• 4 posts
  • 321 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • Ripping out all of these GRUB features would basically mandate that most Ubuntu 26.10+ installations are done with the /boot partition being done on a raw EXT4 partition. Thus no more encrypted boot partition and having to rely on an EXT4 boot partition even if you are a diehard Btrfs / XFS / OpenZFS fan. Or you could opt for the non-signed GRUB bootloader that would be more full-featured albeit lacking Secure Boot and security compliance.

    Reducing the signed GRUB builds to the minimum support necessary they feel would “[substantially] improve security”. Users wanting those features back could use the non-signed GRUB builds albeit losing out on UEFI Secure Boot and security support.

    How the Hell is any of that supposed to “improve” security? Something is fishy here.

  • Admittedly I haven’t used Omada even though my gear supported it (before I flashed OpenWRT on it), but I don’t think it bears any resemblance to Ansible except in the most basic sense of being able to accomplish administrative tasks somehow.

    What I was expecting was something that would provide a web dashboard showing all of my OpenWRT (and ideally, misc. other devices) at once, maybe with a nice diagram of the network topology and stuff like that.

  • EDIT: I talked with a guy and totally forgot an important point, does reflashing the hardware prevent me from using features with the vendors i listed? I know companies can suck

    If they’re software features and OpenWRT doesn’t implement them, yes. That’s not really the fault of the hardware manufacturer, though; that’s just a tradeoff you’ve chosen to make.

    For example, I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to use Ubiquiti’s UniFi or TP-Link’s Omada software-defined networking to manage your OpenWRT-flashed device, but that’s just because OpenWRT hasn’t implemented it, not because installing it trips some kind of DRM fuse or whatever.

    (I think OpenWISP might be the OpenWRT-compatible Free Software equivalent for that sort of thing, but I have yet to look into it myself so I’m not sure.)


    Otherwise, I haven’t personally heard of any vendors intentionally sabotaging their hardware such that it disables itself when flashed with OpenWRT, but that’s not the same as an affirmative statement that it can’t ever happen.

  • Oh man, I’m jealous. I only had two 19" monitors, and they didn’t match. I’ve still got them stored in the basement for eventual use in a retro game cabinet or something, but I’m kicking myself for not swapping them out for Trinitrons when everybody was throwing them out.

  • So unless you’re going for an extremely high resolution on a really cheap monitor over a long distance

    Speaking of “extremely high resolution on a really cheap monitor,” it took a solid decade and a half before I was able to buy a digital flat-panel monitor capable of resolution comparable to the analog CRT I was using in 2002. VGA was no joke!

    (The only problem with QXGA on a 19" CRT, aside from the weight and power draw, was that in a world before decent high-DPI fractional scaling the text was too tiny to read easily. Other than that, it worked fine.)