Posts by tokul

  • Problem: 6TB hard drive totally messed up

    Quote from LybsterKodi

    > you probably supplied insufficient power to the drive.

    That's a distinct possibility. I've never seen so much damage done from that before.

    I had two 1TB WDs connected once. Was sorting files on them, drive started clicking, failed. Required CLI dskchk in windows to get it fixed.

    Technically they were connected to x86 pc and not to RPi, but they were sharing connection on same USB3 header and RPi is known to have limited power output on USB.

    Your story sounded like my two hour long dskchk multipled by six times.

    I won't try connecting HDD enclosures that rely on single USB connection to RPi or x86 USB sockets connected to same header.

  • command "expr" (from coreutils) under LE ?

    write your script without using that calculation.

    You can get current disk space usage in KB or MB. So *1024 part is redundant.

    Assumption that compressed package needs three times more to install is as inaccurate as hardcoding space requirement in a script. Try compressing bmp files and see how much they can expand.

    Nothing stops you from having several size checks and then setting required space accordingly.

  • T400 support

    NVidia Quadro T400 ? Why put LibreElec on it?

    It might be economy version of Quadro card, but it is still from Quadro product line and new Nvidia cards tend to require binary/proprietary drivers from Nvidia.

  • rPi4 won't boot. Probably something really simple.

    Which image is for USB stick boot? First one looks like disk failure or rpi is not giving enough power for argon one addon over USB. Second one is trying to mount device that does not exist in the system.

    some SD card writers come in "USB stick" form. If you could create image in USB stick, you can create image on SD card. Have you tried booting from SD card? Logical way for running LibreELec on RPi would be to install it on SD card and use SSD or NAS for storage.

  • Recommendation for a passively cooled solution

    Quote from dalto

    Sure, the NUCs are faster but as I stated in my initial post, top performance isn't really the goal. Also:

    * NUCs just don't hold up well to 24/7 usage. NUCs were my goto choice for media PCs but I have had two fail in the last couple of years and they are too expensive to be disposable. We also use them at work as SBCs at small remote sites and see high failure rates there too.

    * I am looking for a low power, passively cooled solution.

    there are many ways to interpret "don't hold up well". I was consider suggesting mini-itx based fanless mobo, but did not do that after checking NUC specs. You did sound like NUC was not powerful enough for you.

  • Recommendation for a passively cooled solution

    Quote from dalto

    I ended up getting a passively cooled mini PC based on the Celeron N5105 which is a quad core 10w CPU.

    Intel NUC 11 comes with Core i3-i7

    Celeron N5105 - 4 cores, 2.0 GHz, L2 cache1.5 MB, L3 cache 4 MB, UHD Graphics (24 EUs) 450-800 MHz, 2 × DDR4/LPDDR4X-293, 10 W

    Even I3 1115 got more cache and faster graphics support than that Celeron. i5 or i7 will outdo Celeron N5105 in cores.

    You just got yourself more options in case selection (if you went with mini-itx mobo and custom case), lower wattage and little less performance than NUC11.

    The only 5105 option that I see in local store is essentially non-Intel version of slower NUC at the Gen7 NUC price range.

  • How to change swapfile size on LibreELEC?

    swap.conf is for making persistent configuration change which survives reboot.

    If you continue to use swap.conf, you would have to select swap file location which is accessible at the time when script is executed or change swap.service priorities. I am not the fan of debugging systemd and not the fan of using swap files, if it is not obvious at this point.

  • How to change swapfile size on LibreELEC?

    You describe situation with USB media not mounted when swap file is created.

    Disk IO performance is about 100 times slower than memory performance. You would not want to have any memory read or write operations in file based swap.

    Please note that you are not running out of memory if free column in Linux free command has very small number. Your actual free memory is in last 'available' column. You will be running out of memory only when Linux starts killing running processes.

    Original poster was almost right about the way to activate swap manually. They only missed mkswap command and did not realize that swapon can activate individual swaps.

    1. dd to create file in writable location. Preferably not on SD card or SSD with limited write counters.

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/media/DISK_LABEL/swapfile bs=1M count=256

    2. format that file with mkswap

    mkswap /var/media/DISK_LABEL/swapfile

    3. swapon that file

    swapon /var/media/DISK_LABEL/swapfile

    those are main steps from LibreElec code responsible for stuff in swap.conf. Other steps only ensure that parent directory exists and secure swap file permissions.

  • How to change swapfile size on LibreELEC?

    SWAPFILESIZE value is a number. If you put "other", you would just make swap creation command to error out.

    If you need more memory on your box, get more memory. Don't treat swap as "temporally" memory that you will be using permanently by ignoring performance hit that you get there.

    Instructions that you linked tell you where that swap file is. Technically they are probably for older LibreElec as current swapfile location is configurable. Remember that LibreElec is not regular Linux, you can't use Ubuntu instructions on LibreElec without understanding what they do and you can't put random stuff in its root file system.

    If 256MB swap is improvement over 128MB, remember how much memory your cell phone has and find some dimes in your couch for real memory.