stamasd

Thank you both for the input. Noise is not a problem as the server and the UPS will be installed in a remote corner of my basement. I don't plan to have any Windows machine supervise the Linux server or the UPS for many reasons. 🙂 Looks like I'll go with the larger unit, just to have the open-source package as an alternative (and also to allow me to grow the server if needed). I'll post back if any problems arise.

I finally got around to start building a small file server for my home network. Nothing fancy or expensive, small motherboard, i5 4-core, 16GB RAM, SATA card and an array of 4 HDDs in RAID5. And a small case with a 350W PSU which should be plenty. Now, the most expensive part of this is the disk array, and I want to protect it from power surges, brownouts etc so I will add a UPS as well. I go get brownouts occasionally maybe 4-5 times a year, and major power outages 1-2 times a year. I want to keep things cheap enough, and yet have good Linux support for graceful shutdowns. I've been looking at a couple of UPS units that I can get at Costco, the Cyberpower XC625 (625VA/375W) for $45, and its bigger brother Cyberpower LE850G (850 VA / 460 W) for $75. There is a (binary-only) daemon available from the manufacturer https://www.cyberpowersystems.com/product/ups/pc-battery-backup/le850g/#tab-documents and it looks like it's exactly the same for both. I don't know how well that works though. I've looked at other software, like Network UPS Tools https://networkupstools.org - the smaller unit is poorly supported, the larger one has somewhat better support. Does anyone have experience with either of the above in Linux? Or can you recommend another one with good support and in the same price range? I don't need it to do anything extraordinary, just initiate a clean shutdown at power loss, maybe with a delay of a few minutes in case it's just temporary. (Funtoo will boot from a small SSD independent of the RAID array, in case that matters - which it shouldn't)

Solved. It seems that there was something wrong with my Arduino board, as changing to a different one solved the problem.

This question is not Funtoo-specific, except for the fact that I am working to get this project done on a Funtoo box. I have a headless box on which I installed Funtoo, which I plan on using as a home server. I don't want to have any monitor or keyboard attached to it, and yet I want it to display some status messages on a small attached display. For that I made a small gadget consisting of an Arduino Nano with a I2C OLED attached, which simply takes characters from the serial port and displays them onto the OLED. It shows up as /dev/ttyUSB0 and the serial port speed is 115200. It works as expected when I use a terminal emulator such as picocom to connect to it: picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0 then it takes my keyboard input and displays it to the OLED. However I want to use it non-interactively, and have messages sent to the display from a script run periodically from a cron job. But attempting to do that from the CLI with either echo or printf fails: printf 1234 > /dev/ttyUSB0 or echo "1234" > /dev/ttyUSB0 Neither of the above displays anything on the OLED. There is no error message; the serial port has been set to the correct speed with stty -F /dev/ttyUSB0 115200 and checking with "stty -F /dev/ttyUSB0" shows that it's set to the correct speed. It's not a permission problem, my user has access to the port, and the same thing happens when I try the above as root. At this point I'm not exactly sure why this fails. (edit) FWIW it's not a function of the serial port speed. If I set the speed to 9600 both on the Arduino and in the terminal I get the exact same behavior: it works with picocom, but not with echo/printf.

The needed libraries are installed by flatpak. I choose this method because it's easy, and it works. I'm lazy at baseline. 🙂 Forgot to say that you need to reboot after the last line so the kernel gets the appropriate parameter. After that Steam will work.

You can run Steam using flatpak. Use the Gentoo flatpak overlay: https://github.com/fosero/flatpak-overlay (I use the local repository method, which I put it in /opt/flatpak), emerge flatpak, add the flathub repository: flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo then install Steam from flathub: flatpak install flathub com.valvesoftware.Steam Then as root issue: echo 'kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1' > /etc/sysctl.d/unprivileged_userns_clone.conf Works for me.

@lazlo.vii Off-topic: how do you like the Odroid-XU4? I have a C2 but haven't really done much with it. It has a tendency to overheat even with the extra cooling I added to it.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, patent trolls=bad. On the other hand, Gnome=systemd. I'll watch but I won't intervene.

New hardware is not always better. I have a notebook from circa 2012 which has an amazing sound codec, on the level with the best sound cards that you can buy for desktops today. But it was probably too expensive and the brand decided to drop it and replace with a cheap run-of-the-mill codec in their next generation of notebooks. I keep that laptop around just because of the amazing sound it has. It's not a slouch either, quad-core Ivy Bridge, 16GB and a SSD make it fly even with today's software. The last time I was amazed by new hardware was a few years ago when I built my latest desktop: AMD Vishera FX-8370 8-core, 32GB, SSD, Radeon HD7970. A definite upgrade from my previous Sandy Bridge desktop. To this day I haven't felt the need to upgrade it, though I've been eyeing the new Ryzens. But I just can't justify it to myself.

Hm. I had the same issue when installing flatpak using the Gentoo overlay (with local repo) and I solved it simply by creating a file /etc/portage/categories with the contents: acct-group acct-user It just worked, I could install flatpak without any issues as well as updating it normally.

Yeah, was going to say I just found out there is an ebuild for fbreader; I couldn't check at the time of my original post because I was waiting for calibre to emerge (which failed BTW, I posted a bug report). Trying to install fbreader now. Thanks! (edit) fbreader installed correctly, seems to be the one I was looking for. Thank you again.

One ongoing issue that I've been having is the availability of a good epub reader. I have thousands of ebooks in epub format (and a minority in other formats like mobi). Yes there is the excellent Calibre, but I have some issues with its integrated epub reader - it's not compatible with some of my ebooks, especially those purchased from Barnes&Noble. Specifically it doesn't interpret correctly page order and I get sudden page jumps, for instance from page 54 to 170 and them back to 112 etc. I have tried to edit the epub files themselves but I can't figure out what's wrong, and this is compounded by the fact that other epub readers don't exhibit this behavior and show pages in the correct order. I prefer a lightweight reader too; on Windows there is the excellent SumatraPDF, and on Android I use the Moon+ reader. Both work well and don't have the page order issue with my respective epub files. On Linux however, the top readers that I have seen recommended (apart from Calibre): FBReader and Cool Reader, only come as .deb packages. So, what do other Funtoo users have been using for reading ebooks (again, except for Calibre which has the above problem for me)?

Yeah I've read about this a week or two ago. I feel very safe at /home, thankyouverymuch.

Since 1.3 was released I've been using this Gentoo overlay (using the local repository method) to install flatpak and Steam in it: https://github.com/fosero/flatpak-overlay It works well even after upgrading to 1.4

Made a HOWTO on the wiki. https://www.funtoo.org/32_bit_chroot_environment_for_Wine