G RAM vs 2G
- 64G eMMC vs 32G eMMC
- 1920x1200 vs 1280x800 resolution
- warranty support vs no support

If you want a good tablet, and don't need Linux, it is hard to argue
against iPads.  Android tablets only seem to win when you consider price
(which I do) or tinkerability.

ChromeOS tablets are probably clunkier than Android tablets but they
can run Android apps and they get support for many more years.  Linux
under ChromeOS is supported by Google but Linux under Android is not.

Windows Subsystem for Linux is a potentially interesting thing on
tablets.  It will not run on 32-bit Windows, and so it won't run on
this HP.  Actually, the HP hardware is too limited to be officially
supported by current Window 10, but I think it works.  32G of "disk"
is a nightmare when running Windows Update.
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Re: [GTALUG] decent cheap ChromeOS tablet -- can run debian in a container

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

Nice review: 

Includes discussion of Linux on the tablet.
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[GTALUG] Humble subscription service is ditching Linux after this month

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

I've never used it, so I don't know what I'm talking about.

If you need to fetch anything from their server, do it now.


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Re: [GTALUG] ot: perhaps, headphones?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Karen Lewellen via talk 

| To be sure, the idea of noise cancellation, or any variation's is a no,

I never suggested noise cancellation.  That's a whole other kettle of
fish.

I talked about "closed" vs "open".  Your existing headphones are
"closed", according to the specs I read.

That means that they block sound travelling through the outside of the
cup.  They block sound two ways: leaking from the headphone to the
room and from the room to the ear.

I thought that if you are using your reader, you might still want to
hear what's happening in the room, albeit in an attenuated way.  For
example, you might want to hear other people in the room.  Or you
might not.  That's why I mentioned closed vs. open as a choice.

Nicholas had other considerations for the open / closed choice.  They were 
beyond my experience or knowledge.

| not
| just because of the  sense of position, but because I have something talking
| in my ears when I use them in this particular setting..no phone ringing, door
| bells, or the all important music  playing  in the background.

I don't quite understand.  If you have someone talking in you ears, do
you want to hear them or block them out?

| As I have been a radio producer, and professional singer for many many years,
| over the ear headphones are the most comfortable, speaking personally.
| I  truly dislike earbuds, they tend not to stay in my ears, to put pressure on
| my ear canal etc...and the buttons are a no, mic interferes with  the machine.

The specs I saw said your existing headphones had buttons but did not
say what the buttons did.



| The most important thing, for this particular set of headphones though is
| A combination of frequency range, sensitivity, impedance, and driver
| units...oh and input power.

I understood that these phones were for a reader.  I cannot imagine
that frequency range would be critical.  I would not imagine that
stereo mattered.

| a few settings in the wrong direction, and the headphones will make me
| dizzy..literary.

Very important point!  I imagine that's mostly about phase problems or
artifacts of noise cancellation.

If I understood correctly that this is for your Kurzweil reader, I suspect 
monophonic headphones would be fine.  If you used the headphones 
monophonically, would that prevent dizziness?

| And those numbers can be device specific, what I will use for my reading edge,
| differs for what I use for production, or music listening, or whatever.
| It is part of why once found I may buy more than one pair.
| Cannot fault you for using the same ones  since the 80's. Had a set once I got
| from radio shack that I used for  more than a decade as well.
| Goodness but I miss radio shack.

I just took a dead (but not leaky!) Radio Shack 9v battery out of nework 
tester that I hadn't used in some time.

The Source still exists (unlike US Radio Shack).  But it has devolved.  
They still have headphones.  And their page has filters -- I'm not sure 
that they'd work for you.



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Re: [GTALUG] ot: perhaps, headphones?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Karen Lewellen via talk 

| However, this is a fine example of my personal issue...I cannot use them.
| The impedance on this model is 24, and they make me dizzy.
| I do have production assistants use them, and in all these years the ear pads
| remain flawless.

I don't see how impedance could have anything to do with making you
dizzy.  Could you explain?

I'm not saying those headphones don't make you dizzy.  But it would be
very interesting to know the mechanism.

If I had to guess at a factor that might cause dizziness, I'd pick
problems with phase.  That would imply serious filters, I'd think.
Plain old passive headphones don't have fancy filters.

Perhaps one driver wired backwards: that would make one signal 180
degrees out of phase.  But that doesn't seem like an easy mistake to
make.  (It is easy on some home stereo's the swap the lines into a
speaker.)
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Re: [GTALUG] decent cheap ChromeOS tablet -- can run debian in a container

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: o1bigtenor via talk 

| Is dual boot better than blowing away the android system and installing
| an OS?

I think that you mean blowing away the ChromeOS system.

I don't know if that is possible.  I know that this was possible on at
least some x86-based CromeOS clamshells.  The Arm world is less
standardized so it's not a sure thing.  Best to search for others who
have done this.

In my modest experience most x86 boxes sold with Windows can be easily
switched to Linux.  That's a better direction to go for Linux on bare
metal.

| I'm a long time debian user - - - trying to decide between debian or
| galliumOS - - - suggestions?

I have no experience will galliumOS.
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Re: [GTALUG] ot: perhaps, headphones?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Karen Lewellen via talk 

| If you desire a visual idea then perhaps google jvc ha-s44x.

Thanks.

From past discussions, I know your shopping technique isn't like mine.  
But I'll mention my considerations on the off chance you might find them 
useful.


Most wired headphones are electrically / electronically
interchangeable.  Of course that's a good thing.  It also means that there 
are a lot to choose from.

There are lots of issues of sound reproduction quality, but to be
honest, all should have sound quality that is good enough for a reader
(as I understand it).

I would imagine that the main issues are comfort -- a very individual
thing.  Oh, and durability -- not something in the specs!

Here's what I glean from the specs of your old headphones:

- closed (i.e. they try to block sound from your environment)

- over-ear [I find such headphones uncomfortable fairly quickly]

- 5.57 ounces

- button controls (what do they control?)

- 1.2 m cable [the units are unspecified but 1.2 ft would be very short]

Do you use the buttons?  What for?

I think "over-ear" means that these clamp on your ear as opposed to
clamping on your head around the ear ("circumaural").  I find over-ear
very uncomfortable after a few minutes but I seem to be in a minority.

Do you really want to have sound isolation from the room ("closed")?
I imagine "situational awareness" would be useful.

Out of habit, I use ancient Sennheiser HD430 phones.  They are
circumaural, light, open [i.e. I can hear things going on in the
room], good enough sound.  They have replaceable cables and ear pads
(but now hard to find).  Out of production since 1986.  I find that
even these get uncomfortable after a while.

My current favourite is ear-buds.  The ones with a selection of soft
tips, not the hard ones.  You can get decent inexpensive ones from China.  
I have, for example:
  https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002184896879.html
Currently C$16.84 without microphone.  I paid less.
There are many other brands that are likely fine.
There is an enthusiastic following for "Chi-fi".

TWS (true wireless stereo) headphones are amazingly convenient if you have 
Bluetooth.  But you don't.  There are a lot of adapters to convert analog 
to Bluetooth but I don't have any experience with them.

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Re: [GTALUG] [GTALUG-Announce] January Meeting Reminder

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: murph nj via talk 

| On Sun, Jan 9, 2022 at 10:43 AM o1bigtenor  wrote:

| >> *We're going to use Big Blue Button for this meeting: *
| >> https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl

| >  Hmmm - - - - so I need to sign up for an account at this location to
| > participate?
| >
| > Will this work on my tv (used for streaming)? (FAQs do not indicate)

| >From my experience using BBB for other events, a new account is not
| required.  Just give a name to label yourself for interactions.

Yes.

| As far as your TV, it runs in a browser, no plugins or programs required.
| If you're using a browser on the TV itself, I have no idea if it would
| work.  I've used Firefox and Chromium based browsers without an issue.

Anyone can test now.

Do report any issues.
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Re: [GTALUG] [GTALUG-Announce] January Meeting Reminder

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: o1bigtenor 

I got two copies of this message from o1bigtenor.
Once last Tuesday, and once today.  Odd.

The message I got today included these two chunks in the header.

| Received: from penguin.gtalug.org (localhost [127.0.0.1])
| by penguin.gtalug.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5086AE60A;
| Sun,  9 Jan 2022 10:43:45 -0500 (EST)

| Received: from mail-lj1-f181.google.com (mail-lj1-f181.google.com
|  [209.85.208.181])
|  by penguin.gtalug.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id DD9E8E383;
|  Tue,  4 Jan 2022 07:04:25 -0500 (EST)


It looks like it has been sitting in a queue on penguin for most of
the week.

Did anyone/everyone else get two copies of this?
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Re: [GTALUG] Debian install fails due to network failure

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: sciguy via talk 

This second message had a lot more useful information.  That
eliminates several hypotheses / blind alleys.

| On 2022-01-08 11:20, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
| > [I hate top-posting but it seems best in this case.]
| 
| [No prob. I hope you will tolerate my "interleaved" posting :-) ]
| 
| > 
| > It sounds like you have two problems:
| > 
| > (1) debian doesn't understand your network card (NIC)
| > 
| > (2) your UEFI setup isn't doing what you need it to
| > 
| > What is your computer?
| 
| "Brand-X". My own concoction from a few years ago. The motherboard is a ASUS
| Maximus VI Hero. Video is a NVidia GeForce GTX 1660 supporting a dual monitor.
| Sound is on-board. Processor is an Intel Core i7-4770K.

If I remember correctly, computers of that era supported UEFI but were
generally configured to use the alternative.  The alternative doesn't
have an official name.  MBR or "Legacy" or "BIOS" are sometimes used.

It's best to have one booting scheme on a computer.  If your current
Windows system is MBR, your Linux ought to be the same.

There are complexities.  Like: how do you support large disks with
MBR?  The Linux convention is to use GPT partitioning but fake an MBR
partition table to allow MBR booting.  I'm not going to discus that.

Is your Windows set up as UEFI-booting or as MBR-booting?

| > What is your NIC?
| 
| The NIC is also just a chipset on the motherboard. On Windows, my Device
| Manager says that I am using "Intel Ethernet Connection I217-V". Network
| discovery is enabled. I don't have wireless on this computer. A direct cat-5
| goes to the router, and DHCP is used.

Google is your friend.

Is this your problem?:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=191981

It looks as if the Windows driver, if Wake on LAN is enabled, puts the
device in a state that Linux cannot deal with.  Rebooting doesn't fix
it.  Turning off the computer doesn't fix it.  Unplugging the computer
long enough (30 seconds?) does work.

| > (2)
| > 
| > UEFI can almost always be convinced to do what you need.  If you are not
| > used to it, you are probably trying to get it to do something unnatural.
| > 
| > Note: UEFI and GRUB are not alternatives: you will be using both.
| > 
| > UEFI booting is a multi-stage process (true of all kinds of booting)
| > 
| > - UEFI starts
| > 
| > - UEFI has a setting for what to boot.  This will be the path to a .efi
| >   file within the ESP (EFI System Partition) of the hard drive.
| > 
| > - The ESP is a distinguished FAT partition.  It will have been created by
| >   installing Windows.  Linux needs to share it.
| 
| I think this is a bottleneck. I notice that it stalls when "writing to boot
| record" or something like that. I never saw EFI mentioned by Linux, so I
| wouldn't know how to "share" the EFI with Linux. I notice it is not doing it
| on its own; or in the case of Debian, it just goes halfway.
| 
| I have also just tried installing Slackware, and it happily installs, but
| stalls on the dialog for writing boot information. Pressing ENTER cleared that
| dialog and the install finished, but something was probably up, since it only
| booted partially, and only with a USB as a boot drive.

At least with Fedora, if you booted the installation medium with UEFI,
it will try to install a UEFI system.  Note: the Fedora installation
meddium can be boote using UEFI or MBR.  Make sure that your boot
options boot the flash memory stick the same way as you want the
installed system to boot.

| > - To boot most Linux distros, there will be a "shim" .efi program in the
| >   ESP.
| > 
| >   On a Fedora system, it is /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/shim.efi
| > 
| > - Once the UEFI has started shim.efi, the shim loads grub
| >   (/boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grubx64.efi)
| > 
| > At this point things are close to what you are used to.
| > 
| > What is odd under UEFI is selecting what .efi to boot.  Almost every
| > UEFI firmware has a setup page that lets you select what .efi to boot,
| > but the capabilities and methods vary wildly.  I cannot tell you what
| > to do from the setup page because I cannot see yours.
| 
| I guess I could repeat the Slackware boot procedure (since it offers an extra
| root console), and mount the EFI partition. Are these .efi files text files?

A live Ubuntu system (i.e. running from the installation medium)
offers lots ot oportunities for hacking.
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Re: [GTALUG] Debian install fails due to network failure

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

[I hate top-posting but it seems best in this case.]

It sounds like you have two problems:

(1) debian doesn't understand your network card (NIC)

(2) your UEFI setup isn't doing what you need it to

What is your computer?
What is your NIC?

(1)

Some NICs are have non-open drivers.  By default, debian would not have 
those drivers but Ubuntu might.  That could be the problem.

Some NICs are too new to have drivers in a stable debian.

Anecdote: (perhaps a year ago) my son's motherboard came with a 2.5
gigabit NIC that was not supported by the latest official Fedora
installation image.  But it was supported after updates were applied.

Does the live Ubuntu system (i.e. the booted installation medium) see
your network?  That is a fine environment in which to try to debug
networking hardware.

Hack: install via a different NIC.  If you have tried wireless, try wired.  
Or vice versa.  If desperate, try a USB NIC.  Or a NIC card from another 
computer.

(A USB ethernet NIC is a handy thing to have in your toolbox.)

(2)

UEFI can almost always be convinced to do what you need.  If you are not 
used to it, you are probably trying to get it to do something unnatural.

Note: UEFI and GRUB are not alternatives: you will be using both.

UEFI booting is a multi-stage process (true of all kinds of booting)

- UEFI starts

- UEFI has a setting for what to boot.  This will be the path to a .efi 
  file within the ESP (EFI System Partition) of the hard drive.

- The ESP is a distinguished FAT partition.  It will have been created by 
  installing Windows.  Linux needs to share it.

- In a running Linux system, the ESP is conventionally mounted as /boot/efi

- To boot most Linux distros, there will be a "shim" .efi program in the 
  ESP.

  On a Fedora system, it is /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/shim.efi

- Once the UEFI has started shim.efi, the shim loads grub
  (/boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grubx64.efi)

At this point things are close to what you are used to.

What is odd under UEFI is selecting what .efi to boot.  Almost every
UEFI firmware has a setup page that lets you select what .efi to boot,
but the capabilities and methods vary wildly.  I cannot tell you what
to do from the setup page because I cannot see yours.

Once you have Linux running, Grub will usually let you select Windows
to boot, and that is the most convenient way to control what gets
booted.

I've posted to this list a few messages about the mysteries of UEFI
in general and efibootmgr(8) in particular.

| From: sciguy via talk 

| This has happened with what I have tried so far: Debian and Ubuntu. I have
| been accustomed to my network card being auto-detected and the internet being
| automatically connected with an installation, but I am not getting internet on
| installation, so much of the installation has failed.
| 
| This machine was set up as a dual boot, and is running Windows 10 with the
| latest updates. It has previously run a version of Ubuntu Studio, but with
| this upgrade (first by USB then by DVD), I am not getting a network, and so
| the installation remains half-finished.
| 
| Somehow, after changing this over to Debian, where the installation failed for
| the same reason, Windows 10 EFI detected the incomplete installation and now
| offers "finishing the Debian installation" as a boot option when I reboot.
| 
| It seems the root of my problem is in Microsoft's choice to take over the EFI
| in a recent update, thereby supplanting GRUB, which was there before. GRUB was
| a technology I understood fairly well; EFI is not. Can anyone suggest, or
| point to some resources, for how to install Linux alongside W10, in a way that
| the EFI appears to recognize (since it seemed to almost accidentally with
| Debian).
| 
| Thanks
| 
| Paul
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Re: [GTALUG] [GTALUG-Announce] January Meeting Reminder

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Kevin Cozens via talk 

| On 2022-01-03 1:50 p.m., Alan Heighway via talk wrote:
| > *Speaker:* Chris Sullivan
| > *Topic:* Radio Direction Finding with the Raspberry Pi
| 
| Why does this message have a capital A with an upside down v on top of it
| after every word??

Great question.

Your message contains quoted text.  It sure has odd stuff:
The first quoted line is:
> *Speaker:* Chris\303\202\302\240Sullivan

The \ followed by three octal digits represents a byte with the high bit 
on.  In ISO 8859-1, these mean:

\303LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH TILDE
\202invalid [in Control Character range]
\302LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX]
\240NO-BREAK SPACE

That's nowhere in the copy of the announcement that I received.

That text comes in two forms within the original mailed announcement:

- plain text, in UTF-8, but with no bytes with the high bit on.  So plain 
  ASCII.  Looks simple and fine.

- HTML, in quoted-printable UTF-8.  This is where the problem lies

Here's the second line in the raw mail:

Speaker: Chris=C2=A0SullivanTopic:=C2=A0Radio=

Getting rid of the quoted printable bits (= stuff) and adding harmless line 
breaks:






Speaker:
Chris=C2=A0Sullivan


=C2=A0
is one character in UTF-8.
1100 0010
1010 

It stands for UNICODE
1010 
which is
Non-breaking space.

SUMMARY:

The original message looks OK to me.  Your MUA or maybe MTA have probably 
screwed up.

Barracuda?  Thunderbird?---
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Re: [GTALUG] decent cheap ChromeOS tablet -- can run debian in a container

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: James Knott via talk 
| 
| I borrowed one from the Mississauga Library and wasn't impressed. You pretty
| much had to do everything in the "cloud", though having Linux built in would
| improve on that.

The idea of ChromeOS is "cloud first".  But there is some provision
for doing offline work.

If you use Android apps on this tablet, you get and Android
experience.  But better because you device support is much longer.

If you install Linux, you get a Linux experience.  With the expected
amount of cloudiness.
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[GTALUG] decent cheap ChromeOS tablet -- can run debian in a container

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

https://forums.redflagdeals.com/lenovo-canada-chromebook-10e-tablet-129-less-rakuten-2501804/

This is $129 tablet seems to be aimed at kids in schools.  It's not 
particularly powerful, but it has a nice screen (1920x1200, 400nit), 
battery, and a solid build.

This version of ChromeOS invites you to create a container with debian in 
it.  The debian is from the debian repos: not customized.

I've done so.  I can run xterm, but it is awkward without a keyboard and 
mouse.  I've loaded gnome desktop but I'm not sure how to start it.  I 
wanted to use gnome's on-screen keyboard.

Seems like a fun toy for this price.  The weakest point is that it has 
only 32G of eMMC (disk) and no slot for an SD card.

It has only one USB port and that is used for power.  I was able to use a 
USB-C hub with "power delivery" to add more peripherals.

The sale might end at any time.  Perhaps the end of the day or the end of 
the weekend.
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[GTALUG] "a web page is slowing down Firefox. To speed up your browser, stop that page."

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

I get this message when I read the Globe and Mail with Firefox on my 
Fedora 35 desktop.

How can I figure out the cause?
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[GTALUG] LAN speed and USB ethernet dongles that go faster than 1 gigabit

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

2.5 and 5 gigabit USB ethernet dongles are available. They are not even 
too expensive.

Does anyone have experience with these?  Are they engineered in a way that 
doesn't put too much load on the host?  Are they reliable?

Background:

I don't actually need anything faster than 1 gigabit yet, but the time to 
start migrating is always yesterday.  Some ordinary motherboards come with 
2.5 gigabit ports already.

I don't know what the world will settle on as the new standard LAN speed.  
But it sure looks like we'll all want to be doing 2.5, 5, or 10 gigabits 
on our wired LANs in a few years.

Does anyone have an inkling about what the next consensus will be?

2.5 gigabit hardware is cheap but might not be enough better than 1 
gigabit to be worth the transition.  So it might not become the consensus 
speed.

10 gigabit hardware is still quite expensive.  More than I'm willing to 
pay right now.

It is possible that 5 gigabits is a good compromise.


Some example fast USB ethernet dongles:


This cost the authors about US$20 from Amazon but in Canada, right now, it 
is $50.

The least expensive 2.5 that I found is generic, of unknown quality, for 
$33:

Canada Computers has a few at $35:


5 gigabit is available, but more expensive.  Here's a review (it contains 
links to reviews of other 5 gigabit units):

I don't see it on Amazon.ca even though it is on amazon.com.
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[GTALUG] no meeting tonight

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

The meeting tonight is cancelled.

We hope that we'll be better organized for the next meeting.

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Re: [GTALUG] a solved problem unsolved itself: WordPress, MySQL, UTF-8

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk 

| On 2021-11-27 18:04, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
| > 
| > Do you have shell access?  I think you imply "yes".
| 
| Yes, I do, but not to the database server. All I have for that is socket
| access and PHPMyAdmin (blecch).

Ahh.  Kind of "no".

| > Does "fix it" mean "changed the raw data" or mangle the data somewhere
| > downstream of the disk files?
| 
| "fix it" meant "broke it".

I quoted "fix it" because I understood that.

| The MySQL DB tables seem to have been quietly
| reprocessed from one encoding to another.

That seems (1) odd and (2) rude.

Is there a chance that the problem is actually in presenting the data
(due to some incorrect setting of a locale somewhere)?

Can you ask you supplier just what happened, why, and if they can
reverse it for you?

There is a chance that the transformation was bijective (or at least
injective) and thus reversible.
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[GTALUG] war story: Fedora 35 and Nvidia GTX 650

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

I've been using a GTX 650 on my desktop for over seven years.

This may surprise you since I am an open-source fan.  The reason I
chose it is that it was all I had that would drive my UltraHD TV at
full resolution.  Things are better now (not as much as one would
like) but I'm still using the same setup.

The open source Nouveau driver isn't up to the job.  It wouldn't drive
the monitor seven years ago.  I try it every few years but it never
does the job I need.  Currently it seems to be OK until I start my
million-tab Firefox session.

I upgraded from Fedora 34 to 35, using the in-place dnf method.


After that, the nvidia driver would not run.  I thrashed about for a 
considerable amount of time and I cannot explain what happened, but I got 
it working.  Here are some of the things I found useful.

I used the RPM Fusion repository for the drivers.  (Red Hat doesn't 
distribute closed source drivers.)  This document is useful:


When nvidia drivers fail to load, the log is not at all helpful.  (One
reason can be that the firmware has Secure Boot enabled, but that was
not my problem.)

Nvidia considers my card "legacy" so the mainstream drivers 
no longer support it.  The RPM Fusion drivers for Fedora 34 and earlier 
did but not for Fedora 35.  Basically, I have to switch to the 
nvidia-470xx series of drivers.

Hint: I think you only want one generation of nvidia driver installed on a 
machine (I could be wrong).  If you are changing generations, rip the 
former ones out before installing the new ones.

In the Fedora 34 time frame, something else when wrong (see an earlier war 
story) so I created a new F34 installation that shared the /home partition 
with my old one.  I had two root partitions, one for the old F34 and 
another for the fresh F34.  This was handy when I was experimenting with 
this problem.  But it exposed my ignorance of grub2 in Fedora.

I always thought that you could fix the grub configuration by
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg
Not so since Fedora 34.  Read this:

(It even covers the case where you have screwed it up like I did.)
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Re: [GTALUG] a solved problem unsolved itself: WordPress, MySQL, UTF-8

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk 

| I have been running a WordPress blog hosted on a Linux-based shared host since
| WordPress became a thing. It has worked quite well from about 2004 up until a
| few weeks ago.

Do you have shell access?  I think you imply "yes".

| Sadly, *something* recently decided my database encoding was wrong. And that
| something decided to "fix" it. It certainly "fixed it", but not in any way I
| could want. It also did the same for Catherine's blog.

Does "fix it" mean "changed the raw data" or mangle the data somewhere 
downstream of the disk files?

| I know I didn't change any part of the config chain. As far as I can see:
| 
| * the MySQL database still thinks the text is encoded in UTF-8;
| 
| * Wordpress thinks the data is in UTF-8;
| 
| * the web server is serving UTF-8.

And says so: "UTF-8" />

| I'm pretty much resigned to going through 16+ years of posts fixing this, but
| can mangled UTF-8 be recovered without rekeying?

Back-ups?
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Re: [GTALUG] Swapping ThinkPad drive

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: William Park via talk 

| Personally, I don't like UEFI.

I mostly like UEFI.

+ UEFI is less hacky than BIOS

+ UEFI knows it is running on a 32 or 64-bit system; BIOS thinks it is 
  running on an 8088

+ UEFI can be called from a modern OS; BIOS can only be called by 8088 
  code that doesn't use interrupts for I/O.

- UEFI supports only one architecture on x86: 32-bit or 64-bit, even 
  though modern processors can do both

+ BIOS is too simplistic but UEFI is too complicated.

- old-timers kind of understood BIOS well enought to live with it
  (but try explaining the oddities to newbies!)

- old-timers have to start over with UEFI.  But they/we have had plenty of 
  time to make our peace with it.

+ UEFI makes dual-booting work better.  Usually.

- there is plenty of room for vendors to make awkwared UEFI firmware

|  If you change motherboard, you can't boot.
| Personal experience!

That should be easy to fix.  But it involves new skills.

Why would the system not boot?

My best guess at what you experienced is that the UEFI firmware didn't
know the path the the .efi file to boot.

The firmware setup screen should let you specify the path.  But some 
firmware is pretty bad at that.  In desperation, you can take matters 
into your own hands.

The path lives in non-volatile memory.  If you cannot get the firmware to 
set it to what you want, you can boot a live Linux USB stick and use the 
tool efibootmgr(8).

Here's an example from my system.  This is a summary that doesn't show
important details.

[hugh@redeye ~]$ sudo efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: ,0003,0001,0002,0005,0006,0007,0008,0009
Boot* Fedora
Boot0001* USB Floppy/CD
Boot0002* USB Hard Drive
Boot0003* Windows Boot Manager
Boot0005* ATAPI CD-ROM Drive
Boot0006* CD/DVD Drive 
Boot0007* USB Floppy/CD
Boot0008* Hard Drive
Boot0009* Realtek PXE B03 D00

BootOrder is a variable that lists the sequence of entries to try.
The first is "" meaning Boot000, which is Fedora.

The whole fedora entry looks like this: 
Boot* Fedora
HD(2,GPT,f66e4ede-1301-47fd-af96-7f45aee7bc28,0x40800,0xb4000)/File(\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi)

I read that as:
The entry variable is called Boot000.
The * means that it is bootable.
The entry label (for human purposes) is called Fedora.
The path is on the second hard drive [I think that's what 2 means]
which is GUID-paritioned
and the ESP (EFI Sytem Partition) has a UUID of
f66e4ede-1301-47fd-af96-7f45aee7bc28.
There are a couple of hex numbers that I don't understand.
The file's path within the ESP is EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi

Trivia: Windows entries include some parts in UTF16.  What a pain!
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Re: [GTALUG] Swapping ThinkPad drive

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: James Knott via talk 

| I've bought a 1 TB SSD drive to replace the 750 GB drive in my ThinkPad.  I
| was considering using the opportunity to change to UEFI.  I'll be mounting the
| old drive in an external case so that I can copy over the partitions, one of
| them NTFS.

Superstitious mode:

Does your HDD have a block size larger than 512 bytes?  Likely.

Many USB<->SATA devices seem to present 512-byte blocks to the computer.

That may confuse things.

On the other hand, maybe I'm wrong.

|  Anything I should worry about in converting to UEFI?  Any
| suggestions?

There are generally two conversions involved:

- old fashioned partitioning (MBR vs GUID)

- old fashioned booting (BIOS vs UEFI)

It is possible to do these separately.  Even though BIOS only boots from 
something it thinks is MBR, Linux distros can and do create 
GUID-partitioned disks that have a fake MBR at the start.

Personally, I have done clean installs for these transitions.  Clean 
installs are easy and they tend to result in a cleaner system.  
Superstition again.---
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Re: [GTALUG] Booting linux from nvme disk?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Peter King via talk 

| Anyone had success with getting linux to boot from an nvme disk?

Installation just worked for me (Fedora).  But I've only installed
them in recent computers.  Mind you, I might be using knowledge that I
don't remember I'm using.

Back in the Haswell days, firmware would not boot from NVMe.  I don't 
remember when that changed but it was several Intel generations ago.

Computers built as complete units (i.e. not sold as parts to be
assembled) sometimes have very limited firmware setup screens.  In
particular it can sometimes be very hard to set a boot target.  But if
I remember correctly, your computer was assembled from components by
you or your dealer.

One funny trick: have one ESP (EFI System Partition) on the system,
even if there are two drives.  I do that sometimes.  That means that
you steer the firmware between .efi files in that ESP rather than
between drive-and-thus-ESPs.  I'm not advocating this.

| (Over the years I've learning to approach installing Linux with fear and
| loathing, with almost all the problems being with the bootloader -- from
| LILO through GRUB and GRUB2 now down to UEFI.)

Do it enough and it becomes second nature?

I claim to have no problems but I just upgraded to Fedora 35 on my
main desktop and had the nvidia driver fail (because my card is too
old).  Grrr.
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[GTALUG] How to join GTALUG / pay membership

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

At least one person missed this in a longer earlier message.
Here's an extract of that message.

If the extact isn't perfectly clear, do ask us.

| From: h...@gtalug.org
| To: annou...@gtalug.org
| Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2021 17:12:21 -0400 (EDT)
| Subject: [GTALUG-Announce] GTALUG AGM - Tues. Nov. 9th, 7:30pm

| annual dues are paid by sending $20 by Interac e-transfer to
| [members...@gtalug.org]. If the member for whom the dues are paid is not the
| sender of the Interac transfer, please indicate that in the note message
| accompanying the payment.
|
| For any inquiries please email [members...@gtalug.org]
| or ask on the discussion email list.

Joining helps us sustain GTALUG.  You don't need to be a member to attend 
meetings or to subscribe to the mailing list.

Membership normally ends each October, just before the Annual General 
Meeting.  We were disrupted by the pandemic and the death of Chris Browne, 
our treasurer, but we hope that we're back on track.
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[GTALUG] GTALUG board election results (informal)

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

We have five board positions.
Four were available -- Alex Volkov's term expires next year.
Three people volunteered and were acclaimed:
Evan Leibovitch
Alan Heighway
Warren McPherson

Thanks and congratulations to our new board.

If you are interested in serving, there is still room.  Consider talking 
to a board member.

Thanks to everyone who joined or renewed their membership.  You can still 
renew if you haven't done so.
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[GTALUG] help run GTALUG!

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

GTALUG requires members, board members, and voluteers to run it.
The better they do their job, the less we see how important it is.

We have the Annual General Meeting tomorrow.  That's when board members 
get elected.  Details were sent out on Oct 30.

Please consider joining or renewing your membership.  It's easy -- see the 
Oct 30 email.  That supports GTALUG and it allows you to vote.

Consider putting your name forward for a position on the board.  We 
definitely need new blood because several mainstays are retiring.
No experience is necessary but any experience is valuable.
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Re: [GTALUG] UPS brand recommendations?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

Folks have recommended replacing the gel-cell batteries.

Where is a good source for these batteries?  I prefer online.

(I have UPSes that need new batteries.)
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Re: [GTALUG] Command doesn't work in script but works on command line?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Jim Ruxton via talk 

What Desktop Environment are you using?  Gnome?  KDE?  Something else?

When you say "run from the command line", is that command line inside
an xterm window?  (That's what I assumed.)  Or is it before you start a Desktop 
Environment.

| > Could it be a permissions issue? What perms do you have when running it from
| > the command line vs. running from a shell script by clicking the file/icon?
| 
| Thanks for the suggestion but no it's actually the same file with the same
| permissions. As I posted earlier when running the script by clicking it I get
| the error message:
| 
| Capture open error: Device or resource busy
| 
| Perhaps this is the clue. As to why it happens only when executing the file by
| clicking it I am not sure. Perhaps I should ask in a Linux sound or music
| forum. Maybe its something specific to alsa?

That's a half-useful useful message.  It doesn't say what resource is
being used.

There might be some hints in
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=116042
Pretty old and not squarely on topic.

If I were tracking it down, I'd use the "strace" command.  A bit
arcane and a bit laborious.  It runs a command, listing all system
calls and their results.

Strace flags you might find useful.

-o logfile # where to put the log
-f # trace child processes too

Some system call will probably return EAGAIN or EBUSY or some other
code listed in errno(3).  You can compare this to a log of a working
run of the script to see what is different.
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Re: [GTALUG] [GTALUG-Ops] Command doesn't work in script but works on command line? (fwd)

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

Jim accidently sent this to me privately instead of to the list.  He 
confirmed this in further private email.  (I normally don't like copying 
private email to a public list.)

-- Forwarded message --
From: Jim Ruxton 
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2021 10:24:43 -0400
Subject: Re: [GTALUG] Command doesn't work in script but works on command line?

I am running the script by double clicking on it after making it executable and
setting scripts to run this way via nautilus.  All the other scripts I wrote run
fine this way. I tried running the script from the command line and that does
work. So it is only not running correctly when activated by the mouse? Still a
mystery.

Jim

On 2021-11-06 10:04 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> | From: Jim Ruxton via talk 
>
> | I'm having trouble with a simple script. It adds a second sounccard. This
> | command works on the command line but not in a script. Any ideas why?
>
> How are you running that script?  Is it from a cron script or something
> like it?  Does your script work when invoked from your command line?
>
> I haven't paid attention to JACK, but I assume that each Linux user
> session has some kind of jack context -- plumbing done by one user should
> not affect the plumbing of another user.  I don't really see this issue
> addressed in the first few jack documents I read.
>
> My guess is that your script is modifying a different context from the one
> you are observing.  That's really vague and hand-wavy, but that's the
> direction I'd investigate.---
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Re: [GTALUG] Command doesn't work in script but works on command line?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Jim Ruxton via talk 

| I'm having trouble with a simple script. It adds a second sounccard. This
| command works on the command line but not in a script. Any ideas why?

How are you running that script?  Is it from a cron script or something 
like it?  Does your script work when invoked from your command line?

I haven't paid attention to JACK, but I assume that each Linux user 
session has some kind of jack context -- plumbing done by one user should 
not affect the plumbing of another user.  I don't really see this issue 
addressed in the first few jack documents I read.

My guess is that your script is modifying a different context from the one 
you are observing.  That's really vague and hand-wavy, but that's the 
direction I'd investigate.
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Re: [GTALUG] Was Re: Heads up: Ubuntu 21.10 kills your desktop icons now - keyboards

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Evan Leibovitch via talk 

|   The emergence of high-end gaming on PCs has led to a quest for
| keyboards that are super-responsive and comfortable for long periods.

Yeah.  That seems like the best place to look.

Beware: I've found their goals are not completely aligned with mine.
Here are some.

One feature that I don't care about is rainbow coloured lights for the 
keys.  Benign, but you are paying for this.  On mine (a Razer Blackwidow 
Ultimate -- love the names), I've got a green light per key, solidly on 
unless I install a daemon to change that.

Another is "tenkeyless" which means "without numeric keypad".  I use
the numeric keypad and don't want to lose it.

Another is low-latency: I've never noticed keyboard latency.

Another is: ugly seems to be valued.

All support n-key rollover, for large n.  This requires sending multiple 
USB packets per keystroke.  This in turn confuses the firmware on a couple 
of our machines: if we wish to adjust firmware settings, we have to plug 
in a different keyboard.  As you can imagine, that took some effort to 
figure out.

There are many web pages that describe the colours of switches.


My wife likes "blue" keys (noisy and tactile).
I like "brown" keys (less noisy but tactile).

If you care a lot, you may care about the company that produced the 
switches.  I haven't bothered to sudy this aspect.

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Re: [GTALUG] Heads up: Ubuntu 21.10 kills your desktop icons

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk 

| On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 10:47:30AM -0400, Michael Hill via talk wrote:
| > I prefer the elegant design and centralized vision of the GNOME
| > desktop, but the whininess of the GNOME hatred here never gets old.

Agreed.

Gnome screen (not really a desktop metaphor) UI is mostly simple, which I 
mostly like.

In fact, since I first lived with GUI "desktops" (35 years ago?), I've 
been battered into submission.  Customization is a bit like building a 
sandcastle below the high-tide mark.  I just take the desktop that the 
distro prefers since I expect it to be better supported.

| When a desktop going from version 2 to 3 throws away everything users
| are used to, and the developers simply don't care, then it deserves any
| hate it receives.

The only way to break "technical debt" is to start over.

I actually like the result.

| If they wanted to have a totally new vision (which is perfectly fine to
| do), they should have started a new project, not hijacked an existing one.

Agreed.  But leaving an unmaintained chunk of software is an attractive 
nuisance.  Maintaining two versions is very resource intensive.  Compare 
the Gnome Shell 2->3 transition to the Python 2->3 transition.

| Personally what I want a desktop to do is:
| Let me launch programs (preferably by just typing the name in)

In Gnome Shell: type the Windows key, type as much of the program name as 
you have to, hit return when your choice is the first offered.

| Let me resize windows.

Yes, by conventional mousing.  I don't know of a keyboard-only way because 
I've never wanted one.

| Let me maximize windows.

Yes, by conventional mousing.

| Let me close windows.

Yes, by conventional mousing.

But it is better to get the application to close the Window.

| Let me alt+tab between the windows.

Not exactly.

First: ALT+TAB seems to work like Windows key + TAB.  I 
like using the Windows key because I've conceptualized the Windows key as 
the way of talking to the Gnome Shell whereas the application gets ALT.

Window+TAB gets you a choice of running applications to cycle through.  
All terminal windows, for example, will be represented by a single icon.  
If you wish to select a particular terminal window, you move to the 
universal terminal icon and type Down Arrow to be able to select.

I almost never use the down arrow version.  Possibly because it is a bit 
awkward.  But a flat list of windows would be bad for me: I have at least 
66 windows open right now; most are Firefox windows.

Selecting between apps-with-windows works well for me.

| Anything other than that is just extra.
| 
| Gnome 3 failed at quite a few of those basic things, at least for the
| first while which was inexcusable.

I don't remember such a failure.  It may be so.

| These days I tend to just use xfce.  kde does the job too, but tends to
| be slower and I don't need the extras it adds.

I've rarely used KDE.  It seemed a bit busy the few times I tried it.

I've not used XFCE enough to be comfortable with it.  I seem to remember 
that it requires few resources, which would be welcome on older machines.  
On newer ones, the enormous waste of heavier systems doesn't matter much.

The transition that hammered some of my machines was when compositing the 
desktop started requiring 3-D graphical ops.  Slow on many of my older 
machines.  That seemed gratuitous.

I have too little understanding of the graphics stack (it is so big!  
does it need to be?).  For some reason, my older machines' desktops seem 
to have gotten faster again.  I suspect that the software OpenGL 
implementation has improved.  But my observations are confusing.  For 
example, one of the machines that slowed down actually had an OK iGPU (AMD 
C50); perhaps the driver improved.
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Re: [GTALUG] Do people have opinions about the Framework modular laptop

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Evan Leibovitch via talk 

| They've not taken sides on Linux vs Microsoft ... you pay the Windows tax
| as everything ships with it.

That sure sounds like "taking sides" to me.

I'm no insider, but the rumours about Microsoft contracts seem to make
this wise.  If all units ship with Windows, it is cheap.  Otherwise it
is expensive.  I'm not confident that these rumours are accurate these
days.  Certainly a retail license for Windows is expensive.  Unless
you buy it from recyclers.

Erica said that there is no Windows bundled with the DIY version.  Good.  
The videos make the DIY version sound really easy to assemble (antenna 
connections on the WiFi card are a little tricky).

| As some have said, a Ryzen-based motherboard will be welcome -- especially
| since nobody seems to like Intel integrated graphics for games -- but given
| the current Windows 11 problems with AMD the delay can be excused.

According to some reports, Intel's new notebook iGPUs (Xe) are faster than 
AMD's iGPUs.  I would guess that the Intel GPU drivers for Linux 
are better too. (I don't care too much since I don't game and I'm not 
planning on buying a new notebook.)

AMD's comparable processors seem a little faster and often have more
cores.  Neither of these is important to me.  What might be more
important is that AMD processors might use less power and need less
cooling.

I've had some problems with Ryzen mobile CPUs and Linux.

| I've added RAM and replaced batteries in "sealed" laptops and it wasn't too
| hard.

Not all laptops are the same.  The general trend is to get worse.

It takes some skill and research to find where a given laptop model
falls on this scale.

A lot more laptops have soldered memory now.

Most have replaceable NVMe SSDs (not M1 Macs; not Microsoft Surface).

Batteries are another matter.  Most can be replaced with third-party 
batteries; my limited experience with these suppliers has been bad.

| And the variety of dongles is such that any current laptop with a
| PD-capable USB-C port is able to have external Ethernet and video no matter
| what ports it ships with.

I think so.  I imagine that any Framework module is simply a USB C to 
something adapter.  Your solution makes several modules redundant.

It's a Good Thing that the industry is converging on USB C for everything.  
Unfortunately every USB C connector seems to have a different subset of 
possible features.
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[GTALUG] War Story: Thunderbird vs my mail server

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

TL;DR: using self-signed x.509 certs with Thunderbird is hard

I run a mail server for my family.

One of us uses Thunderbird's POP3 to pick up mail.  This is through our 
LAN, not on the public internet.

My server uses self-signed certificates.  I don't care to become a 
customer of any certificate vendor, although I think Let's Encrypt is a 
Good Thing.  I haven't even bothered to create my own Certificate 
Authority.

My certificates expire, so I have to regenerate them.  (Since this happens 
only once a year, I don't always remember the drill.)  I just did that.

Thunderbird stopped being able to pick up mail.  There was NO diagnostic.  
Not to the user, and not to the sysadmin.  It didn't even say that it 
failed to pick up mail.

I soon discovered that I needed to get the new certs into Thunderbird.  
Previously, if I remember correctly, when confronted with a new cert, 
Thunderbird warned the user but could be coaxed to accept it and remember 
it.

How could I get Thunderbird to accept the new cert?  Why was it unhappy 
with the old one?  The lack of diagnostics meant I never did figure out 
why it was unhappy, but I did do a lot of experimenting.

In the end, I decided to manually install the new cert into 
Thunderbird.  Thunderbird has a facility to do this:
Edit: Preferences: (search for "cert"): manage certificates:
Add exception.

The Thunderbird facility required me to fill in an HTTPS URL from which to 
get the cert.  At first I thought that this would require me to set up a 
web server.  No, this design actually makes some sense: since Thunderbird 
will use the cert for TLS, why not use TLS and harvesting the cert from 
the negotiation.

The proper URL was HTTPS://my-pop3-server:995.
995 is the port used to serve POP3 (probably not obvious to many users).
But that didn't work!  With no diagnostic!

The answer can be extracted from 


The problem is that Thunderbird seems to have its own firewall, set up to 
block port 995 in some cases.  Which cases?  Not for POP3, but yes for the 
"Add exceptions".  Very Very dumb.

How to punch a hole in this firewall:
- find the registry editor (not called that, but that's what it is)
  Edit Preferences -> General -> Config Editor [at bottom]
  Add a new thing "network.security.ports.banned.override" and set it to 
  the string 995
This is a string so that a list of ports can be used.  This "preference" 
is documented (but not for Thunderbird):
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.security.ports.banned.override

Now you can add the cert through HTTPS (see above).

Optional: remove the security exception.  I left it in so I don't have to 
do this next year.
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Re: [GTALUG] Looking for assistance with Firefox

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk 

| Hmm, just noticed my tab count (in the main window) of my firefox says
| 503 tabs (not counting tabs in other windows although those have a
| lot less).  I think I better do some purging.

I have an urge, that I'm resisting, to see what happens with 500 tabs
in one window.

If you get more tabs than can fit in the tab bar (is that the right
name?), the list can scroll.  Scrolling through 500 would seem very
awkward.  There is also a drop down menus showing you the tabs.  But
500 in one menu sounds unwieldy.  I guess you can fall back on
searching for a tab ("% " in the URL.).

Len: how do you navigate through 503 tabs in a window?
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Re: [GTALUG] Looking for assistance with Firefox

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: o1bigtenor via talk 

| On Sat, Oct 9, 2021 at 8:12 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk 
| wrote:

| >   This shows bad discipline on
| > my part.
| >
| 
| 'bad disciple' regarding what - - - - not following through with the quit
| or 

Not keeping my quantity of tabs down.

| I've found that parking a page on a 'new tab' helps longevity (smile).

Yeah.  Superstition: tabs that are not the selected tab in a window gets 
less attention.  Less Javascript?  Who knows.

| > | From: o1bigtenor via talk 
| >
| > | > Are there hard limits that force Firefox to not renew pages as they were
| > | > (so more than xx number of pages)?
| > What do you mean by "renew pages"?  Is that "reload"? ^R
| 
| I'm not sure what the 'correct' term is!!!
| You've restarted your system.
| You ask for FF to be started.
| Typically I have been asked if I wish to 'restore' to the previous.
| (Firefox is set to restore previous session.)

So maybe the term is "restore"?

| FF has already been shut down and then asked to restore.
| My question is - - -  at what point in the use of resources does FF decide
| to
| 'not' honor the requested 'restore previous session'.
| That not restore can be selective - - - if one page has a plethora of tabs
| - -
| such a page may 'not' be restored even if all the other pages are.
| This last iteration for me - - - - well all the pages and all the tabs were
| not
| restored. That was the prompt for asking about what the are.

I don't think that it is documented.  I guess that this is a "soft 
landing" for being out of resources.

Maybe you'll get a chance to ask at tonight's meeting.  Our speaker is 
from Mozilla.

| >
| > | > If there are no 'hard' limits (programmed in per se) are there amounts 
of
| > | > pages or tabs or perhaps tabs/page or something else from this stew that
| > | > greater than xx tabs or yy pages or even a small number of pages having
| > | > more than xy tabs where such activity results in firefox not restarting 
as
| > | > it is listed to do so (restart the pages and tabs present upon 
shutdown) is
| > | > considered 'usual'?
| > | > I am trying to find parameters where I'm not faced with what I have 
right
| > | > now.
| >
| > I think that it just runs out of RAM or processor cycles.
| >
| 
| Hm - - - - so how many TB of ram does it take so this condition doesn't
| happen?

I assume that it uses all the resources it can.  And you use all the
tabs you can.

I know that I can have way way more tabs on a 24G machine than a 4G 
machine.

I know that a beefier CPU is better able to handl lots of tabs.  Some of 
which have horribly expensive javascript.  Some of which is from the ads 
that they have no control over.
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Re: [GTALUG] Looking for assistance with Firefox

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

All my knowledge of FF is superstition, not science.  The
specifications, the manual, and the code base are too large to
understand.

If I type ^Q in FF, I am currently told that I have 53 windows with
386 tabs.  Then I tell it not to quit.  This shows bad discipline on
my part.

Go to URL "about:performance" for some hints about what different tabs
cost.  I'm not sure that it is accurate.

Superstition: when things get bad, quit and restart.
Model: garbage collection of something is imperfect.

Superstition: some pages are way more expensive than others -- a
simple page-count isn't a great measure

Superstition: javascript eats my CPU.  Sometimes it makes my coputer's
fans sping up.  Sometimes FF tels me FF is taking a lot of CPU..
Often it is on Globe and Mail pages.

| From: o1bigtenor via talk 

| > Are there hard limits that force Firefox to not renew pages as they were
| > (so more than xx number of pages)?

What do you mean by "renew pages"?  Is that "reload"? ^R

| > Are there hard limits that force Firefox to not renew 'a' page (I've had
| > this happen where one page doesn't renew but all the rest do)?

I'd take it as a sign to close tabs you don't need any longer, quit
FF, and then restart it.

| > If there are no 'hard' limits (programmed in per se) are there amounts of
| > pages or tabs or perhaps tabs/page or something else from this stew that
| > greater than xx tabs or yy pages or even a small number of pages having
| > more than xy tabs where such activity results in firefox not restarting as
| > it is listed to do so (restart the pages and tabs present upon shutdown) is
| > considered 'usual'?
| > I am trying to find parameters where I'm not faced with what I have right
| > now.

I think that it just runs out of RAM or processor cycles.

| > There were about 30 odd different pages and from 15 to who knows how many
| > tabs per page. Some tabs were held as I was working on business deals.
| > Re-establishing this amount of stuff is a royal pita. If I know that any
| > behavior over a level described as 'x' is dangerous then I can work hard to
| > stay under those levels.

Superstition: no.

| > Please advise

Cut down on tabs.  FF is a lot snappier, starting and running, when it
isn't dragging all those tabs around.

You could start up another browser (I use Chromium) if you hav
something quick to do and FF isn't yet started.
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Re: [GTALUG] Enlarging /boot

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: William Witteman via talk 

| When I installed Debian on my current computer, I (foolishly) let the
| install script partition my disk.  Now I have a /boot partition that is too
| small.

Useless advice: I've never felt the need for a /boot partition.
I just have it as part of /.  Start up the time machine.

Turning this into useful advice: you could change your setup to do
this, abandoning the /boot partition.

I assume you are using UEFI booting.  In particular, grub and its bits
are living in /boot/efi (a mount point for the ESP).  

You need to have the grub.cfg refer to /boot inside / rather than
/boot the (obsolete) partition.

Off the top of my head, UNTESTED, here's what I'd try.  Do have a live
Linux USB stick standing by in case your surgery results in a broken
system.

1. unmount /boot/efi

2. cp -a  /boot /boot-new

3. mount /boot/efi

4. change things (mostly grub.cfg) ain /boot/efi/ so that they refer
   to the relocated /boot (a new GUUID, the one for /; a new path,
   including /boot).

5. umount /boot/efi

6. umount /boot

7, mv /boot /boot-old

8. mv /boot-new /boot

9, remove /boot from /etc/fstab

10, reboot.

The tricky bit is getting step 4 just right.
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[GTALUG] apropos of DCB's lightening talk on bad diagnostics, a Windows war story

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

A poet friend's Windows notebook ceased working and Windows could not get 
up again.  A couple of days work did not result in a working system.  He 
was going to solve the problem by buying a new machine.

I volunteered to attempt to fix his machine.

I investigated the system (using a live Fedora stick).  I found 
that his files were gone and that the disk wasn't 100% happy.  I fixed it 
by copying /dev/zero to the whole raw drive.  (There were 8 relocated 
sectors, not a strong sign that the disk is deteriorating quickly.)

Whereas before my fix, a short drive-self-test failed, afterwards it 
passed.

The next step was to make a bootable Win 10 installation disk.

A bootable Win 10 installation disk is not as simple as a bootable Linux 
disk.  It won't perform as a Live system.  It isn't made by dding a .iso 
to the USB flash stick.

On another Windows box, download the Media Creation Tool.  Run it, 
asking it to create an installation stick.  It downloads Windows, 
and uses the files to build the installation stick.

This failed for me.  I'm not alone.  There are many postings by confused 
users.  I found many many suggestions of work-arounds, but no convincing 
theory that any of them worked.

At the start of this thread, you'll see the truly useless error pop-up:



Windows 10 Setup

There was a problem running this tool

We're not sure what happened, but we're unable to run this tool on 
your PC.  If you continue experiencing problems, reference the 
error code when contacting customer support.
Error code 0x80042405 - 0xA001B

There is no evident customer support.  Just fora full of ignorance.  This 
problem (or at least this symptom) has been around for years.

For no good reason, I reformatted the USB stick and ran the MCT again.  
And it worked.  At the cost of having downloaded all of Win 10 twice.  MCT 
is too stupid to save its work.

Evan may like Windows, but my modest experiences with it are 
often unpleasant.

Now I'm onto the pleasures of installing Win 10 on a slow machine without 
an SSD.  This is an area where Linux is much much more streamlined.
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Re: [GTALUG] Vaccination Receipts on Linux

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Karen Lewellen via talk 

| which is why my question, about a human, still stands.
| Those are not screen readers, and there are countless individuals in the
| province who read and interact with the Internet differently.

The only accessibility concession I saw was a phone line:

  - call the Provincial Vaccine Information Line at 1-888-999-6488 (TTY 
for people who are deaf, hearing-impaired or speech-impaired:  
1-866-797-0007)

+ information is available in more than 300 languages
+ this line is available 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., 7 days a week
+ you may have to wait for an agent when call volumes are high

There is an Accessibility link that looks useless:


| And that does not even get me started on the reprehensible nature of access in
| much of Linux  for these populations.

Yeah.  That should be fixed.  By whom?  All of us, I guess.
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Re: [GTALUG] Vaccination Receipts on Linux

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

I've been told that the thing in email does not count as a receipt.  
Neither does the thing that they handed you when you got the vaccine.
You are supposed to go to

answer lots of questions, and get a real receipt.

| From: James Knott via talk 

| I have no problem reading mine.  I received both paper and PDF versions of the
| receipt and put the PDF on my smart phone.  Maybe yours are defective.

What's your MUA?  SeaMonkey?

| What happens if you detach it and then try reading?

Fails.

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[GTALUG] Vaccination Receipts on Linux

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

The Ontario Governement emailed us Vaccination Receipts shortly after we 
were vaccinated.

As of Sept 22, we will need to show them some places if we want access.

When I go back to that email, I find that it is defective.  You cannot 
read the PDF from my MUA (Alpine on Linux), and I suspect that this is 
true for any Linux or UNIX MUA.  Perhaps also for Apple MUAs.

The reason is that the PDF is sent as an attachment, with the wrong type 
specified in the attachment's headers:

Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8
Content-Disposition: attachment;filename=Dose_Admin_...pdf"

On POSIX systems, attachments with Content-Type "text", have CR LF 
sequences replaced by NL.

I was able to make it work by manually editing my mailbox, changing the 
Content-Type header to:

Content-Type: application/pdf


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[GTALUG] old computer / new computer

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

When I started playing with computers (1967) mainframes were the thing (we 
called them computers).

The University of Waterloo got an IBM SYSTEM/360-75, the biggest computer 
in Canada, in 1967 or 1968.  It filled a lot of the "Big Red Room", a
jewel case the size of gymnasium.

Eventually, it had 1MiB of core memory and 2MiB of LCS (slow core
memory).  It ran most of the computing work for the whole campus,
including student programs.

The successor to this hardware is IBM's System Z.  The latest announced 
processor chip has 512MiB of cache per socket.  I have no idea how many 
sockets a large system would have.

The /360 architecture only allowed for 24 bits of address -- 16M.  The 
/370 eventually allowed for 31 bits of address.  I don't know what Z's 
limits are.  Anyway, the whole contents of the 360-75 core would occupy 
1/512 of the cache of one socket of the Z.

The -75 didn't even have a cache.  The -85, introduced a couple of years 
later, did.  When an Ottawa company (SDL?) got one, that became the 
largest computer in Canada.

The fastest instructions on the 360-75 (for example, adding two registers) 
took .39 microseconds.

On my main computer in those days, the IBM 1710 Model 2, the fastest 
instruction took 70ns, plus 10ns for each pair of digits processed.  The
-75 was a LOT faster.

Now ordinary PCs are 2GHz or more and execute better than 1 instruction 
per cycle.  Perhaps 1000 times faster than the 360-75.

Bulk RAM is perhaps only 10 times faster.  But cache has a large effect.

Disk latencies might not be a lot better: 2,400 RPM vs 10,000 RPM but seek 
times, capacity, and bandwidth are.  Not to mention SSDs.

I cannot even estimate power requirements.  And you have to add power for 
cooling.

The price is perhaps 10,000 times lower.

You can see why I'm not really impressed with x86 improvements since 
Haswell.
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Re: [GTALUG] Win 11 requirements may be windfall for cheapskate Linux users

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Dave Collier-Brown via talk 

| However, recent AMD architecture changes have caused a large step
| upwards in number of hardware threads: my production Intels have either
| 10 or 18, and my two test AMDs have 512 and 1024. And they draw less
| current.

AMD's Thread-Ripper and Epyc have a lot of cores.  (I don't know how
to value hyperthreads, but Intel and AMD kind of match.)

How many processor sockets do your Intel and AMD systems have?  I'd
guess that the Intel has fewer sockets than the AMD, but it might not
be so.

Each socket generates a lot of heat.  Perhaps 200+w in servers.

Each socket might provide additional memory bandwidth.

As time has passed since Haswell, density of chips has gone up. My
i7-4770 has "22 nm lithography".  Current chips from AMD use TSMC's
7nm process which might be five times as dense as the Intel's 22nm.

Reasoning: not everything scales; Intel 10nm is about like TSMC 7nm;
(22/10) ^ 2 isn't far off 5.

So current processors ought to be five times as powerful in some way.
That way is mostly core count.  I imagine lots of cleverness improves
things too, but the Haswell generation was already fairly clever.

The i7-4770 has 4 cores and each had 2 hyperthreads.
Scale-by-5 and you get 20 cores.

Threadripper 3990x has 64 cores but it is way more expensive and
throws of a lot more heat (84w vs 280w).

Perhaps a better comparison would be with Ryzen 7 5700G.  Like the i7,
it has an integrated GPU.  It is rated at 65w.  It has 8 cores,
similar clock frequencies ("max boost clock" is higher), better
instructions/clock (IPC), better iGPU.  Currently the price is roughly
twice what the i7 would have cost (we live in strange times).

Xeon prices have historically been very high.  AMD's server parts have
cut like a knife through that market.

Summary: a Haswell system's book value has amortized down to almost
nothing and yet it still works well for most desktop users.  Why
upgrade?  Perhaps lots of little things:
- NVMe support
- USB improvements since USB 3.0
- DDR4 instead of DDR3
- Win 11 likes newer systems
- a few security things that users likely don't understand
- AVX 512
- PCI 4
- improvements in gaming performance -- every little bit counts

(You can get Dell XPS desktops with 10th and 11th gen Intel Core
processors quite cheaply off of Kijiji at the moment.  People bought
them for the video card, ripped that out, and are selling the rest of
the system.  If I actually needed a new desktop right now, that's what
I might buy.)

| This doesn't have as much effect on small machines, but it does greatly
| improve price-performance. Expect to see a step-function upwards in
| performance and some price improvements as the bottleneck shifts away
| from chip price toward capacity per watt.

Yeah.  Desktops are not improved much; big server systems much more so.

I keep expecting killer ARM servers.  Very slow to arrive.

But then I (and perhaps you) thought Sun's Niagara was a killer system
too.
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Re: [GTALUG] Win 11 requirements may be windfall for cheapskate Linux users

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: o1bigtenor via talk 

| Somehow I'm supposed to believe that Windows is serious about security - -
| - - tough for me to believe.
| Yes they will eliminate a couple deep security flaws but what about the 10s
| of thousands of other flaws?

Security is very hard in the face of a bounty of features.  Windows
has a lot of features.

Microsoft wants backwards compatability compatibility, at least for 
software. This means that re-achitecting things for greater security is 
very hard.

Most people don't like the inconvenience that comes with greater
security.  Nor do they want to pay for it.

Linux security is subject to the same forces.  We should not presume
that Linux has the high moral ground.

Linux's transparency is a double-edged sword from a security standpoint, 
but I think that it is a net win.  The same can be said for the diversity 
of Linux systems.

| I found 'linux' back in early 2000 after I got a virus on Win 98 SE.

OK, I'll admit it.  Win 98 security was way way worse than early
2000's Linux.

| Did some thinking at the time and realized that even at that time the
| anti-virus/bug killing industry was
| 'only' worth $4 billion USD and today likely 'far much more'.
| I remain unconvinced that M$ wants this part of its cash cow to disappear.

I'm not sure.  AV software isn't directly a profit centre for them.

Additionally, the bundled AV software on Windows badly degrades the
performance of the only Windows application I use (Windows Update).  If it
degrades the performance of other applications as badly, it alone
would be a strong reason to run Linux.  But I don't know this and
don't care to waste my time experimenting.  Windows Update is the
worst application I use on Windows, but perhaps because it is
essentially the only one I run.  (I use Windows run tax software once
a year.)

| They are just trying to
| appease some vocal detractors and will be able to point at these
| couple three flaws and say - - - -
| look Ma - - - we fixed the holes - - - - whilst creating ever more - - - -
| what a royal joke!

Actually, the new baseline requirements add to "defence in depth".
This is a Good Thing.  I expect Linux to use the features on systems
that have them available (except for the new style of Windows
drivers (DCH)).

| These changes will force about 85% of users to upgrade - - - I suppose its
| part of the plan to
| drive profit margins up but this could backfire if john q public figures
| out how they're getting
| hosed! (Hope it does get out!!)
| Likely Win 11 is also part of the forced upgrade routine too - - - - argh!!

It's a little fuzzy, but it looks as if Win 11 can run on old hardware
but automatic upgrading to Win 11 will be blocked.  Whether old
hardware gets replaced depends on whether
(1) the transition is desired by ordinary users
(2) the transition is easy for ordinary users to effect
(3) users understand (1) and (2) -- advertising can influence this.

Certainly the value proposition of replacing old hardware has never
been lower.  System capabilities, performance, and price have not been
improving quickly since Intel Core's 4th generation.

(As I've said before, my main desktop is almost eight years old and I
don't have a good reason to replace it.  I keep wanting to for some
odd version of fun or adventure, but have so far resisted.)
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[GTALUG] Win 11 requirements may be windfall for cheapskate Linux users

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

Win 11 has requirements that seem to obsolete a bunch of quite recent 
processors and devices.

Windows can be manually updated on these machines but they will feel 
obsolete.

- TPM 2.0 required.  Documented a lot of places.  It can be added to many 
  systems that don't have it.

- obsolete: Ryzen 1 and older AMD

- obsolete: most Intel Core 7th gen and all older

- obsolete: any device that has no DCH driver (these can include things on 
  the motherboard)

- unknown: Atom-based processor (like I'm  typing this on).

All these will still work fine with Linux.

I don't think any of my systems will qualify for Win 11.



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Re: [GTALUG] intel graphics announcement

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk 

| On Tue, Aug 24, 2021 at 06:20:45PM -0400, Scott Sullivan via talk wrote:

| > The High Preformance cards are still to hit the market. And while it's going
| > to be a while for Game developers to smooth over the rough edges in software
| > support, we're already seeing real products leveraging the new graphics for
| > gaming on hand held PC platforms.
| 
| It should not be up to game developers to fix issues, the driver
| developers should make the drivers work properly.

I'm not in the gaming world.  Not as a producer and not as a consumer.
So what I say is unreliable.

Here's why I think that game developers need to help make the Xe
platform useful for games.

Games tend to need high performance graphics.  Games that don't are
not relevant to this discussion.

Games are coded to the platform.

They have often been enticed to use features that are only on one
platform.  For example, NVIDIA's PhysX SDK.  Or NVIDIA's ray tracing
hardware.

They have often been optimized to run on particular hardware.  Or
separately optimized for different achitectures.  But optimizing for
Xe is surely just beginning.
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Re: [GTALUG] intel graphics announcement

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: o1bigtenor via talk 

| Found an announcement from INtel that they are getting back, I think, into
| graphics cards - - - in a big way.
| 
| Did some searching - - - - all I can find is 'purdy pitchers' and swag for
| sale.
| 
| Is this some more fud or is intel serious?
| 
| Anyone out there know - - - if so I'm guessing it will be 24 months before
| anything useful shows up - - -yes?

(from my increasingly fallible memory) Intel's Xe(tm) GPU architecture is 
already shipping on (some?) 11th gen processors, as iGPUs.  I think that 
discrete GPUs for mobile are shipping too.

The first card is supposed to show up in 2022q1. They also announced 
ARC(tm) and Alchemist branding.


There is a variant for high-performance computing.  Or maybe two (Xe-HP 
and Xe-HPC).

My understanding is that there will be good and open support in Linux.  
Intel has been good about this, but perhaps only because it has been 
behind AMD and Nvidia in performance.  (They probably ship more iGPUs than 
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Re: [GTALUG] Today! Re: [GTALUG-Announce] Meeting Tomorrow

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk 

| Please tell me there is a recording.  I forgot about it and this sounded
| really interesting.

Alan made a Zoom recording.  I would guess that it will be made public.

The QA session was not recorded.  I found it very interesting, but then I 
would since I asked too many of the questions.
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