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On the 18th of May I blogged about my new 5120*2160 monitor [1]. One thing I noted was that one Netflix movie had run in an aspect ratio that used all space on the monitor. I still don’t know if the movie in question was cropped in a letterbox manner but other Netflix shows in “full screen” mode don’t extend to both edges. Also one movie I downloaded as in 3840*1608 resolution which is almost exactly the same aspect ratio as my monitor. I wonder if some company is using 5120*2160 screens for TVs, 4K and FullHD are rumoured to be cheaper than most other resolutions partly due to TV technology being used for monitors. There is the Anamorphic Format of between 2.35:1 and 2.40:1 [2] which is a close match for the 2.37:1 of my new monitor.
I tried out the HDMI audio on a Dell laptop and my Thinkpad Yoga Gen3 and found it to be of poor quality, it seemed limited to 2560*1440, at this time I’m not sure how much of the fault is due to the laptops and how much is due to the monitor. The monitor docs state that it needs HDMI version 2.1 which was released in 2017 and my Thinkpad Yoga Gen3 was released in 2018 so probably doesn’t have that. The HDMI cable in question did 4K resolution on my previous monitor so it should all work at a minimum of 4K resolution.
The switching between inputs is a problem. If I switch between DisplayPort for my PC and HDMI for a laptop the monitor will usually timeout before the laptop establishes a connection and then switch back to the DisplayPort input. So far I have had to physically disconnect the input source I don’t want to use. The DisplayPort switch that I’ve used doesn’t seem designed to work with resolutions higher than 4K.
I’ve bought a new USB-C dock which is described as doing 8K which means that as my Thinkpad is described as supporting 5120×2880@60Hz over USB-C I should be able to get 5120*2160 without any problems, however for unknown reasons I only get 4K. For work I’m using a Dell Latitude 7400 2in1 that’s apparently only capable of 4096*2304 @24 Hz which is less pixels than 5120*2160 and it will also only do 4K resolution. But for both those cases it’s still a significant improvement over 2560*1440. I tested with a Dell Latitude 7440 which gave the full 5120*2160 resolution, I was unable to find specs on what the maximum resolution of the 7440 is. I also have bought DisplayPort switch rated at 8K resolution. I got a switch that doesn’t also do USB because the ones that do 8K resolution and USB are about $70. The only KVM switch I saw for 8K resolution at a reasonable price was one designed for switching between two laptops and there doesn’t seem to be any adaptors to convert from regular DisplayPort to USB-C alternative mode so that wasn’t viable. Currently I have the old KVM switch used for USB only (for keyboard and mouse) and the new switch which only does DisplayPort. So I have two buttons to push when switching between input sources which isn’t too bad.
It seems that for PCs resolutions with more pixels than 4K are as difficult and inconvenient now as 4K was 6 years ago when I started doing it. If you want higher than 4K resolution to just work at this time then you need Apple hardware.
The monitor has a series of modes for different types of output, I’ve found “standard” to be good for text and “movie” to be good for watching movies/TV and for playing RTS games. I previously wrote about how to use ddcutil to use a monitor as a KVM switch [3], unfortunately I can’t do this with the new monitor as the time that the monitor waits for a good signal on a new input after changing is shorter than the time taken for Linux on the laptops I’m using to enable HDMI output. I’ve found the following commands to do the basics.
# get display mode
ddcutil getvcp DC
# set standard mode
ddcutil setvcp DC 0
# set movie mode
ddcutil setvcp DC 03
Now that I have that going the next thing I want to do is to have it switch between “standard” and “movie” modes when I switch keyboard focus.
The Akismet WordPress anti-spam plugin has changed it’s policy to not run on sites that have adverts which includes mine. Without it I get an average of about 1 spam comment per hour and the interface for removing spam takes more mouse actions than desired. For email spam it’s about the same volume half of which is messages with SpamAssassin scores high enough to go into the MaybeSpam folder (that I go through every few weeks) and half of which goes straight to my inbox. But fortunately moving spam to a folder where I can later use it to train Bayesian classification is a much faster option on PC and is also something I can do from my phone MUA.
As an experiment I have configured my blog to only take comments from registered users. It will be interesting to see how many spammers make it through that and to also see feedback from genuine people. People who can’t comment can tell me about it via the contact methods listed here [1].
I previously wrote about other ways of dealing with hostile comments [2]. Blogging seems to be less popular nowadays so a Planet specific forum doesn’t seem a viable option. It’s a pity, I think that YouTube and Facebook have taken over from blogs and that’s not a good thing.
The recent issue of Windows security software killing computers has reminded me about the issue of management software for Dell systems. I wrote policy for the Dell management programs that extract information from iDRAC and store it in Linux. After the break I’ve pasted in the policy. It probably needs some changes for recent software, it was last tested on a PowerEdge T320 and prior to that was used on a PowerEdge R710 both of which are old hardware and use different management software to the recent hardware. One would hope that the recent software would be much better but usually such hope is in vain. I deliberately haven’t submitted this for inclusion in the reference policy because it’s for proprietary software and also it permits many operations that we would prefer not to permit.
The policy is after the break because it’s larger than you want on a Planet feed. But first I’ll give a few selected lines that are bad in a noteworthy way:
- sys_admin means the ability to break everything
- dac_override means break Unix permissions
- mknod means a daemon creates devices due to a lack of udev configuration
- sys_rawio means someone didn’t feel like writing a device driver, maintaining a device driver for DKMS is hard and getting a driver accepted upstream requires writing quality code, in any case this is a bad sign.
- self:lockdown is being phased out, but used to mean bypassing some integrity protections, that would usually be related to sys_rawio or similar.
- dev_rx_raw_memory is bad, reading raw memory allows access to pretty much everything and execute of raw memory is something I can’t imagine a good use for, the Reference Policy doesn’t use this anywhere!
- dev_rw_generic_chr_files usually means a lack of udev configuration as udev should do that.
- storage_raw_write_fixed_disk shouldn’t be needed for this sort of thing, it doesn’t do anything that involves managing partitions.
Now without network access or other obvious ways of remote control this level of access while excessive isn’t necessarily going to allow bad things to happen due to outside attack. But if there are bugs in the software there’s nothing to stop it from giving the worst results.
allow dell_datamgrd_t self:capability { dac_override dac_read_search mknod sys_rawio sys_admin };
allow dell_datamgrd_t self:lockdown integrity;
dev_rx_raw_memory(dell_datamgrd_t)
dev_rw_generic_chr_files(dell_datamgrd_t)
dev_rw_ipmi_dev(dell_datamgrd_t)
dev_rw_sysfs(dell_datamgrd_t)
storage_raw_read_fixed_disk(dell_datamgrd_t)
storage_raw_write_fixed_disk(dell_datamgrd_t)
allow dellsrvadmin_t self:lockdown integrity;
allow dellsrvadmin_t self:capability { sys_admin sys_rawio };
dev_read_raw_memory(dellsrvadmin_t)
dev_rw_sysfs(dellsrvadmin_t)
dev_rx_raw_memory(dellsrvadmin_t)
The best thing that Dell could do for their customers is to make this free software and allow the community to fix some of these issues.
Continue reading SE Linux Policy for Dell Management
After the VoLTE saga [1] and the problems with battery life on the PinePhonePro [2] (which lasted 4 hours while idle with the screen off in my last test a few weeks ago) I’m running a Galaxy Note 9 [3] with the default Samsung OS as my daily driver.
I don’t think that many people will be rushing out to buy a 2018 phone regardless of my review. For someone who wants a phone of such age (which has decent hardware and a low price) then good options are the Pixel phones which are all supported by LineageOS.
I recommend not buying this phone due to the fact that it doesn’t have support for VoLTE with LineageOS (and presumably any other non-Samsung Android build) and doesn’t have support from any other OS. The One Plus 6/6T has Mobian support [4] as well as LineageOS support and is worth considering.
The Note 9 still has capable hardware by today’s standards. A 6.4″ display is about as big as most people want in their pocket and 2960×1440 resolution in that size (516dpi) is probably as high as most people can see without a magnifying glass. The model I’m using has 8G of RAM which is as much as the laptop I was using at the start of this year. I don’t think that many people will have things that they actually want to do on a phone which needs more hardware than this. The only hardware feature in new phones which beats this is the large folding screen in some recent phones, but $2500+ (the price of such phones in Australia) is too much IMHO and the second hand market for folding phones is poor due to the apparently high incidence of screens breaking.
The Note 9 has the “Dex” environment for running as a laptop if you connect it to a USB-C dock. It can run nicely with a 4K monitor with USB keyboard and mouse. The UI is very similar to that of older versions of Windows.
The Samsung version of Android seems mostly less useful than the stock Google version or the LineageOS version. The Samsung keyboard flags words such as “gay” as spelling errors and it can’t be uninstalled even when you install a better keyboard app. There is a “Bixby” button on the side of the phone to launch the Bixby voice recognition app which can’t be mapped to any useful purpose, The Google keyboard has a voice dictation option which I will try out some time but that’s all I desire in terms of voice recognition. There are alerts about Samsung special deals and configuration options including something about signing in to some service and having it donate money to charity, I doubt that any users want such features. Apart from Dex the Samsung Android build is a good advert for LineageOS.
The screen has curved sides for no good reason. This makes it more difficult to make a protective phone case as a case can’t extend beyond the screen at the sides and therefore if it’s dropped and hits an edge (step, table, etc) then the glass can make direct contact with something. Also the curved sides reflect sunlight in all directions, this means that the user has to go to more effort to avoid reflecting the sun into their eyes and that a passenger can more easily reflect sunlight into the eyes of a car driver. It’s an impressive engineering feat to make a curved touch-screen but it doesn’t do any good for users.
The stylus is good as always and the screen is AMOLED so it doesn’t waste much power when in dark mode. There is a configuration option to display a clock all the time when the screen is locked because that apparently doesn’t use much power. I haven’t felt inclined to enable the always on screen but it’s a nice feature for those who like such things.
The VoLTE implementation is apparently a bit unusual so it’s not supported by LineageOS and didn’t work on Droidian for the small amount of time that Droidian supported it.
Generally this phone is quite nice hardware it’s just a pity that it demonstrates all of the downsides to buying a non-Pixel phone.
I wrote a comment on a social media post where someone claimed that there’s no computer advances in the last 12 years which got long so it’s worth a blog post.
In the last decade or so new laptops have become cheaper than new desktop PCs. USB-C has taken over for phones and for laptop charging so all recent laptops support USB-C docks and monitors with USB-C docks built in have become common. 4K monitors have become cheap and common and higher than 4K is cheap for some use cases such as ultra wide. 4K TVs are cheap and TVs with built-in Android computers for playing internet content are now standard. For most use cases spinning media hard drives are obsolete, SSDs large enough for all the content most people need to store are cheap. We have gone from gigabit Ethernet being expensive to 2.5 gigabit being cheap.
12 years ago smart phones were very limited and every couple of years there would be significant improvements. Since about 2018 phones have been capable of doing most things most people want. 5yo Android phones can run the latest apps and take high quality pics. Any phone that supports VoLTE will be good for another 5+ years if it has security support. Phones without security support still work and are quite usable apart from being insecure. Google and Samsung have significantly increased their minimum security support for their phones and the GKI project from Google makes it easier for smaller vendors to give longer security support. There are a variety of open Android projects like LineageOS which give longer security support on a variety of phones. If you deliberately choose a phone that is likely to be well supported by projects like LineageOS (which pretty much means just Pixel phones) then you can expect to be able to actually use it when it is 10 years old. Compare this to the Samsung Galaxy S3 released in 2012 which was a massive improvement over the original Galaxy S (the S2 felt closer to the S than the S3). The Samsung Galaxy S4 released in 2013 was one of the first phones to have FullHD resolution which is high enough that most people can’t easily recognise the benefits of higher resolution. It wasn’t until 2015 that phones with 4G of RAM became common which is enough that for most phone use it’s adequate today.
Now that 16G of RAM is affordable in laptops running more secure OSs like Qubes is viable for more people. Even without Qubes, OS security has been improving a lot with better compiler features, new languages like Rust, and changes to software design and testing. Containers are being used more but we still aren’t getting all the benefits of that. TPM has become usable in the last few years and we are only starting to take advantage of what it can offer.
In 2012 BTRFS was still at an early stage of development and not many people wanted to use it in production, I was using it in production then and while I didn’t lose any data from bugs I did have some downtime because of BTRFS issues. Now BTRFS is quite solid for server use.
DDR4 was released in 2014 and gave significant improvements over DDR3 for performance and capacity. My home workstation now has 256G of DDR4 which wasn’t particularly expensive while the previous biggest system I owned had 96G of DDR3 RAM. Now DDR5 is available to again increase performance and size while also making DDR4 cheap on the second hand market.
This isn’t a comprehensive list of all advances in the computer industry over the last 12 years or so, it’s just some things that seem particularly noteworthy to me.
Please comment about what you think are the most noteworthy advances I didn’t mention.
Introduction
In Australia the 3G mobile frequencies are to be reused so they are in the process of shutting down the 3G service. That means that everyone has to use VoLTE (Voice Over LTE) for phone calls (including emergency calls). The shutdown time varies by telco, Kogan Mobile (one of the better services which has good value for money and generally works well) shut down their 3G service in January. Aldi Mobile (another one of the good services which is slightly more expensive but has included free calls to most first-world countries and uses the largest phone network) will shut theirs down at the end of August.
For background there’s a Fosdem talk about OpenSIPS with VoLTE and VoNR [1], it’s more complex than you want to know. Also VoNR (Voice over New Radio) is the standard for 5G voice and it’s different from VoLTE and has a fallback to VoLTE. Another good lecture for background information is the Fosdem talk on VoLTE at the handset end [2].
The PinePhonePro
In October 2023 I tried using my PinePhonePro as my main phone but that only lasted a few days due to problems with calls and poor battery life [3]. Since then I went back to the Huawei Mate 10 Pro that I bought refurbished in June 2019 for $389. So that has been my main phone for 5 years now, giving a cost of $1.50 per week. I had tried using a Huawei Nova 7i running Android without Google Play as an experiment but that had failed, I do many things that need Android apps [4].
I followed the PinePhone wiki to get my PinePhonePro working with VoLTE [5]. That worked fine for me, the only difference from the instructions is that I had to use device /dev/ttyUSB3 and that the modem kept resetting itself during the process and when that happened I had to kill minicom and start again. After changing the setting and saving it the PinePhonePro seemed to work well with VoLTE on a Kogan Mobile SIM (so definitely not using 3G).
One issue I have found is that Plasma Mobile (my preferred FOSS phone GUI) appears to have a library issue that results in polling every 14ms even when the screen is locked [6]. If you have a few processes doing that (which means the most lightly used Plasma system) it really hurts battery use. The maintainer has quite reasonably deferred action on this bug report given the KDE 6 transition. Later on in the Trixie development cycle I hope to get this issue resolved, I don’t expect it to suddenly make battery life good. But it might make battery life acceptable.
I am now idly considering carrying around my PinePhonePro in a powered off state for situations where I might need to do high security operations (root logins to servers or online banking) but for which carrying a laptop isn’t convenient. It will do well for the turn on, do 30 mins of work that needs security, and then turn off scenario.
Huawei Mate 10 Pro and Redmi 9A
The Huawei Mate 10 Pro has been my main phone for 5 years and it has worked well, so it would be ideal if it could do VoLTE as the PinePhonePro isn’t ready yet.
All the web pages I’ve seen about the Mate 10 Pro say that it will either allow upgrading to a VoLTE configuration if run with the right SIM or only support it with the right SIM. I did a test with a Chinese SIM which gave an option of turning on VoLTE but didn’t allow any firmware updates and the VoLTE option went away when I put an Australian SIM in. Some forum comments had led me to believe that it would either permanently enable VoLTE or allow upgrading the firmware to one that enables VoLTE if I used a Chinese SIM but that is not the case. I didn’t expect a high probability of success but I had to give it a go as it’s a nice phone.
I did some tests on a Redmi 9A (a terrible phone that has really bad latency on the UI in spite of having reasonably good hardware). The one I tested on didn’t have VoLTE enabled when I got it, to test that I used the code *#*#4636#*#* in the dialler to get the menu of SIM information and it showed that VoLTE was not provisioned. I then had to update to the latest release of Android for that phone and enter *#*#86583#*#* in the dialler to enable VoLTE, the message displayed after entering that magic number must end in “DISABLE”. I get the impression that the code in question makes the phone not check certain aspects of whether the carrier is good for VoLTE and just do it. So apparently Kogan Mobile somehow gives the Redmi 9A the impression that VoLTE isn’t supported but if the phone just goes ahead and connects it will work. I don’t plan to use a Redmi 9A myself as it’s too slow, but I added it to my collection to offer to anyone else I know who needs a phone with VoLTE and doesn’t use the phone seriously or to someone who needs a known good phone for testing things.
Samsung Galaxy Note 9
I got some Samsung Galaxy Note 9 phones to run Droidian as an experiment [7]. But Droidian dropped support for the Note 9 and I couldn’t figure out how to enable VoLTE via Droidian, which was very annoying after I had spent $109 on a test phone and $215 on a phone for real use (I have no plans to try Droidian again at this time). I tried installing LineageOS on one Note 9 [8] which was much easier than expected (especially after previously installing Droidian). But VoLTE wasn’t an option. According to Reddit LineageOS doesn’t support VoLTE on Samsung devices and you can use a “magisk” module or a VoLTE enabler module but those aren’t supported by LineageOS either [9].
I downloaded an original image for the Note 9 from SamsMobile.com [10]. That image booted past the “orange stage” (where if you have problems then your phone is probably permanently useless) but didn’t boot into the OS. A friend helped me out with that and it turned out that the Heimdal flash tool on Linux didn’t do something it needed to do and that Odin on Windows was required. After using Odin everything was fine and I have a Note 9 with VoLTE running the latest Samsung firmware – which is security patch level 1st July 2022!!!
So I have a choice between using a Note 9 for data and SMS while running a current version of Lineage OS with all security fixes or running a Samsung image with no security updates for 2 years which supports phone calls. So based on this I have to recommend Pixel as the phone of choice, it has a decent level of support from Google and long term support from LineageOS. According to the LineageOS web site you can run the current version of Lineage on the original Pixel phone from 2016! Of course getting VoLTE to work on it might be another saga, but it would probably be easier to do with LineageOS on a Pixel than on a Samsung phone.
Conclusion
The operation of the Note 9 for me is decent now apart from the potential security issues. The same goes for selling one of the phones. The PinePhonePro still has potential to become my daily driver at some future time if I and others can optimise power use. Also a complicating factor is that I want to have both Jabber and Matrix be actually instant IM systems not IM with a 5 minute delay, so suspend mode isn’t a good option.
Pixel phones will be a much higher priority when looking at phones to buy in future. The older Pixel phones go for as little as $100 on eBay and can still run the latest LineageOS.
VoLTE seems needlessly complicated.
Fosdem had a great lecture Building an Open Source Community One Friend at a Time [1]. I recommend that everyone who is involved in the FOSS community watches this lecture to get some ideas.
For some time I’ve been periodically inviting a few friends to visit for lunch, chat about Linux, maybe do some coding, and watch some anime between coding. It seems that I have accidentally created a micro users’ group.
LUGs were really big in the mid to late 90s and still quite vibrant in the early 2000’s. But they seem to have decreased in popularity even before Covid19 and since Covid19 a lot of people have stopped attending large meetings to avoid health risks. I think that a large part of the decline of users’ groups has been due to the success of YouTube. Being able to choose from thousands of hours of lectures about computers on YouTube is a disincentive to spending the time and effort needed to attend a meeting with content that’s probably not your first choice of topic. Attending a formal meeting where someone you don’t know has arranged a lecture might not have a topic that’s really interesting to you. Having lunch with a couple of friends and watching a YouTube video that one of your friends assures you is really good is something more people will find interesting.
In recent times homeschooling [2] has become more widely known. The same factors that allow learning about computers at home also make homeschooling easier. The difference between the traditional LUG model of having everyone meet at a fixed time for a lecture and a micro LUG of a small group of people having an informal meeting is similar to the difference between traditional schools and homeschooling.
I encourage everyone to create their own micro LUG. All you have to do is choose a suitable time and place and invite some people who are interested. Have a BBQ in a park if the weather is good, meet at a cafe or restaurant, or invite people to visit you for lunch on a weekend.
USB-A is the original socket for USB at the PC end. There are 2 variants of it, the first is for USB 1.1 to USB 2 and the second is for USB 3 which adds extra pins in a plug and socket compatible manner – you can plug a USB-A device into a USB-A socket without worrying about the speeds of each end as long as you don’t need USB 3 speeds.
The differences between USB-A and USB-C are:
- USB-C has the same form factor as Thunderbolt and the Thunderbolt protocol can run over it if both ends support it.
- USB-C generally supports higher power modes for charging (like 130W for Dell laptops, monitors, and plugpacks) but there’s no technical reason why USB-A couldn’t do it. You can buy chargers that do 60W over USB-A which could power one of our laptops via a USB-A to USB-C cable. So high power USB-A is theoretically possible but generally you won’t see it.
- USB-C has “DisplayPort alternate mode” which means using some of the wires for DisplayPort.
- USB-C is more likely to support the highest speeds than USB-A sockets for “super speed” etc. This is not a difference in the standards just a choice made by manufacturers.
While USB-C tends to support higher power delivery modes in actual implementations for connecting to a PC the PC end seems to only support lower power modes regardless of port. I think it would be really good if workstations could connect to monitors via USB-C and provide power, DisplayPort, and keyboard, mouse, etc over the same connection. But unfortunately the PC and monitor ends don’t appear to support such things.
If you don’t need any of those benefits in the list above (IE you are using USB for almost anything we do other than connecting a laptop to a dock/monitor/charger) then USB-A will do the job just as well as USB-C. The choice of which type to use should be based on price and which ports are available, EG My laptop has 2*USB-C ports and 2*USB-A so given that one USB-C port is almost always used for the monitor or for charging I don’t really want to use USB-C for anything else to avoid running out of ports.
When buying USB devices you can’t always predict which systems you will need to connect them to. Currently there are a lot of systems without USB-C that are working well and have no need to be replaced. I haven’t yet seen a system where the majority of ports are USB-C but that will probably happen in the next few years. Maybe in 2027 there will be PCs on sale with only two USB-A sockets forcing people who don’t want to use a USB hub to save both of them for keyboard and mouse. Currently USB-C keyboards and mice are available on AliExpress but they are expensive and I haven’t seen them in Australian stores. Most computer users don’t wear out keyboards or mice so a lot of USB-A keyboard and mice will be in service for a long time. As an aside there are still many PCs with PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports in service so these things don’t go away for a long time.
There is one corner case where USB-C is convenient which is when you want to connect a mass storage device for system recovery or emergency backup, want a high speed, and don’t want to spend time figuring out which of the ports are “super speed” (which can be difficult at the back of a PC with poor lighting). With USB-C you can expect a speed of at least 5Gbit/s and don’t have to worry about accidentally connecting to a USB 2 port as is the situation with USB-A.
For my own use the only times that I prefer USB-C over USB-A are for devices to connect to phones. Eventually I’ll get a laptop that only has USB-C ports and this will change, but even then adaptors are possible.
For someone who doesn’t know the details of how things works it’s not unreasonable to just buy the newest stuff and assume it’s better as it usually is. But hopefully blog posts like this can help people make more informed decisions.
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