January 2021 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

war story: power failure makes CentOS system unbootable
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 30 Sep '22

30 Sep '22

tl;dr / spoiler: change fstab so that /boot/efi is not automatically mounted. See the recommendation at the end of this message. My gateway computer is a little PC running CentOS. It does not come back after a power failure. The reason (as best I can tell) is interesting and I think that I have a fix. My system is UEFI. It boots from a UEFI system partition, known as /boot/efi to Linux. If this gets corrupted, it won't boot. It is a VFAT partition. On my gateway (a Zotac Zbox RI321, a cute little box with two ethernet ports), the UEFI firmware apparently won't boot if the dirty bit is set in the system partition. CentOS normally runs with /boot/efi mounted. So when the system isn't shut down cleanly, the dirty bit will be on. Consequence: the system is not going to boot after a power failure. Odd observation 1: if I put a live Fedora 25 USB stick in the system and try to boot in this otherwise-unbootable state, CentOS boots from the main disk. So this really looks like a firmware bug/quirk. Odd observation 2: fsck doesn't seem to automatically fix the system partition. Once CentOS 7 booted, I dismounted /boot/efi and did an fsck on it. $ sudo fsck /dev/sda1 fsck from util-linux 2.23.2 fsck.fat 3.0.20 (12 Jun 2013) 0x25: Dirty bit is set. Fs was not properly unmounted and some data may be corrupt. 1) Remove dirty bit 2) No action ? 1 Leaving filesystem unchanged. /dev/sda1: 16 files, 2420/51145 clusters Googling got me to <https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=50917> In particular, this advice seemed quite good: ==== recommendation ==== Two other changes I recommend for UEFI systems, to each OS's /etc/fstab. - For the /boot/efi mountpoint, add the mount options x-systemd.automount,noauto - Change fs_passno (last column) to a 1 or 2; the canonical fstab instructions suggest 2, but systemd treats 1 and 2 as the same. The first change means the EFI System partition will not be automatically read-write mounted at boot time; it's a bad idea this is the default because it puts the ESP at risk especially if ther are crashes, FAT has no journal and will therefore always be marked dirty in such a case; no other UEFI OS mounts the ESP by default. Second, if anything tries to access /boot/efi (read or write), systemd will automatically mount it, and because of the fs_passno 1 or 2, it will fsck it first and that fixes and clears the dirty bit in case it's set. Right now without these changes, it's just a matter of having the right number and bad timing of crashes to render the EFI System partition corrupt.

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RISC-V based GPUs?
by Ivan Avery Frey 31 Jan '21

31 Jan '21

https://www.tomshardware.com/amp/news/risc-v-open-source-gpu-nvidia-intel-a…

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Vulcan Ecosystem Survey Results for 2020
by Nicholas Krause 30 Jan '21

30 Jan '21

Greetings Everyone, Since I've been playing around with Vulcan and have to take a survey the results were sent to me for last year's results. This is the survey of what the development landscape looks like based on last year's survey for the Vulcan ecosystem i.e. 2020: https://www.lunarg.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/2020-Vulkan-Ecosystem-SDK… Maybe it interests some people here who are interesting in high performance GPU computing, Nick

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Fwd: HISTORIC opportunity for cheaper Internet in Toronto
by David Collier-Brown 30 Jan '21

30 Jan '21

A proposal for a community broadband, in Toronto! --dave

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YAD-Zenity-GTK on Pi - assistance needed
by Giles Orr 30 Jan '21

30 Jan '21

YAD ("Yet Another Dialog") is a fork of Zenity - essentially a way to display GTK+ dialogues from shell scripts. I've chosen YAD because it supports a couple things Zenity doesn't have, namely form buttons and tabs. I've created an ugly but functional interface that's meant to go on a 3.5" touch screen on a Raspberry Pi. But here's the problem: by the time it gets on a screen that small, the buttons are too small to reliably poke with a finger. So I want to increase the font size. All that was needed to fix that on my Fedora desktop was: # file: ~/.configs/gtk-3.0/settings.ini [Settings] gtk-font-name = Sans 32 And voila, 'yad' appears with a super-huge font. However - this behaviour isn't replicated on the Pi. It's an old(ish) Debian stretch install on an old Pi B (not Pi 2 B, just "Pi B"). I'm pretty sure that ~/.configs/gtk-3.0/settings.ini is the right file, because when I mis-configured it, 'yad' complained loudly. But it ignores the font setting that works fine on another host. I tried 'yad --font' which throws up what amounts to a GTK font selection dialogue, and "Sans 32" is a valid font on the Pi. Anyone got any ideas on this? -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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Re: [GTALUG] Fwd: HISTORIC opportunity for cheaper Internet in Toronto
by David Collier-Brown 29 Jan '21

29 Jan '21

The best is probably the Star's article, https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2021/01/26/torontos-broadband-plan… Sources, from the original article * Agenda Item: Affordable Internet for All - City of Toronto http://app.toronto.ca/tmmis/viewAgendaItemHistory.do?item=2021.EX20.8 * Mapping Toronto’s Digital Divide - Ryerson Leadership Lab https://www.ryersonleadlab.com/digital-divide * Toronto’s Broadband Plan an Indictment of CRTC’s Delay on Affordable Internet - The Star https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2021/01/26/torontos-broadband-plan… * Want Faster, Cheaper Internet? Let’s Build It - OpenMedia https://openmedia.org/article/item/want-faster-cheaper-internet-lets-build-… * Hope Springs Municipal: How Small Towns are Driving Canada’s Digital Future - OpenMedia https://openmedia.org/article/item/hope-springs-municipal-how-small-towns-a… * Remarks by the President on Promoting Community Broadband - The White House https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/01/14/remarks-pr… * Community-Owned Fibre Network: Value Leaders in America - Harvard https://cyber.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.harvard.edu/files/2018-01-10-Pricing.… * Localizing the Internet: Five Ways Public Ownership Solves the U.S. Broadband Problem - Institute for Local Self-Reliance https://community-wealth.org/sites/clone.community-wealth.org/files/downloa… On 2021-01-29 6:31 a.m., ac via talk wrote: > > Some web links, PLEASE? > > thanks > > On Thu, 28 Jan 2021 21:29:37 -0500 > James Knott via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: > >> On 2021-01-28 8:52 p.m., David Collier-Brown via talk wrote: >>> Hydro was "purchasable" >>> >> ???? >> >> --- >> Post to this mailing list talk(a)gtalug.org >> Unsubscribe from this mailing list >> https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk > --- > Post to this mailing list talk(a)gtalug.org > Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb(a)spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain

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Odd VLC problem
by Evan Leibovitch 26 Jan '21

26 Jan '21

Hi all, Last week, in an attempt to make my desktop more readable to my ageing eyes, I bought a $40 stand and set up my monitors vertically (see 1st pic). Changing the KDE setup to accommodate this (Kubuntu 20.04 LTS) was easy, and all of my apps seem to work fine with the new setup ... except VLC. VLC no longer works the way it used to. Videos will now play only if I decouple the video window from the VLC interface ("Integrate video in interface" must be unchecked). And now if I try to resize the interface, it visually "stutters" (see second photo) and remains stuttered in this form until I resize the window again. I have tried multiple options for video output with no change in behaviour. Again, the videos display fine but only if I separate the video window from the interface window. Resizing the video window works fine. Also, videos displayed inside the browser (ie Plex and YouTube) work fine. All suggestions are appreciated. Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56

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Strange VLC problem
by Evan Leibovitch 24 Jan '21

24 Jan '21

Hi all, Last week, in an attempt to make my desktop more readable to my ageing eyes, I bought a $40 stand and set up my monitors vertically (see 1st pic). Changing the KDE setup to accommodate this (Kubuntu 20.04 LTS) was easy, and all of my apps seem to work fine with the new setup ... except VLC. VLC no longer works the way it used to. Videos will now play only if I decouple the video window from the VLC interface ("Integrate video in interface" must be unchecked). And now if I try to resize the interface, it visually "stutters" (see second photo) and remains stuttered in this form until I resize the window again. I have tried multiple options for video output with no change in behaviour. Again, the videos display fine but only if I separate the video window from the interface window. Resizing the video window works fine. All suggestions are appreciated. Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56

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time is running out for gtalug.org
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 24 Jan '21

24 Jan '21

I managed to get Linode to revive the gtalug.org machine. I was told that it would work until the end of the billing cycle (the end of this month -- soon!). I would like to facilitate transferring control of the site from Chris to the GTALUG. Note: I do not have control. I have no authority to request it. I don't know who to talk to on our end. I've sent messages to a few people but haven't gotten very far. Who should I be talking to? I don't actually know who the GTALUG board and executives are. (Chris didn't post the results of the last election. I suspect he wasn't well and we just didn't know it. I feel really badly about not knowing and not trying to help him. I think that I talked with him on the phone on the day of the AGM.) (It could even be that the GTALUG folks I've reached out to are not in a good place. I have no idea.)

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Membership Card??
by Slackrat 24 Jan '21

24 Jan '21

By the way, what happened to the Membership Cards, or do I not remember correctly? -- William Henderson aka Slackrat http://billh.sdf.org/slackware.jpg 9HS5203 ON HamSphere Ham Radio

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