EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Products => Computers => Topic started by: GlennSprigg on March 30, 2021, 12:17:17 pm
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My last post was about utilizing a MacOS via 'VirtualBox' on my latest Win-10 System. (Going OK, mainly thanks to 'PushUp')...
Over the years, not only on this Forum, but throughout the vast number of 'Unix' (based!!) supporters/advocates/fans on the 'Net' have tried to get
me to change to such systems, as opposed to MS-Windows that I've been used to ALL my long life!! I was always averse to such a change, for a
number of reasons! Like "Having to learn something totally new", "Software available" and "compliance/usability" with most PC's/Laptops etc etc...
Obviously, on old/original systems that may have been a problem, and belonging in the World of Hard-Core Programmers/Coders, but with todays
versions, and simplistic GUI adaptations, they can 'really' feel like just what you are used to!! (Though any tech person wants to get under the Hood!! 8)
SO, after quite a bit of research, I chose the 'base-line' build of 'Ubuntu', with the latest version/flavor being 'Ubuntu-Mate 20.04'... WOW !!! :-+
Now I'm someone who could fit everything I know about 'Unix' systems, on the back of a Match-Book up to now, and not using a small pen!!!
HOWEVER, I AM EXTREMELY IMPRESSED WITH MY EXPERIENCE SO FAR !!!
My current setup is 'still' temporarily as a Virtual Machine via VirtualBox on my Win-10 system, but even so, it is running flawlessly and FAST, and everything
is working perfectly, including installing additional software, and running countless system utilities etc. I'd rebooted a couple of times, for OTHER reasons, but
it has been running constantly for the last few days, in the background, as a 'Guest'. I'm even using it NOW, on this Forum!
OK, it has a pretty & simple (though as complicated as you want it to be!!) GUI, and adaptations & variations are all available... However, I quickly 'realized' that a
LOT of 'settings'/'actions' are still available under the proverbial 'Hood', (as all techs would cream for!!), and seems to be the 'norm' for Linux users!! :)
(NOTE... I found amongst MANY things, to enable the 'Drop-Down' Terminal, which is absolutely fantastic, instead of relying on a 'Windowed' Menu option!!).
My only (yet!) 'beef', as a lifetime MS-Windows user, are simple & seemingly logical file/app Naming conventions!!! For instance... Instead of a seemingly logical
name like 'Notepad' (in Windows', MINE here is called 'Pluma' ?? It's not exactly 'suggestive' of what it does, but WOW is it powerful!!! Too much to explain here,
but it is more like 'Sublime' text for Windows, but better ...
And the major 'File-Manager' app called... 'Caja' here !! etc etc... :(
I intend to get into a few specific common 'terminal' commands soon, however I will suffice for NOW by stating that this/my initial integration into 'Unix' based
systems has been VERY positive so far!!, and I;m starting to understand WHY people may/would transfer their life's needs to a totally different Operating
system, for which I am becoming grateful !!! Virtually NO concern about such 'Viruses' etc, , constantly/immediately updated, virtually ANY type of 'APP' that
you want these days is available & open source... I'll stop here!! 8)
Suffice to say, that I was/am impressed!!!! B.T.W. ... I place a LOT of the presently flawless/fast integration via VirtualBox, by allocating (my system has it
available!) plenty of RAM, HDD availability, and offering at least 3 CPU's (out of a total of 8) for it's use... ;)
Terminal Commands is a WHOLE new/different issue!!!! I would like to discuss that SHORTLY !!! :-+
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Congratulations in going on this path. Linux has quite a few interesting applications and utilities that sometimes allow mimicking Windows but most of the times will require a learning curve. Also, the use of command line is more prominent but the syntax of a lot of commands haven't changed in decades - for the ones that are different, the internet helps a lot.
I am personally bound to Windows due to some specific applications, but I also plan to sandbox them on a VmWare and hope to not lose too much performance in the process.
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and be greeted by a myriad of driver issues
ive had the opposite experience,install windows and it cant use the network port without a driver (would you like to connect to a network to locate the driver? ) however linux just worked,no drivers needed
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That is true for a mainstream and/or older computer. If you have a newer platform (tablet PC, super new laptop) then the device driver issues start to appear. Also, as blueskull mentioned, specific functions are either poorly implemented or not well supported. Regardless, this is a far cry from the days of yore where to setup anything other than standard VGA display was a nightmare.
I am typing this in a former Chromebook (Acer C720) that is quite the specialized/non-standard machine, but it is old enough that all its kinks were solved in the process of removing the former Chrome OS (not supported anymore by Google) and replacing it with a Q4OS (a lightweight Debian). All this is running on its original 16GB of SSD and 2GB of RAM.
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But how is this a linux problem?more like lazy hardware manufacturers who cant be arsed to provide drivers,If you bought new hardware for a windows machine that didn't run would you be shouting at microsoft?
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Welcome! :D
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It's definitely worth being comfortable and familiar with both Windows and Linux. There are plenty of people who seem to take pride in rejecting one or the other. The only person losing out in that situation is themselves.
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Wait until you installed it on physical machine and be greeted by a myriad of driver issues, worse on laptops with latest hardware.
This may be true if you try to spin your own.
But Ubuntu/Lubuntu etc. just work out of the box. The exception being nVidia drivers (who insist on being proprietary.
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But how is this a linux problem?more like lazy hardware manufacturers who cant be arsed to provide drivers,If you bought new hardware for a windows machine that didn't run would you be shouting at microsoft?
Well I can't blame Intel can I, as if I have an option.
It's their buggy hardware and their staff writing the drivers..
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But how is this a linux problem?more like lazy hardware manufacturers who cant be arsed to provide drivers,If you bought new hardware for a windows machine that didn't run would you be shouting at microsoft?
Well I can't blame Intel can I, as if I have an option.
WE DON'T ... (have any option)
It is a whole buzz model made to launch "new modern" stuff at
an insane (totally insane) rate of incompatible obsolete things.
every 15 days or so a "new modern" piece of stuff appears
so a new hardware should be bought and a new 'release' or version
of some "partner" OS should be licensed..
This thing caused me a lot of prejudice already in 90s and 00s
mostly.. Since I replaced the OS part with open source drivers
and software things started to work far better..
The problem is not keeping the invested money on hadware
working ... but how to make all that crappy new garbage
they release every 15 days to work... with the good stable stuff
Changing the whole hardware asset base every 4m or 6m
is ... let's just say unprintable..
Since the 00s I got rid of these greedy cash seekers corps which
not by chance release buggy software and crappy hardware.
They got rich .. just see the numbs.
Not surprised they are steering whole *NIX thing to match
almost identical look and behave like the old crappy ones..
In time the very same buzz will be placed on top..
Paul
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Wait until you installed it on physical machine and be greeted by a myriad of driver issues, worse on laptops with latest hardware.
Even the safest bet (say, Intel CPU with no discrete GPU) is not safe. The latest Linux 5.11 and Mesa 21.1 has issues driving a rotated display on Intel Iris iGPU with vertical sync enabled.
With enough commitment and time, it can be largely solved, but you just have to think the *nix way and keep constantly tinkering.
This is incidentally why I use a Mac or Windows to do my Linux stuff on. It's the hardware support that's a PITA. Try Linux with a 4k display with fractional scaling - total shit show.
Incidentally most of the problems are NOTHING to do with the hardware manufacturers or the Kernel. It's the freedesktop.org project, world reinventers and the desktop environments which provide the kicks in the balls. Oh plus input management. The entire display manager input situation is a shit show as well.
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NetBSD and OpenBSD are even worse.
And on Haiku and Minix 3 the support is rather zero :D
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Actually the power management on OpenBSD is better than anything they've mustered on Linux so far...
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This is incidentally why I use a Mac or Windows to do my Linux stuff on. It's the hardware support that's a PITA. Try Linux with a 4k display with fractional scaling - total shit show.
(..)
What to expect... ?
Fabs like NV and AMD (although AMD has an "open" stuff) do not
release their soft to be recompiled nor they provide specs..
They release "new" graphic things every 15 days ..
in which more likely there should be nothing really new besides
the requirement of new firmware for a design variation..
Falling the pitfall of the new gizmos is a dead end..
You stick with the closed source OS and very short lived drivers..
A new OS "release" will soon require you again all new stuff..
otherwise you are "running obsolete deprecated OLD..." shit..
go figure
Paul
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No that's nothing to do with the issue.
The issue is it's not interesting fixing the thousand paper cuts when you can spend that time writing large swathes of new bugs and marketing features. And it's impossible getting anyone to fix anything or even fixing it yourself (I have tried both numerous times).
The problem with Linux is quality i.e. it lacks it. Even compared to windows.
High DPI features don't work because no one has sat down and fixed them properly. And then there's a multitude of UI toolkits all held together with tape and string. I have looked, I have understood. It's a shit show underneath all that.
Even on the server side it's getting terrible with the rube goldberg machine of systemd.
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My only (yet!) 'beef', as a lifetime MS-Windows user, are simple & seemingly logical file/app Naming conventions!!! For instance... Instead of a seemingly logical
name like 'Notepad' (in Windows', MINE here is called 'Pluma' ?? It's not exactly 'suggestive' of what it does, but WOW is it powerful!!! Too much to explain here,
but it is more like 'Sublime' text for Windows, but better ...
And the major 'File-Manager' app called... 'Caja' here !! etc etc... :(
This is one of my pet peeves about FOSS as well. A lot of the names are meaningless, or just embarrassingly stupid. GIMP, WINE, BURP, all the KDE related stuff that starts with the letter K, and all that stuff you've noticed. At best they are non descriptive, at worse they just sound stupid and in many cases it undermines the quality of the overall product. It's like giving your kid a "clever" name, it may seem funny and cute at the time but it's going to follow them around for life and cause them troubles.
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No problems here with drivers.
But my notebook is a Dell XPS 13 that came with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled.
Just buy a notebook or workstation that is Linux certified by the manufacturer.
Here you go:
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/new-xps-13-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-9310-laptop/ctox139w10p2c3000u (https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/new-xps-13-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-9310-laptop/ctox139w10p2c3000u)
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/desktops-all-in-one-pcs/precision-3640-tower-workstation/spd/precision-3640-workstation/xctop3640us_vivp?view=configurations
(https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/desktops-all-in-one-pcs/precision-3640-tower-workstation/spd/precision-3640-workstation/xctop3640us_vivp?view=configurations)
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No that's nothing to do with the issue.
The issue is it's not interesting fixing the thousand paper cuts when you can spend that time writing large swathes of new bugs and marketing features. And it's impossible getting anyone to fix anything or even fixing it yourself (I have tried both numerous times).
The problem with Linux is quality i.e. it lacks it. Even compared to windows.
High DPI features don't work because no one has sat down and fixed them properly. And then there's a multitude of UI toolkits all held together with tape and string. I have looked, I have understood. It's a shit show underneath all that.
Even on the server side it's getting terrible with the rube goldberg machine of systemd.
Like you said a while ago.. the problem w/ systemd itself is RH behind it.
The whole RH thing now is a vertical pig shit buz...
RH steered the whole thing to their only buzz solely ..
Unless they veer *NIX to look and behave like MS they can not
put their buz on top of it.. the whole buz.. so to offer a replacement
Compiled pack repository ... security as a service and proprietary solutions..
all their stuff unfortunately entered other very good distros like Debian
and Arch.. mostly because nobody have the big pockets like them to do
things at that pace... to deal with so much hardware.
not do better .. because these distros now impregnated with systemd_py
wayland gizmos are garbage for serious use... they are "mainstream"..
goonies ready made.. point click and boom.. reinstall in case of trouble.
The sponsors "foundations" are no more than the same folks of ever..
MS RH IBM and other well known names..
they want to continue the very same cash model
unless they really steer linux to be the same shit as MS ...
they can say the .. see ya ? how MS modern new competes with linux..
Then they can put videos comparing Win x Lin..
otherwise impossible
Open source coders out there would fix things readily even having
few resources.. but truth is nobody can compete at that rate of expense
they deprecate hardware....
In a matter of weeks they throw incompatible things on our faces..
I can not see a better result for this.. :wtf:
Paul
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Wait until you installed it on physical machine and be greeted by a myriad of driver issues, worse on laptops with latest hardware.
This may be true if you try to spin your own.
But Ubuntu/Lubuntu etc. just work out of the box. The exception being nVidia drivers (who insist on being proprietary.
That's been my experience. 20 years ago it was an issue, hardly anything would work right. In recent years though I've installed Linux on loads of different machines, desktops, laptops, whatever, and for the most part it just works, just as well as Windows, without all of the forced update nonsense.
Lately I've found myself more and more annoyed with systemd though. Seems like the guy who developed that should have got a job at Microsoft or Apple, the annoying updates installed, reboot required nonsense that pushed me away from Windows has been creeping into Linux. I hate rebooting, it's incredibly disruptive, I often go months without a reboot and have loads of different things open that I have on the back burner.
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No problems here with drivers.
But my notebook is a Dell XPS 13 that came with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled.
Just buy a notebook or workstation that is Linux certified by the manufacturer.
(..)
Ohh forgot to mention how these "badges" and certificates...
they managed to push play a selective role in the buz..
see ya? CERTIFIED.
Saw this movie way back ago.. same certificated shit of ever..
same players... same cash flow
Paul
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This is one of my pet peeves about FOSS as well. A lot of the names are meaningless, or just embarrassingly stupid. GIMP, WINE, BURP, all the KDE related stuff that starts with the letter K, and all that stuff you've noticed. At best they are non descriptive, at worse they just sound stupid and in many cases it undermines the quality of the overall product. It's like giving your kid a "clever" name, it may seem funny and cute at the time but it's going to follow them around for life and cause them troubles.
theguardian.com:
In fact, the word ubuntu is just part of the Zulu phrase "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu"
:-DD
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Wait until you installed it on physical machine and be greeted by a myriad of driver issues, worse on laptops with latest hardware.
This may be true if you try to spin your own.
But Ubuntu/Lubuntu etc. just work out of the box. The exception being nVidia drivers (who insist on being proprietary.
That's been my experience. 20 years ago it was an issue, hardly anything would work right. In recent years though I've installed Linux on loads of different machines, desktops, laptops, whatever, and for the most part it just works, just as well as Windows, without all of the forced update nonsense.
Lately I've found myself more and more annoyed with systemd though. Seems like the guy who developed that should have got a job at Microsoft or Apple, the annoying updates installed, reboot required nonsense that pushed me away from Windows has been creeping into Linux. I hate rebooting, it's incredibly disruptive, I often go months without a reboot and have loads of different things open that I have on the back burner.
I think your workflow is broken rather than rebooting. We reboot/restart thousands of processes/machines every day here, all Linux. Going months without patching which is what you are suggesting is insane really in this day and age.
But yes they could do better with systemd. The point is that unix is supposed to be mostly stateless, apart from files. The new stuff is all stateful. Which is the same as windows.
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No problems here with drivers.
But my notebook is a Dell XPS 13 that came with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled.
Just buy a notebook or workstation that is Linux certified by the manufacturer.
Here you go:
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/new-xps-13-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-9310-laptop/ctox139w10p2c3000u (https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/new-xps-13-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-9310-laptop/ctox139w10p2c3000u)
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/desktops-all-in-one-pcs/precision-3640-tower-workstation/spd/precision-3640-workstation/xctop3640us_vivp?view=configurations
(https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/desktops-all-in-one-pcs/precision-3640-tower-workstation/spd/precision-3640-workstation/xctop3640us_vivp?view=configurations)
Ubuntu certified T495s has power management issues on the supported LTS version after a month. Certifying a linux distribution doesn't mean they actually test it more than once...
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No that's nothing to do with the issue.
The issue is it's not interesting fixing the thousand paper cuts when you can spend that time writing large swathes of new bugs and marketing features. And it's impossible getting anyone to fix anything or even fixing it yourself (I have tried both numerous times).
The problem with Linux is quality i.e. it lacks it. Even compared to windows.
High DPI features don't work because no one has sat down and fixed them properly. And then there's a multitude of UI toolkits all held together with tape and string. I have looked, I have understood. It's a shit show underneath all that.
Even on the server side it's getting terrible with the rube goldberg machine of systemd.
Putting the words windows and quality in the same sentence is hilarious. I've been using Microsoft products since the early days of DOS and quality is not a word I would use. I've had so many issues with windows, including version 10. It's a bloated mess of legacy software and it's a miracle it can work as well as it does.
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I think your workflow is broken rather than rebooting. We reboot/restart thousands of processes/machines every day here, all Linux. Going months without patching which is what you are suggesting is insane really in this day and age.
But yes they could do better with systemd. The point is that unix is supposed to be mostly stateless, apart from files. The new stuff is all stateful. Which is the same as windows.
My point is that Linux has been going in that direction, whereas in the past it was almost never necessary. I would always update my Linux machines and unless it was a kernel update I wouldn't have to reboot. Now I have multiple machines that say "Reboot required" every time I log in, although at least they don't rudely force a reboot and the resulting data loss if I'm not around to tell it to shut up and remind me later.
Insane or not, I turned off Windows update back around 2016 and have not patched my Win7 machines since then, so far so good and so many fewer problems than I had before. I do keep my browser up to date though, and I use adblock and noscript religiously, and these machines are all behind a NAT firewall and not directly exposed to the outside world. For all the hysteria about patching, on the average desktop/laptop the user is by far the most exploitable vector. For a server that is exposed, keeping everything patched up is obviously a high priority.
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LOL your funeral. That's insane. Even for a desktop user. No better than antivaxers.
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I just put off installing their assured broken crap until I can spare an entire evening to fix it.
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That’s what I do. But you do have to patch it. I’ve seen the tears of people who don’t patch it. It’s not pretty.
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No problems here with drivers.
But my notebook is a Dell XPS 13 that came with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled.
Just buy a notebook or workstation that is Linux certified by the manufacturer.
Here you go:
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/new-xps-13-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-9310-laptop/ctox139w10p2c3000u (https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/new-xps-13-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-9310-laptop/ctox139w10p2c3000u)
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/desktops-all-in-one-pcs/precision-3640-tower-workstation/spd/precision-3640-workstation/xctop3640us_vivp?view=configurations
(https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/desktops-all-in-one-pcs/precision-3640-tower-workstation/spd/precision-3640-workstation/xctop3640us_vivp?view=configurations)
Dell in Australia, as far as Linux per-installed sucks balls. Switch to the Australian version of the site. Try and buy one. MS has Dell over a barrel here and Linux is a dirty word on their website.
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No problems here with drivers.
But my notebook is a Dell XPS 13 that came with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled.
Just buy a notebook or workstation that is Linux certified by the manufacturer.
Here you go:
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/new-xps-13-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-9310-laptop/ctox139w10p2c3000u (https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/new-xps-13-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-9310-laptop/ctox139w10p2c3000u)
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/desktops-all-in-one-pcs/precision-3640-tower-workstation/spd/precision-3640-workstation/xctop3640us_vivp?view=configurations
(https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/desktops-all-in-one-pcs/precision-3640-tower-workstation/spd/precision-3640-workstation/xctop3640us_vivp?view=configurations)
Dell in Australia, as far as Linux per-installed sucks balls. Switch to the Australian version of the site. Try and buy one. MS has Dell over a barrel here and Linux is a dirty word on their website.
But you can buy the same hardware, just wipe it clean and install Linux.
It's only a pity you have to pay for a license you don't use. But no problem with drivers.
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LOL your funeral. That's insane. Even for a desktop user. No better than antivaxers.
I've had people telling me that since I was running XP more than a decade ago. Pure hyperbole, it's the same obsession with safety that is going on everywhere. The sky is falling, the world is ending, OMG OMG OMG OMG drama drama drama. I've heard the doom and gloom predictions over and over and over, still waiting for something to happen. At this point even if something does happen, I've still come out way ahead by not having to mess with all the stupid updates.
And I'll restate the important part, for a typical non-server, the biggest most easily exploited attack vector sits between the keyboard and chair, and you can't patch that one. I've lost count of the number of infected machines I've cleaned up for people and so far it has *always* been the user installed something sketchy, got fooled by a fake antivirus popup, phishing email, etc. Always. Times I've seen a non-server compromised by an unpatched exploit? Zero, nada, not even once. Can it happen? Sure, just like a part could fall off an airplane and crush my head while I'm sitting at my PC. Absolute insanity that I don't wear a helmet all the time just in case, my funeral. Nonsense.
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It's only a pity you have to pay for a license you don't use.
Bet microsoft have moved the goalpost since 2009
This is the clause in Microsoft's EULA Graeme took advantage of:
"By using the software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the software. Instead, return it to the retailer for a refund or credit. If you cannot obtain a refund there, contact Microsoft or the Microsoft affiliate serving your country for information about Microsoft's refund policies."
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LOL your funeral. That's insane. Even for a desktop user. No better than antivaxers.
I've had people telling me that since I was running XP more than a decade ago. Pure hyperbole, it's the same obsession with safety that is going on everywhere. The sky is falling, the world is ending, OMG OMG OMG OMG drama drama drama. I've heard the doom and gloom predictions over and over and over, still waiting for something to happen. At this point even if something does happen, I've still come out way ahead by not having to mess with all the stupid updates.
And I'll restate the important part, for a typical non-server, the biggest most easily exploited attack vector sits between the keyboard and chair, and you can't patch that one. I've lost count of the number of infected machines I've cleaned up for people and so far it has *always* been the user installed something sketchy, got fooled by a fake antivirus popup, phishing email, etc. Always. Times I've seen a non-server compromised by an unpatched exploit? Zero, nada, not even once. Can it happen? Sure, just like a part could fall off an airplane and crush my head while I'm sitting at my PC. Absolute insanity that I don't wear a helmet all the time just in case, my funeral. Nonsense.
Do you not wear a seatbelt because you’re a careful driver as well I assume, nor a face mask?
The point is I am regularly asked to help people who had the same arrogance and idiotic perspective on things. For them it was too late. This was peak WannaCry. I’m sure your unpatched machine is probably quite happy to receive a copy of that fun. And then it’s too late for you too. It gets in your backups. It gets in your data and it lays dormant for weeks at a time sometimes.
I had a customer (XP user who was too arrogant to upgrade to W10) actually crying her eyes out because it’d wiped out her entire family photo archive spanning thirty years.
You can live in your knowledge that you won’t click X or Y but there is more than one way into an unpatched machine and some of it doesn’t even require user intent. A fun one only a year or two ago was receiving specially crafted mail was enough to trigger a sandbox escape and complete system compromise. The end user had to open their email client. That was it.
Internet facing servers, something I run hundreds of, tend to be more secure because they’re not run by idiots and are run by professionals.
https://alessandrorossini.org/anti-updaters-it-equivalent-anti-vaxxers/
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Wait until you installed it on physical machine and be greeted by a myriad of driver issues, worse on laptops with latest hardware.
Even the safest bet (say, Intel CPU with no discrete GPU) is not safe. The latest Linux 5.11 and Mesa 21.1 has issues driving a rotated display on Intel Iris iGPU with vertical sync enabled.
With enough commitment and time, it can be largely solved, but you just have to think the *nix way and keep constantly tinkering.
I also have to admit this hasn't been my experience at all, with the exception of NVIDIA drivers. Those are the only ones that have caused me problems and I use a ThinkPad as my daily driver.
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Apple is different because they support the software for the same hardware they make while Linux tries to support the hardware made by different vendors and this results in randomly positive or negative experience even with the same vendor.
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... Linux tries to support the hardware made by different vendors and this results in randomly positive or negative experience even with the same vendor.
Except when you buy a notebook or a workstation that can also be bought with Linux preinstalled by the manufacturer like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.
In that case there's nothing random. It simply works.
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No it doesn’t. It worked when they certified it. They regularly break. We have some Z series ones from HP which the RAID controller no longer works properly on. That’s RHEL as well.
Of course they ended up with windows on them and Linux in a VM.
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(..)
Of course they ended up with windows on them and Linux in a VM.
EXACTLY how they want to mange it...
MS closed tight controlled drivers.. and "something" they call SUB_SYSTEM
running under their also patronized control ...
No surprises .. their nice game of always..
Funny is how to call *NIX a SUB SYSTEM of something.. :popcorn:
Paul
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There’s no game. Linux QA is shit. It’s why we pay Amazon to run our stuff. They have their own Linux distribution which is qualified properly not run on their infrastructure.
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No it doesn’t. It worked when they certified it. They regularly break
Yup, as well as my Lenovo Carbon laptops regularly break when you look at a new kernel.
Then you need to hack here, and there, fix here, and there.
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No it doesn’t. It worked when they certified it. They regularly break.
That is one of the things that messes up things in the long term. I personally have experienced just a handful of drivers and tidbits breaking on minor updates, but major upgrades tend to bring more trouble (Dell Latitude E6520 Wi-Fi drivers, to name one). To be fair, however, Windows and OSX are not better in this regard but, since there is much better third party support, things get fixed faster.
There’s no game. Linux QA is shit.
That is what RH promised many, many years ago with their neverending piles of patches. Not being an active user from them, I can't tell what is the current state of affairs. This is explained in part by ROI, really.
Since the early days I was always amazed at how well Microsoft got it right with something simple as appropriate dialog and window resizing to acommodate its content. In Unix and FOSS worlds, it was not uncommon to see these weird rolling bars whenever a longer message was displayed in a dialog box or a large set of elements/options was shown in the same window. This existed even in commercial/paid Unix releases (SunOS and Solaris were two that I am familiar).
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Yeah early days of Unix were awful as well. The basic specification was the X protocol and that was it. Every damn vendor built their own toolkit on top of it. Apart from cost, the thing that really made NT a big thing at the time was the consistency of going down the route of a single vendor. At the time Sun were swapping openwindows for CDE, DEC had already put CDE on VMS but it worked different, HP were crowing that they won with VUE.
The bit that frustrates me is that rather than build a cohesive operating system with a standardised user interface and build quality, they are still busy kicking out the modern equivalent of the DEC vs HP vs Sun battle while the foundations and quality rot. This is while magically crowing how wonderful it is compared to the commercial software vendors. It's the same fragmented mess that Linux was supposed to solve and the same pain. The same thing is true across the toolchain underneath. The whole GNU pile of shite is a fine example of taking POSIX and doing an Embrace Extend and Extinguish job. All with fanboys getting their piss boiling over it when someone actually tears the curtain down and shows what's underneath.
At the end of the day, only the actual certified Unix vendor that is still shipping desktops is Apple and that's because they are opinionated as hell and have spent the last decade eviscerating the entire GNU ecosystem and Linux tools from their foundations. It's all BSD userland and LLVM under there...
But I digress, my task is to get from A to B with the least cost and least hassle and most of the time, as much as it pains me, some cloud provider or Windows gets the job done before anyone else. Worse is better when better is mediocre infighting.
A reminder: I've used Linux since around 1996. I'm an RHCA and run it in production for at least 20 years on a large scale. That was after 10 years of Unix. This shit is not new to me and I know all the sweaty cracks and shit shows hiding at this point. We can and should have done better but humans are not good at improving.
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I am still trying to make a full working for daily use X11-terminal entirely based on NetBSD + directFB + nanoX, for several reasons this project failed.
I have already made a couple of working X11-Linux terminals, and I found I needed to create and apply several patch and hack here and there within the Kernel module for the video card and to X11 itself, in order to make it working decently, but in the last hack I deleted something like 2K useless C lines from X11 to purge all the useless legacy stuff from the code, and there's still a lot to sweep out and get rid of.
O men, don't they sweep out their garbage when they push out new releases?
Apparently "no" ... and with Linux they have this tendency ... it fixes, breaks, fixes, breaks again, but one thing is constant: the entropy always grows!
So I think the developers do not do anything wrong, but rather simply respect the laws of thermodynamics :D
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Yeah that's going to hurt. Even basic X stuff died out for me in ~2005. If that's not depressing enough, half the xorg maintainers are involved in Wayland as well :o
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Yeah that's going to hurt. Even basic X stuff died out for me in ~2005. If that's not depressing enough, half the xorg maintainers are involved in Wayland as well :o
They are actually being paid for that ...
No surprises. To succeed steering the whole *nix base to something
which looks and behaves like MS that is imperative... systemd + py + wayland
so they will even succeed in imposing anti-virus cash cows.
[ DiTBho ]
What exactly is the video card with such issues? Too "modern" shit?
I have a DOZEN cards working flawless using Xorg vanilla..
Daily use with accelerated hw and OGl working fine..
Full Xorg based site wide including XDM/xauth and legacy athena aps
That should work fine.. unless you have too "modern" shit requiring
these firmwares and kernel patches to impose DRM counter measures...
??? card
Paul
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What exactly is the video card with such issues? Too "modern" shit?
Even old (2004) Matrox dual head (G4xx series) are not 100% working, it's still partially documented, and needs wild hackering and black voodoo in order to work especially in non-x86 computers like in my case.
Mine is a PCI G450/Plus. It's nice because it has two MGA chips talking on 32Mbyte of shared ram and provides two VGA channels. It perfectly works on Windows NT, 2000, XP, but does not even correctly initialize the channel#2 of the video card when I plug it on a Linux PowerPC embedded machine, and the result is a black screen on Xinerama.
Channel#1 immediately worked, Channel#2 did not, and digging deeper I found the reason is that ... well, the video ram is shared between the two MGA chips, but if you don't initialize them correctly they don't know how to address the shared ram, so the first chip addresses the whole ram, the MGA chip #2 simply runs "disable_channel_and_halt", and it shutdowns.
The first time I tried the card without a "special magic flag" passed on cmdargs it crashed the kernel because it expected some pre-initialization done by the "PC-BIOS" which tries to initialize the video card in some kind of legacy mode. I am not sure, and I don't care since I don't have any "PC-BIOS" on my PowerPC board.
The MGA driver is full of garbage, and you need to pass special argument to the Linux kernel on bootstrap, but this is not enough in my case because there are also an "VGA-ISA-Legacy" probe in both the kernel and X11 which not only pushes tons of weird and useless message into the x11.log, but it also somehow causes the MGA chip2 to shutdown (probably because it goes mad due to the crazy probing) ... a full disaster!
Rather than pushing more garbage here and there (someone suggested me to put a x86 emulator inside X11 in order to execute exactly the x86 mesa-code used by a PC to initialize a video card) I removed the whole block of useless code full of "probe here, if the results match then set this, else set that" ... too complex and too difficult to follow , so I did some wildly reverse engineering a piece of code under Windows 2000 and cloned what that code does to initialize the chip#2, then I modified the MGA driver on Linux and X11 making them specific for the M4xx dual channels.
Now it works this way:
Uboot -> does nothing, it simply initializes the two chips in PCI-mode rather than forcing silly PCI-ISA-legacy, and equally splits a the video ram between them. The lower 16Mbyte is assigned to the first chip, the higher 16Mbyte to the second chip.
Linux -> MGA-4xx, it enables the two MGA chips, and registers the video ram assigned to each chips so even the kernel knows about it. After this step, /dev/fb0 and /dev/fb1 will be also registered.
X11 -> does no more probe/re-initialization/whatever. That code has been entirely removed, so now it simply sees two MGA video cards and uses two MGA instances in xorg.conf to manage the desktop over Xinerama.
Simple, and linear! Problem solved, it took me 2 years in my spare time, now it works as I like :D
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That is not vanilla ...
Dual headed Maxtrox displays would run fine
perhaps in a well compiled 32 bit x86 Xorg.
Apart from that I doubt developers would have
resources to fill the gap..
But I doubt even if more recent hardware and kernels
would allow a proper XP installation..
almost bet it segfaults on booting w/classic BLUE LOGO
Paul
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That is not vanilla ...
I initially used a Vanilla kernel from kernel dot org (https://www.kernel.org) (which is what "vanilla" means) and it didn't work anything except a kernel crash!
Dual headed Maxtrox displays would run fine perhaps in a well compiled 32 bit x86 Xorg.
Even on a PC you need to pass things at the bootstrap (via Grub/Lino for a PC), plus other obscure things in xorg.conf, and I saw this stuff randomly collecting more useless lines year after year and stop working.
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well compiled
I have successfully compiled/x86 and cross-compiled/PPC xorg with uclibc, MUSL, glibc, and the funny is that if you look at Gentoo ebuilds in a time-window of 10 years you find there have always been problems with recipes for packaging this definition, and something tells me they will always be there :D
(maybe - my speculation - because those who do these things for a trade are happy when I call them for a paid advice ... I remember when someone asked me 50 USD/hour to solve a problem with xorg)
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My Trident SVGA card worked so-so with Slackware in 1996 and, when I got a Diamond Stealth 64, nothing further from plain VGA was achievable (even the VESA extended modes were barely supported).
Later I bought a Matrox G400 new and tried to get decent drivers for it back in the turn of the century. Windows NT4 was so-so in terms of performance, but for both Linux (Slackware) and Solaris 7 x86 it was impossible. Some strides were made when Solaris started shipping with x86 instead of CDE (IIRC this was Solaris 8 or 10), but by then I was fed up and replaced the Matrox card. I never looked back.
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Later I bought a Matrox G400 new and tried to get decent drivers for it back in the turn of the century. Windows NT4 was so-so in terms of performance, but for both Linux (Slackware) and Solaris 7 x86 it was impossible. Some strides were made when Solaris started shipping with x86 instead of CDE (IIRC this was Solaris 8 or 10), but by then I was fed up and replaced the Matrox card. I never looked back.
Yup, if we talk about performance ... well, my hack hasn't yet solved it because some 2D accelerating features are not working so I copied the simplest ever, those provided by fbdev, the simplest framebuffer for xorg, which works (even on a 3DFX voodoo2) but it's not hw accelerated.
I'm not taking full advantage of the power of the the MGA-G4xx chips even because there are several problems with the DMA on the PowerPC side and the original driver is so a mess that I am frankly lost.
I am neither a good nor a pro dev, and two years to reach this minimum point means that if these stuff were for a paid project I would have already been fired ;D
I am simply obsessed with that project and the idea of using a couple of Matrox MDA 4xx chips that when I was a student I couldn't afford because the G450 was seriously too expensive for me.
I mean, for sure I wouldn't suggest to use this technology neither modern Matrox products for daily job stuff on Linux because ... well "Matrox" for video cards is like "Adaptec" for SCSI adapters, they were great in the 90s and 2000s, but nowadays these two companies are no more the same thing they were in the past.
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G450 was a nice card. Had matrox stuff for years myself. Did my first "silent" PC build with a G400 in a Compaq DeskPro AP230 with a Pentium 3 1GHz.
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But how is this a linux problem?more like lazy hardware manufacturers who cant be arsed to provide drivers,If you bought new hardware for a windows machine that didn't run would you be shouting at microsoft?
Linux exists on less than 2% of desktops. Why would a device manufacturer bother to write drivers - and possibly have to update them every time the kernel changed.
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But how is this a linux problem?more like lazy hardware manufacturers who cant be arsed to provide drivers,If you bought new hardware for a windows machine that didn't run would you be shouting at microsoft?
Linux exists on less than 2% of desktops. Why would a device manufacturer bother to write drivers - and possibly have to update them every time the kernel changed.
And yet.. they do.
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But how is this a linux problem?more like lazy hardware manufacturers who cant be arsed to provide drivers,If you bought new hardware for a windows machine that didn't run would you be shouting at microsoft?
Linux exists on less than 2% of desktops. Why would a device manufacturer bother to write drivers - and possibly have to update them every time the kernel changed.
And yet.. they do.
Yes, they do! More applications oriented but still, these apps require device drivers of some kind.
Digilent Waveforms is an important application to me and it runs fine on my Raspberry Pi so I can use the Analog Discovery 2 to look at signals on the same Pi while running code from the console. Very cool!
The Arduino IDE runs on Linux and this seems important. Perhaps not so much hardware support required but still, it runs.
I have never tried it but I understand that Xilinx Vivado runs on some variants of Linux. About 5 of them according to:
https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/sw_manuals/xilinx2020_2/ug973-vivado-release-notes-install-license.pdf (https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/sw_manuals/xilinx2020_2/ug973-vivado-release-notes-install-license.pdf)
There some amount of hardware support required to be capable of programming devices.
Many of the hardware manufacturers figure they can overlook the < 2% and not have to deal with the costs. I know I would! There just isn't a big enough market to make it worth the effort. I'm not sure why the others do it. It's got to be a hassle.
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There just isn't a big enough market to make it worth the effort.
Yup, I do think the same.
edit:
and since there isn't enough market, I would also add what I was told last time I had to fix a very inner couple of bugs and I was tempted to hire/pay some "true Linux kernel and user-land expert" to solve it: "no problem, buddy, it's 50 USD / hour with a minimum contract of 50-100 hours" :o
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Depends. Their internal developers might be doing the majority of development on Linux so pushing a version out might be cheap and easy. In one company I worked their entire product was wxPython which they had 4 people working on. All the dev was done on Macs. There was another (poor bastard) who’s job it was to build and package it for windows.
As for the expertise cost, it’s expensive indeed. Which is good for me :-D
Edit: if I was going to start a new software project today that had desktop interaction I actually have no idea where I’d even start to be honest. Everything is a pit of despair at the moment. It’d have to be cross platform. Perhaps Electron (there needs to be a puke emoji in the forum)
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As for the expertise cost, it’s expensive indeed. Which is good for me :-D
LOL, so will you give me some "EEVblog-member-friendly discount", won't you?
Yes, yes, yes, right? Look at my (poker) smiling face -> :D
(kidding ;D )
A couple of excellent things those pro guys offered were their professional development tools. Don't only they know how to debug your embedded system(1) using Lauterbach, but they also have Trace32 debuggers and license to use it, and debugging with that stuff is thousand years more powerful than trying to wildly debug with kgdb(2) and gdb-stub(3).
(1) Lauterbach's tools are excellent to debug u-boot, which in my case added a couple of other bugs
(2) I used kgdb to debug the Linux kernel over a dedicated serial line
(3) I used a simple gdb-stub to debug u-boot ... it was a poor solution, but I had no other options since I don't even have a jtag cable for PowerPC 4xx.
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Hahaha.
I avoid the hell out of kernel debugging these days. Last time I went there it was over serial ports and kgdb as you mention. It’s userland for me or something lower like FreeRTOS on STM32 (today’s project).
If you ever want some fun play with WinDBG. I occasionally have to debug windows server crashes. Those are really nice to deal with. We had one recently where HyperV decided to lose heartbeat and reboot itself. Eventually we found it was a BCM NIC driver. Fingers suitably primed, point at HPE and make them fix the turd :-DD
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I have never tried it but I understand that Xilinx Vivado runs on some variants of Linux.
In some ways it is the same with the Windriver's stuff for VxWorks. It's the fourth time I've seen this happen, and it seems like when you buy something from them it's a "corporate habit" that they send you a pendrive with a VirtualMachine image (for WmWare) where Linux is patched by them and ready to go straight away.
Initially I thought it was a kind of "courtesy", but when I tried to replicate what they were doing ... I found many patches applied here and there, so many that actually make the Pendrive a true variant of Linux.
[ corporate habit | courtesy ] -> corporate variant of Linux
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No it doesn’t. It worked when they certified it. They regularly break. We have some Z series ones from HP which the RAID controller no longer works properly on. That’s RHEL as well.
All the RAID controllers in HP z Series workstations are fake RAIDs, and HP never supported them on Linux (where you're supposed to use dmraid). For good reason as on-board fake RAID is mostly designed around Windows anyways.
However, most HP z Series desktop workstations also support optional hardware RAID controllers (LSI on older machines, Adaptec on newer ones) and they are fully supported under Linux.
We have lots of z Series machines (mostly z6 Gen4 and z8 Gen4), some of RHEL 8 but most on SELD 15, and aside from the Linux specific stuff no real issues.
There’s no game. Linux QA is shit. It’s why we pay Amazon to run our stuff. They have their own Linux distribution which is qualified properly not run on their infrastructure.
I disagree, Linux QA isn't shit. The QA of many distros is (and that includes especially Debian and Ubuntu) and that shows.
On the other side we run a very large business pretty on Linux (RHEL and SEL, now mostly just SEL), backend to desktops (we only use Windows when there's no alternative, i.e. for certain applications). For development systems or systems where budget is an issue and support not important, we run openSUSE Leap (we also used to run CentOS but RH killed that off so we're now in the process of migrating away from RH completely).
Yes, there are issues (especially with the stuff that isn't the Linux kernel, such as the KDE desktop) but we managed to either get them fixed by SUSE (if its a bug) or (if it's something else) we fix it and feed the fix back to SUSE so it may well end up upstream.
It's still more efficient for us than having to deal with the shit show that Microsoft has become and the one that Microsoft licensing has been since forever. Just talking to suppliers and clients who are on Windows and all the issue they have with half-baked software and updates to Windows, Exchange and all the other stuff is nauseating. None of the problems that affected Microsoft products (such as the recent and apparently still ongoing shit show that is printing on Windows or the Exchange exploit) did affect us.
On top of that, anyone who ever had to deal with Microsoft's "support" knows that poking needles in your eyes is a preferable experience. SUSE support is the complete opposite, you talk to people who really understand their products and sometimes even to the person who wrote the actual code in question. It's like day and night.
AWS is great if your data can be sent there (ours can't), and for some application is a great thing, however at the end of the day you need to be aware that you're entrusting your data to a 3rd party and that has dangers and consequences.
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Not sure what gen these ones are. They are Z8's and hardware RAID though. These were top end spec machines
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fake RAIDs
I spent a lot of money and effort on them, testing, hacking them, and my points here are:
- there different kinds of fake RAIDs
- those where "fake" means "software", so the controller is simply a dual/quad sATA ports adapter and the mirroring/stripping is done by the Kernel
- those where "fake" means "firmware", they have advanced CPUs (i960 and similar) which are useless unless you upload a special firmware embedded with the kernel driver, which also has to manage these cards in PCI-bus-master, which is very complex so only cared by corporate for serious business. When there is not enough interest they could be used as "fake" RAID, and "fake" here mans that don't manage their special firmware, you simply turn off the CPUs and use them as a simple dual/quad sATA ports adapter, again forget RAID 5,10, etc, only RAID0 and RAID1 are possible, and all the mirroring/stripping is done by the Kernel
The funniest card found was a weird card with 128Mbyte PC133 ram stick and PPC405 cpu mounted to control two sATA interfaces. After some digging and wildy hacking, I reprogrammed the card (via kernel firmware upload mechanism) to offload some SHA256 work, so I actually turned a "sATA controller" into a "SHA" crypto-coprocessor.
I doesn't make any sense, but it was funny ;D
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Not sure what gen these ones are. They are Z8's and hardware RAID though. These were top end spec machines
There's only the Z8 Gen4 (earlier models were three digit, i.e. z840, before that z820 and before that z800). And the only supported RAID controller for that model is the Adaptec SmartHBA 2100-4i4e:
https://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c05527763.pdf (https://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c05527763.pdf)
As the name implies, the SmartHBA is a Host Bus Adapter with some RAID functionality:
https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/smarthba-2100-12g-host-bus-adapters/4998-smarthba-2100-faqs (https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/smarthba-2100-12g-host-bus-adapters/4998-smarthba-2100-faqs)
[Unlike prior generation entry level RAID adapters from Microsemi, the SmartHBA 2100 does not support an external DDR cache. Instead all memory required for all RAID levels is integrated onto the SmartIOC 2100 silicon on the adapter. This provides cost, power, and thermal benefits. The SmartHBA 2100 is an “HBA first”, with basic RAID support included.[...]
Still, the SmartHBA 2100 is fully supported under RHEL:
https://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/readme/adaptec_smarthba_smartraid_relnotes_02_2021.pdf (https://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/readme/adaptec_smarthba_smartraid_relnotes_02_2021.pdf)
(https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-computing/linus-wow-im-almost-toltally-sold-now!!!/?action=dlattach;attach=1206960)
I think our early z6 and Z8 Gen4s came with the same adapter as they were equipped with quadruple 12Gbps SAS SSDs, and they have been working fine with subsequent RHEL and SELD updates (but then we regularly update BIOS, firmware and drivers on our machines which many enterprises don't do). Now we only use NVMe local storage and for large amounts of data simply connect machines via dual 10Gbps or 40Gbps network to a large flash-based SAN) :)
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- there different kinds of fake RAIDs
- those where "fake" means "software", so the controller is simply a dual/quad sATA ports adapter and the mirroring/stripping is done by the Kernel
- those were "fake" means "firmware", they have advanced CPUs (i960 and similar) which are useless unless you upload a special firmware embedded with the kernel driver, which also has to manage these cards in PCI-bus-master, which is very complex so only cared by corporate for serious business. When there is not enough interest they could be used as "fake" RAID, and "fake" here mans that don't manage their special firmware, you simply turn off the CPUs and use them as a simple dual/quad sATA ports adapter, again forget RAID 5,10, etc, only RAID0 and RAID1 are possible, and all the mirroring/stripping is done by the Kernel
Leaving aside that shared PCI (and things like busmatering) hasn't really been a thing with PCs and servers for more than 15 years now (and i960 based controllers are even older!), your second description of what amounts to "fake RAID" is simply incorrect.
"Fake RAID" is a term which describes RAID functionality which is implemented in software *only*, sits in the boot firmware and is executed on the host's CPU. Which is the case for the vast majority of RAID functionality embedded on mainboards and desktop chipsets, as well as in some HBAs (like the LSI 2008 based ones).
The opposite of "Fake RAID" is "hardware RAID", which isn't really "hardware" but "hardware and software" RAID. Here the controller or RAID chipset comes with hardware support for certain RAID functions (like XOR), and increase the performance these adapters usually also come with some form of cache memory (usually battery or supercap backed). However, as with fake RAID, the RAID functionality is also part of the firmware, so it's never a pure hardware solution.
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BTW, those "hardware and software" RAIDs are called hardware-assisted software RAIDs, or - using your terminology - hardware-assisted fake RAIDs. >:D
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Leaving aside that shared PCI (and things like busmatering) hasn't really been a thing with PCs and servers for more than 15 years now (and i960 based controllers are even older!), your second description of what amounts to "fake RAID" is simply incorrect.
The i960? Sure it's old, mine was found in a 2008 product; it was just an example of something I have recently hacked and of which I know its inner working details.
"Fake RAID" is a term which describes RAID functionality which is implemented in software *only*, sits in the boot firmware and is executed on the host's CPU.
That's what I wrote in my post: RAID0 and RAID1 done by the Linux kernel :D
The opposite of "Fake RAID" is "hardware RAID", which isn't really "hardware" but "hardware and software" RAID. Here the controller or RAID chipset comes with hardware support for certain RAID functions (like XOR), and increase the performance these adapters usually also come with some form of cache memory (usually battery or supercap backed). However, as with fake RAID, the RAID functionality is also part of the firmware, so it's never a pure hardware solution.
Here, I am afraid you haven't understood my post.
I didn't wrote anything different from what you explain, I simply said that these "hardware RAID" have more complex "boot firmware"; a part of it is a "BIOS extension" written in x86 code which does some setting before the kernel is loaded, and once the kernel is up it also requires the kernel to pass them the second stage firmware (this was i960-code in my case), so these "hardware RAID" are useless if you don't have the proper second stage firmware or if your kernel cannot support it, or if your system cannot manage PCI-bus master.
My point is: in all of these cases I could only turn a "hardware RAID" into a "software RAID", which doesn't sound good, but it is better than throwing away the card.
battery
512Kb static ram
||
PCI <--------> i960 <------> Sil3112 <---> sATA disk
||
PC133 ram
PCI <----------------------> Sil3112 <---> sATA disk
I bypassed the i960 entirely in a way its only purpose is to call pass commands and data to Sil3112 chips with no additional computation (and no more PCI-bus mastering, because I am not able to support it). So the kernel directly talks to the two Sil3112 sATA interface chips, and this way I cloned and lightly modified one of the kernel driver wrote for the Sil3112 chip.
In my case I bypassed the i960 entirely in a way its only purpose is to pass commands and data to Sil3112 chips with no additional computation on the i960 chip, everything is done by the kernel which directly talks to the two Sil3112 sATA interface chips.
This way I cloned and lightly modify one of the kernel driver wrote for the Sil chip and I avoided to trash the card since it's a fully working RAID0 and RAID1 system :D
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PCI <--------> PPC405 <------> M8?WTF?!? <---> sATA disk
||
PC100 ram
PCI <--------> PPC405
||
PC100 ram
This is the second "hardware RAID" card I hacked. It cost me 35 Euro including postage. This time I didn't know which is the sATA chip, so I played with the PPC405 CPU. The DMA doesn't yet work and I have no idea of the reason, but when you don't know how to sort it out, "polling I/O" is the way to go, which is definitively slow for something really useful but it has anyway given hours of fun :D
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But how is this a linux problem?more like lazy hardware manufacturers who cant be arsed to provide drivers,If you bought new hardware for a windows machine that didn't run would you be shouting at microsoft?
Linux exists on less than 2% of desktops. Why would a device manufacturer bother to write drivers - and possibly have to update them every time the kernel changed.
And yet.. they do.
(...)
Many of the hardware manufacturers figure they can overlook the < 2% and not have to deal with the costs. I know I would! There just isn't a big enough market to make it worth the effort. I'm not sure why the others do it. It's got to be a hassle.
Been there, done that. Some manufacturers decide to forfeit the 2%, but others take the plunge but, after the fourth or fifth kernel modification that causes a production stop bug to happen, decide to either carefully consider or kill the support roadmap. That is why it is not uncommon to see the downloads page for drivers or even IDEs available only for older releases of the OSes, while the newer stuff is usually made for Windows.
Regardless, it has become much better in the latest years and, in my own experience, macOS has been way worse at the low level stuff.
and since there isn't enough market, I would also add what I was told last time I had to fix a very inner couple of bugs and I was tempted to hire/pay some "true Linux kernel and user-land expert" to solve it: "no problem, buddy, it's 50 USD / hour with a minimum contract of 50-100 hours" :o
Yep, Those Lauterbachs do not come cheap and the yearly maintenance fee is quite hefty...
A favourable supply/demand curve pays hefty bounty. My mother in law made a ton of money with Cobol in 1999.
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Even old (2004) Matrox dual head (G4xx series) are not 100% working, it's still partially documented, and needs wild hackering and black voodoo in order to work especially in non-x86 computers like in my case.
My last graphics card from Matrox was a G550. Back then their cards worked quite well with their proprietary X11 drivers (x86). The developers of the open source drivers had a hard time to get any details about Matrox' graphic chips. Therefore their drivers weren't really usable for recent cards. For the G450 one needs to load a binary blob from Matrox to get the second port up and running (blob available only for x86). The lesson to be learned about hardware and linux is to choose components fully supported by open source drivers. If a component's vendor treats everything as a state secret stay away. It's not worth the hassle! And tell the vendor of your decision not to buy their product and why.
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Leaving aside that shared PCI (and things like busmatering) hasn't really been a thing with PCs and servers for more than 15 years now (and i960 based controllers are even older!), your second description of what amounts to "fake RAID" is simply incorrect.
The i960? Sure it's old, mine was found in a 2008 product; it was just an example of something I have recently hacked and of which I know its inner working details.
"Fake RAID" is a term which describes RAID functionality which is implemented in software *only*, sits in the boot firmware and is executed on the host's CPU.
That's what I wrote in my post: RAID0 and RAID1 done by the Linux kernel :D
There is a difference between software RAID as provided by many operating systems and "Fake RAID". The latter is reserved for hardware devices which come with boot firmware but no hardware support for RAID functionality, and the RAID code runs entirely on the host CPU (initially through the firmware, later through the fake RAID drivers). Also, like hardware RAID, "Fake RAID" is completely transparent to the host OS (which only sees the virtual drives, not the physical ones). Which is why it's called "fake RAID"(i.e. faking a hardware RAID controller).
Software RAID like Linux dmraid isn't "fake RAID" because it doesn't "fake" the functionality of a hardware RAID, it's also not OS transparent as the OS can still see the physical storage devices.
Here, I am afraid you haven't understood my post.
That's entirely possible. It's Thursday after all and mentally I'm already in Easter Weekend mode :popcorn:
I didn't wrote anything different from what you explain, I simply said that these "hardware RAID" have more complex "boot firmware"; a part of it is a "BIOS extension" written in x86 code which does some setting before the kernel is loaded, and once the kernel is up it also requires the kernel to pass them the second stage firmware (this was i960-code in my case), so these "hardware RAID" are useless if you don't have the proper second stage firmware or if your kernel cannot support it, or if your system cannot manage PCI-bus master.
That's correct, however I have yet to see a hardware RAID controller where the 2nd stage fw (the one for the controller IC) is not part of the boot firmware and loaded by the host OS separately, at least not in the last 20 years or so. So unless you fiddle with the controller firmware there shouldn't be a situation where you can lose the 2nd stage fw.
My point is: in all of these cases I could only turn a "hardware RAID" into a "software RAID", which doesn't sound good, but it is better than throwing away the card.
Depends what you mean with software RAID, if you're talking about what comes with Linux, Windows and other OSes then yes (and there are people that try to remove RAID functionality from fake RAID controllers so they can use them as simple HBAs and put ZFS on top) but that would still be software RAID but not "Fake RAID" ;)
battery
512Kb static ram
||
PCI <--------> i960 <------> Sil3112 <---> sATA disk
||
PC133 ram
PCI <----------------------> Sil3112 <---> sATA disk
I see what you mean, however no-one really builds RAID controllers that way any more (and hasn't been for a very long time). Today it's a single RoC (RAID on Chip) controller from LSI/Broadcom or Adaptec/Microsemi, which contains pretty much everything including the SAS/SATA PHYs. The only thing that's external is the cache (BBWC or FBWC). The ROC has a single firmware image which contains boot block and 2nd stage fw for the chip itself, and once that's loaded then the controller performs its duties independent on what the host computer does (or if the OS has a driver for that controller).
I bypassed the i960 entirely in a way its only purpose is to call pass commands and data to Sil3112 chips with no additional computation (and no more PCI-bus mastering, because I am not able to support it). So the kernel directly talks to the two Sil3112 sATA interface chips, and this way I cloned and lightly modified one of the kernel driver wrote for the Sil3112 chip.
That's great, but that's possible because this design is pretty antique (this is how Mylex used to design their RAID controllers back in the late '90s) and processor and SATA PHYs are physically separate components. As I said, that no longer exists in this form.
In my case I bypassed the i960 entirely in a way its only purpose is to pass commands and data to Sil3112 chips with no additional computation on the i960 chip, everything is done by the kernel which directly talks to the two Sil3112 sATA interface chips.
This way I cloned and lightly modify one of the kernel driver wrote for the Sil chip and I avoided to trash the card since it's a fully working RAID0 and RAID1 system :D
As I said, this is similar with what some people do to common LSI HBAs with fake RAID BIOS, they remove the RAID code (or replace it with a pure HBA BIOS) so the connected drives are simply passed through to the OS, which they want so they can use software RAID.
But the resulting system is still just "software RAID", not "fake RAID" ;)
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But how is this a linux problem?more like lazy hardware manufacturers who cant be arsed to provide drivers,If you bought new hardware for a windows machine that didn't run would you be shouting at microsoft?
Linux exists on less than 2% of desktops. Why would a device manufacturer bother to write drivers - and possibly have to update them every time the kernel changed.
This is an understatement..
"The (so called) desktop" is a metaphor carved by patent trollers.
AFAIK back in the 70s Xerox already has that.
The point is that: *NIX RUNS ON 99.99% of "REAL COMPUTERS"
mostly Linux now .. just because..
All serious buz require serious reliable machines running stable
so the drivers of the 99.99% on the world will need that.. for a long time.
The "desktop" gizmo seem to be now a *BUNTU hoax much like
an MS shell company at this point.
Not surprisingly the huge effort to IMPLOD Xorg steering
developers to systemd_py_wayland thing
where MS can PATRONIZE linux running a tiny little "thingy" from the
app-store called buntu for windows on WSL.
EEE strategy of success: implode Xorg -> doom the desktop -> run *nix on WSL
Rumors that several apps are on the way that WILL ONLY RUN INSIDE WSL
see ya? they love *NIX. Foundations and shell companies
Paul
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The 2 cents tidbits..
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/whats-new-in-the-windows-subsystem-for-linux-september-2020/#gui-apps
In a projected scenario...
With no FAB driver support .. **ALL** "desktops will be forced
to run inside that shitty MS azure account where only their
shell companies (like buntu for WSL or RHEL for WSL..) will be
allowed to run..
Applets contained into that shit hole included.
Otherwise be happy w/one of these veered "distros" like RHEL or Debian.
as of today far steered from *nix ground
Paul
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INTERESTING READING !! (OP here...). Though quite a bit is over my head at this early stage... :phew:
Interestingly, their is a fair amount of discussion here about new/updated 'Drivers' lacking, from hardware/etc developers, and their reasons or
interest in producing them for smaller markets?? I would have 'thought' that they would/could supply some parameters/coding/information to the
Unix/Linux COMMUNITY, (who collectively supply such general Open-Source software, gratis!), so that maybe THEY can work on creating such drivers?? :-//
And in regards to my VirtualBox Guest 'Ubuntu-Mate 20.04', I found out about a few additional things!! The VM Guest was not recognizing my BlueTooth
hardware, but that's due to the VirtualBox emulation environment! However, 'V.B.' still allows it to work, via the Host, so that's OK. The same sort of thing
is going on with Wireless Broadband. I didn't have to set up communications via the Ubuntu Guest at all, as 'V.B.' just passes the comms via the Host,
straight through my existing (and already logged on) wireless connection, via this Win-10 Laptop Host! So that all works from the get-go with no setting up!
I ALSO found out after research, that you can improve a lot on the VirtualBox emulation, that's NOT done within VirtualBox. In the folder where you installed
VirtualBox, there is a dormant file, called 'VBoxGuestAdditions.iso'. This is to be used within the GUEST only! When the Guest Ubuntu etc is running, and you
are working in it, go to the VirtualBox menu area, select Devices, and CD, and mount the above .iso into the guests virtual drive. It will auto-boot, for various
operating systems, and install into your virtual environment a whole lot of extra settings & refinements, to make it work even better & more smoothly!! 8)
(NOTE: This is NOT the same as installing the Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack' from within VirtualBox itself).
The only program so far that will install, but not run for me, is 'Blender'. Does nothing when selecting it within the GUI. So I learnt to TRY running it in 'Terminal',
which would/(did!) show what the error is! Turns out it needs at least OpenGL 3.3, which the virtual VMWARE screen/graphics controller only has ver 2.1...
(Although the NVIDIA Graphics GeForce GTX-670M card in the host laptop is using OpenGL 4.6, but this can't be seen in the guest!!).
I suspect that if/when I set up UBUNTU-MATE on a stand-alone system, then that won't be the case, and the latest Linux drivers ARE available from...
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/results/134859/ (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/results/134859/)
GIMP works fine though!!
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wayland
Wayland ... I think I have to make my X11-terminal project compliant with Wayland.
At the moment it's a nano-X compliant.
What is nano-X? It's a directive used in xorg to compile it with the minimal features.
It will be a challenge :D
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wayland
Wayland ... I think I have to make my X11-terminal project compliant with Wayland.
At the moment it's a nano-X compliant.
What is nano-X? It's a directive used in xorg to compile it with the minimal features.
It will be a challenge :D
Well.. I am really unsure about how things will be in a couple of years..
But.. following the money .. they are diverting developers (paying them)
to steer the whole "desktop" base of all *NIX (read Xorg drivers) to that
"thing" ..
Putting some pieces together it looks like demolishing X Windows...
which is impossible to overtake with these single display license model..
(remember X Windows is fully network aware..)
It looks like all points to X Windows implosion by removing developers (paying them)
to steer the whole "desktop thing" to run only under that premises..
Without support from NV and AMD it is impossible to have proper displays
working .. easy to demolish XWindows (call it old, bloated, etc.. etc.. remove
people from that and let it just fade away. like nobody wants it works on it..)
So MS will CLAIM PROPERTY OF YOUR/OUR HARDWARE and decide
what can be run, see, listen.. and obvious..
Only the shell companies (partners) will be allowed to run under WSL..
SO.. conclusion: If investing time, resources, hardware...
Remember that the whole thing has being has been(is being) taken by assault..
subverted and perhaps (if no one cares) we will be forced to pay MS licenses to
have a working proprietary video driver... (implosion of Xorg)..
And wayland + systemd shit working under WSL..
MS will again claim property of all hardware by just shitting Xorg dead ended
speculation based on facts.
they will doom CYGWIN
they will doom WINE
they WILL DOOM Xorg
Paul
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I am investing a part of my spare time in haiku-os (https://www.haiku-os.org). The project is stalled at the moment, but there is a beta CD for x86 systems, and who knows? If anyone puts a lot of money into this project ...
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With these BIGGGG pockets of RH and Canonical and IBM
diverting competent developers (read bribing) from key
driver devel?
NV is giving a shit to anything besides their closed stuff
under MS and their own pocket in ARM...
The options shrunk to less than a hand
Paul
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Proprietary drivers for graphics cards have another common issue: licensed technology (patents). So the manufacturer can't "open source" the driver because of licensing agreements. It's a wicked situation. For the last decade AMD's Radeon is the least evil and the X11 drivers work generally well. Intel's integrated graphics are also supported in case you're happy with basic 3D performance. But always check if a specific chip is supported by X11 before buying. Otherwise you'll have to use the generic VESA driver.
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I can not speculate over "closed" stuff never seen.. actually
But given the AMD status on opening some code base..
i guess it must be more FUD than really an issue.
They can open the ting but probably trading a bit
chunk of their extortion algo. deprecating chips and
boards every 15 days
True as well we can run VESA (still INT10H ?) but since
some versions of Xorg drivers I have far better results
running FB when the "official" chip driver has critical issues
FB works marvelous and better than VESA.. although
acceleration is crappy and some apps will just argue about OGL.
BOTTOM LINE: Wo official and OPEN vendor support there is
no way "THE DESKTOP" metaphor will be smooth on *NIX.
SO far SO good it works - as you said - by carefully chosen hardware.
AND WE DID EVEN TOUCH THE BIG ISSUE OF SECURE BOOT
(aka paying keys to MS to boot with that jerk asshole shit)
Another post..
Paul
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Proprietary drivers for graphics cards have another common issue: licensed technology (patents). So the manufacturer can't "open source" the driver because of licensing agreements. It's a wicked situation.
Perhaps open hardware video cards? I am surprised a couple of similar projects just died five years ago :-//
Do you happen to know a PCI dual head VGA video card with open source driver for X11?
I don't need MESA, I need a fast 2D hardware acceleration and Xinerama support.
Just to consider an alternative to my wild hack to the G450, which works, but it's not as fast as it should be :D
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I'd suggest to check out some older Radeons.
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I'd suggest to check out some older Radeons.
hmm even older RADEONS still require the gallium compiled stuff
by LLVM - you will need things like DRI and OGL support
You must go BEFORE that to avoid such problems..
Mach64 or Rage3d boards... or the excellent line of..
[SiS] 661/741/760/761 PCI/AGP a.k.a. = SiS 671/662 bridges
Paul
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AND WE DID EVEN TOUCH THE BIG ISSUE OF SECURE BOOT
(aka paying keys to MS to boot with that jerk asshole shit)
MS is being very kind on this case. They allowed user generated keys (MOKs) for Linux, and that's remarkable.
Being old MS, they would have asked an extortionate amount of money per version per distribution, and only on good day they may potentially approve that.
As far as I am aware of that they allowed *ONLY* their shell partners
do have such keys.. e.g. Canonical RedHat and *may be* some other
player in direct interest for their strategy..
No surprises on that "technology" emerged from them.
Secure... for whom ?
Paul :o
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I'd suggest to check out some older Radeons.
hmm even older RADEONS still require the gallium compiled stuff
by LLVM - you will need things like DRI and OGL support
You must go BEFORE that to avoid such problems..
Mach64 or Rage3d boards... or the excellent line of..
[SiS] 661/741/760/761 PCI/AGP a.k.a. = SiS 671/662 bridges
Paul
Yes, let us remain in the 1990s. Good plan.
Seriously, stop with your baseless conspiracy rants. It's getting old.
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No rants.. no conspiracy.. business as usual.
Alas very same it was on the 90s.
For the boards I am a collector.
And i have these suggested (SiS Mach64 and a Rage3D AIW)
plus some very nice S3 Diamond Stealth.. some Rage AGPs..
And some of these crappy totally closed shit RADEONS and NVs GPUs.
Which took me very hard time to proper setup using these LLVM
compilers and closed source instruction sets... no fun no joy
and overpriced... :palm:
SiS as suggested has one of the *BEST* clear crystal images
with an awesome X driver suuport. It works dual headed or
multiheaded without a single issue and a nice control panel..
Rage3D also works fine (including DVB) as long patched with
proper midia (they are xorg based drivers)
They still work.. last time I checked.
I have fun collecting them..
Paul :popcorn:
PS. Unfortunately my old Trident boards are not booting ..
i have half dozen Tridents but just one ISA capable MOBO..
and the boot kernel is really not fitting in that FPM memory
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Anyone tried Q4OS ?
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But how is this a linux problem?more like lazy hardware manufacturers who cant be arsed to provide drivers,If you bought new hardware for a windows machine that didn't run would you be shouting at microsoft?
Ultimately it's the user's problem if they can't use their device properly, whatever the underlying reason is. Blaming manufacturers for for not providing drivers does not fix the issue or make Linux look more attractive to people used to having stuff just work (or at least mostly work) under mainstream operating systems.
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But how is this a linux problem?more like lazy hardware manufacturers who cant be arsed to provide drivers,If you bought new hardware for a windows machine that didn't run would you be shouting at microsoft?
Ultimately it's the user's problem if they can't use their device properly, whatever the underlying reason is. Blaming manufacturers for for not providing drivers does not fix the issue or make Linux look more attractive to people used to having stuff just work (or at least mostly work) under mainstream operating systems.
I don't think so.. (it is the user solely problem).
Actually we have paid for a product...
and having a DYSFUNCTIONAL product is not a good point.
Whatever reason may be it boils down to the fact that due
to some very basic "bad practices" we are collecting such SHIT
products across DECADES..
Whoever thinks this is any sort of new thing have not lived
the bad days of 90s across 2000s where the fast pace of
deprecating motherboards and cards caused a nasty prejudice
for *ALOT* of people while filling MS and half dozen shell partners.
Due to ignorance most manufactures do not have a clue how
to actually "support" their devices on the market by providing
users with the proper tools to adapt the product to the real world..
This ignorance driven by a simple choice of following what is
mostly a lie that MS is some sort of "prevalent desktop" or computer..
will then free them to support the wider and better real computer world.
Result is that all folks old enough probably have a *BIG PILE* of
DYSFUNCTIONAL hardware due to unsupported or deliberate crippled software.
from 2000s on to 2010s things got better just because a large
user and developer base of *NIX folks play a role..
THE O.P. HAS VERY GOOD REASONS ASKING FOR DRIVER DIRECTIONS
but the bottom line is that under a VM it will never ever works as it should..
And proper decisions should be made when chosen the OS and the products.
Paul
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This ignorance driven by a simple choice of following what is mostly a lie that MS is some sort of "prevalent desktop" or computer.. will then free them to support the wider and better real computer world.
I don't think this was ignorance, but rather marketing!
Linux has always sucked as a desktop probably because there is no centralized way to connect drivers with hardware; there is no Apple, no Microsoft, and years ago brands like IBM and HP ran their business with their proprietary Unix solutions, leaving the rest of the PC uses in a chaotic scenario where there was nothing supported, documented except that done by volunteers.
Linux is not Unix, do you remember the most famous meme? Well, Linus said it because he didn't like those Unix solutions (also because too bloody expensive).
Linux is done by hackers for hackers, and and recently it has somehow captured the interest of the mass!
It has evolved and it's keep getting better, but for sure you cannot put Linux kernel v1.0...v2.6 and their related userlands in the same basket of commercial holy Unix monsters like { IRIX, HPUX, AIX, ... }.
Back in 2000 I was a BeOS user, and I hacked every single version of BeOS, from 4.5 to 5.03-Netbone, and also ported a lot of text-based applications to it.
X11 apps were not trivial to be ported because BeOS has no X11 support and the graphis engine is completely different.
BeOS was great on its BeBox hardware produced and sold by the same Be.inc company. They were somehow a kind of Apple in miniature, uncommon PowerPC hardware (dual PPC60x processing!!!) easy to use and very intuitive software, they initially developed both hardware and drivers, and this was it was "plug and play".
Then they had to face it out: they spent a lot of money and they weren't earning a penny becase the marketing was dominated by x86 PeeeeCeeee, so they ported BeOS to this architecture thinking they could have benefit more available hardware.
Result?
I spent months and months trying to adapt Linux drivers for PC's common hardware to BeOS/x86, and found the Linux code is not exactly friendly to be understood and recycled, and worse still, the most of Linux developer are not willing to help unless you pay them.
Which brings us to the question: how money and resources are allocated?
If I have to pay a Linux developer to help me to port a driver to BeOS, why cannot directly pay whom did the hardware to have a fresh driver rather than some adapted code?
That's what Apple and Microsoft do, but usually not Linux, unless it's something enterprise, for example Darpa and Cern pay IBM, who pays whoever is involved with POWER9-POWER10-approved hardware to have their drivers written as they need to be!
So it's like the BeBox, but on a larger money scale!
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Linux has always sucked as a desktop probably because there is no centralized way to connect drivers with hardware
There's Chromebooks.
The Chromebook hardware model is a very nice intermediary between Windows PC's chaos and Apple's closed garden. As open source as possible, but using trademark and certification to keep configurations of Chromebooks tightly controlled so Google can do good QA.
If only Google had a different revenue stream than datamining people and served more hardware intensive markets. I hoped that Valve would do something similar to Chromebooks, but without datamining the users ... but alas.
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Anyone tried Q4OS ?
I am using it. I posted about it in the first page
I am typing this in a former Chromebook (Acer C720) that is quite the specialized/non-standard machine, but it is old enough that all its kinks were solved in the process of removing the former Chrome OS (not supported anymore by Google) and replacing it with a Q4OS (a lightweight Debian). All this is running on its original 16GB of SSD and 2GB of RAM.
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Neither is the Windows ecosystem a driver heaven. If you don't get a Win10 driver for your old scanner it becomes e-junk also, for example. There are expensive special purpose devices which run only with XP/Win7 or are certified in conjunction with with XP/Win7 (like medical devices), while vendors don't provide Win10 drivers or don't wan't to pay large sums for re-certification of their systems for each new Win10 release.
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Yep. There's a driver bug with the Intel graphics in my desktop which means every time it wakes up from sleep it resizes all the windows. But that's the only thing it does which is annoying (so far)
(https://imgur.com/kgvMT4g.jpg)
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You are lucky. There are no bugs in my Apple Powerbook G4 with macOSX v10.4, but with Linux every time the laptop wakes up from sleep something somewhere inside the graphics chip starts to go wrong so much that the screen color is like the TV tuned to a dead channel and the snow falls like pixels of a random color.
There are no solutions, you have to force the laptop to go back to sleep again and pray that waking up will bring it back to working order, kind of leap into the dark you have no guarantees and no care, you don't even see what's on the screen. Which is so annoying that I removed all the backcalls in the kernel in order to remove the sleep/wake up functionality.
feature-- (because bugged). Problem solved :D
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There are several kernel parameters to modify sleep mode settings, just saying.
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No one wants to screw with that though :)
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Only for the brave? ;D
PS: The kernel parameters are documented.
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Only for the brave? ;D
PS: The kernel parameters are documented.
Yep, and that is one of the reasons why Linux can be extremely unpalatable for the general public. Computer goes to standby/sleep, never recovers, the person loses unsaved data. No worries, let's muck around with parameters in a very sensitive area that, if you do a typo or delete too much, your system may become unbootable.
For that you have the immense power of M$'s popularity: things get fixed much quicker and these "details" (which are very critical IMO) are left behind in Linux.
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Only for the brave? ;D
PS: The kernel parameters are documented.
Yep, and that is one of the reasons why Linux can be extremely unpalatable for the general public. Computer goes to standby/sleep, never recovers, the person loses unsaved data. No worries, let's muck around with parameters in a very sensitive area that, if you do a typo or delete too much, your system may become unbootable.
For that you have the immense power of M$'s popularity: things get fixed much quicker and these "details" (which are very critical IMO) are left behind in Linux.
The problem is not *NIX neither the kernel.
These suspend/resume problems are ACPI only related ...
Blame WINTEL for the very mess they have done with the Super I/O
chipsets which now require specialized firmware..
The mercy bullet is called UEFI in which unless things match
your hardware may be a total or partial brick
Things are just converging as always:
- no driver support
- a messy obscure closed source of firmware and buggyware..
- ultimately rendering *ONLY* allowed shell partners to succeed
Alas same film again again... only those selected have undisclosed
information to make that shit really work
the rest.. well the rest will have to figure it out or just doom themselves..
nothing new.. same shitware they do since 80s
Paul
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For that you have the immense power of M$'s popularity: things get fixed much quicker and these "details" (which are very critical IMO) are left behind in Linux.
Precisely :D
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For that you have the immense power of M$'s popularity: things get fixed much quicker and these "details" (which are very critical IMO) are left behind in Linux.
Precisely :D
Don't buy that so easy.. they have been crippled/defective by design.
not by chance
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For that you have the immense power of M$'s popularity: things get fixed much quicker and these "details" (which are very critical IMO) are left behind in Linux.
Precisely :D
Don't buy that so easy.. they have been crippled/defective by design.
not by chance
Well, the unfortunate reality is that, whenever you are chasing the leader, you need to bend and adapt to some of its idiosyncracies.
I am not saying it is right, but it is the reality.
Similar thing about Windows' higher instability when compared to the fruit company: mostly caused by deviations and crippled/badly supported hardware and software* - something Apple does not have to deal. Unfair comparison? Perhaps, but it is the reality (and Apple still manages to screw up from time to time).
*something so serious that caused an entire OS (Vista) to be canned due to poorly behaved application software that wanted to scribble everywhere in the system but UAC wouldn't let it.
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These are just some facts to account:
- Apple products are way better than PCs (generics)
- Even ¨branded" PCs are way below Apple hardware
- Nevertheless Apple charges insane values for that - true overpriced
- PCs can be generic speaking repaired and tweaked - Apple hardly will be true
- PC OS mostly falls the duet *NIX or MS ( or ...1% other)
- Apple never did that. Soon they realized how profitable is to *NIX Apple
- Apple is not by chance closed (however using open source soft)
- MS never was and never will be open soft - accepting that while having true OSS is pure BS
There is no possible comparison
neither in hardware - software or even in price range.
If you want a product - go Apple
If you want a filthy hoax - go MS always
If you want good reliable stuff - go *NIX
crude facts of business
Paul
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You forget that apple did or was based on the same pc components
They had the same scsi ide sta drives, intel based cpu's etc... they just had an little extra to make them Apple
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You forget that apple did or was based on the same pc components
They had the same scsi ide sta drives, intel based cpu's etc... they just had an little extra to make them Apple
TRUE. they may be the same parts...
BUT! the build quality of their boards and the finish and the design
have absolute nothing in common with ordinary retailer generic PCs
They are built with some degrees above the PC quality..
AND.. they do invest in people full time working to adapt the OSS
drivers and stuff to their proprietary hardware base..
they found the niche to claim property and transform OSS into Apple property
at a very very overpriced rate
Simply put they are better - but do not worth that much
Paul
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Apple has a long list of design flaws, e.g. butterfly keyboards or too short display cables (Flexgate). I can't see any superior built quality.
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Apple has a long list of design flaws, e.g. butterfly keyboards or too short display cables (Flexgate). I can't see any superior built quality.
Yup! My friend's Apple MacBookPro fried during computations. My Lenovo Carbon X1 is still alive.
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Damn if you think MacBooks are bad try a Dell. I have a corp precision 5550 and it’s a complete piece of shit. Literally the worst laptop ever used and I have owned a lot of stinkers.
I’ve broken three MacBooks. They aren’t very durable. Neither are they very reliable unfortunately. Just had to return an M1 Mac mini as well due to display failure :palm:
About the only thing that still isn’t a steamer is a Lenovo thinkpad T, X or P series. Running windows.
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M1 Mac mini
I have a cluster of Mac-Mini ;D
Four G1 units (PPC)
Four G2 units (x86 intel core duo dual)
I will add for sure four M1 units, but not now, for sure next year.
I think they are still "unripe" apples
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These are just some facts to account:
I am sorry, but these are far from facts. Having used Apple since 2013, I can tell their hardware is well done but at the same price bracket as a higher end PC (my company buys both). The huge differential in quality was mostly during the 2000s, but in the 2010s they were caught by competition.
Don't take my word for it: a cursory scan over Louis Rossmann Youtube channel can give you some perspective.
Regarding the OS, it took them many years to realize that *nix would do anything for them - they were very late with a preemptive multithreaded kernel and only released something four years after Jobs was back at the company. I used lightly their versions prior to OSX and Win98/NT and were light years ahead.
Damn if you think MacBooks are bad try a Dell. I have a corp precision 5550 and it’s a complete piece of shit. Literally the worst laptop ever used and I have owned a lot of stinkers.
This was indeed a bad series from Dell, worse than the Latitudes D620/D630/D820 (although these were plagued by the failing nVidia chips). I had a 5500 where the battery swelled within 1-1/2 years. Not to mention the dance around 4k monitors and docking station support. I was forced by the company to switch to this from my excellent Latitude E6520. Now the company gave me a HP Elitebook 830 - I really hope it is better (although I won't keep my hopes up).
Oh well... Bad examples can be found everywhere. No company is perfect and is always better than everybody else.
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Not so sure. Lenovo are notoriously less shit than all the others. I say less shit because better isn't a fair description yet :-DD
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M1 Mac mini
I have a cluster of Mac-Mini ;D
Four G1 units (PPC)
Four G2 units (x86 intel core duo dual)
I will add for sure four M1 units, but not now, for sure next year.
I think they are still "unripe" apples
M1's are crazy fast. Was getting better multi threaded compile times with LLVM than my Ryzen 3700X without it getting warm to the touch.
But yes, give it a couple of generations. There are TB, Bluetooth and display issues with them. It's a good first gen product though. They nearly nailed it.
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A pic of the PowerBook G4 I was talking about. I am hacking Yaboot just right now because is no more supported and I don't like grub.
[attachimg=1]
I have an experimental uboot that I wrote myself and would love to use it. Maybe this way I can assure that the Linux kernel is initialized correctly, so I could rule out that this is the main problem due to the flaw encountered during suspend / wake.
Who knows? Let's let's hunter the fox bug :D
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Not so sure. Lenovo are notoriously less shit than all the others. I say less shit because better isn't a fair description yet :-DD
Hehehe... Good way to put it. In any case, a few years ago our company put two generations of Lenovos and quickly retired them. I didn't use them directly but the IT folks told me they were almost at the point of going "Office Space" style on them.
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I like my Lenovo X250, it's been rock solid since I bought it in 2015. The only thing I really hate about it is the lack of physical buttons under the trackpad. I have several T400 series machines and they're great too except the displays are crap. Nice reliable machines though, I fished 5 or 6 of them out of the recycle bin at a former job.
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These are just some facts to account:
- Apple products are way better than PCs (generics)
- Even ¨branded" PCs are way below Apple hardware
There is no possible comparison
neither in hardware - software or even in price range.
I call bullshit. As someone who has serviced and repaired both, Apple and "Quality" generally don't go in the same sentence. Many models of Apple computers are plagued with build quality or design issues. You only need to look as far as Louis Rossmann's videos for a good cross section. Give me a Lenovo Thinkpad over a Macbook any day of the week!
The "problem" with the PC market is that there is so many variables and to build a reliable, high quality PC takes quite a bit of skill and knowledge.
As for Microsoft, Windows has turned into a piece of shit ever since Windows 8 was released and it has barely gotten any better today.
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As for Microsoft, Windows has turned into a piece of shit ever since Windows 8 was released and it has barely gotten any better today.
You wash your mouth out with soap, young man!
Winders 3.1 was OK (barely) and it all went down hill from there.
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These are just some facts to account:
- Apple products are way better than PCs (generics)
- Even ¨branded" PCs are way below Apple hardware
There is no possible comparison
neither in hardware - software or even in price range.
I call bullshit. As someone who has serviced and repaired both, Apple and "Quality" generally don't go in the same sentence. Many models of Apple computers are plagued with build quality or design issues. You only need to look as far as Louis Rossmann's videos for a good cross section. Give me a Lenovo Thinkpad over a Macbook any day of the week!
The "problem" with the PC market is that there is so many variables and to build a reliable, high quality PC takes quite a bit of skill and knowledge.
As for Microsoft, Windows has turned into a piece of shit ever since Windows 8 was released and it has barely gotten any better today.
Very specific reasons to conclude that:
- Apple SMC supervisor is a step ahead the PC Super I/O
- Apple board finish is always a step above PCs ...
BUT!. recently I am very pleased with Gigabyte AORUS board finish..
Regarding Apple "quality" is pretty obvious they are designed to fail shortly
Let's not mix their superior fab. design with their obvious "deadline" goals.
In summary no Apple product should last more than 10 ..12 or 18 months
They are "defective by design" although built with very good designs..
But last generation PC boards are really worth comparison..
But I have never ever seen the Super I/O generation so crippled as today
Paul
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These are just some facts to account:
- Apple products are way better than PCs (generics)
- Even ¨branded" PCs are way below Apple hardware
There is no possible comparison
neither in hardware - software or even in price range.
I call bullshit. As someone who has serviced and repaired both, Apple and "Quality" generally don't go in the same sentence. Many models of Apple computers are plagued with build quality or design issues. You only need to look as far as Louis Rossmann's videos for a good cross section. Give me a Lenovo Thinkpad over a Macbook any day of the week!
The "problem" with the PC market is that there is so many variables and to build a reliable, high quality PC takes quite a bit of skill and knowledge.
As for Microsoft, Windows has turned into a piece of shit ever since Windows 8 was released and it has barely gotten any better today.
That was true until recently. Thinkpads have gone to shit now.
1. Non removable battery with no purchasable replacement.
2. Glue
3. All the USB-C ports soldered onto the main board.
4. No separate charger port
5. PWM modulated backlit screens
Depressing.
But at least it's not Dell.
Anyway it doesn't matter what you buy now. Buy it new, with a warranty and use it until that's up and then chuck it onto the second hand market and fuck dealing with repairs.
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But I have never ever seen the Super I/O generation so crippled as today
And what, exactly, is so crippled?
Not that I expect an intelligible response containing any provable facts.
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As for Microsoft, Windows has turned into a piece of shit ever since Windows 8 was released and it has barely gotten any better today.
You wash your mouth out with soap, young man!
Winders 3.1 was OK (barely) and it all went down hill from there.
Windows has never really been good. Good enough perhaps, but not good.
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But I have never ever seen the Super I/O generation so crippled as today
And what, exactly, is so crippled?
Not that I expect an intelligible response containing any provable facts.
Programmable ACPI firmware.
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But I have never ever seen the Super I/O generation so crippled as today
And what, exactly, is so crippled?
Not that I expect an intelligible response containing any provable facts.
Programmable ACPI firmware.
...
You'll have to provide more than that.
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You'll have to provide more than that.
You wish...
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You'll have to provide more than that.
You wish...
That you'd contribute, yes.
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Thinkpads have gone to shit now
I have no experience with modern Thinkpads, but let me know: even the carbon line? even the new nano? :-//
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Thinkpads have gone to shit now
I have no experience with modern Thinkpads, but let me know: even the carbon line? even the new nano? :-//
Anything T480 and later (2018/2019) has gone down the toilet. Only the non-S models have non soldered RAM and then you only get one slot.
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Last week, I software revamped someone's lenovo from 2012. Solid.
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These are just some facts to account:
- Apple products are way better than PCs (generics)
- Even ¨branded" PCs are way below Apple hardware
There is no possible comparison
neither in hardware - software or even in price range.
I call bullshit. As someone who has serviced and repaired both, Apple and "Quality" generally don't go in the same sentence. Many models of Apple computers are plagued with build quality or design issues. You only need to look as far as Louis Rossmann's videos for a good cross section. Give me a Lenovo Thinkpad over a Macbook any day of the week!
How did Rossmann get to be this big hero? I don't get it.
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How did Rossmann get to be this big hero? I don't get it.
From what I saw, he was one of the few at the time to have practical information that dismantled Apple's reputation of uncompromised quality.
At the same time, he taught people to actually fix Apple's shortcomings through his youtube channel, enabling many others to be successful in this business.
Despite he is not perfect, this scores pretty high in my book - and apparently in many others' books as well.
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I am using Linux exclusively for about 20+ years now. Linux can be really frustrating. If you have the time to carefully select hardware you will be ok. The main issue is with laptops. I have a 14" dell (6 years) that everything works from day one. No hardware issues at all. I had to really carefully selected it though.
Another issue with the "Linux ecosystem" is the documentation. Or better the lack of it. I don't know if things is better in Windows and MacOS.
Now I must replace it. I will just buy a Thinkpad T495 hoping that everything will be ok.
Why I use Linux; It just happened that the first pc given to me, had Linux installed (I think Redhat). Now; I cant work efficiently in a non Linux machine.
Alexander.
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You wash your mouth out with soap, young man!
Winders 3.1 was OK (barely) and it all went down hill from there.
3.1 was not even really an operating system, it was a graphical shell and memory manager that ran on top of DOS. I would argue that 95 was superior to 3.1, 98 was superior to 95, Win2k was a huge improvement over any of those, combining the best of NT (which was not really usable by home users) with the usability and gaming support of 9x. XP was in some ways an improvement over Win2k but mostly just in support for newer software. Vista gets a bad rap due to hardware at the time not being powerful enough and drivers not being ready when it shipped but after things caught up it was a solid and nicely polished OS. Win7 is essentially Vista with a few refinements and is excellent. Win8 was a complete train wreck, an unmitigated disaster that should never have seen the light of day. Win10 fixed a few things but in other ways, particularly the whole rolling release "Windows as a service" nonsense was another disaster, nearly unusable to me. I suffered through it for about a year at my former job and then my current employer gave me a Mac and I never touched Win10 again.
I still use Win7 on my daily driver at home, but everything else modern-ish is running Linux.
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"What do you anticipate Microsoft will do next?"
Microsoft will switch to Linux and keep selling their software on top of Linux. And it will cost the Windows users as
much as before.
At the same time will the Linux community get face-stomped by hordes of Windows users, all trying to learn everything
there is to learn about Linux and in record-breaking time.
Some long-time Linux supporters will switch to Microsoft in a heart beat like cold-hearted back-stabbers, while others die
the slow death of the White Knight in the most epic drama the Linux community has ever seen, before the Linux
community itself disappears and we will all have turned into "the new Windows user".
Once it's all done and over, and Microsoft has taken over Linux with its hordes of Windows users, will you either be the
new slave of the Microsoft empire or you will have found refuge under a tiny bridge, just next to the one where all the
FreeBSD trolls live, and where you'll then be telling tales of Linux's past.
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These are just some facts to account:
- Apple products are way better than PCs (generics)
- Even ¨branded" PCs are way below Apple hardware
There is no possible comparison
neither in hardware - software or even in price range.
I call bullshit. As someone who has serviced and repaired both, Apple and "Quality" generally don't go in the same sentence. Many models of Apple computers are plagued with build quality or design issues. You only need to look as far as Louis Rossmann's videos for a good cross section. Give me a Lenovo Thinkpad over a Macbook any day of the week!
The "problem" with the PC market is that there is so many variables and to build a reliable, high quality PC takes quite a bit of skill and knowledge.
As for Microsoft, Windows has turned into a piece of shit ever since Windows 8 was released and it has barely gotten any better today.
That was true until recently. Thinkpads have gone to shit now.
1. Non removable battery with no purchasable replacement.
2. Glue
3. All the USB-C ports soldered onto the main board.
4. No separate charger port
5. PWM modulated backlit screens
This applies so many machines (including Apple). But I have a current Gen Thinkpad P1 and it's a brilliant machine.
None of it is glued together, in fact it's designed with serviceability and up-gradability in-mind. A few screws and the bottom cover lifts off. The RAM, SSDs, fans, battery etc.. are all accessible and easily serviceable/replaceable. Unlike many laptops (like Apple) where the components are soldered to the board.
My P1 also has a separate dedicated charger port (of course you can charge off USB-C if you want to). My proprietary Lenovo charger lives in my laptop bag and I almost always use that. At home, the dock connector also has a dedicated charge cable.
Not sure about the PWM screen, but it looks just perfect to me.
The P1 is not the slimmest nor lightest laptop you can buy, but for me, it's just the right amount of portability, performance and serviceability that I need and to be honest, it's still pretty darn thin and light for what you get.
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3.1 was not even really an operating system, it was a graphical shell and memory manager that ran on top of DOS.
95 was pretty much a more advanced shell with a better task scheduler and a better memory manager that finally had built-in protected mode but still running on top of a more advanced DOS as well. If you recall, DOS started the OS and, at the end of Autoexec.bat, is called "win" but never returned. 98 and Me had the same, but it was better hidden.
I would argue that 95 was superior to 3.1, 98 was superior to 95, Win2k was a huge improvement over any of those, combining the best of NT (which was not really usable by home users) with the usability and gaming support of 9x.
I had NT4 running games even in the newfangled "3D" chipsets (a 3DFX Voodoo2 IIRC), but you indeed needed an overpowered system for that (I had a dual Pentium II with 128MB at the time).
XP was in some ways an improvement over Win2k but mostly just in support for newer software.
XP had a much faster boot time (something that it was said at the time that MS stole from the Linux core kernel) and had much better support for hibernaton and standby, as well as dual monitor - things that, as a road warrior on a PIII laptop running 2K, were massive shortcomings. At home, 2K ran smoothly but XP naturally brought better support for games.
Vista gets a bad rap due to hardware at the time not being powerful enough and drivers not being ready when it shipped but after things caught up it was a solid and nicely polished OS. Win7 is essentially Vista with a few refinements and is excellent. Win8 was a complete train wreck, an unmitigated disaster that should never have seen the light of day.
Windows 8 is identical to vista: 8.0 was a very problematic OS but 8.1 is perfectly usable and stable - I have two laptops here running them as an extention of their lifetime. I expect to ditch them as Windows 10 will not run well on them.
Win10 fixed a few things but in other ways, particularly the whole rolling release "Windows as a service" nonsense was another disaster, nearly unusable to me.
I agree and also had a very bad experience with Windows 10 at home due to the whack-a-mole game of closing its gaps. Corporations with large and/or competent IT departments are capable of keeping it running more or less smoothly - I have been running 10 smoothly for a few years now but I can tell how much is filtered out (we have version 1909 still).
I still use Win7 on my daily driver at home, but everything else modern-ish is running Linux.
I have both: 7 and 8.1.
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(OP here...) WOW, I never wanted this to get into a shit fight! ;D
As a previously/still non-expert in anything non-Windows all my life, I mainly started this post as a result of hearing numerous people
over the years here, and elsewhere, to look-at/think about a Linux variation, as an alternative. (Not to mention the 'Mac' supporters!).
So, I've initially NOW set up 'Ubuntu-Mate 20.04' as a virtual machine, via 'VirtualBox', AND successfully set up a 'MacOS-Mojave' virtual
machine via 'VMWARE-Player', on my latest Win-10 Laptop. (2nd hand, but HIGH spec.!). All are working fine at the moment!!! I simply
wanted to 'educate' myself, about all I'm being/been told, and learn something NEW !! And that has been achieved!! ;D
Re: 'Win-10'... I understand people's concerns today, and I was totally averse to using it up to date, until I had researched how to remove
ALL, (and I mean 'all') the crap/links/software/settings, so that it is NOW behaving like say an older 'Win-7' system, but with all the latest
'perks' and opperability. So I am 'now' perfectly at ease & confident with using it, in the way that I like, considering my age! And I am TOTALLY
used to & proficient with dealing with all it's file-systems, including the occasional quirks lying there-in...
Re: 'Ubuntu-Mate 20.04'... I am slowly understanding the 'apparent' simplicity, (especially when involving the 'numerous' builds/versions with
a 'myriad' of named styles), which often vary mainly in regards to their particular pertaining 'GUI' front-end!! This 'diversity' does cause me a certain
amount of confusion, as well as not understanding all the 'choices' as a relatively new/prospective 'tinkerer' for an alternative to Windows!! :scared:
I also 'think' I understand, (and HAVE experimented greatly in it's use!), where the POWER of using a 'Terminal' for manipulation/control/info, can
greatly enhance one's power/abilities to 'Get Things Done', outside of the particular variants 'GUI'... I 'Get It'... However, for someone/user who is a
generally 'non-technical' in their background/thinking/abilities, I THINK they might struggle with even the simplest 'Non-Clickable' options/abilities!! :(
Re: 'MacOS-Mojave'... (and all similar variants!)... I found the 'GUI' interface to be generally pleasant!... However, at 1st I was TOTALLY lost, in my
attempt to just simply just 'look' at a Drive, and see what is free!! (Yes, I know now how to...). Again there was totally different 'wording' for things I was
used to in 'Ms-Windows' but that's to be expected. (My bad!). Utilizing the 'Finder' app is a whole new kettle of fish!! (Never understood that analogy!).
I 'learnt' how to display hidden files etc... (YES I know to be careful !!!), and to delve into multiple normally un-viewable sub-directories, (I was a Windows
power-user, and wanted to know how!!)... The UPSHOT of what I was saying there, is that ONE BIG difference between Macs & M.S. seems to be the 'lack'
(sorry) of PROPER 'Un-Install' facilities???? W.T.F.? One uses 'Finder' to locate an 'App', right-click it & send to the trash bin, or HOLD select an 'App' via various
means/displays, until it 'wiggles', and 'delete' it?? After only a cursory investigation with Google, indicates that NOT ALL files/mods are removed!! ?? |O
I have 'studied' how to do it, 'properly', (though unnecessarily long winded!), but I struggle to believe that Apple systems do NOT have a BUILT-IN app to
properly 'Un-Install' software, without having to use 3rd party apps?? I mean... Windows, with all it's faults, ALWAYS has an 'Un-Install', involving not only
the major directories/files, but including any changes/mods to any win/system files, not to mention the ubiquitous 'System Registry'. I don't understand...
Anyway... I have had, & am having fun, playing with & learning, like I never have before... :-+
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Not sure about the PWM screen, but it looks just perfect to me.
It's 26 KHz, no one is going to be able to perceive that.
Do any displays even use a smoothed constant current supply? It would screw up the colours as you adjust the backlight. High frequency PWM is the obvious way to do it.
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Not sure about the PWM screen, but it looks just perfect to me.
It's 26 KHz, no one is going to be able to perceive that.
Do any displays even use a smoothed constant current supply? It would screw up the colours as you adjust the backlight. High frequency PWM is the obvious way to do it.
Nominally 26KHz. Irritatingly the one I had would drop into audible range occasionally.
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I briefly had some monitors at a former job that gave me an awful headache although I couldn't really put a finger on why at first. I figured out that they used PWM dimming at around 400Hz, it wasn't readily visible but I could certainly sense it. I ended up pulling a couple of the old monitors out of the recycle bin and went back to those. As an added benefit they were 1600x1200 vs 1600x1080 that all the newer ones are. I hate the trend of using cheap TV panels that are only 1080 vertical. That extra 120 lines doesn't sound like much but it's significant.
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This isn't always the case, a couple of years back Linux ended up stable on one of my laptops before Windows. I've actually have had more trouble with laptop vendors not supporting their laptops correctly with BIOS updates.
That isn't to say laptops are perfect with Linux or any hardware for that matter. Just that support for Linux is nowhere near as bad as it was a decade ago.
Wait until you installed it on physical machine and be greeted by a myriad of driver issues, worse on laptops with latest hardware.
Even the safest bet (say, Intel CPU with no discrete GPU) is not safe. The latest Linux 5.11 and Mesa 21.1 has issues driving a rotated display on Intel Iris iGPU with vertical sync enabled.
With enough commitment and time, it can be largely solved, but you just have to think the *nix way and keep constantly tinkering.
I'm actually stuck with all three OS 's to keep track of, Windows at work, and Mac OS and Linux at home. I really think it is safe to say that Linux is only a few steps behind Mac OS as far as OS stability goes.
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LOL your funeral. That's insane. Even for a desktop user. No better than antivaxers.
At least an anti vaxer might have a good reason for their position, as not all of them are idiots.
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M1 Mac mini
I have a cluster of Mac-Mini ;D
Four G1 units (PPC)
Four G2 units (x86 intel core duo dual)
I will add for sure four M1 units, but not now, for sure next year.
I think they are still "unripe" apples
M1's are crazy fast. Was getting better multi threaded compile times with LLVM than my Ryzen 3700X without it getting warm to the touch.
I'm not sure people really grasp how fast Apples M1's are and in the Mac Book Air they are passively cooled. This actually makes Apple's lowest end laptops competitive with some of the higher end machines on the market right now.
My idea of a perfect laptop would be a Lenovo chassis with a ripe ARM processor, in the same performance class as an M1, built from the ground up to run Linux.
But yes, give it a couple of generations. There are TB, Bluetooth and display issues with them. It's a good first gen product though. They nearly nailed it.
I think that they nailed if good enough for the hardware they introduced it on. M1 is no more perfect than any other processor, it just demonstrates what might be possible with a purpose built ARM based Linux laptop. I can Actually see M1 class laptops with a few built in solar cells, much like many calculators these days, that use those cells to supplement the battery.
What Apples M1 indicates to me is just how badly the x86 world has stagnated. I just imagine what could be done with a similar hardware in a machine designed to run Linux. It would be an amazing machine.
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(OP here...) WOW, I never wanted this to get into a shit fight! ;D
Are you new here? :-DD
I simply
wanted to 'educate' myself, about all I'm being/been told, and learn something NEW !! And that has been achieved!! ;D
This is so gratifying; the virtual machines are quite a leap from the old days to start experimenting with such different OSes without having to spend a considerable amount of time with dual boots, partitions, drivers, etc.
Re: 'Win-10'... I understand people's concerns today, and I was totally averse to using it up to date, until I had researched how to remove
ALL, (and I mean 'all') the crap/links/software/settings, so that it is NOW behaving like say an older 'Win-7' system, but with all the latest
'perks' and opperability.
You give me hope. Since I use some Windows only utilities that have no counterpart in Linux, I have been toying with the idea of installing Windows 10 at home again but the number of hours spent in trying to plug its idiosyncracies in the past is still very present. Not to mention the $$$ for a new license.
Re: 'Ubuntu-Mate 20.04'... I am slowly understanding the 'apparent' simplicity, (especially when involving the 'numerous' builds/versions with
a 'myriad' of named styles), which often vary mainly in regards to their particular pertaining 'GUI' front-end!! This 'diversity' does cause me a certain
amount of confusion, as well as not understanding all the 'choices' as a relatively new/prospective 'tinkerer' for an alternative to Windows!! :scared:
I also 'think' I understand, (and HAVE experimented greatly in it's use!), where the POWER of using a 'Terminal' for manipulation/control/info, can
greatly enhance one's power/abilities to 'Get Things Done', outside of the particular variants 'GUI'... I 'Get It'... However, for someone/user who is a
generally 'non-technical' in their background/thinking/abilities, I THINK they might struggle with even the simplest 'Non-Clickable' options/abilities!! :(
There is indeed a wide range of distros, GUIs and with varying degrees of support. Ubuntu is one of the distros I like and is well supported, but the terminal is where its strength lies and the GUI is indeed very limited in the customizations and settings department, which are drawbacks for the novice user. Once you get a system customized to your liking and/or fully operational, this reduces in importance and it becomes a "normal" GUI based OS.
The apllications also have a very high variability of quality and testing, but that is not an OS fault.
Re: 'MacOS-Mojave'... (and all similar variants!)... I found the 'GUI' interface to be generally pleasant!... However, at 1st I was TOTALLY lost, in my
attempt to just simply just 'look' at a Drive, and see what is free!! (Yes, I know now how to...). Again there was totally different 'wording' for things I was
used to in 'Ms-Windows' but that's to be expected. (My bad!). Utilizing the 'Finder' app is a whole new kettle of fish!! (Never understood that analogy!).
I 'learnt' how to display hidden files etc... (YES I know to be careful !!!), and to delve into multiple normally un-viewable sub-directories, (I was a Windows
power-user, and wanted to know how!!)...
When I started on macOS years ago I had to get some help from a friend that was a long time power user. In my complete ignorance at the time, I was able to show him so many non sensical things on the GUI that made him admit that Windows had it better in several instances. The weird flexing of keys to be pressed to perform a single PrtScr or a few other tasks is a complete loss for the novice, while the inability to set up a screen lock after a few minutes of system inactivity is impossible without Duckduckgo''ing and diving into the command line. A good GUI, but the competition caught up.
The UPSHOT of what I was saying there, is that ONE BIG difference between Macs & M.S. seems to be the 'lack'
(sorry) of PROPER 'Un-Install' facilities???? W.T.F.? One uses 'Finder' to locate an 'App', right-click it & send to the trash bin, or HOLD select an 'App' via various
means/displays, until it 'wiggles', and 'delete' it?? After only a cursory investigation with Google, indicates that NOT ALL files/mods are removed!! ?? |O
To be fair, a great deal of Windows applications have a poorly tested uninstall feature and leave a lot behind, especially on the wild west that is the System Registry. Not necessarily a fault of the OS, but its intricacy does not make things much easy. One of the most inexcusable things, however, is leave behind files and directories - to which several of them do, unfortunately.
Anyway... I have had, & am having fun, playing with & learning, like I never have before...
And that is a great outcome! Congratulations! Keep the squirrels running in our brains... :-+
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Just remember you have the registry on Linux too now :-DD (gsettings)
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What Apples M1 indicates to me is just how badly the x86 world has stagnated. I just imagine what could be done with a similar hardware in a machine designed to run Linux. It would be an amazing machine.
This was done before in many instances, where tablets are mostly exclusive ARM domain and chromebooks had a huge chunk of models running on this ISA. At least for chromebooks, I think the marketing machine of the big AMD/Intel corps managed to kill ARM almost completely.
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I'm not sure people really grasp how fast Apples M1's
I'm not sure people grasp how badly node advantage and comparing intel processors optimized for speed to the M1 stacks the deck. Diminishing returns set in so badly with processors ... you can burn twice the power for 10% performance gain easy.
That's why 4800U is the only really fair comparison to M1 and at a node advantage the M1 ain't all that impressive architecturally. Apple's margins to be able to buy that node advantage certainly are impressive, good for them and that's all the consumer has to care about, but lets not exaggerate the architectural advantage.
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It burned 23 watts doing what my 3700x used 180 watts to do and took 8% less time :) (total consumption by the entire box). Multi-core LLVM compilation.
That’s a very important architectural advantage. In fact the most important in 2021 as the majority of compute cost now is billed in amps on the server side.
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LINUX - Lost In Numerous Undocumented eXtras.
Wouldn't it be nice if there was a Linux O/S. But there isn't one, there are hundreds. Wouldn't it be nice if programs could be installed on any Linux - but unless you compile from source, each flavour has a different package and installer. I wanted to install a serial terminal on two laptops. I ended up with two variants, one running gtkterm (preferred) and one running cutecom because the O/S that supported gtkterm wouldn't run on the other laptop. So even though the second laptop was older than the first, it needed a later and different O/S to work. And I couldn't find a gtkterm package for it. The first laptop has a serial port, but I found I could use a USB/serial device if I wanted. Just plug it in, it works. The second one only has USB, I have to plug the device in and modprobe ftdi_sio. Argggh!
I love that I have old machines that are still useful, and my server (now over 10 years old) is a Ubuntu install. But in the end I stick to Windows 7 for the family desktop, and Windows 10 for my development machine. I'd love to run Linux everywhere but when an install in Windows is download THE installation file and run it, it is just too hard to find an equivalent Linux package in the flavour you want, then hope it installs. Not enough hours in the day.
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Well there kind of is, if you want one Linux to standardize on and you don't want to do a lot of tinkering just install Ubuntu and you're done. It's widely supported, just about any software you could want works on it out of the box, there are some things I don't like about it personally but it's hard to come up with a better distro for someone who wants that "it just works" out of the box experience.
I don't think there is any way to get the versatility and freedom offered by Linux without the fragmentation, but now that there are several mainstream distros that have gained widespread use this is not nearly the problem it was 10-15 years ago. I struggle to think of a popular Linux application that won't install on Ubuntu.
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Look at, for example, the industrial grade EDA. They support Suse and Red Hat.
The same with all the tools for MCU firmware and FPGA development.
In practice, it also runs on Ubuntu and derivatives like Mint.
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I struggle to think of a popular Linux application that won't install on Ubuntu.
I agree, but it requires more work. I do some programming for PIC processors, using MPLAB X. The way MPLAB X is structured, I thought maybe it was developed for Linux and ported to Windows. I use it under Windows 10, just install and run. Out of curiosity I asked the question of the Internet - here is a typical reply:
"Version MPLAB X works on Linux as well as Windows, so I decided to load it on my Laptop running Linux Mint.
Loading it is not quite as simple as doing it in Windows.
With windows, you download a .exe file, double click that, and the computer walks you through the rest.
With Linux, extra steps are required, and there are instructions on the web for these, but they miss out a few points – that would be obvious to Linux black-belts, but not to poor me."
another:
"The only difference I noticed is that you need to plug in PICkit3 before you start MPLAB X"
Some of my programs use GPS modules, and it is useful to see the satellite data. I downloaded VisualGPS, ran the installer, plugged in a USB/serial adapter, looked in Device Manager to see which port it was, ran the program. Maybe that simple with Linux, maybe not. If you can find an equivalent program. But do I want to spend time figuring it out - no.
My impression is Linux is almost there. If it were possible to harness all the brilliance that goes into all the Linux variants, and point it all in one direction, it would be the de facto standard. After all it is the basis for Android, Apple, Chromebook, routers, NAS, and just about anything that isn't based on the Intel processor. I look forward to the day it happens.
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My impression is Linux is almost there.
Linux will never be "there". If you want something like windows, then use windows.
Windows is made for the masses, a big part of it are housewives, kids and gamers. Linux is made by engineers, for engineers.
If it were possible to harness all the brilliance that goes into all the Linux variants, and point it all in one direction, it would be the de facto standard.
That will never be the case. It's also a bad idea. No variants means no competition. And it's the competition that fuels innovation.
Apart from that, there are just a couple of mainstream distro's. The rest are either derivatives or niches. So, in practise, there isn't really a problem.
Also, it's not true that windows programs always install and work nicely. It happens many times that there's some lib missing or doesn't have the correct version.
Forums are full of questions from desperate people that have some weird windows problem and usually they have to dive into the registry and apply unknown commands
and pray it fixes their problem.
Windows is worse than Linux. It's just that most people are used to the weirdness of windows.
Not that I care. The desktop marketshare of Linux (+/-1%) is big enough to keep it floating.
For me, the idea of windows users migrating to Linux is a nightmare...
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Most linux distributions share a common package format, like deb or rpm. There are also tools for converting packages from one format into another, e.g. alien.
BTW, a few weeks ago I installed Debian on an Asus Eee PC (512MB RAM, 4GB flash disk) for fun and giggles. It was a smooth install - slow, but it's usable. ;D
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Oh well.
Do you need to use Solidworks? Linux doesn't support it, so use Windows.
Do you need to use Premiere? Linux sucks with it (and it also sucks with Audio), so use Windows.
Do you need to use FinalCut? Neither Windows nor Linux support it, so use MacOS.
Do you need to develop something that is GNU-dependent? MacOS is BSD-oriented, so use Linux.
Do you need to develop something on a SBC board? Well ... Linux runs on SBC boards
Do you need to develop something on some industrial board? Well ... WindowsCE can be interesting
Do you want to implement any paranoid-hardened server? OpenBSD can satisfy the paranoia of the most paranoid person in the world
Do you need something nice to have fun with? Look at ArOS or Haiku, but forget applications because there are just a few
At the end of the day, you need all of these OSs, I said ALL of them :D
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Also, it's not true that windows programs always install and work nicely.
I think the situation is worse on Linux, when you change the .so libraries you can break links. On Gentoo this is a serious problem since you can easily break soft-link pointing to .so libraries when you emerge new stuff; at least Windows does native support layers of legacy libraries without any soft/hard link so it's harder to break something.
Windows is even better when applications are compiled as "portable", basically it's the same trick on Linux and MacOS when applications are compiled as "static"
No dependencies with system libraries is better, but there is a price to pay: it consumes more ram and space on the hard-drive.
-
You can have old and new libs in parallel without any problem. And if you need a special environment you can use LD_LIBRARY_PATH for example.
-
You can have old and new libs in parallel without any problem. And if you need a special environment you can use LD_LIBRARY_PATH for example.
TRUE. An absolute true elsewhere on Linux.
What is wrong/right on above comments is:
- *NIX was meant to be used by competent people
- such folks are capable to make decisions and proper service tasks
- There is absolute *NO WAY* to do just "point click install ..." in *NIX
- There is a very clear trend to try this requiring:
-- A complete ditch of the sysadmin replacing that critical part w/systemd
-- a complete decommission of Xorg replacing it w/non network aware and
totally obscure display manager so DRM can be placed on top
-- A complete ditch of safety practices (aka kernel ring tools) so "daemons"
can be placed and managed on user level.. having obvious security holes.
So. the above comment holds true: *NIX is made by serious people
aimed to suit serious day by day use where a sysadmin is required.
You can easily run a LIBC version 5 compiled application just placing
the all libs in a proper directory and pointing that LD_LIBRARY_PATH
the shell is self aware and self contained - is does not require anything
other than this.
BTW you can compress a WHOLE *NIX SYSTEM (W/LIBS + TOOLS) in
a small compact image..
Have a look on the TOTAL MESS OF LEGACY CRIPPLED AND BUGGY DLLs
are placed on each MSWin sub directory.
it is a total unmanageable mess which requires ODD weird registry keys
and when they work... the few times and apps are crippled and full of faults..
The bottom line is that:
- THEY WILL PRIVATIZE and PATRONIZE LINUX
- not by chance systemd python and wayland are being heavily pushed ..
- the GNU tools and proper sysadmin tools are WAY TOO MUCH POWERFUL to let them there.
Have a look at how the CARTEL will run *NIX tools on top of MSWIN
using a VM and so called crippled WSL
https://www.osnews.com/story/133281/ibm-cobol-for-linux-on-x86-1-1-brings-cobol-capabilities-to-linux/ (https://www.osnews.com/story/133281/ibm-cobol-for-linux-on-x86-1-1-brings-cobol-capabilities-to-linux/)
Read like this:
IBM COBOL for (UBUNTU) (aka LINUX) on x86 running on WINDOWS WSL
and that is it : LINUX apps for WINDOWS WSL..
if that makes any reasonable sense..
That same CARTEL already subverted and diverted *NIX to their particular buz.
They have control over semicond. and common goals.
UEFI and secure keys are another piece on that CARTEL puzzle
Paul
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You can have old and new libs in parallel without any problem. And if you need a special environment you can use LD_LIBRARY_PATH for example.
This usually works for multi-libraries not for multi-version-of-the-same-libraries. The trick is about putting libraries in different folders and set the environment accordingly, it's practically used for multi-lib profiles (e.g. softfloat vs hardfloat, or 32bit vs 64bit, or glibc vs uclibc vs MUSL), unfortunately the problem with Distro like Gentoo is not solved because the issue is related to how the upgrading software manages soft and hard links to ".so" files: since it's made through soft and hard link, it can break during the install procedure, and you have to figure out exactly what happened in order to fix it.
For example, look at this
/usr/lib/libzzip.so -> libzzip-0.so.13.0.60
libzzip.so is a link which points to libzzip-0.so.13.0.60, which is actually the binary of the dynamic library
What can happen if I do emerge a new libzzip, say libzzip-0.so.14.0.0, and during the install, something removes the old libzzip-0.so.13.0.60 but doesn't link libzzip.so to the new libzzip-0.so.14.0.0 ?
/usr/lib/libzzip.so -> dead_link
It is not an unsolvable problem, I have seen and solved hundreds of times over the last 20 years, my point is only that it can consume hours to understand what went wrong.
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Have a look on the TOTAL MESS OF LEGACY CRIPPLED AND BUGGY DLLs
are placed on each MSWin sub directory.
Have a look here: I am running Avocet compilers on Windows 10 ;D
They were released as 16-bit applications for windows 3.1 many many years ago.
I cannot run a similar software designed for Linux-2.0, unless I make a mini-root, or better, unless I put all the files and libraries into a QEMU/x86 VM with all the old libraries and kernel.
I have four mini-root here supporting legacy kernel 2.6 software, they work nicely, but things for kernel 2.4 and 2.0 have so many troubles that it's simpler to have them in a VM.
-
Just a point: the guys who designed Unix didn’t introduce shared libraries. In fact everything was statically compiled. The only thing that was an interface was the kernel API and ABI. The same is true of the latest thing that came out of their stable: Go.
Shared libraries were a cost consideration when stdlibs started getting bloated and RAM was expensive and were introduced to the n commercial Unix variants.
Linux kernel ABI and API is very stable since ELF was introduced so mostly stuff will run that is that old, if it’s statically linked. The rest of the crapshoot is mostly UI toolkit issues from experience.
But yes you have to give Microsoft their due on this one: they put a hell of a lot of effort into making old stuff work down to allowing API bugs to exist through compatibility layer. I’m regularly impressed if I’m honest.
-
(yup, a lot of the old stuff is ecoff or aout, not elf, see executable file formats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_executable_file_formats), that's why I need a VM)
-
- *NIX was meant to be used by competent people
Incompetent developers make incompetent software. Installers also.
Android is Linux and is used by a significant amount of world's population. Sure, it has layers and layers of garbage on top of it, but is still Linux and easy enough for someone to do single click install and add more garbage to their system.
- There is absolute *NO WAY* to do just "point click install ..." in *NIX
This is not true even for desktops. I use Code Composer Studio and it is a single click installer. Q4OS also has quite a few installers that are single click wrappers. Ubuntu software store also does a lot of that as well.
Have a look on the TOTAL MESS OF LEGACY CRIPPLED AND BUGGY DLLs
are placed on each MSWin sub directory.
Microsoft support for legacy software is quite good. Sure, there are gaps here and there, but I am able to run quite ancient software (20+ years old) in modern versions.
Microsoft is not perfect in any way, but they have their high points as well, just like Linux, BSD, macOS, etc.
-
- ANDROID *may be* very very long related to the Linux kernel
- But honestly there is no possible way to recognize *NIX on top of that ..
- Sure we can "point and click and install.." a lot of stuff...
- I do that when deploying MINT for those sick of MS...
- it works... i call that the "BANANA BUNTU SOLUTION.."
OK it works.. but we are talking serious..
And seriously? no competent folk will do that on a serious machine...
It is just not meant for that.
Paul
-
Have a look on the TOTAL MESS OF LEGACY CRIPPLED AND BUGGY DLLs
are placed on each MSWin sub directory.
Have a look here: I am running Avocet compilers on Windows 10 ;D
They were released as 16-bit applications for windows 3.1 many many years ago.
I cannot run a similar software designed for Linux-2.0, unless I make a mini-root, or better, unless I put all the files and libraries into a QEMU/x86 VM with all the old libraries and kernel.
I have four mini-root here supporting legacy kernel 2.6 software, they work nicely, but things for kernel 2.4 and 2.0 have so many troubles that it's simpler to have them in a VM.
Try OpenWatcom.
It runs native on LINUX producing 16 and 32 bit apps
for C/C++ and FORTRAN
Open Watcom C/C++ x86 16-bit Compile and Link Utility
Version 2.0 beta Apr 2 2015 11:06:47 (32-bit)
Copyright (c) 2002-2015 The Open Watcom Contributors. All Rights Reserved.
Portions Copyright (c) 1988-2002 Sybase, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Source code is available under the Sybase Open Watcom Public License.
See http://www.openwatcom.org/ for details.
Open Watcom FORTRAN 77 x86 16-bit Optimizing Compiler
Version 2.0 beta Apr 2 2015 10:59:26 (32-bit)
Copyright (c) 2002-2015 The Open Watcom Contributors. All Rights Reserved.
Portions Copyright (c) 1984-2002 Sybase, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Source code is available under the Sybase Open Watcom Public License.
See http://www.openwatcom.org/ for details.
Just from my terminal..
Running LINUX with my own LIBC compiled tool set
free from those definitions and versioning problems..
Paul
-
/usr/lib/libzzip.so -> dead_link
It is not an unsolvable problem, I have seen and solved hundreds of times over the last 20 years, my point is only that it can consume hours to understand what went wrong.
I haven't seen such an issue for a long time despite keeping some old/obsolete libs and doing multiple dist upgrades.
-
Android is Linux and is used by a significant amount of world's population. Sure, it has layers and layers of garbage on top of it, but is still Linux and easy enough for someone to do single click install and add more garbage to their system.
I think it would be more appropriate to say that Android is based on linux since Google took only a subset of the kernel (and features).
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Firstly, in answer to 'rsjsouza', (about 6 or 8 comments back!)....
I really really thank you, for your in-depth and verbose response & comments, regarding my prior post/comment!!! :-+
As you probably know, I'm a real 'newbie' in regards to non-Windows O.S.'s etc, and your thoughts were VERY much appreciated mate!...
To ALL though, and since then, I've learnt that in the 'Mac' system, their 'emphasis' seems to be on simplicity & user-friendliness, without either
the 'need' or desire (Apple don't WANT you to know too much!). You have a 'Document' you've written/created, what is the File-Name Extension??
(Don't worry about it... and look for it in 'Documents'!!). I hate that forced control, but I understand the apparent 'simplicity' for general Home users.
The 'File' system on a 'Mac' seems to be like looking under the hood of a modern car, for people that barely know how to put some petrol/diesel in it!...
THAT being said, I've noticed over the years, that places like 'Medical-Centres', (and all their networked Doctors etc.), GENERALLY all use MAC Systems?? :)
So I guess that says something about the proven reliability etc of such systems....
I never initially understood why 'Apple' changed years ago to incorporating/using 'Intel' style CPU's ? I'm not complaining either, as it means that 'we' are
now able to utilize such modern Virtualization Software... such as 'VirtualBox'. Although!!... 'VirtualBox' is by FAR in-superior to VMWARE, even using the
totally free version called 'Player'. However, in that case, you DO need the 'UnLocker' patch, freely downloaded, to add such 'MacOS' Guests... 8)
To ' rsjsouza' again... Regarding the 'availability' of Linux/Ubuntu software... Yes, there is a myriad of generally needed/wanted software equivalents,
but of course anything 'specialized' is almost non-existent!! Like my 'Embroidery' Software/Design requirements etc etc. I've just noticed!, that there is
add-on software available, via various companies/names that can allow you to 'run' various 'MS-Windows' apps on 'Ubuntu' etc... that is something like,
(but somehow subtly different?) from using another 'VM' machine?? (Something like 'Wine', or other variances...)
Thank you all for your kind words & comments... Glenn
-
Have a look here: I am running Avocet compilers on Windows 10 ;D
They were released as 16-bit applications for windows 3.1 many many years ago.
I cannot run a similar software designed for Linux-2.0, unless I make a mini-root, or better, unless I put all the files and libraries into a QEMU/x86 VM with all the old libraries and kernel.
I have four mini-root here supporting legacy kernel 2.6 software, they work nicely, but things for kernel 2.4 and 2.0 have so many troubles that it's simpler to have them in a VM.
I will assume everybody knows already what is BGI.
How *old* (and good) it is /was and how you would possibly run it today?
You are kidding ? no. Compiled native in watcom linux using BGI interface
Running BGI on X11 terminal and graphics viewport...
WTF ? nuts?
No. attached. simple as typing make.
Paul
-
(..)
I've just noticed!, that there is
add-on software available, via various companies/names that can allow you to 'run' various 'MS-Windows' apps on 'Ubuntu' etc... that is something like,
(but somehow subtly different?) from using another 'VM' machine?? (Something like 'Wine', or other variances...)
Thank you all for your kind words & comments... Glenn
YES.. there are 2 ways to run *ANYTHING* on *NIX (including those apps mentioned
above like Premiere .. Studio*.. 3D that.. )
First way and always preferred is WINE: https://www.winehq.org/ (https://www.winehq.org/)
- WINE *IS NOT* for newbies.. you *can* point click install..
- BUT proper results will vary a lot because there are issues with 32/64 libs
I have a totally dedicated 32bit system setup to run my 32bits well under WINE
Second alternative is "non free" as you **NEED** a complete OS.
- you may try a VM like VirtualBox...
- BUT! VirtualBox is proprietary and requires some odd tidbits
- YOU HAVE QEMU a totally free alternative VM which runs perfectly..
- you need to install the whole shit OS to run your apps..
WINE in my case runs 99.99% of all i need.. flawlessly
But requires substantial proper setup to do that..
Paul
-
Or do what I do: run windows with Linux in VMs :-DD
-
Or do what I do: run windows with Linux in VMs :-DD
Thanks for the laugh..
TRUE indeed. :-DD
There is no need to setup a VM anymore...
They already did that using WSL.
The "future" of linux as some say is MS-Linux.
(and the whole CARTEL in between .. )
things will shrink a lot this way
Paul
-
WSL is a VM. A naff buggy one built on Hyper-V which is Satan’s own hypervisor platform. I use virtualbox.
I have an entire 6 node kubernetes cluster, build agent and management node sitting here on my desktop.
-
WSL is a VM. A naff buggy one built on Hyper-V which is Satan’s own hypervisor platform. I use virtualbox.
I have an entire 6 node kubernetes cluster, build agent and management node sitting here on my desktop.
and I see things just converging to that kind of stuff....
They are putting money and people to (aka diverting devels) to
migrate the ecosystem for that..
Without drivers on *NIX and locked by UEFI keys..
Everybody will be likely forced to have such setups..
sooner or later.. it is depressing.
Paul
-
Doubt it will happen. Most of the bare metal OS and hypervisors out there these days are Linux.
-
Doubt it will happen. Most of the bare metal OS and hypervisors out there these days are Linux.
... but they are "heavily modified property" of them..
Like ANDROID modified kernel.. and considering that UEFI
now integrates http ( server farm ) transparent boot ...
they can just force a UEFI image which just http boots such hypervisor
and nothing more they will need besides a toaster on the other end...
Paul
-
To ALL though, and since then, I've learnt that in the 'Mac' system, their 'emphasis' seems to be on simplicity & user-friendliness, without either
the 'need' or desire (Apple don't WANT you to know too much!). You have a 'Document' you've written/created, what is the File-Name Extension??
(Don't worry about it... and look for it in 'Documents'!!). I hate that forced control, but I understand the apparent 'simplicity' for general Home users.
Back before macOS was based on Unix (that is before OS X 10.0, which according to Wikipedia was 20 years ago, March 2001!), Mac OS did not use file extensions in the manner of DOS and whatever to indicate file types. Remember, back in the DOS days, the eight dot three file name was standard because of filesystem limits, and the file extension was more traditional indicator of file type, and DOS actually didn't care (with the exception of .exe and .com for executable files and .bat for batch files). You could give any file any three-letter (or 2, or 1) extension you wanted and the application didn't care. That's all because the file system pre-dated the notion of a graphical user interface, and specifically where you could click on a file icon and that would launch the application meant to edit it.
Mac OS, being a GUI from the start, used content types and magic "content creator" codes to inform the OS what application created a file and could be used to edit it. However, with macOS now being Unix-based, file extensions are actually used, and like modern Unix and Windows, the file extension is not limited to just three characters. Now, by default the file extension is hidden (in the Finder) for most things, as the type of file is obvious from its icon. Display of file extensions is easily enabled, of course. (There is a minor annoyance: being Unix, many applications use "dot files," like .cproject in Eclipse, and by default macOS does not display those files in the Finder. It's exactly like if you did the ls command without the -a argument. Unfortunately, when you select all of the files in a directory, the hidden dot files are not selected. But there's a fix, you can enable that display either temporarily or permanently.)
The 'File' system on a 'Mac' seems to be like looking under the hood of a modern car, for people that barely know how to put some petrol/diesel in it!...
THAT being said, I've noticed over the years, that places like 'Medical-Centres', (and all their networked Doctors etc.), GENERALLY all use MAC Systems?? :)
So I guess that says something about the proven reliability etc of such systems....
The macOS file system is a standard Unix file system. User-created files can be stored anywhere, of course. Now for convenience, there are default storage locations for most files. Typically, that is in /Users/yourname/Documents because ... well, why not? And the various Apple programs like Music (the former iTunes) and iMovie and Photos have default folders called /Users/yourname/Music and /Users/yourname/Movies and /Users/yourname/Photos, and of course you can move all of those to some other location.
Anyway, Unix users are comfortable with that file structure.
As for why medical offices and others uses Macs? Remember: the IT people select the software that fits the business's needs, and then they buy the hardware that runs that software. For example, a previous employer (going back quite a few years now) ran the BOM and ordering and inventory stuff all on a nice Filemaker database -- on Macs. It was quite reliable and it did what was necessary. Also it was a fuck of a lot less expensive than an Oracle database solution.
I never initially understood why 'Apple' changed years ago to incorporating/using 'Intel' style CPU's ? I'm not complaining either, as it means that 'we' are
now able to utilize such modern Virtualization Software... such as 'VirtualBox'. Although!!... 'VirtualBox' is by FAR in-superior to VMWARE, even using the
totally free version called 'Player'. However, in that case, you DO need the 'UnLocker' patch, freely downloaded, to add such 'MacOS' Guests... 8)
They switched from PowerPC to Intel processors because at the time, there was no roadmap for higher-performance/lower-power-consumption PowerPC processors after the G5 from IBM or Motorola. Intel clearly had products that met that need. What needs to be stated again is how seamless Apple made the transition from PPC to x86. (And they're doing it again, for the third time, with the M1.)
After 20 years of Unix-based macOS, I still don't understand why tools vendors (all of the FPGA vendors, for example) haven't offered macOS versions of their software. Instead, you're stuck dealing with specific variants of Linux and spending way too much time fucking with getting it all to work. macOS presents a standardized GUI and there are obviously multiplatform GUI toolkits that can be used to make the applications look the same across all platforms. All of the standard Linux/Unix development tools work on it, which is why once Mac OS X was released, much of the scientific computing community moved from Linux to the Mac.
Of course, when you ask them they say, "Nobody's asked for Mac support!" and then you can say, "bullshit" and point to many examples: MatLab, Mathematica, all of the microcontroller development platforms based on Eclipse (SiLabs, TI, NXP, ST) and NetBeans (Microchip/Atmel) ...
-
Or do what I do: run windows with Linux in VMs :-DD
Yeah, rather than dicking about trying to get Xilinx ISE to run in Windows 10, I created a Linux VM with VirtualBox, and that works well enough. Still, fuck you, Xilinx.
-
Doubt it will happen. Most of the bare metal OS and hypervisors out there these days are Linux.
... but they are "heavily modified property" of them..
Like ANDROID modified kernel.. and considering that UEFI
now integrates http ( server farm ) transparent boot ...
they can just force a UEFI image which just http boots such hypervisor
and nothing more they will need besides a toaster on the other end...
Paul
No one would buy that.
-
This guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4IDTblOHYY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4IDTblOHYY)
-
After 20 years of Unix-based macOS, I still don't understand why tools vendors (all of the FPGA vendors, for example) haven't offered macOS versions of their software.
In the case of the software suite I used to support, it was an easy answer: macOS users are a noisy but infinitesimal crowd. 1% of downloads when compared to 10% for Linux and the rest for Windows. Still, it was enough to actually create a version for this OS, to which was quite reasonably well received. Over the years, though, the California Fruit Co. made sure to screw our lives to the point that our first release does not work anymore after all the certification/signing and ending 32-bit support (among other shenanigans like overhauling the USB/serial subsystem, which broke compatibility on day one).
-
This guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4IDTblOHYY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4IDTblOHYY)
Sieving primes is a fairly useless synthetic benchmark for testing OS performance. Especially as most of his stuff would quite happily lurk entirely in the CPU cache. You want to hit network, IO and lots of RAM for that and the kernel’s API. NT’s syscall overhead is high enough to make a 10% difference in benchmarks on its own. On top of that, NT’s disk cache is hopeless.
-
After 20 years of Unix-based macOS, I still don't understand why tools vendors (all of the FPGA vendors, for example) haven't offered macOS versions of their software.
In the case of the software suite I used to support, it was an easy answer: macOS users are a noisy but infinitesimal crowd. 1% of downloads when compared to 10% for Linux and the rest for Windows. Still, it was enough to actually create a version for this OS, to which was quite reasonably well received. Over the years, though, the California Fruit Co. made sure to screw our lives to the point that our first release does not work anymore after all the certification/signing and ending 32-bit support (among other shenanigans like overhauling the USB/serial subsystem, which broke compatibility on day one).
Yes have to say that I agree. Fine example: Qt still doesn’t work properly on Big Sur.
-
Yeah, rather than dicking about trying to get Xilinx ISE to run in Windows 10, I created a Linux VM with VirtualBox, and that works well enough. Still, fuck you, Xilinx.
ISE is ancient, why would Xilinx bother to make it work with Win10? They're focused on Vivado now and have been for quite a few years. I run ISE on Win7x64, it works perfectly on that.
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Yes have to say that I agree. Fine example: Qt still doesn’t work properly on Big Sur.
..and M1 :rant:
https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/macos.html
https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/macos.html
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I haven't seen such an issue for a long time despite keeping some old/obsolete libs and doing multiple dist upgrades.
In my experiences, it happened on "rolling distro" when I compiled and installed stuff and didn't keep things weekly updated but rather spent a few months without doing it.
On Gentoo this is a known problem, because the portage changes a lot during a month.
On Debian and Arch I have never seen this problem, but things are managed differently, they are binary-based distro and you can update with a half-yearly rate without any problem.
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They're focused on Vivado now and have been for quite a few years.
Sure, they probably do and don't bother to progress further at the same time
https://www.xilinx.com/content/dam/xilinx/support/documentation/sw_manuals/xilinx2020_2/ug973-vivado-release-notes-install-license.pdf (https://www.xilinx.com/content/dam/xilinx/support/documentation/sw_manuals/xilinx2020_2/ug973-vivado-release-notes-install-license.pdf)
@see Supported Operating Systems
used to be before 2020 version
https://www.xilinx.com/support/answers/54242.html (https://www.xilinx.com/support/answers/54242.html)
Basically, Windows 10 or Ubuntu >:D (or Amazon Linux for guys who is runing tools in the cloud), RHEL/SLES left behind and everything else out of scope.
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Qt still doesn't work properly on Gnome :palm:. Hi-DPI and native theme supports are still horrible.
Is it all good with GNOME and Hi-DPI now? ::)
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-computing/what-linux-desktop-(not-for-a-hobby)/msg3307586/#msg3307586 (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-computing/what-linux-desktop-(not-for-a-hobby)/msg3307586/#msg3307586)
GNOME cannot do a fraction scale adjustments via UI right now (no comments)
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Yeah, rather than dicking about trying to get Xilinx ISE to run in Windows 10, I created a Linux VM with VirtualBox, and that works well enough. Still, fuck you, Xilinx.
ISE is ancient, why would Xilinx bother to make it work with Win10? They're focused on Vivado now and have been for quite a few years. I run ISE on Win7x64, it works perfectly on that.
ISE worked fine on win10 just have to hack mod dll's names .... was to make it work on win 8 and up had to do it to use old Xilinx cpld's up to version ISE 10.x ... BUT not tested the latest versions up to 14.x
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Yeah, rather than dicking about trying to get Xilinx ISE to run in Windows 10, I created a Linux VM with VirtualBox, and that works well enough. Still, fuck you, Xilinx.
ISE is ancient, why would Xilinx bother to make it work with Win10? They're focused on Vivado now and have been for quite a few years. I run ISE on Win7x64, it works perfectly on that.
ISE worked fine on win10 just have to hack mod dll's names .... was to make it work on win 8 and up had to do it to use old Xilinx cpld's up to version ISE 10.x ... BUT not tested the latest versions up to 14.x
Yeah, that is the dychotomy of modern pro software: making it work through some simple procedures/hacks can be done in many instances, but making the modifications in-house, adapting the test jigs to acommodate the hacks and officially declaring support is a whole other story, especially with older software that was already "frozen" in the dev tree due to age and/or priorities.
That is one of the beautiful things of the internet: someone will eventually find an unsupported way and others will follow.
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I have been a linux user for 15+ years now, and i have no (major) issues.
Ps: I don't do gaming , and might not have the Latest in laptops (My TP T430s , is my current).
I'm using Linux Mint (19.3) - Mate edition (Gnome 2) for all my laptops/desktops.
And Debian for servers.
My i7-Desktop was bought w. Nvidia GFX , as they have nice linux support.
Mint uses Ubuntu as the engine , but has better driversupport , and Mate (Gnome2)
I was running Ubuntu until the end of 10.4 , where they switched to their own desktop manager , that imho was terrible.
I switched to Mint at that time , and have never looked back.
I'm running
Xilinx ISE 14 , and Altera 13.x on Mint 17.3 (had to do a bit of tweaking, but not too bad)
When switching to 19.3 , i made a Mint 17.3 (FGPA VM - in virtual box) , and that's now my FPGA Machine.
I'm not using Vivado yet , as i don't have any fancy boards.
I'm not a power user (as in multiple screens or advanced sound).
But i have no issue with sound , or BT headsets or ....
I'm a Network guy , and electronics & computers is my hobby , so Solidworks or Altium or ... , is not something i use.
The only things i "really miss" is :
Atmel AVR debugger and Microsoft Visio.
But if i want to solve that i suppose i could install Win10 in a Vbox VM.
I do have one Win7 PC , as i have to update maps on my Garmin GPS , it's booted 2..3 times a year.
I have not missed Windows
/Bingo
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Is it all good with GNOME and Hi-DPI now? ::)
I try to avoid anything written with Qt. For wx and Gtk programs, they scale well in Gnome Desktop.
That being said, Gnome Desktop exposes scaled resolution to apps, so if your app captures a 200% scaled 4K screen, it will only capture at 1080p, as it was fed 1080p source from the toolkit. If you stream, you need to either use a hardware or low level recording tool.
Also, canvases can only output at scaled resolution too. So if you draw on the screen, you draw 1080p on a 200% scaled 4K screen. As expected, this may not be pixel perfect from time to time. This is particularly bad for remote desktop clients, like Remmina.
HiDPI is much better on KDE, as I have heard, but I am just too lazy to explore it. Last time I tried it I found it to be very unnatural to my baked in Gnome thinking.
In order to provide good scaling without getting fuzzy, the applications need to be updated.
I maintain a Qt application that runs on Linux, Mac and windows and some time ago I adapted the whole interface to automatic scaling
using some basic rules:
- NEVER use setGeometry() or setFixedSize() for widgets!
- Use QVBoxLayout and QHBoxLayout to position the widgets on a dialog. Use insertStretch and setStretch so that Qt will
adapt the geometry of all widgets correctly when the user resizes the dialog.
- Give the user the possibility to change the fontsize of the application, the default is to use the same font and fontsize as the
desktop is using. Qt automatically adapt the sizes of widgets like pushbuttons and menus to make the text fit, no issues there with Qt.
(but only if you apply the above rules!)
- When drawing/creating your own widgets using QPainter, calculate the dimensions of everything you draw based on the actual size
of your widget during a paint event. In order to know how much space a text string uses given the actual font and fontsize, use QFontMetrics.
By following these rules, my Qt application run perfectly fine on old screens (1024x768) and modern top of the line hidpi 4K screens,
no matter the physical size of the screen.
Unfortunately, not all programmers follow these rules or update there existing applications.
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I am on Haiku now, wow it's like silk :D
No applications, only a few available, but I am going to write one myself
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Two videos released today. Both putting the boot into their systems that won't boot windows 10. :horse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yCm65w055s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yCm65w055s)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX_yFWKXkz8 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX_yFWKXkz8)
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I do have one Win7 PC , as i have to update maps on my Garmin GPS , it's booted 2..3 times a year.
If you're using Openstreetmaps for the maps you probably can skip that too. I understand that the OSM maps might have some limitations, but as it is free you can give it a try. And you can select of many different flavors (e.g. VeloMap for bicycles). I use mkgmap to convert the files and my Oregon is happy with it.
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Two videos released today. Both putting the boot into their systems that won't boot windows 10. :horse:
It's nothing new, MS started screwing up updates over a decade ago. Back then you had the chance to wait and skip bad updates. But now you're forced to install update rollups and can't dodge the bullets anymore. Meanwhile MS is causing so much trouble that windows became a liability. Give them some more time and they will sink their own ship.
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Been running Linux Mint on a Ryzen 7 board for years - doing Seti@home (project now paused) and now Einstein@home project.
No issues to speak of. 8)
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Two videos released today. Both putting the boot into their systems that won't boot windows 10. :horse:
( :-DD) Meanwhile MS is causing so much trouble that windows became a liability. Give them some more time and they will sink their own ship.
liability ? :-DD
it's been time already
You know what they say about the first ones to abandon ship...
Currently (and for quite some time) MS is the lowest possible shit-ware
anyone can install on a computer..
MS is ground zero of computer shit
I can't bear the idea of people boasting running that WSL thing,,
and advocating MS thingos like power-shit-shell in *NIX
geez do they realize that PERL, RUBY, AWK, TCL .. and even python
sweat hearts are several decades ahead that shit ? :palm:
unbearable
Paul
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I'll give you the WSL and Powershell argument as I don't like them at all but quite frankly there are a lot of doomsayers, zealots and whingers out there who have conspicuous virtues about their shit. And I'm quite fed up with all of it because most people have precisely fuck all experience compared to those of us actually in the trenches on both platforms.
3 windows 10 machines here. No problems at all. Day job is keeling a large fintech on the rails that almost entirely runs on Linux. I've got 11 linux machines running on the hypervisor under the desk which is also windows 10 running vbox.
(https://imgur.com/qJoHGPC.jpg)
Sometimes the right side is both sides. The best tool is the one you use, not the one you talk about using.
I've used Linux professionally for about 24 years now. Windows about 30. They're as bad as each other :-DD
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(..)
3 windows 10 machines here. No problems at all.
(..)
I've used Linux professionally for about 24 years now. Windows about 30. They're as bad as each other :-DD
Hardly... question is "when their shit will hit *your* fan.. "
They are obviously in a decadent spiral descent ...
Trying to pile *NIX inside their shit hole..
second question is "When this shit hits their gaming audience..."
what they will FUD next.?
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-10-update-bsod-frame-rate-plummeting (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-10-update-bsod-frame-rate-plummeting)
serious problems for their last trench
Paul
PS> I have my own pile of WINTEL MS shit on my scrap bags..
Interesting (just BLAH non focused points)
https://www.pcmag.com/news/cleaning-up-the-e-waste-mess-big-tech-needs-to-do-more (https://www.pcmag.com/news/cleaning-up-the-e-waste-mess-big-tech-needs-to-do-more)
But the figure is amazing clear to show what they did and
how they filled their pockets so fast..
Figure shows their irresponsible methods.. in permanent effect
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I've got 11 linux machines running on the hypervisor under the desk which is also windows 10 running vbox.
What's the advantage for a windows host? Is there an equivelent to in kernel vhost-net and vhost-scsi for virtio on windows hosts?
-
(..)
3 windows 10 machines here. No problems at all.
(..)
I've used Linux professionally for about 24 years now. Windows about 30. They're as bad as each other :-DD
Hardly... question is "when their shit will hit *your* fan.. "
They are obviously in a decadent spiral descent ...
Trying to pile *NIX inside their shit hole..
second question is "When this shit hits their gaming audience..."
what they will FUD next.?
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-10-update-bsod-frame-rate-plummeting (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-10-update-bsod-frame-rate-plummeting)
serious problems for their last trench
Paul
PS> I have my own pile of WINTEL MS shit on my scrap bags..
Interesting (just BLAH non focused points)
https://www.pcmag.com/news/cleaning-up-the-e-waste-mess-big-tech-needs-to-do-more (https://www.pcmag.com/news/cleaning-up-the-e-waste-mess-big-tech-needs-to-do-more)
But the figure is amazing clear to show what they did and
how they filled their pockets so fast..
Figure shows their irresponsible methods.. in permanent effect
Ah that's bullshit though.
What happened was a load of gamers with barely working PCs made out of ass end components rolled out an update without testing it that shit the bed. I have no sympathy. They all popped up and some tech aggregator knocked up some clickbait for it. Most people don't understand stability, testing etc.
Big tech only sells what people want. Stop buying stuff if it's an issue for you.
Anyway not sure what the whining is about. During covid the whole supply chain including recycled kit dried up due to demand. It's not all going in landfill.
Edit: to point out on other threads I am all for manufacturers taking responsibility for recycling. The issue is the end users get all pissy when I tell them to go with a vendor that will actually do this i.e Apple because Apple is Satan's slippers in the eyes of most people. So what happens is the end user demands the lowest price crap because the real reason they don't want to buy apple is because they are cheap asses or genuinely poor, which means you actively choose to stamp on the people below you instead. Either that or if you take an item back to Apple for recycling that is thoroughly obsolete (that's 6 years for an iPhone which is forever) you still won't take it back because you can sell it on ebay for £30 and MONEY GOOD.
Selfish people is the problem, not big tech. If you don't want to be part of this, spend on a company who has an ethical policy that matches your expectations or just don't own the device.
Breaks down to:
Wah wah wah I won't pay $1000 for an iPhone. Apple are cunts.
Really it's wah wah wah there's this cheaper thing which has bigger numbers and is only $800 and all I have to do is trade my data, several Uighur souls for the privilege of saving $200. To hide this from society I take a public stand against Apple's irrelevant policies to my ethical position through conspicuous declaration of their inferiority.
Lame humans all of you.
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I've got 11 linux machines running on the hypervisor under the desk which is also windows 10 running vbox.
What's the advantage for a windows host? Is there an equivelent to in kernel vhost-net and vhost-scsi for virtio on windows hosts?
Excel, Visual Studio Classic, SQL Server, Outlook run on it too. It has 64G of RAM so I can get a full stack of our stuff on it which is cross-platform unlike smaller nodes.
-
(..)
Big tech only sells what people want. Stop buying stuff if it's an issue for you.
(..)
:-DD :-DD :-DD ::) ::) ::)
Lucky me then... I have stopped buying their stuff late 90s.
But from late 80s to late 90s I had a smaller similar pile of that garbage..
This is no rant no whine - they gave me serious prejudice.
But by 80s/90s there were no practical alternatives... :palm:
Stopped that by late 90s never looked back.
best thing I did stopping to use and support these assholes
All folks with similar trajectory will probably say the same
Paul
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Most of it's crap yes but there's some gold out there. Knowing what to use and what to avoid is a massive social advantage. And surprisingly that still only applies to things evaluated on technical merit and not marketing. Food for thought.
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Excel, Visual Studio Classic, SQL Server, Outlook run on it too. It has 64G of RAM so I can get a full stack of our stuff on it which is cross-platform unlike smaller nodes.
But why the Windows host? Doesn't that leave a lot of potential performance on the table for the guests?
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Why not? It’s a general purpose computer. It might not need to be a hypervisor tomorrow. Might be runnin’ down hoes in GTA :-DD
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The only things i "really miss" is :
Atmel AVR debugger and ...
Not from Atmel, but I cobbled together a working hardware AVR debugger (hardware, 1 wire) with only a generic USB to serial adapter, a diode and the rest is all FOSS.
It's working nicely either from inside an IDE with GUI, or from a terminal:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/avr-(arduino)-linux-debug/ (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/avr-(arduino)-linux-debug/)
(https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/avr-(arduino)-linux-debug/?action=dlattach;attach=1194562;image)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLP-B3-OftU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLP-B3-OftU)
-
The only things i "really miss" is :
Atmel AVR debugger and ...
Not from Atmel, but I cobbled together a working hardware AVR debugger (hardware, 1 wire) with only a generic USB to serial adapter, a diode and the rest is all FOSS.
(..)
Awesome done... :popcorn:
First time I realized that ECLIPSE could actually be used for that twist.
:-+
Paul
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10 COOL FACTS ABOUT WINDOWS 10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jodOv9Ltbtw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jodOv9Ltbtw)
-
10 COOL FACTS ABOUT WINDOWS 10
(..)
geeeeeezzzzzzzzzzzz... How the things may change over time
or point of visions...
While that folk may consider that "cool" ..
I consider that a pile of shit put together by incompetents along
those shitty versions of WIN.
As all their products feed patent trollers they have always
subverted **ALL** good standards and best practices so to
have "own" rights over that pile of shit called "cool facts"
They subverted everything to the point that when they CLONED CP/M
into DOS for x86 the just extended the directory entry keeping
the .COM 100H required format and the limits of BDOS.
Talk to any folk used to program in those early version
to see how many HACKS the 127 character PATH would need then...
pile of shit over the years they just kept growing over rolling.
eks :horse:
Paul
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Two months ago I installed some new paid software on my Windows10 laptop:
- Premiere 2021
- Ti-na Design Industrial v9
- Omron PLC Studio
They still work as expected, no problem. Windows10 has demonstrated me to be decent at least (and I have no alternative, I cannot find anything similar for Linux). Just, since I don't trust it too much, I don't play any movie on it, I don't access Facebook, or similar, I only use this laptop unconnected from the internet and only for job' stuff.
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Talk to any folk used to program in those early version
to see how many HACKS the 127 character PATH would need then...
I am not sure what you are talking about :-//
I have recently forked DosBox to embed some old DOS commercial compilers into a Linux shell. Why? Well, because I want to pass parameters from the bash to the DOS compiler without any X11 things in the middle, I don't wont to use QEMU, I cannot use Wine on a non-x86 machine, and I also want to pass files in and out during the process.
I have a full x86 CPU emulator running on a PowerPC CPU, I have no VGA card emulation for the DOS stuff DOSBos has it, it has been massively hacked and removed:
- messages sent to VIDEO card are catch on the fly and readdressed to STDERR (it's ugly but it works)
- when DOS invokes FAT primitives, there is a FAT16 wrapper to pass files from/to Linux's shell
I haven't seen so much garbage in it :-//
What's really annoying is the the DOS filename because it's limited to 8 chars plus 3 other chars for the extension -> 8+3 = 11 chars, and since on Linux I am using longer filenames, I am using an blackmagic function to mediate.
Linux's filename input (source file, assembly, C, linker script) -> blackmagic8-3_encode(filename) -> 11 chars -> wrapper_in -> DOSBOX -> compiler -> DOSBOX -> wrapper_out -> blackmagic8-3_decode(filename) -> Linux's filename output (binary and list files)
It works so transparent that you wouldn't feel the difference between invoking gcc/sdcc and an "embedded-DOS-compiler" if I didn't tell you about it ;D
-
...
- Premiere 2021
...
I only use this laptop unconnected from the internet ...
How it possible? :o
It used to be 30 or 100 days (depends from Creative Cloud subscription) you can use their apps in the offline mode
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I don't stay 24h/24 connected to the internet with that production laptop.
Only when it's strictly necessary and also with Windows10 updates disabled.
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I wouldn’t disable updates. I say this a hundred times a year to people. You don’t know better than MS. They fuck up occasionally yes but you can roll it back fine. Hang back on “feature updates” and install patches and you’re good.
The key thing people don’t understand is that windows 10 has been 3-4 different major releases which would have been windows 11, 12, 13 etc. They are now called feature updates and are optional.
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I wouldn’t disable updates. I say this a hundred times a year to people.
It's a simple strategy which hasn't yet failed: if something works there is no need to change it, so don't update it, don't even touch it, just don't do it! But do a backup to resume it back :D
The whole C: drive has been cloned into a Compact Flash of 64Gb. Even if I am traveling and something goes wrong, I can resume it in minutes!
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Never change a running system. ;D The drawback is that you'll miss fixes for security issues. And there are tons of them.
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The drawback is that you'll miss fixes for security issues. And there are tons of them.
Exactly, and compare Linux vs Windows updates - I have a felling nothing happend too much on Windows side at all :-DD while Linux (SUSE in my example) - flooding with an updated stuff frequently :scared:
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I wouldn’t disable updates. I say this a hundred times a year to people.
It's a simple strategy which hasn't yet failed: if something works there is no need to change it, so don't update it, don't even touch it, just don't do it! But do a backup to resume it back :D
The whole C: drive has been cloned into a Compact Flash of 64Gb. Even if I am traveling and something goes wrong, I can resume it in minutes!
Bad idea.
Your working practices are how we keep hearing about these nice SCADA and PLC focused vulnerabilities.
"Ah I'll just plug this unpatched windows 10 laptop into some random client's infrastructure because I know better."
:palm: you don't.
I was responsible for security on such things over 20 years ago in the defence sector and we did not allow this sort of approach. It's even more relevant today.
Edit: ask yourself this:
Your client sues you because you infected their network / equipment or damaged something (even unrelated or accidental). Third party auditor is pulled in for damage claims. Finds out you have a poor security stance. Your legal / professional insurer decides to LOL at you when they do their claims due diligence. You're now on the hook for whatever damages turn up. Enjoy losing a few years salary or bankruptcy.
"I am a superstitious techno anti-vaxxer" is no legal defence.
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I wouldn’t disable updates.
Never change a running system. ;D
I have an offgrid workstation (not connected to internet at all) with a couple specific apps installed, been in use over year and still planning to keep these as is for another year at least.
After that, I would very likely end up with a new M.2 and install updated software (included Windows) from scratch rather than 'enable' updates :popcorn:
How people live without permanent internet in past?
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Meanwhile, WSL2 progressed to WSLg :P
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/the-initial-preview-of-gui-app-support-is-now-available-for-the-windows-subsystem-for-linux-2/
-
Since we're talking about security issues. Linux bans University of Minnesota for sending buggy patches in the name of research: https://www.neowin.net/news/linux-bans-university-of-minnesota-for-sending-buggy-patches-in-the-name-of-research/ (https://www.neowin.net/news/linux-bans-university-of-minnesota-for-sending-buggy-patches-in-the-name-of-research/)
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Meanwhile, WSL2 progressed to WSLg :P
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/the-initial-preview-of-gui-app-support-is-now-available-for-the-windows-subsystem-for-linux-2/
This is ultimately a good thing. We can now go from companies taking a position of "We don't need to produce a Linux version, they can just run the Windows one under WINE" to "We don't need to produce a Windows version, they can just run the Linux one under WSLg".
More seriously, good support for Windows apps killed OS/2 because nobody needed to produce an OS/2 version of their apps and given the choice of one or the other companies chose the one with the larger market share. Rather than thinking of this as "people don't need to use Linux to run Linux apps" consider it as "companies don't have to[1] produce only Windows apps".
[1] For commercial viability reasons of 'have to'.
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More seriously, good support for Windows apps killed OS/2 because nobody needed to produce an OS/2 version of their apps and given the choice of one or the other companies chose the one with the larger market share. Rather than thinking of this as "people don't need to use Linux to run Linux apps" consider it as "companies don't have to[1] produce only Windows apps".
OS/2 was nice... I was a user of 2.1, 3 and 4. Years ahead of its main competitor at the time Windows 95, and version 4 had that incredible voice recognition software... Unfortunately for the reasons you mentioned and for the fact IBM really couldn't care less for the retail market... Oh well.
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IMO if you lose retail you eventually lose it all.
The moment Microsoft gave up on mobile phones they became dead man walking. Even if they have been dipping their toes into first party hardware for a while now, they can't offer a complete ecosystem ... and that's what it's all about in the internet interconnected age. Google vs Apple is all that's left, but Google is destined to lose because their funding model makes it impossible to offer anything premium, while Apple can offer low end devices ... premium and datamining your customers just don't go together. Apple can't lose, not because their execution is particularly good (when they can't buy a year worth of process advantage) but simply because no one is competing.
Which is a shame, with Microsoft disappearing all the interesting hardware to run Linux on will disappear. The future looks boring ... the only dark horse might be NVIDIARM.
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(OP again...)... Well I wasn't expecting all that, but as a Community Forum there's nothing wrong with, or unexpected, regarding
the diversity of technical opinions, over the last 10 pages!, that 'sometimes' digressed !! :)
The first FEW pages left me thinking I should change the Topic to "Linux.. WOW, I was almost sucked in!!" haha... :phew:
I guess I was not so totally 'SOLD/Sucked-In' that I don't at least understand that there is good & bad with virtually everything in life! :-+
However, I can CERTAINLY appreciate the benefits & utilizations of BOTH sides of the proverbial Fence, not to exclude the 'Mac' users/lovers!!
I've used DOS based systems from before 'Windows' existed, with no H.D. and just a 5+1/4" floppy drive, and every Windows system since...
So I guess I'm 'biased', but was/am totally willing to experiment & learn further, now. I for one, (though I can understand there are some!),
have not 'yet' found any major issues regarding 99% of 'Drivers' (default/simulated or otherwise), with the OS's I've tried so far!
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I didn’t read the entire thread but as an Ubuntu user for several years now I will give you my thoughts. First, your choice of which operating system to use depends mostly on the apps you need to run. It is a tool to allow certain apps to run and at the end of the day you can argue about the “superiority” of one OS versus another forever... real world applications and productivity will be the determining factor.
I’m on Ubuntu as well as my entire family (and the various Ubuntu variants) because for what we needed it works. I found it easy to repurpose older hardware, mostly used free laptops, into machines the kids would use for online COVID-era learning, with minimal resources. I wasn’t as concerned about viruses and the kids couldn’t screw things up too much. Even if they did, a complete reinstall was easy and quick.
For my purposes I have all the open-source options I need in Linux to be productive. Graphics, office, video and publishing software and many other tools are available. It was a learning curve but now I can do everything I was doing on Windows.
At my office I use Windows 10 because I run work software only available for Windows and there are no alternatives or options to switch. I am locked in and pay lots of money annually into special software that is Win10 only. So I try to keep nice clean updated Win10 machines at work, of which I have plenty. When they get old and no longer useful at the office I put Linux on them and either bring them home or run a headless server for file sharing. Either way I use both Win10 and Linux and look at them as nothing more than TOOLS required for applications I need to run. I prefer Linux at home only because I can choose leaner distros to run on older hardware and things are now simple thanks to many years of learning Linux.
The only reason I didn’t mention Apple here is because I’ve never owned Apple hardware, but the same thing applies... some exceptional software is available on Mac and has been for years, so people who are used to those applications and productive on them will stick to them and not bother switching if there is no compelling reason to do so.
In summary... learn and try and figure it out for yourself! Nobody can tell you what OS is better, because it depends on YOU! I only wish to encourage you to play around and since Linux distros for the most part are easily obtainable and free you can play around all you want!
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Well said (and understood) edy...
I've quickly realized that (apart from being free!) that a lot of long-term Linux/Unix users LOVE the hands-on 'Under-The-Hood' abilities, and
actually can/do swear by the speed & technical accomplishments they can achieve without even a 'GUI' as such! (And I can grasp that!) ;D
And I further understand now, the myriad of GUI Distros & their included software/apps, that is very much a personal choice in most scenarios...
Computers/(software) have always been like 'cars' for instance... Some people just want to get in, start the engine, have the heater & radio on,
and just push a few pedals! They care not, nor understand, about what's under the hood or how it all works! And that's OK!! ;D
That's what programmers/coders are for... do do the hard work behind the scenes, to simplify things for the 'majority' of normal users. However,
it 'seems' that a LOT of Linux-Style 'users', seem to be generally 'technical' in their nature, and LIKE to delve deep & play ! 8)
I've learnt a lot over the last month or two, and for that I'm grateful . . .
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Some of us programmers/engineery types like a computer that works like a car for the 80% of the time we're not actually in the bowels of some code because we're not that invested in it or grew out of that phase of thinking.
Which is where there's a compromise.
Incidentally I've got WSL2 on my laptop now and it's not terrible but there are some rough edges. For example I was trying to dd some data onto a USB stick the other day and that's not straightforward as the virtualization layer doesn't expose raw storage devices. So I had to boot a Ubuntu USB, at which point the amdgpu drivers hosed themselves after 2 minutes resulting in a reboot and enabling safe graphics mode. Ugh and you get the idea... all I wanted to do was write some bytes to a USB stick. Ended up using HxD on windows. Job done :-//
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I've been using dual boot since middle of 2019 - Windows 10 and Fedora Workstation. It turn into realizing that in a full year I booted my Windows install less than 20 times.
For someone that know the basics of Linux it had been an fun experience, of course combined with lots of Google Searches and some logical thinking. It culminated yesterday when I converted a bunch of commands to configure StrongSwan on Fedora from Debian distro, were the directories where not the same. It may look easy for anyone other than me, but for me the fact of being able to create, edit, save, delete and configure anything all by terminal without checking a single help manual just by the knowledge I acquired in tinkering with my system made me fell accomplished.
Currently at my day to day use I go specifically to Linux, using only Windows if for some reason I need to edit a photo (I'm a Photoshop/Lightroom user, and Adobe didn't release yet a version for Linux). It's true that Linux have the power to be the next big thing in the home computing, as it is currently in the server world. What It needs is a push by schools and universities, even more than it is currently, or teach in conjunction with Windows. Also needs uniformity, too many distros that spun off because of the "EGO" of some members that don't agree with the majority.
I also totally agree with the user edy when he said that there are certain distros for certain use cases. Will I ditch Windows totally? I don't think so, it still in my DNA and was what I was once certified to (MCSE). This use case is good enough for me, the best of both worlds. Future will be a Desktop PC but with dedicated NVME drives for each install (Windows and Fedora). Yes I know I can in my use case try Gnome Boxes and see if it satisfies my use case but I also play some PC Games, and having a second GPU just for that is not what I intend to (Although looks like nVidia is now allowing in GeForce cards the PCIe Passthrough that were reserved to their Quadro line up).
By the way, Rocky Linux is set to be released very soon, probably even today - https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/community-update-april-2021/2349 (Yes is the famed Discourse everyone hates...)
For the ones who may be out of the loop:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/centos-shifts-from-red-hat-unbranded-to-red-hat-beta/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/rocky-linux-gets-a-parent-company-with-4m-series-a-funding/
EDIT - well looks like the Release Candidate is available to download for who may be interested into - https://rockylinux.org/download/
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Yesterday I paid for an update to TINA. It's still Windows XP/Vista/10 compatible, but it doesn't work well on WINE, so I am using it on a Windows machine.
I also bought a "MSI MODERN AM241" PC.
It's a "all on one" computer, embedded with the LCD, like an Apple iMac; intel i7-based, it has 8Gbyte of ram, an an internal NVME unit, but also it comes with a 2.5" bay for an SSD.
It has HDMI_out for a second LCD, and an HDMI_in port!!! (wow!!!) to be used as "LCD" from an other computer.
It looks perfect as "local Windows 10 Machine" when I need to use TINA attached to some things that don't work under visualization, and it's also good as "LCD" for the other computer which is Linux based
There were also included wifi Keyboard and mouse.
Paid 900 euro for it, I love it :D
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That's a fairly nice looking machine that. Whole thing being a VESA mount is a winner as well. Can get one of those nice Sapper monitor arms for it then :-DD
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LOL ;D
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offtopic: ::)
I have a look what is 'MSI MODERN AM241' ... the sad part of today world, you need minium 24" monitor to able browse a few t-shirts on screen |O :palm:
https://www.msi.com/All-in-One-PC/Modern-AM241-11M (https://www.msi.com/All-in-One-PC/Modern-AM241-11M)
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offtopic: ::)
I have a look what is 'MSI MODERN AM241' ... the sad part of today world, you need minium 24" monitor to able browse a few t-shirts on screen |O :palm:
https://www.msi.com/All-in-One-PC/Modern-AM241-11M (https://www.msi.com/All-in-One-PC/Modern-AM241-11M)
... this is NOT offtopic...
LINUX allowed such (WTF!!!!) brick gizmos by dozens..
WTF is that shit?
A 24 inch display with that insane shit under ?
To display "camera pics" and "allowing" you to "store" some shit ?
WTF is that shit ?
a computer? running LINUX kernel...
"allowing" you to BUY shit and display ADDS..
WTF IS THAT SHIT ?!!!!
give me a break... if computers will become that sort
of shit.. bricks with a "internet account"
i am out..
the "internet" is being privatized with such shit..
and the linux UNIX kernel 's becoming a stack of stinky shit like that..
unprintable
Paul
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Did you forget your meds today? :-DD
Commerce enabled the Internet to exist after it grew past academic interests...
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Did you forget your meds today? :-DD
Commerce enabled the Internet to exist after it grew past academic interests...
nah I read that with my extra strong cup of caffeine in veins
:-DD :popcorn:
still burning
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Did you forget your meds today? :-DD
Commerce enabled the Internet to exist after it grew past academic interests...
Precisely. The internet as we know it today is sponsored by the advertising industry.
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you need minium 24" monitor to able browse a few t-shirts on screen
Well, I am still using my 4:5 15" LCD here. Not a problem for my daily needs.
I feel the need for a 24" monitor for Premiere. Here I am with you.
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Did you forget your meds today? :-DD
Commerce enabled the Internet to exist after it grew past academic interests...
Precisely. The internet as we know it today is sponsored by the advertising industry.
ooo I just love that part... "as we know today" ...
They are still trying to privatize the very basic
things that actually "make" the "internet"..
Basic services are "forcedly" induced by "applets" (based on gizmos)
such as:
- Converting email into WEBMAIL hosted on their computers (snooped by adverts)
- Converting your media and assets into "cloud drives" (paid and snooped as well)
- Converting and obsoleting FTP into those shit "midia transfer" shitlets... (censored as well)
- Converting all you photos/music/videos into proprietary DRM licences.. (paid snooped as well)
- Converting IRC and CHAT into ZAPs and all shit like that..(snooped by adverts)
- Converting your computer into their computers and pushing you a license..
- Converting all your life into (hosted) their computers (snooped by adverts)
they just call that "THE CLOUD" ..
just don't buy that - it is based on adds?
No it is based on fuckwit idiots paying licenses to access what once
a short time ago was free ... on their whole life produced data..
privatized ...
just don't buy that so simple
Paul
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A 24 inch display with that insane shit under ?
To display "camera pics" and "allowing" you to "store" some shit ?
WTF is that shit ?
a computer? running LINUX kernel...
It's the computer where I run TINA Industrial v9 and where I design and simulate circuits. It's internal pcie is attached to lap instrumentation and it's so compact unit!
I also run MobaXterm/Pro to access my remote Linux SBC, and even Premiere and SolidWorks work decently, even if these, are for little tasks, I have to admit.
And it's the same computer LCD which serves me the output of my POWER9 workstation, and I didn't have to buy a KVM for this.
Why don't you like it? Aesthetically it's not very nice, but the cooling-fan and the thermal unit are more than decent and they make the CPU to work without any need for scaling down its frequency, and considering it's a low cost machine "all-in-one" and that it comes with WiFi keyboard and mouse included, well ... these are mostly the reasons why I like it.
Rationally, a practical good compromise for my both my needs and my wallet!
if I had more money and more space I would have bought a different computer. Here I am with you.
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A 24 inch display with that insane shit under ?
To display "camera pics" and "allowing" you to "store" some shit ?
WTF is that shit ?
a computer? running LINUX kernel...
(..)
Why don't you like it?
(..)
In just a simple shallow explanation...
Have you noticed how much shit stuff you (we) are forced
to buy (AND PAY) on any ANDROID ? or IPhone ?
All those applets bundled and impossible to remove...
They are paid.
Under disclosed agreements force us to pay all that shit
insane prices.
This case just a bit close you are paying a forced "OS"
bundled and licensed and the whole thing inside it.
It is not a choice. Nor it has been anymore.
While consumers accept that shit..
it will force the way into our lives.
That is why.
I run my own bench made computers as long as I remember
and as long as I can do so.
That is why.
Paul
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It is a choice. I actively chose to buy and pay because they give me a social, personal and business advantage. This allows me to make the most of my life without having to piss around micromanaging things.
It costs me 2.4% of my income to do this. For which it enables at least 40% if that income. Fucking good deal!
I can’t stand people complaining about people choosing things and saying that they have no choice. The argument is invalid. You can exist on a Linux desktop with Firefox, bury gold bullion in your garden, eat home grown farmed vegetables from your back garden and await the apocalypse. But that is a worse form of slavery to an ideology. It’s just another form of extremism which I’d hoped died out on slashdot 20 years ago….
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While consumers accept that shit..
I don't know what are you talking about in this specific case :-//
The included Windows10 license? I need it to run Tina, SolidWorks, and Premiere, so I am happy to see it.
The included webcam? I need it to run Zoom and Skype in order to make mini video conferences.
The included mouse and keyboard? Well, they are "Wifi", and they are also of decent-good quality.
The included LCD-arm? Well, I don't find the need to replace it. It's of superb quality.
D'oh, but there was no power-cord included, luckily, there are many of them in my labs.
I am going to install Arch on a USB stick, reserving 512Mbyte of ram and make the computer a "RAM-rootfs live" Linux one.
I promise to myself, I will! Today, in the early evening just after the dinner, or Tomorrow in the late afternoon, just after the tea break :D
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(..)
I promise to myself, I will! Today, in the early evening just after the dinner, or Tomorrow in the late afternoon, just after the tea break :D
That sounds..
I have seen more and more folks that once done that..
the so called advantage has been booted once or two a year..
Paul
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Did you forget your meds today? :-DD
Commerce enabled the Internet to exist after it grew past academic interests...
Precisely. The internet as we know it today is sponsored by the advertising industry.
ooo I just love that part... "as we know today" ...
They are still trying to privatize the very basic
things that actually "make" the "internet"..
The internet "as we know it today" is in comparison with Altavista or Lycos days - you know, back when MCI Worldcom was maintaining the vast majority of DNS and backbones on New York or Washington (at least that is where the traceroute pings showed on my screen) and you could telnet and FTP everywhere in plain text. Back then you were lucky to have a very limited mailbox space for email tied to your ISP monthly fee, and individually paid for the telephone line with a slow connection, the TCP/IP protocol stack (Trumpet Winsock - anybody ever paid for it?) and both the NCSA Mosaic was "free" simply because the US government put a ton of money on its development (just as well as the infrastructure to run all this). Netscape used most of Mosaic's code, thus allowing it to be "free" as well.
For everything else, everything either had an explicit money/material exchange (the few online stores) or were behind paywalls (news agencies, services, etc.)
Pretty much both sides of every service you mentioned "for free" aren't, regardless if it is in "the cloud" or not. Money has to come from somewhere (advertisement is the main source) to maintain infrastructure and most people can't afford or isn't technically inclined to maintain their own email or multimedia web server, let alone cutting off any communications with their family living abroad by not using an established messaging system.
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I ' ve similar things over this across 90s 00s..
Bottom line always was:
- Who was the lunatic who publish a free TCP/IP stack in
the very first place.. so FTP/HTTP/IRC/SMTP... could be used..
question is undeniably: DARPA as soon as WWII showed that imperative.
Netware failed miserably with their proprietary stack..
But today merchants seems to forgot WWII DARPA reasons
Paul
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I've quickly realized that (apart from being free!) that a lot of long-term Linux/Unix users LOVE the hands-on 'Under-The-Hood' abilities, and
actually can/do swear by the speed & technical accomplishments they can achieve without even a 'GUI' as such! (And I can grasp that!) ;D
And I further understand now, the myriad of GUI Distros & their included software/apps, that is very much a personal choice in most scenarios...
If you logically examine this further, you'll see it is all about workflow. And that is what I believe matters: having the tool conform to ones workflow, instead of having the tool dictate which workflows are "allowed" or possible.
Then, considering a tool separately from any workflow(s), becomes utterly goofy: like five-year-old kids talking about what make and model car they'll buy when they're old enough. (Such talk is fun, though; it just doesn't have much to do with real life.)
That's what programmers/coders are for... do do the hard work behind the scenes, to simplify things for the 'majority' of normal users. However,
it 'seems' that a LOT of Linux-Style 'users', seem to be generally 'technical' in their nature, and LIKE to delve deep & play ! 8)
Yes, because those are the users/developers that contribute to Linux. It would be silly to expect such user-devs to try to make the tool they use less intuitive/effective/efficient for themselves, just so that it would be more popular, especially since statistically, such personality types tend to be more focused on things rather than people.
(Those paying for Linux development use Linux either in embedded devices and appliances (where the end users don't know they're using a "computer", much less Linux, at all), or highly technical environments – software development, HPC, servers, etc.; and AIUI the humans involved are much more technically-oriented than average computer users, so it makes sense that even those paying for Linux development, generally target more technical users too.)
Obviously, there are lots of things in Linux (the kernel, the GNU parts, and the distributions) that need fixing, and a lot of development that does not actually make sense to many of us... but because of the licensing, it is not a matter of what is possible or allowed, only a matter of what is feasible, time/effort/cost-wise. The correct question to any workflow-related issue is not "Could we ... ?", but "How ... efficiently/effectively?" – and this distinction is something a lot of people do not grok; that the answer is a spectrum of options depending on the context and personal preferences, even less. Freedom is fun only when it's also simple, I guess.
I do believe you are beginning to see both the options and their relative "costs" when it comes to things Linux-y, sir.
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Another pro are the kernel features and tools to debug issues when something doesn't work.