Rick's b.log - entry 2025/08/11

Bye bye Linux, Hello Linux!

I finished updating my blog yesterday and went to look at The Guardian prior to shutting down for the night.
Firefox just did nothing.
Odd. Let's open up a terminal to enter:

top -e=m

I was expecting to open a command line and see something like this.

top - 17:30:23 up 43 min,  1 user,  load average: 0,12, 0,45, 0,63
Tasks: 246 total,   4 running, 242 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  6,1 us,  3,3 sy,  0,0 ni, 90,4 id,  0,1 wa,  0,0 hi,  0,1 si,  0,0 st 
MiB Mem :   3806,9 total,    804,9 free,   2018,0 used,   1489,4 buff/cache     
MiB Swap:   3120,0 total,   3120,0 free,      0,0 used.   1788,9 avail Mem 

    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND  
   4242 rick      20   0 1903,4m 148,5m  67,1m R   8,1   3,9   2:59.11 rhythmb+ 
   1417 rick      20   0 4373,5m 232,7m 125,2m R   5,2   6,1   6:48.40 cinnamon 
   1011 root      20   0  596,6m 112,6m  69,3m S   3,3   3,0   3:38.29 Xorg     
   4553 rick      20   0 3207,3m 389,0m 204,6m S   2,3  10,2   1:41.47 firefox+ 
    681 root     -51   0    0,0m   0,0m   0,0m S   2,0   0,0   0:32.00 irq/29-+ 
   4725 rick      20   0   18,6g 161,4m  82,4m S   1,9   4,2   0:44.19 WebExte+ 
   2057 rick      20   0  479,2m  55,7m  34,9m S   1,9   1,5   0:51.44 mintrep+ 
   1065 rick       9 -11  119,8m  18,7m   9,4m S   1,8   0,5   0:31.00 pipewir+ 

Alright, let's shutdown and reboot.

Nope. It complains about unable to start a process.

After trying a few other things, I decided that I needed to hold down the Power button to force a shutdown.

Upon rebooting, I ended up in the grub console. Looking to see what partitions were available, the USB stick had two partitions. A FAT32 boot and an "unknown".

Getting the LiveCD install running from the other USB stick was harder than it should have been - because Grub had installed itself on the Windows disc, it was hardwired to start up Linux proper. I had to remember to bash Esc repeatedly at start in order to get to the boot override.

With the LiveCD version running, I put the other USB key in and it failed to mount. I had a try with fsck.ext4 to look at the drive, and it recognised it as a valid partition, then freaked out with loads of errors, then froze for several minutes, then did something else, then froze for several minutes.

Looking at the kernel messages log, it appears that the device was reporting a hardware error (bad flash) and then disconnecting. Actually, I suspect the controller was crashing, but it disconnected and reconnected as a new USB device. Credit to fsck for managing to keep track of that mess, but it was pretty clear that the USB key is toast.

Now, I have lost all of my installed software and settings - obviously. I haven't lost my data, screenshots, downloads, etc because my most recent backup was on the 8^th. I was quite aware that the USB key would flake out, I just thought it might have lasted a little bit longer...

Along the way last night, I was tired, it was late, and I wasted twenty minutes because the bootloader tossed me into Windows. Which took nearly ten minutes at start to fail to update itself. I was like "nah, this isn't Linux dummy, reboot" so I shut down Windows. Which spun it's "I'm busy" thing for nearly another ten minutes. I don't know if it would have gone on longer, I long-pressed the power button to force a shutdown.

And thanks to Windows' ability to be intensely irritating, I made a decision.

This morning, I started up the LiveCD and set to install onto the internal SSD. Hasta la vista, Windows!

It has taken a few hours to get everything back and running. I don't begrudge installing Linux on the USB key. Sure, it's annoying to have to restart from scratch, but then I was able to break things and unbreak them afterwards (maybe) using the USB install and not risk trashing a proper install. The learning curve was useful.

There were some differences. When installed, the 28GiB partition was 49% full. Adding in a few of my extra things (like Gimp and Gedit) took this to 51% full. Installing the Arduino IDE with the ESP32 tools took this up to something like 76% full.

Free space before.

I deleted the downloaded archives in "staging", and then I pushed all of the ESP32 Risc-V stuff to the trash can and tried to build my camera firmware. It worked fine, so I deleted the Risc-V stuff because that's for very recent ESP32 devices and not the cheap knock-offs that I buy from Amazon. ☺
The difference is obvious, and isn't it a bit mad that a compiler and toolkit for a small microcontroller takes almost as much space as half of the entire operating system? How? How is that possible?

Let me reiterate - I deleted the temporary installation files, which maybe should have been autotidied? I have not deleted the ESP32 tools, only the Risc-V parts. If I was to wipe the Xtensa (normal) ESP32 tools, I could free up this much all over again.

Free space after.

I think I now have pretty much everything I wanted installed and my drive is 67% used with 18.6 GiB free space - and this is after installing the latest kernel.
Which is pretty amazing, given that the same setup on the USB key seemed to leave me with around 3 to 4 GiB free - just a couple of blog entries ago I removed two kernels to give me more free space.
It's also pretty amazing given that Windows 10 on the same device left me with around 2 GB free (which is why the update kept failing, there wasn't enough room to unpack the files and the installer was too dumb to offer to use attached storage instead).

In fact, pretty much the only thing that caused me trouble is the "Convert file" right-click action on images (so PNG to JPEG in one click) absolutely refused to appear in the file manager. So I tried a manual conversion and the system complained that convert was not a recognised command, but I could get it by installing ImageMagick.
Which I did. Now the right-click action works. ☺

I didn't bother with RPCEmu. The simple VNC client is quicker because it interacts with a real RISC OS system, and since it is my main Pi it has all my stuff on it already set up and available.

Anyway, Linux is now installed on the internal SSD, a device that will be more capable of dealing with things like swap files - after all, this machine ran Windows and god knows Windows will swap to harddisc at the drop of a hat. It is also faster, the USB key benchmarked at around 68MB/sec, while the internal device manages around 140MB/sec.
Plus, I no longer have the fragility of a USB key sticking out the side. That's a help, too.

I have even added a pretty picture to Grub when it starts up, and set the menu to appear always. This is because it takes about fifteen seconds to get to Grub and as long again to get to the bit where it says "EFI stub: loaded initrd blah blah". That's a long time of blank screen before I get the scrolling messages, so I have invoked Grub with a three second timeout. It's more reassuring to see something appearing on the screen as soon as possible.

Much better than a dumb Windows logo, isn't it?

So here I am, now, writing this in Gedit. ☺

Oh, and the sound? Worked right out of the box. No weirdness like before. I did need to apply the options snd_sof sof_debug=1 patch to ALSA in order to make the sound work and not end up as a never-ending blast of failed beepery, but since I had already documented that here it was easy enough to find to remind myself what and how.
Oh, and when we finally get to the desktop starting, you'd hear a burr-bip well known to those of us of a certain age. ☺ Far better than the barely-audible Cinnamon start sound.

Anyway, back and running now.

This device is now junk.

MP3 durations

On the command line, however...

rick@Rick-E200HA:~/Music$ cd ~/Music/AI\ music
rick@Rick-E200HA:~/Music/AI music$ soxi -T -d *
01:08:45.17
rick@Rick-E200HA:~/Music/AI music$ 

Nice.

Tea!

Tetley decaf.

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Zerosquare, 12th August 2025, 03:09

Heck, for once I'd have preferred to be wrong. But at least you didn't lose any valuable data.    And Arduino IDE is terrible in multiple ways ; the disk space it requires is only one of them.

C Ferris, 12th August 2025, 09:08

Its seems that there will be many in your boat with Linux - with support being dropped for W10.    Have you room for WINE - might be able to get your Win PCB prog going.

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