Any of you fucking larpers actually use a minimal system for day-to-day computing...

any of you fucking larpers actually use a minimal system for day-to-day computing? With minimal I mean doesn't jump up to 200W of power consumption when I open a text file. I'm talking minimal hardware here.

I keep looking at ARM computers for that but they're mostly retarded chinkware that's borderline impossible to set up with a mainline kernel. Every time I tried to get into shit like the Pi it ended up being a disappointment for various chink-engineering related reasons. My wish would be a minimal system that can do shell, some light graphics, browsing not required and no fucking fans. I don't think it's possible without x86 and the inherent bloat, botnet, fans and high power consumption that has. Why isn't this a thing in two-thousand-fucking-nineteen? Also none of the chinkware I looked at can drive anything higher than 1080p. What the shit is up with that?! I have a 4k monitor and sadly got fucking used to it. Should I go back to 4:3 screens Zig Forums? I just wanna simplify my life somewhat.

Other urls found in this thread:

newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0EP-00ED-00003
archive.is/hlezu
github.com/saitoha/libsixel
linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort
fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers
linux-sunxi.org/UART
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Kys

Just model your own processor, it is not that hard user. Or if it is, there are plenty of other soft microprocessors you can implement in an FPGA. You can even run linux on Xilinx's Microblaze. I'd recommend you take it a step further though, and write your own OS from scratch. If you're white, it's not that hard, but it would help if you were commanded by God to build such a temple.

It seems you are the larper here. You're basacally overengineering a fucking computer without realising even x86 processors have become better on every metric. Use x86 and jump ship if you manage to get everything working on another chip.

You need a Pentium, Joey. You can't just go around writing python scripts on ARM systems.

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Don't lie to yourself. If you actually wanted to simplify your life then you would be using fucking Windows 10.
The only reason to use Loonix is not being spied on and some narrow, obscure functionality that you probably don't need. And even then and with all the damn bugs, KDE is the only usable desktop environment. I know because I was a tilingfag, and then realized using a bare wm is fucking retarded.

More like getting cucked by your own computer.

newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0EP-00ED-00003

It only adds complexity to your life if you think about your privacy from microsoft. Otherwise he time you'll spend working around Linux, especially on a weak non x86 system, will be more than any update would take.

Redpill me on the Linux framebuffer. Is it a viable alternative to running a bloated X, why allowing to avoid being confined to pure text mode?

Is there anyone here using a oldish (U)SFF Dell Optiplex as a home server or NAS? Preferably without ME/AMT (though even the Core 2 ones seem to have ME, while anything older probably is Netburst based).

Yeah, why?

No it's not. Unless all you do is play mp3s and low res movies, read pdfs and browse the web with no javascript and masively broken CSS.
Friendly reminder that obsessing over "bloat" is a mental illness.

...

Yeah, I'm sure you're making 800k a year by editing K&R C with vim and then debugging it with gdb on a virtual tty. Faggot larper.

But user, what does it mean when you say that it's not hard if you're white? Why are whites better at building software?

It really amuses me when webdevs give their insights as to what they believe programming looks like. Hilarious, thanks for sharing.


Look around you Sandeep, everything was invented by white people.

Text mode is the final destination. Throw your movies and botnet away.

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High IQ, immensely creative and inventive. An autistic Finnish teenager feeling bored can accomplish more than any one of the billions of Asians. Fact.

Not him, but I was making good money exactly like that. Had a Thinkpad with 4:3 screen. Ran tmux on the console to have as many local ttys as needed, some in split-screen mode. Shit was cash. But times change and companies get cucked and decide to move their shit to Java/JS. It was just too good to last. Now I'm a weird antisocial NEET that collects text games.

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Oh, tell me then how development looks like for you without using Xorg. I'm genuinely curious.

The idea makes sense for me. I don't think it's about bloat in the technical sense it's more about bloat in the psychological sense. A clean environment free of distractions always makes me more productive. Might be an idea to have some normie device to consume movies and web and the framebuffer system for work and other serious computing. Clear distinction between two different systems might help further psychologically.

You can buy an actual good desktop with a Pentium or better from HP, Dell or Lenovo with that money. You dumb nigger.

...

So basically gcc, vim and gdb?
Also
Larp confirmed.

Just make a wm that fullscreens everything.

What?

I use Devuan ASCII (Systemd-free Debian) with Linux-Libre using FVWM as a window manager, and use several suckless programs (not including their coreutils thing, fine with GNU atm). I use Surf as my primary browser, and most things are done in a UNIX-y way (one example is I have no login manager and use a series of X11 conf files with `startx` (if I even use X)). I feel my computer is semi-minimalist due to this. I higly recommend you adopt what I have as a beginning to a greater minimalist system.

It was actually pretty common in the 90's to just do everything from the Unix shell, even if you had a Windows or Mac computer. Basically those were just used to run terminal software (like pic) or some telnet or ssh client, and you'd do everything on the server. And that's pretty much how I did most of my work even up to 10+ years ago. And it wasn't just C stuff, lots of Perl and SQL as well (backend stuff, I didn't like messing with PHP so much, but did it relucatantly sometimes).

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I use a sway/wayland on a pentium D 820 and 4GB DDR2 RAM. it pushes 1080p and is comfy.

You'll never need over 256Kb, user. Bill gates said so himself. Look at TempleOS, it is fully functional and a middle finger to modern computing and it is literally the most minimal. Fucks make bloat a requirement now.

Your problem is that you are trying to do everything on your ARM processor. The solution to said problem is setting up a distributed system so that your ARM computer/laptop is just a graphical front-end to your system and all your computational needs are met on another system. This isn't minimal if you use this by yourself, but if you get some friends you can all use the same CPU & file servers from different access points. This won't be sufficient to run "muh gaymes", but it's plenty for everything else.

Plan 9 is good for what this user is suggesting

Using text interfaces exclusively seems to be the only way to really use just wayland and not x11

That was because unless you were running Linux, you didn't have access to a local Unix environment. Cygwin, Mac OS X and the native ports of Apache and other software to Windows and Mac didn't exist.
So you had to make do with what you had. And even then, you see that some people used ncruses IDEs, file managers and other tools with as much features as it was possible to cram onto a text based UI.
But the kind of people who in this day and age wouldn't run an X server is against those things, because ncurses interfaces cannot be called from scripts, and again, because of their mental illness they're against any code that isn't absolutely necessary to perform basic tasks (without any regard for real-world efficiency, as opposed to the Unix ideal of efficiency of piping one minimalist program to another to build bigger tools, that doesn't work in the real world).

Literally just use an old pentium thinkpad running XP. Despite the p4 supposedly being a space heater, my laptop has a battery life of 4 to 6 hours with old batteries. Its definitely low power. Its not very bloated, not botnet, and not a power hog.


Gonna be a yikes from me. Why are you asking for minimal shit then you want some dumb zoomer technology? Honestly just use a notepad and a pencil and maybe you'll stop being a braindead screen zombie and use your brain for once rather than mindlessly editing linux config files.

maybe you are the brainless zombie

There is good reason doe
archive.is/hlezu

I'm cruising at around 36W on a 10 year old Core2Duo MacMini. I don't really need to do anything more than 1080p and the hard drive has been switched out to a more modern 500GB. I've given up on the ARM meme. Nvidia is the only company that makes boards with decent GPU drivers and they have no incentive to keep updating old hardware. I'm sure PowerVR is really slick on Android, but at the end of the day even a shitty Intel GMA950 GPU is better for running GNU/Lunix.

Well there's Midnight Commander, you can do just about anything with that. It even lets you transfer files over ftp or scp, or directly edit files on other computer. You can also setup custom menus and keybindings. Like for example, I have a user menu (F2) entry to run diff between panes:
d diff the selected files (or dirs) %view{ascii} echo diff -urN %s %D/%S
I used to have CVS entries in there and other stuff too, back when I was actually using it at work. But even now I always have an instance of mc open in screen or tmux on my local computer. It saves me a whole lot of time compared to doing everything from the shell exclusively. And I dont need any GUI file manager, this does everything.
For a few years I was using vifm (v0.5), but then it got all bloated and I didn't see the point of using it anymore. Instead I just configured mc to have vi-style keybindings.

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I tried to get into various ncurses-based filemanagers all the time but found it just quicker to use the shell directly. I don't spend that much time shoving files back and forth, to be honest. If I have a lots of file to sort or something, the problem is usually better solved in a script than in mc, although I'll always have mc installed since it's just so immensely familiar from the DOS days and it would feel wrong somehow not having it.

I have an AMD Kabini system, integrated graphics and 4 cores that are about as fast as a core2duo core on steroids.
Can drive 4k@60Hz just fine, via it's display port. Also have 8 GBs of RAM for bigger compilation jobs. (running Gentoo) the Board (soldered-on SoC included) was cheaper than some of the ARM boards. Downside is it needs tons of firmware blobs loaded by the kernel to work properly. Might or might not be botnet, it's too old to have PSP included though. Also you need fans. The ITX-Board came with a passive Heatsink on the SoC but will overheat when it's just a little bit warmer than normal. The board burns about 30-40W depending on load. It also comes with nice stuff like USB 3.0 ports and 4 SATA ports and all the luxuries ARMs usually don't have.

ARM is a meme and will not be good for general computing for a while. It's good with android and proprietary drivers, but that's all. Some older SoCs are mainlined but they're still terrible to set up and way too expensive for what they deliver. I feel you OP, I was looking into that direction quite often too. It's just not worth it. Maybe in a few years but as soon as ARM gets good enough to be usable for serious computing and also not dependant on blobs it will end up having shit like PSP or ME. Quote me on it if you want.

For no-X living:

YAFT: A framebuffer console which gives you 256 free defineable colors to make things a bit prettier. Recently it started to support sixels: github.com/saitoha/libsixel which basically is a format to print graphics directly to the console, including gifs, which is pretty cool and even usable in scripts. It's kinda slow though, as it doesn't use hardware acceleration.

DVTM: a "tiling window manager" for the shell if you will, be aware it's kinda buggy though. tmux and sorts probably works better. It focuses on only being a tiling terminal manager in the UNIX way and doesn't try to be dozens of other things like screen and tmux. For additional functionality (session attach/detach) there's abduco/dtach.

These are two, haven't felt pulled to a non-X living though as X works fine with the open source AMD drivers.

It is possible to keep productive like that if done in a sane way. For actual writing JS, it doesn't matter what you're using. As long as you can bribe your "team motivator" to give you a chance and as long as you are able to setup X and whatever elso software it depends on to test it.

You don't need any special driver blobs to run Firefox or LibreOffice on Linux/ARM. It just works. Even watching videos is fine, there's no need for blobs there. The Allwinner GPU blobs on sunxi are for the actual OpenGL acceleration, not the video decoding. I don't know what max resolution it can push, but I don't care either since I have an 4:3 display and intend to keep it that way. For sure you won't play fancy modern games on these boards, but I also don't care about that either. There's too many fun old games for me to give a rat's ass about pozzed modern shit.

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It's funny how nobody realized yet that anons precious 4k screen will just run fine in 1080p with no image degradation as 4k is literally 4x1080p

no arguing, 4k screens are fucking nice if HiDPI (depending on physical size) especially with well aliased and hinted fonts and high-res pictures of course look nicer on them. Doesn't matter for console livin' tho, as console fonts are bitmapped, even with fancy framebuffer in between. They'd just increase in scale, basically, which you would have to do on a 4k anyways, as the normal console fonts used are fucking tiny in 4k.

The only way he'd be fucked is when his screen does bicubic interpolation instead of nearest neighbor for scaling. That would look like shit, yes.


I'm curious, what kind of Allwinner do you have? From my experience they all run like garbage with browsers in Linux. Are linux browsers still so broken that they don't use any hardware acceleration? Man that's sad.

t. somebody who hasn't tried it

It's just an A20 (dual core 32-bit Cortex-A7 @ 1 GHz). There's no special hardware acceleration in browser, and anyway I don't want to play games/watch video in browser. All I need it for is online banking and ordering things, and stuff like that. Otherwise I use simple browsers like Lynx, Links2, w3m. For playing videos, I use mpv, it works fine even in the framebuffer console (just like pretty much any SDL program).

Bicubic is a bit more complex but same difference, will look like shit with bitmapped fonts. You want next/nearest neighbor.


intrigued, do you do any serious work on it, too?

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The dummy terminaly (Sandy Bridge Xeon with 8GB of RAM) can barely drive the 2 4k monitors I work on at work when all I do is SSH to a Haswell i7 to do all of my compilation. Why the fuck would I ever use shit minimal hardware when my job revolves around compiling software that takes 30 minutes to compile on relatively modern hardware like a 4790k?

No, I'm just a NEET now. But even when I did serious work, it wasn't anything that needed more than a text interface as I mentioned in >>1018780
And compiling stuff on A20 is of course not as fast as amd64, but I'm a madman who built NetBSD kernel on a class 2 microSD card that I had laying around (I didn't want to nuke my Devuan install, so used this spare card instead for playing with NetBSD). I'm working on getting a power supply now that's strong enough to attach sata disk to my board (it does have a sata port). That will be much nicer.

100k but yea this.

...

Widescreen is retarded marketing crap and we are poorer for being stuck with it. Yeah you can put it in portrait mode but with a just somewhat large monitor that's fucking useless and you know it.

Bigger is better. Always sells in marketing. Doesn't really mean shit. I think 20-21" 4:3 is the human comfort zone for a monitor, with 16:9 you need 27" if you sit right in front of the monitor, else you either have to put the monitor at a weird distance or sit in an unhealthy way. Stuff in the corner of the monitor will still be at an angle and backlight bleeding (which can't be avoided fully) will be more noticeable. It's an unsolvable problem with the way human eyes are placed in the head and 16:9. Go ahead, test it, I'll be waiting.

Now test the same with a good 4:3 21" screen. 1600x1200 preferably. (high resolution is always better because of better pixel density, although there are diminishing returns with screen size) everything will be straight ahead, you can sit comfortably close to the monitor and backlight bleeding on dark backgrounds will not be noticeable. Just works. Nobody needs that 16:9 shit. nothing works well with it. You either clutter it with windows which is super distracting or you live with having huge empty spaces.

Not to disregard all new technologies because modern panels with LED backlight and what not are objectively superior, just the form factor is retarded. Nobody will ever make a 4:3 screen for a commercially feasible price again because it would be smaller than competing 16:9 and you can't sell that to normie.

Why not the Pi 2? It has the same CPU, just four of them.

Nah I go way over the top, most of the shit I do outside of gaming is run on my server

If you want real minimalist, the best way is to set your limits and just work from within there. One thing I did was under $1000, and calculating how much ram I would really need. I don't do gaming outside of some MAME/FBA emulation, and so I didnt need anything more than 8gb. If you're talking about software, well there's a lot of options, suckless stuff works best for me

that's the point you fucking retard, you can't change how your monitor scales resolutions, it's hard coded into the firmware. the driver doesn't offer an option to do nearest neighbor either, but that would require OP to pump 4k to the monitor anyways

because of mental illness. that's pretty much the only reason

Atom notebooks, 200$ and you're good.

I wanted a board that can run without firmware or driver blobs. The RPi unfortunately needs one to boot. Allwinner also has some quad cores and even octa cores, but the support there isn't as good as A20 yet. The octa cores also basically need a fan for cooling, so meh.
linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort

I used gentoo on a 2010 atom netbook with 2gb of ram for a year. My main problem was playing 1080p mkvs. I compiled linux and firefox no problem, just start it before bed. Icewm for wm. Firefox ran great with 20+ tabs as long as I used noscript to only run scripts I needed to run. about:memory if it did lag up always fixed it. Great umpc setup if there ever was one. 1080x600 does get old tho.

I'd say just get a 4:3 monitor with a good resolution but I checked eBay, and they cost as much as used 27" 4k monitors. I guess there really is a demand. (for monitors at non-retard sizes/shapes)


there used to be expansion cards for notebooks with a broadcom chip that did video decoding, they also have linux driver support. Don't ask me what the current state is though. Also would've meant you have to drop the Wifi card.


I read somewhere you can compile the blob for video yourself now, but I don't know the details. Might not be true. 1 GB, 100 mbit ethernet and no SATA etc. is quite limited anyways.

You can have lots of fun directly interacting with the framebuffer too. The framebuffer is a file, like everything in linux, a few examples:

For shits and giggles, switch to a virtual console and try this:

(fb0 is the usual framebuffer device, might be different on your system if you have several graphics cards or something)

cat /dev/urandom > /dev/fb0

Should fill your framebuffer with colored snow.

cat /dev/zero > /dev/fb0

clears it

cat /dev/fb0 > /tmp/screenshot

gives you a raw screenshot of the framebuffer and

cat /tmp/screenshot > /dev/fb0

puts it back.

ffmpeg -i [path to some picture format ffmpeg understands, or video, or gif] -pix_fmt bgra -f fbdev /dev/fb0 -loglevel quiet

(loglevel quiet because ffmpeg is quite chatty and will overwrite what it's putting out)

will put a picture/video on your framebuffer. The video will be "played back" as fast as ffmpeg can transcode it, so mplayer is actually more useful for watching videos.

Framebuffer format on modern hardware is usually 32 bit RGBA, but there are kernel interfaces for querying it. With this it's trivial to write a small program that puts a small widget like a clock on it, for example. Or write your own screensaver in bash. Be aware though that it's not hardware accelerated and quite costly, pushing a lot of pixels will be slow. Ideally you want to write to an offscreen buffer and just push changed screen regions. This shit used to be trivial knowledge. Not anymore, that's why I mention it.

As we can see, as the linux console is actually supportive of truecolor you can easily change the 16 colors you get, as simply as

echo -e "\e]P{number of color, hexadecimal 0-F} {hexcode of color, RGB, NO #}"

set your favorite ricing scheme that way.

You can also change the font, now this part is a bit arcane but the information is out there, so I won't describe it fully. Look into the psftools. A lot of distros actually come with a lot of fonts for the console already, you can usually find them in /usr/share/consolefonts/ you can also download fonts from 10inth.org and easily convert their .fon file into psf fonts with psftools, they're very readable and were made to be stared at for a long time, some are quite comfy and easy on the eyes. Setting a font is as easy as setfont {path to .psf}, showconsolefont prints it's characters.

For completeness sake, the proper way to interact with that shit lowlevel now is the DRM interface, but it's a lot more complicated and poorly documented, like everything new in linux.

I checked into the RPi blob thing when I was researching boards, and stumbled on a RE project that was making a replacement for the VideoCore blob. But they never finished it, and it's missing important stuff like framebuffer and USB. Maybe the board can boot and be used for very limited purposes (like say a headless server), but that's not enough for me. Actually they mention it here:
fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers
Anyway, yeah the RPi is kinda gimped in those other areas. My board has 2 GB RAM (at a higher clockrate than the RPi), GigE, and a real sata port. Even the power jack is a real one that can accomodate more current than those micro USB things (good enough to reliably power a laptop HDD).
And I actually have a 4:3 monitor (15 euros from local seller), but run it at 800x600, even though it can do much more. That's how I ran my CRT in the 90's, and my Thinkpads later on, so I'm used to it. Plus less pixels to push means it's faster. I just don't care at all about high resolution stuff, and that's why this board does everything I need.

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Interesting, thanks. Can you explain how to control what mode the consoles will operate in (pure text/frame buffer/KMS), how to select the specific frame buffer driver, and how to set specific parameters (resolution, bit depth, refresh rate, etc.)?

Depends on hardware and kernel. Some hardware doesn't have a text mode, that's more of an x86 thing. There are tools like fbset to change resolution, but those don't work on my ARM board. Instead I had to do it from the u-boot prompt:
setenv video-mode=sunxi:800x600-24@60,monitor=vga,hpd=1,edid=0saveenvreset
In theory, you should be able to set it from the bootargs variable that's passed to the kernel when it reads /boot/boot.scr, but that didn't do it for me. Had to outright set it in the u-boot environment itself.
This is what I get when booting:
[ 0.000000] Kernel command line: disp.screen0_output_mode=EDID:800x600p60 disp.screen1_output_mode=EDID:800x600p60 logo.nologo console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0 consoleblank=0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootwait panic=10[ 0.050398] simple-framebuffer bfe2b000.framebuffer: framebuffer at 0xbfe2b000, 0x1d4c00 bytes, mapped to 0xf0900000[ 0.050452] simple-framebuffer bfe2b000.framebuffer: format=x8r8g8b8, mode=800x600x32, linelength=3200[ 0.059456] Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 100x37[ 0.067865] simple-framebuffer bfe2b000.framebuffer: fb0: simplefb registered!
Then only /dev/fb0 exists as the video device. No /dev/drm or whathever KMS uses.

How is a tiling WM better than framebuffer console with screen/tmux?

Thanks. What about the vga= and video= kernel parameters? Do I remember correctly that vga=normal will set the kernel to use a pure text mode console (if supported), while specifying modes with any of those two parameters will enable framebuffer console?
How is /dev/fb0 interrelated with console devices? I typed sleep 5 && cat /dev/urandom > /dev/fb0 and switched from tty1 to tty2, and the "colored snow" was output to current tty (but error message "no space left on device" was output to tty1) - does that mean that /dev/fb0 is associated with /dev/tty0 (i.e. whatever tty is currently active), while the message went to /dev/stderr which goes to /dev/tty, i.e. the tty where the process was invoked?

Whoops, this was meant as a reply to .

Why no /dev/eth0 so you could put raw data directly onto the network interface?

Why does the effect look very bright, almost white (when squinting your eyes or looking from a distance)? Why is the chroma effect (random colors amalgamating to white) stronger than the luma effect (random colors averaging to mid-grey)?

Interesting question, no idea. Maybe a function of how your eye works/your screen works?


You are basically always in the framebuffer console with modern kernels and common options compiled in. Text mode resolutions are very limited in regards to modern screens and like it has been said, it's an x86 thing, some platforms don't even have it. (Classical, the old 68k Macs are an example - remember a lot of this stuff has legacy reasoning)

All the virtual consoles share the same framebuffer, it just gets cleared and redrawn on switch. The framebuffer is an abstraction layer that lets you directly interact with the hardware, you're talking directly to the kernel else. No idea how that modesetting/DRM stuff works (apparently better) that was a bit after my time.


Short answer - legacy reasons. That Unix hating guy that posts here should have some words on that if he's not only larping.

It also has to be said that using the framebuffer doesn't preclude you from also having X running. You can do usually both at the same time and with KMS switching between X and ttys shouldn't have any real delay.

My reasoning isn't really computational bloat either as X even runs fine on machines 20 years old and isn't too heavy for them, just don't add current-day GNOME or other on top. No, the point of living a text only existence is simplicity, reducing psychological bloat if you will. A set way in how the screen is put together, a set amount of colors, a set font everything is written in. It sounds so simple that it's stupid but it actually really helps!

Also cutting out the internet, social media, and following of news. Having no computer capable of doing that stuff easily can be very helpful. A few weeks after living that way I started drawing. Yeah, drawing. Have never drawn before in my life. I just felt creative like that. I've also started writing my (curses-utilizing) game I've always dreamt about doing but somehow never found time for, time I apparently wasted browsing shitty websites and looking at stuff passively. In regards to social media, I only come here now anymore, and only on select days.

To add to the drawing thing: Before I started living this way I would have probably started browsing for drawing tutorials on youtube/the wider internet, would have seen people that are 100000x better than I ever will be and probably would've never even bothered starting.

What are the (usual, at least) interrelations between the following:
/dev/console
/dev/tty
/dev/tty0
/dev/tty[1-6]
/dev/stdin
/dev/stdout
/dev/stderr
?
It seems that:
Please correct any mistakes (if any) in the above.

Regarding /dev/fb0, I ran the following:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/fb0 bs=1 which made the output slower (every byte a separate I/O operation?) and switched ttys while it was drawing lines of random pixels from top to bottom - upon switching the tty it was continuing to draw in the currently active tty, but from the line where it left of in the previous one. What does that mean?

Btw, can "ls -l" be made to traverse symlinks all the way to the end? For instance, "/dev/stdout" is a symlink to "/proc/self/fd/1", but that is again a symlink to "/dev/tty[n]" (where n is the number of the currently active virtual terminal) - is there a way to an ls on /dev/stdout so that it shows the actual file at the end of the symlink chain?

no i use windows 7 like a man

Note sure if there's a built-in way but if not, you could easily wrap with or pipe into a script that reparses links before printing. They can be identified in a number of ways, with -F probably being your best bet.

How to connect a virtual console (such as /dev/tty1) to a serial console (such as /dev/ttyS1) to get a console connection to device connected to a serial port?

Ahahahahahahaha,chink are superior

Not sure about posix but GNU ls has -L for dereferencing symlinks, which you would know if you read the fucking manual.


ttyN are connected ttys. There are no actual ttys anymore, so they're all virtual. You will normally be dropped onto tty1, from which you will log in and do what it is you do. Display managers might also start on tty1 by default. devtmpfs seems to have 64 of them for good measure.


You don't connect a tty to a serial tty. You start something like agetty on ttySwhatever and plug your vt100 into the corresponding serial port on the machine, just like you would run agetty on tty3 to get a virtual terminal there. Have a look in your /etc/inittab.
If you just want to talk to a device on the serial port: cu, or screen, or whatever the hell you please. As much as UNIX pretends to be everything-is-a-file land, it's all a lie. Everything is special and requires special programs.

What I meant was the other way around, i.e. not using a hardware terminal to connect to a system running on your computer, but rather to use your computer as a terminal connected to another device (like a router or switch etc.) which has a serial/console port.

I use cu in OpenBSD laptop to connect to ARM board. It's part of the base system (/usr/bin/cu) so makes sense to use it. There's also package for Linux. Or else you can install Minicom. Basically I use it like this:
cu -l cuaU0 -s 115200
But device name will be different in Linux. Anyway it uses ~ as escape character, so when you type this symbol at the first character on a line, the next character you enter is assumed to be a command. For example, ~. drops the connetion. Man page has all the possible commands.
If you want something more fancy, try Minicom. Allegedly screen (GNU Screen I guess) can do it as well, but I didn't try this.

It doesn't say what the target file is though, it just pretends the symlink was the target file (i.e. for /dev/stdout it will just say it's a character device, still obscuring the fact that it's indeed a symlink to /proc/self/fd/1, which is in turn a symlink to /dev/tty[n] which is the actual character device). The idea was to have ls reveal what the file at the end of a symlink chain is, -L doesn't seem to do it.

Forgot to mention, cuaU0 is the local USB serial device. I got one of these plugged into my laptop, and the leads to into the ARM board. Careful with this, you probably don't want to connect the red wire, unless the device actually requires it. Details here:
linux-sunxi.org/UART
Oh, and TX line must be connected to RX lead on board, and vice-versa.

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Nobody told me anything you mongoloid. I don't want to scroll almost twice as much for working on spreadsheets, code, documents, or webpages. It's like looking through a slitted window.

nice LARP


At least win10 is upfront about what you get

Ricing is important to me. Your environment has legitimate affects on your state of mind. Windows ricing is a sad hack.
Windows' only benefits apply to people who are apathetic towards their desktop experience, or want software not working on other systems. Those are good reasons, but neither apply to me.

No they aren't. Windows 10 did that shit when instructed not to by user settings.

No they aren't. Windows 10 did that shit when instructed not to by user settings.

Shit bait

10 year old OC posten

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Right now? No but I am looking to do so. Some of the Pine64 and ODROID boards have "good enough" (4GB RAM, multi-CPU, etc.) specifications that they could be daily drivers for everything minus GPU-intensive tasks (and 144hz :( ).
One problem is that many of the most performant ARM based SoCs also suffer from speculative execution exploits (I realize there are mitigations but it would be ideal to spend money on hardware that is more secure).
Another problem, which you mentioned, is that many either require specially-configured kernels or screwing around with a bootloader to get a non-supported distro to work on them; however, this isn't as difficult or deal-breaking as it may seem on the surface.
I've been contemplating this idea (utilizing more minimal hardware in terms of power costs) for a while but still no closer to a definitive decision. Any anons have some suggestions?

you need some special kind of autism for that. systems that are accepted as minimal here are annoying and hard to use for most people.

why would you do that? usually those have a really low res screen so thats just a waste of resources. just get them in 768p instead.

Most people are idiots. There's also a special kind of psychological value in such a system, I think. I know I got more creative and productive every time I limited my environment somewhat. Less sometimes really is more.

What I would love to do is have noiseless, calm, X Terminals everywhere, and have my Workstation somewhere like a closet. I've got the thin clients that could manage it.

What's holding me back is having to give up video playback. I've tried it, but a 100GB LAN w/ client video codec support can't ion anyway manage 1080p, and the setup is a PITA, and you can forget about audio/video staying in sync.

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I tried that in-house steam thing over the network to a linux box in 1080p and it was good enough to play GTA5, but I had to limit the framerate to 30. Cutting the framerate in half helped the weaker client system a lot. It was playable. If you utilize in-hardware video en- and decoding it should work but yeah, it's generally a rough experience. It's one of the things you'd expect technology to do just fine in 2019, yet it doesn't.


You go with a weaker CPU or you live with the possibility of these exploits, can't really have both, else these exploits wouldn't be the huge problem they are.

Sorry if this sounds dumb but couldn't you basically just have an extended cable fpr the keyboard and monitor going to the workstation rather than having a thin client over LAN?

Sounds interesting, anything more on that? were you connecting via serial to another machine (given that kermit seems to be used for that)? If not then how would the connctions work (both physical and software)?

I'm running the [bloated] KDE plasma under 7W power consumption.

I removed and disabled the display of this laptop since it's already broken not quite only 1 vertical line but I have the DVD drive connected right now so it could go even lower if I remove it too. My external display is energy star and ~18W on normal usage. Goes on standby mode under 1W or less.

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