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BOINC and Idle Users

The BOINC distributed computing client in Debian (Bookworm and previous releases) can check the idle time via the X11 protocol and run GPU jobs when the interactive user is idle, so the user gets GPU power for graphics when they need it and when it’s idle BOINC uses it. This doesn’t work for Wayland and […]

Strange X11 Grabbing

A couple of days ago I upgraded my home server from Debian/Bullseye to Debian/Testing (soon to be Bookworm). Since then KDE sessions on that system have had problems of locking the input queue, the mouse can move and mouse-over events work but clicking the mouse or pressing the keyboard does nothing. Various web pages suggested […]

Hyper Threading on the E5-2696v3

I just did some quick tests of hyper-threading on my new E5-2696v3 CPU. I compiled the Linux 6.0.10 kernel with and without hyper-threading enabled. Here’s the times for “make -j36 bzImage” and “make -j36 modules” with HT enabled:

real 2m26.540s user 55m25.121s sys 9m56.443s real 10m57.374s user 309m21.531s sys 58m1.070s

Here’s the times for “make […]

Wayland in Bookworm

We are getting towards the freeze for Debian/Bookworm so the current state of packages isn’t going to change much before the release. Bugs will get fixed but missing features will mostly be missing until the next release.

Anarcat wrote an excellent blog post about using Wayland with the Sway window manager [1]. It seems pretty […]

DDC as a KVM Switch

With the recent resurgence in Covid19 I’ve been working from home a lot and using both my work laptop and personal PC on the same monitor. HDMI KVM switches start at $150 and I didn’t feel like buying one. So I wrote a script to change inputs on my monitor. The following script locks the […]

Converting to UEFI

When I got my HP ML110 Gen9 working as a workstation I initially was under the impression that boot wasn’t supported on NVMe and booted it from USB. I found USB booting with legacy boot to be unreliable so decided to try EFI booting and noticed that the NVMe devices were boot candidates with UEFI. […]

Strange Apache Reload Issue

I recently had to renew the SSL certificate for my web server, nothing exciting about that but Certbot created a new directory for the key because I had removed some domains (moved to a different web server). This normally isn’t a big deal, change the Apache configuration to the new file names and run the […]

Getting Started With Kali

Kali is a Debian based distribution aimed at penetration testing. I haven’t felt a need to use it in the past because Debian has packages for all the scanning tools I regularly use, and all the rest are free software that can be obtained separately. But I recently decided to try it.

Here’s the URL […]

Oracle Cloud Free Tier

It seems that every cloud service of note has a free tier nowadays and the Oracle Cloud is the latest that I’ve discovered (thanks to r/homelab which I highly recommend reading). Here’s Oracle’s summary of what they offer for free [1].

Oracle’s “always free” tier (where presumable “always” is defined as “until we change our […]

Thoughts about RAM and Storage Changes

My first Linux system in 1992 was a 386 with 4MB of RAM and a 120MB hard drive which (for some reason I forgot) only was supported by Linux for about 90MB. My first hard drive was 70MB and could do 500KB/s for contiguous IO, my first Linux hard drive was probably a bit faster, […]