Why Linux?

[servodude]

The Windows PC does not seem sluggish and not much CPU being used elsewhere, so I suspect the problem may be more to do with I/O rather than CPU performance. The Arduino I am compiling for is a new design that is built on the Mbed OS, so every time I compile I have to pull in the whole Mbed OS. It could be that Linux is caching all those C++ files more efficiently than Windows does. I will investigate further when I get the time and do some proper timing. It was really just an experiment, I had no real intention of actually doing Arduino development on the Lubuntu laptop, but it might lead to better compilation performance on Windows if I can figure out what is going on.

Slightly off-topic, but what are you developing the Arduino to do?

RC

Remote sensing, mainly measuring heights of rivers to provide early warning of downstream flooding. I have started looking at a new generation of 32 bit ARM micro controllers with Bluetooth Low Energy 5 to see if they might be a better solution to the existing 8 bit controllers connected to ZigBee radios and cellular modems. Doesn't have to be Arduino, but that is a convenient and easy to use open source platform. The alternatives tend to be manufacturer specific, so you end up having to keep switching toolchains, which is a bit of a pain.

Good plan!
Been using the Nordic nRF52 recently for something similar; and the toolchain required was really quite painful.
Arduino is a pretty good choice to try and get a bit of abstraction for that side of things.

-sd

[hiriskpaul]

Slightly off-topic, but what are you developing the Arduino to do?

RC

Remote sensing, mainly measuring heights of rivers to provide early warning of downstream flooding. I have started looking at a new generation of 32 bit ARM micro controllers with Bluetooth Low Energy 5 to see if they might be a better solution to the existing 8 bit controllers connected to ZigBee radios and cellular modems. Doesn't have to be Arduino, but that is a convenient and easy to use open source platform. The alternatives tend to be manufacturer specific, so you end up having to keep switching toolchains, which is a bit of a pain.

Good plan!
Been using the Nordic nRF52 recently for something similar; and the toolchain required was really quite painful.
Arduino is a pretty good choice to try and get a bit of abstraction for that side of things.

-sd

Is that the Nordic tools that you found painful? I have not looked at those yet, but think I am going to need to as the Arduino implementation does not fully support some of the features we are interested in yet. I am using the Nordic nRF52840.

[servodude]

Remote sensing, mainly measuring heights of rivers to provide early warning of downstream flooding. I have started looking at a new generation of 32 bit ARM micro controllers with Bluetooth Low Energy 5 to see if they might be a better solution to the existing 8 bit controllers connected to ZigBee radios and cellular modems. Doesn't have to be Arduino, but that is a convenient and easy to use open source platform. The alternatives tend to be manufacturer specific, so you end up having to keep switching toolchains, which is a bit of a pain.

Good plan!
Been using the Nordic nRF52 recently for something similar; and the toolchain required was really quite painful.
Arduino is a pretty good choice to try and get a bit of abstraction for that side of things.

-sd

Is that the Nordic tools that you found painful? I have not looked at those yet, but think I am going to need to as the Arduino implementation does not fully support some of the features we are interested in yet. I am using the Nordic nRF52840.

They're nice devices (it was the 52834 in my case).
I just got the impression that whomever put the tools together assumed the user was always going to be using their IDE.
For one example:
they use a pre-compiled "soft device" binary for the BLE code, which determines your feature set
if you want to make use of a feature in this you need to provide RAM for it by changing where the rest of the code is linked to
which you do in a field a couple of menus down in project settings
and the recommended method is to change it to a value you've worked out by peeking via JTAG when it crashes
you only have to do this if you declare something that the soft-device has access to - but it's a bit painful that it doesn't fail till run time

Customer was happy for it to "work" that way; but if I was going to support the platform longterm I'd be looking for a way to get the build running from make/cmake so that I could forego the IDE for a build server

- sd

[GeoffF100]

I hit my first real problem with Lubuntu 20.04. No spelling checker was installed with the preinstalled LibreOffice. There is a bug report:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1878465

I appear to have fixed the problem with this:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install hunspell-en-gb

Featherpad is still telling me that I need to install a Hunspell dictionary. It gives instructions that I expect are for KDE. That is not a real problem for me.

I have added a comment to the bug report.

Whenever I boot my machine, which I do several times a day, I get a message telling me that my Ethernet has been connected. If I do not dismiss it, an annoying exclamation mark appears on the panel. I do not want to be bothered with warnings that my Ethernet is working!

[Infrasonic]

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/lenov ... n-products

Following the news that it will soon offer Linux laptops, Lenovo has now announced that it will also be bringing Ubuntu and Red Hat Linux to its full workstation portfolio...

Cont.

[GeoffF100]

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/lenovo-is-adding-linux-to-all-its-workstation-products

Following the news that it will soon offer Linux laptops, Lenovo has now announced that it will also be bringing Ubuntu and Red Hat Linux to its full workstation portfolio...

Cont.

The catch is that these laptops are seriously expensive. Dell sometimes offers affordable laptops loaded with Ubuntu, but they came and go.

[GeoffF100]

I have just been racing my 4th Generation i5 with 8GB RAM running Windows 10 against my 3rd Generation i3 with 4 GB RAM running Lubuntu 20.04. Lubuntu wins comfortably. It boots faster, loads Google Chrome faster and it is even significantly faster at loading and running LibreOffice. (If I load an application a second time with Lubuntu it is even faster, because the necessary data has been loaded into cache. Windows 10 does not appear to be up to that.)

I have now got Felicity on my desktop:

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/focal-fo ... pers/14621

Lubuntu 20.04 is Focal Fossa too.

[Infrasonic]

One for the CLI gurus...

I've got a ChromeOS Crostini Debian 10 container (not native) that needs some CL to get me out of the following issue. I've already Googled it and tried multiple potential CL solutions, none have worked, although I did solve the failed Thunderbird install via some found CL instructions and those terminal alerts have now gone. And yes I know it would be helpful to post what CL solutions I've already tried but I haven't been that organised...

Code: Select all

W: Target Translations (main/i18n/Translation-en) is configured multiple times in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:1 and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:2
W: Target DEP-11 (main/dep11/Components-amd64.yml) is configured multiple times in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:1 and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:2
W: Target DEP-11 (main/dep11/Components-all.yml) is configured multiple times in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:1 and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:2
W: Target DEP-11-icons-small (main/dep11/icons-48x48.tar) is configured multiple times in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:1 and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:2
W: Target DEP-11-icons (main/dep11/icons-64x64.tar) is configured multiple times in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:1 and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:2
W: Target DEP-11-icons-large (main/dep11/icons-128x128.tar) is configured multiple times in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:1 and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:2
W: Target Packages (main/binary-amd64/Packages) is configured multiple times in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:1 and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:2
W: Target Packages (main/binary-all/Packages) is configured multiple times in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:1 and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:2
W: Target Translations (main/i18n/Translation-en_US) is configured multiple times in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:1 and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:2
W: Target Translations (main/i18n/Translation-en) is configured multiple times in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:1 and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:2
W: Target DEP-11 (main/dep11/Components-amd64.yml) is configured multiple times in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:1 and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:2
W: Target DEP-11 (main/dep11/Components-all.yml) is configured multiple times in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:1 and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:2
W: Target DEP-11-icons-small (main/dep11/icons-48x48.tar) is configured multiple times in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:1 and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:2
W: Target DEP-11-icons (main/dep11/icons-64x64.tar) is configured multiple times in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:1 and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:2
W: Target DEP-11-icons-large (main/dep11/icons-128x128.tar) is configured multiple times in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:1 and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list:2

[ReformedCharacter]

One for the CLI gurus...

I've got a ChromeOS Crostini Debian 10 container (not native) that needs some CL to get me out of the following issue. I've already Googled it and tried multiple potential CL solutions, none have worked, although I did solve the failed Thunderbird install via some found CL instructions and those terminal alerts have now gone. And yes I know it would be helpful to post what CL solutions I've already tried but I haven't been that organised...

I know little about containers, and I'm no CL guru. Is it the case that you cannot use a text editor such as Nano or Vim to edit the files?

RC

[Infrasonic]

One for the CLI gurus...

I've got a ChromeOS Crostini Debian 10 container (not native) that needs some CL to get me out of the following issue. I've already Googled it and tried multiple potential CL solutions, none have worked, although I did solve the failed Thunderbird install via some found CL instructions and those terminal alerts have now gone. And yes I know it would be helpful to post what CL solutions I've already tried but I haven't been that organised...

I know little about containers, and I'm no CL guru. Is it the case that you cannot use a text editor such as Nano or Vim to edit the files?

RC

Thanks RC, yes I'd had a look at editing the text file but I wasn't seeing what was posted in the Debian (native) tutorial screenshots, and couldn't actually edit them.
Hence me thinking it may be container v native that is the issue as Googling brought up a load of links to Docker container issues which were very similar and quite often weren't currently resolved.

I'll revisit the text file editing in a more organised A/B way and start doing some screenshots of the problems I'm running into, hopefully get to the bottom of it without having to rebuild the container yet again. (Currently it's working OK and I'm getting updates via the CL, it's just this outstanding Signal issue remaining.)

[Infrasonic]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zrwjGcyM5s

Explaining Computers 14 June 2020
Raspberry Pi 4 8GB and Raspberry Pi OS overview and demo, plus booting a Pi 4 from USB via a beta firmware update. These really are exciting times for the wonderful world of Pi!

Cont.

[GeoffF100]

I had been tearing my hair out wondering why I was getting different answers for my SSD usage from the Lubuntu 20.04 file manager, the Disk Usage Analyser application, and the df command.

Code: Select all

geoff@HP:~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs           383M  1.3M  382M   1% /run
/dev/sda1       110G  8.3G   96G   8% /
tmpfs           1.9G   27M  1.9G   2% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           1.9G  4.0K  1.9G   1% /tmp
tmpfs           383M  8.0K  383M   1% /run/user/1000

My SSD is /dev/sda1. The other file systems are in RAM. Used + Avail is not equal to Size. Here is the explanation:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... able-space

"By default, ext2, ext3 and ext4 filesystems reserve 5% of their capacity for use by the root user. This reduces fragmentation, and makes it less likely that the root user or any root-owned daemons will run out of disk space to perform important operations."

Phew!

[swill453]

My SSD is /dev/sda1. The other file systems are in RAM. Used + Avail is not equal to Size. Here is the explanation:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... able-space

"By default, ext2, ext3 and ext4 filesystems reserve 5% of their capacity for use by the root user. This reduces fragmentation, and makes it less likely that the root user or any root-owned daemons will run out of disk space to perform important operations."

It was always 10% back in the day (BSD, SunOs, Solaris etc.). Could modify it with tunefs though.

Scott.

[GeoffF100]

My little computer has now notified me that the latest version of Mint (v20 'Ulyana') is now available. Of course, updating is a bit more involved with Linux than Windows (despite the button saying 'upgrade to Linux Mint 20 Ulyana' suggesting it as nothing more than a fire and come back in an hour or two - its not!)

Plus....I've read one or 2 things about Ulyana not being quite right. As my current version is working extremely well (they even seem to have solved my speaker start up problem with a recent update). So that being the case, I'm inclined to leave well alone....

I do have the other laptop however, so the next rainy day might see that getting an upgrade.

The release notes did not suggest any problems that worried me. My Windows 10 machine is sluggish compared with my lower spec machine running Lubuntu 20.04. That is partly because I have got data on a hard drive on the Windows 10 machine. I am tempted to install Mint 20 Xfce in place of Windows 10, and put my home directory on the SSD. I could use the hard drive for snapshots and downloads. It would be interesting to compare Mint with Lubuntu.

[cinelli]

My little computer has now notified me that the latest version of Mint (v20 'Ulyana') is now available.

I would list reasons for upgrading as follows:

1. You are nearing the end of the support date.
2. Something doesn't work in your current version and this has been fixed in the new release.
3. You enjoy tinkering and doing the upgrade will enhance your knowledge.

(1) I myself am running linux Mint 18.3 cinnamon and this is supported until April 2021. I also have Mint 19.3 running on a memory stick and this is supported until April 2023. No urgency at all to upgrade. (2) I have found that the command img2pdf doesn't work for bitmap files in 18.3 but it does in 19.3 so it is convenient to have an alternative version available. (3) I think most people here are like this.

There is informed comment about Mint 20 by YouTuber Joe Collins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_mxhbt1Rxk&t=632s

He gets into the politics of linux. For version 20 chromium is no longer available in the repositories - it is a flat pack. If this is a concern, it might put you off doing the upgrade.

Cinelli

[GeoffF100]

My little computer has now notified me that the latest version of Mint (v20 'Ulyana') is now available.

I would list reasons for upgrading as follows:

1. You are nearing the end of the support date.
2. Something doesn't work in your current version and this has been fixed in the new release.
3. You enjoy tinkering and doing the upgrade will enhance your knowledge.

(1) I myself am running linux Mint 18.3 cinnamon and this is supported until April 2021. I also have Mint 19.3 running on a memory stick and this is supported until April 2023. No urgency at all to upgrade. (2) I have found that the command img2pdf doesn't work for bitmap files in 18.3 but it does in 19.3 so it is convenient to have an alternative version available. (3) I think most people here are like this.

There is informed comment about Mint 20 by YouTuber Joe Collins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_mxhbt1Rxk&t=632s

He gets into the politics of linux. For version 20 chromium is no longer available in the repositories - it is a flat pack. If this is a concern, it might put you off doing the upgrade.

Cinelli

Joe Collins had problems installing the Cinnamon version in a virtual machine. He said it was OK on real hardware, He does not appear to have tried the Xfce version.

You can install Chromium in the same way as Ubuntu by installing the snap store:

https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedoc ... omium.html

apt install snapd
sudo snap install chromium

That does not appear to be too much of an issue to me.

I am using Google Chrome on Lubuntu 20.04. As they say in the link, it is very easy to install Chrome, and I have found it to be much faster than Firefox. Chromium is in the Discover app store on Lubuntu 20.04.

Lubuntu 20.04 has got a lot of flack. I was half inclined to believe it until I saw hiriskpaul's post earlier in the thread. The flack is not really justified. Yes, the 32 bit version has gone, and it is a little bigger but the competition seems to have put on even more weight. The default desktop is horrible, and there are some other default settings that I do not like, but that is easily fixed. Lubuntu 20.04 is fast and trouble free (provided that you use the GTK3 graphics package rather than Qt5 with LibreOffice).

[kiloran]

My little computer has now notified me that the latest version of Mint (v20 'Ulyana') is now available.

I would list reasons for upgrading as follows:

1. You are nearing the end of the support date.
2. Something doesn't work in your current version and this has been fixed in the new release.
3. You enjoy tinkering and doing the upgrade will enhance your knowledge.

(1) I myself am running linux Mint 18.3 cinnamon and this is supported until April 2021. I also have Mint 19.3 running on a memory stick and this is supported until April 2023. No urgency at all to upgrade. (2) I have found that the command img2pdf doesn't work for bitmap files in 18.3 but it does in 19.3 so it is convenient to have an alternative version available. (3) I think most people here are like this.

There is informed comment about Mint 20 by YouTuber Joe Collins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_mxhbt1Rxk&t=632s

He gets into the politics of linux. For version 20 chromium is no longer available in the repositories - it is a flat pack. If this is a concern, it might put you off doing the upgrade.

Cinelli

Joe Collins had problems installing the Cinnamon version in a virtual machine. He said it was OK on real hardware, He does not appear to have tried the Xfce version.

You can install Chromium in the same way as Ubuntu by installing the snap store:

https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedoc ... omium.html

apt install snapd
sudo snap install chromium

That does not appear to be too much of an issue to me.

I am using Google Chrome on Lubuntu 20.04. As they say in the link, it is very easy to install Chrome, and I have found it to be much faster than Firefox. Chromium is in the Discover app store on Lubuntu 20.04.

Lubuntu 20.04 has got a lot of flack. I was half inclined to believe it until I saw hiriskpaul's post earlier in the thread. The flack is not really justified. Yes, the 32 bit version has gone, and it is a little bigger but the competition seems to have put on even more weight. The default desktop is horrible, and there are some other default settings that I do not like, but that is easily fixed. Lubuntu 20.04 is fast and trouble free (provided that you use the GTK3 graphics package rather than Qt5 with LibreOffice).

I installed Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon on a VirtualBox VM the other day and it works fine so far. I just downloaded Chrome from the Google download site: https://www.google.com/chrome/

Didn't need Snap (whatever that is.... must investigate)

--kiloran

[GeoffF100]

I would list reasons for upgrading as follows:

1. You are nearing the end of the support date.
2. Something doesn't work in your current version and this has been fixed in the new release.
3. You enjoy tinkering and doing the upgrade will enhance your knowledge.

(1) I myself am running linux Mint 18.3 cinnamon and this is supported until April 2021. I also have Mint 19.3 running on a memory stick and this is supported until April 2023. No urgency at all to upgrade. (2) I have found that the command img2pdf doesn't work for bitmap files in 18.3 but it does in 19.3 so it is convenient to have an alternative version available. (3) I think most people here are like this.

There is informed comment about Mint 20 by YouTuber Joe Collins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_mxhbt1Rxk&t=632s

He gets into the politics of linux. For version 20 chromium is no longer available in the repositories - it is a flat pack. If this is a concern, it might put you off doing the upgrade.

Cinelli

Joe Collins had problems installing the Cinnamon version in a virtual machine. He said it was OK on real hardware, He does not appear to have tried the Xfce version.

You can install Chromium in the same way as Ubuntu by installing the snap store:

https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedoc ... omium.html

apt install snapd
sudo snap install chromium

That does not appear to be too much of an issue to me.

I am using Google Chrome on Lubuntu 20.04. As they say in the link, it is very easy to install Chrome, and I have found it to be much faster than Firefox. Chromium is in the Discover app store on Lubuntu 20.04.

Lubuntu 20.04 has got a lot of flack. I was half inclined to believe it until I saw hiriskpaul's post earlier in the thread. The flack is not really justified. Yes, the 32 bit version has gone, and it is a little bigger but the competition seems to have put on even more weight. The default desktop is horrible, and there are some other default settings that I do not like, but that is easily fixed. Lubuntu 20.04 is fast and trouble free (provided that you use the GTK3 graphics package rather than Qt5 with LibreOffice).

I installed Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon on a VirtualBox VM the other day and it works fine so far. I just downloaded Chrome from the Google download site: https://www.google.com/chrome/

Didn't need Snap (whatever that is.... must investigate)

--kiloran

You do not need Snap for Google Chrome, but you do need it for open source version Chromium (unless you install it some other way). Snap and Flatpack encapsulate all the packages that the application uses. Normally, these are shared with other applications on Linux. With Snap and Flatpack it is possible to update the dependencies without causing trouble elsewhere. That convenience comes at a cost, of course.

[hiriskpaul]

I recently bought a raspberry pi 4 (4GB version) and am hugely impressed. Very quick for browsing, etc. I do not have a micro HDMI cable, but found it very straightforward to set up headless and access through ssh and VNC. I have not bought a case or heatsink for the board, as I thought I would see if either were necessary first. I have read a lot about reports of overheating/throttling, but also that some of the issues have been fixed with firmware updates. I tried out the sysbench test used on explainingcomputers.com and found that the CPU temperature plateaued at 76C after about 15 minutes, with no sign of throttling. Room temperature was 20C. I have read that placing the board on its side improves ventilation and this seemed to work, with temperature maxing out at 72C. So for anyone wanting to buy one of these, I would advise holding off on the heatsink until you are sure your use case demands it.

For anyone wanting to do something very CPU intensive for an extended period, a raspberry pi is probably not the optimal choice anyway. The sysbench test runs in 63s using all 4 cores. My i3 desktop runs the exact same test, using the same version of sysbench through WSL, in 9 seconds!

[ReformedCharacter]

I recently bought a raspberry pi 4 (4GB version) and am hugely impressed. Very quick for browsing, etc. I do not have a micro HDMI cable, but found it very straightforward to set up headless and access through ssh and VNC. I have not bought a case or heatsink for the board, as I thought I would see if either were necessary first. I have read a lot about reports of overheating/throttling, but also that some of the issues have been fixed with firmware updates. I tried out the sysbench test used on explainingcomputers.com and found that the CPU temperature plateaued at 76C after about 15 minutes, with no sign of throttling. Room temperature was 20C. I have read that placing the board on its side improves ventilation and this seemed to work, with temperature maxing out at 72C. So for anyone wanting to buy one of these, I would advise holding off on the heatsink until you are sure your use case demands it.

For anyone wanting to do something very CPU intensive for an extended period, a raspberry pi is probably not the optimal choice anyway. The sysbench test runs in 63s using all 4 cores. My i3 desktop runs the exact same test, using the same version of sysbench through WSL, in 9 seconds!

That's a coincidence, my pi 4 (4GB) arrived yesterday and I fitted a £2 heat sink set. It replaced a model B rev 2. from 2014. Also running headless and impressed with the performance. No case for me either but I fitted some spacers to keep it 10mm clear underneath.

RC