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PDP11

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  1. Hey guys no hard feelings - this is just a feature-request area just zinging some ideas about - like a plan-b type of thing. In hindsight, I think I'm just paranoid - not fully trusting *any* corporation too much having lived through the ATT/BSDI thing. And coming back for round-2 to try and get the pound of flesh with the whole SCO debacle. Somewhere in the back of my mind I guess I'm waiting for the shoe to drop a 3rd time. Perhaps many of us geezers may feel similar, and any dinking around with Unix means an agenda comes with it. Still happy with Armbian as is!
  2. The request for a Devuan option was just to give some thought for a way out in case one is forced into a corner by any upcoming events or code-blockers. Fortunately, Devuan is not some kid's re-spin of Debian, but is a project maintained by actual Debian developers. But yeah, like all projects, manpower is always the 600 pound gorilla. For sure, I'm not going off on a socialogical bend either. For example, this reply comes from a Chromebook, which is using systemd to my knowledge, so it would be highly hypocritical of me to go cheerleading against it. I'm just trying to think a few years ahead into the future - just in case. *If* there comes a time when systemd scope creep becomes intolerable (it's more than just init now), Devuan might be a reasonable option. Will this creep extend to hardware itself? Redhat-Inside stickers? Are we cool with that? Maybe so. As a geezer, I'm just trying to think about options. If I want it bad enough, I'll just have to "shut up and hack" since we're blessed by having full source code. (Many thanks to Keith Bostic [CSRG - BSD] for seeing that through - they could have just closed up shop and called it a day - we're pretty lucky for that.) Straying OT again - but of course thanks to RMS - even though Keith and RMS didn't see totally eye to eye, there was enough cooperation to help see that through - well before the Linus days when he was only hacking a Vic-20.
  3. Devuan site-hackers caught! I had a talk with the main perpetrator of the takedown. When he found out I had the power to send him back in time to this Pr1me computer to do his evil deeds, the site was restored immediately. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJeu3LCo-6A Phht. Kids these days.
  4. Devuan on ARM is up! Ok, so all I had was an RPI3, but yeah it's a base system. Classic root/toor . You do the rest. Noted that /etc/fstab might need some Armbian love to save your sd card. Crusty old 1.22 ver of busybox included as a catastrophe fallback. Yeah, replace that if you like with an up to date version pronto. Beginners who cut n paste docs might get frustrated by not seeing an mmcblk0 device from some other box when dd'ing the image, and using /dev/sdx initially. So there you go. Kernel 4.9.16, classic init style. Whaddya know? It works! Rock systemd if you want, but nice to know Devuan is more about choice than the init drama itself. (other than luser fanboy stuff...). DIAGNOSTICS: Interestingly enough, my usb mouse kept on disconnecting and reconnecting at random intervals spewing itself on the console while doing so. Makes me wonder if something like that could be *hidden* by systemd constantly babysitting it and only a binary log review would reveal it? Dunno - too many variables - luser talk. Might be interesting to bring up the same systems with different inits to see who's talking and who's not.
  5. Remember when sites were written to be "Lynx friendly"? I still use it to this day as a local file browser appending a period afterwards lynx . It's a little more lightweight than mc ... Getting a bit OT again - but for small SBC boards, I dig busybox. Don't need VIM? busybox vi Or just make a link to it to call it from a link. HTTP server? Busybox will do that too. All sorts of stuff. Unfortunately the busybox included with most Debian-based distros is the old and very crusty ver 1.22, and not the latest, which I usually compile myself - or grab a prebuilt binary from Busybox site directly when I'm lazy. And an init if you want that too. Anyway, straing too far. I'll fire up the aarch64 image for the RPI later as I don't have the other boards. I'll bet it could definitely use the Armbian touch. Well, Allwinner boards that is...
  6. Heh, no sweat. Good to know about the board since I don't want to unduly blame systemd. But I get it more than some. Ok, it aint Unix in it's purest form. Been through that before -- "System V - consider it standard" pins being thrown in the trash by the BSD crowd. Streams / sockets et all .. Ugh. As punishment for the defacement, I'm going to make those guys load Software Tools on a Pr1me computer, and brush up on their Ratfor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_tools_users_group I'll see if an image will come up when access is restored.
  7. You know I thought I had this under control after the initial controversy died down and everyone succumbed. I was happy. But now, with something as simple as the shutdowns in Armbian XFCE not working on my Potato to full completion (it just goes into a reboot loop) - it has me in a crisis of conscience about it. Sure, I can use the terminal to do a proper shutdown. Not a problem. I LIKE using the terminal. But now, is the xfce shutdown an issue with systemd, or is it because XFCE is not "systemd compliant" somehow? Perhaps it isn't a "board issue" at all ? Maybe too much caffeine again, but I'm a little stirred up when I thought I had it under control. :)
  8. Clarification: The point here is that with an SBC running just to monitor the temperature of your beer-fridge, then maybe a classic style of init, say with Devuan - might work just fine.
  9. Right - we're all pretty sick of systemd controversy, and no intent to rehash that all here again with mostly marketed fanboy-ism on either side. Without trying to be a geezer that want's to go back to the old days, I think that at least offering an interesting choice for Armbian using Devuan and the classic style of init might be worthwhile. An interesting perspective might be seen from our BSD brethren, who of course don't take to systemd lightly, yet still see things interesting they may want to incorporate: Benno Rice provides an interesting talk about it. Hey, let's not start yet another fanboy war about it that will never get resolved. All I'm saying is maybe a Devuan based Armbian might be interesting.
  10. Oh yeah - I cut my teeth on vi with a 2-seat version unbundled version of Xenix. Thought the code was bad / monitor broken when I saw all the tildes on the left side of the screen. Then ftp'ed a whole box of floppies to try Slackware. Same thing! Thought it was nuts to run a unix workstation just to use kermit to access a shell .... so with the same excitement of getting my zone mail hour dos batch file not to crash with all the related components, I almost cried when I *finally* got my sendmail config to work on the slack box! Little ot: no disrepect to the OpenBSD guys with what appears to be a cold philosophy of shut-up-and-hack. It actually is meant to be a brutally efficient *time saver* for both devs and users (consult our docs first). So it's not a social-club - but that doesn't mean that personal interaction is full of problems. I see a similar vibe here with Armbian. Just a warning for lurkers, or rpi'ers who may see some unsavory comments - just grow some skin, and your new arm board will be just as much fun. Like this little song about it: http://www.openbsd.org/songs/songsh.ogg Being hard core doesn't mean you can't have fun with it.
  11. I was too - but those two rules above have stuck with me all these years and served me well in the future.. Ah, good times. The first time your system actually doesn't crash during zone mail hour. Tossing mail. Pulling in echoes. 9600 bp$ modems. DESQview. Mailreaders and pointmail. Dedicated phone line(s). It was expensive to be dedicated to it - compared to today. Heh, anyone balking at the price of an SBC or computer gear of today might want to flip through some of the online BYTE or other mags of the day to get an idea of what bang-for-the-buck meant back then! Graduated from that to commercial unix shell-account running slrn to get real access to newsgroups .. the Fidonet philosophy saved me from a heart-attack there too.
  12. Just a tip for something that has helped me from getting a heart-attack over the many years of online discourse.... Back in the day (ugh-really?) there were only TWO rules for participation in the store-and-forward Fidonet system: 1) Thou shalt not excessively annoy others. 2) Thou shalt not be too easily annoyed. Breaking *either* rule, got you kicked out. Strangely enough, rule #2 was broken more often than #1. And it helps you grow a skin, no matter what is said. Most importantly, it keeps you hacking, and not getting a heart-attack. For Devs, maybe the OpenBSD philosophy can cut through some of the angst: 1) Here's what we're doing. Hope you like it. 2) Shut up and hack. Dunno - been through many Usenet and Fidonet flame-wars. Not worth it. DEC vs IBM vs Sun hardware yadda yadda. Binary only distributions (talk about blobs!), with per-seat / per-cpu, and "bundled" apart so that you don't even get a compiler, (and your department won't pay for licensing - hence the glee over GCC) - don't want to break open the Unix-wars again... The point is, these "disposable" SBC's aren't worth getting a heart attack about. Do what you love, but unless you are actually part of making your OWN board, don't get a heart-attack over it. Or over clueless users like me. Or devs that shouldn't even be reading this!
  13. Yeah, when I wrote that I had a bit too much caffeine. It was nice to see it as part of the standard image. At least the 6.0 version. Wonder what the holdups upstream are about V 7.1. ? Anyway, another discussion perhaps, and not a feature request any more.
  14. ** EDIT - noise alert - already covered by F3 utility *** Is there a shell script that one could recommend for newbies that would work similarly to the H2TESTW program? And if so, should it be included in Armbian - perhaps on a first-run even throwing up a big warning to the op? Kudos to you guys for putting all that work into SD card knowledge and programming into Armbian in the first place. In fact, the good engineering of sd card preservation with Armbian is what drew me to it initially. Heck, for my use case, I may never really need an emmc. Anyway, I'm just not up on what an up to date alternative to h2testw is these days. Edit #2: For kicks, uninstalled ver 6.0 and compiled the latest ver 7.1 from source https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3/releases/ f3read, f3write compiled ok, but had to edit the Makefile to get f3probe as a target too. To get that to work, had to install libudev-dev package, and then it all went well.
  15. What's ironic here is that it took an SBC board with only a shell for me to get the hang of RPN. I *dig* it now. I think I'm strange, but I try to *force* myself to use the unix BC or DC desk calculators. Since I could never get the hang of rpn while in school, or with a friend's bitchin hp calculator, I finally tried DC and whaddya know! I like rpn now - it makes sense. Stranger still is just grooving on what was provided back in '69/70 basically by Bob Morris and Lorinda Cherry. Whaddy'a know - it still works nice. Practice makes perfect, and my finger-memory skills using bc or dc is getting better and better. Sorry - had to get that out there. Had to show some cow-orkers tending a redhat box who were all crying about not having a calculator around anywhere. Showed 'em bc. They thought I was some sort of unix super genius. I laughed but kept quiet.
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