Decided to cash in those Digital Ocean credits and spun up a Gemini server for fun. Got a $2 domain as well. It’s been fun, thought I had some frustration with SSH keys but I sorted that out now. It’s my first experience with actually linking a domain to an IP and managing a server remotely that wasn’t on my home network.
Also the first time I’ve ever made a systemd service to start the server on boot. 10/10 would do it again!
My Linux week has been interesting. I tried out Fedora in a vm to try out Gnome 40. I like it but was shocked to see my beloved plank in not compatible with Wayland. I know technically all I need to do is change to activities view to see the built in dock but I have to switch to activities view to see the dock. I’ll stick with pop for another generation I think.
Did an in-place upgrade to Kubuntu 21.04 on my laptop yesterday evening…
The official update channel seemingly hadn’t been opened yet, so I had to run
do-release-upgrade -m desktop -d
I would generally recommend NOT using -d, as it is meant to be used to upgrade to the development release, so there might be the possibility of landing on 21.10 by accident once those repos are up… I’m not quite familiar with how that all works.
I did have to remove manually some old kernels to make extra space on the /boot partition, because for some reason apt autoremove didn’t do that automatically, which it does on my Desktop (Kubuntu 20.04). Other than that, everything went smoothly, and I like the new KDE application launcher.
Yesterday was my weekly backup day. I did backup all data from desktop (Ryzen) to backup-server (Pentium 4 HT).
I had some issues related to UEFI with my laptop a 2011 HP Elitebook 8460p and Ubuntu 21.04 booting from ZFS. I had to reset the BIOS and reinstall Ubuntu. I installed Ubuntu without UEFI enabled, but I had to enable it again, otherwise Ubuntu did not boot.
The wall paper is from the area, where I lived as a young boy, the park did not exist yet, but it was a small forest ideal for us young boys. The town is Hengelo in the Netherlands at 10km of the German border.
I’m interested in the horror stories if you have any in the first 90 days… 
Playing with Debian sid on a Thinkpad X201. Bullseye probably will be released in May? The RC1 is out and Xfce 4.16 also landed in Debian, great!
Nice, I started doing some distro hopping and sid is definitely one I want to check out. I want to give the Devuan version a whirl too.
EDIT:
While Sid sounds great, what I’m really used to is the nice Cinnamon configuration that comes with Linux Mint. So I thought, just for an experiment, I’d take Linux Mint Debian Edition and replace the stable Debian repos with the Sid repos. After a couple of alternating rounds of apt dist-upgrade followed by apt install -f it’s all up to date and working FOR NOW. I know, I’m a monster right?
lol. wget to the rescue
Just finished my weekly backup to my 2003 Backup-Server, based on a Pentium 4 HT, 2 GB DDR; 2 IDE HDDs and 2 laptop HDDs, in total 1.21TB. The original Compaq Evo Tower still has the Windows 98SE stickers.
My 1 TB SSHD in my laptop did break down, so I had to look for a replacement. I looked at three option all around DOP 8800 ($154) plus/minus 10%.
I divided my “work” over 5 Virtual Machines and I run exactly the same VMs on desktop and laptop. I have another 50 VMs just for fun, mainly nostalgia like running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 or playing music in Windows XP.
On my desktop I run Ubuntu 21.04 on OpenZFS 2.0.2. Running VMs with respect to performance is close between my SSD cached HDDs and my nvme-SSD (3400/2300 MB/s). The desktop has a 3 level storage hierarchy for the HDDs. It has an lz4 compressed 4 GB memory cache (L1ARC) and a 120 GB lz4 compressed SSD cache (L2ARC) on top of 2 lz4 compressed and striped HDDs.
The active VM runs from the memory cache with hit rate of ~98%, so basically except for booting/loading, the VMs run from the L1ARC. That is comparable to running the VMs from a RAM disk. For booting/loading the system runs from the L2ARC (SSD). Boot time for Ubuntu 20.04 is 14 seconds from my nvme-SSD, while Ubuntu 18.04 boots in 19 seconds from the sata-SSD cached HDDs. Reboot times are ~10 seconds for both, because both reboot from the memory cache.
So that is why, I decided to replace my faulty SSHD with the 2 TB HDD supported by a 120 GB SSD cache. It is a true improvement, because I doubled storage space and the SSD cache is 120 GB (500MB/s) instead of the SSHD’s 8 GB (200MB/s).
How long did the ssd last? I know it’s a relative question – but I’m just curious.
I bought it in May 2017 and the breakdown was March 2021. You did ask about a SSD, but I had a SSHD, which is basically a 1 TB HDD with a 8 GB solid state cache.
I did not use the laptop very much, so the SSHD only had a few power-on months. It was a refurbished SSHD.
Reorganized my Ubuntu development editions. I deleted all development editions of 21.04 and installed Xubuntu 21.10 on ZFS and Ubuntu 21.10 with QEMU/KVM. That last one now looks like:
Or in a simple drawing:
Windows Vista or Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
on top of
Ubuntu 21.10 on ext4 with QEMU/KVM
on top of
Ubuntu 21.04 on OpenZFS with Virtualbox
on top of the hardware
Ryzen 3 2200G; 16GB
Windows Vista boots in 1 minute, 35 seconds, so it is not very responsive running on top of a stack of two Ubuntu OSes. It is just workable. I have this configuration to keep an eye on the developments in QEMU/KVM.
I did spend a lot of time to find the correct drivers for Vista. And I did update all iobit utilities like:
In Ubuntu 14.04, I can access folders located on the Host Ubuntu 21.04. In Windows Vista, that is not yet possible. That needs some more work.
I tried out manjaros gnome edition excited to find out it has pop shell integration. I was dissapointed though to discover that the implementation was buggy. The auto tiling often left the window maximised to half the screen or some times correctly full screen.
So back to genuine pop os for me.
Because I have a new machine to play with and it is weekend I installed Arch btw, actually EndeavorOS, of course. 
I went with LXQT and want to see how it goes.
Actually it is fun to use it. Very light, very fast and I enjoy pacman even though every time I want to install a new package my muscle memory automatically wants to apt install something.
I think the only thing I installed from the AUR thanks to yay, yay 
, is qlipper. I love that LXQT is just vanilla because every other distro is customizing it heavily and I never could feel welcome in the LXQT environment but by doing just basic customization by myself I am happy with the results.
Arch (btw) made me laugh 
Rumour has it they announced an installer on April 1st, though I wonder how much social stigma there may be in their community attached to using it 
I tried Manjaro for a good long while in a VM. It does have a polished front-end but I’m not sure how stable it would be if needing to dive a little deeper, say manually install something from command-line. Sounds like EndeavorOS is working-out nicely for you.
I have to say, I’m seriously looking forward to Debian 11 now!
I’d be suspicious of an installer released on April 1st. (I don’t know if the meaning of that date translates globally as it does in the US).
1st of April is a “thing” in the UK.
@MichaelTunnell talked about this in an episode of TWIL. There was also an episode of DLN Extend about “Endeavour is not Arch” as Arch is about the process, experience and character building so to some an installer would make Arch not Arch. I’m interested to see what happens here.
Installed my new 2 TB HDD on my Dec 2011 HP Elitebook. I installed Ubuntu 21.04 on OpenZFS 2.0 and backed up all my data from desktop to laptop. I still have approx 53% of the space free. Basically I will use that space to store more snapshots. I now can reduce the number of kept snapshots on my 2003 Pentium 4 HT backup-server to probably 4 weeks. That backup server has 4 leftover HDDs (IDE, SATA-1, 3.5" and 2.5") in total 1.21 TB.
I’m still waiting for my drive caddy from China to replace the DVD. I intend to use it with a 120GB SSD, that I will use as SSD cache (L2ARC) for the HDD. The system now boots from HDD in ~70 seconds and the L2ARC should reduce it to ~20 seconds.
The system has some prototype UEFI support according to its messages. Ubuntu did install a GUID partition table and I now need the boot menu to boot the system. If I turn UEFI support off, the system refuses to boot and asks for an OS to be installed on the HDD. I bought that laptop May 2017, so next year, it is time to replace it.
