ball | Oh, my Ubuntu desktop just locked up. | 00:12 |
---|---|---|
ball | :-( | 00:12 |
daftykins | o0 | 00:17 |
daftykins | and it still switched to a TTY ok? | 00:17 |
ball | Sadly no. I had to hold in the power button. | 00:26 |
daftykins | nasty | 00:26 |
daftykins | disk check + memtest time perhaps | 00:27 |
* ball nods | 00:35 | |
ball | I should retire all my PCs :-) | 00:35 |
ball | I'll be back later, I think. | 00:36 |
ball | Need to get my son ready for bed. | 00:36 |
daftykins | o/ | 00:38 |
ball | I'm back! | 03:05 |
ball | popey: Thought of you yesterday while I was potching with a ThinkPad. Think it was an x280. | 12:52 |
ball | (we're mostly using T14s at work now) | 12:52 |
daftykins | those look alright | 12:53 |
ball | daftykins: They seem very nice. | 12:56 |
daftykins | i've been fond of the ones i've bought for clients, especially the older generation ones i've snagged on ebay and put Linux on though :D | 12:58 |
daftykins | £170 each for a pair of 5th generation intel (broadwell) ones | 12:58 |
penguin42 | heck, that's nothing | 13:00 |
daftykins | yep! and considering you can now ebay 8th generation ones for £450, obviously ignoring all the dodgy listings that have locked firmware etc... when people ask for a system that's where i lean! :D | 13:01 |
ball | Do you have to disable "Secure Boot" to install Linux? | 13:02 |
daftykins | nah, i think there can be some complications if there's discrete graphics / hybrid graphics in the machine though | 13:03 |
ball | I'd probably prefer integrated graphics. I'm not using a GPU for maths and would happily trade that for lower heat and longer battery life. | 13:05 |
daftykins | yeah same here, for laptops my preference is lean and long life | 13:05 |
* ball nods | 13:05 | |
daftykins | any plans to poke around testing your freezing system today? | 13:07 |
ball | Only thing about Thinkpads is that there have been so many different models, it's a job to keep track of them. | 13:07 |
penguin42 | and my experience with Lenovo firmware is it's a lot flakier on the ones with discrete graphics | 13:07 |
ball | daftykins: I might run memtest86+, as you suggested. | 13:07 |
daftykins | sounds good, may be tedious to wait for, but it saves pulling your hair out :D | 13:08 |
ball | daftykins: This is an old computer that a colleague gave us a few years ago. It was my son's desktop for a while and I "inherited" it after he upgraded to a Raspberry Pi 400. | 13:09 |
daftykins | ah ha, does it have an HDD or SSD? | 13:10 |
ball | HDD | 13:26 |
ball | I don't see the model mentioned in dmesg output and I don't know the Linux equivalent of the commands I'd usually use to ask the disk how it's feeling. | 13:28 |
daftykins | doubt it would be responsible for what you described, but it never hurts to look at the SMART data | 13:28 |
daftykins | if you install the 'smartmontools' package and then issue "sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda" that'll give you a nice table, or even pipe it directly to termbin and share here | 13:29 |
daftykins | i.e. "sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | nc termbin.com 9999" | 13:29 |
* ball tries it. | 13:29 | |
ball | https://termbin.com/tv00 | 13:30 |
daftykins | "oooooh, barracudaaaa!" :) | 13:31 |
penguin42 | looks happy | 13:32 |
daftykins | i think that looks just fine | 13:32 |
ball | It has been spinning for almost four years but I see zero reallocated sectors, so that's a good thing. | 13:33 |
ball | The computer was given to me without a hard disk drive so I just popped one in off the shelf. | 13:33 |
ball | I have an SSD I could use but that means messing with brackets etc. | 13:34 |
daftykins | yeah, although trouble occurs much earlier than a successful remap, i never liked the way Seagates increment 'error' fields for normal operation | 13:34 |
daftykins | i don't see the point in mounting SSDs in desktop systems just sat at home, quite happy with dangling them :D | 13:35 |
* ball grins | 13:35 | |
ball | They're light enough that Velcro would probably work. | 13:36 |
ball | ...but old habits die hard. | 13:36 |
ball | Anyway, disk is find of this old chugger. | 13:39 |
ball | I should price up a used ThinkPad though. | 13:42 |
daftykins | i quite like looking for the T series on ebay, so each successive intel generation is matched by the second digit... T450 like mine is 5th gen, T460, T470, T480 etc... | 13:46 |
daftykins | you can genuinely keep just hopping between and the price ramps up | 13:47 |
ball | I wonder how much a T420 would cost me. | 13:47 |
daftykins | oh that's way too old to consider | 13:47 |
ball | Sorry, T420s | 13:47 |
daftykins | i'd even consider 6th generation (skylake) the bottom floor by now, although a 4th or 5th isn't too bad | 13:48 |
ball | Hmm... looks like the T440s has m.2. | 13:48 |
daftykins | hmm i think that'd be too early | 13:49 |
ball | I'm having to look up which "generation" Coffee Lake is. | 13:51 |
ball | 8th, apparently | 13:51 |
ball | Looks like our T14s are "10th generation" | 13:52 |
ball | So Comet Lake or perhaps Sunny Cove | 13:53 |
ball | brb | 13:53 |
daftykins | yip something like that :D | 13:53 |
ball | Looks like they used some high-end Core i5 chips. | 14:05 |
daftykins | i5's are my minimum consideration really | 14:08 |
ball | I'd be happy with a quad-core i3 but i5 is a sensible choice for our work laptops. | 14:11 |
daftykins | i've got an i3-8100 or so in a whitebox server, but i don't know what they perform like first-hand | 14:12 |
ball | In my last job we were happy with them for desktops | 14:13 |
ball | Let me check my notes | 14:13 |
ball | Think we used i3-8100 for the POS machines and perhaps i3-8300 for the office desktops (I liked the extra cache). | 14:14 |
daftykins | very different kettle of fish if it's a 45W TDP or greater part versus a laptop CPU with a typical 15W mind | 14:14 |
* ball nods | 14:15 | |
ball | Stacks of Lenovo desktops at work but I've not had a chance to look at those yet. | 14:16 |
daftykins | is there an ongoing refresh, or is that old stuff? | 14:17 |
ball | They cycle stuff out after a few years, I think. | 14:42 |
ball | Currently pulling 2018 models as the opportunity arises. | 14:43 |
ball | brb | 14:43 |
penguin42 | careful, daftykins will camp out in your skip for them | 14:43 |
daftykins | haha | 14:43 |
ball | I suspect they're leased, though ICBW. | 14:59 |
ball | Wouldn't mind one of the tiny desktops, just to potch with. | 14:59 |
ball | They | 15:02 |
ball | Ugh... my daughter's laptop has a tiny keyboard :-) | 15:02 |
ball | I could probably pick one up used. | 15:08 |
* ball is distracted by Dell OptiPlex | 15:32 | |
daftykins | o0 | 15:40 |
zxmpi | that narrows it down to 28 years or so :-) | 15:44 |
* zxmpi looks at the specs of first optiplex :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_OptiPlex#Series_1,_2_and_3 | 15:51 | |
zxmpi | 486! | 15:51 |
daftykins | :D | 15:51 |
zxmpi | 3 isa and 1 vl slot! :-) | 15:52 |
zxmpi | futureproof or what | 15:54 |
ball | VLB was awful, mechanically. | 15:56 |
zxmpi | it was better than isa | 15:56 |
ball | EISA was available then though, iirc | 15:57 |
ball | ...and PCI shortly afterwards. | 15:57 |
ball | (thankfully) | 15:57 |
zxmpi | wasn't it vesa? it's been a while | 15:57 |
ball | VESA was the organisation | 15:58 |
ball | VLB = Vesa Local Bus | 15:58 |
zxmpi | ah yes, eisa to take on mca :-) | 16:00 |
* ball nods | 16:00 | |
zxmpi | don't think i ever saw more than 2-3 mca cards | 16:00 |
daftykins | i'm too young to have encountered VLB in the wild | 16:01 |
zxmpi | here's an isa network card75 quid. here's the mca equivalent 350shekels. don't know why it didn't succeed | 16:01 |
ball | I had a box full of MCA HBAs, NICs etc. | 16:01 |
ball | ...it was thrown away. | 16:02 |
zxmpi | favourite was an intel aboveboard ram card. added 2mb of memory to a 286 ps/2 and turned it into expanded ram so it was a 286 pretending to be a 386 | 16:03 |
zxmpi | it was running novell headless non dedicated AND dos with win 3.1 on top running excel. | 16:04 |
ball | Extended probably, rather than expanded. | 16:09 |
ball | (expanded was an XT thing) | 16:09 |
zxmpi | no no, deffo expanded | 16:09 |
ball | LIM EMS. | 16:09 |
zxmpi | that was the weird thing, and faster than a 386 doing expanded ram with cpu. it was doing it in hardware | 16:10 |
ball | Eww. | 16:10 |
zxmpi | once had to call ms with a problem with excel on it. when i explained the pc they denied it existed. went all downhill from there | 16:10 |
ball | That's vaguely obscene but nice for Lotus 1-2-3 | 16:10 |
zxmpi | even by then lotus was disappearing fast before excel | 16:11 |
* ball nods | 16:11 | |
ball | Did they ever release Improv for Windows? I forget. | 16:12 |
zxmpi | it looked a lot more modern and was wysiwyg | 16:12 |
zxmpi | think they did | 16:12 |
zxmpi | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv#Windows_release | 16:13 |
ball | ok | 16:13 |
ball | I must fight the temptation to buy an Optiplex | 16:22 |
zxmpi | just keep telling yourself. it's a dell, it's a dell :-P | 16:38 |
ball | Hwh. | 16:39 |
daftykins | dude, it's Adele | 16:46 |
penguin42 | not bad for penguins | 17:54 |
ball | penguin42: Is it cold out? | 19:09 |
penguin42 | ball: I meant Adele's | 19:10 |
daftykins | :D | 19:12 |
* ball wanders off to sit in the comfy chair. | 19:14 | |
penguin42 | https://gitlab.com/penguin42/ohmy is the pico project I've been fiddling with; it's at the 'basically works-ish' stage | 19:49 |
daftykins | very neat idea :D | 19:50 |
penguin42 | it came to me after fighting a lot of alarm cabling | 19:52 |
daftykins | the tedium of repeated placing probes and glancing? | 19:52 |
daftykins | assuming some manual task with a multimeter | 19:53 |
penguin42 | nod | 19:55 |
penguin42 | especially when you need to move leads over <------ while opening and closing doors -----> | 19:55 |
penguin42 | I need to make it a bit better before it's actually useful for that - but getting there | 19:56 |
daftykins | :D | 19:57 |
daftykins | i had a couple of reolink IP cameras arrive today, i played with zoneminder briefly to start tinkering with handling them both - pretty neat 4K units, £95 for the pair | 19:57 |
penguin42 | oh that's ok | 20:02 |
penguin42 | hmm, I need to get the spider web off one of mine | 20:03 |
daftykins | to the trusty broom! | 20:05 |
ball | I fell asleep in the comfy chair. | 21:13 |
daftykins | :D | 21:15 |
daftykins | a fine fate | 21:15 |
daftykins | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9OZ2A-c62g - hrmm nasty | 23:16 |
daftykins | "Take-Two Suing GTA3 Reverse Engineering devs...and it doesn't look good | MVG" | 23:16 |
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