The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Curry Teafag]

Were you live booting the usb drive the entire time? It sounds like the iso image got corrupted, which could be a failed download but you never specified if you had it successfully boot until two days later

I had installed it on a USB SSD. Which is, BTW, something that some distros won't even allow you to do for no apparent reason.

 

[analrapist]

some distros won't even allow you to do for no apparent reason

Possibly initramfs issues. You probably need some module installed for your rootfs.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

What is that weirdo talking about? Stallman has maintained that the system be called "GNU/Linux" since 1994, with GNU itself officially adopting it in early '95. Earliest mentions date back as far as 1992. I remember it from the late 90s when a friend got interested in this stuff and started propagating it (and correcting the rest of us).

That's not what he is talking about. He is talking about the "actually what you are referring to is gnu/Linux" copypasta. Not the name gnu/Linux.

He has a video before this one going over what he could find on the first time that copypasta was used. Then people did some digging resulting in this video.

 

[Curry Teafag]

Possibly initramfs issues. You probably need some module installed for your rootfs.

Or, like, distro people need to stop telling users how to live their lives and use their own machines.
"Nooooo Anon, staaaappp, you just can't install that to a USB drive! It's gonna be sloooooowww!"
This BS needs to stop. Even Windows Server will run from a USB drive, if you use the Windows To Go hack.

That's not what he is talking about. He is talking about the "actually what you are referring to is gnu/Linux" copypasta. Not the name gnu/Linux.

He has a video before this one going over what he could find on the first time that copypasta was used. Then people did some digging resulting in this video.

Well, if it's that specific text he presented, then fine. The name itself, and its use by RMS, is a lot older, though.

 

[Betonhaus]

I had installed it on a USB SSD. Which is, BTW, something that some distros won't even allow you to do for no apparent reason.

How did you install it? The error message sounds like you're still booting from the installation iso and not a properly installed partition. If the iso is not marked read only and your setup is wrong you could've ended up installing updates to the installation media or otherwise editing the iso which would cause it to fail the self test.

 

[Curry Teafag]

How did you install it? The error message sounds like you're still booting from the installation iso and not a properly installed partition. If the iso is not marked read only and your setup is wrong you could've ended up installing updates to the installation media or otherwise editing the iso which would cause it to fail the self test.

It's actually possible that I'm confusing this one for some other installation. I might have had Mint running for two days as a live ISO. It's been so many distros I had tried out in a short period of time, including some BSDs. Did you know that OpenBSD still has the same user-unfriendly installer it had 25 years ago?

Anyway, that error popped up when I logged my user out. The PC was unusable at that point, and had to be rebooted. You know, this kind of stuff shouldn't even happen in the first place. It's like that Windows 98 scanner presentation.

 

[Slav Power]

Would be pretty sweet if these kind of operations ended up bumping a few % points toward Linux on that OS marketshare graph.

At best it'll contribute to a few .% points. The vast majority of W10 systems will stay on W10, some will slowly move to W11, and if anyone's gonna be jumping off of the MS ship, it's going to be either Apple or mobile. The only thing Steve knows about Linux is that it's not Windows and that he hates Windows. So does most of his audience and the people that watch that video. You don't want these sorts of people using Linux just to see a market share percentage go up. Besides, a lot of these refurbs meet the criteria for Windows 11 and come with OEM licenses for it so if you don't have a Canonical representative forcing Ubuntu down people's throats like a certain Canonical employee then they will be running Windows 11 just fine, so W10 EOL won't affect those machines. Not to mention that millions of machines will stay on W10 and the drop-off will be even slower than with 7 or XP due to how close 10 and 11 are to each other.

Remember: the only reality where Linux takes over Windows in the StatCounter market share is the one where you are outright banned from using Windows. No matter how shit Windows gets, it won't lose market share the way you think it will. Plus, the market share is in no way a thing anyone should ever care. It's in no way a sign of which OS is "better" (Makitas and Milwaukees put holes in walls the same way) It's just anecdotal trivia. Android still thwarts desktop on those statistics and they never account whether or not people are moving away from desktops towards smartphones. It's all e-peen measuring contest bullshit.

This BS needs to stop. Even Windows Server will run from a USB drive, if you use the Windows To Go hack.

I feel like the only reason USB sticks are still relevant is because they're piss cheap and convenient, but at this point if I needed good portable storage, I'd much rather buy an NVMe enclosure and an NVMe drive. 256GB/512GB/1TB/2TB worth of storage in a compact form factor that you just hook up with a USB cable. Whether you need portable storage or you want to install an OS on it. Obviously USB sticks are still decent for shit like Ventoy, especially if you have an excess surplus of them like I do.

Besides, the bigger concern with USB sticks is the flash memory longevity. Shit handles R/W's way worse than SSD's, and guess what constantly R/W's like a motherfucker to the point where it can kill a flash drive.

 

[Curry Teafag]

I'm not using USB sticks but enterprise-grade Hynix SSDs with MLC NAND. I bought them used, but they are still in good shape. The disk I use for Ventoy is a new Samsung PM model (likewise, MLC NAND). Connection happens via StarTech.com SATA-to-USB adapters, which aren't the lowest end, either.

 

[Seasoned News Reporter]

Or, like, distro people need to stop telling users how to live their lives and use their own machines.
"Nooooo Anon, staaaappp, you just can't install that to a USB drive! It's gonna be sloooooowww!"
This BS needs to stop. Even Windows Server will run from a USB drive, if you use the Windows To Go hack.

Just to chime in a little bit about this kind of thing (not specifically windows server). For one thing I'll ignore the shit. This kind of thing is really only something that the average person is gonna concern themselves with. Now if they have a friend that is tech literate they should tell that friend (Ignore this shit. Install anyway). I had installed ProxMox at one point on an old ass AIO desktop. I'm talking windows xp days with 6GBS of DDR2 laptop ram and a dual core mobile intel cpu. You can do ALOT of shit with old hardware. I'm sure someone asshole would have told me I need 16gb of ram to run proxmox and any services after the fact. Nope. You can literally run a wireguard instance with like 1gb of ram. Hell you can run a pi-hole dns instance with half a gig actually though a gig makes it nicer. 1 vcore to each service and bam, you're now running 2 services on proxmox on some ancient underpowered ass hardware.

People really need to learn to stop telling people what they can and can't do with their hardware. People don't learn if you just tell them "Oh it can't do this because I said so." That's not confirming it can't do it. That's just you saying it can't because you think that. Show them it can't do it. You need to show them and these fucks won't. They're just as much of a consoomer as the people they'd probably bitch about. (I'm also a consoomer but who isn't these days?)

 

[Zeftax]

Watching LOTR, notice stuttering, run SMART. Pre-fail read error rate and a bunch of other stuff.
Well, I don't think I have any critical data on this drive that is not backed up elsewhere, but I definitely do not have the space to back up all my torrents as well.
I just hope I can finish watching the film, you have served me well for the last 7 years, even outlasted the root SSD I bought alongside you. (yes, the failing drive is indeed a seagate)

 

[Curry Teafag]

I'm talking windows xp days with 6GBS of DDR2 laptop ram and a dual core mobile intel cpu. You can do ALOT of shit with old hardware. I'm sure someone asshole would have told me I need 16gb of ram to run proxmox and any services after the fact. Nope. You can literally run a wireguard instance with like 1gb of ram. Hell you can run a pi-hole dns instance with half a gig actually though a gig makes it nicer. 1 vcore to each service and bam, you're now running 2 services on proxmox on some ancient underpowered ass hardware.

With Proxmox, you need less than 2 GiB for the base system without a swap partition, so 6 GiB should be more than fine to run a lot of things. Plus, you can always deploy a zswap, which is literally free RAM (albeit slower).

I have installed the full 16 GiB my Fujitsu thin client supports, but I've also installed a full-blown KDE with Chromium there, so I have the option to do configuration without a second PC. It's currently running an OpnSense that has 4.5 GiB allocated, and uses up to 10 GiB when running the config interface in Chromium, so there's still 6 GiB free plus a possible zswap extension.

 

[Seasoned News Reporter]

With Proxmox, you need less than 2 GiB for the base system without a swap partition, so 6 GiB should be more than fine to run a lot of things. Plus, you can always deploy a zswap, which is literally free RAM (albeit slower).

I have installed the full 16 GiB my Fujitsu thin client supports, but I've also installed a full-blown KDE with Chromium there, so I have the option to do configuration without a second PC. It's currently running an OpnSense that has 4.5 GiB allocated, and uses up to 10 GiB when running the config interface in Chromium, so there's still 6 GiB free plus a possible zswap extension.

I need to look into small scale computers again. I'd like to run proxmox again to setup a file server and a jellyfin instance. ALso probably run a pi-hole dns instance again.

I didn't know that about the zswap stuff actually. I never really bothered to look into swap stuff all that much and I probably should, if anything just to acquire more knowledge. Also how's the Fujitsu? Does it do anything different than competitors? I'm not familiar with thin clients as I rarely hear the term so I'm a bit curious now.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Open source bros. Its so bad.

Also the editing on this video is really annoying.

I'm just thinking. What would people even be able to do to put some kind of pressure on Google. The US government. Thanks to an allegedly, in my opinion completely bought out corrupt judge. Has said. Even though they are a monopoly. They won't do anything about it. Just cuz they didn't feel like it.

I know Google works with the Linux foundation. I'm wondering if people could put some kind of pressure on the Linux foundation. Or some other areas that Google has their hands in.

 

[Curry Teafag]

I didn't know that about the zswap stuff actually. I never really bothered to look into swap stuff all that much and I probably should, if anything just to acquire more knowledge.

Do it. I'd actually like to know how well it performes on that old AIO of yours.

Also how's the Fujitsu? Does it do anything different than competitors? I'm not familiar with thin clients as I rarely hear the term so I'm a bit curious now.

It's rock solid. In fact, it's made in Germany. No Chy-nah allowed.
Does run without any issues whatsoever. It's a true four-core but only supports a single RAM stick, so it's running in single-channel mode, and Memtest86 reported some laughable 7.5 GB/s (for comparison, my old gaming laptop from 2015 would reach almost 30 GB/s). It typically has some 10-20% load from the OpnSense, so there are still enough resources to play with. You can easily run a GUI on it, but I only recommend Linux or BSD, not Windows, due to insufficient performance. Original OS was Elux RP (an enterprise-only, special-purpose Linux distro), with Windows 10 IoT Enterprise also being available.

 

[Betonhaus]

It's actually possible that I'm confusing this one for some other installation. I might have had Mint running for two days as a live ISO. It's been so many distros I had tried out in a short period of time, including some BSDs. Did you know that OpenBSD still has the same user-unfriendly installer it had 25 years ago?

Anyway, that error popped up when I logged my user out. The PC was unusable at that point, and had to be rebooted. You know, this kind of stuff shouldn't even happen in the first place. It's like that Windows 98 scanner presentation.

weird.
The "Failed to start casper-md5check Verify Live ISO checksums" error typically occurs on Linux systems, particularly Linux Mint and Ubuntu-based distributions, after a system update or during boot. This service is designed to verify the integrity of a Live ISO system by checking checksums against a file located at /cdrom/md5sum.txt, but it is unnecessary on installed systems where the Live ISO is no longer in use. As such, the error is generally non-critical and does not affect system functionality, though it can be disruptive during boot.

The most common and recommended solution is to disable the service to prevent the error from appearing at boot. This can be done by running the following commands in a terminal:

sudo systemctl disable casper-md5check.service
sudo systemctl stop casper-md5check.service
sudo systemctl mask casper-md5check.service

These commands disable the service from starting at boot, stop any currently running instance, and mask the service to prevent manual activation. After executing these commands, a system reboot will resolve the issue, and the error should no longer appear in the boot logs.

 

[Curry Teafag]

Thanks, that's very helpful. I may give it another try in the future.

 

[Zeftax]

I just hope I can finish watching the film

Aaand it died, I could not finish the film.

 

[Seasoned News Reporter]

Do it. I'd actually like to know how well it performes on that old AIO of yours.

I pretty much just use it as a monitor now for my old pc but reading about zswap I have to imagine it would be pretty good since proxmox itself doesn't have any kind of gui outside of a local web page. I might take a look into getting a smaller SSD later down the line to put in it again try spinning it up again.

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

I'm just thinking. What would people even be able to do to put some kind of pressure on Google. The US government. Thanks to an allegedly, in my opinion completely bought out corrupt judge. Has said. Even though they are a monopoly. They won't do anything about it. Just cuz they didn't feel like it.

There may be hope in regulation, such as the EU Digital Markets Act, that could be used to force companies, like Google, to create rules that do not gatekeep third party developers. The GDPR doesn't exist in the U.S., but it did effect U.S. user privacy. Companies tend to want to save themselves legal trouble and complexities by making rules universal..

 

[CheepMeds]

At best it'll contribute to a few .% points. The vast majority of W10 systems will stay on W10, some will slowly move to W11, and if anyone's gonna be jumping off of the MS ship, it's going to be either Apple or mobile. The only thing Steve knows about Linux is that it's not Windows and that he hates Windows. So does most of his audience and the people that watch that video. You don't want these sorts of people using Linux just to see a market share percentage go up. Besides, a lot of these refurbs meet the criteria for Windows 11 and come with OEM licenses for it so if you don't have a Canonical representative forcing Ubuntu down people's throats like a certain Canonical employee then they will be running Windows 11 just fine, so W10 EOL won't affect those machines. Not to mention that millions of machines will stay on W10 and the drop-off will be even slower than with 7 or XP due to how close 10 and 11 are to each other.

Remember: the only reality where Linux takes over Windows in the StatCounter market share is the one where you are outright banned from using Windows. No matter how shit Windows gets, it won't lose market share the way you think it will. Plus, the market share is in no way a thing anyone should ever care. It's in no way a sign of which OS is "better" (Makitas and Milwaukees put holes in walls the same way) It's just anecdotal trivia. Android still thwarts desktop on those statistics and they never account whether or not people are moving away from desktops towards smartphones. It's all e-peen measuring contest bullshit.

Sure, I just tried to be a bit tongue-in-cheek.
But I still think sprinkling the world with essentially free samples of pre-built linux "web-browser stations" could be a meaningful piece of a larger domino effect in shaping the popular view that Linux devices can be something that not only just werks but also doesn't have such a hard line of obsolescence.

Right now, even if the OS is free, I still see going into BIOS to enable virtualization and/or disabling secure boot a huge ask for most normies. Devices like these sound like a neat way of circumventing that barrier.