May 2019 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

NUC NUC NUC
by Evan Leibovitch 22 May '19

22 May '19

Hi all, I'm looking to upgrade my PC that's served me well for about 8 years, but it's starting to be unreliable and I can't upgrade the RAM beyond 4GB. So I'm looking at a new desktop system that will be used mainly for many-tabs-open browsing and multimedia editing using openshot, audacity, etc. Of course must run Linux well. I am currently looking at two NUC-form-factor barebones systems that use the 8th gen Intel i7, an Intel model available through CC <https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=570_7_1203_1157&item…> and a Zotac model available from Amazon <https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B079H24SWZ/>. Both are about the same price. I would be installing 16GB RAM, an SSD and two screens. Can anyone offer any advice whether to go with one, the other, or neither? Are there better places to buy? Thanks for all suggestions. -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch or @el56

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Google suspends some business with Huawei
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 21 May '19

21 May '19

<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-huawei-tech-alphabet-exclusive/exclusive…> This looks like it will affect Huawei Android phones. It looks like Google is being forced by the US Federal government. Google better move out of the US. To be honest, this looks like something so stupid that it's going to be changed.

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Q4OS anyone?
by Ken Heard 17 May '19

17 May '19

Hi, I am thinking of using the Q4OS operating system instead of Debian because Q4OS is one of two distributions which includes the Trinity DE which I have been using for some time with Debian. I would appreciate comments from anyone here who uses or has some knowledge of this OS. Regards, Ken

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a simple security solution?
by Karen Lewellen 17 May '19

17 May '19

Hi everyone, I do hope to ask this clearly. what I desire is a method of confirming if someone enters or approaches my flat without my knowledge. Ideally there would be a small camera, even a phone just for this role might work, with at the absolute best a notification sent via voice or e-mail that the feature is active..I hope this makes sense. Perhaps it activates when someone opens my downstairs door, letting me know? Perhaps an alarm, perhaps not. I might also dedicate a laptop to this role, but the most important thing is that I am notified, the setup calls my own phone number land line for example, or sends me an e-mail. I have no way to get a text message, unless this message is spoken. If I am not being clear let me know. Range need not be profoundly large either. Ideas? Kare

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Question Fodder: Bcache Filesystem
by Christopher Browne 15 May '19

15 May '19

I just saw a report of corruption problems with bcache in conjunction with GCC 9, and realized I had never actually heard of bcache before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcache - a layer in the kernel for using fast storage (e.g. - NAND, SSD) as a cache for spinning rust That's pretty cool; I don't have enough lurking SSD/NAND to have that be of *too* much interest. But wait, they kept working on it, so there's a filesystem... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcachefs - a COW (Copy On Write) filesystem running atop BCache that has the modern stuff people seem to like such as snapshotting, encryption, checksums, compression (ala ZFS, Btrfs) Here's the corruption reference: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203573 And some more diagnosis here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1708315 Sounds like it may be the wrong moment in time to be adopting BCache-related stuff ;-) Has anyone been poking at this sort of stuff? A *loooong* time ago, I used to follow ReiserFS pretty closely, back when that project was a technical matter, as opposed to being (rather properly!) overshadowed by a murder investigation :-( -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"

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Re: [GTALUG] Question Fodder: Bcache Filesystem
by Jamon Camisso 15 May '19

15 May '19

On 5/14/19 5:12 PM, Christopher Browne via talk wrote: > Sounds like it may be the wrong moment in time to be adopting > BCache-related stuff ;-) > > Has anyone been poking at this sort of stuff? A *loooong* time ago, I used > to follow ReiserFS pretty closely, back when that project was a technical > matter, as opposed to being (rather properly!) overshadowed by a murder > investigation :-( We use it for every customer's Openstack cloud for almost every openstack component. Nova, Ceph, Swift, Keystone, and MySQL are the major services, and each has a bcache underlay along with a hardware RAID controller. It has proven to be quite a reliable (and fast) setup, and even in the event of a power cut we haven't lost any data. For nova especially where users are interacting with VMs, it means a customer can have large amounts of storage allocated for a VM, and writes feel as though the whole system is running on an SSD. Likewise for Keystone & MySQL, where in busy clouds with clustered MySQL, tokens can take a long time to generate, fetch, and authenticate without the SSD backing. All around quite useful, just don't run it on the leading edge of GCC, Kernel, and OS releases!

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Question Fodder - RISC-V
by Christopher Browne 14 May '19

14 May '19

I'm bringing in a sample of the Sipeed Tang Primer chip, which is a RiscV on a wee board. Picture attached. Poke a MicroUSB cable into the port at the end, and see some Blinkenlightzen. I have had only very limited success with a "Hello World" (see the following web site; it's got good material, possibly dated, but nevertheless specific... https://justanotherelectronicsblog.com/?p=470) It appears the FPGA may be programmed via the built-in USB port; I downloaded latest edition of Tang Dynasty FPGA programmer app, and pulled the code for the RISC-V; it appears to have been optimizing routing for a couple of weeks now without reaching completion, which makes me suspicious that something may not be working ;-) http://tang.lichee.pro/get_started/fpga_download.html I have built some apps using a suitable GCC target compiler, but again, some lack of success deploying code. That needs an STLink32 "JTAG" programmer, which I have recently had hooked up, but with a lack of success at getting Linux box to talk to it. There is some confusion as to whether I should be seeing /dev/ttyUSB1 or discovering some filesystem-like device (perhaps MTP) that I'd talk to. Supposedly, I should be able to upload a whole image consisting of Linux, init.d, and some set of tools that can boot and run and be talked to via a TTY talking to /dev/ttyUSB1 (or perhaps something else). At any rate, a wee box with a Sipeed Tang and a couple of sets of long pins to help work with it will be coming in tonight, and if anyone is keen on playing with it, I'm happy for it to have it head to someone interested.

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[GTALUG-Announce] Meeting Tonight
by hi＠gtalug.org 14 May '19

14 May '19

<https://gtalug.org/meeting/2019-05/> # Round Table Q&A Session ==== A Round Table Q&A Session is where we take questions from the audience, and the audience discusses and attempts to answer those questions from their own knowledge. It's a great way to meet fellow members of our community and discover the skill sets we each bring to the table. There will be no video recording during the session. ==== ## Location George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre 245 Church Street, Room 203 Ryerson University <https://goo.gl/maps/16oJ2> <https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/23447525> ## Schedule * 6:00 pm - Please discuss on the general mailing list (i.e. <talk(a)gtalug.org>) where you want to go for dinner. * 7:30 pm - Meeting and presentation. * 9:00 pm - After each meeting, a group of GTALUGers move to The Imperial Pub (54 Dundas St East) for refreshments and more socialising. # Code of Conduct We want a productive happy community that can welcome new ideas, improve every process every year, and foster collaboration between individuals with differing needs, interests and skills. We gain strength from diversity, and actively seek participation from those who enhance it. This code of conduct exists to ensure that diverse groups collaborate to mutual advantage and enjoyment. We will challenge prejudice that could jeopardise the participation of any person in the community. The Code of Conduct governs how we behave in public or in private whenever the Linux community will be judged by our actions. We expect it to be honoured by everyone who represents the community officially or informally, claims affiliation or participates directly. It applies to activities online or offline. We invite anybody to participate. Our community is open. Please read more about the GTALUG Code of Conduct here: <https://gtalug.org/about/code-of-conduct/>. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about the GTALUG Code of Conduct please contact the GTALUG Board @ <board(a)gtalug.org>. --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Jobs at Epson Canada
by William Park 13 May '19

13 May '19

Hi all, Three (3) jobs recently opened up at my company, Epson Canada. And, they are asking help from employees in search for candidates. > 1. Machine Learning Research Scientist (Robotics Control) for EDGE This is R&D robotic 2nd floor. The focus is more on algorithm, but Linux is part of discussion during lunch. > 2. Firmware/Embedded Developer for RTSC > 3. Software Technical Support Representative for RTSC These two are in my group 1st floor, and definitely Linux related. If you're interested or know of someone who is interested, then let me know and I can send you more "official" details. Eventually, you'll be applying directly. -- William Park <opengeometry(a)yahoo.ca>

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surprisingly okay laser printer on special at Canada Computers: Brother DCP-L2550DW
by Stewart C. Russell 07 May '19

07 May '19

It's rather sad that Linux users are back to scratching around to find compatible printers. For a few years, almost everything just worked. Now we're deeply into the Gillette model of sales: make money on consumables, but sell the main hardware cheap. It's not helped that the Apple-owned CUPS printing system — though completely open — is absurdly complex and makes diagnosing print problems very hard. Our old Brother network laser printer having become mysteriously slow (first page times in the 10s of minutes) and producing horrible output, it was time for a new one. A little digging turned up this: https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=34_1170_454&item_id=… for $140. It's not marked as a special, but other vendors sell it for around $240. It's a full PCL/PostScript (well, BR-Script) network printer with a simple ADF scanner on top. Since it's an IPP printer, it can usually be auto-discovered on the network. With the right generic driver (cups-ipp-utils on Debian) it'll print properly on any architecture of Linux: my Raspberry Pis are perfectly happy with it. It's IPv6 aware too, if that matters to you. The product page gives you access to "full featured" Linux drivers, including one for the scanner: https://support.brother.com/g/b/producttop.aspx?c=ca&lang=en&prod=dcpl2550d… Unfortunately, these drivers are x86 only (and one's not even x86_64). The scanner driver is *utterly* dismal. While I was quite pleased it could scan directly (via a brscan system service) over wireless to my computer, all it could do is dump the first page as a very low resolution Legal-sized B&W scan to a PNM file in ~/brscan. Worse still, the file and folder were owned by root. Everything but the first page in the ADF is ignored (but ejected from the ADF, dammit). Thankfully, the processes are managed through shell scripts stored in /opt. These scripts are appalling badly written. There's a script for each of the scanner's Scan to Image/Document/Email/OCR functions, but most of them don't work as shipped. The OCR one has a whole section of might-have-worked-once code commented out and doesn't seem to generate any output at all. Despite their flimsy feel, Brother printers are fairly robust. Nait Singh* warns that some of the newer (cheaper) Brother printers use different control engines even in the same printer model, and that very new Brother printers have 'chipped' printer cartridges that need a little work to circumvent. Nait's been refurbishing, refilling and selling printers for years and is quite careful to suggest the lowest TCO printer to buyers. He still recommends Brother laser printers over anything else. HP he describes as dead to him: their support, quality and compatibility has plummeted. Yes, this printer gets a "surprisingly okay" rating from me, as printers these days mostly seem to have difficulty doing what they should. cheers, Stewart *: Nait owns Cartridge Ink Plus at Kennedy & Progress (1-7 Progress Ave, Scarborough, ON, M1P 5A3 — https://www.cartridgeinkplus.com) The store might appear a little eccentric, but Nait just wants you to have a reliable printer at a good price. He didn't seem remotely bothered that I'd buy a printer for less from Canada Computers rather than spend more at his place.

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