Do normal people who don’t do this stuff for a living use Linux now, outside handheld gaming devices?

I run into folks using linux fairly often in tech hobbies. Ham operators, DIY solar folk, people dorking around with a RasPi, etc. And some Normals who want a lighter experience than Win.

Last dedicated windows box I ran at home was Windows NT 4, IIRC. Last time I had to use it at work was Win7 (?) before I retired. I do have a Win7 virtual somewhere around here I spin up every couple years to run something obscure I can’t get to run in WINE.

Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time

Yes, I’d say so. Lots of tech geeks were playing with it but no Normals. Getting audio running was not always pleasant…

10W? What kind of roof? Residential? RV?

When I was in the army the S1 desk jockeys were using dedicated word processors with 8" floppies. Get off my lawn! :-)

Wireguard self hosting

I parsed this as Wireguard self-loathing and thought “that’s a little harsh”. :-)

warning: some non-linux included below

• minix
• slackware
• early Debian
• FreeBSD (ftp installs instead of 20 floppies! OMG!)
• Debian
• Crunchbang <-- loved that original project
• Solaris (friend gave me a Sparc 5)
• DSL, Puppy linux (had a tiny netbook)
• **Debian on workstations and servers since ~2014 **
• various debian-based distros on RPI

I do spin up other distros in a VM from time to time to see what’s what. Most recently NixOS since people won’t STFU about it. :-)

Yeah, they look like horses and act like cats. My grey was the finest doggo I ever had.

the stove over to induction next. I hate it when the batteries fill back up by 10am and I waste solar meanwhile I am still buying propane for the appliances.

It’s possible. For the 11 months I’ve been cooking from excess solar power (December is a little short). I still carry propane for heating and a few things that seem to work better over flame.

In the past I’ve aliased rm to a wrapper that showed PWD and the files to be affected, slept a couple seconds in case I wanted to abort, then shredded smaller files, rm’ed big files, or placed in a Trash dir for certain kinds of files (.conf, .cfg, etc).

I might try to find or rewrite it.

I have made countless mistakes since the 90s, mostly involving rm. The most recent one was yesterday when I was trying to rm files in a directory with lots of other unrelated files.

I don’t remember the exact failure, but I was shooting for something like rm *lng and typo’ed rm *;ng (those chars are next to each other on the kb). This happily rm’ed * (d’oh!) then errored on the nonexistance ng. :-(

Agreed. I haven’t read the article yet, but my first thought was “how am I going to turn that off”

Can’t find it now, but someone once made a vi [gVim?} version with a Clippy-style helper: “I see you’ve pressed ESC. Would you like to…”

any idea why distrowatch periodically goes down for days before returning.

My guess is it’s run as a hobby by A Guy “on his own time and his own dime”.

I mainly use it to find out if some distros have updates to their ISOs but I find it very annoying that quite frequently it’s down completely.

You might follow the RSS feed. Your feedreader would catch new posts whenever they are available.

the site is still up, at least.

In the early 90s I was running a BBS on DesqView over DOS and was annoyed by the limitations. My older hardware didn’t have grunt or RAM (SIPP at $50/MB) to run OS/2 like the big dogs. I also had nearly no money (grad student).

I started experimenting with MINIX, and from there to linux. IIRC I started with Slackware, flirted with Red Hat, then found Debian and it was true lurve. Since that time I’ve generally run servers on Debian stable and workstations on Debian testing.

Isc 0.61A

We can ballpark maximal/theoretical harvest by multiplying the bank voltage (Vbatt) by the panel’s short circuit current (Isc).

• Vbatt 10.0v - ~0% SoC = ≤6.1w (Isc 0.61A x Vbatt 10.0v)
• Vbatt 13.0v - ~50% SoC = ≤7.93w
• Vbatt 14.0v - 100% SoC = ≤8.54w

Real world conditions and esoteric concepts like I/V curve fill factor will conspire to depress observed current (A) and therefore observed harvest (W). The quick math to above is just to illustrate how the bank voltage tail wags the PWM dog.

Keep us in the loop about how the project turns out. :-)

Do you have stats on how many watt hours you collect from the 100w panel in the Dec/Jan (assuming you’re in the northern hemisphere),

You can model average insolation (and use that to extrapolate average harvest) by month using tools like PVwatts. Here’s a walkthrough.

Using Bowling Green, KY as an example since it’s on the 37th. 100w of flatmounted panel on an MPPT solar charge controller would average:

Solar wattage	100
Month	Daily Wh Avg
Jan	168
Feb	249
Mar	331
Apr	426
May	513
Jun	598
Jul	555
Aug	506
Sep	396
Oct	305
Nov	201
Dec	156
Average	367

Derate those yields by ~18% if using PWM. <– rule of thumb, not gospel

if we are on the west coast instead, here’s Santa Cruz, California:

Solar wattage	100
Month	Daily Wh Avg
Jan	206
Feb	286
Mar	386
Apr	519
May	582
Jun	642
Jul	605
Aug	542
Sep	447
Oct	349
Nov	245
Dec	183
Average	416

and how those stats vary on overcast days vs sunny?

The figures above are daily averages, including normal weather patterns and are how we size our systems. But for the sake of curiosity/understanding, my observations have been that if my clear-day harvest is X then overcast is 0.6X, bright overcast is 0.7X and dark/rainy is 0.05-0.10X. Cloud-edge effect and other reflective phenomena can result in harvest >1X.

While it does freeze here (occasionally down to 0° F) the battery will be inside the chicken coop where the temp has always remained above freezing.

A battery warming solution could be implemented for $20 (warming pads, 12v temp controller).

Nominal 12v panel + nominal 12v battery is good, and the Wanderer will charge LiFePO4 with a canned profile IIRC.

Here’s the next hurdle: I’d expect a 10w panel on PWM to max at ~7w under excellent conditions; we could estimate this more accurately better if we knew the panel specs. And the controller will require a certain amount of power to run its own innards. The Wanderer 10A specs say Self-consumption <10mA but this may be with the panel[s] disconnected, or when the panels are connected but there is no PV input. Or it may really be <10mA in all cases; not much electronics inside a PWM compared to MPPT. If you do it please report back with what you find.

These kinds of challenges are common in very small (experimental, learning) solar setups; when the numbers get larger this kind of challenge largely gets lost in the noise of bigger numbers.

What would happen if it was connected to a battery pack containing one 3.6V 18650 battery such as this?

There are many reasons why this would not work. The first one is 3.6v is not enough voltage to boot the solar charge controller in the first place.

Perhaps you could tell us what you are trying to accomplish.

Renology Wanderer

There is no L in Renogy.

Note: I do not own any Renogy gear but have had hands on many of their components (including a Wanderer) and found all to work as designed.

Am I just old or is 4GB actually loads or RAM?

First stick I bought was 1MB of SIPP, used, for $50.

“When I was a boy we had to load HIMEM and EMM386 uphill in the snow”