Posted on 08/26/2020 6:11:46 AM PDT by ShadowAce
> It's actually not that bad once you get used to it. It parallizes the startup process, and can be quite a bit quicker than initd. I've gotten to the point that I can create systemd unit files fairly easily, and can get custom processes to work on boot up pretty easily.
Honestly, I care far less about the "Look how fast it boots!" competition, than about "Look, it did everything in the right order, and it's the same order every time it boots".
The fact that I have to twist its arm -- hard, and with a lot of overhead -- to make it act even somewhat consistently is why I say it's a broken mess. Boot should be a deterministic process by default.
Of course, I say that as a system administrator of a considerable network, not a desktop user who wants his single computer to boot faster than the one his friend has.
THANK YOU! I was hoping someone post the reality of it! Priceless my friend!
It prints everything else fine. I’m using Adobe Acrobat for Linus.
Well said... :)
Thanks! That worked!
ShadowAce, you know I'm not talking about you there :-) I know you are a fellow Sysadmin, likely with a network to manage that dwarfs mine.
Have you tried the “document viewer” that comes boxed with Mint? Once I got the drivers from the printer manufacturer and put them in CUPS it works fine for me?
Someone suggested “okular” and it worked. Thanks.
Good deal... I have made a personal effort to try and learn and utilize everything that comes boxed with Mint before going and grabbing anything additional. :)
I haven’t even updated my kernel in three years now. Or grabbed any Mint updates, it’s been off. What for? New apps check for and go grab any missing dependencies during the install, so it brings it’s self up to date for that particular app.
Everything works fine so don’t try to fix it for no reason is my motto. And unlike windows, you can get away with this if you like with Linux.
And Linux is so easy to update. I have never been asked to reboot my computer (which can take half an hour or more on Windoze.)
Excellent. If you were viewing the PDFs through your browser or something, it might be that the application is not set up to print to your default printer.
Do you know of a good primer on systemd? It's a confusing mess to me. I much prefer the clarity of init scripts.
As for the boot speed, I'm not really concerned about that. It could take half an hour to boot, and I wouldn't care since that only happens 3 times in an average year (if that). I only reboot on kernel upgrades, and do those fairly infrequently. I reboot on kernel upgrades just to make sure nothing got badly bolluxed up. I'd rather know right away rather than have it bite me in the ass later on, and not know what change caused it.
Yep, see my comment #21 above.
Half an hour might bother me. But the difference between 1 minute and 3 minutes of Linux boot time is irrelevant. The hardware servers I maintain spend 3 minutes in hardware initialization and self-test before the kernel menu comes up. What's another few minutes?
The VMs of course are essentially nothing for BIOS time, and it's all Linux boot time. Scary quick. I just wish it was deterministic and consistent. Parallelizing is an invitation to problems, in my experience, and has to be done exceedingly carefully. The history and development of systemd has been been anything but exceedingly careful, IMO.
Something I recommend is to have /home on its own disk(s). When I did my last physical system rebuild, I replaced what was the old boot drive with a new reasonably sized SSD. After doing the OS install, none of my /home data had been touched. I just booted up and went back to work.
For backups, 'backintime' pretty much can't be beat IMO. It is similar to the Mac 'time machine' program and is based on rsync. It is freaking awesome. I have an external drive that I periodically swap out with another one that has backups going back to 2016. I have older backups on other external drives that I can recover stuff from as well if I need to.
Agreed on all points. The whole concept of a lack of a fully deterministic boot process scares the dickens out of me. Back when I was sysadmin with a crapload of boxes to support, it would have frightened me even more.
Now and then you run across an app that might require a reboot, but other than that it just pretty much handles everything on the fly as go along.
Never get any of those “you need to update to run this software” or “your OS version is out of date and will not run this”. They just don’t happen, everything old will run new, and everything new will run old.
Loving every bit of that peace of mind, lack of stress, and no BS proprietary hoops to jump through. :)
Mint cinnamon’s boxed version is called “timeshift”. And it is indeed awesome.
That was one of the advantages of Microstation (a CAD program) over Autocad. No older versions of Autocad would open up an newer version. So when any client upgraded their software, you had to, also or you couldn’t view their files.
I’ve got a laptop so a second, persistent drive is not so easy.
I do backups on an external. I use Deja Dup which works pretty good. Looks like Grsync is the graphical version of rsync, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grsync
I’ll have to check it out
Actually, I think ‘timeshift’ is different. It is more for configuration changes, rather than user data. Might be wrong about that.
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