Re: Quickie Report - Installing Fedora on BMAX Mini-PC

On Mon, 12 Aug 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

On 8/10/24 5:19 PM, D wrote:

  On Sat, 10 Aug 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
 

On 8/10/24 5:11 AM, D wrote:

  On Sat, 10 Aug 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
 

On 8/10/24 12:49 AM, rbowman wrote:

On Fri, 9 Aug 2024 23:20:18 -0400, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
 

BMAX (almost identical to BeeLink) boxes are mostly about 6 inches
square an maybe two inches thick.
A large variety of CPUs/configs can be hand. The prices are VERY good.
Typically two 4k HDMI plugs (cable included !). 2xUSB2 + 2xUSB3 is
typical. They have space in the bottom for an 8mm thick SATA laptop
drive/SSD. They run off a wall-wart.

 I've been running Ubuntu 22.04 on a BeeLink for a couple of years and am
very happy with it. It is a little upscale from your BMAX with a Ryzen 7
4700U. It was an experiment that worked out well.

  I have both brands - and they're mostly identical hardware.
 As said, there are a LOT of configs to be had - from very
 low-performance on up. Real i3's and above DO need a cooling
 fan however. The "laptop" chips seem to work OK without fans.
  In any case, if you really don't need a PI and all the
 I/O pins then THESE seem to be THE way to go - compact,
 cheap, good performance. Anything you need for a very
 good price.
  Still have some PIs ... and DO need those I/O pins for
 certain needs. NICE to have such a broad selection of
 boards these days - something perfect for each need.
  As reported, my current experience with Fedora is now GOOD.
 I've had weird problems with Deb WORM and have just abandoned
 that whole line for now. Manjaro and other Arch derivs ARE
 pretty good - but Fedora is just more "general consumer".
 I'm too old now to put up with big fights making an OS
 work. If you want WORK ... well ... there's always SlackWare  :-)
  Oddly, I accidentally ordered TWO BMax ... must have pushed
 the "order again" button but seen no effect. Now I have to
 figure out what to DO with the extra unit. I've got an ISO
 of FreeBSD ... so maybe ........ if so I'll post a little
 summary of that experience.
 

 A NAS and off site backup solution?

  Possibly ... I'll have to get creative  :-)
  I've got a 4-bay external USB-3 unit ... some
 12gb Gold drives and ....
  I trust the BSDs more for 'security' these days.
  OpenBSD is probably the MOST secure, but as a
 result it's harder to work with and the DRIVERS
 are years behind the hardware curve. That may
 or may not be relevant, depending on your app.

 Add to that a sub par filesystem which affects performance as well. But perhaps it might be possible to compile in support for something better?

>
 If I were younger I might give it a shot ... but .....
>
 Unix filesystems ... well, they're "fair" but not
 really "high performance". Note though that if we
 are dealing with external storage/cloud then it
 is THEY which are I/O-bound, so any Unix performance
 issues become irrelevant. 'Security/solidity' replaces
 'performance' as the #1 priority

Oh yes... if you insist on using your BSD for slow, micro service/cloud application, then as you say it makes little difference.

 Hey, I spent many years with SS/SD floppies ...
 anything faster than those seems "speedy" to me  :-)

You're a lucky man! That's a nice perspective to have. ;)

 For Joe User ... stick with EXT4. BtrFS/ZFS have
 some nice features, but that comes with a LOT
 more complexity and thus undiscovered bugs. For
 Unix ... perhaps good old UFS is all you need.

I've used UFS in production with good results, ext4 and btrfs as well. In fact, I do use btrfs on my laptop and only once did I bite myself in the foot, and once snapshots ate up free space, but apart from those two, I've had many happy years with btrfs. I even have used the boot from snapshot functionality once or twice. Most often though, I prefer to do a restore from my backup server if something goes wrong.
Oh, and just to make sure no one gets the wrong impression, I've never worked at giga-scale FAANG companies optimizing for every single ns, but mostly the use cases were simple web/application/database servers.