October 11th, 2024

I Guess it’s Back to Gentoo Then

Posted by John Havlik in Reviews > Software

To preface this post, it was started as a draft a few months back titled “Back to Gentoo”. At the time it was obvious all was not well in Funtoo land, and for my specific use cases, it was no longer serving its purpose. In the mean time, the BDFL of Funtoo officially discontinued the Funtoo project back on July 26th, 2024 and later revised its status to “hobby mode”.

Funtoo was fun, until recently, when the wheels just fell off. Between stupid errors like new .0 releases of packages not knowing that the distributed files remove the .0 (so the source isn’t found and the build fails), and progressively worse Wayland and KDE support Funtoo is no longer fun. Oh, and Docker broke.

In my opinion, the one thing Funtoo did better was a much better profile system. Funtoo used a layered profile system which had “mixins” which you used to specify what you wanted the system to be. Using intel graphics? Use a mixin. Using KDE plasma? Use a mixin. It essentially was an abstraction of the USE flag system, which was more focused on use cases instead of low level features. The beauty being, if a package’s USE flags changed, you didn’t end up in circular dependency resolution hell quite as often.

Gentoo doesn’t have this. In Gentoo you pick a single profile (so Gentoo has a lot of profiles to handle the various configuration permutations that exist). This isn’t great, it doesn’t scale, and, honestly, it’s a mess. That said, after setting up two servers with Gentoo, I think I can get over the clunky profiles. I took the time to actually setup a distribution kernel with custom config.d overrides. Now, kernel updates are almost painless. While Funtoo had a way of doing the same thing (managed custom kernel config, build, and install), my insistence on using efistub precluded using it, so I had been using genkernel.

Next up on the migration docket are a couple of HTPCs that are not able to run Steam OS, and finally my daily driver laptop (well, if I’m being honest, it’s about time to replace the laptop anyways as the battery is starting to reach the end of its useful life).

-John Havlik

March 19th, 2024

The Intel Arc A310 in the HP Proliant MicroServer Gen 8

Posted by John Havlik in Reviews > Hardware

The somewhat popular HP MicroServer series has been an excellent starting point for all sorts of home lab experimentation. They are particularly well suited for acting as a media server (using Plex, Jellyfin, or others). While CPU transcoding will suffice for a steam or two, it will heavily tax the CPU. Hence, the popularity of GPU transcoding (NVENC and QuickSync).

Thanks to HP’s design decisions, the MicroSever Gen 8 does not enable the iGPU present on many Intel CPUs. What makes this an unfortunate decision is the MicroServer Gen 8 uses the LGA1155 socket—the consumer oriented socket where most of the CPUs, including the Xeons, have integrated graphics. Instead, a Matrox G200EH handles basic VGA duties. Which is a shame, the iGPU in the Ivybridge generation CPUs is not only more powerful, it also has QuickSync for transcoding acceleration. While this is disappointing, the MicroServer Gen 8 does have a PCIe x16 slot (PCIe 2.0).

June 14th, 2019

Seagate 5TB Backup Plus Portable (2019 Edition)

Posted by John Havlik in Reviews > Hardware

Seagate has recently updated their 2.5″ Backup Plus Portable line, redesigning the hard drive’s enclosure. The previous version was somewhat popular for drive shucking due to price, capacity, and ease of shucking. This new model, the STHP5000400, contains a 5TB 5400RPM hard drive in the 15mm tall 2.5″ form-factor. For those looking to inexpensively fill 2.5″ drive bays in a storage server/NAS, this seems to be the only choice.

February 2nd, 2019

Moto X4

Posted by John Havlik in Reviews > Hardware

Back in July (2018), I upgraded to the Motorola Moto X4. After over four-and-a-half years of faithful service, my Moto X (2013) was no longer cutting it. The battery was not lasting a day. I was pretty much out of storage (16GB is not enough), even with a minimal set of apps and music on the device. Topping it off, things were getting generally sluggish.

While I had been looking at phones since December (2017), nothing hit the value mark I was looking for and worked on the Verizon network (they sure do not have “the devices” unless you want a phablet or an iPhone). I was considering the Google Pixel, but given its price point I was disappointed in the second generation device (the screen to body ratio was worse than the Moto X (2013)). I ended up settling for the Moto X4, and picked up the Amazon Prime version on Prime Day.

June 2nd, 2017

Dell TB16 vs TB15

Posted by John Havlik in Reviews > Hardware

A year and a few months ago, I picked up a Dell TB15 to use with my new XPS 15 9550. Since then, the TB15 was discontinued due to hardware issues. Last December, the WD15 as the only available replacement, even though its link was USB C, not Thunderbolt 3 like the TB15. However, Dell has since released the TB16, which officially replaces the TB15.

Since January, Dell has replacing existing TB15 units with TB16 for customers who open a support ticket requesting an exchange. Additionally, it appears that Dell is, as of late April, proactively sending out TB16 units to those who purchased a TB15 unit from Dell.com—this is how I ended up with a TB16. In addition to the TB16, Dell includes a letter explaining the exchange process and a shipping label for returning the old TB15.