The computer and electronics super geek thread

[Nazareno2012]

Linux has it's own share of issues. In many ways, Linux is well on it's way to become the monolithic proprietary platform that people used to rant about when explaining why Linux is better than Windows. But it's okay because Red Hat is one of the good guys!

BSD is better(I happen to enjoy FreeBSD), but suffers from a relative lack of support.

And, well... the Unix way isn't always the right way(even when Linux actually does something the Unix way). There are also many ways in which Windows is better than the Unix knockoffs.

Ultimately, you're picking a set of decades-old decisions made at the dawn of modern computing to embrace and prop up at all costs, be it ATT's or DEC's(Several alleged instances of MS "doing their own thing to be contrary" trace through MS-DOS back to CP/M,and CP/M drew a lot of inspiration from the venerable PDP- series).

I'd like to see a ground-up OS design, free of that historical baggage, but it's impossible at this point.

Yes I am aware of those issues but as I mentioned in a previous post, it is just my preferrence. And community-mantained Linux distributions like Debian generally make the propietary bits optional or remove them entirely (as with Trisquel). Edited April 1, 2016 by Nazareno2012

[Mazinger]

My gaming needs aren't high, but I find that Crossover Office has given me good results with Street Fighter IV on both Ubuntu and Mac OS X. Now with SteamOS on the horizon, I feel like the non-Windows gaming possibilities are about as good as they have ever been.

[SchizophrenicMC]

I work with various Linux distros professionally. CentOS is the only one that isn't complete pain. RedHat is the nonsense payware version of Cent, BSD makes no sense at all, Debian sucks, Ubuntu is the software equivalent of cancer, I'm not even sure what CloudLinux is (I think it might be based on the Cent kernel?) and I was so glad when we dropped Fedora support. And even Cent, which I typically don't mind, becomes an epic pain when paired with cPanel/WHM.

Say what you will about Windows, at least WinServer just kind of *works*.

[Mazinger]

While, I agree that CentOS is fine for datacenters, I don't find it compelling as a desktop replacement. There's plenty of others that have made big strides towards the ease of use most consumers have come to expect from Windows and OSX. If anyone here is curious, I'd suggest downloading and trying the most recent Ubuntu, LinuxMint, or Suse version.

I work with various Linux distros professionally. CentOS is the only one that isn't complete pain. RedHat is the nonsense payware version of Cent, BSD makes no sense at all, Debian sucks, Ubuntu is the software equivalent of cancer, I'm not even sure what CloudLinux is (I think it might be based on the Cent kernel?) and I was so glad when we dropped Fedora support. And even Cent, which I typically don't mind, becomes an epic pain when paired with cPanel/WHM.

Say what you will about Windows, at least WinServer just kind of *works*.

[JB0]

Ubuntu is the software equivalent of cancer

I love this analogy.

Say what you will about Windows, at least WinServer just kind of *works*.

Which is really Windows' biggest strength.I prefer the way it does a lot of things on a personal level, but certainly not everything. And there seems to be more I dislike with every release, it's all been downhill since Win2K. There's some stuff I really prefer the Unix way, and customization is definitely a point I enjoy.

The biggest thing that keeps Windows on top is that it "just works".

My laptop is running Mint right now. I have had some strange issues, but I'm afraid to reformat it because I may never get the WiFi working ever again if I do. Attempts to set up WiFi in the past have led to circus shows, and often to unbootable systems and either fighting to get it up far enough to undo things or reformatting the machine entirely(depending on how fresh the install is, mostly).

[technoblue]

But Windows does not work in all cases. You guys must have your rose colored glasses on, or maybe you're lucky enough to have never encountered a blue screen (but I seriously doubt it). Windows can be brought to a halt just as easily as any other OS. Use what you are comfortable with, especially if it is your home desktop.

I work with hardware designers. The team I work with uses multiple operating systems and we have to test and document the software that they code on these systems. No one system is better than any other, really. They are all equally frustrating/helpful at times. The thing is, you can't go to a customer and say the OS is to blame when there is a bug.

*sigh*

As usual, it comes down to personal preferance, and not who has the most clever hyperbole or snark.

[Nazareno2012]

Just to add to this thread, there is a free and open source clone of Windows that is currently in alpha, ReactOS. Once it gets more stable it would be a viable alternative to Windows, as you can run your Windows programs on it.

[JB0]

But Windows does not work in all cases. You guys must have your rose colored glasses on, or maybe you're lucky enough to have never encountered a blue screen (but I seriously doubt it). Windows can be brought to a halt just as easily as any other OS. Use what you are comfortable with, especially if it is your home desktop.

I work with hardware designers. The team I work with uses multiple operating systems and we have to test and document the software that they code on these systems. No one system is better than any other, really. They are all equally frustrating/helpful at times. The thing is, you can't go to a customer and say the OS is to blame when there is a bug.

*sigh*

As usual, it comes down to personal preferance, and not who has the most clever hyperbole or snark.

Oh, no, I never ever said Windows was perfect. That said, the blue screen crashes are FAR less common than they used to be. For the most part, they died when MS got everyone off the rickety framework of Win9x* and on Windows NT. Most crashes I've seen under the NT family have been due to defective hardware or drivers.

I really do agree with the personal preference thing. I even think that Microsoft's current dominant role is bad for everyone, and WANT to see someone take them down a notch or two.

*I have a lot of respect for what 9x did. MS successfully migrated people from DOS+3.x to NT over a span of about five years, without any dramatic breakages or loss of continuity. So smoothly that most people never realized it happened. 95 introduced enough of NT to get programmers started without blowing up 3.x or DOS stuff wildly, and they turned things up a little at a time until XP. It was always intended as a transitional product, and they stuck with that transition long enough to make it work.

Contrast with Apple, where they killed several modernized versions of "classic" MacOS in favor of ever-larger kludges until they finally just threw everything out, hacked up FreeBSD, and installed a Mac emulator on it.

Just to add to this thread, there is a free and open source clone of Windows that is currently in alpha, ReactOS. Once it gets more stable it would be a viable alternative to Windows, as you can run your Windows programs on it.

Ahhh, ReactOS... They've got a long way to go, and I have doubts that they'll ever catch up with Wine in terms of compatibility(Wine's had a large headstart and has a larger development team).

[mikeszekely]

Yeah, I'm not really trying to declare a definitive best OS for everyone, or even best desktop OS for everyone. I've used every version of Windows since 95, every version of OSX since 10.2 or 10.3, and various versions of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Puppy, Yellow Dog, Xandros, PearOS, openSUSE, Arch, Mint, PCLinuxOS, heck, even Solaris back when it was still a Sun product. Modern versions of Windows and Linux both have their advantages and disadvantages (although the iOS-ification of OSX and the improvements in Android have me pretty much entirely over Apple). I'm not even going to deny that gaming on Linux is getting better.

What I am saying is that, as a PC gamer, my main PC is going to be a Windows box. Actually, I'm running Windows 10 now on both my desktop and a gaming laptop. Doesn't mean I'm not open to trying new operating systems on my spare laptop or my old desktop.

[technoblue]

I can agree with those points.

Also, Microsoft announced this week that it will be supporting the bash shell in Windows 10.

http://betanews.com/2016/03/30/windows-10-ubuntu-bash-shell/

I'm going to have to look and see how well a user can lock down the Windows 10 spyware. It's getting harder for me to say no to the upgrade.

On a tangential point, it seems things are converging more in tech. It's a much different approach than what was common ten years ago. And consider what other companies are doing: Android devices use a Google system which is based on the Linux kernel. The PS4 is a Sony proprietary console which is based on the BSD kernel. MacOS was already mentioned, and it is a BSD derivative too. There are hobby devices, like the Raspberry Pi device, which use the Linux Kernel, and so on.

At the end of the day, I think systems are going to become more and more flexible. If we are also approaching a common standard, then it may be a good thing for businesses and customers alike. My only concern is that the standard makes sense.

[frothymug]

So, I bought a new SSD, GPU, and gaming keyboard from Newegg and they should be arriving today. I had to ask again about Windows 7 OEM. From some research on the internet, it appears that the OEM version only binds to the motherboard. If I just install my SSD and then install Windows 7 OEM onto it, it should work, right? Can I attach my old HDD afterwards and pull files over as needed without having some kind of OS conflict?

[technoblue]

So, I bought a new SSD, GPU, and gaming keyboard from Newegg and they should be arriving today. I had to ask again about Windows 7 OEM. From some research on the internet, it appears that the OEM version only binds to the motherboard. If I just install my SSD and then install Windows 7 OEM onto it, it should work, right? Can I attach my old HDD afterwards and pull files over as needed without having some kind of OS conflict?

If I follow you, the plan is to:

1. Put together the new system.
2. Install Windows 7 OEM on the new SSD.
3. Connect the old HDD to the new system (in a D: configuration, for instance).
4. Move the files from the old HDD to the new SSD (from D: to C:, for instance).

Yes, this will work. The Windows installation on your HDD should be ignored since it's no longer the boot drive.

[frothymug]

Cool. Thanks. Gonna give it a try now.

[technoblue]

Cool. Thanks. Gonna give it a try now.

Hey, frothymug. How'd it go? Is your desktop running okay and did Windows activate on the SSD without any major hiccups?

[SchizophrenicMC]

But Windows does not work in all cases. You guys must have your rose colored glasses on, or maybe you're lucky enough to have never encountered a blue screen (but I seriously doubt it). Windows can be brought to a halt just as easily as any other OS. Use what you are comfortable with, especially if it is your home desktop.

I work with hardware designers. The team I work with uses multiple operating systems and we have to test and document the software that they code on these systems. No one system is better than any other, really. They are all equally frustrating/helpful at times. The thing is, you can't go to a customer and say the OS is to blame when there is a bug.

*sigh*

As usual, it comes down to personal preferance, and not who has the most clever hyperbole or snark.

Windows is incredibly stable. Windows Server is more stable than it has any right to be. And I work with a LOT of different server configs, ranging from 10 year old Opterons with 1GB of RAM and unspeakably small drive volumes, to brand new 4-proc boxes with hundreds of gigs of memory, terabytes upon terabytes of storage, twin K80 GPUs, and everything in between. The one overarching fact in all of this is, the Windows boxes have the fewest issues. The only OS-specific issues with Windows boxes occur with some particular Win2003 servers that crash due to some paging issues. I can't tell you how many times I have to fix Linux boxes because the customer's idiot sysadmin messed around with their SWAP partition too much.

Or the number of times a customer took /b/'s advice and ran

rm -rf /

At least Windows is smart enough to stop deleting things before it kills itself.

But even excusing that, Linux is so unstable. For example, Ubuntu Server likes to set ACPI to off when it boots for some reason, and if you do that on a server with a GPU, the box will do some really funny stuff and cause kernel panic at best, total system lockup at worst. And there are so many stupid things that cause kernel panics. Had a server kernel panic because its RAID card stopped passing on information about a pair of secondary JBODs, neither of which contained anything necessary for booting, because Linux wants to mount every drive in fstab without regard to whether it's there or not. If it was Windows, it'd boot and you just wouldn't have those drive letters available. People love to talk about BSODs, but that's because BSOD is a lot more dramatic sounding and looking than kernel panic. And BSODs are usually hardware issues (RAM is easily 99% of what I've encountered), but most kernel panics I deal with have to do with Linux needing considerable tuning to stabilize on a given config. Plus Windows has a lot of generic driver support, and runs user-installed drivers in userspace. Ubuntu runs it at root level, which causes your OS to stop working completely when you install CUDA drivers but have a GRID GPU.

And then you get payware Linux like RedHat, like what's the point of that? For that matter, cPanel/WHM. And why does Ubuntu take so long to boot? I'll grant that most Linux is super light and boots faster than most Windows, but Ubuntu will just sit and sit and sit and sit. Ubuntu Desktop is almost usable, but Ubuntu Server is super AIDS. Shattered platters are better for your machine than Ubuntu.

God I hate Ubuntu.

[technoblue]

Okay...

* steps back *

I'm going to disagree, based on my experience, and leave it at that. I don't really want to argue bullet points or start a wall of text war. I'm too old for that, and it really doesn't matter in the great scheme of things because stirring the pot wasn't the reason for my reply. My point was that people should use the system they like and leave the political/flame-bait bs out of it. If someone is curious about adding to their skill set or learning about something new, then they should hear all sides (for and against).

As for the rest, I'm glad Windows works for you.

Or the number of times a customer took /b/'s advice and ran

rm -rf /

Morning edit...

Why would a blatant admin command be available to a regular user and not locked behind sudo? I think the crux of what gets people frustrated with Linux is that the use model is different. Windows assumes many things, including basic configuration settings and has a well-developed GUI. Linux does not assume as much, depending on which distro your using, and that can get a person into trouble because a GUI may or may not be available to set up the system.

You keep bringing up Red Hat. I guess you mean Red Hat Enterprise Linux and not Fedora. The rm -rF thing may have been a joke, but the point is valid. A Linux newbie would not be familiar with the command line and should not have access to wipe root.

Edited April 4, 2016 by technoblue

[frothymug]

Hey, frothymug. How'd it go? Is your desktop running okay and did Windows activate on the SSD without any major hiccups?

Oh, yeah. Sorry, I forgot to come back and post an update.

Everything worked out just fine. After reading your response earlier, I realized that what I was doing was basically a hard drive wipe and reinstall. Aside from the usual quirks of getting all drivers installed and working with each other without any conflicts, it went well. Now that I have an SSD, I fully comprehend how painfully slow my old HDD was.

GTX 970 is working great, finally sat down and figured out how to correctly run my RAM at 1600 MHz and then overclock it to match my motherboard's clock speed. Also played around with overclocking the GPU to see how the benchmarking improves.

Now, comes the wait until I get a new modern game to push my setup to its limits.

[SchizophrenicMC]

Why would a blatant admin command be available to a regular user and not locked behind sudo? I think the crux of what gets people frustrated with Linux is that the use model is different. Windows assumes many things, including basic configuration settings and has a well-developed GUI. Linux does not assume as much, depending on which distro your using, and that can get a person into trouble because a GUI may or may not be available to set up the system.

You keep bringing up Red Hat. I guess you mean Red Hat Enterprise Linux and not Fedora. The rm -rF thing may have been a joke, but the point is valid. A Linux newbie would not be familiar with the command line and should not have access to wipe root.

What you think every idiot with an idea for a business and enough income to rent a server can afford to pay a sysadmin? Pah! It's not our problem if a customer runs commands they're not supposed to run, but I'm not joking when I say it's happened enough times to destroy my faith in the notion of Linux users being tech savvy. Linux is (usually) free, any idiot can play with it, and destroy all of their business-critical data.

And yes, I mean RHEL. We stopped supporting Fedora recently, on account of it didn't make sense to have it in a lineup that already included CentOS and RHEL.

Anyway moving on, I had a helluva time getting my machine working yesterday after some updates installed and probably finally killed some stuff on my chipset. Stupid Bloomfield and its triple-channel BS. So anyway now I'm down to 4GB (any more and it won't boot anything) and one of my hard drives is no longer being recognized in either OS I have readily available for boot. I do not have the budget for this nonsense. What a bad time for this to happen. How very inopportune.

[technoblue]

Anyway moving on, I had a helluva time getting my machine working yesterday after some updates installed and probably finally killed some stuff on my chipset. Stupid Bloomfield and its triple-channel BS. So anyway now I'm down to 4GB (any more and it won't boot anything) and one of my hard drives is no longer being recognized in either OS I have readily available for boot. I do not have the budget for this nonsense. What a bad time for this to happen. How very inopportune.

Ouch. That really sucks, man. Having to mess with serious IT-related issues at home is a definite drag.

You mentioned before that you were looking to modernize your hardware and get the system back up to speed. When were you thinking of upgrading? Later this year? If you can't get your old system limping again, how much of a wrench does that put into your schedule?

[SchizophrenicMC]

Ouch. That really sucks, man. Having to mess with serious IT-related issues at home is a definite drag.

You mentioned before that you were looking to modernize your hardware and get the system back up to speed. When were you thinking of upgrading? Later this year? If you can't get your old system limping again, how much of a wrench does that put into your schedule?

The original plan was to wait until Q4 this year to make the move to Skylake. I have a lot of other projects going on this year, and I was hoping to have enough of that knocked out to afford my Skylake build around November. As it is now, I'm struggling to get either of my secondary hard drives (which are frankly the important ones) to spin up. Both the drives are fine, but between them and the memory issue, and the fact that the problem persists regardless of whether I'm in Windows, LiveCD, or an old Ubuntu 12.04 livedisk I keep around specifically for data recovery after Windows stops running drives*, I suspect my motherboard is dying to death. Which sucks because the last thing I want to do is spend money on a junk triple channel Bloomfield motherboard. But all the same I can't much afford the $800 or so I planned on dumping into my new build right now.

*Windows 7 is really aggressive about turning off disks with even a hint of something going wrong. Ubuntu 12.04 LiveCD on the other hand will read off a drive until your bearings go. Assuming it can get the drive to mount on boot, which is a problem I'm having right now. If you have a secondary that won't mount, it won't even attempt to boot. And it won't even drop me into a maintenance shell like most useful versions of Linux. But it is an improvement over Ubuntu 14, which is just all kinds of broken.

[Major Focker]

my Synology update issues finally got sorted. turns out my NAS was already at 98% capacity and was screwing up the processes.

i bought an external drive to offload some photos i haven't sorted through yet. down to 95%, the update went smoothly.

with extra space on my new external drive, i was thinking of backing up my laptop files to it so i can migrate to Windows 10, since it's been bugging me like hell.

i just have a question: what happens to the OEM programs (eg. Photoshop and Lightroom) that came with my laptop? will they be retained or wiped?

[mikeszekely]

If you install Windows 10 through windows update as an update they should be fine. While backing up your files is always a good idea, they should be fine too. Basically, your laptop will do some stuff, reboot once or twice, then when it's all over everything is the same except you have windows 10 instead of Windows 7.

I updated three computers this way with no issues, but Microsoft has a tool on their windows 10 website that will scan your computer first and let you know if there will be issued with any software or drivers that aren't Windows 10 compatible.

[Major Focker]

thanks. guess i'll take the update option then.

was considering a clean install, but i don't have the install discs of the programs. i can probably download the install packages but i'm not sure if my license keys will still work since they are probably tied to my Win7 license, which presumably will be altered once it's replaced by Win10, so said programs might not recognize it.

in any case, i'll probably just be hanging on to this laptop for another year or so.

[Major Focker]

i'm trying to wrap my head around "Libraries" in Windows 7. got a couple of questions:

1) when i add a location in a library, say, a folder in an external drive, will i still be able to see the files in Library view even when the external drive is not connected?

2) if i delete a file in a library location that is currently offline (ie. external drive not connected), will it delete the file from the external drive once i re-connect it?

i have a ton of photos scattered across several external drives and pretty sure there are a lot of duplicates. so i want to include the folder locations in these external drives into one Library so i can sort by filename/date and identify to duplicates. i am hoping that once i find the duplicates, i can delete them from the Library and Windows will "sync" that delete action to the respective external drives when i reconnect them.

appreciate any tips. thanks.

Edited April 17, 2016 by Major Focker

[JB0]

i'm trying to wrap my head around "Libraries" in Windows 7. got a couple of questions:

1) when i add a location in a library, say, a folder in an external drive, will i still be able to see the files in Library view even when the external drive is not connected?

No. The library pseudo-directory is only populated with files that are present at present.

2) if i delete a file in a library location that is currently offline (ie. external drive not connected), will it delete the file from the external drive once i re-connect it?

No. The library function doesn't do any syncing or deduplication. It just provides a common access point for all your pictures that are currently available to the system.

i have a ton of photos scattered across several external drives and pretty sure there are a lot of duplicates. so i want to include the folder locations in these external drives into one Library so i can sort by filename/date and identify to duplicates. i am hoping that once i find the duplicates, i can delete them from the Library and Windows will "sync" that delete action to the respective external drives when i reconnect them.

appreciate any tips. thanks.

I'm sure there is a good way to do this, but I don't know what it is offhand. Unfortunately, the library function isn't going to be useful for this purpose.

[SchizophrenicMC]

On the occasions I've bothered to delete duplicates, I've always done it manually when I come across a dupe. But then, I also do most of my manual data organization when I'm bored and there's nothing else I can afford to do at the moment.

Personally, I just leave sleeping duplicates lie. Storage space is cheap. You should probably come up with a master directory for storing all of your photos, moving forward though. Take a picture, put it in its appropriate location in the master directory, cross-reference within the directory as needed. This will keep you organized and make the creation of backups much easier.

[Major Focker]

thanks guys, for clarifying.

gah, this is driving me nuts.

it's not just about finding duplicates, i was hoping for a consolidated library view so i can search for the photos i need and then connect the right drive so i can access it.

at the moment, it takes me a ridiculous amount of time connecting external drives one by one looking for the photos i need.

guess i'll just get another NAS box to consolidate all my photos. or would it be better to just replace my 4-bay NAS with a 6-bay one?

say, if i connect all my external drives (using USB hubs) to my laptop and create a Library, is there way to export the library's file list and directory structure to an excel file?

[SchizophrenicMC]

Keep It Simple, Stupid

Take some time, consolidate everything to a master directory, and don't try to overcomplicate things. Create frequent backups and when you take pictures, move them to the master directory instead of trying to shuffle them around removable media.

On the topic of NAS, I've always found it more cost effective to fill a cheap chassis full of drives and run a basic system on that. If you can find a quiet place to put one, an old server might even be a good option. Old server components are definitely a good choice for low-performance, high-reliability applications. For example, an enterprise grade Adaptec 5805 drive controller can be had used for $60 all day, and will run up to 100 drives when paired with an active backplane, or 8 drives on its own, through PCI-E x8. I work with these cards and they run for years and years and years. The batteries get a bit tricky after awhile- they do use optional external lipo batteries for cache stability in the event of power failure. But the modern equivalent is over $600, and you'll only notice the difference in an actual webserver. They can also run SAS if you're into that. And that's just one example. Server RAM has excellent stability, it's just really slow. Buy it used and you can pick up 32GB for $50, and you will probably never stress it enough to break it. You can get a SuperMicro X9SCI motherboard with a Xeon 1220 installed for $200 on the used market, and that's a SandyBridge quad-core CPU that isn't even 5 years old yet. The list goes on.

[Major Focker]

i hear ya. guilty as charged.

Synology spoiled me rotten, so i'll likely just order a new unit, than build my own server, which is not my expertise.

still, i'm curious if it's possible to do a file list dump from a library.

[SchizophrenicMC]

While it is possible to generate dirlist.txt from a folder and dump that into an Excel document, it is expressly not possible to do the same with a Library.

[Major Focker]

thanks

[David Hingtgen]

Anyone here sleeve their own cables? If you want red or blue it's easy to find and buy, but purple is rare, especially "the right shade" of purple. So I'm considering learning to do it myself.

PS----so it seems MS has shortened the planned support period for Win 7. So I may be dragged kicking and screaming into 10 soon.

[mikeszekely]

Anyone here sleeve their own cables? If you want red or blue it's easy to find and buy, but purple is rare, especially "the right shade" of purple. So I'm considering learning to do it myself.

PS----so it seems MS has shortened the planned support period for Win 7. So I may be dragged kicking and screaming into 10 soon.

Windows 10 isn't too bad. It's like they mixed some of the good ideas from 8 into 7. Plus, DirectX 12.

[azrael]

PS----so it seems MS has shortened the planned support period for Win 7. So I may be dragged kicking and screaming into 10 soon.

Windows 7 EOL is still scheduled for 2020. End of sales is this October.

[David Hingtgen]

Hmmn, I thought I read about a 30-month shortening, that'd bring it down to 2017 or so.