Jimmyson

I'm keen on hearing any news about their Linux transition and often perk-up whenever it's mentioned on the WAN show. Personally having transitioned over to a primary Linux machine for web, general use and light Steam Streaming, it was quite difficult to get my hardware to a state where it was stable with power management, and getting the AMD GPU to properly work. @LinusTech's comments about having to send time getting the hardware to work properly really brought gravitas to the argument and an expected pain point of the transition, as this was my own personal concern and a source of my frustration at the time. The transition came about originally as I wanted to setup a ITX home console to sit in the living room, but those plans fell though with inadequate space to store the machine. I wanted to cheap out on getting an OS to run, and wanted to give Pop_OS! a run for it's money. It worked hardware wise, with the exception of my R9 390X, often running hot from machine boot. It's a expected issue with these Hawaii GPU based cards. I knew about the issue, and knew of CoreCtrl as a monitoring and fan control software as a Linux drop-in substitute to the Windows AMD Radeon control panel. Getting it to work required changing some Linux boot parameters, and thankfully there was some documentation to activate the flags. Something that tinkers know about, and comfortable adjusting. Sadly as stated the machine never got a proper run for its money, and sat idle for about 8 months before being pulled out again to be used a replacement as my day-to-day machine to replace my main rig, which is soon to become my gaming-only PC once I decide on the space. That machine is Windows based, and I hope to dive into VR, which Windows is currently the best OS to use at this point in time. Whilst the machine is capable, I'm personally frustrated by on-board audio driver issues (as the Motherboard hasn't received updates since 2018) and doesn't play nice with Windows 1903 and beyond with stutters and hitches. It even affected A/V desync issues on my Web Browsers, plus the paranoia of Windows locking down the OS, and running telemetry on everything, I just had enough. I am running Manjaro on my ITX build as it fits my needs of working supporting a community maintained application collection, with a back catalogue of Arch Repository apps too. Snaps and Flatpack packaged apps are also supported, but I don't want to dive into those at present. After the install was completed with some extra applications installed to get my GPU fans under control, and supporting DPI adjustments for my mouse (using Piper), I was running into issues with having the Machine go into Sleep or Hibernation. In either case, the machine would break the experience of launching the Desktop Environment, as the Window Server would crash and fail to launch, or if it managed to restore properly, I would not be able to shutdown the computer without doing a hard power off with the Power Button. Not good. After seeking some support from the Manjaro forums, it came down to two issues Hibernation was due to a misconfigured Swap partition size, as I had a non recommended setup as I wanted to use LVM rather than normal partitions. I wanted some hard drive flexibility. Being of a programmer background, it was a risk I could take, but to solve it, I had to reinstall it. This is something most people SHOULD NOT attempt, such as myself as I didn't know what I was doing. Sleep/Suspend issue was due to an older BIOS image flashed to the motherboard. I had not updated it since I purchased it, and something I don't think to attempt. Thankfully this resolved the issue. There was also a final side issue with the GPU, whilst I had the fan control working, I was unable to launch games, partially a unity game. Having a R9 390X, it was possible that I was not using the newer AMDGPU driver bundled with the Linux Kernel, and was somehow still using the older Radeon driver. A couple of boot configuration changes, and the games launched without and issue, and I had some extra monitor metrics to boot. Circling back, @LinusTech's point of Linux's struggle to go mainstream is issues like these that I experience. Even for him and his edge-case machine which we are yet to learn about. A high majority of 'end users" are not coders or tinkers. They have no confidence to debug a Linux machine. I think (and this extends to myself) is we often expect the systems to be smart enough to identify our hardware, and be properly configure to work out of the box. I honestly feel that having something that allowed me to explore and modify my boot parameters to get hardware to work would get my needs up to speed quickly, but right now, it comes with risks, as if it breaks, I have to "hack" my way back in. So I am interested to hear Linus's and Luke's comments on their journey

Awesome! That defiantly puts my mind at ease! Looks like I can reconsider the need for the SSD, and just buy some low capacity USBs. Save the SATA ports, and not kill the flash chips . As a side-note; if I do end up going down FreeNAS/TrueNAS Core solution with USB sticks, I would need to consider making adjustments to the System Dataset, as reported in TrueNAS's forum thread. Not exactly sure on what a "special device" is for ZFS, and should follow-up on this.

I am intially looking at the Crucial BX500 240GB 3D NAND SATA 2.5" SSD, size is overkill for either boot or OS drive. Reading some articles, maybe USB would be better for lower sizes, and I could pick up a couple USB header adapters, keep them tucked away. True, I was just initially unsure about the Read/Write cycles of a OS drive under FreeNAS or UnRAID, whether the IO index load of managing the ZFS pool was written to this drive. Seems from the messages thus fair, that may not be as extreme as thought. I probs would expect some from of data/pool management stored somewhere though, just can't remember where... I do like what UnRAID offers, and considering that it's heavily pointed to in this community (and not for without reason), I am wanting to start with something free first. Get my bearings straight. UnRAID could be on the cards, but I would be paying for extra I don't plan to use, and mostly are operating elsewhere on other devices. See how my use case adapts.

I am making plans to build put together a NAS vault desktop, using some older spare hardware lying around. I picked up a system without any storage, so I would need to fill this up. The board is in older Intel Z87, rocking a 4th Gen i5 CPU, a little overkill, but should be OK to start with. I plan to fill the machine up with large capacity HDD platter disks, aiming for 4-8TB for each drive, as I don't want to break the bank each time I purchase a small set. Knowing that it's best practice to keep your OS and Data separate, I would need a boot/OS drive. A low capacity SSD, aiming for roughly 128-256GB would be more than enough. I don't plan to using SSD caching drives at present, but its worth considering. Note: NVMe is not supported on the motherboard due to not having one. My question is in regards to the boot/OS drive. I can find a 240GB drive for A$40, while most other drives are around A$80. My guess for the low price is that it is missing a DRAM chip. I'm not sure if there is a way to check, as many vendors don't list/advertise in on their spec pages. My question is the performance impact and reliability of purchasing a DRAM-less SSD as a boot/OS drive. I'm likely to use FreeNAS, (but unRAID, could be on the cards) with a ZFS format across any storage pool drives. How much wear would be placed on the OS drive for a NAS system? Would it suffer from SSD thrashing as big data comes in? Do cache drives offload this work from the OS SSD? Do these OS drives manage the cluster indexes? As a side note, I don't plan to leave this NAS running 24/7. Its use case is primary archiving digital libraries and content, and a second tier back destination, between my long-term critical data on a portable HDD, and my on-demand server which runs NextCloud.

There is also the argument to be had about media companies use for Facebook for news. Many (if not all) take content from it and push it onto the larger audience. It's a publicly accessible communication platform. It has been used to gauge the public's response to whatever is the issue of the day, or hype up stories for content filling, or public shaming, sometimes without consent to the author. Being someone who closed his profile some years ago, I questioned the heavy dependence on the Facebook platform as a Central point for any/all communication. Remember there are countries around the world whom use Facebook as their internet access. It's pretty much a utility in some places. With the legislation of Media Bargaining Code moving though Parliament, Facebook had stated that dropping news content from the Australian portion of their platform was possible, and so it happened. It's not like we weren't warned. What they ended up doing was preventing ANY post from most Facebook Pages. Seems as if they didn't vet their lists, and just did a blanket ban. In a way, Facebook page posts could be seen as news, but in the generic sense. Businesses, Organizations and Government Entities informing people who subscribe to their updates. Is that not news to someone? Preventing posts from pages that often provide critical updates that can protect/save lives is what I believe pissed of many people, or at least those whom either depend on it, or relay the information. Such as the case on the day with the Bureau of Meteorology, or the WA Fire Service, as there was an Extreme Fire Danger somewhere in WA, or a Cyclone could have formed up near the Top end of Australia, as this time of year, it's very active. Most of those pages are now back up and running with their Post functionality restored. But it has left a bitter taste, and is feeding into other debate about media ownership and monopoly/oligopoly.

Time to whip out that VPN. PIA anyone?

Further pages affected. Examples lifted from another article 1800RESPECT (Family Violence Support) DVConnect (Family Violence Support) Australian Council of Trade Unions (Trade Union) Gippsland Jersey (Small Rural Business) Brisbane City Council (Local Area Council) Harvey Norman (Medium Business) TransLink (Public Transports for Queensland State) RACQ (Roadside Assistance) Bowel Cancer Australia (Cancer Awareness Organization) The Kids' Cancer Project (Cancer Awareness Organization) Women's Rugby League (Sport) Queensland Rugby League (Sport) Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-18/bom-health-authorities-betoota-caught-in-facebook-news-ban/13166394

Summary After threats of Google seeking to prevent search operations in Australia, and largely backing down after signing agreements with Australian Media Business, Facebook has decided to suspend the posting and sharing of News Articles and Information from the Pages of Australian Media and other sources. ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Nine and Fairfax, News Corp and others have had their posts removed from the platform. Other pages such as Australian Bureau of Meteorology (weather provider), Comedy News shows and satirical news pages have also been affected. Questions remain for Emergency Services Providers. Communications between the Government and Facebook are ongoing... Quotes My thoughts They are a private company, and can choose to play how they like to. There is a question about media literacy and people's lack of finding alternative sources. Maybe it's just convenient. The are also questions whether this code was mostly put in due to the current conservative government having an ear-shot of larger, right leaning media companies (i.e.: News Corp), whom own Sky News Australia and a majority of Australia's Tabloid Newspapers. Many of the news providers use post taken from Facebook's platform to whip up spin and hysteria in major news cycles, and people either buy it, or it further disillusions them from the content. Just look elsewhere.... Why give in to Daddy Murdoch or Facebook? They both don't care about what they host on their platforms. Sources https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-18/facebook-to-restrict-sharing-or-viewing-news-in-australia/13166208 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-18/facebook-credibility-brought-into-question/13166318

Hi all, I am hitting a bit of a road bump with my plans in setting up a PC Gaming console. Thankfully all the hardware has been configured and built. Took 6 months (not including the last 3 in storage), and everything works fine. I have intended on this machine to be a PC Console/LAN Party box. I primarily will be playing games with Xbox controllers (as that is all I have), and a keyboard/mouse when on the road to LAN meetups. My only problem is picking the right OS. I was to stay clear of Windows (as my main rig already has it), and I will be using Steam as the primary platform. (Thus making streaming a more reasonable choice when at home, and using the grunt of the rig's GPU for graphics) Linux is going to be the OS of choice, but that leads itself down into it own challenges. There hasn't been consistent updates from Wendell about "The state of Gaming on Linux" with that 4-part series, and I do acknowledge the rapid advances and work been undertaken in that domain. My question is to what flavour of Linux will work best for my use-case? I am aware of the Debian family, and the popular derivatives that exists, namely the following, and what I have found so far. (I am not fully informed of all the updates to each Debian (itself). Very stable, but not always running latest kernel Ubuntu, Agile but does come with extra unnecessary components on the Desktop image Pop!_OS, Just works, but Kiosk mode isn't really possible Steam OS, based on an old Debian version and kernel. Each as its ups and downs. I also considered installing the Steam OS components from a custom script that downloads and installs the Steam OS software and tools to a Debian-based machine. Pop!_OS somehow didn't like that and prevented the Steam app from updating by not having the network config available, and required the new "steam" user account to be setup first with the default "Welcome" process before advancing with the Steam OS tools. Ideally, I am seeking answers from the larger community about how they have tackled this problem, and maybe some ideas on what can be done? Should I be trying a different arrangement? My machine's hardware is the following AMD Ryzen 5 2600 MSI R9 390X MSI B450I ITX WD Blue 500GB NVMe SilverStone SFX SX650-G Also note, since I am running a R9 390X in my machine, it does have issues with getting the fans, and the drivers to talk. Thankfully, new kernel versions of Linux allow them to be enabled with the new AMDGPU driver, but I can't seem to set the fan curve in Debian variation of Linux. I am aware that the Arch community have access to a tool that someone built. What can people suggest?

I kinda feel bad for myself lunging at @LinusTech now. It was too unsportsmanlike of myself, but Linus is a good sport. Damn you were good! Thanks for recording the interaction @Dawson Wehage

We are down stairs in the bar

Hopping not to derail peoples intentions to plan meetups, or to add complications to communication channels. But I've opened up a Discord channel for this. Mostly targeting those staying at Samesun, but willing to expand if needed. https://discord.gg/eE2bTYr

I do have Discord though.... Because who doesn't as a gamer! LOL

Cheers... I hate to be that guy, but I recently closed my Facebook profile. For the time being, I'll see if I can find another way to initiate the communication.

Came here to say that I might fit the criteria. Just landed into Vancouver from Melbourne, Australia with Jet lag to boot! Also staying at the Samesun hostel in downtown. This trip doubles as my holiday too.....