Box86 - Linux Userspace x86 Emulator

[Swordfish II]

They gave you life. They gave you meals for free.... and you do not reciprocate? When I build my desktop I build two. One with I7 for me, one with I5 and bigger screen for my mom. With life long support. Both still work (although mine has no SSD, but I don't mind because I do not use it like a laptop to consult something, then shutting it down.
An SD card has less life than a harddisk, so make sure you have a backup solution too. And a standby spare SD card.

My dad plays solitare and mine sweeper and browses the web (turbotax is the deal breaker). My mom use a chromebook to video chat. Oh yeah, I bought their current computers also. There is no point in a high powered computer. As far as support....You must be daft. Of course I do. I even made a dual audio out from their tv, cloned off the hdmi, one to bluetooth headphones for my mom and one to speakers for my dad. Oh, I bought their 70in TV too. But thanks for being Sanctimonious.

Additionally, you clearly have little/no experience with pis or you would know:

- If shutdown cleanly or left on the sd cards last a long time. I have one going on 3 years. You can map a shutdown script to a power button.
- You can boot from an external usb drive as well.

This is about adequate hardware for the use case. Which a pi with a good wine/box86 config is perfect and not completely overkill.

So yeah thanks for throwing in your poor judgement on a situation you don't know.

 

[levi]

The SD card in my linux laptop will hit 4 years old this december, and it's still running fine, even coping with weekly or thereabouts os updates.

By comparison I have computers with 20 year old hard discs in the which are still (touch wood) readable, including one of those IBM deathstars.

 

[Swordfish II]

The SD card in my linux laptop will hit 4 years old this december, and it's still running fine, even coping with weekly or thereabouts os updates.

What I noticed, interestingly enough because of the Pandora, is that a swap partition or a swap file definitely increased the corruption/failure of SD cards which makes sense given the ram on it and the computing requirements of today. I just didn't think about it until it happened to me.

Also interesting that I was scolded for a computer running off an sd....when the Pandora and the Pyra basically do/will for most programs.

 

[Askarus]

An always-on swap partition is the only thing that might break an SD-card.
Did you ever check how many write cycles modern SD-cards (5 - 10 years old) can handle?
Did you ever see a Pandora NAND fail because of too many write operations?

I did not.
I was a Pandora power user and used it for nearly anything.
I had only one broken SD-card so far.
Don't fear the SD-cards. They are save to use unless you completely while and fill them multiple times per day.
If you do so, then they might wear out in 2-3 years or so.

All the whining about "I won't use my emmc so it won't wear out" is useless fear.
These things are meant to be used.
Even if you use your Para every day, booting and most other operations are read operations. And those won't harm flash memory.

 

[FBnil]

But thanks for

You're welcome! You posted something, and I gave a comment, that's what's a forum is for!

for being Sanctimonious.

sanctimonious
ADJECTIVE derogatory
oh wait, nevermind.

you clearly have little/no experience with pis

L' apostrophe is important...
Got a rPI2. And for the former, I know they help with bee and jellyfish stings.

Test this one out for your dad (does not work correctly everywhere, but if it works, it gives a new dimension to MINE-MINE-sweeper): https://armorgames.com/play/18125/minefield-online

So yeah thanks for throwing in your poor judgement on a situation you don't know.

... and you did not address my concern about making backups, at all (tangents).

Post automatically merged: Aug 18, 2020

What I noticed, interestingly enough because of the Pandora, is that a swap partition or a swap file definitely increased the corruption/failure of SD cards which makes sense given the ram on it and the computing requirements of today. I just didn't think about it until it happened to me.

Ext2 did the same, Two consecutive cards I had lasted not even one full year (near daily usage). Switched to ext3, and the card now lasts longer.

 

[Letalis Sonus]

Did you ever check how many write cycles modern SD-cards (5 - 10 years old) can handle?

The FTL of SD cards is very primitive and may contain filesystem-specific optimizations. They are not even getting close to the sophisticated wear leveling implemented by proper SSD controllers or NAND-specific filesystems like UBIFS, using an ext-based filesystem or a swap partition can therefore greatly reduce the lifespan of a card due to broken wear leveling.

OS SD cards breaking down after just a few years of usage is actually a fairly common issue observed with Raspberry Pis, due to their high popularity.

 

[levi]

I've killed a handful of cards by using fdisk on them like they were hard discs. Since I switched to observing the first partiton start point and reusing that, I've not killed any yet.

 

[Swordfish II]

An always-on swap partition is the only thing that might break an SD-card.
Did you ever check how many write cycles modern SD-cards (5 - 10 years old) can handle?
Did you ever see a Pandora NAND fail because of too many write operations?

I did not.
I was a Pandora power user and used it for nearly anything.
I had only one broken SD-card so far.
Don't fear the SD-cards. They are save to use unless you completely while and fill them multiple times per day.
If you do so, then they might wear out in 2-3 years or so.

All the whining about "I won't use my emmc so it won't wear out" is useless fear.
These things are meant to be used.
Even if you use your Para every day, booting and most other operations are read operations. And those won't harm flash memory.

Agreed. My comment about the Pandora running off an sd card was based on programs being on the sd and read/writes to and from the sd.

Post automatically merged: Aug 19, 2020

You're welcome! You posted something, and I gave a comment, that's what's a forum is for!

sanctimonious
ADJECTIVE derogatory
oh wait, nevermind.

L' apostrophe is important...
Got a rPI2. And for the former, I know they help with bee and jellyfish stings.

Test this one out for your dad (does not work correctly everywhere, but if it works, it gives a new dimension to MINE-MINE-sweeper): https://armorgames.com/play/18125/minefield-online


... and you did not address my concern about making backups, at all (tangents).

Post automatically merged: Aug 18, 2020

Ext2 did the same, Two consecutive cards I had lasted not even one full year (near daily usage). Switched to ext3, and the card now lasts longer.

So "cheap-ass" isn't being derogatory and your post not intended to shame? Hmm

I addressed your concerns quite clearly, but I'll reiterate:

- I can boot from a usb hard drive on a pi. No SD needed.
- I have only experienced corruption with swap on sd cards. A pi 4 has 2GB-8GB of ram. No swap needed. So an SD card would be safe to use for years.
- A backup sd card with a tailored image is not hard especially with user data saved on an external . If one fails it's not a big deal.

It takes effort to ignore that much. But hey.

 

[Swordfish II]

OS SD cards breaking down after just a few years of usage

To me, a few years is stable and still acceptable.

$35 for a pi, $5 for a 16GB SD card for OS and programs my parents use, I'll give them an external harddrive. You can burn through a lot of SD cards and years before approaching the cost of a low end desktop not to mention the size reduction and power savings and it meets the use case.

All of this may be moot anyway though because they are a bit leary of Linux. Not as much now that they have a chromebook and have experienced a different OS.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

My mom hates Windows and only uses Linux. My grandma hates Windows, and used System V UNIX for ages at her job when she still worked, but refuses to let me put BSD on her PC. She also thinks Microsoft has gone out of business for some reason.

 

[Swordfish II]

My mom hates Windows and only uses Linux. My grandma hates Windows, and used System V UNIX for ages at her job when she still worked, but refuses to let me put BSD on her PC. She also thinks Microsoft has gone out of business for some reason.

That is a pretty interesting actually.

How old is your mom if you don't mind sharing? I'm curious because my parents were pretty old when personal computers became a thing and Windows computers were the norm which is what drives my parent's fixation, it's what was available then and they knew over the years. I was out of college before Linux became more user friendly for end users.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

That is a pretty interesting actually.

How old is your mom if you don't mind sharing? I'm curious because my parents were pretty old when personal computers became a thing and Windows computers were the norm which is what drives my parent's fixation, it's what was available then and they knew over the years. I was out of college before Linux became more user friendly for end users.

My mom and dad are in their mid 60s. She just hated Windows once we got a new family PC. Until 2001, they were using Windows 3.1. Then they got a new PC and it had ME. They both hated it. We tried OS/2 but she didn't like that much either, although it was better. I didn't find out about Linux until about 5 years later, in high school. So I set her up with Gentoo, which is what my teacher used. Finally she was happy with it, she liked Gnome 2. When CDE went open source I showed her that because it has a somewhat similar interface to Windows 3.1, and she likes that better so that's what she's using now. So she's been using Linux since 2006.

 

[KidPaddle]

Does this have anything else to do with Box86?

I lost the thread.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Yeah, sorry about that.

 

[Letalis Sonus]

Back in school I was surprised to find out that my religion teacher was a Linux user since '98. When asked about it, he simply said: "Windows 98: screen saver cancels burning a CD"

To me, a few years is stable and still acceptable.

It's more about integrity than longevity. But if you like to make physically separated backups every time you change something on your system partition that's fine, I guess.

I lost the thread.

...but where is the needle?

 

[ElPoco]

I've tried again PICO-8. For some reason, the "splore" feature will display the list, but it fails to download carts. But I noticed that wget doesn't seem to be able to retrieve them either (and from what I've read in some threads it seems that pico-8 might rely on wget)... Anyway, I downloaded a few carts manually from the website and ran them.
Picofox (a starfox clone) slows down when there are enemies on the screen. Simpler games seem to run fine but I quite often got a problem where the screen would stop updating (sound would keep working for a while) and the sd-card LED would blink like crazy. Sometimes I could recover by force-quitting, sometimes I had to do a hard-reset.

I'd like to try wine with some older windows games but I'm not sure if extracting the libs in my x86 lib folders and running the binary with box86 would be enough.

 

[ptitSeb]

I've tried again PICO-8. For some reason, the "splore" feature will display the list, but it fails to download carts. But I noticed that wget doesn't seem to be able to retrieve them either (and from what I've read in some threads it seems that pico-8 might rely on wget)... Anyway, I downloaded a few carts manually from the website and ran them.
Picofox (a starfox clone) slows down when there are enemies on the screen. Simpler games seem to run fine but I quite often got a problem where the screen would stop updating (sound would keep working for a while) and the sd-card LED would blink like crazy. Sometimes I could recover by force-quitting, sometimes I had to do a hard-reset.

Mmm, strange, I'll retry pico8 on my side. Which version are you using?

I'd like to try wine with some older windows games but I'm not sure if extracting the libs in my x86 lib folders and running the binary with box86 would be enough.

You need to put wine binary in it's own folder (because it's more than just a few libs). If you want, here is a pre-built version: http://ptitseb.openpandora.org/wine511.tgz but you can probably find other binary on the net, or build a version yourself.

 

[ElPoco]

I'm using a fairly recent build of box86 (built yesterday or the day before) and pico8 0.2.1b. It happens very often after a few minutes of gaming.

 

[levi]

No logs?

 

[ElPoco]

I don't have a log file and I have to do a hard reset so I don't know if there's anything useful in the stdout. I haven't checked the Pico 8 logs... I'll take a look.

For wine, is there anything to do to set it up? Right now I need to start the wineserver manually first and then wine complains about the lack of a driver when it wants to display a window.