Onno (VK6FLAB)

I wonder if we can hear an entire planet scream…

How do you deal with missing drivers?

I miss my SPARC, it had to be given away when I started travelling around Australia for five years. The last IBM ThinkPad replaced it, anyone remember recompiling kernels to support the PATA/SATA driver so you could boot the thing? I never did get all the onboard hardware to work and one day someone in the Debian X11 team decided that using multiple monitors as a single desktop wasn’t required any longer.

I bought a 17” MacBook Pro and installed VMware on it, never looked back.

I take your point on not needing server hardware. The proxmox cluster was a gift on the way to landfill when my iMac died. I’m using it to figure out which platform to migrate to after Broadcom bought VMware.

I think it would be irresponsible to go back to it in light of the developments since the purchase.

Yeah, I was getting ready to use NoMachine on a recommendation, until I saw the macos uninstall script and the lack of any progress by the development team, going so far as to delete knowledge base articles and promising updates on the next release three versions ago.

An added wrinkle is getting local USB devices visible on a VDI, like say a local thumb drive (in this case it’s a Zoom H5 audio recorder) so I can edit audio, not to mention, getting actual audio across the network, let alone being synchronised.

It’s not trivial :)

At the moment I’m experimenting with a proxmox cluster, but any VM from VMware don’t just run, so for ancient operating systems in a VM like Win98se, you need drivers which are no longer available … odd since that’s precisely why I run it in a VM. Not to mention that the Proxmox UI expects you to run a series of commands in the console every time you want to add a drive, something which happens fairly often.

For shits and giggles try finding a way to properly shutdown a cluster without having to write scripts or shut each node down individually.

As I said, not trivial :)

I’ve installed Debian on several bits of bare metal hardware since, Raspberry pi, suddenly doesn’t detect the usb wifi dongle that worked in the previous release. Or the hours trying to get an extended Mac USB keyboard to work properly.

Supermicro servers that didn’t support the on board video card in VGA mode (for a text console).

Then there was a solid-state “terminal” device which didn’t have support for the onboard ethernet controller.

It’s not been without challenge, hence my reluctance. I moved to VMware to stabilise the experience and it was the best decision I’ve ever made, other than standardizing on Debian.

I note that I’ve been installing Debian for a while. This is me in 2000:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2000/09/msg00038.html

I’m all for doing this, but I’m not particularly interested in compiling kernel modules to make my base hardware work, which is why I used VMware until June when my iMac died. This worked for me for 15 years. My Mac had 64 GB of RAM and was plenty fast to run my main Debian desktop inside a VM with several other VMs doing duty as Docker hosts, client test environments, research environments and plenty more.

Now I’m trying to figure out which bare bones modern hardware I can buy in Australia that will run Debian out of the box with no surprises.

I’ve started investigating EC2 instances, but the desktop UI experience seems pretty crap.

A Docker container is essentially a process running on your machine. Just like any other process. It can be idle, stopped or hogging the CPU. You can use Docker constraints to limit resource use if you want to, memory, CPU and network to name a few.

So, can you run 40 processes?

Very likely. Probably 400 or 4000, depending on CPU usage and memory.

I ran that particular CPU with 64 GB of RAM and used it to run multiple virtual machines, my main debian desktop and a VM specifically as a docker host, running dozens of instances of Google Chrome without ever noticing it slowing down.

Then the power cable shortened out and life was never the same. That was six months ago, the machine was a late 2015 iMac running macos and VMware Fusion.