Linux

ArgonOne NVMe Expansion

This weekend I upgraded the Raspberry Pi that hosts my Mastodon instance and Home Assistant (among other services) with an NVMe drive.  Previously it was using an old mechanical USB hard drive, so the performance increase with the NVMe is huge!  

It runs a bit hotter than with the microSD card + external HDD, but it’s nice to have everything in one case without worrying about SD card wear anymore.

I also finally got around to upgrading from Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 22.04, just in time for the next LTS release later this year.

Recently bought a YubiKey 5 to use with my Linux desktop

Now I can automatically decrypt the filesystem just by plugging in the key during boot, and login / sudo just by tapping the button! No more typing passwords, but everything is still encrypted and secure.

A little disappointed that Intel Macs can’t use it with FileVault during boot, but the Mac already has a fingerprint reader so I wasn’t planning to use the YubiKey with it anyway.

Home Assistant OS on KVM

Migrated my #HomeAssistant server to the new Home Assistant OS ARM64 image running in #Linux KVM on my #RaspberryPi 4.

I was previously using a docker installation on #Ubuntu that is no longer officially supported, and various things stopped working properly recently.

Haven’t noticed any performance difference between docker and the virtual machine, and now it’s officially supported and much easier to maintain!

🕹

I recently bought some Game Boy DMG-01 colored buttons from @SakuraRetroModding on Etsy for my Anbernic RG351V and they look amazing!

Input/Output Error

The SD card I use in my Raspberry Pi finally wore out this week after running non-stop for almost 2.5 years. Managed to move everything safely to a new “endurance” card, hopefully it will last longer!

Samsung Chromebox

Replaced the outdated version of ChromeOS on my old Chromebox with Ubuntu Linux. I’ve got the developer model, so the i5 CPU inside is still pretty snappy!

trac mysql schema optimization

For anyone using Trac with the MySQL database backend, check out this ticket: http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/6986

I applied the database schema changes on the MobileScrobbler trac site, and it’s reduced the time it takes to modify or create a ticket from several seconds down to less than a second. Finally, no more error 500 pages when an operation takes too long to complete!

Switching teams

So I finally took the plunge and replaced my Slackware Linux server with Ubuntu Linux. Everything seems to be up and running again now, we’ll see how it goes!

I don’t get it

11:09:45 AM eric: but the printer is going to be attached to the linux machine
11:10:07 AM eric: and I want to print from a windows box
11:13:08 AM eric: looks like it will be another fun afternoon trying to get this worked out 🙂
11:13:28 AM sam: or you could just share it from a Windows box 😛
11:13:49 AM eric: thats what we have now….but we want to be ableto password it and monitor wtuff
11:13:55 AM eric: and winblows sucks that that
11:14:13 AM sam: er… windows 2000 can do that just fine?
11:14:32 AM sam: use ACLs and auditing
11:14:35 AM eric: we only have xp….and maybe 2k3 server
11:14:46 AM sam: both of those are the same as 2000 😛
11:14:46 AM eric: all that is above me 🙁

So let me get this straight.. if this guy can’t handle clicking a few buttons in Windows to password protect his printer, how does he expect to be able to edit 3 cryptic configuration files in Linux to accomplish his task?

On your marks! Get set! Render!

I had the day off work today, so having nothing better to do, I decided to race raz0r (PowerBook G4 1.33Ghz, OS X 10.4.1) and media (Pentium III 933mhz, Ubuntu linux (Hoary)) in rendering with Blender.

raz0r, rendering frame #15 from Magnets: The Movie, required 313MB RAM, and took 2:30 mins to render the frame at 400×300.

media required 380MB RAM, and took 3:40 mins to render the same frame at the same size.

In the words of Stormy Waters, “Smoked that bitch!”. I was expecting the outcome to be along those lines, but I’m not sure why linux requires almost 70MB more RAM to render the same frame.

The output pictures from both were identical, obviously.