@Bob Two coworkers ordered Firefox OS "geeksphones" and they're getting it delivered here, apparently today. It costed EU 180. The taxes were more than that.

@ThatBrazilianGuy :S

Apparently there is a table at customs with the "market prices", and if you order something at a price they don't expect, they charge taxes based on "market prices"

Imagine they seeing a Raspberry Pi!

"RaspWhat? Oh! A computer! NO WAY you paid U$35 for a computer! Computers are at least U$750, let's charge taxes on THAT"

I suspect thats how it works

woo raspberry pis

we have a reasonably sensible taxation policy

lol

@deed02392: I use one as a torrent download box

I use FreeNAS for that

On happier news, there's a Firefox OS phone selling here for US 75.

The specs are quite LOW, however

and I have XBMC on both my pi's for streaming all my media :)

@deed02392: pondering refurbing my atom box for that, but the raspi does ok

then SSH in for whatever other funky stuff I do

@JourneymanGeek I built mine on a cheap Pentium, I don't think an Atom will be enough for FreeNAS

actually, I'm currently transferring slight over hundred gigs of music to stress test it

hm. thinking about ripping apart a CA-45 cable to turn it into TTL communication with the Pi :P

@deed02392: I have an atom mini itx, single core. Not all that bad

@deed02392 I have OpenELEC (xbmc). The lack of some codecs on the Pi makes some files uplayable :( But controlling xbmc with the TV remote is awesome!

if it can run windows 7...

depending on what you're doing. I wanted RAID-Z and the power to run transmission etc

yeah, that would do it

Mines mini itx too

@deed02392 The newer Atoms aren't too bad

I got one that came with a mobile pentium chip

I run qbitorrent-nox with podget downloading every so often

ah, well when I was looking this was a year ago

but you could always get a Celeron

those are several times more powerful than P4s :P

I think I compared what I got with Celerons too and mine was actually better

mine is a single core 1.6ghz, maxed out at 2gb of ram

yea, the newer Pentiums are slightly better than the new Celerons

well I've got 16 gig with it

@Bob: if I was building a home server now, the new server-grade atoms look good ;p

so it can't be that bad

Intel's current lineup is pretty much i7 > i5 > i3 > Pentium > Celeron > Atom

I'll find out

hmm D945GCLF with a single core atom 230 ;p

the newer Atoms are just slightly better than the 3.2GHz P4s, at least with raw benchmarks

@JourneymanGeek Benchmark score on-par with a 2.8GHz P4 :P

how does that CPU come into it @Bob?

;p

@deed02392 Come into what?

@Bob: I have a bunch of core 2s tho

comparing against pentium and atoms

I might swap it out for a new one with AES-NI

not sure what my options are with this socket though

@deed02392 You mean the P4? Wait, which CPU?

Celeron 847

I'm judging by PassMark scores - not necessarily real-world

Hm. That one scores ~1000, with the best Atom at ~700

:)

@deed02392 intel's page says its BGA

I'm sure when I came across it I was really please

The higher Celerons go up pretty high, though - the 847 is comparatively low

after looking at Atoms for ages

a modern Pentium willl beat it

Yeah, I ordered this 10 months ago or so

With a P4 @ 3.2GHz scoring ~400, it doesn't stand a chance :P

I still paid more than I wanted on the whole build

lol

@deed02392 Well, Atoms are supposed to be lower power usage

that's true

@deed02392: I came something like ... 300 dollars under budget

@JourneymanGeek BGA can't be swapped out?

with better parts than I had planned

;p

so are celerons though right

The Celeron is supposed to have two cores

which is even better

@deed02392: BGAs are soldered in place

bugger

the system was £163

drives were £210

>_>

spent something like a grand on this ;p

what sized drives?

3x 2 TB

not bad

wtf is a "nettop"?

@Bob: think a netbook sans screen

@Bob thinclient essentially

think netbook but one you stick on a desktop

ok @JourneymanGeek that was freaky

lol

my typing speed?

oh just the way we both said "think netbook"

@deed02392 That Celeron is 17W TDP

is that good @Bob?

The best desktop nettop Atom is 10W TDP

thats what it is ;p

not far off

@deed02392 17W is good if you want power

considering it is more powerful too

but the Atom actually gives more performance per Watt

yeah I'm not surprised about that

17W is standard for ultrabook ULV CPUs, including i7s

I just wanted more power than the best Atom was offering

I think I went on freenode#freenas and I was told an Atom wouldn't be enough

@deed02392 I was looking at desktop nettop Atoms

the server ones are probably better

Yea, depends what you're doing.

Software RAID, I can see being CPU-bound

Exactly

and I was thinking about encrypting the volume too

but I still wanted to max out GbE

o.O

My coworkers are unboxing two of those right now on a desk near mine:

geeksphone.com

nice ;p

the S1260, which is an old-ish server Atom (about same generation as your Celeron), is actually almost as good as the Celeron.

By raw benchmark.

I want one of those new phones from russia

with the e-ink display on the back

But they're FCBGA1283, which could be difficult to source

that was probably another factor

I can't really remember all my decision processes now

PassMark doesn't have benchmarks for any other server Atoms

also nearly impossible to replace

I imagine the new ones would be considerably more powerful

but when I saw that mobo bundle with that CPU turn up on ebuyer.com it was by far the best option I had

@deed02392 The 847?

yeah

techreport.com/news/25703/… ;p

@deed02392 You mean the Yota Phone?

Have you considered AMD?

They're decent for lower end

mini itx, 4 sticks of ram (ooooh)... 12... sata... ports....

that's the one @ThatBrazilianGuy

I am sure I would have done @Bob

I may have ruled it out for lack of AES-NI

even though the 847 isn't, but shh

I SUSPECT that darned thing might outperform my core i7 with a lot of workloads

@deed02392 When did you buy it?

@Bob So you like cats now ?

The Celeron G1610 costs ~$50 locally

a compatible mobo is also ~$50

the G1610 is a 2013 chip, and about 2.5x 'better' by raw bench than a 847 (2011 chip)

but it's 55W max TDP

(desktop chip - you got a laptop one)

February I think @Bob

surely not @JourneymanGeek

In theory? More ram, more physical cores

@JourneymanGeek in practice? 8 Atom cores isn't going to be any better than 4 i7 cores.

single core i7?

oh does the 847 have HT then?

The i7 is just that much faster

@deed02392 no, it's 2 physical

so @JourneymanGeek only has a single physical core i7

@Bob: yeah, but also the amount of ram ;p

didn't know they made single core i7s

@deed02392: quad core, HT

@deed02392 I don't think they do

so 4 physical cores, 8 logical cores

ah there's no way my 847 will outperform that

@JourneymanGeek I would expect the i7 to sequentially process at twice the speed of the Atom, at least, on all workloads

@Bob: the i7 would crush it on single threaded workloads

more physical cores only matter for certain workloads, and then only to the extend that you can parallelise your task

I'm not entirely sure on multithreaded ones.

@JourneymanGeek which also means that even with half the number of cores, if each core can process >2x faster (ignoring context switching), then it still wins

also, fewer cache misses :P

@JourneymanGeek Eh... 4 slots isn't that much

same as my core i7

but more than every other mini itx box ;p

though it supports twice the max amount

still, if you're going 64 GB of RAM, unles it's extremely distributed I'd say get a proper Xeon

in fact, I'd say that anyway

lol

yeah

more RAM cache is good, but you're probably going to be CPU-bound before the difference between 32GB and 64GB is really significant with an Atom, even an 8-core one

it is ECC RAM, so there's that

I can't find any benchmark results, but it's only 2W TDP, which isn't all that much power (course, you have 17W TDP i7s, but they're considerably less powerful than their desktop counterparts)

sure, you get more perf/Watt with Atoms, but at some point the difference in power (consumption) will make a difference, assuming similar architectures

yup

and yeah. 12 sata ports. I have no idea how you'd power that on a mini itx case ;p

uhh

!!s/2W/20W/

@Bob I can't find any benchmark results, but it's only 20W TDP, which isn't all that much power (course, you have 17W TDP i7s, but they're considerably less powerful than their desktop counterparts) (source)

!!help

@Ash Information on interacting with me can be found at this page

can i get some links to the source code for cavil ?

!!tell ash help

@ash Information on interacting with me can be found at this page

it's really there ^ the source

o.O

ebay.com.au/itm/…

how the heck does that work?

o0

looks like a sheet of plastic...

probably has antenna on the inside?

@Bob mah, any antenna works either way... is just a coaxial cable for godness sake!

we used to have a rabbit ear antenna ;p

@Braiam not a good one

@JourneymanGeek I don't see any electrical contacts

@Braiam sure, you can run a long wire - but that's not good reception

also, properly shielded coax wouldn't work, for obvious reasons

Paul: How fast are you starting at ground level?

(800-tank, small engine, small pod, two small boosters throwing me to 12KM in 29 seconds.)

@Bob: not counting the co-ax?

@Hennes I used to do that until I read up some stuff in the wiki

There was a nice graph between drag and fuel consumption rate or something

I went for the cheapest rocket possible while still making orbit and landing. (and with luck -accident) even a sling shot around Mum and the sun.

Orbital probe 1		       mass 	mass	cost	cost	drag	From
	#	per item	sum	item	sum	item
Mk16 XL parachute	0.3	0.3	850	850	1	Utility
Octo module		        0.5	0.5	450	450	0.2	Pods
2x Oct Stat solar panel	2	0.01	0.01	100	200	0.2	Utility
Z-100 batt pack	2	0.01	0.01	80	160	0.2	Utility
TR-18A decoupler		0.05	0.05	600	600	0.2	Structural
Advanced SAS		0.1	0.1	600	600	0.2	Control
FL-T800 fuel		0.4	0.4	1600	1600	0.2	Fuel
LV-909		0.5	0.5	750	750	0.2	Propulsion	Max: 50
2x RT 10 booster	2	0.05	0.1	450	900	0.3	Propulsion	Power 250

Hmm, cut and paste from a spreadsheet does not work quite as well as hoped.

:O kickstarter.com/projects/1004538774/miniciv-4x-game-for-android

I didn't have enough ram to attempt a mun landing :/

@Gowtham You fund him?

@OliverSalzburg Santa hat lol

@Boris_yo It was a gift

Is there an emulator for the original Apollo moon landing computer?

It would be fun as a benchmark utility to see how many times you could guide the moonlander onto the lunar surface :D would beat superpi any day

@Boris_yo naw

hi

hi

hi

That hideous black bar is not yet on Ask Ubuntu. yay

hi

hi

@Bob I still don't know what foxes say :(

i already know what the Firefox says

it says "Shut up!"

@allquixotic Did they fix .SVG bug?

@Boris_yo no

@allquixotic Not sure why everyone's confused about what foxes say. youtube.com/watch?v=uIR8RtI9kaw

@DarthAndroid they kind of give the answer away anyway, don't they?

something along the lines of "badeep beep deep do BEE-bop"

@Gowtham There is video on YouTube that says that Obama is Barack Obama and vise versa.

@allquixotic Eiffel 65?

@Boris_yo The revelation that Obama is Obama is rather unsurprising.

@ThatBrazilianGuy It's ridiculous

@Boris_yo Unless it is a statement made by Captain Obvious.

That is some powerful voice! O__o

Megacat with eye-LEDs doing combos...

OK, I received and installed the Intel 530 SSD and it's being detected by the BIOS. I added a GPT partition table and set one of the partitions to bootable. The BIOS refuses to let me select the SSD as a boot device; it only offers the spinning-rust drive I'm trying to replace and the DVD drive. SATA is set to AHCI. Any good suggestions as to why, anyone?

@Boris_yo that is the funniest cat image I've seen in a while

@MichaelKjörling did you actually install an operating system on the SSD?

@allquixotic Not yet, but why should the BIOS care about that if there exists a bootable-flagged partition?

Installing an OS on it is kind of pointless if the BIOS won't let me boot off of it.

@MichaelKjörling the very concept of a "bootable" flag is alien to GPT, since UEFI operates completely differently by having an EFI System Partition that provides the boot loaders... are you sure you set it correctly? in GPT it would be done by setting the legacy_boot flag in the protective MBR

also, are you sure your "BIOS" isn't actually a UEFI, and if so, is compatibility mode enabled?

BIOS is UEFI, yes. Checking partition flags now.

According to gparted, these flags are set on the partition I will be using for the OS: boot, legacy_boot.

A notable one that's unset is bios_grub.

e@slhck lol you too with Santa hat? Good job!

and does your UEFI firmware have compatibility mode enabled?

trying to configure a GPT disk for being booted in legacy BIOS mode by setting the legacy boot flag and then trying to boot it in UEFI mode won't be fruitful

Unknown. I can reboot and check, but it takes a few minutes to do a full reboot.

really you should just decide right now whether you want to go all-out BIOS mode or all-out UEFI mode, and decide to cater your entire stack appropriately

all-out BIOS mode: partition the drive as MBR (not GPT), turn on compatibility support module in UEFI configuration screen, and install OS booting in CSM mode

Just don't go full retard

I honestly don't know how well GRUB 2 handles pure-UEFI. Are you thinking it might be that the BIOS doesn't want to see the GPT and wants a MBR in its place?

all-out UEFI mode: partition the drive as GPT, turn off the CSM in UEFI, and install OS by booting the OS disk in UEFI mode

trying to mix and match leads to weird problems

It's worth nothing that the 4 TB spinning-rust drive doesn't show up either, and I know that one is partitioned GPT because MBR doesn't do that much. The SSD is 180 GB so no capacity problems there.

Should I try scrapping the GPT and just try with MBR instead, and see what happens?

@MichaelKjörling GRUB2 works perfectly fine with UEFI, assuming you're using a reasonably modern version of GRUB

I've been booting GRUB2 off of a pure UEFI / GPT / non-CSM Ivy Bridge board for more than a year

@MichaelKjörling GRUB should be able to cope with it

It's the one currently packaged with Debian Wheezy (current stable) but I don't have the exact version number readily available.

that's more than recent enough

UEFI isn't nearly as new, as a technology, as it might be to you the user ;p

@Boris_yo Of course. At this time of the year you need a hat, otherwise you'd be freezing.

The problem is that the BIOS won't let me select the SSD as a boot device at all.

@MichaelKjörling if you install something on it, it will -- that's how UEFI works -- you can't boot off of nothing

I'm also waiting on the phone to get through to Asus motherboard tech support, they should know what conditions need to be met.

So the easiest solution is to just use good ol' MBR?

you have to mark a partition as the EFI System Partition in the GPT partition table, and GRUB2 will install itself to the EFI-SP

I don't really need GPT, I just thought I'd standardise.

a good Linux distro will do all of this for you automatically

basically you pop in the Linux CD/DVD, boot to it in UEFI mode (disable CSM), and it should automatically partition your disk appropriately and put GRUB2 in the system partition and make it bootable

Quite possibly, but I am not really in the mood for a complete reinstall :)

oh, you are wanting to copy data from another drive at the block layer or something?

File layer + reinstall GRUB, actually. But yes, I want to migrate my current install that is on a dying spinning-rust drive.

well if you're copying things at the file layer, there's really nothing stopping you from doing a fresh install of the OS and then copying over programs/data

But let's say I wipe the GPT off the SSD and put a MBR in its place. Then set one partition as bootable. Should that make the SSD show up as a boot-possible device in the motherboard firmware setup?

@MichaelKjörling yes, assuming the Compatibility Support Module is enabled

out of the factory, it's entirely possible that CSM could be disabled on a system that was configured for Windows 8 or 8.1 and secure boot

because CSM and secure boot are mutually exclusive

This is a custom-built machine, based around an almost two years old now Asus M5A97 Pro motherboard.

I just checked and the current boot disk is MBR partitioned.

so wait, you haven't wiped your old disk, and it's still connected, but the BIOS can't boot to it? and the only thing you've changed is installing a new SSD?

sounds like you don't have the hardware plugged in properly or something

there's no reason I can think of that installing a new disk would cause an old disk to be unbootable, unless you did something wrong at the hardware level

I added a new SSD and want to migrate the data from the old spinning-rust drive to the SSD. BIOS detects both fine, I'm running off spinning rust now, but BIOS won't let me select the SSD as a boot device. It just isn't listed as an option, only the HDD and DVD drive are.

oh, I thought you said the HDD wasn't listed

No, the MBR-partitioned HDD is fine. The GPT-partitioned SSD doesn't show up as a boot device option.

Sorry, my bad. That's the data storage HDD that has never been meant to be bootable.

oh okay

The HDD I want to migrate off of is a 1 TB in-death-pains drive.

I mean, try MBR; worst thing that can happen is it won't work

if you have no intentions of doing a full-on UEFI install and boot anyway, no need to use GPT on a 180GB disk

Pretty much. I'll add a MBR partition table.

now I have been able to boot from GPT on a non-UEFI system before; in theory it should work, provided there's bootloader support; and that can be useful for booting from very large (like 4 TB) disks that MBR can't support; but it's somewhat of an odd case

the happiest paths are UEFI + GPT and (BIOS or CSM) + MBR

Can't wait for hearing about @MichaelKjörling amazement at speed of SSD.

GPT doesn't provide any performance or safety benefits during runtime, anyway -- really the only potential performance win you can see is native UEFI booting + GPT + something like hybrid sleep (Windows 8...) or Intel Rapid Boot Technology

not sure if that would help at all on GNU/Linux

OK, MBR written with one partition flagged bootable. Will reboot and check. Back in a few minutes.

you also get UEFI GOP if CSM is disabled; the Graphics Output Protocol combined with a supporting graphics card (it's firmware-dependent) can initialize the display device directly to the native resolution without ever using text mode or VESA compatibility modes, reducing mode switching and loading time

unsure of the state of UEFI GOP support with the open source graphics stack; I presume it's supported by now at least on Intel iGPUs; but it's definitely not supported by the proprietary graphics drivers

I'll change one thing at a time :D

OK, now I'm not quite sure if I should be happy that it seems to have worked out, or angry at the idiosynchronicies of the ASUS firmware setup UI.

The UI only displays the primary boot device of each class (HDD, CD/DVD), but when I went into HDD boot priorities I could choose between all three drives, including the SSD. Tried setting the SSD primary and at least it didn't break completely; it continued with the HDD though, likely because it didn't find a valid boot sector signature.

@MichaelKjörling yup

AFAIK it's been that way for several years (as far as it only having a "boot priorities" list for BIOS mode)

Now I just need to figure out how to wipe the GPT residue off the drive so I don't end up with confused software later.

i have a more modern P8Z77-V (also Asus) and it's similar behavior

@MichaelKjörling if you put MBR on it, the GPT is already gone

Not according to gparted though.

"/dev/sdb contains GPT signatures, indicating that it has a GPT table. However, it does not have a valid fake msdos partition table, as it should. Perhaps it was corrupted -- possibly by a program that doesn't understand GPT partition tables. Or perhaps you deleted the GPT table, and are now using an msdos partition table. Is this a GPT partition table?"

@MichaelKjörling oh, so maybe you only have an MBR Protective Partition

yeah it sounds like it's all confused

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdsomething

make sure to do the right one :P

No, I used fdisk to create a completely new MBR.

Haha, yeah, that's why I use /dev/disk/by-id/* for anything important!

I don't think I understand your SSD talk..

@Boris_yo don't feel bad, they are in a Super Standard Definition era, while you are in the Hey, High Definition era ;)

@Braiam What era are you in?

Isn't that Holy Damoley Definition, @Braiam?

I will download all your brain data!

OK, unless fdisk is lying to me it is now a clean MBR partitioned device, leaving 1 MiB of free room at the beginning and the end.

The only weirdness now is that fdisk claims the ideal I/O size is 512 bytes. I don't think it is.

@MichaelKjörling don't expect fdisk (or anything in software, really) to have a good understanding of what constitutes an efficient use of the underlying storage device... block sizes, boundaries, etc. are all pretty hard to understand from a software perspective due to the tons of abstraction between the physical NAND and the block layer

@allquixotic see: HDDs reporting logical block size of 512B while they have a physical size of 4k

SDDs are likely similar. maybe even more extreme with their pages

@Bob Solid Damn Disks?

@allquixotic eh, whoops

!!info no

@allquixotic Command no, created by allquixotic on Tue, 26 Nov 2013 18:18:45 GMT, invoked 6 times

!!help no

@allquixotic no: User-taught command: <>http://i.stack.imgur.com/M0Ngk.png

!!help say

@allquixotic say: User-taught command: <>$1