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

neidu2 , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

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 , 3 months ago

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

Akinzekeel , 3 months ago

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 , 3 months ago

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

spez , 3 months ago

Knowing some fringe users, your setup is probably ~3 points or so ahead of the middle of the bell curve. You never know. There’s probably a guy running kernel 4.12 on a 1990s CPU with his showa era CRT monitor to play freedoom.

fossphi , 3 months ago

fringe

Kept reading it as fridge users and was really flummoxed for a few seconds

spez , 3 months ago

Well, you aren’t that far off after all!

notthebees , 3 months ago

I have 100% done this. I have a picture somewhere of my old ass p3 laptop with an rgb keyboard. So not showa era crt, it’s heisei era LCD (more appropriate considering it’s a Sony vaio f series)

ExtremeDullard , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

My work machine isn’t too unusual, apart that it has 52 USB devices connected. And here’s something you may not know: Linux can’t enumerate more than 16 USB ports if the root is configured as USB3, so I had to force all the ports to run in USB2 mode - which is fine in this case, since most of them are serial ports.

Telodzrum , 3 months ago

Linux can’t enumerate more than 16 USB ports if the root is configured as USB3

What? Really?

ExtremeDullard , 3 months ago

I’m not sure it’s a kernel limitation or a hardware limitation. But it does throw an error in syslog when you connect the 17th device. Not as USB2 though.

riskable , 3 months ago

This is caused by your root controller’s limited bandwidth and it’s inability to handle that many 3.0 devices at the same time. Some of the newer motherboards with USB C PD have controllers in them that can do a lot more.

It’s basically a hack on part of the company that made the root controller IC. They know they only have enough internal bandwidth to support 16 USB 3.0 devices so they intentionally bork things when you plug in more than that since their Transaction Translator (TT) can’t handle more and they were too lazy to bother implementing the ability to share 2.0 and 3.0 properly.

I’m guessing the decision went something like this…

“We have enough bandwidth for 16 3.0 devices… What do we do if someone plugs in more than that?” “Only a few people will ever have that many! We don’t have the budget to handle every tiny little use case! Just ship it.”

So it’s not Linux fault in this case. Or at least, if it is (a problem with the driver) it’s because of some proprietary bullshit that the driver requires to function properly 🤷

ExtremeDullard , 3 months ago

Yeah I figured it might be something like that. But I wasn’t sure it wasn’t a kernel limit - or even a limit in the USB3 specification - because I actually only have one USB3-capable device connected (my cellphone). All the other devices are low-bandwidth USB2 FTDI USB serial converters. I thought it couldn’t be a bandwidth issue when all but one device can only use a fraction of what’s available.

reallyzen , 3 months ago

Uh, you’re outputing 52 DMX universes straight from USB? I have questions!

• What software are you using, and is qlcplus really able to do that?
• Have you ever heard the words ArtNet? SACN?

ExtremeDullard , 3 months ago

I had no idea what you’re talking about so I had to look it up 🙂

I think you’re making assumptions on what I need many serial ports for and it’s nothing like what you think.

I work for a company that makes measuring instruments that talk serial (RS232, RS422 and UART), we have many variants of our products and I’m tired of plugging and unplugging devices to the same serial ports to test code. Also, I can’t do that remotely when I work from home. So I have many serial ports and all the different devices I need to test my code on regularly are all plugged in and powered at the same time.

No lighting here 🙂

reallyzen , 3 months ago

Oh, here I thought you was running a fancy dancefloor or something! TIL the creator of that chip was a prick.

Fredol , 3 months ago

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

echo64 , 3 months ago

I sometimes use a snap

delirious_owl , 3 months ago

Gross

echo64 , 3 months ago

🤷‍♀️ the snap works absolutely fine with no issues, the flatpak doesn’t exist and the apt is two years out of date.

I’m not on the outrage boat myself tho

dandroid , 3 months ago

I used Ubuntu for years and never had a single issue with snap. I didn’t even know about the hate back then, nor had I heard of Flatpak. I eventually started to really like it and prefer to get my apps as snaps when available. Eventually I had to give up that laptop because it belonged to my work, and I left for another job. When I installed linux on my personal laptop, I decided to move away from Ubuntu for reasons completely unrelated to snap or proprietary software.

delirious_owl , 3 months ago

Security.

delirious_owl , 3 months ago

Both are terrible for security. Apt is actually safe

echo64 , 3 months ago

Lol, no, it isn’t. Anyone can set up an apt repository and ask you to use it. Many providers do… You might mean the walled garden of an official singular apt repository is safe.

kylian0087 , 3 months ago

I mean seeing how often malware and other bad stuff has gotten on their. It is bad for the linux eco system in general. Worse then finding random installers on windows

fruitycoder , 3 months ago

Check out guix or nixpkgs too, very good alts if flatpak or distro pkg manager doesn’t have it. Snap’s store is proprietary.

ichbinjasokreativ , 3 months ago

I have a laptop with an easily accessible m.2 slot, which I use with an m.2 to pcie x16 adapter to connect an external desktop grapics card to game and run ai. apart from that, a diy nas running opensuse and a couple vms for dns, remote nas access, etc

Pantherina , 3 months ago

Damn I need to find out if that works on my machine.

ichbinjasokreativ , 3 months ago

These adapters only exist for pcie 3.0 and m.2 slots for ssds have 4 lanes at best, so you should expect performance to be between thunderbolt 4 and a full x16 slot in a desktop, but it’s been working very reliably for me and is absolutely faster than the iGPU in my laptop. You do typically need a desktop power supply connected to the adapter though, but since it only needs to power the card, it’s fine to go with a lower power one.

dsemy , 3 months ago

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 , 3 months ago

Screenshot or didnt happen :D

You can use Emacs for panels??

dsemy , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

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 , 3 months ago

Test to see if this works

image

image2

Pantherina , 3 months ago

Very neat!

image1

image2

Always nice to have inline images :D

dsemy , 3 months ago

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

ImTryingLemmy , 3 months ago

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 , 3 months ago

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!

delirious_owl , 3 months ago

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

mesamunefire , 3 months ago

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.

henfredemars , 3 months ago

Not mine, but while I was an intern for a lab I enjoyed using a very normal-looking desktop with a casual 4TB of DDR4 and no SSD or HD, dual Xeon configuration. Rather, it did network boot and pivot root into an in-memory filesystem. It had a UPS and typically ran for months entirely from volatile storage and was used to run experimental photo and video processing. This was about ten years ago.

GnomeComedy , 2 months ago

I can only imagine what that much RAM and a system that could hold it cost 10 years ago. Yikes.

Petter1 , 3 months ago

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)

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

I have NixOS running on my main desktop with some unusual changes:

• / is mounted as tmpfs, with /etc, /nix and /var being mounted from the actual system partition (this actually isn’t too uncommon on NixOS)
• For swap, zswap and dynamically allocated swapfiles using swapspace daemon (this is imo the best swap setup if you don’t need hibernation)
• Akonadi (KDE’s PIM server) using PostgreSQL instead of MySQL
• ISO8601 date format, for this I have glibc’s en_DK locale which does this copied to en_SE because Qt has en_SE as the locale with ISO date
• A couple changes to make the layout more like macOS because I can:
  • Partitions are either mounted or auto-symlinked (if they can’t be mounted there, such as for the system partition) under /Volumes
  • I patched udisks to also mount devices under /Volumes
  • User home directories are under /Users and root’s home is /var/root
  • Keyboard layout changed as far as I can to be mostly like Mac’s so I don’t have to rethink layouts as much when switching between this and my MacBook
• Can’t technically list this anymore since I’ve had to tear it down for unrelated reasons but NFS using Kerberos authentication for my NAS
• This is apparently very unusual since a lot of games completely break with it but two monitors with the main monitor on the right

starman , 3 months ago

This is apparently very unusual since a lot of games completely break with it but two monitors with the main monitor on the right

This is unusual? I use the same monitor configuration, and I didn’t notice any problems with it. Or at least I didn’t figure out they could have been caused by monitor setup. Could you give me an example of what problems have you encountered?

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

Either games spawning on the wrong monitor and not reacting well to you moving the fullscreen window to the other monitor, or mouse input issues. Latest I’ve had was L.A. Noire, which locks the mouse to a portion of the screen and doesn’t allow you to freely turn the camera. (I just tested it again and now it seems to work fine though! I hope that persists.) Quake II doesn’t allow you to move the mouse at all, or rather only in what seems in like a 2 pixel wide boundary in the middle of the screen. No such issues if the other monitor is turned off or configured to be on the right side. I’ve encountered more games that had issues with this in the past but these two are the recent ones I’ve had trouble with since setting it up like this again.

LiveLM , 3 months ago

If you’re on Wayland, try gamescope. It’s basically built to handle issue like this.

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

With L.A. Noire, that actually made it worse. It spawned on the wrong monitor, and every time I moved the mouse, the camera would spin to the right no matter what (even with only one monitor, I think). I need to get around to making bug reports for these.

agressivelyPassive , 3 months ago

What’s the deal with / as tmpfs about? I’m so trying to understand nixos.

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

NixOS can boot from a file system that only has /nix, since essentially the kernel command line has init=/nix/store/…/init. Everything else will be created during boot by that if it isn’t already there. So technically you could only mount /nix and you would get a blank system every time you boot (but that wouldn’t be very useful in most cases). Mounting these is done in the initrd.

A lot of people have a setup where only select files are mounted from a persistent partition, such as /var/lib/postgresql, basically anything they want to keep across reboots, so that the rest is discarded when they reboot. This prevents the system from accumulating junk over time, from services you once used to have but no longer have running, and so on. Personally I found it too much of a hassle to keep track of what files I want to keep, so I save the entire /etc and /var. I still keep the tmpfs though because it’s pretty cool.

LiveLM , 3 months ago

Question: are you using Flakes?

I’ve been kinda dipping my toes on NixOS but the flakes are really throwing a wrench my way… Yet they are apparently NixOS’ future so I’m just kinda stuck

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

Yeah. Flakes are essentially three things (or four if you count the new CLI):

1. Lock files for inputs (like NPM)
2. A defined output layout (so, every flake has its packages at packages.<system> for example)
3. Pure mode (don’t worry about it unless you read from arbitrary locations in the file system or try to download files without a hash)

That’s it, essentially nothing else changes. It’s just a different entry point to Nix code including NixOS configurations.

Here’s a great article (apparently, I have only skimmed it myself) explaining flakes more in detail: jade.fyi/blog/flakes-arent-real/

redshift , 3 months ago

I felt the same, but I’m reading through this book and so far it’s been helpful for understanding and setting up system flakes: nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world

pr06lefs , 3 months ago

Flakes on the system level aren’t too bad. You can pretty much just keep your configuration.nix, but now you call that from a flake.nix. The difference is you remove all your nix-channels and you specify your nixpkgs in your flake.nix. So its really using a flake instead of nix-channels.

The cool part is when you nixos-rebuild the first time, it will save your nixpkgs version in a flake.lock. Then it will stay that way until you choose to upgrade with nix flake update. Nice and stable.

NuclearDolphin , 3 months ago

use flakes

qaz , 3 months ago

A fellow en_DK user, I thought I was the only one.

dave , 3 months ago

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.

chameleon , 3 months ago

My casual-browsing-only netbook is currently running on a RAID0 setup between the internal eMMC and the microSD card because I think it's funnier that way. Nothing useful's stored on there and it's one nixos-rebuild away from being reinstalled so I don't mind the inevitable breakage.

possiblylinux127 , 3 months ago

That’s so wrong…

Your MicroSD is very slow and will die