- Talk - lists.gtalug.org

[GTALUG-Announce] Meeting on 10 May at 7:30pm
by Myles Braithwaite 26 Apr '16

26 Apr '16

<http://gtalug.org/meeting/2016-05/> # 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. ## Location George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre 245 Church Street, Room 203 Ryerson University <http://goo.gl/maps/16oJ2> <http://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 The Imperial Pub (54 Dundas St East) for refreshments and more socializing. # 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 jeopardize 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 honored 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: <http://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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Fwd: Toronto Homebrew Hosting Club on Thursday at 7:30pm
by Myles Braithwaite 25 Apr '16

25 Apr '16

We're having our second ever Homebrew Hosting Club on this Thursday at 7pm at the HackLab.TO. If you are interested in self hosting you should definitely come out. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Myles Braithwaite <me(a)mylesbraithwaite.com> Date: Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 2:49 PM Subject: Toronto Homebrew Hosting Club on Thursday at 7:00pm To: homebrewhostingclub(a)gtalug.org # Toronto Homebrew Hosting Club on Thursday, 21st April at HackLab <https://homebrewhosting.club/> Are you building your own website? Setup and running your own calendar/contacts server? Developing your own publishing web app? Hosting a Gnu-based-social-network? Running your own Wiki? Hosting your own email server? Did you buy a $35 VPS and looking to replace Google Apps with your a self hosted solution? Or some other digital magic-cloud service? If so, we are a meetup of people in the Greater Toronto Area passionate about self hosting, in the same structure as the [Homebrew Computer Club][1] meetings in Silicon Valley (and the [Homebrew Website Club][2]). It will be a gathering of like-minded people to swap ideas, talk shop, and general awesomeness about hosting your own infrastructure. Our second meetup will be on Thursday 21st April 2016 at 7:00 p.m. at the Toronto [HackLab][3] (near the corner of [Queen Street West and Dufferin Street][4]). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club [2]: https://indiewebcamp.com/Homebrew_Website_Club [3]: https://hacklab.to/ [4]: http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3522641496

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distro for an old Thinkpad
by Stewart C. Russell 24 Apr '16

24 Apr '16

Hi - I've been setting up an old Thinkpad R51 as Protolab's small CNC controller. I've been trying to use Debian 8, but it seems not to like the Radeon 250M in the machine at *all*. I'm stuck with "an error occurred / click here to log out", and no sshd to access the machine remotely. Can anyone suggest a light(ish) graphical distro that's user focussed and will allow fairly recent packaged apps like Cura and LinuxCNC to run? I realise that this Thinkpad is slower than a Raspberry Pi 3 (I benchmarked it) but it does have a parallel port that we can use with the ZenBot CNC. cheers, Stewart

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Anyone tried UbuntuBSD?
by Giles Orr 24 Apr '16

24 Apr '16

I just downloaded UbuntuBSD from https://sourceforge.net/projects/ubuntubsd/ . I really like the idea: ZFS and no systemd. But attempting to install it in VirtualBox, I got "error: failed in building a Huffman code table" (a line that stumped Google!) and got dropped to the 'grub>' prompt (where I admit to being a bit lost). This happened on two different machines, one Debian, the other Ubuntu, and I'm fairly sure they're amd64 systems (needed since the ISO is x64). An md5 file to verify the download would be a plus, but I haven't found one. -- Giles http://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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Ubuntu 16.04 out
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 23 Apr '16

23 Apr '16

I just downloaded AMD64 live desktop Ubuntu 16.04. Downloading was quick. 8 minutes on my supposedly 25mbit VDSL connection. It used to be that you had to use a specialized tool to write ubuntu on a USB stick from a .iso file. Just dd-ing it works with this release (at least). The 64-bit .iso does not have 32-bit UEFI support. Rats. I think that this would only have required: EFI/BOOT/BOOTx32.EFI, EFI/BOOT/grubi32.efi and a 32-bit version of the grub command. I don't think that it would add significantly to the .iso size and would allow support for a bunch of cheap devices. debian multiboot manages this.

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Experience with MonoPrice SlimRun Ethernet cables?
by Terry Tanski 20 Apr '16

20 Apr '16

Anyone have experience using the following SlimRun CAT6 or CAT6A cables in a moderately dense datacenter environment? http://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=102&cp_id=10232&cs_id=1023208&p_id=13… - Are they sufficiently shielded? - Are they easily bent or kinked? - Good quality cable ends? - Do the shorter CAT6 work properly for 10G? I have used MonoPrice CAT6 cabling before and found no issues with their product but I used the traditional thicker cable. Thanks in advance for any insight, Terry Tanski ComQi Canada Inc. ttanski(a)cogeco.ca

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Man deletes his entire company
by Stephen 19 Apr '16

19 Apr '16

The mind wobbles .... http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/man-deletes-entire-company-running… -- Stephen

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Modem/router replacement?
by William Witteman 18 Apr '16

18 Apr '16

I have been using the same DSL modem for ages (I think I might have bought it from iStop), and it continues to work pretty well. However, because it has a router in front of it, whenever I have a problem tech support wants me to plug it directly into my computer and run the PPPoE from there to eliminate the router as the source of the problem. A brief, magically resolving problem over the weekend has brought up two things that I would like to know from the list's vast knowledge. 1) How do I run a PPPoE connection from Linux, preferably from the command line? 2) If I want to buy a new modem as a spare, do people have recommendations, and should it include a router? Thanks!

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The truth comes out: Microsoft needs Linux - TechRepublic
by James Knott 16 Apr '16

16 Apr '16

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-truth-comes-out-microsoft-needs-lin…

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beware CherryTrail and BayTrail systems
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 16 Apr '16

16 Apr '16

Over the last few years, Intel has been improving the Atom line of processors. Device manufacturers have been using these improved SoCs to create interesting low-end boxes. There are two marketing pushes: Android and Windows. Linux get a bit-part mention. All these processors are 64 bits but some have only 32-bit firmware (UEFI). None has a conventional old-style BIOS. Examples that I have some experience with: - Asus ZenPhone II cellphone (Android) (I think that later ZenPhones use ARM) - google nexus player (Android) - Asus transformer T100TAF (32-bit Windows) (convertible tablet/netbook) - Kangaroo little computer (64-bit Windows) - Dell Venue 8 Pro (5830) (32-bit Windows) - Acer Aspire E11 (ES1-11M-c0fq) notebook (64-bit Windows) - HP Pro Tablet 608 G1 (64-bit Windows) - for contrast: HP Stream Mini (64-bit Windows) (Haswell-based Celeron, not Atom) All these were about $200 or less -- kind of appealing. Good Linux experiences: - The Acer Aspire just worked under Linux. I don't know why. I have not tried HDMI-out: sound may not work under Linux. Sleep and all the other goodies do. I use it a lot. - The Kangaroo will boot Fedora easily. But I haven't tested much with it -- I use it in Windows 10 because of Netflix + Shomi mess. - HP Stream Mini just works. It is even possible to add RAM up to 16G and a 2.5 inch drive (with a magic cable that can be purchased from Hong Kong sellers). But it is Haswell, not *Trail. Bad Linux experiences: I don't really know an easy way of installing a normal Linux distro on an Android device. So I haven't tried. It takes hacking to get most Linux distros to boot under 32-bit UEFI. Now Ubuntu multiarch supports it out-of-the-box, things are starting to get better (as far as I'm concerned). There had already been projects to work around this limitation: <https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Asus/T100TA> <https://www.happyassassin.net/fedlet-a-fedora-remix-for-bay-trail-tablets/> <https://plus.google.com/communities/117853703024346186936> and more. Even with that, there are plenty of problems with driver and power management support. The first link gives a nice scorecard. There is a kernel bug in handling cstates (compute states for power management) with BayTrail and CherryTrail. This has been around for over a year with no fix (initially it was thought to be a GPU driver bug). The bug appears to have been introduced by Intel. For the life of me, I don't know why they have not fixed it. <https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109051> I haven't experienced this bug on my Acer notebook, possibly because I never watch videos on it. Intel created a driver to handle sound over HDMI but never upstreamed it so it no longer works. <https://01.org/ubuntu-hdmi> Most of these devices have 2G of RAM, 32G of eMMC (disk). This appears to be due to Microsoft licensing prices (free up to this size, expensive above). So there isn't really room for a dual-boot Windows/Linux setup. Before I install Linux, I want to try it to find if it works well enough on this hardware. On the T100TAF, there is a MicroSD drive. I thought that I could install Linux on that instead of replacing Windows on the eMMC. Amazingly, there is no UEFI driver for the MicroSD so the machine won't boot off MicroSD! debian 8.4.0's install disk doesn't see it either so I cannot install with most filesystems (except /boot) on the MicroSD. Incredible. CherryTrail is reputed to be very demanding of cooling and thus many systems suffer badly from thermal throttling (the chip slows down to cool off). This is true in Windows. I wonder how this works with Linux when cstates are constrained to avoid the bug mentioned above. The HP Pro Tablet 608 G1 was made for a much higher price-point (I lucked into a cheap unit from Factory Direct). It has 4G of RAM and 64G of eMMC. But it has it's own bugs under Windows that HP has been slow to fix. For my purposes, one problem is that there is only one USB C connector for power and for extra peripherals and HP won't let it act for more than one role at once (the whole point of USB C). They want me to buy a dock that connects to a proprietary POGO plug, for $200. No thanks. Summary: beware when buying a *Trail device thinking that you can just drop a normal Linux distro on it. Bonus warning: There are some problems with Linux support for Skylake, Intel's most recent generation of mainstream processors. I'm confident that they are being ironed out (Linus has a Skylake desktop).

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