What are they?

I ditched Windows roughly 15 years ago and I run a MS Silver partner shop.

I daily drive Kubuntu (was Arch but I need to tick boxes). I used to teach DTP, WP, spreadsheets etc and Libre Office is fine as a replacement for MSO. Email - Exchange and Evolution EWS. I create the most complicated docs in my firm and MSO works with them OK.

I 3D print stuff and use LibreCAD and OpenSCAD. All good. Also note that there are lots of other CAD apps on Linux for free/libre and of course we have

As far as I am aware, games is the only area that Linux might fail and that issue is shrinking rapidly.

I doubt it. They make a hell of a noise and print at a rate of characters per second not pages per second. The ribbons suffered from similar issues as cassette tapes (the other ribbons that we had to deal with). The ribbon would dry out if not used for a few days and you’d waste paper and a lot of time.

DM printers were ideal in the guise of “line printers” - the big old IBM jobbies that munched through A3 landscape fan fold at ridiculous speeds. Home printers like the Epson FX80 or RX80 were at least affordable. I still remember the manual of our RX80 congratulating us on buying it and exhorting me to hug the printer on unpacking it. I suspect the Japanese to English translation might not have been the best.

We had to get a Centronics interface board stuffed into our C64 and get it working (sacrifice a chicken on a waxing gibbous moon night, etc)

It worked better on my 80286 box, some years later. I had to set it up in each application - Harvard Graphics, Word Perfect, Super Calc.

In around 1991 I was able to buy a 80486 based beastie, thanks to gift from granddad. In around 1993 I was given a HP LJ 4P so I could print out proofs for a Plymouth (Devon) tourist tat thing.

Nowadays I have a fairly elderly HPE MFP five toner humming away at home. Its on a VLAN that doesn’t get to see the internet. It just works. I won’t be “upgrading” it for the foreseeable future.

My Epson RX80’s ribbon is somewhere in landfill. The Commodore 64 however is all good and now sports a USB interface with more storage than the poor thing can possibly ever use. The Quickshot II joystick still works too.

1984ish was when the C64 was bought by my dad, from the NAAFI in Rheindahlen (West Germany, as was).

Picture the scene:

Me and brother fly home from UK to probably Dusseldorf at the end of the winter term. Its December in the mid '80s. Every now and then, Russia sends a Tupolev Bear or Badger to chug along overhead. The US sends a YR-71 over the USSR at multiples of the speed of sound. The Cold War was quite unpleasant to live through. Its quite chilly, snow tyres on the car, chains in the boot. The autobahn has the usual psychotic bunch of lane two and three drivers. Lane one generally runs at around 90mph (yes, even back in the '80s)

We get to home at the time (we move every two years or so - it is the way of things). Dad shows off the new gadget. He plugs the power lead into the video port.

Some weeks after we have gone back to school for the spring term, the C64 is returned from the menders. We get to use it in the Easter hols. It travelled to the UK and back to DE several times and also to Cyprus (WSBA). The QS II took a serious battering thanks to Daley Thompson’s decathalon.

I got it re-capped in 2019, which was all that needed doing. They were rather well made …

Start the linuxa or alinux project and off you trot. Find a better name than I did here and you’ll be fine.

You

I’m not feeling too genocidal at the moment and I’m not too sure what a big blob of capitalism looks like but it sounds like you are impugning me (int al) in some way.

If you are going to deliver a stinging attack on something you dislike, why not deploy an impassioned and pithy argument rather than … that. You do at least manage to spell it’s correctly, which is nice.

What on earth went wrong?

Arch is just as safe as any other distro, sometimes more so. Being a rolling jobbie, smaller bits tend to break at a time. If you want to live life on the edge then Gentoo is your man but even Gentoo is becoming pretty safe. You might lose your windowing system for a while but you still have links2 to get to a search engine.

♬rope and pull and brand 'em ♬

“Every subsystem is a private fiefdom, subject to the whims of each one of Linux’s 1,700+ maintainers, almost all of whom have a dog in this race. It’s herding cats”

There are three similes in that quote. When your considerations are that disorganized, you have not finished thinking everything through. Fiefdoms, dogs and cats … oh my! That’s on top of wild west and other trite, well worn and rather silly similes.

Make your argument without recourse to inflammatory terminology and similes and you slighten the risk of pissing people off.

Clarity is in the eye of the beholder or as someone once said: “You do you”.

I like to use my enterprise number and a UUID (all in lower case, for legibility). Here’s an example:

.1.3.6.1.4.1.33230.0d456e46-67e6-11ef-9c92-7b175b3ab1f1

Now you might say that the UUID is already globally unique or at least pretty unlikely to turn up anywhere else, so why bother prefixing it with more stuff? To that I say: “I need to be absolutely or at least reasonably sure … OK nearly sure”.

Anyway, you maintain a database of these things and then attach documentation and meaning to them. An editor could abstract and hide that away.

I started this post as a joke. Not sure anymore. Why get your knickers in a twist with naming conventions for variables and constants. Programming is already a whopping layer of abstraction from what the logic gates are up to, another one wont hurt!

If you just run perl it will sit waiting for input. Try perl --version

Windows GPOs are a right old mess. I’ve been managing them for over two decades. The first fuck up is the word “Group”. You cannot assign Group Policy Objects to AD groups unless you use something like ZENworks or some funky WMI filters!

Settings are applied to computers or users. Many settings are available to be set for both but only make sense or even work for one or the other. MS bought out some solution providers and that’s why you get the Control Panel and other handy stuff, rather roughly bolted on.

AD with GPOs with the extension to “local machines” is a great idea but dreadful in execution. MS didn’t want to nobble third party apps in the past so that’s why we have this nonsense. Now its all about Azure/whatevs ie MS’s cloud and subscriptions.

Now you belong us!

Linux being a Unix has NIS(+) for a directory or LDAP or AD or anything else you fancy. Ansible works for all mainstream OSs, including Windows.

So often I see people confusing and conflating authentication and authorisation, machine and session state configuration databases.

There are so many options it is almost impossible to know where to start!

Which distro is the VM running (is it even Linux)?

If you want the VM to use the host’s VPN then you will need some routing and perhaps NAT/masquerade. This is non trivial to sort out. Can the VM have its own VPN connection to your supplier?

You are starting to reach the point where VLANs/subnets and separate routers (real or VM) may be required. Depending what you use as your ISP router, we might be able to get a solution together - so what model is it and do you have any switches?

Lemmy is quite good at not being too “tribal”. Why not embrace a message as expressed, instead of worrying about where it is … posted?

For me, one of the worst issues affecting t’internets is tribalism. Us humans are hardwired to go all in on tribal affiliation. It is generally harder to find inclusive measures than it is to find exclusive measures.

If you are here then you may not be exclusively: Firefox user ⊆browser user ⊆human. Note that browser user can have multiple browsers.

IANAL but I do have a fair handle on consumer rights in the UK.

In the UK the price displayed is “an invitation to treat”. There are other laws requiring the price stated being the price paid, ie it must include all taxes etc. Prices per unit seem to be an industry “lol” sorry “best” practice here, rather than legislated for - it is a bit randomly applied.

If you keep your wits about you, you can do real comparative shopping. For example: in Somerset, Somerset produced Brie is cheaper in Tesco than French Brie. I can’t remember if French Cheddar is cheaper than Somerset Cheddar or even if it exists. Obviously, there is the brand thing too to consider.

Anyway, the “invitation to treat” is not a binding contract. It is only a form of introduction to one. You see the price and might think OK, I like that and take the item to the check out. If the item was miss priced the shop may try to amend it. If you pay for the item then you are considered to have accepted the invitation to treat, the bargain is made and related duties are discharged.

That’s sort of the central doctrine behind how you flog stuff for money hereabouts. There are lots of fluffy consumer related legislation to try and ensure it is all fair but in my opinion, no one has bothered to teach us proles about how a sodding contract is formed. All that extra legislation would be no longer needed if everyone understood … where they stand!

It doesn’t help when you hear stories of firms required to honour ridiculous prices due to silly accidents. You do not get to buy a Dyson Funky Biscuit Crumb Sucker 1000 for 20p because you Sno Pake’d out a few decimal places or an employee answered a phone call mid reprice. You get the idea.

Invitation to treat (price tag): £10.99 for a bottle of wine (with a £9.49 Tesco card offer price writ large) Go to check out: £10.99 - 1.50 (but we get to suck on your data, sorry you get a discount via your Tesco brand loyalty card) Pay: £10.99 now and get a £1.50 rebate as a voucher that only works at Tesco, probably. The voucher will expire in three weeks time.

Here the contract was successfully formed. A good was transferred from Tesco to you for … some money and you might be 1.50 better off too. All a bit murky. That’s why we have consumer legislation and why you and I need to now what on earth it is and how it protects us.

Please do a little research before trying random stuff. After checking to see if you are actually using the iwlwifi module, why not find out a bit about whether the mentioned param. is available to you and what it does:

Am I using the module. If the output from this is blank, then no:

$ lsmod | grep iwlwifi
iwlwifi               622592  1 iwlmvm
cfg80211             1331200  3 iwlmvm,iwlwifi,mac80211

Also verify with lspci -k as above:

$ lspci -k | grep iwlwifi -A2 -B2
        DeviceName: WLAN
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Raptor Lake PCH CNVi WiFi
        Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
        Kernel modules: iwlwifi
00:15.0 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller #0 (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Alder Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller

# modinfo iwlwifi
   ...
parm:           swcrypto:using crypto in software (default 0 [hardware]) (int)
parm:           11n_disable:disable 11n functionality, bitmap: 1: full, 2: disable agg TX, 4: disable agg RX, 8 enable agg TX (uint)
parm:           amsdu_size:amsdu size 0: 12K for multi Rx queue devices, 2K for AX210 devices, 4K for other devices 1:4K 2:8K 3:12K (16K buffers) 4: 2K (default 0) (int)
parm:           fw_restart:restart firmware in case of error (default true) (bool)
parm:           nvm_file:NVM file name (charp)
parm:           uapsd_disable:disable U-APSD functionality bitmap 1: BSS 2: P2P Client (default: 3) (uint)
parm:           enable_ini:0:disable, 1-15:FW_DBG_PRESET Values, 16:enabled without preset value defined,Debug INI TLV FW debug infrastructure (default: 16) (uint)
parm:           bt_coex_active:enable wifi/bt co-exist (default: enable) (bool)
parm:           led_mode:0=system default, 1=On(RF On)/Off(RF Off), 2=blinking, 3=Off (default: 0) (int)
parm:           power_save:enable WiFi power management (default: disable) (bool)
parm:           power_level:default power save level (range from 1 - 5, default: 1) (int)
parm:           disable_11ac:Disable VHT capabilities (default: false) (bool)
parm:           remove_when_gone:Remove dev from PCIe bus if it is deemed inaccessible (default: false) (bool)
parm:           disable_11ax:Disable HE capabilities (default: false) (bool)
parm:           disable_11be:Disable EHT capabilities (default: false) (bool)

sysfs is a pseudo filesystem with lots of info in it. cat the files here:

$ ls -l /sys/module/iwlwifi/parameters/

… to see what your current values are set at. You can install sysfstools and run this for a neat report:

$ systool -vm iwlwifi
Module = "iwlwifi"

  Attributes:
     ...
  Parameters:
    11n_disable         = "0"
    amsdu_size          = "0"
    bt_coex_active      = "Y"
    disable_11ac        = "N"
    disable_11ax        = "N"
    disable_11be        = "N"
    enable_ini          = "16"
    fw_restart          = "Y"
    led_mode            = "0"
    nvm_file            = "(null)"
    power_level         = "0"
    power_save          = "N"
    remove_when_gone    = "N"
    swcrypto            = "0"
    uapsd_disable       = "3"

xfs has reflinks. That means you can copy huge wodges of data nearly for free on one filesystem. For backup systems this is a killer feature. Veeam rolling up incremental backups into the last full happens in seconds because pointers to blocks are juggled around rather than the data blocks themselves.

xfs has been around for a very, very long time. I use it for larger filesystems eg Nextcloud, Zoneminder and the like (and Veeam backup repos that are not object storage). I use ext4 by default.

pfSense boxes - zfs because the alternative is ufs.

RPi - OverlayFS (with ext4 and tmpfs) gets you a generally read only filesystem with changes held in RAM. Ideal for kiosks, appliances and keeping memory sticks alive.

Windows - NTFS, it works well and has streams and there aren’t many other options (ReFS is a bit new but it does have reflinks)

That looks like a cherry picked starting point. Read the whole thread for the full context.

fwiw, I don’t think anyone comes out looking particularly good. However, attempting to describe Frenck as infamous here and now is a bit rich. That minor disagreement all happened during the pandemic and I’m sure we have all passed a lot of water since then.

“Gilfoyle” is an anagram of Cthulu.

This is from 2004: https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/ibm-thinkpad-x31 It will chew amps (electricity). Recycle it as best you can. Grab a modern box instead.

Unless sparks are free where you live, this beast will become a liability very quickly.