My year-long failure with Linux at home

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

This isn't an instance of someone being against Linux as a home desktop, in fact I was all for it. And I am in a Unix shell for 99% of the time I am at work.

I installed Mint with the front end Cinnamon a year ago. It has utterly failed to be a remotely useable desktop. In fact, it's laughable at just how shitty it is. There are three constant - as in, I have to reboot the machine every other day - failures:

1) I will lose my WiFi connection and the OS never attempts to reconnect. Utterly amazing that this is a thing in 2018. And I used the most expensive WiFi dongle I could find.

2) Cinnamon crashes about every other day. This renders doing anything useless and I have to reboot.

3) The computer will just display garbage on the screen, requiring a reboot.

I suspect that the video card is simply not supported by the OS, which doesn't help things, but is at least some kind of answer. The WiFi thing I see with Linux machines all the time. Are people just accepting that their Linux machines will permanently stop connecting to WiFi networks every other day? I see an 86% connection strength on mine.

I am probably going to wipe the hard drives and start over with something more stable. I think just regular Ubuntu with some UI will be better? I mean, it cannot be worse.

[Jizaboz]

You could try Ubuntu Desktop edition? Then you wouldn't need an additional UI. I haven't used that in a while but it used to do fine for me from everything to work applications to running Lord of the Rings Online in Wine. It does get updated very often though which could get annoying.

[The Happiness Engine]

You don't need the most expensive wifi dongle, you need the most supported wifi card. I have no idea what that might be, but linux is pretty much an ass about desktop hardware.

[AArdvark]

Interesting...the problem I had most with Mint was the inability for it to write to any of my USB flash drives. There were others but that was a deal breaker. I hadda switch to Ubuntu, which does update as much as Adobe Flash, if not more. It does recognize flash drives and lets you read/write to them.
Never tried a desktop with wifi before, always been ethernet cables. What are the advantages of a wifi desktop?

THE
PORTABLE TOWER?
AARDVARK

[Tdarcos]

Never tried a desktop with wifi before, always been ethernet cables. What are the advantages of a wifi desktop?
[/quote]
1. No need to run cables. I have to run a cable from the cable modem to the router outside my room in order to provide wifi to the upstairs (the signal isn't strong enough to reach through the ceiling from in here and I don't have the password to connect directly to the Xfinity router.
2. No cable to run over in my wheelchair.
3. Can move or replace the computer without having to worry about cabling.
4. Can switch to faster network connections as the price for adapters come down (I use my router to connect a multi-terrabyte Buffalo NAS to my computers so I can store files there and work or print them from any computer I'm using). Increasing wired speed means replacing every network cable.
5. Wireless printer can be moved anywhere there is an electric plug.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

What are the advantages of a wifi desktop?

Brian, don't -- !

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Okay. Based on what you guys said, I am going to install Ubuntu on this machine and then buy the most widely-supported WiFi piece. ALL I WANT.... is for it to reconnect if it disconnects. I mean, should be the easiest thing in the world. Windows does it. In fact, I've never had my Windows WiFi piece ever disconnect.

Now. Time to find the forum with the greatest number of assholes to ask this question to. I mean, aside from this one JUST KIDDING LUV YOU GUYS! <3

[RealNC]

Time to find the forum with the greatest number of assholes to ask this question to.

phoronix.com has got you covered.

[AArdvark]

I guess I asked the wrong question (BTW, why did Commander answer RobB's question? It must be a form of ventriloquism)

So it's the convenience of not having to run ethernet to the machine at the sacrifice of loading times. In all the history of me having a PC tower the router has been on the desk, so it's never been any other way.

Answer no. 2 applies to nobody else here


What is

a multi-terrabyte Buffalo NAS

It sounds like a new sports team

THE
CELERY CAP
AARDVARK

[Tdarcos]

Tenda makes very inexpensive wireless adapters and routers, and they follow the standards so you can use a competing product on 802.11n, Micro Center is selling their 300MBit router for $9.95 (normal price is $12.95). Excuse me, I'm going to go buy one tomorrow, thanks for causing me to look. The "up to 400Mbit" Tenda wireless adapter is $17.95. They're also selling a 4-port gigabit switch for $10. Presumably this is a wire-only connection, but that's amazing.

The ordinary up to 100Mbits 802.11g router was $19.95 and their adapter was $9.95. This worked with windows and with a non-Intel Mac I bought a few years ago. I ran VNC on it allowing me to run its desktop from a terminal window on my Windows PC; it looked exactly like the Macintosh desktop.

So you might want to check if Tenda adapters are supported. I've had very good results with them.

[Tdarcos]

What is

a multi-terrabyte Buffalo NAS

Buffalo, a maker of hard drives produces their Drivestation NAS in 1, 3, and now 5 terabyte sizes. You plug the NAS into the router, then check what address was assigned, and connect to it like http://192.168.0.103 and its web interface comes up. You assign the device's name (I call mine Buffalo), define the subdirectories, and reboot. After that, you can access it on your network by its name same as any other computer. If you enable FTP you can connect to it using Filezilla.

I started with a 1 terabyte at $120 and a couple years later bought a second one for about the same price in a 3 TB size, and I think it was just before we had the huge hard drive price increase. Basically I keep no work files on any computer, I work with them on the NAS so I never have to worry which computer I saved a file on. Every so often I use FileSync to copy all new or changed files to my 5TB Seagate backup drive. My writing I also back up on a 500mb seagate personal drive (about the size of two cell phones and uses the USB cable for data and power.)

[The Happiness Engine]

UGGGGGHHH.

[Jizaboz]

Like Flack said..



We always hang in a Buffalo NAS

[Tdarcos]

Yeah, and when I was at Micro Center Friday I saw a luscious Buffalo NAS about the size of a large UPS or a small PC, whose price was $339, and whose capacity is a jaw-dropping 8 TB.

Next year we have elections and maybe I'll use the $400 I get from serving on that to buy the Buffalo instead of buying a replacement computer.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

So I put Ubuntu 17 on my Linux PC. Surely that wou--

It literally locks up in 15 seconds. Fuck. Downloading 16, but this is leading to a hardware problem.

[Jizaboz]

Yeah you have bad RAM or something going on.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Me???

BAD RAM???

I still can't get over that 3TB drive I saw. I think Christmas is coming early to the New/Doom House.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

This may be a rant, I don't know.

So, Ubuntu 16 is not suffering from the problems that my instance of Mint did. I have not permanently lost my WiFi connection. The desktop hasn't died. It's speedy. Great.

This machine runs the continuous integration server Jenkins, so I installed that. I use it to run browser (Chrome and Firefox) automation jobs. It appears that you have to run vncserver for this to work, even though I've never had to do this for anywhere else I've installed Jenkins, and I have installed Jenkins and gotten this to work on Windows 7, Mac's OS, CentOs and my now-deleted Mint machine.

I simply can't believe that it is required over Ubuntu. I created a Stack Exchange or whatever it's called account to ask people this because it is amazing to me that so many automation engineers want to run in headless mode. I mean... you want to see the screen and the very first time I said, "Fuck it" and went with vnc server anyway last night, it didn't work! How can anyone think this is acceptable if it doesn't work on VNC but does locally? The fact that the simplest test possible doesn't pass on VNC means the entire system is unreliable. Who is trusting their deploys to headless displays? No wonder all software is broken and not automated.

[pinback]

-1

[RealNC]

Look, if it builds, ship it. Testing and automation are for pussies.