My new Mageia system

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My new Mageia system

Postby artee » Jan 31st, '16, 15:56

For the first time in 7 years, I built a new system - this time truly from scratch (before I'd typically reuse PSU and case plus fans, floppy, dvd drive).

Target OS: Mageia 5 (just because)
Purpose: (KDE) desktop system, web browsing (incl. Youtube etc), mail, light document editing, photo viewing (and sorting etc - Digikam), playing 4k videos from my LX100 camera, running backups from / to my server, watching movies (projector).
This system is built as a replacement system with 4k screen capability.

Hardware:
Motherboard: Asus A88X-PRO FM2+ A88X ATX (only mobo I found with fm2+ socket and DP (1.2) out)
CPU: AMD A10 7800 3.9 GHZ (3.5GHz with auto turbo mode for one core to 3.9MHz)
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury DDR3-1866 16GB Kit (2 kits for 32GB)
Hard drive: Samsung SSD 850 Evo Basic - 250GB
Extra CPU fan: be quiet! SilentWings 2 PWM (120mm)
Case: SILVERSTONE Grandia SST-GD07B, Black (3 120mm fans)
PSU: be quiet! Straight Power 10
Inherited parts: 4TB HDD (WD red, with gpt not mbr), WinTV-FM card (used for the remote eye, there's no more analog TV around where I live), BTF95 fanless heat sink CPU cooler, Logitech 5.1 audio, BD-burner (SATA)

Monitor: Samsung 24 inch UHD / 4k on DP. Projector: Sanyo 1280x720 on VGA.

To explain some of the choices, or perhaps to pre-empt some questions that pop up when viewing that list,...

For 4k at 60Hz one needs DP1.2 or HDMI2.0 - HDMI 1.4a will do 4k at 30Hz. It's not sure if that is really an issue, but I figure, if you have 60Hz refresh and a 23Hz frame rate, there's more margin to make things come out more or less okay than with 30Hz refresh and 23Hz frame rate. Aside that, 30 may be fine for reading the web and watching photos.
BTW viewing photos was the main reason to go for UHD/4k, but even when browsing the web, the comfort of crisp and sharp characters is much more than I expected.
So anyway, I got the only motherboard with DP1.2 for AMD APUs that I could find. Bonus: AMD sent a system to Phoronix (Linux oriented site) to benchmark their (then new) Kaveri APU, and it was the same Asus A88X-PRO. (Hmm, my previous system was also with a motherboard that AMD had shipped to reviewers.)

AMD CPU? Anything will be fast enough for my purposes, so why pay the premium for Intel (not just the CPU but also the mobo and memory will be more expensive, for a machine that will spend its operating lifetime waiting for user input..)?
Also, all motherboards for Intel CPUs with graphics that I found have a limit of 512MB of shared mem for the graphics, the AMD boards allow up to 2GB.
Besides, it always helps to financially support the number 2 or 3 if their products are good enough (and I am still grateful for AMD's x86-64 that killed Intel Merced / Itanium).

2x2x8GB DDR3 RAM: well, there are 4 slots on this board, and for less than 100 euros/dollars for a pair of DIMMs I figured, why not fill all slots? Linux will use it (and it does).

The extra fan: with the fanless heat sink, I wanted there to be something to take the heat off, which may not have been necessary, but ah well, it's very quiet and will boost whenever there's more heat due to high load (dvd ripping and compressing or so).

Building the system was easy (lego like).

Installation of Mageia: most things went fine, except the following.
I managed to get into the BIOS (UEFI, or whatever it's called) to disable legacy mode. But then at the HDD partitioning step (custom) it wouldn't write the partition table. I tried a couple of times, also with automatic mode, to no avail. The SSD was completely new (I rarely install on a new drive, usually partition on a running system and upon clean install just assign the partitions).
So then I booted the dvd into legacy, non-UEFI-mode and made my way past the hard drive partioning, custom mode with the EFI partition as I read on the Mageia UEFI howto page.
After the partition table got written, I rebooted and changed to non-legacy mode, then only used the existing partitions (no table to be written), and all was well.

Getting up and running:
Tainted repo's added, lots of software added (my list of favs like gmplayer, gkrellm and such - found that some of my favs are barely known but hey, if they're still there and work why change..)

Configuration:
Found that cpufreqd is not only not required, but should not be installed; instead for frequency scaling, the correct governor should be loaded (for some reason it sets "performance" with max speed by default, so I put "ondemand" with min speed by default, editing /etc/sysconfig/cpupower to do that.)
Then I had to mess a bit with LIRC as per: https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13978#c2
For the Epson XP860 (great printer, prints dvds/cds directly, has paper feed for scanning) I installed the Epson Linux drivers for the printer and scanner, and all was fine (also using Skanlite instead of the Epson scanner program). Support the companies that support Linux, if you buy a printer, buy Epson instead of Canon (had a Canon for a short time before, terrible)
Oh, and after putting the regular user accounts (with old data from the 4TB hdd - still using account and group nrs in the low 500s) in place, I had to do a lot of font and icon size changes..! This new monitor is just so much sharper, but without proper setting you need to get really really close to read anything.

The not so good things:
Graphics:
I thought the closed source drivers should be on top of things, so I gave those a whirl first. Now, with DP and all in X.org doing stuff automagically, this creates quite a mess when I want to watch a movie and turn off the monitor - everything gets stuffed into the 1280x720 projector screen (which I put on top of the monitor with krandrtray.
Seems the open source radeon driver is less trying to control my setup, but there I usually need to turn off the KDE desktop effects to stop video from stuttering (sometimes). Even turning desktop effects back on will often work...
Oh, and with the closed source driver, desktop effects (cube turning or windows translucency and more) will sometimes work, but then for no reason come down to 2 or just 1 frame per second.
A word of warning: AMD Freesync is supported on my monitor and computer, but it doesn't work (at the moment) for me, ymmv.
Audio:
Then, I found that since a while there is no gapless playback under Linux. This sucks. In the youtube day and age, people don't seem to care about anything but social media and such. I'm sure I enjoyed my flac audio collection with quite a few concept albums without any gaps. Alas, with vlc or gstreamer backends, this doesn't work. Pulseaudio fixed problems that were none (network audio for what?) and brought us here...
Another audio thing: the Asus motherboard has some annoying whistling noise at higher volume with no sound playing (I put the logitech relatively loud, so noticed it). Unplugging the analog cinch helped, so I got an optical SPDIF cable (3m, under 3USD from ebay some chinese seller - note: don't go to ebay.cn, just use ebay.com / .fr / .co.uk / .yourcountrycode and search the "whole world", "cheapest including shipping"), which works surprisingly well (and naturally clean), although Linux / pusleaudio from time to time decides that it wants to output to analog only, instead of "analog in, digital SPDIF out". It also won't allow me to really turn off the HDMI audio...
General:
While we're on the subject: systemd is really different, but after getting it to do the cpu frequency scaling the way I wanted, I'm not so upset about it (seems lots of people still hate it). It's just different.
I found that Mageia 5 doesn't have the updated version of The Sleuth Kit, so it can't rescue files from 64GB SDxC cards. Would be nice if someone backported that...

Conclusion:
All in all, things are working, not perfectly, but hey, nothing is perfect. The system is relatively nice to use, no fan noise audible, hourly incremental backups working fine,

I will probably be talking to myself in this thread, updating it with all the things that I come across that don't work as I wish, and mentioning how I fixed or worked around it.
Whenever I find something clearly broken, I'll try to find the time to make a bug report.

Anyway, thanks to all Mageia / Linux / FLOSS contributors! Keep up the good work!
artee
 
Posts: 37
Joined: Jun 15th, '13, 14:00

Re: My new Mageia system

Postby doktor5000 » Jan 31st, '16, 16:51

artee wrote:Now, with DP and all in X.org doing stuff automagically, this creates quite a mess when I want to watch a movie and turn off the monitor - everything gets stuffed into the 1280x720 projector screen (which I put on top of the monitor with krandrtray.
Seems the open source radeon driver is less trying to control my setup, but there I usually need to turn off the KDE desktop effects to stop video from stuttering (sometimes). Even turning desktop effects back on will often work...
Oh, and with the closed source driver, desktop effects (cube turning or windows translucency and more) will sometimes work, but then for no reason come down to 2 or just 1 frame per second.

You may want to create separate topics for your issues if you want to fix them, apart from this feedback post ;)

artee wrote:Then, I found that since a while there is no gapless playback under Linux. This sucks. In the youtube day and age, people don't seem to care about anything but social media and such. I'm sure I enjoyed my flac audio collection with quite a few concept albums without any gaps. Alas, with vlc or gstreamer backends, this doesn't work. Pulseaudio fixed problems that were none (network audio for what?) and brought us here...

Well, at least gstreamer supports gapless playback in general, and this is not an issue about pulseaudio, but more about the audio players ...

artee wrote:While we're on the subject: systemd is really different, but after getting it to do the cpu frequency scaling the way I wanted, I'm not so upset about it (seems lots of people still hate it). It's just different.

Good to hear that, and that you see it as what it is - just different.

artee wrote:I found that Mageia 5 doesn't have the updated version of The Sleuth Kit, so it can't rescue files from 64GB SDxC cards. Would be nice if someone backported that...

Uhmm, why do you need a newer version of sleuthkit just to read bigger SD cards ? You mean you need 4.2.0 for exFAT support?
You should report that on our bugzilla so one of the packagers can take care of it.
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doktor5000
 
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Re: My new Mageia system

Postby artee » Jan 31st, '16, 19:13

Thanks for your response, indeed I will create separate topics in the relevant forums, as time permits and as itches motivate... :-)

As for audio, I think it started with phonon and pulseaudio that the whole audio architecture was turned upside down.
So all players (Amarok is what I use mostly) just use the backend libraries through gstreamer or vlc (I tried both). But those are not aware of what needs to be played when, so they somehow get the files to play and push it through a decoder then get the wav to be pushed to the right sink. (Ok, simplified, but that's about the gist of how I understand it works.)
So the players can't do anything about it, it's the backend and decoding libs that should make gapless work, but they don't.

As an aside note, general gapless playback is impossible, since for instance mp3 doesn't have true gapless playback possible (the encoder needs to take it into account, and mp3 as a format doesn't have what it takes), flac (naturally, since it's lossless) and ogg audio can and will do it.

Video issues: it would take me too long to explain and the itch is not big enough right now. I'm also not hopeful that it reproduces nicely, and I doubt it's a Mageia issue. I may just have to create a clean user account and try there, but for now, I'll live with my workaround.

TSK: yes, support for ExFAT is what is missing - I'll try to make some time to make a bugzilla report. If not, I guess Mageia 6 will have it.
artee
 
Posts: 37
Joined: Jun 15th, '13, 14:00


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