My sons are in that age bracket and when they requested a laptops for themselves (older sister got one for school stuff) I “borrowed” decommissioned thinkpads from work, threw empty ssd’s on them and gave computers to boys with linux mint installer on usb-stick. Younger one got it running in couple of hours without any help and is actively learning on how to use the thing, yesterday he told me how he had learned to open software using keyboard shortcuts and in general is interested about the tinkering aspect of things. Older one has a bit more pragmatic approach, he got the installation done as well but he’s not interested about the computer itself as it’s just a tool to listen to a music, look up for tutorials for his other interests and things like that.
Both cases are of course equally valid and I’m just happy that they are willing to learn things beyond just pushing the buttons. But I’m also (secretly) happy that my youngest shares my interests and he’s been doing simple games with scratch and in general shows interest on how the computers, networking and other stuff actually works.
I haven’t installed ubuntu in a while, but in EU you need to have prior consent from the user to gather any kind of data and if I remember correctly I haven’t seen such thing. And it’s not enough to bury that into documentation and say ‘if you use our software you allow us to blah blah’, you must get consent via an action from the user which spesifically allows that, so if telemetry comes silently with ‘apt dist-upgrade’ it’s not enough.
I’m in the market for a Linux friendly ultralight laptop to check web apps and run terminal, nothing fancier then that. Do any cheap systems exits these days? I was looking at a chrome book but apparently the mediatek chip doesn’t play nicely with FOSS....
I used to have X230 as a daily driver for laptop (I got separate desktop) and it’s a really nice machine for it’s size. Only the display is a bit lacking by todays standards as it’s only 1368x768, but for 150€ (give or take) it’s not too bad.
Guys I truly don’t mean to spam the community but these are legit questions. Yesterday I posted about linux compatibility and computers and every single person gave me knowledge to use and you’re all awesome....
I’d say that single core performance and amount of RAM you have are the biggest issues with running anything on old hardware. Apparently, in theory, you could run even modern kernel with just 4MB of RAM (or even less, good luck finding an 32bit system with less than 4MB). I don’t think you could fit any kind of graphical environment on top of that, but for an SSH terminal or something else lightweight it would be enough.
However a modern browser will easily consume couple gigabytes of RAM and even a ‘lightweight’ desktop environment like XFCE will consume couple hundred MB’s without much going on. So it depends heavily on what you consider to be ‘old’.
The computer at garage (which I’m writing this with) is Thinkstation S20 I got for free from the office years ago is from 2011. 12GB of RAM, 4 core Xeon CPU and aftermarket SSD on SATA-bus and this thing can easily do everything I need for it in this use case. Browsing the web on how to fix whatever I’m working with at the garage, listen music from spotify, occasional youtube-video, signal and things lke that. Granted this was on a higher end when it was new, but maybe it gives some perspective on things.
Oh, right, the screen resolution is something I didn’t even consider that much. My system has 1600x1200 display and GPU is Quadro FX570. This thing would absolutely struggle anything higher than 1080p, but as all the parts are free (minus the SSD, 128G drives are something like 30€ or less) this thing is easily good enough for what I use it for and it wouldn’t be that big of a stretch to run this thing as a daily driver, just add bigger SSD and maybe a bit more modern GPU with a 2k display and you’d be good to go.
And 1600x1200 isn’t that much anyways, if memory serves I used to have that resolution on a CRT back in the day. At least moving things around is much easier today.
I think that installation was originally 18.04 and I installed it when it was released. A while ago anyways and I’ve been upgrading it as new versions roll out and with the latest upgrade and snapd software it has become more and more annoying to keep the operating system happy and out of my way so I can do whatever I need to...
Great piece of information. I personally don’t see the benefits with immutable distribution, or at least it (without any experience) feels like that I’ll spend more time setting it up and tinkering with it than actually recovering from a rare cases where things just break. Or at least that’s the way it’s used to be for a very long time and even if something would break it atleast used to be pretty much as fast as reverting a snapshot to fix the problem. Sure, you need to be able to work on a bare console and browse trough log files, but I’m old enough that it was the only option back in the day if you wanted to get X running.
However the case today was something that I just couldn’t easily fix as the boot partition just didn’t have enough space (since when 700MB isn’t enough…) even a rollback wouldn’t have helped to actually fix the installation. Potentially I might had an option to move LVM partition on the disk to grow boot partition, but that would’ve required shrinking filesystem first (which isn’t trivial on a LVM PV) and the experience ubuntu has lately provided I just took the longer route and installed mint with zfs. It should be pretty stable as there’s no snap packages which update at random intervals and it’s a familiar environment for me (dpkg > rpm).
Even if immutable distros might not be for my use case, your comment has spawned a good thread of discussion and that’s absolutely a good thing.
Would I be correct to assume that you’ve been hurt by Btrfs in its infancy and choose to not rely on it since?
I have absolutely zero experience with btrfs. Mint doesn’t offer it by default and I’m just starting to learn bits’n’bobs of zfs (and I like it so far) so I just chose it with an idea that I can learn it on a real world situation. I already have zfs pool on my proxmox host, but for that I hope I’d gone with something else as it’s pretty hungry for memory and my server doesn’t have a ton to spare. But reinstalling that with something else is a whole another can of worms as I’d need to dump couple terabytes worth of data to somewhere else in order to make a clean install. I suppose it might be an option to move data around on the disks and convert the whole stack to LVM one drive at the time, but it’s something for the future.
But I imagine you couldn’t care less 😜.
I was a debian only user for a long time but when woody/sarge (back in 2005-2006) had pretty old binaries compared to upstream and ubuntu started to gain popularity I switched over. Specially the PPA support was really nice back then (and has been pretty good for several years), so specially for a desktop it was pretty good and if I’m not mistaken you could even switch from debian to ubuntu only by editing sources list and running dist-upgrade with some manual fixes.
So, coming from a mindset that everything just works and switching from a release to another is just a bit longer and more complex update the current trend rubs me in a very much wrong way.
So, basically the tl;dr is that life is much more complex today than it was back in the day where I could just tinker with things for hours without any responsibilities (and there’s a ton more to tinker with, my home automation setup really needs some TLC to optimize electricity consumption) so I just want an OS which gets out of my way and allows me to do whatever I need to whenever I need it. Immutable distro might be an answer, but currently I don’t have spare hours to actually learn how they work. I just want my sysVinit back with distributions which can go on for a decade without any major hiccups.
But regardless of that you can still daily drive it as your distribution and many do. That’s why I said it’s an adventure of it’s own, but if you know what you’re getting into and accept the reality with Sid it can work. Personally I don’t want to use it at this point in my life, but I used to run it for several years when woody was getting a bit old on packages and sarge wasn’t out yet (and I think I just continued with sid after sarge release).
You can still fuddle your way through even that scenario and retain a fully working system.
Or at least you used to have that option without too much of a headache. I’m pretty sure you can still do it tho, but the steps required to ‘rescue’ old installation tend to be more complex than they used to be.
I haven’t been paying attention on the rolling releases scene, but I’m pretty sure there was no mature option back when I installed that thing in 2019 or so other than Debian Sid (and daily driving that used to be an adventure in itself, but it’s been years since I last had a system like that). With ubuntu since at least version 14 upgrading from stable release to another was pretty stable experience, but that’s not the experience I’m having today.
You might be correct, but I haven’t found one that I’d like (not that I’ve really looked for one either). Maybe you know if there’s any Debian derivatives which do rolling releases?
I like cinnamon and I’ve been running mint on my laptop for quite a while and I like it, so I’m going with it right now and plan for my next distro-hopping needs more carefully when installing.
But in general I’d say that Ubuntu is far from what it used to be and the TLC the latest version wants is just something I’m not willing to put up with. If something breaks on a update then it breaks, but at least give me an option to choose when it happens.
Yes, I know. Existing drive layout however says that I need to repartition the whole thing and that says that I need to copy couple of hundred GB’s over to something else before reinstallation and so on, so it’s not a half hour job. And while I’m at it it’s better to do it right than half-ass it over a long, long period of time.
Why I didn’t think of that. It whould have fixed the immediate problem pretty fast. I would still have the issue with too small boot partition, but it would’ve been faster to fix the issue at hand. But in either case, I’m pretty happy I got new distro installed and hopefully that’ll fulfil my needs better for years to come.
Broken computers aren’t really stressful to me anymore, but it sure plays a part that I kinda-sorta had waited for reason to wipe the whole thing anyways and as I could still access all the files on the system, so in the end it was somewhat convenient excuse to take the time to switch the distribution. Apparently I didn’t have backup for ~/.ssh/config even if I thoguht I did, but those dozen lines of configuration isn’t a big deal.
Thanks anyway, a good reminder that with linux there’s always options to work around the problem.
I used to have old ThinkStation as a home server. Even older ones like S20 I have couple of laying around is still pretty capable system (I’m typing this on one) and as they’ve been CAD workstations and things like that when they were new many have 12+GB of RAM already. I got mine for free troguh a work contact, but they should be available via ebay or (preferably) your local version of it for pretty cheap.
Then you just need new drives and their prices have dropped too. 100€ is a bit of a stretch, but if you can get a whole computer from someone in the industry it should be possible. I have a few systems laying around I could get rid of for a case of beer or something, but shipping alone from here would eat up majority of your budget (if anyone is interested in x3550 m3 throw me a message, located in Finland, I might remember the model wrong but that’s roughly in the ballpark).
Other than thinkstations I’d say you’ll want a xeon CPU with at least 4 hyperthread cores, 16GB RAM and all the drives your budget has left. SSD for a boot drive(s) is nice to have, but spinning rust will get you there eventually.
Many rack mounted servers only accept SAS-drives which are a bit more expensive. Tower mounts generally use SATA so you can just throw in whatever you have laying around. The main concern is amount of RAM available. For older systems it might be a bit difficult to find suitable components, so more you have already in place the better. For VM server I think 16GB or above is fine for learning and it might be possible to shoehorn most of the stuff in even with 8GB. Performance will definetly take a hit with less RAM, but with that budget some compromises are necessary.
So, in short, with that budget it might be possible if you have a friend who has access to discarded workstations or happen to stumble in a good deal with local companies. It’ll require some compromises and/or actively hunting for parts and with old hardware there’s always possibility of failure so plan accordingly.
Well I’ve joined the “accidentally trashing your system with rm -rf” club! Luckily I didn’t delete my home directory with all the things I care about, but I did delete /boot and /usr, and maybe /var (long story, boils down to me trying to delete non-system directories named those but reflexively adding the slash in front...
That can be done, but as others mentioned, if you don’t have permissions/other attributes for the files it’s going to be a real PITA to get everything working. If I had to do that I’d just copy over the files, chown everything to root and then use package manager to reinstall everything, but even that will most likely need manual fixes and figuring out what to change and to what value will take quite a bit of time and complexity of it depends heavily on what you had running on the host, specially things under /var.
I can handle the software part. I just want some ideas on how I can change the keys via a cheap and less-effort method. It is not a Peripheral keyboard, just the one integrated with my laptop....
With some models it can be done, but they are delicate things and going over the whole keyboard will most likely result in a couple of broken mechanisms and/or missing hooks on keycaps.
Hello, recently I have started to see the limit’s of vps’s and have been thinking about getting a hetzner dedicated server from the auction. My question is are they worth it and if so what would be the best way to make use of them....
have seen some people have networking issues with them.
I’ve been a happy customer for hetzner for almost a decade and I haven’t had any issues with their networking. If you’re running virtualization you need to take care of you MAC addresses or they won’t allow traffic and eventually will kick you off from their platform (and they have a good reason to do so). As long as you play by their rules on their hardware it’s rock solid, specially for the price.
Firewall kinda-sorta plays with this idea, but all the tech is pretty stupid (and main focus, if memory serves, isn’t even in the technology). It’s not a bad movie as a hollywood 13-in-a-dozen action category, but it’s a far cry from “Server Down” we have here.
Bing Chat (so ChatGPT) wrote an opening scene (or maybe more like a trailer, prompt was opening scene) too:
The opening scene of “Server Down” begins with a shot of a high-tech skyscraper. The camera then zooms into the basement of the building, where we see Jack Bauer, a nerdy and obsessive system administrator, working on his servers. He is surrounded by racks of blinking machines, tangled cables, and humming fans. Jack is wearing a t-shirt with a witty tech joke printed on it, and he is sipping a cup of coffee from a “World’s Best Sysadmin” mug.
Suddenly, the lights flicker, and the servers go offline. Jack’s face turns pale, and he drops his coffee mug. He frantically tries to reboot the servers, but nothing works. He checks the network connections, the power supply, and the cooling system, but everything seems fine. He then realizes that the problem is not with his servers, but with the building’s infrastructure. He rushes to the security room, where he finds out that the building has been taken over by terrorists.
The camera then cuts to the terrorists, who are holding the employees hostage and demanding a ransom from the government. They have cut off all communication lines, disabled the security cameras, and planted a bomb in the building. They are confident that they can get away with their plan, but they didn’t count on one thing: Jack Bauer.
The scene ends with Jack staring at the security monitors, his eyes burning with determination. He knows that he has to act fast to save his servers, his colleagues, and himself. He takes a deep breath, puts on his backpack, and heads towards the ventilation ducts. The adventure begins!
I’ve repurposed a 32 GB M.2 SATA SSD as a bootable “USB stick” and I’m putting useful tools on it. So far I’ve got memtest, seatools, gparted live, system rescue, clonezilla, and a live install iso of the distro installed on my PC. What other great bootable tools am I sleeping on?
Not spesifically a tool to put on a USB stick, but Ventoy is worth checking. I’ve had a bit mixed results with it on older hardware but when it works it’s pretty easy to manage your carry-on-tools.
12V 200A relays are pretty easy to find (I wouldn’t get one from alibaba tho), but that much current requires quite beefy wiring as well. Personally I’d review options to place auxiliary batteries in parallel since that would simplify wiring and the whole system a bit, but as I don’t know how your camper is built it can be tricky or you need to sacrifice storage space somewhere.
And as you’re placing a battery at the same space where people stay be careful with hydrogen. Charging lead acid battery produces hydrogen and in the worst case scenario, specially if you have a gas stove be dangerous if not lethal.
So you’ll have total of 3 batteries at the car? One for engine, existing utility battery and now you’re planning to install another utility battery, right? That should work. I don’t know how much current you’re pulling from the battery, so it’s difficult to recommend anything. Common bosh switching relay is something you can find from pretty much every car part store for ~5€, but I think they’re rated only up to 40A and I wouldn’t push them to the limit. Check your inverter datasheet how much current it can draw and preferably get a relay which can do double the maximum rating for longevity and stability.
Get a switching relay or one normally closed and another normally open one. That way there’s no paraller connection at all. Connecting two batteries together with different voltage levels causes a huge current spike, think jump starting a car and how thick those cables are. Arcing will happen on the relay contacts no matter how you switch it if there’s load connected.
And since you’re not talking about a trailer, is one of the batteries for the car itself? Since if you’re planning to use the secondary battery as a car battery too you need very heavy wiring to give starter enough amps to run plus running that over a relay is a whole another beast to manage since starter motor can pull hundreds of amps momentarily.
Any experience with teaching kids Linux?
Any one here has any experience with teaching 8 to 12 years old kids Linux?
Need to switch to Hanna Montana Linux now (lemmy.ml)
Looking for a "couch laptop"
I’m in the market for a Linux friendly ultralight laptop to check web apps and run terminal, nothing fancier then that. Do any cheap systems exits these days? I was looking at a chrome book but apparently the mediatek chip doesn’t play nicely with FOSS....
Are older, but Linux compatible computers capable of running the newest kernel/version of various distros?
Guys I truly don’t mean to spam the community but these are legit questions. Yesterday I posted about linux compatibility and computers and every single person gave me knowledge to use and you’re all awesome....
My ubuntu installation broke completely
I think that installation was originally 18.04 and I installed it when it was released. A while ago anyways and I’ve been upgrading it as new versions roll out and with the latest upgrade and snapd software it has become more and more annoying to keep the operating system happy and out of my way so I can do whatever I need to...
Help me build a home server
Help me build a home server with a budget of €100/$109 (I live in Denmark)...
Can one recover from an accidental rm -rf of system directories by copying those files back in from a backup?
Well I’ve joined the “accidentally trashing your system with rm -rf” club! Luckily I didn’t delete my home directory with all the things I care about, but I did delete /boot and /usr, and maybe /var (long story, boils down to me trying to delete non-system directories named those but reflexively adding the slash in front...
Requesting advice on converting a Laptop Keyboard from QWERTY to Colemak-dh
I can handle the software part. I just want some ideas on how I can change the keys via a cheap and less-effort method. It is not a Peripheral keyboard, just the one integrated with my laptop....
Hetzner Server auction worth it?
Hello, recently I have started to see the limit’s of vps’s and have been thinking about getting a hetzner dedicated server from the auction. My question is are they worth it and if so what would be the best way to make use of them....
Devotion to duty (sh.itjust.works)
source
What bootable "live" images of useful tools?
I’ve repurposed a 32 GB M.2 SATA SSD as a bootable “USB stick” and I’m putting useful tools on it. So far I’ve got memtest, seatools, gparted live, system rescue, clonezilla, and a live install iso of the distro installed on my PC. What other great bootable tools am I sleeping on?
Two battery setup in camper
I want to change te battery setup in the camper van a bit....