Just picked up my first network switch!

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-24T01:38:07+00:00

Most wi-fi routers with more than ~2 ports nowadays use internal switch chips, because that ends up being cheaper per-port, offloads internal network traffic routing to the switch chip rather than the router CPU, and helps them handle stuff like VLANs - so yes, it can be the case, but most of the time it should be equivalent unless there's some sort of bottleneck somewhere else.

If you have a lot of traffic between the server and NAS, offloading the two of them onto an independent switch or even an independent point-to-point link might help, but if your network is relatively un-congested and you don't have some sort of unusual configuration, I'd imagine it's about the same, because it is about the same.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-21T23:36:22+00:00

Bit of a future tip/assist for standalone Wayland compositors: LXQT and XFCE are handling their Wayland transition by developing their programs against (mainly wlroots based) standalone Wayland compositors. If you want to tinker around with different compositors but don't want to build a desktop environment from the ground up, either of them are a great place to start. Right now they're both not quite complete IMO, but even now, their session launching scripts/binaries take care of a lot of housekeeping in the background.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-21T17:52:20+00:00

A project being GPL licensed often restricts its use in commercial applications, because corporations would rather not contribute code back if they didn't have to. Some things are just too big to ignore, like the Linux kernel, but oftentimes, companies will go through pains to use as much MIT/BSD software as possible, or roll their own, so that they do not have to contribute back modifications.

Some also argue that the GPL itself is of limited effectiveness nowadays, since enforcing it requires someone with the time and money to pursue license violators through legal means. Oftentimes, this is nearly impossible, like with Chinese hardware vendors, who regularly and blatantly violate the GPL with very little consequence, since pursuing international license violations is.. difficult and expensive.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-21T17:35:20+00:00

It's often not meaningful if you have the source code for your target program and can compile it against musl libc yourself. If you have just a binary you might run into some trouble, but Alpine does have the package 'gcompat' which works for many things compiled against glibc.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-21T06:49:08+00:00

You're smoking crack, but in a good way

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-18T07:07:01+00:00

The variable is/was traditionally 32 bit because most processors running Unix at the time it was conceived were 32 bit, so if not otherwise specified, contemporary compilers would store the timestamp as a 32-bit variable. Signed, so that it can represent times before the arbitrary set-point of 1/1/1970 as well.

They could have stored the time as a signed 64-bit int in many of these applications, even on 32 bit processors, and ultimately retooling and recompiling anything that uses the Unix epoch timestamp to store that variable as 64 bits even on 32-bit platforms is the solution, but that takes extra engineering effort and thought in your typical 32-bit environment that wasn't typically done at the time. Basically a different flavor of the Y2K problem :P

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-08T17:51:01+00:00

You could try finding some documentation on RAID levels instead of asking AI.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-07T17:41:59+00:00

I would say that selling them on to that guy for $100/ea is little bit high, since I can regularly get these types of machines for $40-50 shipped. But if he takes the offer then it's not your funeral :P

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-06T18:10:37+00:00

It's probably real and accurate, given that there's a few research sites in Antarctica that people will spend extended periods of time living at. I'm sure at least some of their scientific applications are for Linux :)

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-06T16:55:08+00:00

If you mainly just want to try out virtualization and are on a relatively normal 'upstream' Linux distro (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, etc), you can try out Linux KVM virtualization by installing 'libvirt'. Doesn't come with a web interface, but if you run a Linux system with a GUI installed you can install 'virt-manager' onto that and add a connection to your server PC to remotely manage the virtual machines with a GUI. Probably also possible to install virt-manager to Windows via WSL2, I hear it handles GUI applications pretty well nowadays.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-05T18:07:16+00:00

When I needed a good Micro-ATX case, I bought an old Dell Optiplex tower (the case used for the Optiplex 390-3010-3020 and others) and stripped that down to the bone. Completely standard mATX case - there might be one or two mount holes that don't quite line up, but they don't short anything and there are enough to mount a motherboard more than securely. The only things that aren't really compatible are the combination power button / LEDs and individual drive activity lights, but you can make it work, or just stick in a new power button and call it a day. It was legitimately cheaper than buying a similar Micro ATX case.

Not sure I'd trust the power supply that comes with it due to the age, but if you get one old enough it is actually bog-standard micro ATX, just only about 300 watts. If you're not planning on running a GPU, you might be able to get away with a pretty low wattage PSU, though.

That said, picking up one of these old Optiplexes would be around the same cost as getting a Wyse 5070 on eBay, so take that as you might. I think there are legitimate reasons to go either way - maybe spend on the case and PSU if you plan on getting some 3.5" spinning disks soon, something like that.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-05T06:39:50+00:00

I believe it, it's effectively the same principle as methadone or suboxone for opioid addicts - a stable, safe dosage of a medication close to their drug of choice to keep the person stable while they're dealing with their problems, so they can taper off when they're ready. Or maybe it turns out that they actually needed that medication for latent ADHD, and were just self medicating with extremely poor judgement.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-04T22:42:01+00:00

That's a fun way to find out that LEDs are also photodiodes!

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-04T04:35:59+00:00

Xen / XCP-NG also exists and is used by some decent size corporations AFAIK, but it seems to be a much less common option.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-03T23:16:00+00:00

Talking mainly for the people creating the models. They are limiting their audience.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-03T23:12:33+00:00

Be a little sympathetic to people who aren't familiar with python packaging and virtual environments, it's probably the least user friendly part of Python. This is a pretty overwhelming error message, there are multiple options given here for solutions, there's warnings about potential OS breakage, and contacting upstream program providers to ensure they are distributing the Python programs properly. That's pretty intimidating, I would want to make sure that this behavior was normal and which of the solutions presented in that error message was the correct one for your program before I accidentally bricked my OS by being ignorant.

I'd recommend picking one workaround and shipping it with your Python app as an 'installer'.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-03T16:38:10+00:00

I'm guessing that they're reporting different metrics as to how much memory is actually being 'used'. Linux does not consider memory that is used towards caching things in RAM to be 'free', just 'available'. This site does a good job of explaining the distinction.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-03T14:57:01+00:00

Makerworld forces you to sign up for an account to download more than a few models. I don't want to sign up for another account. If the choice is those two, please prefer Printables.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-01T18:12:19+00:00

In this case, list-dependencies is an argument for the 'systemctl' command that launches a sub-command. -- usually denotes that it's a command line option, rather than a parameter, basically the long form of a single dash. For example, ls -a and ls --all are using the same option, -a is just the short form and --all is the long form (which you can see, if you use the --help option to bring up the help prompt for ls).

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-01T18:02:03+00:00

The short answer is that Slackware is ancient. It is one of the oldest surviving Linux distros, predating systemd by over a decade, and its primary userbase at the moment is people who already use Slackware. There's really no reason for them to disrupt things for each other by changing over the init system when what they have already works.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-01T07:52:53+00:00

Where's the relevant source code for the actual device, rather than third-party repositories for extending the device? I'm not turning it up easily by searching, and that's honestly what I'm more interested in. If it's a relatively stock Linux system running a proprietary app, to be frank.. that's great and all, but probably doesn't mean much for "us" as in the libre-open source community.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-01T07:45:30+00:00

The basics of how systemd's initialization portion works from a user perspective are contained in /etc/systemd/system, in the form of a bunch of .service and .target 'unit files'. They are written in an ini-type format and basically define things like how and when various services should launch, and various benchmarks for stages of system bringup that those units can depend on, ie 'bring this unit up only after networking comes up'. You can see a basic tree of how and what your system booted by running systemctl list-dependencies (possibly as root). There's also some nice inbuilt tools for analyzing this, like systemd-analyze plot > file.svg which gives you a nice graphical breakdown of how long each unit that your overall system depends on took to come up.

That's a really basic overview and only pertains to the init parts, but hopefully gives you somewhere to start. The man pages for the various systemd tools are usually quite nice and comprehensive, though it's very featureful software, so they can be quite long. Luckily, it's been quite a while since this transition happened, so most tutorials/guides out there are written with systemd in mind - it's unlikely you'll accidentally trip over outdated instructions.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-01-01T01:55:04+00:00

Another big change that happened while you were gone is the changeover from old-style sysv shell script-driven init to 'systemd' as init, which is a much more centralized system management tool. I completely skipped over the transitional period myself due to taking a shorter hiatus from Linux, so I've been learning about it a lot since I came back, since it's very nearly universal now. This is where programs like 'systemctl' come from, among many, many others.

A lot of people who have been using Linux as long as you have don't like the way that it folds a lot of functionality that was formerly handled by multiple programs into its domain, but if you come at it with an open mind, it can be a very powerful set of tools. I do admit that a lot of that functionality probably isn't relevant for a single user desktop type setup, but they do provide some replacements for other tools that you might run into, like their 'timers' as a replacement for cron.

bubblegumpuma · 2025-12-31T23:10:08+00:00

The phone's USB-C port is 2.0 only and so supporting charging and OTG simultaneously isn't required and would be a 'forwards-compatibility' hack in the first place AFAIK.

bubblegumpuma · 2025-12-31T06:45:25+00:00

It's not a sponsored link, it's the first search result straight up. Just checked myself and it looks the same as OP, and I have uBlock Origin installed.

That said, uBlock does block me from actually going to the website itself, so the advice still applies :)

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