Goofed Home

We could have had another season of Domina, but got this instead.

Desktop Linux is in a better place than it used to be. App stores have made software discovery much simpler, and it’s become normal to install an app without even needing to know what a repository is.

We can grab almost any app in seconds (or minutes, depending on your connection), but that convenience comes with a trade-off. We’ve lost some of the fine-grained control that used to be standard on the Linux desktop.

Clonezilla Live, free and open-source disk cloning and imaging software for system backup, recovery, and deployment, has released its latest stable snapshot, v3.3.1, based on Debian Sid, with the Linux kernel updated to v6.18, and Partclone to v0.3.45.

A major highlight is expanded support for 4Kn (4K native) and 512n/e disks. The release adds mechanisms for cloning between mismatched sector formats, allowing 4Kn-to-512n/e and 512n/e-to-4Kn migrations. NTFS handling is improved by correctly updating the Total Sectors field.

Moreover, a new utility, ocs-pt-512-4k-convert, enables conversion of partition tables from 512B to 4Kn layouts. The GPT expansion tool ocs-expand-gpt-pt has also been rewritten to detect sector mismatches and perform conversions when needed.

I am currently looking for Thin Clients on ebay to use as my main server instead of the RPi 4 with an external USB drive.

I found decent offers for: - Dell Optiplex 3020M with i5-4590T 4GB RAM 120GB SSD - Dell Wyse 5070 with Celeron J4105 or Pentium Silver J5005 both with 8GB RAM 64GB SSD

Given the current prices of new hardware my questions are: - Should I go for 8GB RAM? - Or are 4GB RAM fine and I should take double the storage?

Things I want to run on this server: - Karakeep - FreshRSS - Paperless-NGX or Papra - Immich - Booklore

Because I plan to mostly use podman I tried to check for virtualization and all three suppoert Intels VT-x technolgy, will that be fine for my use case?

Advanced Vector Extensions instruction set; introduced with Sandy Bridge in 2011, but not included in Pentium/Celeron branded processors even after then for reasons best known only to Intel.

Mongo is the application that has most irritated me by requiring it, but I doubt it’s the only one.

Correct (which is why I mentioned Kata, as that’s a container runtime backed by microvms, sort of like how AWS uses firecracker to run lambdas and “serverless” container workloads)

Yeah, all consumers care about is good content.

It was actually so easy. Definitely would make again.

The green stuffed pictured is not grass. It’s thinly sliced scallions.

yea, I know

Another swing and a miss?

Following yesterday’s Linux 7.0-rc1 release, Linus Torvalds authored and merged a patch to get rid of the Linux kernel’s WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM Kconfig option. While that option was added with good intentions, on some systems it can yield a lot of unnecessary kernel log spam.

The WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM option has for many years been part of the Linux kernel and enabling it will provide a warning whenever there is a use of unseeded randomness within the kernel. To help spot situations of random number generation use prior to being able to securely use RNG on the system, this option was added long ago to help spot such uses of unseeded randomness by kernel code. But due to caveats on some CPUs around a fully-seeded CRNG, the WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM can become like an endless stream of spam. After encountering a bug report where much of the kernel log were just messages about unseeded randomness and in turn losing some of the initial boot log, Torvalds had enough and gutted out this option.

The proper way to find these things for the hypothetical developer that cares - if such a person exists - is almost certainly with boot time tracing. That gives you the option to get call graphs etc too, which is likely a requirement for fixing any problems anyway. See Documentation/trace/boottime-trace.rst for that option.

The solution for developers that care, if they exist.