Re: [Trisquel-users] Conflicting packages and libqt4-opengl-dev
Have you tried apt-get with --no-install-recommends? Sometimes the recommends get in the way in surprising ways.
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
conformance to standard nand management (formatting etc.) tools, and direct communication with mtd-aware filesystems such as jffs2 and ubifs.
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
Cool, so the only downside being that it's not replaceable, then using it minimally should be the best. and worst case, it's like there's never been any NAND. No big deal :) Thanks for the info!
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
So MTD is an abstraction layer for raw flash storage? According to this, it's needed in order for the CPU to access the NAND (http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1187102=5). Or am I missing something?
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
> Wait, what if the NAND part wears out and becomes unuseable? Is an SD-card still useable? Yeah, based on what lkcl has said, support for booting from a microSD card is in the boot ROM. The NAND doesn't have to be used at all.
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
Exactly, I'd rather wear out a "disposable" and replaceable part rather than the part physically unmovable. Also, the OS most will most likely occupy a small fraction of the available space. And considering the OS on the NAND as a backup OS is a really nice idea. But thinking of the remaining space as extra storage kinda worries me, unless it's data that isn't meant to move, but only be accessed. Still, 1 writes minimum is a whole lot, and if I end up using the NAND as much as I use the SD-card on my phone, I won't have to worry about it. But one thing is for sure, the less the NAND is used, the better. Wait, what if the NAND part wears out and becomes unuseable? Is an SD-card still useable?
Re: [Trisquel-users] I'm leaving Trisquel
I'm not sure I understand : "universe" repo appears in Synaptic in Trisquel while "main" is the one updated in Ubuntu? And you can't know how often the packages are updated? So what? I mean, what's the big deal?
Re: [Trisquel-users] Development updates
Interesting! Thank you for that link. I'm also wondering why this has been abandoned.
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
I think you misunderstand the problem with flash memory. It's not random failures, but the inevitability of successfully writing to a bit on the flash memory for the last time (since each bit can only be written to a particular number of times), after which the flash memory becomes useless. Good flash memory firmware compensates for this by leveling this wear across the entirety of the flash memory. In fact, for backups, flash memory is probably more resilient than hard drives. By using a hard drive for backups, you are spinning up and spinning down this hard drive every time you use it; that's the type of thing that wears down a hard drive fastest. Hard drives are still cheap, so that alone might make them a better backup option (i.e. you can afford a really big capacity hard drive more easily than a really big capacity flash drive), but if you have a flash drive which is a sufficient size, it's probably the better option.
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
I have a Samsung SSD. It works pretty well. But I definitely wouldn't buy a no-name generic drive. But I back up to my old HDD just for safety...
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
don't EVER get anything other an an Intel S3500 series drive (or anything else with INTEL ssd controllers) - watch out for the S3700 series they use a 3rd party totally-shit SSD controller - or now you *might* be okay with Samsung EVO Pro, i haven't tested them though. report here: http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html raw NAND, i'd recommend using ubifs. if you ABSOLUTELY insist on the rather stupid practice of using ext4 directly on raw NAND, lock it to read-only, and use tmpfs even for /var/log - i did this successfully once by following someone else's howto and adapting it. the guy whose post i found had a set of scripts to remount the debian rootfs read-only or read-write so that he could install packages etc. mount /home on external sd card, and you're good to go.
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
argh there was a guy who did some research on the mailing list about USB-SSD drives a while ago, he found some reaaally good ones that had dual USB and SATA interfaces, those he said were superb. one of the main problems with USB flash drive firmware is they do cacheing of the first few sectors because it's ASSUMED that you're gonna be doing a FAT filesystem, i mean who would want to do something other than a FAT filesystem on a removable USB stick, right? so you write to the beginning of the drive, nooo problem... by the time you get to the end it's often dead within a few writes. ... yah so anyway this guy did a really comprehensive review - i'll remember his name soon, began with "g"... it was about 3 years ago on the arm-netbook mailing list...
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
it's full source code available, for both versions (all GPLv2 compliant). the first version from allwinner is... odd. they didn't do an MTD design, and they extended the block size beyond that of a normal NAND write-block... very weird. anyway it works. the second is a rewrite to conform to MTD, it's experimental, it's now working... sort-of, just be careful. available in u-boot and mainline (or at least in sunxi-next). yes it would be a libre storage device, these are cheap-and-cheerful raw nand devices. trisquel isn't one of the suggested OSes because there's no ARM port. or, not an up-to-date one. we looked. couldn't find one. at least now this is modern enough hardware to consider making a port.
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
yay! https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/07/31/0323255/new-crowdfunding-campaign-offers-modular-eoma68-computing-devices
Re: [Trisquel-users] can't restore bookmarks with .json file
Eh, mybe the Magique is onto something there. Try converting the json to html http://json.bloople.net/
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
You can run an OS on flash memory, but you will have to replace it eventually; it's not about "failure rate" with flash memory so much as failure time, because all flash memory has a definite number of writes that can be performed on it. Intelligent wear leveling tries to maximize this number, but it is literally impossible to use the same flash memory forever, unlike a hard drive which does tend to fail after some time but theoretically can last forever in the right conditions. Anyway, because of this, I would recommend using a microSD card for the OS rather than the NAND, regardless of how reliable it is. Just use the NAND for a backup OS, or for extra storage, or even as a shim for booting the drive that really has the OS on it. It's much easier to replace a microSD card than to replace the NAND. :) Besides, you can get more storage for the OS this way.
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
I read that modern SSDs are just as resilient as HDDs. In fact, in many cases they have a lower failure rate than an HDD used for the same tasks. What is best is to use SSD for frequently-written files such as the programs while storing and backing up to an HDD that isn't used often. To be honest NAND flash is probably fine for most tasks, as is an SSD.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Libre storage device?
I have no idea which devices this is compatible with. It could be dodgy...
Re: [Trisquel-users] I'm leaving Trisquel
Some people have mentioned security updates, or rather seemingly lack of them. As far as I can tell you synchronise the packages with Ubuntu according to templates you have created which gets rid of the nonfree packages. However, it isn't clear how often this is done. Another concern is that Ubuntu does not provide security updates to "universe" repositories, just "main", which is made up of some 7000 or so packages. Trisquel does not separate the repositories in the same manner as Ubuntu (from what appears in the /etc/apt/sources.list file), although in Synaptic Package Manager "universe" repositories appear. This is strange and confusing even for someone familiar with how Debian apt repositories work. So I cannot tell how up-to-date my Trisquel installation is. I do not use Trisquel now unfortunately although it was for other reasons before this. But I feel sad for the project as I like these forums. I hope the project does not go the way of BLAG or gNewSense.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Development updates
I followed jxself's example and threw a portion of my income at trisquel. It's a fixed %, not a fixed amount. It depends on my income, before expenses. And yes, I have to budget this in. But there are both gratis and libre software to do so. So I save my rights and money through Free Software, Trisquel. It therefore deserves my gratitude, a part of what of the money it saves me.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Libre storage device?
I wonder if exploiting the firmware in some USB device could be used to create a so-called "Bad USB" attack, without the victim knowing their USB drive has been turned into a zombie. Stranger things have happened...
Re: [Trisquel-users] So Linux-Libre Kernel 4.7 fails to boot properly
Ah ha! Good to know, thanks!
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
If it's possible to separate parts of the OS that get written often on the SD-card, that would be really cool. Of course, most of the 8Gib would remain unused, which would be a waste of real-estate. But at least, it would possibly keep it usable for a really long time. I don't know for example how torrents sharing (downloads-uploads) would affect its longevity. As for the SD-card, or a thumb drive, I have yet to see one fail. But of course, I never used one daily (for hours), for years.
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
Maybe some of the OS-- parts of it that are hardly moved, often read? (I assume that copying to and from is what kills NAND, and not reading from...?)
Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now
Thanks guys. I don't understand much of what a lot of writes on disk involves exactly (changing location of files, things like that?), but looking for it on the web, I found this (https://askleo.com/can_a_usb_thumbdrive_wear_out/): The best use of USB thumb drives and other flash memory-based devices is simply copy-to and copy-from. By that I mean copy the information to the thumbdrive to store it, copy it from the thumbdrive to a local hard disk to use it, and then copy it back to the thumb drive to store it. Never run disk-intensive applications directly against files stored on the thumb drive. If you copy to and from even ten times daily, you’re looking at three years of usage for the low end of the flash memory lifespan. (Yes, I know that’s not exact. In fact, it’s way more complex than that; factoring in things like the type of file system, FAT or NTFS, the efficiency of the device driver, and even the circuitry on the specific flash memory device – but it’s a good order of magnitude.) You may also note that your application speeds up when you copy your database to the hard disk for use. While reading flash memory is typically quite fast, writing is not. So the best strategy as a user for longevity would be to copy to and from the NAND, but not use applications that do this often (can't figure out examples. maybe intensive saves from a video editing software?)? but since there's a possibility to have external memory cards, I suppose it's possible to use the 8GiB of NAND for anything that's not meant to move often. Supposedly, reads wouldn't affect its longevity as much as copying to and from.
[Trisquel-users] Re : Development updates
It was tried in the past: https://trisquel.info/en/tasks I do not know why the suggested amounts were so small, neither why the idea was abandoned.
[Trisquel-users] Re : Development updates
I would like to remember the associate membership program for whoever wants to monthly donate to the Trisquel project: https://trisquel.info/member
[Trisquel-users] Re : can't restore bookmarks with .json file
The normal way to "export" the bookmarks (through the related window that one can get from the "Bookmarks" menu or with Ctrl+Shift+O) gives an HTML file, not a JSON file.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Development updates
You're welcome! :)
Re: [Trisquel-users] Development updates
Muchas Gracias Ruben ;-)
Re: [Trisquel-users] Development updates
@AFENO thanks that’s nice of you to help out on the bug*issues
Re: [Trisquel-users] So Linux-Libre Kernel 4.7 fails to boot properly
hmmm... well i can only tell you, that this is a quite virgin trisquel installation, and i did not mess with any package repo settings (other then adding your repo to sources.list). it seems like it is looking for "freesh-keyring:i386", and while "freesh-keyring(:all)" is available (and i manually installed it already with "sudo apt-get install freesh-keyring"), this seems not to be enough for the dependency satisfying algo ... strange indeed, but if you have no other report about 32bit actually working... i would assume that this would happen for everyone. can i somehow create a dummy package "freesh-keyring:i386" that depends on "freesh-keyring:all"? (even though it makes no sense) tell me if i can test something.
