September 2023 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

Introduction (really just a new nick)
by joeDoe 21 Sep '23

21 Sep '23

Hello, As I've sent a couple of emails to a thread here, I thought I should let you know that I am one and the same person as znoteer. That's an old nick that I have been maintaining pretty much only on email. I max'd out the number of email users I could have on my email account, so I couldn't create a joeDoe address to switch to. But, I've been experimenting with running my own email server as part of a Freedombox (a Debian Pure Blend). I can now have as many frickin email users as my system can handle :) So, I am now subscribed with a nick that I've been using in chats etc for some time. This will permit me to evaluate this mail server thang. If keeping an email server proves to be not too onerous (so far Freedombox has made it quite effortless), I may just keep on going. Otherwise, I'm looking for a new provider as mine changed their offer and it doesn't suit me so much any more. Cheers, joeDoe

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brands matter; Lenovo's brands
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 19 Sep '23

19 Sep '23

(This was part of a reply to Peter, but I decided to make it a separate message. I hope you don't find it too didactic.) Brands matter. They are meant to telegraph certain things to the customer. Of course the brand's meaning can be changed: it isn't a contract. The perception of a brand in the potential customer base takes a long time to develop. It is cultivated by marketing, but not just marketing. We techies get a feeling based on past products. A wise vendor does not jerk around the message of a brand. Unless it is a throw away brand. It takes a long time to build a brand but it can be destroyed quite quickly. Think of how Loblaws, over the last 40 years, has elevated the house brand "President's Choice" to actually have a premium connotation. In the computer field, IBM's and then Lenovo's Think* brands have commanded tremendous loyalty, only occasionally misplaced. A large part of that is that the Think* devices have mostly lived up to their implicit promise. Lenovo's Think* brands are mostly solid conservative business machines. Most Think* systems that support Windows also support Linux. (There are Think* things that don't: non-computers and Android or ChromeOS computers.) The markups are high and the discounts can be large. They have long support cycles. I have had Think* firmware updated a decade after the machine was released. That makes Lenovo's occasional ThinkPad slips much more notable: - old timers often claim that ThinkPads are going down hill. + part of that is that thin and light is something a majority of customers want but it has to come at the cost of serviceability. ThinkPads were known to be rugged as tanks but tanks are heavy + part of that is users don't like change. But some changes are good. Objectively, touchpads are way better now than 10 years ago, and part of that involved getting rid of physical buttons. + some features (wired ethernet port, serial port, VGA port) are really niche now but those who want them really want them - the ThinkBook line really seems to be exploiting the brand without matching the values - ThinkPad displays are often mediocre. Not bright enough (nits), not great colour gamut. Inexcusable in an expensive notebook. - the ThinkPad Android Tablet was a disaster that I got fooled by. Lenovo's Legend brand, as I understand it, is aimed at gamers. It is intended to compete on price and performance. It isn't aimed at you or me. I've never bought one. - in the notebook range, gamers want gaming performance (GPU) at the cost of weight and power consumption (heat, noise, short battery life). I want the opposite. - in the desktop range, gamers want NVidia dGPUs. I don't. Lenovo has other desktops, none of which has seemed a good buy to me. Sometimes their other notebooks have been interesting. I have a nice Lenovo Yoga 2 pro notebook that is about 10 years old. For all of those ten years, it gets a machine check during the Linux booting process but works anyway. The ThinkPad team was able to duplicate this but could not interest the IdeaPad team to fix it! Apple has a great brand too. Sometimes it seems like a cult. I know little about Macs because they are the opposite of what I want: an expensive closed proprietary system. I did buy a used MacBook Air M1 but that is for running Fedora Asahi when that's ready. Dell branding confuses me. Ditto Acer. HP Elite brand seems to be roughly similar to Think* HP Envy Brand was being developed by HP (my desktop is one) then the diluted it to the point of it being meaningless. >From reading the ads, HP seems to have completely gibberish names for its consumer laptops. For example HP 15-fc0004ca, HP Laptop 15-dy5024ca, HP 17-cp2030ca are the first three I find here: <https://www.hp.com/ca-en/shop/list.aspx?fc_form_nb=1&sel=ntb>n

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Repair & Replace
by Peter King 18 Sep '23

18 Sep '23

I have a Lenovo Legion T5 desktop (tower configuration) with Ryzen 9 cpu, which has given me all sorts of trouble over the past year and a half; it's already been sent back to Lenovo once after the power supply / motherboard went completely dead, and in the months since it intermittently locks up when I fire up X. Well, just a few days ago with no warning it froze at boot with the message 000135 that *all* of its internal fans had failed (!); a reboot got that down to only the CPU fan failed; when I told it to ignore that the computer finally booted up and runs sort of okay. By "sort of" I mean that the CMOS memory seems wonky: it won't keep track of the date or time. Plus it still sometimes locks up when I start X. Google -- mostly Reddit -- tells me that the fan problem is probably a BIOS/motherboard issue, apparently common in this model after about a year. Some people claim a BIOS update fixes it, most people say it doesn't, and BIOS update for Lenovo products under Linux are a pain. I could send it back to Lenovo. Again. But I am inclined to just replace the motherboard instead, to swap out the proprietary Lenovo 3716 MB for something else. According to Reddit again, the Gigabyte B550M is pretty much a drop-in replacement, though you need to add a CPU fan. I don't know how to verify that it will work, though. But more importantly: I am way too busy right now to do the replacement myself. So, does anyone have any recommendations for good reliable computer repair work, someone or some company I can just take this to and tell them to do it? I am located in the Junction. I used to use A2Z Computers, which was great, but that business didn't make it through the pandemic. I suppose I could take it to Canada Computers or someplace like that, but I though their work was only just adequate and priced high at that. Any common wisdom about who might be good for this job? Thanks! -- Peter King peter.king(a)utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-946-3170 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42

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installing Windows is uselessly worse than installing Linux
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 17 Sep '23

17 Sep '23

[Always do backups before such drastic measures.] The best way to install Windows is to go to another Windows box and use the the Window Media Creation Tool to create a bootable USB stick <https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/software-download/windows11> Alternatively you could download the WIndows 11 Disk Image. During installation, you have to answer a lot of questions. It is extremely hard to evade linking the installation with a global Microsoft account (google to learn the ever-evolving tricks). Good news: Windows can let other partitions on the disk remain. In earlier years, it would just grab the whole disk. Once it is installed, Windows will spend a lot of time installing updates and rebooting. Installing updates is quite slow (perhaps due to anti-malware software). And it lies about whether there are more updates. When it says there are none, ask it to look again. You also need to separately run the Microsoft app store app and ask it to do updates. You also need to run you system vendor's update thingee too for some driver and firmware updates. Even then, it is useful to see what firmware is available on the vendor's web site This whole process involves multipler reboots, each requiring babysitting.

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Websites down after upgrade
by William Witteman 15 Sep '23

15 Sep '23

Last night I ran an upgrade of my server (Debian trixie/sid), and afterwards none of my websites are working. Server version: Apache/2.4.57 (Debian) The websites are a mix of static pages and Wordpress blogs - all Virtual Hosts. None of them resolve, and I am getting "unable to connect" messages - but nothing is showing up in the /var/log/apache2/error.log or the access.log. Apache is running - I can see the restarts in the error log - but nothing is happening when I try to hit a page. Does this ring any bells for anyone? Is there a new configuration wrinkle that I didn't adapt to? Thanks for any help you can provide. Wililam

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GTALUG meeting Tuesday 7:30 PM: Rocky Linux
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 11 Sep '23

11 Sep '23

When: Tuesday September 12, 2023 at 7:30 PM Where: online <https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl> Speakers from Rocky Linux will talk about the distribution's evolution away from CentOS. We may also hear about the association between Rocky, SUSE and Oracle. Context: <https://rockylinux.org/> <https://www.centos.org/> <https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux> CentOS was a very popular open source and free rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This was very useful to many of us since RHEL releases are very stable, have very long life cycles, great engineering, and were adopted by many corporations. Since Red Hat effectively killed it, there has been a struggle for a consensus on a successor. Rocky Linux is one of the clear leaders to take on this role. It's not easy since Red Hat is trying to impede clones. Oracle (which has had its own clone for some time) and SuSE (which has long had its own commercial distro with a significant engineering team) are somehow working with Rocky.

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GTALUG Meeting Reminder
by Alan Heighway 11 Sep '23

11 Sep '23

Rocky Linux and its evolution from CentOS. <https://gtalug.org/meeting/2023-11/> with The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation <https://gtalug.org/> 12 September, 2023 at 07:30 PM More details to come soon. We're going to use Big BLue Button for this meeting: https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl *Time:* September 12, 2023 7:30 PM Eastern Time *Join us on Big Blue Button:* https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl. LocationBig Blue Button - https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl *A*lan *H*eighway <http://heighway.ca/> heighway.ca VA3WAH / VA3YKZ [image: Please consider the environment before printing]

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Debian Linux as-a-router Guide
by Giles Orr 10 Sep '23

10 Sep '23

As per my previous post, I just purchased a mini-PC which I intend to turn into a router. Is anyone aware of a guide for turning a Debian PC into a _home_ router? I'd like to be running probably DNSmasq, using a blocklist, stuff like that. I've found webpages that tell me how to turn on network forwarding, or maybe configure DNSmasq, but not the whole process. Please don't suggest pfsense: I'm well aware of it, and it may well be better. But I'm very adept at managing Debian, and initially at least I intend to try to set this up. If it turns out to be direly difficult, pfsense may happen later. Thanks. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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Landline and Bell revisited.
by Karen Lewellen 08 Sep '23

08 Sep '23

Hi folks, I am privately discussing the mess with Evan off list. Still I recall someone? here indicated being connected with bell's CEO? My situation basically is this. because Teksavvy contracts with bell I have spent the last five months being promised analog service, paying for some of it, only to have bell send techs over and over again some of whom engaged in retaliatory actions based on other complaints tied to accessibility. I do have a doctor's note documenting my medical need for analog service, something bell refused to read and Teksavvy refused to share even with permission. At the moment breech of contract and negligence cases feel reasonable. teksavvy does not monitor what the bell techs actually do, they get paid anyway, and I have different stories from the teksavy side, including that they do not provide analog service, something I know is untrue. The copper wiring is still here, I have photos, in spite of bell saying otherwise. Anyway, still need a solid analog landline door of any kind, service or creative electric wizard smiles. Thanks, Kare

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Boot fails into Linux
by sciguy 07 Sep '23

07 Sep '23

I have a dual-boot PC running WIndows 10 and Ubuntu Studio Linux 22.x LTS. Over the past year or so, I could not boot into Ubuntu, and the reasons were difficult to trace, which is why I had put it off, and used Windows for a while. Now that I am taking the time to poke around the Linux system, I had noticed things that were highly unusual: 1) I noticed two swap partitions. Was that me being absent-minded when I did the installation/upgrade a year ago? Then I noticed: 2) There are also two (2) EFI partitions. One installed 2 years ago, and one installed almost exactly a year ago (I would say that is about when the unexplained reboot failures happened. Both EFI partitions are on the same physical drive. I am fine with deleting one of the swap partitions, but is it ok to delete one of the EFI partitions, more than likely the newer one? The older one is listed as sdd2 (sdd1 is a windows recovery partition), and the newer one is sdd7. Any ideas? Paul

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