Re: [LUG] Getting a USB AC68 dongle to work in Mint 19.3

[comrade meowski <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx>]

On 03/04/2020 20:34, Michael Everitt wrote:

> ^ This is true. I'm reaching the stage where I can recognise families of
> build failures when built with different architectures, bit-endianness and
> C libraries. So this is pretty advanced stuff. I know people who deal with
> the C<->assembly side of things, and those who have fingers in bootloaders
> too. Although with my ARM hardware I do need an appreciation of how
> bootloaders work at least...

My first RPi4 turned up today and the first thing I do normally is plug 
a new box in and let it netboot ipxe so I can get started without the 
hassle of physical install media (soooo 20th century). Then I remembered 
it was ARM and gave up and wrote Arch to a SD card.

Although apparently RPi4s do have netboot at last, so that's next on my 
list. Bootloaders are my chief outstanding headache at the moment - the 
grub team footdragging are the last barrier to booting fully natively 
encrypted ZFS disk setups on x64 at the moment and have been for years. 
Currently if clients want fully encrypted at rest ZFS boxes I have to 
drop another point of presence on their network (like a RPi) to either 
trail a USB > Serial cable or unlock the boot volume over SSH during 
early init. Painful if the box unexpectedly needs a reboot - or already 
has rebooted - and they don't have someone technical on hand to deal 
with it.

Fixing bootloaders remains way, way above my paygrade though.

> But each to his own, and I know the list here are mostly more focussed on
> user-experience than 'under-the-hood' although some transcend through the
> tiers from time-to-time. It's this that makes Linux flexible and versatile
> to a great extent, and whilst I'm unsure about the future, we definitely
> have options available at the present.
>
> I need to get back to ZFS - it would help me a great deal with the
> ever-evolving package repository that is "the Gentoo tree" where all build
> instructions or "ebuilds" live. When something is constantly moving, it
> does make it slightly harder to keep up and to overhaul older/lagging
> systems :( oh well ...

When I was still using Gentoo I think I just used portage overlays for 
this, from err Zuguina I think? Ring a bell? Meh, you're a Gentoo user, 
pretty sure you're just supposed to make everything yourself out of raw 
machine code instructions aren't you?

*Zugaina apparently - https://gpo.zugaina.org/sys-fs/zfs


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