- Talk - lists.gtalug.org

Thanks For Responses -- Buying A Dell Optiplex Tower PC And A Dell Monitor.
by Steve Petrie 23 Feb '25

23 Feb '25

Hello GTALUG, Thanks to GTALUG members: William Park, D. Hugh Redelmeier, Ron / BCLUG and Howard Gibson for your responses to my message subject "Seeking Recommendations For New Desktop PC -- To Run Debian Linux;". My apologies if I missed any names. * * * * * * I have settled on a Dell Optiplex Tower Model 7020 Plus and a Dell Monitor: Dell Tower: -- 32 GB RAM -- 4 TB SATA Hard Drive -- No Windows 11 Dell Monitor: -- 21.4 inch -- HDMI Prices before taxes: Dell Optiplex Tower: CAD $2,021.89 Dell Monitor: CAD $119.99 ========= CAD $2141.88 No doubt GTALUG members will be choking on their Cheerios, at the pricing. * * * * * * The Asrock motherboard on my present self-built (7 years ago) tower is dying. And I am never going to build another PC. So, I have decided to pillage my bank account, buying a new PC with twice the RAM and twice the disk capacity on my dying tower. Only downside is Dell's predicted delivery date for the tower: Tuesday, March 18, 2025. But could be sooner. So, I just have to hope that my current dying tower survives for another month. The motherboard problems show up at boot time. I'm keeping he Debian 11 running 24/7 and only powering down if / when Debian crashes. Which it occasionally does for some mysterious reason. I already have a USB flash drive with Debian 12 live ready to boot on the Dell. * * * * * * I will report my experience with the Dell tower in due course. Steve Petrie apetrie(a)aspetrie.net 416-233-6116

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PSA: Kindle book downloads blocked after Feb 26 (or maybe 25)
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 21 Feb '25

21 Feb '25

This is only of interest: - if you "own" kindle books - want to download them to your computer (not just read them on your computer) - and you own a current Kindle e-reader (but not one released in 2024) (This restriction isn't obvious but Amazon won't allow downloading without satisfying it. Note: a Fire Tablet does not count.) Why would you want to download them? - backup - allow you to transfer them to your e-reader from your computer later - unauthorized acts like stripping DRM and putting them on a non-Kindle e-reader If you want to find out more, google.

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Re: [GTALUG] Seeking Recommendations For New Desktop PC -- To Run Debian Linux;
by Steve Petrie 21 Feb '25

21 Feb '25

Thanks to Ron / BCLUG and William Park for responses about a recommended mother board and a recent build. Although I did build the desktop PC with the mother board that is now failing, I'm not going to build the replacement PC. Building will take too long and the expert friend who helped me with the build is to busy to help me with another build. So, I will buy a pre-built PC. * * * * * * Seems that Lenovo certifies their desktop PCs for Ubuntu linux but they nave compatibility problems with Debian linux. Dell (Heresy, I know) has a few models that look interesting: ... Inspiron Desktop Model: 3030 CAD $899.99 ==> https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/dell-desktops-workstations/inspiron-desktop… ... Inspiron Small Desktop CAD $549.99 ==> https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/dell-desktops-workstations/inspiron-small-d… ... XPS Desktop Starting At $949.99 ==> https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/cty/pdp/spd/xps-8960-desktop ==> see left-hand column model; ... Dell Tower Plus Starting At $1,499.99 ==> https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/cty/pdp/spd/dell-ebt2250-desktop ==> see left-hand column model; ... So I'm researching these Dells. Steve Petrie apetrie(a)aspetrie.net 416-233-6116

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Finally ordered a new laptop
by Lennart Sorensen 20 Feb '25

20 Feb '25

I decided it was finally time to get a new laptop after 12 years. The old machine has lost the NVIDIA chip (forcing it to run only on the intel video works, but don't even think about running 3D games and the external monitor port does not work). Also the fingerprint scanner and color meter haven't worked in years (not that I really cared much about those two things). Also the top of the screen has a chunk of dead pixels showing white all the time. I guess it was time. So my choice that I ended up with using the cyber Monday discounts and rakuten was a Thinkpad P1 Gen 7. 21KV001CUS which is: Intel Core Ultra 9 185H NVIDIA RTX 4070 Mobile 8GB 64GB LPDDR5 CAMM2 2TB NVMe 16" 2560x1600 IPS 165Hz 5MP Camera Fingerprint scanner (Seems those are just standard) Backlit US keyboard 2x2 WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3 I think I am set for another decade or so. I will have to try putting Debian on it to see how well supported the hardware is, although it will most likely only ever end up running it in WSL for the most part. I have other systems dedicated to running Linux. Cyber-Monday deal knocked 59% of the list price (do they ever sell for list price?) and then rakuten provided 15% cash back after that. Still not cheap, but I don't buy computers very often. -- Len Sorensen

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Anyone using Google Cloud Shell?
by William Park 19 Feb '25

19 Feb '25

I keep getting spam about "Deletion notice for your Google Cloud Shell home directory" from Google. Curious, I clicked. I must have activated the cloud console in the past but can't be sure when. Anyways, anyone using Google Cloud Shell? It's Ubuntu 24.04 terminal shell in browser. --

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Surprising selfhosted LLM performance with underwhelming results
by Mark Prosser 16 Feb '25

16 Feb '25

The Tuesday meeting came at exactly the right time; My managers want to tick off the AI box, so I've been trying to become informed to prevent any disastrous outcomes, squashing my network automation efforts. I was thrilled to find out just how easy it was to self-host these models, and that it was feasible to do it on a mini PC, like my Beelink SER6 (small NUC-like mobile ryzen platform). I downloaded the model last night, and to my surprise, the performance was more than adequate. The model was able to reason & give seemingly good results, despite my box being at the very low end of "AI performance". The bad news is that, all this hype about "Agentic AI" and all the other cool "tool models" isn't really fully available yet, in a format that can be hosted well on my box -- let alone a box I can afford. To make matters worse, it also seems that distilled models aren't really 1:1 Deepseek R1. Rather, they're more-so the same old meta model, trained off of R1's reasoning & results. So it's not always comparing apples to apples, when people discuss their results. When I dug deeper into what's going on in "Agentic AI", especially in the network automation space, the results are currently more trivial than I could've imagined. They also currently rely on cloud API access, since you need the big hosted models... something that I would never condone in my environment, no matter how much the google whitepaper assures that "extensions" and "function calling" help with this concern. Anyway, it's neat that I can have this little chat bot or coding assistant hosted on a little cube on my desk; however, it seems that it's still quite far away that I can have little AI interns working on generating insightful signals for my automation workflows. Some additional reading I found interesting: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.15030 https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04249 https://angiejones.tech/system-access-for-ai-agents/ https://antirez.com/news/146 Thanks, everyone. See you at the next meeting! Warm regards, -- Mark Prosser // E: mark(a)zealnetworks.ca // W: https://zealnetworks.ca

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Asking for advice/insight: Which filesystem for an encrypted root partition on a single disk?
by Daniel Wayne Armstrong 16 Feb '25

16 Feb '25

Which file system should I use for an encrypted root partition on Linux for a single disk? I typically use LUKS + ext4. I've also used encrypted BTRFS and ZFS (with ZFSBootMenu) but never worked with them to any extent beyond getting them setup. I see distros such as Fedora are now defaulting to using BTRFS. For a Linux install on systems with 8GB-16GB RAM and a single disk (no RAID), I'm seeking some advice: Should I stick with ext4? Or use BTRFS? Or ZFS? -- Website: https://www.dwarmstrong.org

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Seeking Recommendations For New Desktop PC -- To Run Debian Linux;
by Steve Petrie 15 Feb '25

15 Feb '25

Greetings To GTALUG Members, The desktop PC I built from parts in late 2017 is dying. Looks like the ASRock E97 EXTREME ATX LGA1150 mainboard is failing. I get various mainboard error messages at power on and today got some linux boot panics before a final power on booted the Debian 11 linux live on USB. Looks like ASRock no longer makes the E97 EXTREME ATX LGA1150 mainboard and anyway, since I built this computer in late 2017, it's already seen over 7 years of heavy usage. So I will buy a new one. There is one disk drive in the PC that I will move to the new PC: Western Digital 3.5 inch SATA 2TB. Recommendations for a new desktop PC to run Debian linux booting live from USB port, would be appreciated. Steve Petrie apetrie(a)aspetrie.net 416-233-6116

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CZUR Linux support
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 13 Feb '25

13 Feb '25

CZUR makes interesting scanners. They are currently listing a new model "CZUR ET MAX" on kickstarter. <https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/czur-notebook/czur-et-max-the-unpreced…> They claim that it will support Linux. But then we bought an ET24 Pro from them because they claimed it would support Linux. Unfortunately, it only supports Ubuntu. I bet that will be true of the new model, even though this isn't disclosed in the advertising material. <https://www.czur.com/support/et24_25pro> We wanted a scanner that didn't require rebooting to use it. Switching from Fedora to Ubuntu and back isn't better than switching to Windows and back. I guess they could have used a flatpack or snap, but they don't. I've suggested it to them but I got no response. In any case, the software is not open source. Is it easy for me to run this software on Fedora? - I could run Ubuntu in a VM under Fedora but that feels way too heavy: a whole extra distro installation - is there a way that I could package their stuff ans a Flatpak or Snap? Any other ideas are welcome.

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Service resource management: i.e. Mailman3 vs Mailman2
by Ron / BCLUG 11 Feb '25

11 Feb '25

I found a nifty trick for measuring the resource consumption of various services using systemd. This was while trying to gauge the differences between Mailman v2 and Mailman v3 resource management. I have ranted about how much more expensive MM3 is in resource consumption (basically, about ¾ of a 2GB RAM VPS is consumed). I wanted further details. What I found was, a setting (or several) that systemd provides: There are a couple methods for enabling the *Accounting= features: Edit /etc/systemd/system.conf and enabling: DefaultCPUAccounting=yes DefaultIOAccounting=yes DefaultIPAccounting=yes DefaultBlockIOAccounting=yes DefaultMemoryAccounting=yes DefaultTasksAccounting=yes If one wants it for a single service, also a couple methods: systemctl set-property mailman3 TasksAccounting=yes MemoryAccounting=yes systemctl daemon-reload Or add these lines (my preferred method, no systemctl daemon-reload needed): # systemctl edit mailman3 [Service] MemoryAccounting=yes TasksAccounting=yes Or: do it manually This makes it really easy to measure resources used by a service that has many processes running, i.e.: # systemctl status mailman ... Tasks: 9 (limit: 2256) Memory: 46.5M CGroup: /system.slice/mailman.service ├─1054 /usr/bin/python2 /usr/lib/mailman/bin/mailmanctl ├─1056 /usr/bin/python2 /var/lib/mailman/bin/qrunner ├─1057 /usr/bin/python2 /var/lib/mailman/bin/qrunner ├─1058 /usr/bin/python2 /var/lib/mailman/bin/qrunner ├─1067 /usr/bin/python2 /var/lib/mailman/bin/qrunner ├─1068 /usr/bin/python2 /var/lib/mailman/bin/qrunner ├─1071 /usr/bin/python2 /var/lib/mailman/bin/qrunner ├─1083 /usr/bin/python2 /var/lib/mailman/bin/qrunner └─1084 /usr/bin/python2 /var/lib/mailman/bin/qrunner And for comparison, mailman 3 (which has TWO service files): # systemctl status mailman3 ... Tasks: 17 Memory: 889.9M CGroup: /system.slice/mailman3.service ├─4112698 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112711 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112712 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112713 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112714 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112715 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112717 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112718 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112719 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112720 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112721 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112725 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112726 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112790 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python └─4112791 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python # systemctl status mailman3-web ... Tasks: 12 Memory: 182.4M CGroup: /system.slice/mailman3-web.service ├─4112890 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/uwsgi ├─4112904 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/uwsgi ├─4112905 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/uwsgi ├─4112906 /bin/sh ... ├─4112908 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112910 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112912 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112913 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python ├─4112914 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python └─4112915 /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python It's now quite clear: mm2 uses 9 process and < 50 MB RAM, but MM3 uses 17+12=29 processes (and that's with the default NNTP bridge disabled), and 889.9+182.4=1072.3 MB RAM. That's a *lot* of Python processes! Also, both require Apache (or NGINX), and MM3 requires PostgreSQL. As it is, I can see a lot of small mailing list users abandoning MM3 over this issue (plus its complexity). For my list, that's about one Python interpreter loaded into RAM for each list subscriber!

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