with many thanks to Hugh Blemings the Virtual Coffee calls were a lot of fun. in LibreSOC we liked them so much that it would be a shame to stop.
the time and day is the same: every tuesday, UTC 22:00 hrs. this turns out to be a reasonably sane time for both US and AU, a little late for EU though.
it is on jitsi meet, if you would like the URL (which does not have a password set) please email me and i will privately provide the link.
if you cannot use jitsi meet directly (web, android) there is a dialup number available as well.
discussion is, as usual, eclectic and entirely informal. even OpenPOWER can be a topic for discussion.
l.
Sounds like a neat group. What should I study up on to get the most out of the discussion?
On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 12:30 AM Richard Wilbur richard.wilbur@gmail.com wrote:
Sounds like a neat group. What should I study up on to get the most out of the discussion?
computers, time keeping (using atomic clocks), radio astronomy, 6-hole whistles, cubesat satellites, err... nothing at all that's predictable :) it's not that kind of formal discussion, it's intended as more of an informal social thing.
l.
is on, now... l.
continues in 5 mins...
On Tue, Oct 06, 2020 at 10:55:11PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
continues in 5 mins...
Yes ... I could not join ... I had set up a jitsi meeting early y/day evening ... Firefox could not see my webcam it could a few days ago - but was updated on Saturday - which, I suspect, is the issue - nothing else changed.
That FF update also brought in new options "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" and auto-set to on ... I do not recall that I was asked :-(
Time to upgrade my desktop to be able to run Brave (which does work with jitsi). I have run RedHat/CentOS for 25 years, but Centos 8 comes with Gnome 3 -- which I hate with a passion. I could install Xfce - but prefer Mate - so I am prob going to install Linux Mint - a child of Debian.
My desktop has mirrored disks. I will break the mirror, install on one disk, preserve the current installation on the other, run up the current system, run the new one as a virtual machine, configure it, copy stuff over, then boot the new system native, test, add the old disk as a mirror to the new system (which current versions of LVM should let me do).
I have been putting this off for far too long :-(
On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 12:56 PM Alain D D Williams addw@phcomp.co.uk wrote:
On Tue, Oct 06, 2020 at 10:55:11PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
continues in 5 mins...
Yes ... I could not join ... I had set up a jitsi meeting early y/day evening ... Firefox could not see my webcam it could a few days ago - but was updated on Saturday - which, I suspect, is the issue - nothing else changed.
yep, almost certainly. there is a dial-up link (which was in the calendar invite)
That FF update also brought in new options "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" and auto-set to on ... I do not recall that I was asked :-(
sigh.
Time to upgrade my desktop to be able to run Brave (which does work with jitsi). I have run RedHat/CentOS for 25 years, but Centos 8 comes with Gnome 3 -- which I hate with a passion. I could install Xfce - but prefer Mate - so I am prob going to install Linux Mint - a child of Debian.
it's not - not really. it's ubuntu-based, which is known for more repeated consistent privacy-violations than any other GNU/Linux distro. i strongly recommend you *not* to use anything based on ubuntu. aside from anything they enable background updates by default without your consent and knowledge.
debian is extremely strict about privacy violations: they don't tolerate them, at all. however they do allow people to choose foot-shooting by adding the nonfree repos, which is a good compromise.
sadly though they over-rode common sense *and blatantly disregarded the results of a major poll/vote* by making systemd the default. if you make a "base" install (netinst minimal) followed by "apt-get install sysvinit sysvinit-utils" then you can follow that up with "apt-get remove systemd" and *then* use tasksel to install a full desktop (or just do apt-get install task-lxde-desktop or apt-get install task-mate-desktop) you should be good to go.
if you want something that's *guaranteed* to be free of systemd yet has all the "modern" features expected of a GUI desktop, try "trinity desktop", hosted by pearson computing. it's KDE 3, and because it doesn't have all the crap that's worked its way into QT5, it's lightning quick to start up on modern hardware.
21 years ago i deliberately chose fvwm2 and do not install a "desktop" *at all*. i log in at the console, have created a suitable ~/.xinitrc (which includes fvwm2 at the end, non-backgrounded), and run "startx". i *do not want* anything that f***s around trying to tell me how to "manage" files, or where to click to start programs. i am perfectly capable of typing "firefox &" in an xterm, and when i got bored of that (about 5 years ago), i set up a script to do it for me, as well as starting 8x 80x65 xterms on the same virtual screen.
l.
On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 01:17:49PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
21 years ago i deliberately chose fvwm2 and do not install a "desktop" *at all*. i log in at the console, have created a suitable ~/.xinitrc (which includes fvwm2 at the end, non-backgrounded), and run "startx".
I used to use fvwm2 as well, for a long time. Then one day I tried xmonad ( http://xmonad.org/ ), and never switched back...
Wolfram
On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 4:35 PM Wolfram Kahl kahl@cas.mcmaster.ca wrote:
On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 01:17:49PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
21 years ago i deliberately chose fvwm2 and do not install a "desktop" *at all*. i log in at the console, have created a suitable ~/.xinitrc (which includes fvwm2 at the end, non-backgrounded), and run "startx".
I used to use fvwm2 as well, for a long time. Then one day I tried xmonad ( http://xmonad.org/ ), and never switched back...
1000 lines of haskell. the most awesome WM evva :)
l.
On Wed, 7 Oct 2020 at 15:18, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
sadly though they over-rode common sense *and blatantly disregarded the results of a major poll/vote* by making systemd the default.
What vote is that? There have been two Debian "General Resolutions" about systemd. The result of the first one in 2014 [1] was "General Resolution is not required" meaning that the topic wasn't appropriate for a vote at the time.
The second one was done in 2019 [2]. The winning option was "Systemd but we support exploring alternatives". Further to disprove your point, the very last option was "Support for multiple init systems is Required".
In conclusion: No, the Debian developers did not "disregard the result of a major poll/vote" about systemd.
[1] https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_003 [2] https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002
On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 12:56:25PM +0100, Alain D D Williams wrote:
On Tue, Oct 06, 2020 at 10:55:11PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
continues in 5 mins...
Yes ... I could not join ... I had set up a jitsi meeting early y/day evening ... Firefox could not see my webcam it could a few days ago - but was updated on Saturday - which, I suspect, is the issue - nothing else changed.
That FF update also brought in new options "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" and auto-set to on ... I do not recall that I was asked :-(
Time to upgrade my desktop to be able to run Brave (which does work with jitsi). I have run RedHat/CentOS for 25 years, but Centos 8 comes with Gnome 3 -- which I hate with a passion. I could install Xfce - but prefer Mate - so I am prob going to install Linux Mint - a child of Debian.
If you want Mate and do not want systemd, you could start with Devuan and install mate as a package. Mate is not the default desktop, but it is available.
-- hendrik
My desktop has mirrored disks. I will break the mirror, install on one disk, preserve the current installation on the other, run up the current system, run the new one as a virtual machine, configure it, copy stuff over, then boot the new system native, test, add the old disk as a mirror to the new system (which current versions of LVM should let me do).
I have been putting this off for far too long :-(
-- Alain Williams Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer. +44 (0) 787 668 0256 https://www.phcomp.co.uk/ Parliament Hill Computers Ltd. Registration Information: https://www.phcomp.co.uk/Contact.html #include <std_disclaimer.h>
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On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 6:49 PM Hendrik Boom hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
If you want Mate and do not want systemd, you could start with Devuan and install mate as a package.
the downside of devuan is how far they diverged from debian (global search/replace debian on *everything*). this means that if you want to use debian/testing - say you are a developer and that makes debian/testing absolutely essential - you're absolutely screwed because the small devuan team absolutely do not have the resources to keep the entire debian/testing repo converted and rebuilt absolutely every single day 24x7 with the "global/search/replace" system they created.
if they had done it as an "add-on" to the debian repository it would have been fine, but the fact that they chose a "backlash" path meant that they've completely isolated themselves and their community from the rest of debian.
l.
On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 06:59:11PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 6:49 PM Hendrik Boom hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
If you want Mate and do not want systemd, you could start with Devuan and install mate as a package.
the downside of devuan is how far they diverged from debian (global search/replace debian on *everything*). this means that if you want to use debian/testing - say you are a developer and that makes debian/testing absolutely essential - you're absolutely screwed because the small devuan team absolutely do not have the resources to keep the entire debian/testing repo converted and rebuilt absolutely every single day 24x7 with the "global/search/replace" system they created.
if they had done it as an "add-on" to the debian repository it would have been fine, but the fact that they chose a "backlash" path meant that they've completely isolated themselves and their community from the rest of debian.
Yes, it is a small team. The way their repository works is to contain only packages that they had to modify because of systemd dependency. For the rest, they do a network-level redirect (possibly an http redirect) to the Debian repositories. So for those packages, Devuan is automatically as up-to-date as Debian.
And there are lots of mentions of Debian within the Devuan system that should technically be mentions of Devuan. Nobody worries about them.
There is actually a /etc/debian_version file as well as an /etc/devuan_version file, for software that wants to check such things.
-- hendrik.
l.
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On 10/7/20, Hendrik Boom hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 06:59:11PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 6:49 PM Hendrik Boom hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
If you want Mate and do not want systemd, you could start with Devuan and install mate as a package.
the downside of devuan is how far they diverged from debian (global search/replace debian on *everything*). this means that if you want to use debian/testing - say you are a developer and that makes debian/testing absolutely essential - you're absolutely screwed because the small devuan team absolutely do not have the resources to keep the entire debian/testing repo converted and rebuilt absolutely every single day 24x7 with the "global/search/replace" system they created.
if they had done it as an "add-on" to the debian repository it would have been fine, but the fact that they chose a "backlash" path meant that they've completely isolated themselves and their community from the rest of debian.
Yes, it is a small team. The way their repository works is to contain only packages that they had to modify because of systemd dependency. For the rest, they do a network-level redirect (possibly an http redirect) to the Debian repositories.
this is really neat... except they fail to keep up-to-date with testing, unstable, experimental and volatile packages in the bits that they do not "redirect".
So for those packages, Devuan is automatically as up-to-date as Debian.
try adding debian/testing on a spare devuan machine with a huge amount of software packages including qt5-dev, xlibs-dev, python-dev and many more which are perfectly normal for an experienced developer to have, and do an apt-get dist-upgrade.
you will immediately see the extent of the problem that devuan have created for themselves.
l.
On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 01:49:25PM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
If you want Mate and do not want systemd, you could start with Devuan and install mate as a package. Mate is not the default desktop, but it is available.
The principle of systemd I am OK with, what I do not like is that it has grown too many tentacled arms and is going places where it should not be, replacing things that work well, they refuse to acknowledge non Linux Unix. But it is not a battle that I choose to fight, so I'll accept it.
What I really want to avoid is gnome 3.
I would like LVM on top of Raid-1 (MDADM). I have tried hard, the Linux mint installer only does LVM if you give it the whole disk. I mirrored 2 disks by hand, and am installing on top of that - no LVM, so I shall throw it away once I see if it works.
Next: try plain Debian.
I might be forced back to Centos 8 & Xfce ... if that does LVM on top of raid - should do, it works in Centos 6 - but no guarantee.
Thank goodness for virtual machines as play areas.
Alain D D Williams addw@phcomp.co.uk writes:
On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 01:49:25PM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
If you want Mate and do not want systemd, you could start with Devuan and install mate as a package. Mate is not the default desktop, but it is available.
I would like LVM on top of Raid-1 (MDADM). I have tried hard, the Linux mint installer only does LVM if you give it the whole disk. I mirrored 2 disks by hand, and am installing on top of that - no LVM, so I shall throw it away once I see if it works.
Next: try plain Debian.
If you want anything complicated regarding RAID/LVM, while it is possible to do via debian-installer, it can be a bit of a pain, especially if you end up needing to drop to a shell to do the twiddly bits, given that the shell in d-i is busybox.
Instead, I'd recomend booting grml (a debian live image) which will then a) prove Debian will run nicely on your hardware (given that grml is very close to straight Debian), and give you a full OS with which to configure your disks etc.:
Look here for docs:
Reading this might help too:
https://grml.org/grml-debootstrap/
I might be forced back to Centos 8 & Xfce ... if that does LVM on top of raid - should do, it works in Centos 6 - but no guarantee.
LVM on MD is no problem at all with Debian -- personally I'd recomend creating several partitions on the disks, and then RAID each pair of partitions, and then add the resulting raids into LVM as PVs -- that way you get more choices about what to do when later migrating to bigger disks, or deciding that adding a third disk might be good, say.
Thank goodness for virtual machines as play areas.
Definitely.
Cheers, Phil.
On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 11:54:17PM +0200, Philip Hands wrote:
Alain D D Williams addw@phcomp.co.uk writes:
On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 01:49:25PM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
If you want Mate and do not want systemd, you could start with Devuan and install mate as a package. Mate is not the default desktop, but it is available.
I would like LVM on top of Raid-1 (MDADM). I have tried hard, the Linux mint installer only does LVM if you give it the whole disk. I mirrored 2 disks by hand, and am installing on top of that - no LVM, so I shall throw it away once I see if it works.
Next: try plain Debian.
If you want anything complicated regarding RAID/LVM, while it is possible to do via debian-installer, it can be a bit of a pain, especially if you end up needing to drop to a shell to do the twiddly bits, given that the shell in d-i is busybox.
Instead, I'd recomend booting grml (a debian live image) which will then a) prove Debian will run nicely on your hardware (given that grml is very close to straight Debian), and give you a full OS with which to configure your disks etc.:
Look here for docs:
Reading this might help too:
https://grml.org/grml-debootstrap/
I might be forced back to Centos 8 & Xfce ... if that does LVM on top of raid - should do, it works in Centos 6 - but no guarantee.
LVM on MD is no problem at all with Debian -- personally I'd recomend creating several partitions on the disks, and then RAID each pair of partitions, and then add the resulting raids into LVM as PVs -- that way you get more choices about what to do when later migrating to bigger disks, or deciding that adding a third disk might be good, say.
That's what I do on my (very old now) server. I have two functioning RAID-1's, one partitioned by LVM and the other is /boot. /boot has to be set up with an older version of RAID -- there are options to do that. Roughly speaking grub doesn't care abput RAID, and the RAID software has to put all its identifying marks at the end of the partition, not the beginning.
I wish I hadn't put *all* my remaining disk space into the main RAID. It makes it awkward to set up file systems that contain their own RAIDing, such as btrfs -- just to try it out.
By the way, all this runs under Devuan.
-- hendrik
Thank goodness for virtual machines as play areas.
Definitely.
Cheers, Phil.
|)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY _______________________________________________ arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
Hi Alain,
Alain D D Williams addw@phcomp.co.uk writes:
Time to upgrade my desktop to be able to run Brave (which does work with jitsi).
Isn't Brave a bit dodgy in parts too? ISTR seeing someone talking about forking it to remove some sort of tiresomeness.
If you fancy something completely different, I'm really enjoying using Nyxt as my browser at present. It's a bit rough around the edges, mostly because it's using webkit2gtk which has some issues, but it's got great potential -- it's written in common lisp, and it sort-of emacs for the web (the author actually prefers vi key bindings, so if you're not into emacs that's not necessarily a reason to turn your nose up):
I have run RedHat/CentOS for 25 years, but Centos 8 comes with Gnome 3 -- which I hate with a passion. I could install Xfce - but prefer Mate - so I am prob going to install Linux Mint - a child of Debian.
I knew it would happen eventually -- welcome to the clan :-)
Luke's wrong about Mint being exclusively Ubuntu based BTW, as you probably already know, since you state that it's Debian based.
In fact it's both -- here's the Debian flavoured version:
https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
My desktop has mirrored disks. I will break the mirror, install on one disk, preserve the current installation on the other, run up the current system, run the new one as a virtual machine, configure it, copy stuff over, then boot the new system native, test, add the old disk as a mirror to the new system (which current versions of LVM should let me do).
If I were you I wouldn't do the mirroring in LVM, but rather in md. You can create md RAID1s with a missing disk, and then add in a second disk to the raid when you have it available, with no noticeable changes to the configuration.
Look in mdadm's man page for: simply give the word "missing" in place of a device name.
Not having used the mint installer, I don't know how easy it is to do that at install time though.
BTW I'd normally make several partitions on both disks and then raid the partitions, and add those raids as PVs into LVM. That allows one to move things around, and migrate to bigger disks etc. more flexibly than when just mirroring the whole disk, but it takes a bit more work to keep such a setup in order.
I have been putting this off for far too long :-(
I imagine it will be a little painful to teach your fingers to type the debian versions of some sysadmin incantations, so I'm sure I'd also put this off if I was migrating in the other direction.
Here's hoping that you have fun learning some new tricks.
Cheers, Phil.
On 10/7/20, Philip Hands phil@hands.com wrote: https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
ah fantastic, that's really good to know. my friend showed me mint when it first came out, he loved it, it was really easy: then he said "it's an ubuntu derivativr" and i switched off and never looked at it since.
if since they've got a debian version that's a really nice combination.
l.
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