because zsh I swapped out ~ -> $HOME. In addition to some permission denied that you always get finding over the home dir, I get these weird hits:

find "$HOME" -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script "/path/to/target/dir" {} +
/home/user/.konan/dependencies/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-gcc-8.3.0-glibc-2.19-kernel-4.9-2/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib64/libatomic.so
/home/user/.mozilla/firefox/xxx000xx.someprofile/chrome/dir/file.css

lib atomic is something I’ve heard of vaguely but certainly not anything I use. I couldn’t identify any way this file was doing anything outside the ~/.konan dir.

the CSS files there were a few different ones in a couple different Firefox profiles. it’s the user customization. But I don’t think it should have anything to do with the directory I was asking for.

If I give it a bit more of a hint, telling to look in ~/.config specifically, now I get some (but not all) the links I expect.

find "$HOME/.config" -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script "/path/to/target/dir" {} +
/home/user/.config/dir02
/home/user/.config/dir01/subdir/file
/home/user/.config/dir01/subdir2/file2

And suggesting it searches in the .konan dir where it found lib atomimc, it now doesn’t find anything.

find "$HOME/.konan" -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script "/path/to/target/dir" {} +

Could be all kinds of things getting the way. Different versions of relevant tools, filesystems/setups, permissions…

Ventoy is just soooo fucking useful.

Idk which has worked best. Currently it is running on a debian derivative called “sparky” for no particular reason. As I said, bluethooth magically started working so I’m not changing anything.

I really strongly recommend you prioritize a popular distro as a novice user. When you have problems, it will be a lot harder to get help if you are using something obscure. People who are using more common distros won’t be able to know if your problem could be due to some oddity of your distro. So they will be more reluctant to offer solutions.

Mint is a really good first choice. And you should just try the thing I suggested about booting from USBs and seeing if networking and other basics work properly.

Only proceed to something like sparky if nothing else works.

The good news about having a device from 2018, is there should be no (few) surprises. Other people will have tried things already. It’s a similar benefit as choosing a popular distro.

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You are thinking too hard I think in the wrong direction. Use Mint unless you have a strong feeling/need for something else. In which case, use that. Choice of first distro is not really that important. Pick a popular one and if it’s wrong for you, you’ll figure it out.

What you haven’t mentioned is any research you have done regarding hardware support/compatibility for your specific device. I searched the specs you listed and it came up with some netbooks like CB012DX. I actually have an older, shittier version of this device running a debian derivative. (Mint is also in the debian family FYI.) And I’ve had fun installing various linuxes on even older, shittier chromenetbooks over the years.

Assuming yours is in this ballpark, I have one really important piece of advice for you. Before you think anymore about it, download ISOs of your top 1 or 3 distro choices, flash them to USB and attempt to boot. These super cheap devices cut corners on components. It is not unlikely that you will have some hardware that either doesn’t have open source drivers, or has some sort of theoretical support that will be too esoteric for you to implement at your current skill level. It is quite common on these devices that everything works fine except networking or something like that. So you might be able to exclude some of your choices based on that. Try to find a distro that works reasonably well out of the box.

You should find the various names your device goes by

As you have probably read, booting from a flashed USB is non-destructive of you normal system (unless you choose to format your disk or something of course). Assuming you have no issues booting, try out all the hardware features you have like: trackpad (different kinds of click, drag, zoom etc), ethernet, wireless (2.4 + 5ghz network), bluetooth, speakers, headphones, external input device, external displays, fingerprint scanner, touch screen, all keys and buttons, cameras, mics, sensors, keyboard lights. Any external devices you like to use: mice, keyboards, dongles, should also be included. I suggest making a list and systematically checking each item.

You can use this amazing tool called ventoy to flash one USB boot drive to have multiple distros available. You can even keep a windows ISO on there. It will even let you reserve a portion of the disk for persistent storage. Ventoy substantially improves this whole process so you don’t have to have 10 different USB disks floating around. It is well designed and straight forward to use.

So on my current netbook, I was lucky that networking has been no problem. people with a slightly different model have to use an external wifi dongle (and not all wifi dongles are compatible with linux). I have never gotten anything form the speakers, but they might have arrived broken, apparently it’s pretty easy to blow out the speakers and I didn’t test while ChromeOS was still installed. Using an arch-based distro, the touch screen worked but now in Debian it doesn’t. I don’t really care about that. I really wanted Bluetooth to work and I couldn’t for the longest time til one day it just magically solved itself and I haven’t reinstalled since then because I am not sure I’d be able to re-solve it.

The other piece of advice has to do with storage. Depending what software you run, it can require a bit of space. 64gb could be gone quickly. This will be somewhat controversial (for good reason) but I always end up devoting the full eMMC to the system partition and having a permanently mounted SD card for /home, user storage and maybe even some of the system temp directories. This goes against common advice because SD cards are more prone to failure. So you need to have a good backup plan or just accept the risk. But if you run out of storage space on your system drive you can get yourself into the kind of mess that requires reinstalling.

In terms of both storage and RAM/CPU use, you will want to be extremely judicious of you application use. Firefox is a beast on any operating system.If you like to have a bunch of hungry tabs going on, you can’t really optimize the OS.

In another subthread I came up with the below, is this what you mean? I haven’t tried it yet.

• /home/user/folderApple is always empty
• /home/user/folderApple-original mounts ontop of /home/user/folderApple at boot
• then /mnt/drive/folderBanana also mounts ontop of /home/user/folderApple when/if it becomes available (later in the order)

Ideally I’d like to avoid a script because my experience is they aren’t very durable. I make mistakes and they are difficult to troubleshoot. So I am trying to just use the tools that are already available in the system.

But maybe there is something in the idea of using a second mount, like if

• /home/user/folderApple is always empty
• /home/user/folderApple-original mounts ontop of /home/user/folderApple at boot
• then /mnt/drive/folderBanana also mounts ontop of /home/user/folderApple when/if it becomes available (later in the order)

The results are the same no matter which order I do the mounts in.

don’t delete your post, people wrote things here.

You can tell hugo to build from an arbitrary directory of markdown in the config file. Then it’ll just do it’s best. I have done this experimentally on completely un-optimized obsidian vaults for just my own local use. IIRC there are some mandatory frontmatter elements that hugo requires (date, draft status, and/or title? consult the docs) which will prevent a file from appearing at all if they are missing. Depending how vigilant you are with that kind of thing you can get a more or less janky site straight away.

There are also some plugins, bash scripts etc around that will assist in this. In tidying up the files, selecting which ones to publish, mirroring to another directory etc. I have had mixed success personally, but my vaults are sprawling, badly organized and the frontmatter is often a mess which is all on me. Someone who is less/differently negligent would have different luck. I can provide some links to relevant projects if anyone is interested.

For nonidentical devices you create additional packages prefixed with specific device name. You don’t need to link all packages at once with stow, pass a name of a package to link it alone.uuu

Sooo… I find some way to share the dotfiles directory across devices (rsync, syncthing, git, nextcloud, DAV) then make specific subdirs like this?:

~
  - dotfiles
      - bash-desktop
         dot-bashrc
         dot-bash_profile
      - bash-laptop
         dot-bashrc
         dot-profile
         dot-bash_profile

But what is the software doing for me? I’m manually moving all these files and putting them together in the specific way requested. Setting the whole thing up is most of the work. Anyone who can write a script to create the structure can just as easily write it to make symlinks. I’m sure I’m missing something here.

yadm is the one I liked the best and tried it a few times. fact is that I am unlikely to keep a repo like this even part way up to date. New files are created all the time and not added, old ones don’t get updated or removed. There’s not even a good way to notice in any file manager what is included and what’s not as far as I know. yadm doesn’t work with tools like eza which can display the git status of files in repos. (and it probably wouldn’t be feasible.)

Plus I have some specific config collections already in change tracking and it makes more sense to keep it that way. Having so many unrelated files together in one project is too chaotic and distracting.

It’s not realistic for me to manage merges, modules, cherry picking, branches all that for so many files that change constantly without direct intervention. Quickly enough git will tie itself into some knot and I won’t be able to pick it apart.

I agree. Chromebooks are a viable choice for those who want a web terminal. I used one for about a year. Got the job done.

thanks for all the details! I’ve fairly recently done an FS migration that entailed moving all data, reformatting, and moving it all back. Mega pain in the ass. I know more now than I did at the start of that project, so wouldn’t be as bad but not getting into something like that lightly.

Though it might be the excuse I need to buy another 12 tb hdd…

TBD

I’ve been struggling with syncthing for a few weeks… It runs super hot on every device. Need to figure out how to chill it out a bit.

Other than that I’ll look at both NFS and WebDAV some more. Then will come back to this page to re read the more intricate suggestions.

thanks I appreciate it. I’ve been around the block enough times to expect maximalist advice in places like this. people who are motivated to be hanging around in a forum just waiting for someone to ask a question about hard drives are coming from a certain perspective. Honestly, it’s not my perspective. But the information is helpful in totality even though I’m unlikely to end up doing what any one person suggests.

RAID is something I’ve seen mentioned over and over again. Every year or two I go reading about them more intentionally and never get the impression it’s for me. Too elaborate to solve problems I don’t have.

Thanks this comment is v helpful. A persuasive argument for NFS and against sshfs!

Forget NFS, SSHFS and syncthing as those are to complex and overkill at the moment. SMB is dead simple in a lot of ways and is hard to mess up.

OTOH, SSHFS and syncthing are already humming along and I’m framiliar with them. Is SMB so easy or having other benefits that would make it better even though I have to start from scratch? It looks like it (and/or NFS) can be administered from cockpit web interface which is cool.

Now that I look around I think I actually have a bit of RAM I could put in the PC. MacMini’s original RAM which is DDR3L; but I read you can put it in a device that wants DDR3. So I will do that next time it’s powered off.

Thanks for letting me know I could use an expansion card. I was wondering about that but the service manual didn’t mention it at all and I had a hard time finding information online.

Is this the sort of thing I am looking for: SATA Card 4 Port with 4 SATA Cables, 6 Gbps SATA 3.0 Controller PCI Express Expression Card with Low Profile Bracket Support 4 SATA 3.0 Devices ($23 USD) I don’t find anything cheaper than that. But there are various higher price points. Assuming none of those would be worthwhile on a crummy old computer like I have. Is there any specific RAID support I should look for?

I have only the most cursory knowledge of RAID but can tell it becomes important at some point.

But am I correct in my understanding that putting storage device in RAID decreases the total capacity? For example if I have 2x6TB in RAID, I have 6 TB of storage right?

Honestly, more than half my data is stuff I don’t care too much about keeping. If I lose all the TV shows I don’t cry over it. Only some of it is stuff I would care enough to buy extra hardware to back up. Those tend to be the smaller files (like documents) whereas the items taking up a lot of space (media files) are more disposable. For these ones “good enough” is “good enough”.

I really appreciate your time already and anything further. But I am still wondering, to what extent is all this helping me solve my original question which is that I want to be able to edit remote files on Desktop as easily as if they were local on Laptop? Assuming i got it all configured correctly, is GIMP going to be just as happy with a giant file lots of layers, undos, etc, on the Desktop as it would be with the same file on Laptop?

Do you mean take the board out of this case and put it in another, bigger one?

I actually do have a larger, older tower that I fished out of the trash. Came with a 56k modem! But I don’t know if they would fit together. I also don’t notice anywhere particularly suitable to holding a bunch of storage; I guess I would have to buy (or make?) some pieces.

Here is the board configuration for the Small Form Factor:

I did try using #9 and #10 for storage and I seem to recall it kind of worked but didn’t totally work but not sure of the details. But hey, at least I can use a CD drive and a floppy drive at the same time!

Thanks! I have gone to look at TrueNAS or FreeNAS a few times over the years. I am dissuaded because hardware-wise they seem expensive. Then on the other hand, they are limited in what they can do.

Comprehension check. Is the below accurate?

1. TrueNAS is an OS, it would replace Debian.
2. Main purpose of TrueNAS is to maintain the filesystem
3. There are some packages available for TrueNAS, like someone mentioned Syncthing supports it
4. But basically if I run TrueNAS, I will likely need a second computer to run services

Also for comprehension check:

• The reason many people are recommending NAS (or WebDAV, NFS, VPN etc) is because with better storage and network infrastructure I would no longer be interested in this caching idea.
• Better would be to have solid enough file sharing within the LAN that accessing files located on Desktop from Laptop would work.
• The above would be completely plausible

How’m I doing?