Uncategorized – Page 18

The Interesting Case of Fixing Things with 32GB RAM

So here’s a fix that left me with some question marks:

A family member likes to test the limits, and pushes out rebooting the notebook running on Linux for as long as possible, sometimes well over 6 weeks. A side-effect of this is that applications that like to bloat, such as Firefox, Chromium, Thunderbird, Libreoffice, etc. etc., keep eating up more and more RAM. At some point, usually after a week or so, all of the 16 GB RAM + 8 GB swap space on the SSD becomes used.

Closing the apps occasionally would help, but that’s also not in the cards. EarlyOOM helps to keep the system stable, but at some point the system just keeps banging its head against the 16 GB of RAM. So what to do? At some point I was convinced to install 32 GB of RAM. I reluctantly agreed, but honestly, I thought it wouldn’t help much. From my point of view, doubling RAM would just extend the time to the inevitable, and EarlyOOM would be asked to help again. But it looks like I was wrong.

Moving on to MediaWiki – Part 2 – Docker Install

In the previous post on this topic, I’ve had a look back at which Wiki’s I’ve used over the decades to store my personal tech information and why I decided to move on to MediaWiki as a platform. In the past, getting a new web service up and running required the setup of a web server, a database and some other things and was a bit of a hassle. Fortunately, there is an official containerized version of MediaWiki these days and I found a good description of how to get it up and running with docker-compose in no time. As the description is in German and because I have changed a few things, here’s my version of how to get up and running:

Moving on to MediaWiki – Part 1

One tool that has become absolutely essential to me for note taking and finding information again is a Wiki. A very long time ago, I initially used WOAS, a personal Wiki platform that was basically a local HTML file that could be modified in the browser. It was a nice system, but at some point, modifying local files from the browser became a security risk and was hence disabled. So I had to look for something else. That was 10 years ago in 2013, and I wrote about it on this blog at the time.

At the time, I decided to migrate my pages to the MoinMoin Wiki system, based on Python and an Apache web server. I liked MoinMoin a lot, because it was easy to use and it stored all pages as a file in a directory structure. Why complicated when things can be simple? Unfortunately, MoinMoin development pretty much came to a halt, and when I upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04, it stopped working. It turned out that MoinMoin was still based on Python 2.7, which has been unsupported for a long time now, and hence version 2.7 was not included anymore in the current Ubuntu Long Term Support version. As I got the impression that the situation is unlikely to change anytime soon, I started to have a look around for alternatives. From what I can tell there are two main options at the moment: DokuWiki and MediaWiki.

Letsencrypt, Ubuntu 22.04, DAVS and the File Manager

After upgrading my notebook to Ubuntu 22.04, one of the few quirks that I had to deal with was that the file manager suddenly threw a security warning when I wanted to mount my Nextcloud DAVS share that is protected with a Letsencrypt certificate. Very strange, as this worked flawlessly in Ubuntu 20.04. It doesn’t break the functionality, but getting a certificate warning each time I mount the network drive is not acceptable. It turns out that for whatever reason, Ubuntu 22.04 doesn’t have the Letsencrypt chain of trust in their certificate store. Web browsers like Firefox don’t have the issue on 22.04, as they come with their own certificate store. For some strange reason, there isn’t really a description of the problem on the net, or it’s well hidden by other search results, so it took me a while to figure out how to import Letsencrypt’s current certificate chain. But I finally figured it out and here is how it is done:

Lenovo T14 Gen 4 – Intel – Suspend/Resume Surprises – Part 4

And on we go with my series on Ubuntu 22.04 support for the Lenovo T14 Gen 4, Intel variant. In this part, I’ll have a closer look at how suspend / resume works when the notebook lid is closed. Spoiler: It works perfectly out of the box, but things are different from what I was used to so far!

Lenovo T14 Gen 4 – Intel – Performance – Part 3

s-tui and gkrellm in action. Right click and select ‘open image’ in new tab for full size.

My new notebook has the latest and greatest Intel CPU inside that is currently on the market, a 13th generation i5 1335U. It’s an entry level i5 processor and the notebook is available with stronger processors as well. So how does it compare to the 2 year old AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U in my Lenovo X13 notebook? At the time, it was said to be the fastest CPU for notebooks on the market. Well, as usual, it depends.

On the notebook I ran my ‘taken from real life’ ffmpeg video transcoding test, and used ‘s-tui‘ to look at processor load, temperatures and clock speeds. And on my power supply, I had a cable with a display that showed me how much power the notebook drew during the tests.

Lenovo T14 Gen 4 – Intel – Wi-Fi – Latest Chip – Latest Kernel – Part 2

After my general overview of how the Intel variant of the Lenovo T14 Gen 4 fares with Ubuntu Linux, let’s have a closer look at the only major point I had somewhat of an issue with to get working: The Intel AX211 Wi-Fi chip. As I’m still using a 3.5 year old Ubuntu 20.04 with a 2 year old Linux kernel 5.15 stream, I was a bit disappointed but not really surprised that this didn’t work out of the box. But with a bit of effort, I got it working anyway.

Lenovo T14 Gen 4 – Intel – First Impressions

About 6 weeks ago, Lenovo launched yet another generation of their Thinkpad notebooks. As I needed a new notebook, I thought I’d give it a try and see how well Linux would run on brand new hardware. I’ve made some good experiences back in 2021 when I bought a relatively recent notebook with an AMD CPU. Instead of an AMD CPU, however, I chose the Intel variant of the Lenovo T14 Gen 4 this time around. So here’s the story of how that went.

microSD cards Speeds in 2023

It’s been almost 5 years since I’ve last looked at the speed of removable flash storage media. I use them a lot for transferring very large files among devices, so speed is trump. If size doesn’t matter, the current speed limit for high speed USB flash drives seems to be the speed of the USB port. In case of USB 3.2 Gen 2, that’s somewhere around 1 GByte/s. If there is limited space in the pocket or backpack, MicroSD cards and a good USB adapter are an interesting alternative. Despite speeds being much slower, read/write performance varies significantly between cheap and somewhat more expensive cards. So let’s have a look where the bar is at the end of 2023.

Driven Between Intel and AMD – The Wi-Fi Divide…

In the past few years I bought a number of Lenovo notebooks for me, friends and family to run Ubuntu Linux on them. Most of them had AMD CPUs inside, because they had a price and performance advantage. These days, however, I’m drawn again to the Intel side for a simple reason: Integrated Wi-Fi.