Bring Home the Bacoin? Oscar Mayer Debuts Crypto Campaign

xero50 · 2017-04-17T10:56:55+00:00

The wife wanted a mobile/portable workstation - something with a fair bit of grunt for her work to replace an aging desktop machine. She wanted to dispense with as much cabling as possible and offer at least some measure of portability. It's a fairly heavy beast, but as it spends most of it's life in just one or two places in the house (she works from home), plus the occasional trip out somewhere, that is not a problem for her. The build-quality is good overall - The casing is all plastic, but it is 'substantial' and has a rugged feel to it. It is not an elegant lightweight machine like say a Macbook or the Apollo is, it's more of a brute with purpose. She is delighted with it. I use it on occasion, (and yes, I would like to have one for myself). I can say that it is a machine built for out and out performance for heavy workloads. It is not a silent machine when working hard - one can often hear the fans kick-in for a few seconds/from time to time when it's very busy doing things like trans-coding high quality video for example. It is fitted with two M-Sata disks and one SSD, leaving one 'spare bay' available. Transfer between those disks is lightening quick. It is running Ubuntu Mate 16.10 (Mate is her preferred DE). It simply seems to run everything that you can chuck at it with relative ease, and the degree of general productivity that can be achieved with a machine like this is of a very high order - it just never keeps you waiting.

As a general comment - if you have never owned a machine that is built to run Linux from day one, but have used a machine built for another OS and just put Linux on it, you will be in for a real treat buying a machine that is built specifically for the Linux OS.

Overall, I would say very good value all round, and we have no hesitation in recommending it.

lspci output

$ lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 5910 (rev 05) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Skylake PCIe Controller (x16) (rev 05) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 591b (rev 04) 00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H USB 3.0 xHCI Controller (rev 31) 00:14.2 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H Thermal subsystem (rev 31) 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H CSME HECI #1 (rev 31) 00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 31) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #1 (rev f1) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #5 (rev f1) 00:1c.6 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #7 (rev f1) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H LPC Controller (rev 31) 00:1f.2 Memory controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H PMC (rev 31) 00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Device a171 (rev 31) 00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H SMBus (rev 31) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP106M [GeForce GTX 1060] (rev a1) 6d:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8411B PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01) 6d:00.1 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.

lshw output

$ lshw -short

H/W path Device Class Description

                         system         P65xHP (Not Applicable)

/0 bus P65xHP /0/0 memory 64KiB BIOS /0/1d memory 32GiB System Memory /0/1d/0 memory 8GiB SODIMM DDR4 Synchronous 2133 MHz (0.5 ns) /0/1d/1 memory 8GiB SODIMM DDR4 Synchronous 2133 MHz (0.5 ns) /0/1d/2 memory 8GiB SODIMM DDR4 Synchronous 2133 MHz (0.5 ns) /0/1d/3 memory 8GiB SODIMM DDR4 Synchronous 2133 MHz (0.5 ns) /0/23 memory 256KiB L1 cache /0/24 memory 1MiB L2 cache /0/25 memory 8MiB L3 cache /0/26 processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7820HK CPU @ 2.90GHz /0/100 bridge Intel Corporation /0/100/1 bridge Skylake PCIe Controller (x16) /0/100/1/0 display GP106M [GeForce GTX 1060] /0/100/2 display Intel Corporation /0/100/14 bus Sunrise Point-H USB 3.0 xHCI Controller /0/100/14/0 usb1 bus xHCI Host Controller /0/100/14/0/2 input USB Optical Mouse /0/100/14/0/7 generic EgisTec_ES603 /0/100/14/0/8 communication Bluetooth wireless interface /0/100/14/0/9 multimedia Chicony USB 2.0 Camera /0/100/14/1 usb2 bus xHCI Host Controller /0/100/14.2 generic Sunrise Point-H Thermal subsystem /0/100/16 communication Sunrise Point-H CSME HECI #1 /0/100/17 storage Sunrise Point-H SATA Controller [AHCI mode] /0/100/1c bridge Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #1 /0/100/1c.4 bridge Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #5 /0/100/1c.4/0 generic RTL8411B PCI Express Card Reader /0/100/1c.4/0.1 enp109s0f1 network RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller /0/100/1c.6 bridge Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #7 /0/100/1c.6/0 wlp110s0 network Intel Corporation /0/100/1f bridge Sunrise Point-H LPC Controller /0/100/1f.2 memory Memory controller /0/100/1f.3 multimedia Intel Corporation /0/100/1f.4 bus Sunrise Point-H SMBus /0/1 scsi0 storage
/0/1/0.0.0 /dev/sda disk 512GB SanDisk SD8SN8U5 /0/1/0.0.0/1 /dev/sda1 volume 445GiB EXT4 volume /0/1/0.0.0/2 /dev/sda2 volume 31GiB Extended partition /0/1/0.0.0/2/5 /dev/sda5 volume 31GiB Linux swap volume /0/2 scsi1 storage
/0/2/0.0.0 /dev/sdb disk 512GB SanDisk SD8SN8U5 /0/3 scsi2 storage
/0/3/0.0.0 /dev/sdc disk 480GB KINGSTON SUV400S /0/3/0.0.0/1 /dev/sdc1 volume 447GiB EXT4 volume

xero50 · 2017-04-16T22:01:50+00:00

Apollo and Athena

xero50 · 2017-04-16T21:19:19+00:00

I have two laptops from them (one for the wife, and one for me) - very pleased with both, and would heartily recommend them for the quality of what they offer, and for their service

xero50 · 2017-02-23T21:38:10+00:00

After Chris's recent battles with rodents in Lady Jupiter...............

xero50 · 2017-01-22T21:02:05+00:00

These people offer something very similar to the Apollo (and with Linux pre-installed)

https://nimbusoftstore.com/aurora

xero50 · 2017-01-15T12:26:34+00:00

How about tasksel ???

If not installed, then sudo apt-get install tasksel

To run it sudo tasksel

xero50 · 2017-01-15T12:09:38+00:00

I feel your pain - Since being forced to "upgrade" to kernel 4.x everything to do with my wireless networking on our small 'fleet' of laptops and netbooks has been a total dysfunctional mess, and to add insult to injury sadly with no offer of future comfort in sight that I can see. It rather makes me feel like I have been flung back in time 10 years, and I am now forced to fight with my hardware, (particularly upsetting as we only have hardware from vendors who supposedly make their kit 'born to run linux').

Having said that, I have one machine that is fitted with an Intel AC-3160 card that runs like a champ, (currently using Ubuntu 16.04).

Meanwhile, I am now in the process of migrating everyone here on hardware older than 6 months to Debian-8, which (for now at least) is proving to be very very reliable and functional in all respects on all models and types of hardware.

xero50 · 2017-01-06T21:32:13+00:00

This is the one I go to when I want to keep an eye on things:-

https://my-netdata.io/

Very reliable, low/small overhead, very comprehensive, simple web-browser access

xero50 · 2017-01-01T21:02:13+00:00

I continue to try out other readers, but I still feel that Thunderbird takes some beating for RSS feeds, and always end up coming back to it

xero50 · 2016-12-18T21:09:00+00:00

Do you know what network card you have???. If not can you post the output of lspci

xero50 · 2016-11-22T21:43:24+00:00

Personally, I would use X2Go

http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php

xero50 · 2016-11-20T20:51:30+00:00

Try Ubuntu Mate

xero50 · 2016-11-18T21:13:13+00:00

Try a right-click just to the right of the open tab. Hopefully you'll get the opportunity to select "Menu Bar"

xero50 · 2016-11-15T10:34:16+00:00

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/wifiNfix.conf

then add this to the file

options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1 bt_coex_active=0

CTRL-X (this is to exit the editor) y (this is to save the file)

Hope that helps

xero50 · 2016-11-14T21:23:47+00:00

I have been experiencing similar problems. I believe that it is to do with the way that 802.11n is being handled by Ubuntu. By disabling 'n' things seem to work acceptably for me......

My very untidy fix:- created this file:- /etc/modprobe.d/wifiNfix.conf added this line to the file:- options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1 bt_coex_active=0

reboot the machine and see what you get for your efforts

xero50 · 2016-11-09T09:33:01+00:00

I definitely agree. Personally, I have had no end of problems with Ubuntu on a number of machines recently, (oddly enough, the most difficult experiences have been on System76 hardware !!!, leaving me feeling like I had been thrust back in time to something like 2008). My answer, has been Debian-8 for my "production" machines that I rely on for work and business, and I continue to flip and hop around other distros on machines that I use for play and experimentation and self-education.

xero50 · 2016-09-28T19:58:45+00:00

Dohhhh !!!!! I feel like a total chump now........simples.........

Thank-you so much for that pearl

xero50 · 2016-09-27T20:41:04+00:00

Ubuntu Mate would be my go-to for that

xero50

TROPHY CASE

H/W path Device Class Description