PDP11

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!

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

** 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.

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.

2.4ghz - yes a mess in my area too. But mostly from neighbors who figure out how to change channels, and putting theirs "in between" two others which appears to be vacant. Causing major sideband interference to other users on either side! It's too hard to tell them that the system was designed to have channels on top of each other in congested areas, and be better off without sideband interference. Oh well. One thing I can do is identify carriers in use by things that don't actually transmit much data - like wireless printers, and put my carrier on top of those. Anyway, made the switch to 5ghz years back and it's so much nicer. But still, if you have a preference, and see ID's that are obviously wireless printers and such, those are good targets while still being "neighborly" to them.

Noise has only been an issue sometimes when running high-power rf getting into the gpio line cabling making it go deaf or garbled data. Fixed with ferrites, but the sd card and sbc itself stayed alive.

Nice info! On a side note, it makes me wonder if anyone having problems with RFI, especially on gpio pins etc. Wonder if the random selection of switching wall-warts usually powering our sbc's have no idea what rfi filtering - either in or out - is, and how it may be affecting things. Maybe testing the noise floor against a linear supply might be fun. I know for my ham radio stuff, I usually have to incorporate ferrite materials not only on the output leads, but also prevent the warts from getting back into the house and/or each other with something like a Tripp-Lite Isobar for the ac outlets. Currently testing: I applied Deoxit-D5 with a q-tip to my sd card contacts, and while wet exercised the jack with a few insertions, waited about 30 seconds and wiped it off with a rag. Yay - it still boots! I'll let you know if I wake up to a rubber stick of gum in the morning, or if it falls apart shortly...

One Potato, two Potato: I picked up the smaller 1gb board as a backup to my 2gb Potato running: Linux lepotato 4.19.20-meson64 #5.75 SMP PREEMPT Fri Feb 8 10:08:40 CET 2019 aarch64 GNU/Linux So thanks for fixing that issue for the 1gb boards! I also pulled up a browser to push it a little, and am impressed with the swap tuning/optimization even when using just the sd card. An emmc is in my future, but for now on a casual use basis, I can't tell much of a difference in responsiveness between either the 1 or 2gb version for medium duty use. Nice work. It's why I like Armbian for tweaking the internals as compared to just a standard install. I think attention to hard core swap tuning paid off so I don't have to mess with it! No problem with a wireless dongle (model EDUP-AC-1619 [Realtek RTL8811AU]), even when hotplugged. Mind blown. Sometimes on the 5.8g side, I'll have to connect to a "hidden" network that actually isn't hidden, and has good signal strength once connected. Or even if the 5.8ghz signal is not detected, it *eventually* finds and connects. Who knows if it's the network manager, driver, or whatever. Not a showstopper, no big deal. Small beans. Monitor: 22-inch HP22CWA. Armbian looks great with default monitor settings. Note: I still power-off in the terminal (tricking the blob) using sudo shutdown -H now and everything shuts down nicely leaving only the red led on the Potato illuminated, and the display falls asleep. I don't use the XFCE4 shutdown, logout, or restart functions but rely on the terminal instead. You guys are rockin' my Potatoes!

Heh, what was that saying? "The craft so long, the lyfe so short..." I'm still blown away at the amount of boards you guys support, officially and unofficially. I'd go totally insane. I really enjoyed your recent BalcCon and Tuxcon video presentations! Thanks for doing those, it's inspiring.

It's *amazing* what you can find reading the Armbian documentation! I dig the shell, even old-school in a virtual terminal or minimal server type setup. Normally that means going through some squinty-eyed hoops to get the Terminus console font installed with larger sizes in the first place on large monitors. Wait - what's this? sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup I did this in a virtual terminal, and allowed setup to pick the right character set for me. Then I blasted the framebuffer with the largest Terminus font size allowed. Perfection! Not a big deal to most, but having this be part of the standard distribution image made my day. Soooo easy. thanks!

SPI flash? I'm not dev so can't say directly, but I've booted from spinning rust to most other forms of any flash that was bootable. Heh, the out-of-box install looks spartan, but one takes it as far as they want. Like Armbian, I'm fascinated by whats under the hood. btw, a special shout out to Tkaiser et al concerning the sd cards. Before I had my Potato, I got schooled by you guys on the cards, controllers, official sd card formatter and the like. Saved me from flailing around on quite a few non-Armbian projects when I was just a lurker.

As much as I love Armbian, I'm also interested in the Tinycore project - not as competition, but as a slightly different discipline with a different outlook. Rather than merely reproduce what can be found at the project site, I'll run over a few quick concepts. Maybe you'll find it interesting as well. In a nutshell - what makes it tiny is that it is basically a kernel, which then relies upon Busybox for the shell/file/unix utilities, including init. You add on as much or little as you like, although there is the total basic commandline / shell offering, or lightweight Xvesa gui desktop to get started. If you want a full blown X11 setup, you can do that too. But it is more than that - relying on a ram-based filesystem, which can include on-demand, and changes to your userland are done with persistent storage. That means no bit-rot. Totally goof up your configurations? Just don't save your changes on exit / logout. There are 3 similar versions - Tinycore 32/64 bit - custom made by devs/users, Dcore relying on Debian/Ubuntu, and Picore for RPI's. Other limited board support is there but not super active. But still basically kernel, busybox utils and init, and you take that as far as you want to go. http://www.tinycorelinux.net/ Most quickie "install and boot" reviews online show systems that haven't actually adjusted their system or screen resolution. Just because it's called Tinycore, doesn't mean your screen (or config.txt file or whatever) has to be microscopic. Again - it is not meant to "compete" with Armbian, but just a different way of looking at things - which is always good for inspiration on both sides. Hint for those digging out an RPI from the closet - don't forget to resize your partition after install. Most importantly, it has the same sort of small dev vibe to it like Armbian, which is the *real* reason to run anything...

No problem - for me what I donated to was the project, the people, and not necessarily the specific ARM hardware/software support. The devs here are certainly passionate, as well as the users, and that passion is what I donated to. I think there is a lot of unspoken appreciation for the work under the hood, but unless one raises their voice, or contributes in some fashion, it can become easy to be discouraged and wonder what's the point? It's not about the money. If you use Armbian, lurkers drop a little donation to keep it up and running. It's one small way to let the devs know they aren't operating in a vacuum.

Donated about two days ago. The community "vibe" was part of it, and also a a somewhat restrained anti-rpi kept to a minimum, prompted me. (I'm a big "Pi-Core" / Dcore / Tinycore fan as well. I don't run Raspbian much as PiCore fascinates me much more instead). For me, it's just as much of a cool community helping each other out, as it is the hardware itself. I see similarities between the vibe of Armbian, Tinycore, and even Busybox, fullfilling the small-ish group centric thing that our originators, Ken Thompson / Dennis Ritchie / Doug McIlroy / Brian Kernighan and the whole host of others who had the "drive" to do something unique and interesting and helpful for others.... Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I can feel a common thread going waaay back.