neil in gemini space

sbc woe woe - 2023-01-03

i ended 2022 perplexed, disturbed, flame extinguished - and worse than all of that my RPi4-4gb died in the dark in a storm and now resides in a plastic box with three other sbcs.

i think a loose emmc card did for the RPi4 - card unreadable, RPi4 un-bootable.

my other options:

• vim 4 running a hateful, hateful, gnome desktop; i can sorrta see why khadas went with wayland, but still! also it freezes - desktop visible but un-wakeable!! so not a practical low power day to day computer despite being quite quick when not frozen. bluetooth not fully functional - looks like it works until reboot then nothing recognised until after a plugin keyboard used???
• Rock pro 64; bluetooth also not really working that well, no video acceleration without going to a legacy kernel so this quite quick computer does not provide as useful a desktop experience as it might.
• back to an RPi4 2gb with performance slowed due running out of memory a lot for desktop tasks - although i did have it running by pruning the install and careful choice of apps.

woe, woe, ah - asus chromebox 3 in storage.

=> 2023-01-03 - asus chromebox on a disorganized and messy desk.

my low power everyday computer is now the chromebox (1.8 celeron 2 core, 4GB, 32GBSSD) purged of google corp.

some burning hoops to jump through but using mrchromebox resources i flashed the bios and installed debian 11:

• to flash i had to open the box and remove the firmware write protect screw. so as not to lose it i put it back over a quick made plastic washer to retain firmware write unprotected.

=> 2023-01-03 - screw out allowing firmware write. | 2023-01-02 - screw back in so as not to get lost.

• chrome box clock not correct so partitioning failed, WTF, but true, until i corrected the time; not immediately obvious to me at least. this was for two reasons, apt would not install shit without a correct date time, then the same for the writing to boot bit of the install. hilariously as i write this the MrChromebox.tech website clock is wrong and throwing browser warnings:-) possibly it was the firmware from there that screwed the clock on the chromebox???
• intel sound hardware recognised but no driver, so no audio over hdmi:-( but a cheap usb audio interface to the rescue:-) i plugged the output into my ruark so the music didn't die.
• bluetooth looks like it works but after scanning, pairing, trusting, no connecting; possibly a general gnu-linux (:-)) thing atm because my amd tiny monster build had it's bluetooth borked by an update a few months ago same symptoms; xubuntu'ish install. usb bluetooth to the rescue; works perfectly for keyboard and mouse, including waking:-)
• as a precaution i've disabled all sleeping, hibernating, screen locking actions as one or the other or all of them r i think borked, or not, depending on our hardware.

so now for 30 watts i run a computer and 4k monitor again (abeit at 2560x1440), xfce4, mpv playing from external usb flac stash, and all my usual toys:-)

=> 2023-01-03 MrChromebox.tech link - beware of clock issues.

• compute

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neil.gemini@mingmengtou.org

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