Why Linux?

[1nvest]

If you're doing it 'persistent' and use it a lot then the spectre of write durability rears its ugly head with USB flash drives

With some Linux persistence you can use a file filesystem as the persistence store area. Basically a single file that 'looks' like a complete filesystem - as though it were a disk. So just a single file in Windows (on HDD), but a complete 'disk' under Linux when mounted.

One of my Linux system boots from DVD, and can save changes (persist) back to the same DVD. Good for auditing as changes are stored in separate files that are all merged within ram when booted. Once the DVD fills up, then blanking it and converging the set into a single changes file usually frees up a lot of space (but you lose the audit trail). I've used some DVD's for years like that with no apparent decay, unlike USB's that as you say can have durability issues. I've found that some USB's have surprisingly good/long durability, whilst for others its very short lived - even for the same brand of USB - so seems very hit and miss.

[1nvest]

Here he is installing linux to an external SSD and doesn't touch the already installed Windows at all. He makes this important point very strongly at about 7 minutes in his video. But I am not sure how widely known is the fact that you can equally install linux to an USB memory stick in just the same way. You might think that this would be a slow option but my experience is the opposite.

I boot from USB all the time, where its unplugged as part of bootup to isolate it. Boots the exact same time after time. For changes/updates its - boot - change - save changes, so it remains 'clean'. Any virus and a reboot has that removed. You can also boot/run from DVD, micro sd or even via the net, which is good if you're travelling across borders where you might be pulled up for your laptops content. If its a clean/open/empty laptop then you wont be locked up looking for disclosure of the content of a file that they might claim is encrypted but that isn't. More often they'll be looking for a bribe, with you repeatedly in court, locked up for another 2 weeks and back to court again - looking for disclosure where none is actually possible.

[Infrasonic]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04 ... ptop-club/

Lenovo is joining Dell in the “OEM Linux Laptop” club
Several Thinkpad models will join the Dell XPS 13 DE in Linux-land this year

Cont.

[Infrasonic]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyz91Q_JrBc

ExplainingComputers 03/05/2020

Odyssey X86J4105 FreeNAS install and configuration, including adding a drive to a pool, creating a user, and setting up a Windows (SMB) share.

At the time of making this video in April 2020, FreeNAS can be downloaded from: https://www.freenas.org/ However, sometime in Q3 2020, FreeNAS is going to merge with TrueNAS, to become TrueNAS CORE, and will be available from the iXsystems website: https://www.ixsystems.com/

[Infrasonic]

https://www.zdnet.com/article/coronavir ... st-a-week/

Coronavirus: Linux laptops and long hours helped this team switch 4,000 staff to home working

Cont.

[Infrasonic]

Linux tutorials...https://computingforgeeks.com/category/linux-tutorials/

[Infrasonic]

https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... disciples/

Ubuntu 20.04: Welcome to the future, Linux LTS disciples
ZFS gets more accessible, security becomes a bigger priority, and Ubuntu speeds up overall.

[GeoffF100]

https://www.zdnet.com/article/coronavirus-how-one-team-switched-4000-staff-to-remote-working-in-just-a-week/

Coronavirus: Linux laptops and long hours helped this team switch 4,000 staff to home working

Cont.

A great story. Hackney Council needed 400 laptops for remote working, and installed Linux on 400 old laptops that were too crappy to run Windows, and were due to be given away.

[GeoffF100]

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/ubuntu-20-04-welcome-to-the-future-linux-lts-disciples/

Ubuntu 20.04: Welcome to the future, Linux LTS disciples
ZFS gets more accessible, security becomes a bigger priority, and Ubuntu speeds up overall.

Another good article. Is Ars Technica a misspelling? Have they missed an "e" from the end of the first word? Xubuntu hardly got a mention. Too boring I guess. Nothing much seems to have changed in Xubuntu 20.04, but I am happy with that.

Has anyone updated yet? I am still on Xubuntu 18.04. I am holding fire for a while. A recent update bricked some Lenevo laptops. (The root cause was a documentation error by Intel.) Better safe than sorry.

[Infrasonic]

https://www.linuxbabe.com/apps/create-m ... indows-iso

5 Apps to Create Multiboot USB – Linux and Windows ISOs Supported

Cont.

https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1CAPK ... CAw&uact=5

[Infrasonic]

https://www.pendrivelinux.com/category/virtual-machine/

How to boot from a USB Flash Drive in VirtualBox. This process will allow you to run your Portable Linux from the USB Flash Drive or external hard drive while still running from a Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X Host. By default VirtualBox does not support USB Boot. However this is easily attainable by mapping a virtual machine (.vmdk file) to the USB Drive.

[Infrasonic]

https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... rformance/

ZFS 101—Understanding ZFS storage and performance
Learn to get the most out of your ZFS filesystem in our new series on storage fundamentals.

[Infrasonic]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORf4eVo ... H_rRjp%3A6

Explaining Computers 17 May 2020

Odroid C4 specifications and demo, including running Ubuntu 20.04 desktop, Ubuntu MATE, Android and CoreELEC (Kodi) on this $50 single board computer.

Cont.

[hiriskpaul]

I have an old Acer Aspire V5-122P laptop. It has an AMD A4-1250 APU (1GHz, 2 cores, embedded radeon GPU) and 4Gb RAM. I bought it a long time ago in a hurry. It was very cheap and ran like a dog with Windows 8. When Windows 10 came along I upgraded and it was not really much better. It has been on the shelf for a few years, but as I had a small SSD from a broken laptop I thought I would try it again. Put the SSD in, installed latest W10 (1905) and after a few hours of updates, I rebooted and found the laptop as bad as ever.

Nothing to lose now, so I thought I would try Linux on it. I went for the latest Lubuntu 20.04 LTS. I didn't have a USB drive to hand, so I used the drive I took out as a boot disk, connected via a USB 3 SATA cable. Installed the Lubuntu ISO on it using Rufus, as recommended by Ububtu, and booted it. There was no install option which was a bit strange, instead it booted straight into Lubuntu. I found the install option from inside Lubuntu. Installed onto the internal SSD and rebooted.

What an amazing transformation! The laptop absolutely flies along. It boots in about 50 seconds, which is fine, and Lubuntu has vastly exceeded my expectations in terms of speed, functionality and ease of use. Everything just seemed to work. Touchscreen, video and sound, the WiFi network, it even spotted my network printer. From the file browser I was easily able to connect to my local network and drag across a DVD ISO image, without having to mess around on the command line mounting the remote shares. The DVD image played flawlessly in VLC. Much smoother than my Huawei tablet and far better than it ever managed with Windows 8 and 10. There is a power setting tool so I can define what happens when I close the lid, etc.

Despite being a lightweight distribution, it comes with Libre Office and Firefox. The touchscreen worked without me having to fiddle with any settings, so I installed Chromium as I prefer using it with the touchscreen. Scrolling up and down BBC news is very quick, youtube videos play just fine. Had a quick go with Libre Office and it seems fine. No problem loading a simple Excel worksheet I have been using to sort out someone's tax.

Would like to get OneDrive working. There appears to be a package available, recommendation is to build directly from source on github rather than use the package manager. Anyone tried OneDrive on Linux? For the moment, I could just mount a network share from my Synology NAS that contains my OneDrive sync and rsync across if/when I am away from my local network.

Battery life seems to be about 2 hours, due to the age of the battery. There seem to be a few people advertising new compatible batteries on ebay for under £30. Might be worth a try if I get on with the laptop.

Anyway, I am definitely a Linux convert!

[Infrasonic]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05 ... ne-winner/

ZFS versus RAID: Eight Ironwolf disks, two filesystems, one winner...

Cont.

[langley59]

Mint has offered me an update to a new Linux kernel. I've never noticed it before, but it carries the warning:

The Linux Kernel is responsible for hardware and drivers support. Note that this update will not remove your existing Kernel. You will still be able to boot with the current Kernel by choosing the advanced options in your boot menu. Please be cautious though.. Kernel regressions can affect your ability to connect to the Internet or to log in graphically. DKMS modules are compiled for the most recent Kernels installed on your computer. If you are using proprietary drivers and you want to use an older Kernel, you will need to remove the new one first.

I had 2 updates to Linux Mint today both in relation to kernels. I updated them both and have no issues as far as I am aware. NB. I'm a newish Linux user and by no means an expert on these things so please don't rely on my experience.

[servodude]

I think I might have gotten there.......and.....yeesssss!

I was all full up. Cheers SD.

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=264114

Ah that will do it ( and to be fair to linux - windows does it to me also on one of my machines)

- sd (not wanting to kick off the updates he has waiting to install on his surface book)

Mint has offered me an update to a new Linux kernel. I've never noticed it before, but it carries the warning:

The Linux Kernel is responsible for hardware and drivers support. Note that this update will not remove your existing Kernel. You will still be able to boot with the current Kernel by choosing the advanced options in your boot menu. Please be cautious though.. Kernel regressions can affect your ability to connect to the Internet or to log in graphically. DKMS modules are compiled for the most recent Kernels installed on your computer. If you are using proprietary drivers and you want to use an older Kernel, you will need to remove the new one first.

DKMS is a way of providing kernel modules via source code
instead of being built in to the kernel, or provided as .ko files, the DKMS framework fetches the source and compiles the modules for installation if they are not there

the crux of your warning is that the modules compiled on a newer kernel might use "something" that the older kernel doesn't provide and thus will fail
- removing the new kernel will cause DKMS to rebuild them for the older kernel

it's very likely you don't have any drivers that it needed to provide (unless you're writing your own outside of mainline)
- running the command: dkms status on a terminal will give you a clue as to whether this is likely to be an issue IFF you decide to roll back your kernel (which you probably won't need to anyway)

have fun
-sd

[langley59]

Can anyone give me advice about system snapshots on Linux please. I think I understand the concept, you are able to restore the operating system to a previous version if something goes wrong with an update, but if the snapshot is saved to your one and only hard disk is this an effective safeguard? Should you have two hard disks installed and save to the auxiliary drive?

[Infrasonic]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05 ... station-32

Linux distro review: Fedora Workstation 32
We took Red Hat's bleeding-edge desktop distribution for an extended spin.

Cont.

[Infrasonic]

Would like to get OneDrive working. There appears to be a package available, recommendation is to build directly from source on github rather than use the package manager. Anyone tried OneDrive on Linux? For the moment, I could just mount a network share from my Synology NAS that contains my OneDrive sync and rsync across if/when I am away from my local network.

I've recently installed Rclone (the gui 'browser' version) on my Chromebook Debian 10 Crostini container, not had a chance to really get to grips with it yet, but OneDrive is listed as one of the cloud services it will work with (although it might be the £ business version only, not the free).
There's also Grsync an rsync gui (which I also need to learn properly).

https://rclone.org/gui/