There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

Linux users with uncommon or unusual setups: tell us about it

I’ll start with mine. yes part of this was to brag about my somewhat but not too unusual setup. But I also wanna learn from your setups!

Anyways: I primarily use Gentoo Linux.

I have two headless servers: a Raspberry Pi 4B and a Oracle cloud VM (free tier). Both running OpenRC, and both were running mainline kernel with custom config (I recently switched the Pi to PiFoundation kernel due to some issues). The raspberry pi boots from SSD and has no sd card inserted.

Both servers were running musl libc instead of glibc for a while. This gave me a couple of random issues, but eventually I got tired and switched back to glibc.

I have a desktop running gentoo and a laptop running arch, but hoping to switch the laptop to gentoo soon.

Both are daily driving wayland (the desktop had nvidia card and used for gaming). The desktop is running a kernel with a minimal config that compiles in 2-3 minutes.

What’s your unusual setup like?

grue ,

https://i.imgflip.com/8ki934.jpg

dario ,

I use Parabola GNU/Linux-libre.

neidu2 , (edited )

Not THAT unusual, but… I have a Dell R520 server that was leftover/retired from work. I mostly use it for storage due to the amount of disk trays it has. I have all of these disks in a ZFS pool, leaving no actual drives for the OS. However, this was an old VM server, so it has an internal USB 2 port and a ridiculous amount of RAM, so the OS is booted from USB, and I don’t use swap.

Boot performance is abysmal (on the rare occasion where I actually need to reboot), but once booted I notice no real downside to having the OS itself on really slow storage. Sure, it’s somewhat slow to do os-related stuff such as apt-get, but it’s not like I’m in a hurry when doing it. Plus other than updating stuff, the OS storage doesn’t see a whole lot of changes/writes.

Now I just need to figure out how to economically attach these 40 additional SAS drives I have. It doesn’t have to look good (i.e. fit in the same chassis. Or any chassis at all, for that matter), it just have to work. These additional drives are only 4TB each, but they were free.

corsicanguppy ,

www.ebay.com/itm/166534645494 – but for the other 28, it’s just drawers, right?

Akinzekeel ,

Just wondering what’s the power consumption and how long have you had it? I just got my electricity bill after running an R720 for a year and… let’s just say it wasn’t worth the low price after all

neidu2 ,

Good question. I honestly haven’t got a clue.

LiveLM , (edited )

Oracle cloud VM (free tier)

Remember to back that shit up rigorously, as Oracle is known to terminate free accounts with no warning (…which is fair for a free account imo)

You probably already know this but I thought I’d say it just in case

Octorine ,

Sometimes I’ll start up ConnectBot, which is an android ssh client, on my meta quest. Then I connect to my laptop and attach to a running tmux session so I can use the laptop keyboard but see the text in a virtual window.

My actual laptop setup is pretty boring though

dsemy ,

I have Void Linux running on a GPD Win 4 (6800u). It performs well enough to emulate Demon’s Souls through rpcs3 at 720p 40-60 fps. It has a button on the side which toggles the built in controller between a “kb+m” mode and a normal controller mode, so I wrote a udev rule which opens Steam in big picture mode if its not running already when I switch to the controller mode.

I also sandbox a bunch of applications installed from the repos (including Steam and Firefox) using bubblewrap instead of using something like Flatpak.

I have a custom (half-working) version of slurp which allows starting selection immediately, which in turn allows me to immediately get the position of the cursor, which I use to launch tofi under the cursor (I don’t know of any other way to do this on river or even Wayland in general).

I use secureboot with custom keys (using sbctl), and I build a unified kernel image from which I boot with dracut, into a fairly standard LVM-on-LUKS setup, all flicker-free (by manually turning off Plymouth at the right time). UKIs allow me to boot from an efi shell very easily if thing go very wrong.

I run dnsmasq for caching, together with stubby for DoT. I highly recommend at least dnsmasq if you use Steam (fixes weird issues with their downloads).

I toggle running Qt apps’ dark/light mode by modifying the qt5/6ct config file with a perl script which darkman runs. I switch the wallpaper in a similar way.

I don’t use a status bar, I put most of what should go there into the Emacs tab bar (with custom dynamic icons and everything). It has volume, battery, temperature, wifi, system load, incoming mail, playing music and time display. Everything but temperature display works on both Linux and OpenBSD (and some on Android too).

Honestly there’s a bunch more weird stuff but this is getting pretty long.

Pantherina ,

Screenshot or didnt happen :D

You can use Emacs for panels??

dsemy , (edited )

I don’t use Emacs as a panel (though I’m sure you can do it somehow), I just almost always have a window open so I can just look at its tab bar.

This is how it looks: ibb.co/tbyZ8vH

And when the window is too small, it uses two lines: ibb.co/s3dhzCr

These are from my main PC, which use the same setup (no battery/wifi, but you can see that the volume icon only has a single “bar”). The name of the song is truncated to the maximum possible width and “cycles” through the name. Second picture also shows tofi which was opened under my cursor in an arbitrary position. BTW the header bar only appears for the floating Emacs window (so I can drag it with a touchscreen) using a GTK css hack.

Edit: Wow, I took the pictures 9 minutes apart and both the CPU and GPU temperatures are exactly the same (they both fluctuate slightly while idling).

Pantherina ,

Test to see if this works

image

image2

Pantherina ,

Very neat!

image1

image2

Always nice to have inline images :D

dsemy ,

Huh, for some reason I thought I had to upload the images to my instance to inline them. Thanks!

nyan ,

Gentoo + OpenRC + TDE (therefore X) on both a first-gen Threadripper desktop with 96GB RAM and a laptop from 2008 with an Athlon64x2 processor and 2GB RAM. Updating gcc on the laptop can take a while, but it still serves well enough. Plus a couple of headless Pis that are also running Gentoo. Not overly unusual, but I may well have the only Threadripper of that gen running that specific distro and DE combination anywhere in the world, since each individual item is kind of low probability.

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Now, not so unusual, I have pretty dull and standard "gaming" type PC running stock Debian, but about 20 years ago as a broke mofo I was running a phpBB forum off a wheezing Pentium MMX laptop with no screen (got ripped off a year prior) on Mandrake Linux. The whole thing was just loosely sitting under my bed. Managed to get a userbase of just under a hundred people before I lost interest. I was using Webmin to manage it from another PC.

I had to connect up an external monitor every time I needed to do something I couldn't do remotely. I learned so much from that laptop. "./configure, make, make install" became muscle memory.

dave ,
@dave@feddit.uk avatar

Just started running Arch + KDE on a Kingston Traveller to experiment with setup. Installed from live usb iso and then ran archinstall to the same device.

Runs nicely on my dell xps laptop and my desktop with 3 monitors connected to an Nvidia 1070Ti.

ImTryingLemmy ,

Debian testing on a MacBook Air 6,2 (2013). I guess that’s kinda weird. Works fine as a netbook: Firefox, Thunderbird, TigerVNC (handles the low resolution well) and SSH. That’s all I ask of the thing and it works fine. The only hardware that doesn’t work is the webcam, everything else is 100%

It was a free hand-me-down and I put a $45 battery in it so I can use it on the couch. I think what will kill it is when the proprietary charger dies, they cost more used on ebay than the battery did.

mesamunefire ,

Nice I have a MacBook pro 2016(?) that runs a flavor of Ubuntu over at a local makerspace. It was hard as heck to find and customize the driver’s to get it working, but it does!

Petter1 ,

I guess my macbookpro from 2009 with Legacy NVIDIA grafics running Arch with GNOME on Wayland is pretty uncommon, lol (Of course using nouveau derivers)

mesamunefire ,

I’m not too sure how unusual it is, but I have a satellite tracker on a pi 3 b+ based on satnogs. It helps other scientists get data out of cutsats and other satellites. It’s pretty easy to set up once you know what to set up.

I once had a butler program on a pi 1 with WiFi chip back around 10+ years ago. No ai, just a bunch of batch scripts + espeak. It was a cool project that would tell us the weather, time, any to-do items, and internet usage ( att had a hard limit of 100gb and I used a script tu tell how much we used per month). Ran for a couple of years and then disassembled it. Still have the GitHub repo. This was many years before Alexa, Google, and the other such projects. It wasn’t better at all (espeak sounds so robotic, even when tweaked).

I ran a Bitcoin miner on a pi and made -$4.50ish a month back a decade ago. It was my most popular wiki pages back when I self hosted one. People were really interested, but it never made any money. It was more of a proof of concept . It’s pretty easy to compile, but hard to track down all the dependencies. That was waaaay before the asci miners came into play.

delirious_owl ,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

Probably the weirdest I’ve done was play doom on a sansa mp3 player with rockbox installed

Fredol ,

I use a very very minimal OpenSuse Tumbleweed KDE but I start the DE manually; startplasma-wayland or startx

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •