Mon 17 Mar 2025 11:50:50 AM EDT Greetings List Lurkers,
Happy Saint Patties Day! Thank God for Irish Saints... To continue a short term tradition we again have some substance to this email, in as much as I am going to begin my review of the last few weeks in dealing with the NVIDIA Orin Nano. NVIDIA ORIN NANO JETSON Since last weeks missive I continue to have an interesting experience with the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. To repeat, the good news is that the unit I purchased at a good discount is functioning, so I am not sending it back, and I got the base NVIDIA operating system to run. How much trivia can you learn about NVME? The bad news is due to memory constraints I fear I shall never get "ollama" operating due to my lack of disk storage. 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. For openers, you would think that they would place a model number somewhere on the hardware. The basic trouble I am having now is that the model/version I got shipped amazingly does not have an M.2 m Key or SATA b Key (key type "b"), and is only supplied with an NVME "e" type key slot. I suspect that the only way to add more storage to this sucker is as USB... Note that poor documentation is the root cause of my difficulty/ire. To restate my complaint from last week. 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 it's inception; that coupled with the rise of the Internet, a bank switching processor from Intel, and the Torvalds kid all came together with a vengeance for me. Again, with NVIDIA, I get the feeling that while they exploit FOSS and they attempt to mimic the FOSS Raspberry Pi path, I am not satisfied with the much more closed culture of NVIDIA and that's kind of the whole problem. In my opinion. 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". i finally got the 6.0 version of the Orin Jetson Nano Working... Again, 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. In summary, 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 go buy well at this point in order to get any meaningful running on it I think I'm going to have to add an NVME hard drive this has been frustrating, the non-standard M.2 Type M NVME adaptor is between NVME "b" and "m" key and has no provisions for "e" key! . 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! I ended up ordering a battery for $2, a better deal, and it snapped right in. In summary, I have prevailed but I am not done, and 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. 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. The next step in this project is a Jetson based LLM. - Can I the hardware and software into a "looperplex" (a musical instrument)? Answer, not without the worlds 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 toe into 3270 land after St Patties day... ...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
