Greetings List Lurkers, Daylight savings time can get away from you... It's early afternoon and I am just now getting around to writing this.
Unusually there is little substance to this email, Thus I am going to begin today's email with my review of the last few weeks in dealing with the NVIDIA Orin Nano. NVIDIA ORIN NANO JETSON As many of you are aware, I've had a very interesting experience with the NVIDIA Orin Nano. The good news is that the unit I purchased at a good discount is functioning, so I am not sending it back. The bad news is that I am Not Terribly Happy with what it took to get it running. The reason for my ire is the "documentation" emanating from the NVIDIA culture. NVIDIA is a hardware company, and while it has embraced to an extent, open source hardware, the software side, at least for me, has been and remains a struggle. I suspect the poor documentation is a cultural thing. I am used to the culture of the very developed Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) available on the web. I recall that while the IBM PC was not a closed source product even in its inception; that coupled with the rise of the Internet, a bank switching processor from Intel, RMS and the Torvalds kid all came together with a life changing vengeance for me. With NVIDIA I get the feeling that while they exploit FOSS and they attempt to mimic the FOSS Raspberry Pi path, I am not used to the much more closed culture of NVIDIA and that's kind of the whole problem. In my opinion. As an example, I spent hours and days trying to download the 7gb sd card image file. Unlike some members of our community, I am a binary baby, and as the Jetson hardware is essentially a one-off here in rural central Vermont, I reasoned that the only way to tell if the hardware was any good was to get the system loaded and operational. Why NVIDIA could not include some on board or a rational size SD card with diagnostics is completely beyond me. Once you get the 7Gig SD card image downloaded, uncompressed (it doubles to 14 Gig), and correctly blown onto an SD card (with 25 partitions!), you then may be able to figure out how to install and run "jetson-stats" (if you can find it!), but do not hold your breath... Now you have a working version of Ubuntu customized with the "Linux nvidia-desktop". Basically, my biggest problem was downloading the SD card image. I spent a lot of time trying to download the 7 gigs (5 or so tries) from the Jetson Orin Nano Development website. The fact that you cannot find torrents of the SD card image was particularly maddening. My big break came when a good and kindly soul uploaded a torrent file to the community forum. Unfortunately the torrent was for 4.9.337 of the image, the current image is 6.02. If anyone has this 6.02 image, please let me know!! I'm going to bring this with me to the meeting tonight. It has been a struggle to get it working. The online documentation is simply frightening. Apparently, the budget deal that I got did not include any software so I had to download the software onto a 128 GB SD card which I had to buy in order to get anything meaningful running on the Jetson. It appears that I'm going to have to add an NVME hard drive. This has been frustrating, the non-standard M.2 Type M NVME has been ordered and is on it's way. The software is not the only thing that did not come with my Jetson. Would it have killed NVIDIA to have included the CMOS Battery? I think I can get one but one of the scalpers on the net wants $25.00 for it! In summary, I have prevailed but I am not done, and again, I am not happy. Note the difference between Jetson and Raspberry culture. RASPBERRY PI 5 WITH NVME I am going to put off reviewing the other projects I have been frantically working on. That said, the big breakthrough was that I have a Raspberry PI booting off an NVME drive. This turns out to have been a boon and blessing, as I had somewhere to put SD images and a device that reliably installed these images using good old gnome-disks, which you have to install on the PI OS release. Still tweaking but hey! RED HAT BLUEFIN My foray into Red Hat Bluefin continues, hopefully under the continued guidance of the now healthy DTG. God knows that blowing SD cards on Bluefin is a bit of a problem, and it should not be. Again, I must confess that DTG found the problem with running the Arduino Development code on my Bluefin. I still maintain that running Bluefin absolutely needs "Ports and Protocols" Documents. The issue here is what can you write to and what can you read from under these "immutable" distributions and under what conditions? What directories (and particularly ports)... What you can read and under what conditions (host or guest)would also be useful... This ongoing frustration has manifested itself in the following draft document: http://docbox.flint.com:8081/geekland/#BluefinPorts%26Protocols Which I continue to hack at. SUMMER DREAMS Again, my ridiculously ambitious plans for spring include my dream of a meet up of Adult Swim at SugarTower. The working title of this is for now "Open Source Summer Camp" (OSSC): http://docbox.flint.com:8081/geekland/#Open_Source_Summer_Camp_(OSSC) Sing out or attend this evening's meeting in person if you are interested in the SugarTower TechnoRubble organizational project, now known as OSSC... What would you think of a Summer festival maybe including other FOSS groups such as the Free Software Foundation? We have a nice 10 acre facility for this at SugarTower. Ah the dreams of Winter modulating into Spring! That all said we have a meeting tonight at 6PM under Daylight Savings Time. The life lesson here is that serious development remains for the winter. Winter shall soon allow us to answer questions like: - Can we build a Large Language Model server? (Preferably on the cheap... we are close :^) This is a serious discussion between acquiescing to NVIDIA (CUDA) or finding an open source equivalent. So, the next step in this project is a Jetson based LLM. - Can I turn the hardware and software into a "looperplex" (a musical instrument)? Answer, not without the world's smallest 1000W power supply. ( http://docbox.flint.com:8081/echoplex) effects box? - A VIAOC based Arduino and Pi development environment that "Breaths" Code. http://docbox.flint.com:8081/geekland/#Virtual_Immutability_Associated_Containers_(VIAOC) - Can I use the Jetson AI to generate VisualBash scripts? - Would it make sense to store VisualBash functions in MariaDB? - Could all tie into Kubernetes? - Should I start on a Baby Bear VM code review? (http://bbbvm.org/) Maybe I will dip my toe into 3270 land tomorrow... ...so more about these foolish ideas is available this Monday evening at 6 PM at the York Library in beautiful East Barre Vermont. Thus we are convalescing, centralizing and convocating at the York Branch Library this evening. That said, come in person or remotely and bring this and any other problems and questions and we shall do our thing! Again this evening, beyond the Library face-2-face & gizmo-2-gizmo, we shall use: https://meet.jit.si/bosi to connect. Feel free to click the following link (around 6PM tonight) to join the meeting: https://meet.jit.si/bosi Let me know if this works for everyone... ===== Just want to dial in on your phone? Dial-in: +1.512.402.2718 PIN: 1992759198# Note that this dial worked with devastating effect from the road... Click this link to see the dial in phone numbers for this meeting: https://meet.jit.si/static/dialInInfo.html?room=bosi Kindest Regards, Paul Flint, Director Barre Open Systems Institute
