Author Topic: Whats a minimal Linux install for electronics/tech programs  (Read 3577 times)

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Offline shapirus

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Re: Whats a minimal Linux install for electronics/tech programs
« Reply #25 on: December 28, 2024, 11:10:27 am »
XFS is currently recommended over EXT4 by Gentoo and SerpentOS.
Haha. That's a good enough reason for me not to use it. Just kidding (or maybe I'm not).

EXT4 has a lot of limitations, particularly for hardlinks, but is still receiving regular updates.
65k hardlinks per inode limit is a valid concern for those whose applications may require to have more, of course. I would call this a rare edge case scenario, but it's still a valid one.

Otherwise, ext4 is a mature production-ready file system, which is widely used as such, has been around for decades and is the default fs in countless setups.

As for powerloss data corruption, F2FS is particularly suceptible to this. XFS may still be. But an SSD is likely much less likely to have this happen since writes are made much faster than on a HDD. I think any FS is susceptible to this--but the kernel developers are now pushing "atomic" writes that should help mitigate this issue somewhat.
That's not the kind of data corruption I was talking about. What you mentioned is corruption of data that was pending write when a power loss happens, correct? Of course this can be an issue with any fs, to a varying degree (from writing partial data to writing all or nothing, if proper atomic writes are implemented).
What I mentioned was loss of entire files that simply had to be open()'ed (I'm not sure if open for writing was necessary or open for reading was sufficient too) to be affected by this.

https://superuser.com/questions/84257/xfs-and-loss-of-data-when-power-goes-down

...and more links can be found, but they're mostly old. I can't quickly find a good article describing in detail exactly what I experienced back then. Maybe it has been fixed since. But I don't trust it anyway. Besides, with modern drives I see no reason to use anything but the battle-proven ext4, except for the situations when specific features may be required, like those supposedly provided by btrfs and maybe others.

To be honest, I did try to use XFS a couple of times since then -- of course only for partitions holding cache/temporary files, but which would benefit from faster access. But I did not notice any performance improvement over ext4 in my tests, so I ditched the idea.

However, the current testing branch (eventually to become the next stable release) is almost always good to go with for a desktop. It receives reasonably fresh updates, though not always the very latest ones, it rarely has any issues with package dependencies, and I see no problem recommending it for a general Linux user except maybe a very beginner one.
I agree, but this isn't something that a newbie would know. I've never run into a packaging dependency issue with Fedora, but I've only used it since version 39 (and I have used many RPMs that are old as hell--mainly for my 20 year-old Brother printer).
Well, I would say that a newbie can more or less equally easily run into issues with any distro. And with any distro, a newbie can quickly become a non-newbie if learning the OS more deeply presents any interest -- and I think that with Linux it's more a necessity than an aimless curiosity.

Another point is that these days the amount of documentation and community support on the internet in general is huge. Which makes me think that for a newbie the best distro to choose would be the one that has a good compromise between the size of the community and the skill level of a typical member of the community. I've not used pretty much anything beyond Debian (and Ubuntu, which is the same thing, though lately it started to somewhat diverge with this "snap" bullshit of theirs) and, in the distant past, RHEL/CentOS, so I'm in no position to compare, but, from the information seeker's perspective, I want to point out that Arch seems to have a great community and they surely have an excellent knowledge base at wiki.archlinux.org, which kinda suggests that those folks know what they're doing.
 

Online DiTBho

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Re: Whats a minimal Linux install for electronics/tech programs
« Reply #26 on: December 28, 2024, 12:03:54 pm »
The C++ compiler is very memory-hungry.

Code: [Select]
2023-12-23--19-29---2024-12-28--11-32 - [ dev-util/cmake ] - success - DiTBho@2.18/4.1.2

cmake(1) is written in C++, and is one of the worst things I've ever tried to compile on a small GNU/Linux board computer.

1 core, MIPS32r2/le @ 400Mhz
64Mbyte dram @ 66Mhz
3 NIC, 10/100Mbps each
1 pATA microdrive, 4Gbyte(3), 5Mbyte/sec
no USB

The compiler(2) ate itself up to 600 Mbytes of swap (32bit kernel/mips limit here), and since I have no space on the microdrive for the swap partition and no more than 64 Mbytes of soldered RAM, I had to use the network heavily, which is also limited to 8 Mbytes/sec

Not ideal, you can see for yourself how long it took to complete on that machine.

Proof of concept, it's technically possible, if you can dare and have the patience to wait several days ...

Modern gcc-toolchains are much worse, they consume much more ram, I'm still working on it

(1) dev-util/cmake v2.6.4
(2) gcc v4.1.2, binutils v2.18
(3) does not accept more than 4GB

edit:
p.s.
you have a PM  :D
« Last Edit: December 31, 2024, 12:18:54 pm by DiTBho »
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Offline radiolistener

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Re: Whats a minimal Linux install for electronics/tech programs
« Reply #27 on: December 28, 2024, 01:47:39 pm »
Yeah, probably that could fit in 50 GB or even less. But I don't think it would leave so much space for KiCAD projects or to build AVR things...

16GB disk is more than enough for KiCad and C/C++ programming for ARM/STM32/etc. The problem may happens if you want to compile and install very bloated software, like VSCodium/VSCode. But for MCU programming Geany editor is more than enough.

As I said, I used a 16GB disk for some time and had all these things working without any issues. The low disk space problem started when I began installing too many bloated software packages.

For example, Octave 9.2 consumes about 800 MB, which is a significant portion of space on a 16GB disk, so you need to take that into account. With a 64GB disk, you can install all these things without worrying about it.

Dude. That is not a small program! I just downloaded the source code and the total of .h, .hpp, .c, .cpp files is 45000 lines of code.

Yes, my example is definitely not lightweight in terms of memory consumption for C++ compiling, but it is smaller compared to compiling a large project.

Another issue with RAM is trying to run student code in Octave. I'm not even sure that Octave can run on 64MB of RAM.
« Last Edit: December 28, 2024, 02:04:27 pm by radiolistener »
 

Offline eugenenine

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Re: Whats a minimal Linux install for electronics/tech programs
« Reply #28 on: December 31, 2024, 02:04:31 am »
I'm using 22GiB right now, not counting home. I have Libreoffice, KiCAD, VLC, KDEnlive, Viking GPS/Mapping, gmm arm, paspberry pi pico sdk (without visualCrappio), some emulators, couple games, etc. I don't care for any of the "modern" distros where they install a bunch of bloat. I tried a couple and went back to Slackware.
 

Offline wilfred

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Re: Whats a minimal Linux install for electronics/tech programs
« Reply #29 on: December 31, 2024, 02:16:35 am »
I'm using 22GiB right now, not counting home. I have Libreoffice, KiCAD, VLC, KDEnlive, Viking GPS/Mapping, gmm arm, paspberry pi pico sdk (without visualCrappio), some emulators, couple games, etc. I don't care for any of the "modern" distros where they install a bunch of bloat. I tried a couple and went back to Slackware.

I'm all for the retro-grouch, I might even be one, or I'm just cheap. But at some point the cheap vast expanse of current SSD's makes the line between bloat, and I just don't care it's there, moot.  More important to me is how easily I can get any software installed and use it. That's the best distribution for me or at least it's good enough. I spend very little time fiddling with and looking at the desktop.

I use and recommend Linux Mint, just for this reason. Is there a better distro? Maybe. But I just can't be bothered to find out or change to it. Mint is good enough.
 

Online tggzzz

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Re: Whats a minimal Linux install for electronics/tech programs
« Reply #30 on: December 31, 2024, 09:51:55 am »
I'm using 22GiB right now, not counting home. I have Libreoffice, KiCAD, VLC, KDEnlive, Viking GPS/Mapping, gmm arm, paspberry pi pico sdk (without visualCrappio), some emulators, couple games, etc. I don't care for any of the "modern" distros where they install a bunch of bloat. I tried a couple and went back to Slackware.

Double that, if you use FPGA tools.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
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Offline langwadt

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Re: Whats a minimal Linux install for electronics/tech programs
« Reply #31 on: December 31, 2024, 01:00:54 pm »
I'm using 22GiB right now, not counting home. I have Libreoffice, KiCAD, VLC, KDEnlive, Viking GPS/Mapping, gmm arm, paspberry pi pico sdk (without visualCrappio), some emulators, couple games, etc. I don't care for any of the "modern" distros where they install a bunch of bloat. I tried a couple and went back to Slackware.

Double that, if you use FPGA tools.


yeh, Vivado is +40GB, ISE is ~20GB

but, a 256GB SSD is like 20€

 

Offline eugenenine

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Re: Whats a minimal Linux install for electronics/tech programs
« Reply #32 on: December 31, 2024, 11:45:36 pm »
More important to me is how easily I can get any software installed and use it.

My most recent use of a "modern" distro. I had picked up a Raspberry Pi 400 on clearance at Micro Center which came with a Rasbian install (debian based). I ran their apt get install whatever for openSCAD and it wouldn't run. troubleshooting I found that it had installed a wrong version of the Opencascade dependency so I had to download it from source and build it myself.
Slackware I go to slackbuilds.org and search for openscad and it tells me it needs opencascade and the version and has the slackbuild for it. I download both and run the builds and it works fine the first try and took less time to install than to troubleshoot why debian/rasbian's version didn't work.
So Slackware IMHO is easier to get software installed and use.
 

Offline Smokey

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Offline wilfred

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Re: Whats a minimal Linux install for electronics/tech programs
« Reply #34 on: January 01, 2025, 01:35:45 am »
More important to me is how easily I can get any software installed and use it.

My most recent use of a "modern" distro. I had picked up a Raspberry Pi 400 on clearance at Micro Center which came with a Rasbian install (debian based). I ran their apt get install whatever for openSCAD and it wouldn't run. troubleshooting I found that it had installed a wrong version of the Opencascade dependency so I had to download it from source and build it myself.
Slackware I go to slackbuilds.org and search for openscad and it tells me it needs opencascade and the version and has the slackbuild for it. I download both and run the builds and it works fine the first try and took less time to install than to troubleshoot why debian/rasbian's version didn't work.
So Slackware IMHO is easier to get software installed and use.

Slackware might be easier to install OpenSCAD on is all you can conclude from your example. And I am not here to convert you away from it. I recall trying Slackware out a long time ago, I tried Ygdrassil too and SUSE, Fedora, Redhat, Ubuntu and I've settled on Mint because until it gives me a reason to change I just won't bother anymore. I've spent more than enough time changing Linux Distros when I was younger.

You didn't give much info on just where the incorrect dependency error was in the install you did, but on the brief search I did I did not find a rash of reports of it. That is my usual first test to see if it is a common or widespread issue and if there is a likelihood of a fix being already available. I also found out that there is a thing called Pi-Apps which has an install for OpenSCAD.

Unlike Windows or whatever the Apple OS is called, Linux with the plethora of different distros available  does introduce a bit of uncertainty as a result. It is both good and bad depending on what your motives are in using Linux. If you want the freedom to choose without being tied to a giant corporate overlord then you accept it as a consequence of different developers doing different things. If on the other hand you want to use Linux because it is "free" from cost then you may be less idealistic in accepting the lack of homogeneity  that comes with a single monolith OS like Windows. I think choosing Linux is partly a lifestyle choice and it will remain so until it too becomes a single monolith. Which would defeat the purpose for it to even exist. So it is what it is. Linux Mint is near the most popular distro  and so it can to some extent straddle the gap between freedom of choice and freedom from choice. But debating which Linux distro is the best is so utterly pointless I don't bother. The list of top distros by popularity is the answer to that question. I just looked at what others were doing and went with that.
 

Offline eugenenine

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Re: Whats a minimal Linux install for electronics/tech programs
« Reply #35 on: January 01, 2025, 03:43:00 am »
Just one example. Another was just trying to update and seeing a Microsoft repo get added, unplugged it and wiped the SD card at that point. But other distros had similar from the dependancy hell in redhat or some program not being in a distro's repos so I had to build from source which apparently their package manager didn't like. When you use those distros that automatically install every dependency for you then you end up not knowing whats going on your system. Another issue is having to learn distro specific tools. Everything is so much easier without all the extra stuff that was supposed to make things easier. So many kids growing up on Windows/Mac think their Linux distros should be similar just makes things worse. Keep it simple and pure.
 

Offline brucehoult

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Re: Whats a minimal Linux install for electronics/tech programs
« Reply #36 on: January 01, 2025, 06:02:48 am »
Slackware might be easier to install OpenSCAD on is all you can conclude from your example.

Or more precisely THAT (unspecified) version of Slackware was easier than THAT (unspecified) version of Raspbian.

I just did sudo apt install openscad on my Ubuntu 24.04 x86 machine and it worked perfectly on things from Thingiverse.
 

Offline wilfred

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Re: Whats a minimal Linux install for electronics/tech programs
« Reply #37 on: January 01, 2025, 07:03:20 am »
Slackware might be easier to install OpenSCAD on is all you can conclude from your example.

Or more precisely THAT (unspecified) version of Slackware was easier than THAT (unspecified) version of Raspbian.

I just did sudo apt install openscad on my Ubuntu 24.04 x86 machine and it worked perfectly on things from Thingiverse.

Exactly right.

I never find a new problem no-one has reported before me. I'm not living close enough to the leading edge for that. If I can't find a hit on the problem then I start looking at my system because I probably missed something I should have done or did something I shouldn't have done.

Using one of the popular distros that thousands of others use to just get stuff done is a pretty safe bet.
 

Offline shapirus

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Re: Whats a minimal Linux install for electronics/tech programs
« Reply #38 on: January 01, 2025, 09:53:27 am »
I never find a new problem no-one has reported before me. I'm not living close enough to the leading edge for that.
I am. I have sid in my sources.list. Even with that, I exceptionally rarely run into any dependency issues when installing packages. It happens more often that apt wants to install something that I don't (yet) want as depencencies, in that case I will either install the desired parent package from testing or download the source package from sid and rebuild it on the local system to make it have dependencies on my locally installed libs.

Even the huge near-cataclysm event that Debian has undergone recently -- the t64 libraries transition -- did not cause much trouble for me with my mixed stable+testing+sid system (plus a handful of 3rd-party repos).

So I'm inclined to think that in the case mentioned above it was either an edge case maybe involving some 3rd-party repos or a user error such as forgettting to run apt update before installing the package. Might have also been some glitch in raspbian itself, or with a particular package repo mirror.
 

Offline Infraviolet

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Re: Whats a minimal Linux install for electronics/tech programs
« Reply #39 on: January 03, 2025, 08:39:07 pm »
I'm not sure if the idea of a "minimal install" makes sense here. The space saved by trying to make an install minimal is probably pretty minor compared to the space needed for packages like FreeCAD and KiCAD anyway. A better strategy is surely to start with a stable and easy to use distro (Linux Mint is a good choice, Ubuntu can be a good choice, if you want .rpm rather than .deb files then there are other distros from a non-debian background which are aimed at a similar ease-of-use point), then just install each tool you need and let the distro handle the dependencies for you. One thing I will say about space saving and program installs on Linux, is that certain packages for the Latex document production suite (very common in academia for research papers) are remarkably space hungry (multiple gigabytes taken up by just one part of them), so if you use Latex to write up documentation then better to do that on another system if you want to save space on the install you're discussing here. The idea of minimal installs only really applies when you're setting up Linux to run on an embedded device, in which case you're probably not installing CAD tools and other user-interactive GUI focused complex programs at all.

Note: I made such a Linux Mint based install, not optimised for being minimal, just for having all my commonly used programs in it, as a Timeshift image. It comes to under 60GB as an image, and that is including the big latex packages I mentioned, and all the other programs I could think of commonly using (not just for electronics but for general PC usage and basic video and audio processing too) and it also includes a few tens of GB of useful files I included as things I might want as reference materials. In use the install takes about 44GB of space in the root partition, and a few tens of GB in home.
« Last Edit: January 03, 2025, 08:44:41 pm by Infraviolet »
 


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