Linux Journal

Nov was the last issue !

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/lin … ublication

stephen

All the old news stand favourites are struggling or have gone. Its a tough time to be in niche market publishing.

Anybody remember ETI (merged in to Everyday Practical Electronics) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroni … ernational
Computer Weekly (still alive, but online only) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Weekly
PC Plus – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Plus

.. and many others too numerous to mention. Some survive, for example Elektor, but it is always a little sad when when one of the old stalwarts gives up the struggle.

We still have “Australian PC” (APC) over here, but I only read it in the library, as most of it is just reviews of graphics cards or keyboards or get another first person shooter game (yawn)

I got suckered into buying another magazine while on a weekend break, (I forget what its called), and found it was by the same publishing company with the same editor, and re-hashing stories from APC magazine

So that was a waste of a fiver UK ($10 AUD)

I think its good that Elektor is still going, but its projects all used to be a bit too complex for me, and I have enough self generated projects to last a lifetime 10 x over.

sad, i’ve been a keen follower, it is one of the earliest journals on linux
before android came to being, there is linux and android runs on linux

the other thing i missed much as well is dr dobbs
http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and … /240169421

DDJ was always a bit highbrow for me
also had to get Smiths to order it for you, sad intro to the $1 ==> £1 conversion rate.
there was a time LJ was the same, then i subscribed for some years for postal, when it went digital. then it seemed to lose something apart from the paper.
i’ve still got all my LJ from 1 onwards, in all honesty condition would be poor, aka exceedingly well thumbed
stephen

A tear shed and life goes on…

I was trained in UNIX System 5, so that shows my age. At that time, AT&T controlled UNIX. It is easy to write about something when there is only one color to describe. But with Linux, there are many colors and the distributions are fragmented along multiple architectural lines: Puppy to Raspberry Pi. Trying to captivate a diverse audience with enough reading material to make everyone happy is simply not economically; which is to say, some readers will feel cheated if their flavor of Linux is not well represented and will not renew their subscriptions. Eventually, it is a downward spiral as the subscriptions diminish there is less revenue and less opportunity to generate quality articles.

The price for advertisements and the entire ecosystem around adverts and cash flow is the magazines circulation numbers.

I certainly do not have a crystal ball and my Gypsy consultant has moved on to reading palms in downtown Atlanta, but I would venture to guess that published-on-paper magazines will continue to collapse: publishing on paper is not environmentally friendly and materials, printing, and distribution costs are on the rise and while this old goat used to love to sit back with a cold beer and read a technical publication, I have evolved to get my techno-buzz from online sites… not a single magazine is delivered anymore. When put in prospective, the wife no longer harps on my stack of magazines in the living room so in some respects not getting paper magazines has improved my life. Plus, beer is more expensive than ever so the money saved on subscriptions helps to offset the increase cost of my brew.

Ray

perhaps it’s time to invest the|some savings into home brew equipment ?
srp

[zmemw16 – Wed Dec 06, 2017 2:25 pm] –
perhaps it’s time to invest the|some savings into home brew equipment ?
srp

Yea … that thought has come to mind more than once …

there is something common between linux, arduino, stm32duino
and it is actually more than open source
the first time when i installed a linux distribution on a *386* pc using *floppies*, the most amazing and fun thing then is that ‘i’ve my own (un*x) os’, back then un*x used to be run on expensive dec, sun, apollo and sgi workstations, having linux (un*x) on a pc is ‘disruptive* it changed the status quo. no longer is windows and ms dos the only (public) desktop os. i can run my own mail server, domain name server etc, back then in the windows world it is a privilege of the ‘servers’ unless of course one downloads and run shareware / freeware versions of those.

back then and for a long time connecting to diy custom peripherals is pretty much rs232 16550 uart etc. then come usb, and for the longest time there is no ‘user custom-able usb’, vlsi are expensive short of buying in bulk. many resort to usb-serial converters. today comes leaflabs maple, stm32duino it is ‘disruptive’ in a similar light, user customizable usb is now a reality. a blue pill, maple mini’s role can be simply re-defined uploading a sketch or firmware. in a sense stm32 could just ‘spoof’ any usb vid/pid and mimic whatever device one deems fit. similarly with things like nrf51822 makes bluetooth le ‘user customizable’. i’m not sure how long this niche trend would last, but i’d guess this is part of that ‘iot’ hype along with the RPis, beaglebone blacks, arduinos, micro:bit, and all that n variety of mcu boards and single board computers.

but i’d guess ‘iot’ is simply a buzzword to the ‘average’ man on the street probably ignored just as the ‘average’ crowd seemed pretty happy with the notion that computers runs windows, phones runs android or ios, while things like linux, arduino (etc) simply co-existed below the ‘noise floor’

OT: on a side note things like stm32duino could literally outdo the million monkey theorem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
with the help of things like AI, deep learning etc, stm32duino could simply mimic a 3 in 1 device usb serial, keyboard, mice, it receives ‘AI’ instructions over usb serial, spoofs as the keyboard and mice and conjure the works of an other worldly william shakespheare

I just read the closure announcement on the initial link and noticed that it now has 578 Likes. I am still trying to figure this out!!!!????????

I used to publish a hobby magazine myself and when I finally gave up the unequal struggle I got deluged with messages of support like they have — much of it from people who had been “meaning to take out/renew a subscription” and would certainly do so if I restarted the magazine. People just don’t value these things until its too late.

[ag123 – Wed Dec 06, 2017 3:03 pm] –
there is something common between linux, arduino, stm32duino
and it is actually more than open source
the first time when i installed a linux distribution on a *386* pc using *floppies*, the most amazing and fun thing then is that ‘i’ve my own (un*x) os’, back then un*x used to be run on expensive dec, sun, apollo and sgi workstations, having linux (un*x) on a pc is ‘disruptive* it changed the status quo. no longer is windows and ms dos the only (public) desktop os. i can run my own mail server, domain name server etc, back then in the windows world it is a privilege of the ‘servers’ unless of course one downloads and run shareware / freeware versions of those.

back then and for a long time connecting to diy custom peripherals is pretty much rs232 16550 uart etc. then come usb, and for the longest time there is no ‘user custom-able usb’, vlsi are expensive short of buying in bulk. many resort to usb-serial converters. today comes leaflabs maple, stm32duino it is ‘disruptive’ in a similar light, user customizable usb is now a reality. a blue pill, maple mini’s role can be simply re-defined uploading a sketch or firmware. in a sense stm32 could just ‘spoof’ any usb vid/pid and mimic whatever device one deems fit. similarly with things like nrf51822 makes bluetooth le ‘user customizable’. i’m not sure how long this niche trend would last, but i’d guess this is part of that ‘iot’ hype along with the RPis, beaglebone blacks, arduinos, micro:bit, and all that n variety of mcu boards and single board computers.

but i’d guess ‘iot’ is simply a buzzword to the ‘average’ man on the street probably ignored just as the ‘average’ crowd seemed pretty happy with the notion that computers runs windows, phones runs android or ios, while things like linux, arduino (etc) simply co-existed below the ‘noise floor’

OT: on a side note things like stm32duino could literally outdo the million monkey theorem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
with the help of things like AI, deep learning etc, stm32duino could simply mimic a 3 in 1 device usb serial, keyboard, mice, it receives ‘AI’ instructions over usb serial, spoofs as the keyboard and mice and conjure the works of an other worldly william shakespheare

As someone who’s a bit more in between, i have some linux devices and don’t mind interfacing with them, but usually uses windows, i think the problem with a lot of open source programs for “normal people” is that people also value their time (and in some cases sanity).
Open source still seems to have very little motivation to make things usable to everybody. And usually when asking around, everything is possible with open source software, until you actually try to do it, and end up having to compile your own recent drivers, messing around with version hell on certain components, getting stuck for hours in obscure config files and getting 3 different tools to work together somehow, and then giving up because it’s all just falling apart (may or may not reflect some of my past experiences).
I have a certain interest in linux/unix, but until i actually want to learn/investigate it as a hobby, it’ll just be what’s deep down in my android phone, NAS servers, raspberry pi, and i’ll just use it very superficially with things i know work well, not trying too fancy things (which i know i can easily achieve on windows).
It also depends on how you like working, i know people who adore CLI interfaces, hack everything together using scripts, etc… if that’s your thing, go for it . i grew up with ms dos -> windows 3.1 -> windows 95. and for me it always felt like an improvement, and i like where it is now .
And for all the goods & evils about microsoft etc… There are some obvious evils, but so far they haven’t bitten me too much yet (and luckily in europe the EU fights back when corporations go too far). Some of the goods i like is that they are very driven to make things usable, compatible across the entire system, great backwards compatibility, and a lot of effort in continuous improvement of their ecosystem.

i’m not really anti-(ms) windows for that matter, just that i find that linux, un*x apparently seemed suitable for different purposes / use cases.
when one tries to build scripts / have some simple batch automations etc, i tend to find linux , unix shells and tools more versitle.
for a programming environment e.g. with eclipse, arduino etc i tend to find various open sourced tools well developed and suited to the linux environment e.g. dfu-util which we used to flash the sketches. it tends to ‘work out of box’, my guess is in part it is built around libusb which is pretty much a mature single library in the linux world. in addition, for development, linux distributions comes with a rich set of tools such as make files etc which simplified things before IDEs become commonly available on linux as well. the open sourced environment also tends to ‘hide little’ between the hardware and os (pretty much close to bare metal), you could pretty much observe the logs out right e.g. running lsusb, checking dmesg etc when troubleshooting connectivity problems e.g. with a blue pill / maple mini etc. i’m thinking that on windows, sometimes it isn’t as easy to troubleshoot and diagnose usb connectivity issues as the logs/hints may not be there or may be rather obscure.

there are other use cases such as intel compute stick, on windows it pretty much works as a ‘tiny desktop’ computer.
it is actually rather inconvenient if u discover that to use the compute stick you’d need to hook up a monitor, keyboard, mouse, a usb hub (it has only one port) and power to basically use it as a little desktop pc.
with linux i turned it into a remote device in which i can remotely control and run pretty much anything over wifi
https://liliputing.com/2015/07/simplest … o-far.html
and with some of those dlna clients
https://elinux.org/DLNA_Open_Source_Projects
or kodi
https://kodi.tv/
i could stream videos to it just like a chromecast dongle

a strange thing i like about the internet is a quote from somewhere
“censorship is interpreted as damage and is to be routed around”
ok probably not totally true anymore.

i remember being on the phone for guidance whilst doing the 3.5 hr kernel compile and also the 15 3.5″ non floppies to install slackware and i think a 0.98 kernel, 386sx16 over clocked to 20, 2mb of sip, hercules graphics card. £1317 istr, someone at the time crowed about getting his £10 cheaper.
the guy distributing it had to do the copying them quietly in the student computing area of Aston Uni and i had the train journey to wait for and collect them.

something about linux hardware, wait and it will work; bit like censorship in the above
where’s my barcode reader, anyone remember Tandy … … yes it did eventually and that was enough for me !

stephen

i’m not really anti-(ms) windows for that matter

Well, I am… anti-MS. I spent many years as a MCSE Windows-role architect and have thousands of Windows automated installations under my belt and years of 3rd and 4th level engineering support.

… Rick’s screwed up royally. … he went to reply and inadvertently edited instead .. I’m so sorry Ray
Nah… no problem Rick… beware the edit icon

… To elaborate in a weebit less words than the original: Wife’s PC broke Jan 2016 and I bought a 2nd hand refurbished notebook and installed Linux Mint 17.x on the box. She had 23 years of Windows experience at work and she move to Linux @home with no issues… I did not get yelled at even once. She edits WP and spreadsheets in Open Office and moves files between Windows 8.1 and Linux Mint without any concerns.

Here is the punch line:
If my 66 YO wife can move from Windows to Linux, anyone in this forum can too. Just bite the bullet, convert, and stop all the rediculous bla, bla, bla excuses … or, would you like everyone to know you were passed in the techno fast lane by a granny?

Just do it.

Ray

oh well, either way, it’d seem m$ and even the os itself is going the ‘cloud’ route these days, a trouble is many commercial s/w vendors still continue to do ‘windows only’, and oh yeah, they’d basically support 1 h/w platform and maybe even 1 os level (say windows 10), if windows 11 comes along good luck or maybe u can buy another new s/w package from them (‘upgrade’)

[mrburnette – Wed Dec 06, 2017 5:54 pm] –
i’m not really anti-(ms) windows for that matter

Well, I am… anti-MS. I spent many years as a MCSE Windows-role architect and have thousands of Windows automated installations under my belt and years of 3rd and 4th level engineering support.

… Rick’s screwed up royally. … he went to reply and inadvertently edited instead .. I’m so sorry Ray

Ray

I read your full post, and i see where you’re coming from. Luckily a lot of the things you’re mentioning have improved (it also reflects how the pc industry evolves). Windows 10 runs great on older systems etc… not like the windows 95 -> windows vista era where every consecutive windows indeed basically required a new pc…

someone said

Well, I am… anti-MS

work wise didn’t have much choice, then someone said want to build a test rig and i sold them linux for the license fees.
linux boxes, kernel, isa & pci device drivers AND i get paid.
system unit was pretty much a display, mouse and keyboard less laptop, take home and connect … …
back in next day and connect … …
best 5yrs, even better i was able to carry on using a linux box.
seems some people thought i’d be bored senseless with one on my desk.
they didn’t quite get the unix do one thing well and pipe approach, aka divide and conquer, i almost got fond of Perl5; they still favour monolithic c++ app approach.

stephen

… tools that live in the Windows only world can almost always run in a VM.

Example:
cypress_linux_tools – Tools to build and flash cypress PSoC Creator projects under Linux. … gengetopt; make; wine (to run cyelftool when using makefile); An arm toolchain (arm-none-eabi-). In order to build and install …

Simple Win32 API stuff often runs under Wine which is often part of Linux base installations.

When all else fails, dual boot…

Ray

ot again: on a side note, i’m wanting to try to make arudino make files that’d build my sketches in linux with or without eclipse.
it is one of those ‘projects’ that i wanted to do but never seem to be able to dedicate time to it.
linux distributions normally has all the tools for a make file based build. on windows i’d think u’d at least need to get things like visual c++ or some c based compilers and packages. and i’d guess normally ‘IDE’ seem to be the norm these days on windows and makefiles are ‘delegated’ to the linux / un*x world.
the benefit of make files? copy the whole project change a few lines in the make file and different sets of libraries gets included, all the default defines and includes could be pre-defined ‘arduino ide’ isn’t needed for that
and building a binary/sketch is simply ‘make’

[ag123 – Thu Dec 07, 2017 2:00 am] –
ot again: on a side note, i’m wanting to try to make arudino make files that’d build my sketches in linux with or without eclipse.
it is one of those ‘projects’ that i wanted to do but never seem to be able to dedicate time to it.
<…>

https://github.com/sudar/Arduino-Makefile

This is a very simple Makefile which knows how to build Arduino sketches. It defines entire workflows for compiling code, flashing it to Arduino and even communicating through Serial monitor. You don’t need to change anything in the Arduino sketches.

Features

Very robust
Highly customizable
Supports all official AVR-based Arduino boards
Supports chipKIT
Supports Teensy 3.x (via Teensyduino)
Works on all three major OS (Mac, Linux, Windows)
Auto detects serial baud rate and libraries used
Support for *.ino and *.pde sketches as well as raw *.c and *.cpp
Support for Arduino Software versions 0.x, 1.0.x, 1.5.x and 1.6.x except 1.6.2. We recommend 1.6.3 or above version of Arduino IDE.
Automatic dependency tracking. Referred libraries are automatically included in the build process. Changes in *.h files lead to recompilation of sources which include them
Installation

Through package

Using apt-get (or aptitude)

If you’re using FreeBSD, Debian, Raspbian or Ubuntu, you can find this in the arduino-mk package which can be installed using apt-get or aptitude.

sudo apt-get install arduino-mk

I also think Rick or another Linux member posted about Linux make

Ray

[mrburnette – Wed Dec 06, 2017 5:54 pm] –
i’m not really anti-(ms) windows for that matter

Well, I am… anti-MS. I spent many years as a MCSE Windows-role architect and have thousands of Windows automated installations under my belt and years of 3rd and 4th level engineering support.

… Rick’s screwed up royally. … he went to reply and inadvertently edited instead .. I’m so sorry Ray
Nah… no problem Rick… beware the edit icon

… To elaborate in a weebit less words than the original: Wife’s PC broke Jan 2016 and I bought a 2nd hand refurbished notebook and installed Linux Mint 17.x on the box. She had 23 years of Windows experience at work and she move to Linux @home with no issues… I did not get yelled at even once. She edits WP and spreadsheets in Open Office and moves files between Windows 8.1 and Linux Mint without any concerns.

Here is the punch line:
If my 66 YO wife can move from Windows to Linux, anyone in this forum can too. Just bite the bullet, convert, and stop all the rediculous bla, bla, bla excuses … or, would you like everyone to know you were passed in the techno fast lane by a granny?

Just do it.

Ray

lol XD
couple of years ago when my parents’ pc was having HD issues, i temporarily booted it with a ubuntu live cd so we at least could browse the internet on it.
I think it took my ~60YO mother a full 10 minutes to get stuck on firefox having opened a tab full screen, without address bars or any kind of window controls, and not knowing the firefox shortcuts myself i came close to having to reboot the computer to get out of it XD (i think i ended up logging out & back in, nearly as bad XD).
it’s ofcourse a silly first experience, but it’s the kind of thing that leaves people with a very bad feeling if they’re ever suggested to move to linux ^^’.

I’ve never been a big fan of all things Micro$oft, however, they do seem to have a tenacious grip on the majority of people’s perception of what can be done with their computer. Most of us don’t like to stray out of our comfort zone.

Having said that, if you give someone Linux, but don’t tell them what it is, they tend to be able to use it without any more issues than they might experience in Windoze. Furthermore it could be argued that since everyone who ever picked up and Android phone, has uses Linux, then the vast majority of those exposed to any form of modern technology, have been, or still are Linux users.

I on the other hand I personally, probably encounter Windoze less than 1% of my working life these days, and I feel at least 99% less stressed as a result

[ahull – Thu Dec 07, 2017 8:28 am] –
I’ve never been a big fan of all things Micro$oft, however, they do seem to have a tenacious grip on the majority of people’s perception of what can be done with their computer. Most of us don’t like to stray out of our comfort zone.

Having said that, if you give someone Linux, but don’t tell them what it is, they tend to be able to use it without any more issues than they might experience in Windoze. Furthermore it could be argued that since everyone who ever picked up and Android phone, has uses Linux, then the vast majority of those exposed to any form of modern technology, have been, or still are Linux users.

I on the other hand I personally, probably encounter Windoze less than 1% of my working life these days, and I feel at least 99% less stressed as a result

Lol, i feel a bit the opposite way around . When a bit younger (although i’m still pretty young XD), the promises of open source fascinated me, and was really curious, but when attempt after attempt of trying it out failed and just ended up me digging myself into really deep holes, and i just kept encountering half finished things, difficult to install things, things working worse than on windows (for example back in the day multi monitor support was pretty bad), only finding old/half finished tools etc… i kind of gave up, and windows isn’t ideal either, but seeing a big set of things with proper backwards compatibility and a lot of interoperability is really nice .
i’m sure some of the things i remember are pretty outdated, but i’m now pretty pragmatic about open source. Don’t mind it at all, but i’ve come to realise people tolerate a whole lot of half finished and user unfriendly things when it comes to open source, and i just don’t have the drive to endure all of that crap. For me Microsoft is far from ideal too, being the big corporation and the shit that comes with that, but it feels like a better managed & more usable environment for me .

[racemaniac – Thu Dec 07, 2017 9:19 am] –
For me Microsoft is far from ideal too, being the big corporation and the shit that comes with that, but it feels like a better managed & more usable environment for me .

I think you should crank up a modern distro, Linux Mint or Ubuntu for example, and see how much things have changed.

You should be pleasantly surprised.

It is different from Windows, and that can lead to some head scratching, but I actually find that more hardware “just works” in Linux these days, than in Wiindows 10. This is mainly because Windows seems to drop support for older hardware, if the drivers are not signed by the Gatesian Empire, thus ensuring that A) your perfectly serviceable printer/scanner/whatever ends up in landfill, and B) You have to buy the latest, more flimsy, less well engineered printer/scanner/whatever to replace it.

I find Windows 7 a much better workhorse than W10.

I have a machine with W10 on it, purely for testing, but its always updating and generally being a nuisance.

I know the WIndows 7 drivers system is not as advanced as W10, and W10 supposedly has Bluetooth LE etc, but in practice BLE on W10 didnt work for any of the dongles I tried, so I can’t see a compelling reason to go to 10

[RogerClark – Fri Dec 08, 2017 10:05 am] –
I find Windows 7 a much better workhorse than W10.

I have a machine with W10 on it, purely for testing, but its always updating and generally being a nuisance.

I know the WIndows 7 drivers system is not as advanced as W10, and W10 supposedly has Bluetooth LE etc, but in practice BLE on W10 didnt work for any of the dongles I tried, so I can’t see a compelling reason to go to 10

i’ve mostly just kept up with new windows releases, and things like the new start menu take some getting used to (but by now i like them, i don’t need a hierarchical start menu with a 1000 things, i’ve got 20 things i use often directly reachable, and anything else i just start typing the name and it immediatly finds it for me), and indeed, windows 10 has more big updates, but never anything that really annoyed me.
only back in the day vista had its reputation of needing a decent pc to run properly, not a bottom of the barrel one, so i made sure i (and people who asked my advice) had a pc that was up to the challenge, and never had any issues with it, liked working with it (both at home & at work).

And indeed, should give linux another try, it’s come a long way since i last tried. But i’ve also reduced my expectations of open source quite a bit over the past years. The community always seems to be convinced they’ve got this incredible thing, and you can do anything, till you actually try XD.
Stupid recent issue: having some raspberry pi’s, i wanted to set one up as a motion detector, with the standard raspberry pi camera (not a usb one).
I expected this to be a walk in the park (looking up raspberry pi & motion detection made me believe it was a solved problem)… still haven’t got it working :p. there is a motion sensor package, that works with any usb camera, but not the raspberry pi camera -_-. then there was an older package that some people linked that would do it, but couldn’t get it to work. It even took me quite a while to just get the regular camera software of the pi running and making 1 jpg every 5s (just giving an easy gui to enable the camera you connected, or just detecting it’s there would not be linux, would it XD).
At least got that running (even immediately making images as soon as it boots… but that gives the great sideeffect of the preview screen of the camera beign superimposed on the raspberry pi showing its boot up log).
That’s my usual experience with linux & open source. I set out to do a simple task with what i think would be a very standard case, and i end up struggling with it for a weekend, and settling on a solution that isn’t what i was hoping for -_- (or worst case, giving up because it’s just not worth my time & frustration).

I don’t think the RPi is a good indicator of the unruliness of Linux.

I have 4 different RPi boards and have yet to find a project which they are suitable for.

e.g. recently I thought I would use my RPi Zero W to scan for my Bluetooth thermomenters and disolay that data on a web page using a web server in the RPi.
But I found out very soon, that this is not easy, because the Bluetooth suooort seems to be complicated and I could not find an easy way just to pioe the data to a web server e.g. to PHP

So I went back to coding it on. ESP32 and so far it’s much easier, but things in Linux.

I bet for your motion detector, it would be possible to detect general motion using the OV7670 camera on a Blue Pill. The only problem would be the frame buffer would need to only be 6 or 8k so it would be low resolution

[RogerClark – Fri Dec 08, 2017 10:05 am] –
I find Windows 7 a much better workhorse than W10.
<…>

IMHO, Win 8.1 when beaten into submission with numerous registry hacks is the better workhorse based upon my 2 years of experience with that distribution 4 years back (been on Linux exclusively for 2 years and would never go back to MS. You may remember that I spent years as a MCSE.)

For those Win users that avoid hacks to the registry, I suspect that Win 7 is better for their general usage.

Ray

[RogerClark – Fri Dec 08, 2017 12:00 pm] –
<….>
I have 4 different RPi boards and have yet to find a project which they are suitable for.
<…>

Back in February of this year, one of the first projects I built on a RPi was a live video webserver. The camera API is really rather robust.
https://elinux.org/RPi-Cam-Web-Interface
and
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/camera … -for-sale/

Arduino’ish programmed hardware and ESP32/ESP8266 can host a video webpage but as you mentioned, the frame buffer takes a serious bite from SRAM.

The RPi-Zero-W has 512MB of RAM for $5 with a 1GHz clock. If you need 1G of RAM, the RPi 3 is often found for $29 and regularly at $35 from MicroCenter in the USA.

With Linux on the RPi, one can run a serious webserver such as lighttpd, PHP, Python w/flask, … even Apache.

Not being harsh on anyone who has not found a use for a Raspberry Pi, but likely it is a lack of comfort and productivity with Linux tools. One absolutely must be comfortable down under the UI. The learning curve can be steep for Windows only developers, IMO mainly due to the multitude of tools, many that are repetitive with just a little different flavors added.

I often use an ESP8266 (cheap) with the WiFi turned off as an Arduino-compatible for simple projects where more SRAM is necessary than the Maple Mini clones will provide… truth of the matter is that the only reason in my mind that the STM32duino exists is because it had more SRAM than the AVR-based Mega and a lower price point and secondarily has better architecture implemented on that slice of silicon.

Raspberry Pi Zero-W can be compared to the ESP8266 for battery requirements … around 800mA peak. Add LiOn mAH to fit the task.

Another thing I find useful is that SSH is easy to implement for remote control (headless systems) and VNC works very well if one needs a remote GUI and VNCserver is integrated into the RPi OS distribution for consistency – literally only setup is providing a local User account (in some cases.)

Ray

[mrburnette – Fri Dec 08, 2017 3:07 pm] –

[RogerClark – Fri Dec 08, 2017 12:00 pm] –
<….>
I have 4 different RPi boards and have yet to find a project which they are suitable for.
<…>

Back in February of this year, one of the first projects I built on a RPi was a live video webserver. The camera API is really rather robust.
https://elinux.org/RPi-Cam-Web-Interface
and
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/camera … -for-sale/

Not being harsh on anyone who has not found a use for a Raspberry Pi, but likely it is a lack of comfort and productivity with Linux tools.
Ray

thanks, going to give that camera interface a try . looks promising (but that has bitten me far too often ^^’)

Concerning the lack of comfort & productivity with linux tools… isn’t that part of the linux problem ^^’. i know my basics of the linux command line, how to edit config files etc.., i don’t get stuck on when i need elevated privileges. but it’s usually still a royal pita to find out what i need to configure, and then get it all configured. please just give me a gui that covers the most common scenarios, and if i want to dig deeper, then i can. but at least give me an easy way to get started XD

My two cents…

I’m using linux at home as main Os since some years, using Kubuntu LTS (I like the KDE DE).
Of course I have also “some” Windows machines “around” and a couple of Mac (that I don’t use anymore)…

One month ago I assembled a new desktop for my “lab room” as main workstation (dual monitor configuration), and with about 200€ I get a new MB with 8GB DDR4 and a Pentium G4600 (really a great beast), re-using a case and the PSU of a xw4300 HP workstation and re-using some stuff (HDDs, DVD/BD burner, cables…).

This time I installed Mint KDE 18, and I must admit that it is one of the best distros I have ever seen. It is all ok just out of the box, and it’s also a pleasure from the graphical aspect.

And if I need Windows (e.g. for Rigol DSO remote control) I can use VMs (the G4600 has all the features for VMs…) or Wine (e.g. for LTspice).

More, I’ve a triple boot choice (using Plop as boot manager) with Mint, Win 7 and Win 10 just in case…

I am on racemaniac side.
Couple of years ago I wanted to use linux on my old (now 7 years old) Sony laptop.
I don’t remember which distro did I try, but it was a pain just to have 800×600 resolution. No web camera, no WiFi, no micro, no Bt, no Ethernet card recognized…
Since then, no linux for me.
Weendoze just works.

i’d guess due to the various proprietary nature of laptops compatibility is commonly a problem for linux on laptops.
rather often it is necessary and some trouble to find ‘linux compatible’ laptops prior to purchase

i’ve got linux on a Asus ux305 it works as well as this article reads and suggests, pretty much ‘everything works’
https://liliputing.com/2015/04/ubuntu-o … abook.html

i’d guess these days the preference for desktop os is driven mainly by personal preference and hardware compatibilities issues etc
on my home pc and laptop, i mostly set them up for dual boot which means i could choose between the os but mostly i work in linux.

i tend to find linux more effective when open sourced hardware drivers are there in the kernel or libraries, troubleshooting usb connectivity problems is often basically running dmesg or lsusb to see if the device has enumerated. i find this ‘closer to bare metal’ approach more effective when trouble arises say due to hardware etc. on windows it seemed that drivers etc are rather obscured and when problems occur, it may leave one guessing where is the issue as in if it is windows and drivers having problems or that it is a hardware issue. in linux i actually have got this little usb reset utility
/* usbreset -- send a USB port reset to a USB device */

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <sys/ioctl.h>

#include <linux/usbdevice_fs.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
const char *filename;
int fd;
int rc;

if (argc != 2) {
fprintf(stderr, "Usage: usbreset device-filename\n");
return 1;
}
filename = argv[1];

fd = open(filename, O_WRONLY);
if (fd < 0) {
perror("Error opening output file");
return 1;
}

printf("Resetting USB device %s\n", filename);
rc = ioctl(fd, USBDEVFS_RESET, 0);
if (rc < 0) {
perror("Error in ioctl");
return 1;
}
printf("Reset successful\n");

close(fd);
return 0;
}

I just read this: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/2433 … uck-s-sake
reminded me of what i still think linux is like (and apparantly sometimes it still is like that ^^’)

hi all,

i found this link in the discussion comments thread, a link to purchase the archives (most likely a download)
http://disq.us/url?url=http%3A%2F%2Flj. … id=2869225

not too sure if it’s still available

pretty sure i pulled that, as i have/had a digital subscription. it was a link after i logged in..
stephen

just looked at that page again. it’s not a LJ site, hence the price.
srp

for those who are not existing subscribers but who are keen about linux, it may be well worth purchasing the archive, it is every issues since the beginning
i’ve actually been following linux journal partly as the topics covered aren’t necessarily linux specific, rather they are linux related and the focus on use cases and apps provides interesting insights to linux related and not necessarily linux technologies, use cases and sciences

for instance this old article describes the use of linux in the production of titanic the movie
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2494
today something similar becomes a boinc community distributed computing project
http://burp.renderfarming.net/forum_thread.php?id=2222

[RogerClark – Wed Dec 06, 2017 10:33 am] –
I got suckered into buying another magazine while on a weekend break, (I forget what its called)…

Roger those breaks are called Weekends, and you should work less and get more of them so you don’t forget them!

@Ray, dons his Dick Turpin costume and hijacks the thread.

[ahull – Mon Dec 18, 2017 2:14 pm] –
@Ray, dons his Dick Turpin costume and hijacks the thread.

Well, hopefully not that terse of a move … reckless interjection, perhaps. With 2 cups of coffee in my system, I am trying to remember exactly why I posted that to this thread…
Anyway, I am running the beta Chromium on this 64-bit Linux Mint and I am not at all pleased with how Google implemented the auto-start feature; what I thought was going to be a ‘hard line’ on this sort of autostart of multimedia on webpage activity has been reduced to just blocking streams with both sound+video. Video only seems to break-through easily. Further blockage requires user interaction on a site-by-site basis. PooPoo on Google and their Alphabet soup… they are beginning to act more and more like Microsoft every year.

Ray

…they are beginning to act more and more like Microsoft every year.

In my experience, once a company hits a critical size, any pretence at occupying the moral high ground goes out of the Window (or should that be Windoze) If the shareholders/advertisers/accountants want something badly enough, then to hell with security and the needs of the customer, get that feature out yesterday boys, if not sooner.

BTW Black suits you Ray..

linux journal bounce back to life
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/hap … rnal-alive

ok so that’s December and Janurary issues at some point, maybe even a triple first issue in march??.
i would think they’d be at least one if not two issue(s) in advance.

stephen dusting and polishing his credit card