Brickfrog

CPU: socket LGA1200 era Intel Celeron

DRIVES: 4 SATA, 1 PATA, 2 NVME

Just wanted to mention that PATA hard drive may need to sit this one out, depends on whether you want to buy more stuff beyond a motherboard. LGA1200 means you’re using motherboards built from roughly 2020+, it would be highly unusual to find a motherboard with a PATA port in this decade or even last decade. So to use that drive inside the server you’re looking at buying some type of adapter (I’ve seen PATA-to-SATA adapters but can’t vouch for any in particular) or a PCIe card with PATA ports if those exist. Or to use it externally you’d have to hunt around for an old IDE-to-USB enclosure or some other type of USB adapter to have the drive sit outside the server.

I have a few old PATA drives myself but actively using them seems like more trouble than it’s worth

The last ancient USB to PATA only adapter I once had did actually support SMART stats, but apparently the adapter’s firmware didn’t support drives over 128GB

So close, you almost had it!

Same, been thinking of just keeping an eye out at thrift stores and such for an antique USB drive enclosure… one that isn’t a Maxtor OneTouch, heh. Or maybe my idea of a janky PATA-to-SATA connected to SATA-to-USB will actually work for SMART info by some miracle.

If I had more space for storing old tech I’d maybe just adopt or buy an ancient desktop that actually has PATA ports in it. I’ve actually seen them come up on Craigslist, like ancient Compaq desktops from back in the day before SATA existed.

Your post title and post body are asking for two different things :P Tons of SATA to USB adapters and drive enclosures work well on Linux, that part isn’t too difficult.

But what you probably want is one that has both UASP support and TRIM support for best SSD support. Here’s the tricky part, even if the adapter or drive enclosure has TRIM support that doesn’t mean it was auto enabled in the Linux system it was plugged into. Often times Linux can’t tell if an adapter or drive enclosure has TRIM support so the safe thing to do is to not enable it by default. That means you can see the drive supports TRIM, hdparm says the drive supports TRIM, yet when you run fstrim it still complains that TRIM isn’t supported.

Take a look at

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_state_drive#External_SSD_with_TRIM_support

and https://glump.net/howto/desktop/enable-trim-on-an-external-ssd-on-linux

If you already have an external adapter or enclosure that claims TRIM support but it isn’t working in Linux maybe try to enable TRIM and see how it goes?

For what it’s worth I do have a drive enclosure, with ASMedia ASM1351 chipset, that claims TRIM and UASP support but by default fstrim still won’t run TRIM on any drives inside it. If I get some free time maybe I’ll see if I can get Debian to enable TRIM on the device just for testing but it could be a bit.

EDIT: Confirmed the instructions in archlinux seem to work and I was able to temporarily enable TRIM on my external drive enclosure to successfully run fstrim on an SSD inside it. I only did a quick test, setting provisioning_mode to “unmap” so it’ll lose TRIM configuration once I disconnect the drive or restart the system. You’ll probably want to go the extra step and set up udev rules to keep it enabled.

Tested on Debian with a Startech S251BMU313 (USB 3.1 enclosure for 2.5" SATA drives with ASMedia ASM1351 chipset). In theory the archlinux instructions should work with any external USB adapter or enclosure with TRIM support.

Also note the instructions are a bit confusing, I did notice that running sg_readcap immediately resets the configuration in provisioning_mode so in my case I had to avoid re-running sg_readcap after enabling “unmap”.

EDIT2: Forgot one important tidbit :P for whatever reason the actual echo “unmap” command in archlinux would not work for me, I think you may need to have root permissions to actually do that? Instead I ran this with my non-root admin user:

echo unmap | sudo tee /sys/block/sdX/device/scsi_disk/*/provisioning_mode

Replace sdX with the drive device you’re working with. I’m not entirely sure why the above command works for me in Debian, and not the archlinux version, but figured I’d document it here just in case.

That’s good info! I’ve been looking around for a PATA to USB adapter with SMART support and haven’t had a ton of luck narrowing one down. Thinking offhand I may need to cobble together a PATA-to-SATA adapter connected to a SATA-to-USB adapter to actually get some SMART info moving from a PATA drive via USB. It’s not the only way to do this but it would be a lot easier if it can be done via USB :/

Also some fun info since you mentioned PATA adapters - The Maxtor OneTouch II is a terrible ATA enclosure, especially on Linux. For whatever reason the built-in chipset does some sort of disconnect right at the end of long operations like formatting, partitioning, etc. so you’re never entirely sure if the command worked correctly. I guess it was designed with Windows in mind, or maybe its Linux compatibility isn’t 100% there. And of course no SMART info gets passed through.

Right now using a pfSense router, it’s been working well but I’ll eventually replace it with hardware to run OPNsense (pfSense fork) when the time comes.

If you’re mainly just worried about wireless I’d just look into something to run OpenWrt or maybe FreshTomato if you’re sticking to older hardware. I have an older Linksys wireless router that is compatible with FreshTomato firmware so it’s been running on that and works well for my own usage, nothing fancy.

I was reading into this recently too. My understanding is that Debian + LibreOffice install the Liberation Fonts by default so usually you don’t need to worry about documents using Ariel and Helvetica (Liberation are metrically compatible replacements).

After further reading I ended up also installing the Crosextra fonts, the advantage of those two is that they are metrically compatible with Microsoft’s Calibri and Cambria. Once installed in theory LibreOffice should be able to open documents that had those Microsoft fonts and auto replace them with the open versions. (there’s a setting in LibreOffice to force font replacements but it didn’t seem like I needed to do that in my case)

Some more info on that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croscore_fonts#Crosextra_fonts

The Crosextra font packages in Debian

https://packages.debian.org/trixie/fonts-crosextra-carlito

https://packages.debian.org/trixie/fonts-crosextra-caladea

Also interestingly - if you do really, really want some of Microsoft’s fonts they are free to install but I don’t think you actually get a license to distribute/publish with them. I didn’t bother installing these but could be useful for someone with tons of old MS Office documents with lots of random MS fonts.

https://packages.debian.org/trixie/ttf-mscorefonts-installer (need to enable contrib in your apt settings to be able to apt install those)

but a friend told me that to get one I either need a VPS with a public ip (which just takes all the fun out of selfhosting) or purchase a static ip

Neither of those are requirements. Just buy a domain at a registrar that allows you to dynamically update an IP address with a domain you have there. Look into DDNS update scripts and/or your own internet router, many routers have that feature built-in already.

My system completely locks up every few hours. It’s not just a DE crash; the entire machine becomes unresponsive. The mouse and keyboard are completely dead (no cursor movement, Caps Lock key doesn’t toggle).

Before you rule out a DE (or Wayland issue), are you 100% sure the entire system is unresponsive? Like is it still online and responding to ping or SSH? Just to be sure try enabling SSH on the system - then set up a spare laptop/computer on the same network that can normally ping or SSH to your Linux system. Next time the issue occurs test to see if the Linux system is truly unresponsive by checking if it is still responding to pings and allowing you to SSH into it.

If you don’t have a spare laptop/desktop but do have an Android phone you could do the same with Termux.

Also if you can SSH into it you should be able to force logout your own user, that would bring your Linux system back to the login screen and you’d then be able to use mouse/keyboard normally again. (run “who” to view logged in users, run “pkill -u your-username” to kill and logout the user, may need to run those with sudo)

Only reason I mention it is that I have an ancient desktop that exhibits similar behavior occasionally but my system is still alive on the network. So far for me it seems like it might be a Wayland + Nvidia + GNOME issue. Once I switched back to X11 it doesn’t seem like the issue occurs anymore.

Some ideas:

• You could try changing some of the power save settings when you close your laptop lid to see if it helps. I have a spare laptop that used to get stuck with a scrambled display when going into suspend then waking up, it ended up being easier just to disable suspend altogether… I think for whatever reason Hibernate actually behaved better than suspend in my specific case. Granted its been a while since I retested all that against the current Debian version. Take a look through https://wiki.debian.org/Suspend for some ideas

• It’s possible Nouveau is still a bit buggy with suspend/resume, plus maybe when paired with hybrid/optimus graphics mode? I don’t have a solid solution for that but it could be worth experimenting with the regular Nvidia driver, Debian has a pretty detailed how-to on setting it up https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers … in particular take a look at enabling NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations (see https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Wayland_configuration) to help with suspend/resume, maybe the driver along with that setting will do the trick? The big caveat here is that same Debian page mentions

Warning: enabling NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations will cause the driver to malfunction on laptops with Optimus hybrid graphics.

and it does sound like you have some sort of hybrid graphics setup, so I can’t say if enabling it would be helpful or very bad in your case. :/

• I wonder if the issue is manifesting due to the hybrid graphics? I haven’t played around with one of those type of configurations but maybe you could go into your laptop’s BIOS and try disabling one of them so you’re always using the Nvidia graphics, or the AMD graphics?

• Speaking of BIOS, kind of a longshot but you could double-check if your BIOS is up-to-date. Power saving issues could just be due to buggy firmware particularly with laptops. But sometimes you’ll just have to look for workarounds if the firmware itself quite right and the laptop vendor never fixes it.

Assuming you already have a valid Windows .iso installer:

Just use Ventoy (it can be used on Linux as well as Windows).

Or if you have access to a running Windows system then Rufus or YUMI are other options you can use.

That’s a pretty good one, hadn’t heard about it until you mentioned it. xournal++ is great at marking up PDF files and was able to keep the layout formatting intact with my janky test PDF (a sad document that must have been print-to-pdf’d multiple times under Windows).

I also like that it’s easy to use and has just about every markup tool you’d want, all the stuff that Firefox is missing.

Only thing missing is that it doesn’t have the advanced .pdf export options that the other tools have, but that’s kind of minor… figure I could open/re-export the marked up .pdf in another application if I really want to configure any advanced .pdf options for the final document.

LibreOffice Draw can do markup and much more, the downside like OP mentioned is that sometimes the formatting of the PDF can get messed up so it’s a bit hit-or-miss.

Beyond that try Firefox (yes the web browser), its PDF markup capabilities are way better than you’d expect and the PDF formatting tends to stay intact. It’s probably better than LibreOffice for simple markup stuff, I just wish Firefox included a way to draw straight lines/arrows and shapes (circles, squares, etc.) to complete the markup toolbox. It does have a pen and highlighter but drawing an arrow via mouse looks a bit janky, LOL.

If you do a lot of the same type of markup (say an arrow pointed right) you could probably just save an image of an arrow and keep pasting it into the Firefox PDF editor, it’ll probably look better vs drawing them out.

I haven’t needed to do this myself but have a few ideas if you haven’t already tried these yet

• Are you trying to mount as HFS, or as iso9660? Those CD media you are looking are are probably hybrid ISO/HFS discs so they technically can be read in either format… I suspect mounting as iso9660 with/without its mount options could help you copy the data afterwards. Check the man page for mount to review the options, thinking iocharset and/or utf8 could be helpful if the defaults aren’t working.

• If the standard mount / cp isn’t working you could also give other tools a look. Have not tested this myself but I saw the Debian repo has hfsplus - which includes hpmount and hpcopy which should in theory be able to copy off HFS+ media. No idea if the tool also works with HFS but could be worth a go.

Look into audio normalisation… for playback purposes scanning/applying Replay Gain on the files should help a bit. Most audio playback software has support for that.

There is also EBU R 128, a slightly different type of loudness normalisation, it uses a different algorithm vs traditional Replay Gain. For my own usage I found it works better keeping the loudness at the same level when playing through a bunch of different audio tracks. No idea about VLC but the Strawberry application does support it so it could be worth a look if you want to try other audio playback software.

Earlier post https://lemmy.world/post/43496203

Those are pretty low limits but without knowing your actual bandwidth, or if you’re dealing with data caps, can’t say if you’re being rude… but you’re probably fine. In the end you contribute what you can, and seeding is still better than not seeding :)

My own rule of thumb, if my running p2p software needs to have bandwidth limits then I aim for at least 1 Mbit/s (122 KiB/s) to contribute to the network. But that assumes you actually have 1+ Mbit/s internet upload and no data caps, people around the world have different available speeds.

Might be helpful too https://duckduckgo.com/?q=50+kibibyte+to+megabit

Seems like it’s down right now.

Not Teamviewer-ish but on Windows I’ve set up a simple batch file that launches a reverse VNC connection (using TightVNC) from the remote system to myself in the case someone needs me to look at something on their desktop. Nothing fancy about it, just something simple to get going if you don’t want or need anything more complex.

Haven’t done it on Linux yet but I suspect a bash script + a VNC app (TigerVNC maybe?) would be able to do the same thing.

Mainly the users folder(s) e.g. c:\users\YOURUSERNAME , the hidden appdata\local and appdata\roaming folders in there probably contain way more than you actually need to back up but you could back up the whole thing to be on the safe side. Most of your user’s program configuration data is in those folders.

Sometimes systemwide program config data is in the hidden c:\programdata folder but I wouldn’t back that up aside from specific programs you really want to save config info for.

Aside from that any other folders you created containing data you care about.

And like the other comment mentioned, the Windows registry also has lots of program config data but I usually skip that, the majority of it is useless… but if there’s a great need for you to export a specific registry tree you could do that via the command prompt to export to a backup text file. I think reg export would do it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/reg-export

Is there something I am missing, or does it really just come down to people not wanting software that isn’t “cutting edge” release?

It might just be that, people tend to gravitate to the next shiny new thing. But you’re right, even when the application repos skew a bit older they’re not really that old. And technically nothing is stopping you from running a more up-to-date application via flatpak, appimage, or just compiling directly. I think it’s perfect for people looking for a more vanilla boring experience with the standard DE environments (GNOME, KDE, etc.).

I will say for total noobs another distro is maybe more friendlier, more polished installer, etc… before settling on Debian I was happily using Ubuntu which felt easier for someone still getting used to Linux. But I always knew it was Debian based which made me curious about eventually just running Debian itself… nowadays Debian is my main and has been great.