New Ryzen Mini PC

Completely unnecessary, but I had thought about getting a faster booting and more responsive computer to run Jiggit, my 3D printer. When I happened to see all this stuff on sale for Cyber Monday at newegg, I couldn't resist:

ASRock AMD Barebone 4X4 BOX-4800U

Crucial P2 1TB 3D NAND NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD

G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) 260-Pin DDR4 SO-DIMM DDR4 3200

Got everything unpacked after it was delivered. The hardest part of installing the hardware was removing the 4 screws to take the bottom off. They are really really long screws, you imagine something must be wrong long before you get them unscrewed :-).

I had some supports for hanging the power cubes off the back of the monitor. I need to print a couple of additional ones exactly like the one I use for the monitor's power cube since it fits the computer power cube perfectly.

Once you get it open, the memory clicks into the slots with no problem, and the M.2 stick is relatively easy to insert, although it needs the most tiny of tiny screws to hold the end down, which is tricky to find in the bag of screws and tricky to get started in the hole, but it wasn't too bad.

Got Ubuntu 20.04 LTS installed off my USB stick which can boot a whole collection of ISO images, and that seemed to go well. Spent a lot of time trying to get memtest86 working with this machine which will only boot UEFI, finally got the proper UEFI version installed on a USB stick, and it has been running memtest86 ever since (no errors so far after a few hours and two passes).

After I tire of running memtest, the next step will be to apt install openssh-server so I can work on it remotely, then apt list --installed and compare the list of packages to the old computer and install anything I'm missing.

Glitch the first: With the display port cable plugged in, I get BIOS messages on the screen, but no boot messages till the graphical interface starts. I tried booting from the install ISO, and it puts boot messages on the display port just fine, but once installed, it never shows up any longer.

Glitch the second: Frequently when I plugged something into the front USB3 port, the screen would go blank. I got all the updates installed, got ssh working, and tried it again while connected via ssh to see if the system crashed, or the display just went blank. It never happened when I tried testing it (of course). Update: Happened again, the system is up just fine, but the screen blanks. How could those be tied together?

Compared packages, that seemed to work, I have very similar lists now (just some old stuff I never use any longer on old machine I didn't bother to install on new).

I've got the disk extracted from the old zino system and plugged into a USB dock so I can copy stuff off of it, but that's a job for tomorrow.

I've also ordered a couple of adapters to make the USB-C ports on the front useful since I have nothing that expects to plug into a USB-C port on a computer.

BZZZT! Couldn't take the screen blanking problem any longer. I've returned the computer to newegg for a replacement, hopefully that will fix it, but who knows how long it will take the replacement to get here (especially since they insist on waiting till the original makes it back to California).

I've got the old zino back together and working again. I didn't bother with getting everything hung off the monitor again, I'll worry about that when the replacement arrives.

State of the new system: I got all the same debs installed on the M.2 stick, but hadn't yet installed the mjpg-streamer snap or copied anything off the zino disk. Since I decided to change the system name rather than copying the name zino, I'll need to fix the host based authentication I use to make backup so the new system can access the nas not to mention finding all the other things scattered around that reference "zino".

Good news! The replacement came (took about two weeks total), and I've plugged and unplugged the webcam a few times now in the front USB port and no disappearing screen this time. I guess it is safe to pick up where I left off trying to reproduce the software on the old zino.

I've noticed that sometimes the monitor is a bit weird at boot time with EDID info and the resolution of the screen is crap. I don't believe the computer is at fault here, but I've captured good edid info and stashed it in /lib/firmware/edid/uhd.bin then added drm.edid_firmware=edid/uhd.bin to the default kernel parameters in /etc/default/grub Hopefully, I'll boot at the correct resolution now even if the monitor is slow. [Nope: It always works perfectly when everything powers up from scratch, and gets wrong resolution if I just reboot - can't think of anything else to try fixing it]. More info: Comparing an Xorg log that worked to one that didn't work, I see it saying in both cases that it is falling back to the old probe method for modesetting (I can't find any information on what that means). In the case where it works the probe finds the correct UHD resolution, in the case where it doesn't work, it finds a much smaller resoltion. If I power off the monitor and power it back up, it gets the correct resolution. I tried wayland, and it doesn't have this problem, but it still has nothing like xinput for implementing drag lock, so it is still useless.

I also have a complete list of all the files from both systems, so the next step is some perl scripts to compare them, then rsync any missing files from the last zino backup.

I think I have most of the stuff copied over now, probably run into missing bits from time to time, but things seem to be working moderately well. I can poke the printer now and it moves as requested. Had fun adventures with the proxy settings in firefox, but finally was able to talk to the smoothieboard http interface by telling it never to proxy 192.168.2.2/24 (I think that was broken when I installed OctoPrint, but I never noticed till now).

Got zooty and the nas backups nfs mounted to make it simple to access the most common remote stuff I'll need.

I also notice there is a newer BIOS available, perhaps I should update it. Did that. Seemed to work fine. I don't notice any change other than the firmware version it prints at boot.

I'm now making my fist print since getting new system configured. Seems to be printing fine (a new spice holder since the new spice I bought won't fit in the old one's slot). Finished printing and installed in cabinet. Worked OK.