After being dissastisfied with OSMC on my RPi4, I decided to give LibreELEC (10.0.0) a chance. Worked very nicely. My cheap-and-cheery OSMC remote control worked with no configuration whatsoever (it Just Worked™). 
One slight complaint: transferring files into the Kodi install from a USB stick worked fine if the stick was formatted with VFAT. But not LUKS-encrypted EXT4! No support for LUKS, yet, I guess.
Grinning with this sweet 1 liner.
I had several PDF files to print from a directory. I used this 1 liner to save the day – ( okay - at least part of the day).
for f in *.pdf; do lp "$f"; done
I hit the enter key and walked away from my desk.
Now that is very cool
I had terrible bad response times from my brand new 2 TB Seagate STM2000M007 HDD, sometimes it takes 5 seconds or so to start the terminal and the system boots in 4 minutes from the HDD. I installed Ubuntu 21.10 on OpenZFS 2.0.6 and that combination on that HDD did cause that awful performance. I did not experience those long boot times since the previous century. It is a normal laptop drive at 5400 rpm. Its sequential read/write speeds are ~140MB/s while its seek times are ~13 msec.
The measurement with gnome disk utility confirmed those figures, the throughput on ZFS was ~120MB/s, but the difference could be caused by the latency of the 10 year old i5-2520M (2C4T; 2.5/3.2GHz). I did the standard ZFS install of Ubuntu. The disk SMART data was OK.
Everything seems normal, ashift is set to 12 and the HDD has 4096 Byte physical sectors and 512 Byte logical sectors. All partitions are starting on 2048 boundaries of UEFI. I had been thinking about misalignment, because the throughput as measured by Conky was a factor 2 larger than measured by ZFS itself (zpool iostat). The disk read-out is
Disk /dev/sdd: 1.82 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors
Disk model: 007-1R8174
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: F4581F88-2B2E-4C16-8D73-E55EC05CF987
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sdd1 2048 4095 2048 1M BIOS boot
/dev/sdd2 4096 1054719 1050624 513M EFI System
/dev/sdd3 1054720 5249023 4194304 2G Linux swap
/dev/sdd4 5249024 9443327 4194304 2G Solaris boot
/dev/sdd5 9443328 3907029134 3897585807 1.8T Solaris root
Many partitions start on the 2048 B boundary or a multiple thereof, which means that you have a misalignment and you double the number of IO Operations needed to read/write a ZFS record. In my opinion an error in the ZFS implementation of Ubuntu, however most people will not have the issue, because they run mostly from 512B aligned SSDs or nvme-SSDs.
The easiest solution for me is to run Ubuntu from a 16GB ext4 partition and use the remainder of the HDD for ZFS data storage on a Partition aligned by me :). Anyhow I will replace this 10 year old off-lease laptop by a 5 year old off-lease laptop in the next spring during my family visit in Europe.
The re-installation of Ubuntu on ext4 instead of zfs did improve the boot time from ~4 minutes to ~40 seconds.
A couple weeks ago I was at the local landfill and in the “electronics recycling” bin I found a motherboard with cooler and ram still attached. It looked to be “fairly recent” hardware compared to what I usually find there. I presumed Linux would do a better job recycling this machine than whatever was going to happen to it so I took it.
Turns out the hardware was more recent than my current machine. An Intel Core i7 4790K graced the socket and 16 gigs of ram came with it. Turns out the RAM was bad and resulted in a perpetual boot loop but it powered up and booted just great after swapping that out. I ran some CPU stress tests using stress and s-tui as well as the yes test for a few hours. All peachy.
Compared to Geekbench results from my current system this processor improves single core performance by 40% and multithreaded by 20% if my math is correct. So now the MOBO et al. is in my main rig and it was completely free from the landfill. Which is exactly where I got my very first computer that started my Linux journey to begin with. Full circle.
Very nice find there
What a great find! This brings back memories – way back in the day circa 1992/3 I found my first 486DX2-66 CPU in a dumpster dive behind a computer store. It worked perfectly and I used it for many years. That find made me a regular diver for a few years – LOL.
Happy that you got such an upgrade at the best price ever. Plus, you kept it out of the landfill. Good on you!
That is a great find. I don’t have any functional 90s era x86 machines. I sort of wish I did though. I think the oldest x86 I currently have is Pentium 3 from the early 2000s. I do have a 286 that I loved for a long time but I am not sure what to do with it now. The drive, with all the games I enjoyed has long since spun its last.
I suppose this isn’t specifically Linux, although I’m definitely running on Linux 
My Firefox profile has been getting a bit slow and I decided to clean it up a bit. First place to start is all my open tabs… So I “Select all tabs” and save them to a bookmark folder.
That was easy. Now to delete the tabs and I get the following warning: “Do you really want close 4132 tabs?”
I knew I had a few tabs open but I didn’t realise it was that much!
Have you thought about Onetab ? It has really helped me in many ways. I never liked having tabs open at all, but when doing research it can come in handy to have several open. OneTab is great to be able to save and come back to things.
Whenever you find yourself with too many tabs, click the OneTab icon to convert all of your tabs into a list. When you need to access the tabs again, you can either restore them individually or all at once.
OneTab lets you easily export and import your tabs as a list of URLs. You can also create a web page from your list of tabs, so that you can easily share your tabs with other people, other computers, or with your smartphone or tablet.
I have actually tried that ages ago and forgotten about it. Thanks for the reminder, I’ll give it another go.
Quick update: A day (or two) later and I remember why I stopped using OneTab. It’s because I started playing with STG (Simple Tab Groups) and the two are incompatible and can’t be enabled at the same time.
Not such a bad Linux week for me. I’ve been playing with some Gnome shell and gtk themes. My Fedora 35 Gnome system is now looking pretty fancy.
This week I installed MX Linux 21 on an external hard drive. This was a bit of a risk, because I didn’t want it to interfere with the grub on the internal M.2 drive, where I currently run Ubuntu 20.04 (and it’s starting to annoy me with an embarrassing bug that came from out of nowhere, but is still livable for now).
Like I wanted the grubs of both OS’s to leave each other alone, not overwriting each other, or adding menu entries for the other one, like it was the dominant one in charge of the other. The MX Linux installer had the sufficient flexibility and sufficient nerdiness to accommodate this with no problems. I was so very pleased that this worked so well. After a short amount of tweaking, it was all settled into. The default desktop background in MX 21 is also really nice. I didn’t change it, for like the first time in my life.
The MX devs are so awesome. MX Linux is so very satisfyingly nerdy. Not to mention, blazing fast, in comparison to Ubuntu.
Am I right in thinking MX Linux started life as Mepis and later Simply Mepis? I think I read that somewhere. Mepis was KDE 3 back then I daily drive this for years.
Right now I am running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as my main driver, with the plasma desktop. Everything runs smoothly and I’ve not run into any sorts of problems at all.
I also tried Fedora Kinoite on another NUC I have, and it had no issues either, so I like that.
Usually I am attracted to the more esoteric distros, like Void or NixOS, but sometimes I want everything to Just Work, and OpenSUSE and Fedora usually have no trouble in that regard. I’m just more used to OpenSUSE because SUSE Linux was my first distro. I love YAST personally.
I get my Raspberry Pi Zero 2W today, I pre-ordered it, but it took a while to get here. Anyways, I already downloaded the new Raspberry Pi OS for it, and will install a NFS server on there. I think it’s really suited to a home file server role because how tiny it is. That or use it for RetroPie in a Retroflag Gameboy-style case, since apparently it can do up Dreamcast pretty well in that regard.
I am also running a server on Digital ocean, a FreeBSD server that runs Gemini and a website. I really wish Digital Ocean had a rolling release distro for a server, then I would switch from FreeBSD to it. Well, a “stable” rolling release distro, like Manjaro or something… maybe I should look again at their options.
As far as games go, I wanna get Civ 6. I recently bought BallisticNG, which is like Wipeout for the original Playstation. If you’ve ever played F-Zero, it’s like that, except with weapons. Pretty fun!
I think so. The Mepis community and Antix got together for MX. Though Antix still exists as its own distribution whereas Mepis no longer exists and its community came to be MX Linux.
I’ve heard of workarounds that allow you to install whichever distro you want. I like Digital Ocean but Linode has quite a few more options including Arch.
After watching this video:
I had one of those “shut up and take my money” moments (to buy this product), and in short order, one of the last units from Mouser was ordered. The price was a little higher than I would have liked, but I felt it was still worth it anyway, due to the rarity of stock.
It comes with OpenWRT installed in the 32GB eMMC on the included CM4 board. I like how it’s a comprehensive kit. That’s worth something to me.
I’ve been working on a project to aggregate data for a rollout. User feedback, User Stories, Bug reports the whole thing. Just a ti bit of what I am doing:
A company, unwilling to renegotiate with their Hardware Vendor, since their Laptops, Desktops, Lab PC’s can hold up with minimal effort for atleast 2 more yrs. What’s the option? Since they own the current hardware, Linux is on the table. The problem has been identifying a Linux experience that is a level ground for all users. No ! Linux Mint is not on the table, and the “Linux Mint is good for windows converts” Does not hold up in my book.
We’ve started testing with small groups to some mixed results, but not disruptive enough to throw the concept all out the window. The sticking points are more Linux-user-centric than terrible design. Some things just don’t work out of the box, some things are seamless.
This will go on for a while, but i think in the end, it’ll be fine.
Now I am using Ubuntu Touch full time on my old Galaxy S3 Neo and my Android phone finally gave up working correctly after two years in use although it still has one year of official support. Obsolescence is shouting.
Thank you Linux and UBports for making my hardware still usable and not going to waste! 