cheap laptop suggestions that will boot to ubuntu without hassle

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 28 November 2019 13:25:11 Liam Proven wrote:

> On Thu, 28 Nov 2019 at 19:07, Gene Heskett <gheskett at shentel.net> 
wrote:
> > That hasn't hit me yet, Liam. But I also use a minimum of a 5 amp
> > supply too.
>
> It's bitten a couple of friends of mine who use them for remote
> monitoring: i.e. boxes you can't get at. Some have killed cards so
> hard you can't even list them on other machines.
>
> Also there's a "fun" new glitch on the RP4: a certain  screen res
> disables wifi (!)
>
> https://www.enricozini.org/blog/2019/himblick/raspberry-pi-4-loses-wif
>i-at-2560x1440-screen-resolution/
>
> They are complex little beasts.
>
> > so I have setup a few gigs of swap on an ssd plugged into a usb to
> > sata adapter and turn off the file.
>
> I use ZRAM on mine. No wear and no USB load.
>
> > Debian puts an arm64 kernel on the pi for buster, but I've not found
> > it as stable as the raspbian armhf builds, which so far have run
> > from power bump to power bump even if its months. IRQ latency is
> > less on the armhf's anyway, an advantage for my LinuxCNC app.
>
> There's a lot of stuff in Raspbian I didn't want so mine ran Lubuntu.
> Not used it in a while, though.
>
> > blister pack card of one disclosed there was a diff. IIRC one was
> > marked SDHC and one was marked SDHCX. SDHC worked, even dd couldn't
> > write to the SDHCX.
>
> Do you mean SDXC? That uses ExFAT. Linux supports that fine:
>
> https://itsfoss.com/mount-exfat/
>
> Anyway, ExFAT is going FOSS:
>
> https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-readies-exfat-patents-for-linu
>x-and-open-source/
>
Universe isn't in the raspi.list.  That and my rt kernel isn't that new:

pi at rpi4:/etc/apt $ uname -a
Linux rpi4 4.19.71-rt24-v7l+ #1 SMP PREEMPT RT Thu Oct 10 15:22:22 EDT 
2019 armv7l GNU/Linux

Locally built right on the rpi4, new enough for full speed 1920x1080 60 
fps video. And I didn't have to donate any blood to build it. FWIW the 
radio is turned off to keep a jerk neighbors cell phone out of my 
system. He's got some sort of a hacking proggy that walks thru in 30 
seconds after I change a 25 char passwd. I had it bridged to the net in 
the rpi3b, but not to the rpi3b. I get 300gigs a month, normally use 
about 30, but he ran it to over 100gb when I discovered it one month 
about a year ago. Turned off the radios as I'm all wired here, enabling 
only the one in dd-wrt if my boys are visiting so they can get online 
with their phones.

Anyway, it appears I am having much better results than you're 
experiencing. OTOH, my use target, while quite unusual, is a much 
narrower target.  And the rpi4 is working tons faster than the 3 its 
replacing.

My biggest bandwidth problem ATM is all the search bots on this ball of 
rock and salt water have now decided to not just index my site, but 
download and mirror it all, repeatedly, thereby DDOSing my upload 
bandwitch, so I'm watching the log, and banning any bot with a /24, but 
it looks like to stop all of yandex or semrush, it will take at least 12 
nn.0.0.0/8 to get em all.  Persistant a/h's.  But at least I can serve 
up the pi stuff I've built. That is the reason I put all that where it 
could be pulled and used by other rpi4 folks who want to run machines 
with it. You will have to ask me where it is though.

Thanks Liam.
>
> --
> Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
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