freeNAS it once was

All the good old time do come to an end one time. 

I am not joking here, freeNAS using BSD (freeBSD, I think), has been a really reliable NAS for its time, in particular since it was using ZFS.

In fact, I put all my data in a freeNAS ZFS pool. It was Easy to manage and deal with, until freeNAS turned into trueNAS. 
It was not easy, as I recall, but I managed to run the proper update programs to finally end up with an operating trueNAS system, still having my data in my original ZFS pool. That was until.....

Someone decided to f#-up trueNAS by porting it from BSD to Linux. While I am generally would go along with such a move, I would like to have some safeguards for random users.
While I am not considering myself a random user, I am not far off those anyway.

The treuNAS system told me that there is a fresh upgrade I shall apply, so I did... stupid me! This bloody upgrade, f-ed up my NAS for good. I spent several night trying to rescue the system, and failed doing so.

At the end, I was giving up. I booted Linux-Mint and was glad to see all my zpool drives lined up.
After installing Linux-Mint on my (non-zfs), boot drive I was able to install zfs-tools on my server. With the help of the zfs-tools I was able to import my zpool to the present Linux installation. 

I am happy to report that all my ZFS data us save. I was even able to successfully run a SCRUB on the RAID, resulting in 0 errors. May data is hence safe.
However. All the elegant management provided to trueNAS is gone. 

Is there a conclusion we can take from my experience? I am not sure. It is a gamble to trust one of the other flavour of provider. BACKUP on your own media and format.

Maybe it is better to setup your very own NFS-server and ignore all the other solution available for convenience. 

MacBook Air (early 2015)

Those things, now that Apple no longer provides updates to macOS for Intel Macs, are getting really inexpensive by now.

My latest purchase was an 11" MacBook Air (early 2015) with an Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM and a 128GB SSD. The thing cost me €150 and came in good condition. There is a scratch on the clam shell, nothing I do care about. 
When I ordered the device, the one thing I cared about was the 8GB of RAM. I do not actually care about the amount of storage that came with it for two reasons, both of those later in this post. The other thing some people might be bothered by is the Intel Core i5, rather than a Intel Core i7. My understanding is that the i7s used in this machine were just i5s which could run of a higher clock speed, correct me if I am wrong. And here, the i5 actually plays into my use case of the device, lower CPU clock speed means longer battery life. So, for my use case, the i5 was a good thing.

There was a lot of typing "use case" in the previous section. Here is what I intend to use the thing for: travel. Hours of battery operations with tasks such as text-processing or displaying PDF-documents. With the speed of my typing, the entire computer might just to to sleep between the hits on the keyboard. And as for reading, maybe an e-Ink display would suit me better...

Those Intel-Apples are getting pretty inexpensive by now, but by no means those are cheap computers. The build-quality is exceptional, at least in this generation; the one with the good keyboards. The screen is what it is, good enough for me though. Me needing reading glasses by now, I wonder if "Retina Displays" would make any severe difference to me.

Apple is phasing out the support for Intel Macs, hence their low prices on the 2nd-hand market. Is this a bad thing? Yes and No!
Over the last few years, I did secure a few bargain Intel Macs of my likings, knowing that Linux can be installed on those very easily. My (presently) preferred flavour is Linux-Mint Cinnamon. Very easy to install, very easy to deal with. Disclaimer: my experience with Linux dates from 1993 onwards, with SLS and Slackware. And even before that I was using 386BSD. So, my definition of easy might differ from yours.
Installing Linux-Mint Cinnamon exhibit only a single simple to overcome hurdle: the lack of a WiFi-driver. I overcame this by using a generic USB-WiFi-dongle, which got me online. Once the OS was up, I could install the required driver. Now Linux was up and running. HOWEVER, the facetime-camera did not work and I could not get it to work either. With the camera not working, the ambient light adjustment does not do anything While I could ignore the camera, the ambient light-thing was a real bummer!

So, I decided to re-install some macOS for the time being. There are some options to do that, depending on what is wanted: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/reinstall-macos-mchlp1599/mac

First time I tried Option-Command-R, every fell apart... now idea why.
I then tried Options-Shift-Command-R (finger acrobatics involved!), which worked (I don't recall which OS this ended up with).

Some time later, the first option worked, resulting in macOS Monterey.

One of my initial thoughts was to run Linux and macOS parallel, which dual boot, using the macOS home directory from Linux. While dual boot worked out for me, the using of the macOS home-directory from Linux did not.

There is another idea, which would work, but for the time being does not appear practical to me: partition the SSD into 3 parts. A first for macOS (APFS), a second for Linux (ext4) and a third for home (exFAT). I am pretty sure this would work, however, 128GB are pretty tight for such games.

Now to the elephant in the room, the jumping point (German: der springende Punkt) here is the use-case again. How much storage is actually needed? See above, some LibreOffice documents here and there, some PDFs here and there... not much space needed for those. Of course it is a different story should one consider photo-shoots in RAW or even videos. But, let's be honest, who would consider a MacBook Air for video editing?

As promised, there are 2 solutions to consider:

1. Upgrade the machine with a bigger SSD. No problem with the MB-A 2015. The back can be removed easily, just a few screws to remove and it pops right off. Apple uses a proprietary SSD socket, however, adapters (eg. from China) to regula M.2 from can be found for about €2. Not all M.2 SSDs will work, you will find information about this on the InterWeb.
2. Just of what you have, that's what I do. In addition to the internal SSD, I am using an old WD external USB3 spinny HDD. This external HDD serves 2 distinct purposes 1) external storage (dah) and 2) time-machine backups. The setup of such a disk is explained below.

Setting up the external USB3 disk is no magic either, however, at first, this might not be as obvious as it seems to the regular consumer.
My path was the following:

• using disk-utility to erase the NTFS partition
• reformat as APFS
• partition the external HDD into an APFS particion twice the size of the internal SSD
• format the remainder of the external HDD with exFAT 

Why exFAT for the second partition, you might ask. Simply said the two partitions will serve different purposes. The APFS partition will serve Time-Machine for backups.

The exFAT partition can be used as external data storage, which can be used with non-macOS computers, thereby allowing for very easy data transfer. Think of the photos or videos I mentioned above.

In my case, we are looking at 

• 128 GB internal SSD
• 256 GB Time-Machine storage
• 768 GB shared/scrap/data/video/photo/etc space

Will the external drive connected all times? Of course not. When out and about, 128GB seems more than enough. Once back at the bed, connect the drive, backups will start, move the data about. All good! To be honest, I don't think that I would need any more storage than that in a daily task situation.

Concluding: get one of this Intel MacBooks now that they are soooo cheap. Don't get any of the ones with the bad butterfly keyboards! (older is better in this respect, DO THE RESEARCH). 

Review you use-case. What to you actually need when using your ultra-portable computer.

As a final tip: When you are already in your MacBook, apply fresh thermal paste to the CPU. Do that in the manner you found thermal compound in there. Apple left out parts of exposed semiconductors for a reason.
After having applied fresh thermal paste to my MacBook Air 11" (early 2015), I have not heard of the fan since.

 

PYTHON on a Chromebook

Spoiler: Thonny works.

In my previous post, I touched the topic of running Linux and BASIC on a Chromebook. The question was, does Thonny (Python 3) run too? Yes, it does.

Installing Thonny by
sudo apt install thonny
draws in a lot of stuff and takes a while. However, in the end you will get a working Thonny with a Python3 interpreter. I have not checked out any of the advanced things, such as matplotlib or NumPy. Presently I do feel confident that those will work just fine.

BASIC on a Chromebook

This continues my series into the past of many of us. Many of us learned programming by using the BASIC language. I school, I was forced to learn PASCAL, which was not of much use, other than understanding programming principles, which I already knew from BASIC. Learning F0RTRAN was the real step into the world of computing.

Anyway, this post is about BASIC on Chromebooks. I do own several of those. Not everyone of those is able to run Linux easily (there is always a way to force the hardware, one way or the other). This post is concerned with Chromebooks which can be easily set to run Linux applications.

To set any such Chromebook to do that, access "Settings" => "About ChromeOS" => "Linux Development Environment". If your Chromebook has that, install the Linux-thing. This might take a while.

Once your Chromebook has the virtual machine with (Debian) linux on board, you might start a (Linux) terminal and install "BWBASIC" by typing
sudo apt install bwbasic
in the terminal.

For the fun of it, I did install geany the same way. Now you can run your BASIC programs on a Chromebook in style. 
I have not yet checked the use of the FreeBasic Compiler. I see no reason why this should not work.

Can I run Python/Thonny on my ChromeBook? Stay tuned!