September 2017 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

NOT: Re: From BTRFS to what?
by Alvin Starr 07 Sep '17

07 Sep '17

Wow. got into a bit of a snitfest with dhaval.giani over this one. Now to the completely unrelated part. I have been thinking about a project and I would like to bounce it off you. A client came to me asking about helping him setup an Etherium mining server pool. This got me thinking. In its simplest sense the process is power in ..... ETH out. The biggest cost is power then cooling to get rid of all the head from the GPU's. What if you glue a GPU with very little extra hardware to the back of a solar panel. Stick it out in the sun and let it calculate 8-10 hours a day. Put a big heat sink on the GPU and it should be able to stay cool enough just from air cooling Take a few thousand of these and set them out in a sunny place and you would have a coin generator. Once the hardware is paid for then the operational cost would be close to 0 but for some glass cleaner and rags. They would need to be networked together but it does not have to be high speed. It could be a low power mesh to an edge that connects via something as simple as cell phone data. Solar panels cost about $1/watt and there is no ongoing cost but power here costs about $0.08-0.16/KWH. On the face of it there is a 3 year payback for the power but if you add in 30% extra power to run cooling and the building costs for housing the mining pool. Am I crazy? -- Alvin Starr || land: (905)513-7688 Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133 alvin(a)netvel.net ||

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Re: [GTALUG] OT: Solar Designer [Was: NOT: Re: From BTRFS to what?]
by John Moniz 07 Sep '17

07 Sep '17

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From BTRFS to what?
by William Park 06 Sep '17

06 Sep '17

I have BTRFS filesystem used for backup. I chose BTRFS because it can consolidate old leftover harddisks of various sizes into one big pool, and it can do "snapshot" which is pretty cheap way to do daily, weekly, monthly backups. Now, I read (it's an old news, though) that BTRFS is being "deprecated" by Redhat, and presumably others will follow. What do I do? What do you guys plan to do? -- William Park <opengeometry(a)yahoo.ca>

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[OFF TOPIC] Brave new Browser
by Slack Rat 06 Sep '17

06 Sep '17

Does anyone have any comments on Brendan Eich's new "Brave" browser? Now in a sort of wide beta, I'm personally impressed and am using it as my main browser. At least it's blindingly fast and sound works out of the box and many of the early version quirks have been obviated. -- Bill Henderson <billh(a)sdf.org> http://inconnu.freeshell.org/Sig/slackware.jpg

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Re: [GTALUG] From BTRFS to what?
by Stewart C. Russell 05 Sep '17

05 Sep '17

On 2017-09-04 08:30 AM, ac via talk wrote: > > hehehe, yeah... the quoted example was so not a rant.. Hmm, maybe it's a sign that communications around Linux kernel development are utterly broken if the long screed I linked to doesn't even merit “rant” status. Had Reiser really wished to have his code accepted, he would have knuckled down and worked on its deficiencies, rather than posting that "silenced all my lyfe!!!1!" yawp. Stewart

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Request for a talk (or a doc)
by Evan Leibovitch 04 Sep '17

04 Sep '17

Hello all, This is the opposite of an offer to present something. Rather, I am hoping there is enough interest such that one of GTALUG' s more learned souls might be able to present. Specifically, keyboards. I have never quite mastered how to get random Unicode characters from a keyboard on a Linux desktop. I've allways been able to switch keyboards, and I can do French (and some other) accents using dead keys. But I've never been able to duplicate the Windows trick of (for instance) ALT-0128 to get the Euro symbol. Most keyboards these days, in addition to Control keys, have a pair each Windows and Alt keys. On my KDE desktop the Windows key brings up the applications menu - fine. But if I look at /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose I see references to a <Multi_key> that would allow me to combine keystrokes to make ligatures (such as combining "R" and "=" to make the Rupee symbol. I don' t see a key marked "multi key" and I haven't found the ability to do these combined characters. In the KDE keyboard settings there is mention of mapping a <Meta> key to one of the low-row keyboard keys ... but isn't that an EMACS thing? And what is a <Hyper> key? If the answer is RTFM, I happily withdraw the request so long as someone can suggest an FM to R. My efforts to find decent docs on any of this have not gone well. So either a pointer to a good tutorial-level explanation of all this, or a brief mini-presentation at the next GTALUG meeting by someone who knows this stuff, would be highly appreciated. Thanks! -- Evan Leibovitch Toronto, Canada Em: evan at telly dot org Sk: evanleibovitch Tw: el56

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Fedora 26 Wonky Screen
by Howard Gibson 02 Sep '17

02 Sep '17

I have just installed Fedora 26 on my desktop. I logged into Gnome_3. I opened a couple of terminals and logged in as root to set my system up. I launched Firefox. All of my screen colours went completely wonky. I was doing a system update (dnf update) when all this happened. I am installing FVWM but it did not launch. Classic Gnome seems to be working okay but I am being cautious. Has anyone else experienced this? -- Howard Gibson hgibson(a)eol.ca jhowardgibson(a)gmail.com http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson

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