TheHobbyist

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21664063

Linux Mint and Framework Laptops Join Forces

The October 2024 edition of Linux Mint’s Monthly News brings exciting updates, including a significant announcement about collaboration with Framework Laptops, having potential to advance Mint’s compatibility with hardware designed with flexibility, repairability, and sustainability in mind.

For those unfamiliar, unlike most traditional laptops, which are often difficult or impossible to repair or upgrade, Framework laptops are built to be user-friendly, making it easy to replace or upgrade components. This modular approach extends the laptop’s lifespan and promotes sustainability by reducing e-waste.

I landed on this article today about how to configure vLLM for AMD GPUs and it contained this specific snippet:

Meta recently announced they’re running 100% of their live Llama 3.1 405B model traffic on AMD MI300X GPUs [...]

I thought that was an interesting piece of trivia and shows both how important it is for industrial partners to find alternatives to Nvidia and also how much AMD has improved its software suite to enable these use-cases.

Hi folks,

I have Alpine Linux installed in an encrypted LUKS partition. I came across this tutorial which shows how to setup a key in a USB drive and when the drive is inserted and the computer booted, the LUKS partition auto-unlocks with the key on the USB drive.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1414617/configure-ubuntu-22-04-zfs-for-automatic-luks-unlock-on-boot-via-usb-drive

I would like to setup the same thing but I do not have Alpine linux installed on ZFS, so I'm looking for ways to adapt the instructions.

So far, what I've done is:

1. I've setup the key on the usb stick and I can unlock the LUKS partition with that key.
2. create a /etc/mkinitfs/features.d/usb-unlock.sh script with the following content:

(the echo to /dev/kmesg was to check whether the script did indeed run at boot by trying to print to the kernel messages but I can't find anything in the kernel messages).

#!/bin/sh

echo "usb-unlock script starting..." > /dev/kmsg

USB_MOUNT="/mnt/my-usb-key" # The USB stick mounting point
LUKS_KEY_FILE="awesome.key"  # The name of your keyfile on the USB stick

# Search for the USB stick with the key
for device in $(ls /dev/disk/by-uuid/*); do
    mount $device $USB_MOUNT 2>/dev/null
    if [ -f "$USB_MOUNT/$LUKS_KEY_FILE" ]; then
        # Unlock the LUKS partition
        cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda3 cryptroot \
            --key-file "$USB_MOUNT/$LUKS_KEY_FILE" && exit 0
    fi
    umount $USB_MOUNT
done
echo "No USB key found, falling back to password prompt." # this message never appears, despite not having found the key on the usb stick

echo "usb-unlock script ending." > /dev/kmsg

3. I added usb-unlock to the features in mkinitfs.conf:

mytestalpine:~# cat /etc/mkinitfs/mkinitfs.conf 
features="ata base ide scsi usb virtio ext4 cryptsetup keymap usb-unlock"

4. run mkinitfs to rebuild the initramfs. Then reboot to test the implementation, which was unsuccessful.

What am I missing / doing wrong? Thank you for your help!

Edit: forgot to add step 4

Hi folks,

I'm seeing there are multiple services which externalise the task of "identity provider" (e.g. login with Facebook, google or what not).

In my case, I am curious about Tailscale, a VPN service which allows one to chose an identity provider/SSO between Google, Microsoft, Github, Apple and OIDC.

How can I find out what data is actually communicates to the identity provider? Their task should simply be to decide whether I am who I claim to be, nothing more. But I'm guessing there may be some subtleties.

In the case of Tailscale, would the identity provider know where I'm trying to connect? Or more?

Answers and insights much appreciated! The topic does not seem to have much information online.

Hi folks, I'm considering setting up an offsite backup server and am seeking recommendations for a smallish form factor PC. Mainly, are there some suitable popular second hand PCs which meet the following requirements:

• fits 4x 3.5" HDD
• Smaller than a regular tower (e.g. mATX or ITX)
• Equipped with a 6th of 7th gen Intel CPU at least (for power efficiency and transcoding, in case I want it to actually to some transcoding) with video output.
• Ideally with upgradeable RAM

Do you know of something which meets those specs and is rather common on the second hand market?

Thanks!

Edit: I'm looking for a prebuilt system, such as a dell optiplex or similar.

Yesterday, there was a live scheduled by Louis Grossman, titled "Addressing futo license drama! Let's see if I get fired...". I was unable to watch it live, but now the stream seems to be gone from YouTube.

Did it air and was later removed? Or did it never happen in the first place?

Here's the link to where it was meant to happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTBYMobWQzk

Cheers

Edit: a new video was recently posted at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCjy2CHP7zU

I do not know if this was the supposedly edited and reuploaded video or if this is unrelated.

DeepComputing is preparing a RISC-V based motherboard to be used in existing Framework Laptop 13s!

Some snippets from the Framework blog post (the link to which is provided below):

The DeepComputing RISC-V Mainboard uses a JH7110 processor from StarFive which has four U74 RISC-V cores from SiFive.

This Mainboard is extremely compelling, but we want to be clear that in this generation, it is focused primarily on enabling developers, tinkerers, and hobbyists to start testing and creating on RISC-V.

DeepComputing is also working closely with the teams at Canonical and Red Hat to ensure Linux support is solid through Ubuntu and Fedora.

DeepComputing is demoing an early prototype of this Mainboard in a Framework Laptop 13 at the RISC-V Summit Europe next week.

Announcement: https://frame.work/blog/introducing-a-new-risc-v-mainboard-from-deepcomputing

The upcoming product page (no price/availability yet): https://frame.work/products/deep-computing-risc-v-mainboard

Edit: Adding link the the announcement by DeepComputing: https://deepcomputing.io/a-risc-v-world-first-independently-developed-risc-v-mainboard-for-a-framework-laptop-from-deepcomputing/

From Simon Willison: "Mistral tweet a link to a 281GB magnet BitTorrent of Mixtral 8x22B—their latest openly licensed model release, significantly larger than their previous best open model Mixtral 8x7B. I’ve not seen anyone get this running yet but it’s likely to perform extremely well, given how good the original Mixtral was."

Hi all,

I think around 1 or 2 years ago, I stumbled upon a personal blog of an asian woman (I think) working at OpenAI. She had numerous extensive fascinating blog posts on a black themed blog, going into the technical details of embeddings of language models and such.

I can no longer find that blog and have no other information to go by. Would anyone possibly know which blog I'm referring to? It would be very much appreciated.

Hi folks,

I seem to be having some internet connectivity issues lately and I would like to monitor my access to the internet. I have a homelab and was wondering whether someone had perhaps something like a docker container which pings a custom website every so often and plots a timescale of when the connection was successful and when it was not.

Or perhaps you have another suggestion? I know of dashboards like grafana but I don't know whether they can be configured to actually generate that data or whether they rely on a third party to feed them. Thanks!

Just wanted to share my appreciation of the game.

I grabbed a copy of this game a year ago, taking advantage of a sale and ahead of the massive update. Then forgot about it, never touched it.

Fast forward a year later, and now I got a steam deck and decided to dive into the game. I love it. I'm just a few hours in but I can already say this is among my favorite games. The broad openness of the world, the level of detail, the characters, the interactive dialogs, the items, the strategies, the game mechanics. It's a very involved game. It really is up there. Thank you CDPR for this game and this remake.

I was exploring the fps and refresh rate slider and I realized that when setting the framerate limiter to 25, the refresh rate was incorrectly set to 50Hz on the OLED version, when the 75 Hz setting would be a more appropriate setting, for the same reason 30 fps is at 90 Hz and not 60 Hz. Anyone else seeing the same behavior? Is there an explanation I'm missing here?