My condolences. 

Sun Nov 09 2025 01:23:28 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: OpenMandriva is Teh R0x0r

 I selected the Wayland variant --

"Devuan 6.0 “Excalibur” Released — Debian 13 without systemd"

As i was ranting above, so far, no upgrade i have done has worked ( on stock Debian ).  Its all been reloads.  Now, i don't pretend to be upgrading 100s of them and its been just a couple of attempts, but its not a good sign.

Sun Nov 09 2025 23:59:39 UTC from darknetuser

2025-11-09 15:35 from Nurb432
"Devuan 6.0 “Excalibur” Released — Debian 13 without
systemd"

 

 

I was expecting this one. I don't think I am going to upgrade my production systems just yet, though XD.

It was Bookworm to Trixie.  Yes, its always done fine in the past. But not this time. Any attempt. 

Saving home would have been fine for the laptop it ate. But i had nothign there any way of valiue, so a reload fixed it.

The server, home was the least of my concerns it was drivers, CUDA, dev tools, bla bla.  I gave up and redid it with bookworm. Now its fine, which is the version it will most likely stay on the rest of its life.  Goig from buster to bookworm was also a bit of a pain. Some of the components were not there yet, even tho it was in release mode, not testing. But they were in sid ( trixie ) so i did that and left it be until release ( something like 2 years ).   But when trixie finally came out, some were removed, and other things broke, like the laptop.  ***ers.  Sure a reload would have made it 'work', but not for me, i need that NVIDIA crap working or its a boat anchor and might as well toss it in the river.

Mon Nov 10 2025 18:22:19 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

As i was ranting above, so far, no upgrade i have done has
worked ( on stock Debian ).  Its all been reloads.  Now, i

Debian to Devuan, or Debian to newer Debian? I upgrade them all the time and it works pretty seamlessly.

To go to a different distribution though, I do find it's more reliable to just boot from the installer, mount root, delete everything except /home (and maybe /opt and /usr/local if you have anything there) and then proceed with the installation. I just did that over the weekend, in fact.

Any of you use BorgBackup?

Been using Rsync forever, but thinking of looking at alternatives for my off-site storage, for storage/network compression and dedup..  and that popped up. Seems to have been around a good decade. 

I know rsync can compress traffic, but be nice to safe some space on the drive too. 

So, one of the lead developers of the Amiga Vampire project by Apollo Computers is this German guy named Gunner. 

He treats me like I'm a technology idiot. Super arrogant. 

I keep trying to explain to him I ran a Citadel Linux BBS on Proxmox (I just got one of my backup development servers back online today, it is working flawlessly, I could bring it back tomorrow)... 

And he doesn't seem to get it that this means I'm at least not a complete mouth-breather at technology. 

I came into his world the same way I came in here, thrashing and breaking things and not quite sure of anything - but you guys, like Citadelphians always have been - seemed to go, "Wow, look at this Tasmanian devil of blundering moronic insanity, let's see if we can help him..." 

Which is what I love about Citadel. It feels like a community that always goes "Well, that is anarchy, but I bet we can build order from it." 

And by the end - I was... I mean, I was dormant at being decent with Debian when I started - I just hadn't used it for a few years - but I was even BETTER at Debian by the time I stopped, and probably way better than a lot of people who do *nix things for a living. I mean, I'm sure of that last part. I've seen some of the people who get paid to be *nix Admins. 

But it does bug me a bit. The guy is playing with AmigaOS and 68k architecture that is 40 years old and treating me like I'm the idiot because I'm not hyper-present on those platforms. 

But... it wouldn't be a Commodore environment without that kind of arrogance, I suppose. And I don't post these opinions in more.. accessible forums - like Facebook or Twitter or Discord - because I'm actively trying to diffuse a conflict. 

Bingo.

Tho.. i cant say much as us Atarians were not much better.   Not as bad, but still...

Sat Nov 22 2025 01:40:26 UTC from ParanoidDelusions

But... it wouldn't be a Commodore environment without that kind of arrogance, 

 

Atari guys can be pretty bad, but yeah - nowhere near the level of Commodore. I think every Autistic kid in the 80s ended up with a C-64 and wanted an Amiga. 

I was in the minority here. This was commodore country. 

But, we still had better hardware .  lol

Joking aside, i ended up with an Amiga 500 once.  "really, this is it? no wonder we are better".   Now, to give them credit, a C128, could run cp/m native just fine, and not be a behemoth on your desk like a kaypro.. And i will give them credit for helping build the market, they did sell a LOT of 64s... and got a lot of people involved who had no clue before.

Tue Nov 25 2025 03:19:04 UTC from ParanoidDelusions

Atari guys can be pretty bad, but yeah - nowhere near the level of Commodore. I think every Autistic kid in the 80s ended up with a C-64 and wanted an Amiga. 

 

Actually, I had a Commodore 64 but wanted an Apple.

Later on I got an Amiga, which totally blew away the Atari ST, no question about it.

My Computer Is Better Than Yours (tm)

So, you are one of *them*. Ewwwww!. Lol.

Now, to be fair ( on both sides ) you have to compare apples to oranges. They both were a 'line' not a single entity, and unless you compared to similar generations, its like comparing a Model T to a 87 Iroc-Z..  "they are both cars.. "

Still would have loved to get my hands on a ATW...  Not sure how many of those actually hit the streets, but on paper they were scary amazing, even if they did look a like like a PS/2. lol.  Oh, and a STBook, which i dont think did see daylight, due to the damned Tramiel brothers being idiots and F-ing things up about that time frame just before the collapse...  

Wed Nov 26 2025 20:23:34 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

 

Later on I got an Amiga, which totally blew away the Atari ST, no question about it.

 

Bleh! "have to compare apples to apples" and you 'cant compare apples to oranges'

Been one of them days of fat fingers, cut out a bunch of text i wrote just as i hit go.   So, we going to get ability to edit posts with the new UI? :)

Wed Nov 26 2025 22:16:03 UTC from Nurb432

So, you are one of *them*. Ewwwww!. Lol.

 

Now, to be fair ( on both sides ) you have to compare apples to oranges. They both were a 'line' not a single entity, and unless you compared to similar generations, its like comparing a Model T to a 87 Iroc-Z..  "they are both cars.. "

Still would have loved to get my hands on a ATW...  Not sure how many of those actually hit the streets, but on paper they were scary amazing, even if they did look a like like a PS/2. lol.  Oh, and a STBook, which i dont think did see daylight, due to the damned Tramiel brothers being idiots and F-ing things up about that time frame just before the collapse...  

Wed Nov 26 2025 20:23:34 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

 

Later on I got an Amiga, which totally blew away the Atari ST, no question about it.

 

My Amiga friends still give me shit because I have a Mega 2 ST, and I have an FPGA MiST just because it is one of the BEST FPGA Atari STs (it has MIDI ports native). 

And when the ST got a blitter - it sure helped. 

But the Amiga was hands down a better, more advanced computer on almost EVERY metric. 

The ST core clock speed was slightly faster - and despite the custom graphic and sound chips on the Amiga - gave it an advantage on certain games. A rare selection. 

The Amiga *is* an ST - but Atari - Tramiel - blew it and the team left for Commodore - and what Atari cobbled to was what they had left when the design team left. 

So, the A1000 came out first, and Atari responded with the 520ST - which... neither was very good. The A500 and A2000 left the 1040ST behind - and at every next step, the Mega, Mega 2, Mega STE, whatever came next, up to the Jaguar - the Atari was just catching up. 

I have a real soft spot for Atari among Commodore kids, everything from the 2600, to the 5200, the A800, the 800xl, XEGS - the ST line - I have them all. 

But the Amiga - the V4 stand alone FPGA - feels like a *modern* computer to this day. I'm listening to WinAmp streaming internet radio stations on my V4 right now while I'm posting this. No Atari can do this... nothing modern, nothing retro. 

But the V4 is still a "real" Amiga - in that it is backwards compatible almost 100% - and the OS it runs is still basically the AmigaOS from the era of the A3000/4000/1200 AGA Amiga computers. Atari ST was dead by that time.


I was thinking earlier - everything that Windows *and* Linux is today - AmigaOS was doing in 1985. A full CLI based OS with a graphic OS above it. If you know Linux - you know Amiga OS. 

Sorry Nurb - the Atari ST is more like an 8 bit than a 16 bit machine. Like a C-64 with GEOS. 

But.. MidiMaze set me up to be a Quake III Arena *monster*. The ST did have multiplayer first person shooters before ANYONE else. 

And the Atari 800 vs. the C=64 is a closer fight, I guess. They both have their strong suits. 

But the C=64 was affordable and you could buy them and their software all day long at Toys R Us. 

And THAT was the killer feature. It doesn't matter what advantages the Atari 800 had. By the time Atari released the 800XL and the XEGS and you could buy them at KayBee stores - it was too late. 

I also get why wanting a IIe/II+ (or even an XT/8086 with CGA/EGA) back then was the "dream". 

But the Commodore 64 beat the snot out of those too. 

And my FIRST Commodore was a 128 - and I actually ran my FIRST Citadel BBS in CP/M mode on a C-128... one of the local Citadelphia coders made me a version that would run on my C-128 - and it "worked"... 

But it constantly got BDOS errors on the 1571 disk drives required to run CP/M. 

So I eventually got a MIC-504 with an ADDS viewpoint terminal running legitimate CP/M - because... for REAL CP/M - you needed a REAL CP/M machine. 

Otherwise, mostly my C-128 was used as a fancy C-64 that let me run 80 column terminal programs for dial up BBSes instead of 40 col C-64 terminal programs. Which was a nice benefit - but not enough to justify having a C-128 over a C-64, in truth. 

Once I got an Amiga 2000 - the C-128 quickly became a paperweight. 

Did you guys have GEMCO? It got bought out by Target. It is where I got my first C-128. I can tell you the story about that. I was a strung out 15 year old who had overdosed on speed and blow and my dad had died, my mom got a job, and she took me to GEMCO and bought me a C-128 and a 1571 disk drive - to... try and save me, I suppose, with Ultima 3... 

And I think it kinda did. I got a free 1601 300bps modem with it - with QuantumLink - which got me into telecomputing and dialing up and into Citadel eventually. And I was so overwhelmed - with... creating a "data" disk for Ultima 3 so I could play the game. There was no INTERNET to guide you through - no walkthroughs. There were Compute! magazine and Computer Shopper and the dial up BBS lists in the back and I had to figure out the first dozen steps myself with NO help as a 15 year old recently clean drug addict. I think at each step I kind of went, "I'm not the super cool druggie kid I thought I was - I'm a really smart nerd." 

It was a LITTLE too late, in some ways, but it was just in time, in other ways. If I had a good dad, and guidance, and funds, a few years earlier - I'd be FAR ahead of where I am today. 

I always say, I may have said here before - I was a little too geeky for the cool kids, and a little too cool for the geeky kids. So I fell into this weird in-between - but the nerds took me in once I flew too close to the sun and I ended up leveraging that late 80s computing experience into a pretty decent career.