Posts by Colin Critch 114 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Feb 2008
Hi coredump,
I'm also considering AlmaLinux as they have more survival space because they have dropped the 100% compatibility pledge with RHEL. I'm not concerned about the 100 percent compatibility I just need a rock solid desktop with LTS and reliable OS upgrades. If I do go Debian based it will not be with an OS that it dependent upon one snap repository provider it is much more likely to be Debian with flatpak.
Hi Dave,
My journey was Windows XP -> Xandros -> Ubuntu -> Kubuntu -> Linux Mint -> Fedora Cinnamon which is where I am stuck now for the desktop. On my RP pi's I use Debian and on my intel NUC I use Ubuntu sever and Rocky 8. I love the Linux! My users are non technical and I need LTS with a good upgrade path. Fedora has always provided a upgrade path that was flawless compared to Ubuntu/Debian that I can manage remotely. Fedora has never had the the LTS which is why I wanted Rocky Cinnamon with Flatpak. I've recently investigated OpenSuse but it still looks like there is no viable LTS option, but will be interesting when they bring out there version of Centos.
I ended up being firmware/embedded which I still enjoy to this day.
O level electronics -> Working as a wireman -> OND Electronics -> HND Software Systems
I'm not a hardware engineer whom I am truly in awe of ( when not cursing ). Did anyone else learn a good engineer makes themselves very replaceable? If you did how long did you practice this?
It is hard to find a product/company that you would like to get behind these days. A lot of the products are a re-spin with some subscription service on top. It is very hard to find the will to march back up the hill again with another wheel re-spinning startup, but I live in hope of finding a product which I can get behind.
In my spare time I repair electrical (Technician Level) broken items for the community and I have learned a lot tearing down said items. You see the best and the worse product designs and very rarely you think "I would like to own one of these it will last forever", but you do sometimes. I suspect there are very few functioning mini disk players in the UK today.
I think you have to refresh your skills regularly if you want to stay close to the metal so I for one will not be ruling out Rust for bigger micro-controllers even though I love C.
Hi Jim, many thanks. I forgot to mention the Symbian operating systems around the 2000s. I do feel pretty ancient but still get to write firmware. With regards to desktops originally went with KDE but moved away because it was a bit unstable at the time then moved to Cinnamon. The only reason I went to Fedora is that it seemed quite rock solid and a bit less bloaty than the Ubuntu derived OS. I also enjoyed writing applications in Qt. Now I'm looking at rust to see how it scales, so still keeping busy. What happened to the original star wars film in 1977? Bring back the real glass lightsabers Disney and remove that post CGI!
My OS/Computer journey
Mechanical calculator, sharp calculator, casio calculator, ZX80, ZX81, Dragon32 (6809e), pencil batch cards and basic, Commodore 128, Spectrum 48K, CPM, Amiga, VAX, PrimeOS, Self build 286, DoS, OS2Warp, GEM, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Xandros, Windows 7 ( last good MS OS), Ubuntu, kubuntu, Linux mint, Fedora Cinnamon ( which is where I am happily now).
With regards to android and SD card there could be a many modes of how it fails. I guess it might be down to bad reading of the file system allocation tables ( could be EMC or just some marginal flash disturb errors). This could result in the mobile OS not thinking there is a formatted flash card. This could trigger oh there is a blank card in let us format it service.
With nand flash cards you need to get the read write usage right if it doesn’t have global wear leaving. Too much frequent write and you will kill it, mostly reads only and bits will start to flip. The way to keep it good is to copy the files off ( not an image ) reformat it copy the files back on. This will get rid of an read disturb issues you will get via playing the same old mp3 over and over again. You can buy cards with global wear levelling ( which can negate NAND flash read disturb errors) but they are ten times more expensive.
With regards to Pi booting from SD.
Standard SD cards will fail eventually if they do not have global or static wear levelling. If you are putting standard SD card into product you can not easily get to and replace you will be in a world of pain. There are techniques you can use like read into ram then never write which will make a standard SD card last a long time ( based on number of reboots). You could maybe use SPI flash for write storage instead with read and write disturb aware file-system or just use NOR flash with it’s slow erase time.
If you are gong to use a standard SD card then chose one that has android run support A1 or A2 as the flash endurance will make it last longer (like Sandisk).
So the way SD cards fail is that with read disturb multiple reads cause adjacent flash cells levels become harder to differentiate between a one or zero then you get bit flips on reads. These bit flips cause invalid files and file-systems, this makes your PI a bit flaky. If you reformat the SD card the it will be fine but the fact the pi can’t boot makes this difficult to solve remotely. If you are going to put PI in the field running from SD card make sure it has global wear levelling SD card as this is the only thing that can stop read disturb issues, they are expensive for a reason!
Standard SD cards will fail eventually if they do not have global or static wear levelling. If you are putting standard SD card into product you can not easily get to and replace you will be in a world of pain. There are techniques you can use like read into ram then never write which will make a standard SD card last a long time ( based on number of reboots). You could maybe use SPI flash for write storage instead with read and write disturb aware file-system or just use NOR flash with it’s slow erase time.
If you are gong to use a standard SD card then chose one that has android run support A1 or A2 as the flash endurance will make it last longer (like Sandisk).
So the way SD cards fail is that with read disturb multiple reads cause adjacent flash cells levels become harder to differentiate between a one or zero then you get bit flips on reads. These bit flips cause invalid files and file-systems, this makes your PI a bit flaky. If you reformat the SD card the it will be fine but the fact the pi can’t boot makes this difficult to solve remotely. If you are going to put PI in the field running from SD card make sure it has global wear levelling SD card as this is the only thing that can stop read disturb issues, they are expensive for a reason!
Crypto-asset miners have got a lot to answer for, including wasting power and putting up hardware prices.
I know in the old days it was cheaper to put together a box with a mother-board bundle that getting a price all in. Today it may be cheaper getting last years kit second hand, if you want bang for your quid.
Now even the AMD CPU are as expensive as Intel even though the heat-sinks are massive. Also people don't understand that more cores does not necessary mean a faster machine, some times its better to get less cores by higher frequency, dependant on your type of workload. Is a quad core at 1.2Ghz faster than a dual core running at 3.2Ghz?
I found these to make firefox a bit more better.
Add these add-ons
Cookie AutoDelets 2.0.1
Disable WebRTC 1.0.18
HTTPS Everywhere 2017.12.6
uBlock Origin 1.14.22
Type "about:config" in the address bar and press enter proceed by agreeing to the warning.
stop html5 from automaticly playing change media.autoplay to disable
Switch off cache if you are developing websites and want changes to be shown
There are browser.cache.*enable prefs like these: to disable
browser.cache.disk.enable
browser.cache.memory.enable
Allow https in browser bar "browser.urlbar.trimURLs" preference to turn its value to false.
Now type any website URL in the browser, HTTP:// will be shown greyed out/not highlighted for a change in Firefox 7 when compared to the previous versions.
Set “browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled” preference to false after the above mentioned steps to remove the highlighting.(Thanks to Anonymous commenter).
I could not find the graphical way of changing the browser. I tried it out yesterday in virtual box. Seems it comes with two chromes, one firefox and Konqueror web-browsers installed.
I bet as things progress this choice will be added to the graphical settings.
I found Mr Robot very good and also found the hidden fantastic gem "Halt and Catch Fire".
I tried slowing down some of the command line stuff show in Mr Robot, most of it made some sense. Mr Robot's brain does jump about a bit and I like some of the surprises that I got caught out on.
Dear Anon,
I am far from advocating use of mobile phones for such things like texting, browsing or even sometimes talking hands free. I do use my phone as a satnav that sits in my line of sight in a holder. I set it up before I set off. I refrain from touching it while driving ( the phone that is). Is this more distracting than the mirror, oil light or the Speedo?
I sometimes see two people sat in car in front of me with the driver turning their head to talk to their passenger often completely oblivious to the speed limit they just broke. I don’t do this with my passengers because it seems safer not to. I also don’t have a problem with telling the passenger to shut-up either ( and it helps to reduce the number of future passenger requests).
Sorry my mistake. The years roll on too fast these days. I did mean 14.04 (and not 12.04), so I was a bit surprised when only 15.10 seemed to work.
kubuntu 15.10 to 16.04 works
Xubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 ( PVR + mythtv + kodi) (intel atom x 4). No upgrade
Kubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 ( i7) . No Upgrade
I think the kubuntu chaps are still preparing the 14.04 to 16.04 upgrade docs.
I agree with you on this one. One problem that is not well know is that adobe made the latest flash require SSE2 CPU extension. So older PC can not play flash any more.
So for a usable Linux intall you need CPU with SSE2, 1GB Ram, SATA1 disk ( get a £60 SSD hybrid for ebuyer ). 64 bit and dual core is a nice to have, a CD rom drive. Distros that run well are SolusOS, Debian and Kubuntu.
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