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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • It was a struggle. You went to buy some device and you had to check it was not one of those windows-only ones. Modems were particularly bad, for example.

    You had to read the how-tos and figure things out. Mailing lists and newsgroups were the only places to find some help.

    You had to find the shop willing to honour warranty on the parts and not on the whole system, as they had no knowledge of Linux at all. But once you found them, you were a recurring customer so they were actually happy. You might even have ended up showing them memtest86!

    You would still be able to configure the kernel and be able to actually know some of those names, compilation would take several hours but it was a learning experience.

    You could interact with very helpful kernel developers and get fixes to test.

    You could have been the laughing stock of your circles of friends, but within you, you knew who’d have had the last laugh.

    And yes, Loki games had some titles working on Linux natively, Railroad Tycoon was one. Too bad they were ahead of the times and didn’t last much.



  • It is very usable, provided you pay attention to major upcoming changes. To give you a very recent example, during May they switched the time libraries to use 64 bits, and like others said, it was dependency hell until the tide of all the packages being recompiled passed. In those cases, unless you know EXACTLY what to do, it’s better to wait for updates to come in, let apt sort out what could be updated and what had to wait, and just make sure it doesn’t propose you to delete things. After 2 weeks it was all business as usual. Side note: aptitude (my package manager of choice) was unusable, while apt threaded on and pulled me out of the tangle.










  • There are many options, but you have to search for network graphs …

    Here are some names that come off the top of my head:

    MRTG - a classic, serves as basis for many other tools. Can monitor anything that has SNMP and if you do some scripting also things without SNMP.

    Cacti - a bit more evolute than the above, but same concept.

    LibreNMS - this one uses a database for storing data. Can monitor network elements as well as servers. Nice graphs. There’s no .deb but it’s easy to install.

    Prometheus - this can monitor a lot of things, you will need a graphing front end to get the most of it.

    Grafana - coupled with Prometheus or any other modern data collection tool it’s a very powerful graphing and reporting tool. A bit daunting maybe, it requires some learning.

    There are many others, some generic, some specialized. Pick one and try it, if you don’t like the results there’s plenty of choices. A VM will help with not cluttering your server.