Another type of “ports” were game engines made from scratch that used the level files of the original

ScummVM is one of these which plays (some) LucasArts point’n’click adventure games, like Day of the Tentacle. But it’s a bit newer than 1990s, quick search says that it was released around 2001/2002.

There’s already a ton of great examples which I can relate (I’ve been using linux since 1998 or 99) but maybe the biggest difference today, apart from that everything is SO MUCH EASIER now, is that the internet wasn’t really the thing it is today. Specially the bandwidth. It took hours and hours over the phone line to download anything, on a good day you could get 100MB just under 4 hours. Of course things were a lot smaller too back then, but it still took ages and I’m pretty sure I now have more bandwidth on my home connection than most of the local universities had back in the 90s.

Back when CRT monitors were a thing and all this fancy plug’n’play technology wasn’t around you had modelines on your configuration files which told the system what kind of resolutions and refresh rates your actual hardware could support. And if you put wrong values there your analog and dumb monitor would just try to eat them as is with wildly different results. Most of the time it resulted just in a blank screen but other times the monitor would literally squeal when it attempted to push components well over their limits. And in extreme cases with older monitors it could actually physically break your hardware. And everything was expensive back then.

Fun times.

I’ve used Seafile for years just for this. I haven’t ran that on pi, but on virtual machine it runs pretty smoothly and android client is pretty hassle free.

I want to prevent myself from reinstalling my system.

Any even remotely normal file on disk doesn’t stop that, regardless of encryption, privileges, attributes or anything your running OS could do to the drive. If you erase partition table it’ll lose your ‘safety’ file too without any questions asked as on that point the installer doesn’t care (nor see/manage) on individual files on the medium. And this is exactly what ‘use this drive automatically for installation’ -option does on pretty much all of the installers I’ve seen.

Protecting myself from myself.

That’s what backups are for. If you want to block any random usb-stick installer from running you could set up a boot options on bios to exclude those and set up a bios password, but that only limits on if you can ‘accidently’ reinstall system from external media.

And neither of those has anything to do on read/copy protection for the files. If they contain sensitive enough data they should be encrypted (and backed up), but that’s a whole another problem than protecting the drive from accidental wipe. Any software based limitation concerning your files falls apart immediately (excluding reading the data if it’s encrypted) when you boot another system from external media or other hard drive as whatever solution you’re using to protect them is no longer running.

Unless you give up the system management to someone else (root passwords, bios password and settings…) who can keep you from shooting yourself on the foot, there’s nothing that could get you what you want. Maybe some cloud-based filesystem from Amazon with immutable copies could achieve that, but it’s not really practical on any level, financial very much included. And even with that (if it’s even possible in the first place, I’m not sure) if you’re the one holding all the keys and passwords, the whole system is on your mercy anyways.

So the real solution is to back up your files, verify regularly that backups work and learn not to break your things.

What’s your end goal here? You try to keep files just on that one media without any options to make copies of them? Or maintain an image which has enforced files at their directories? And against what kind of scenarios?

ACLs and SELinux aren’t useful as they can be simply bypassed by using another installation and overriding those as root, same thing with copying. Only thing I can think of, up to a degree, is to use immutable media, like CD-R, where it’s physically impossible to move files once they’re in place and even that doesn’t prevent copying anything.

Then do sudo apt install xfce4 and sudo apt purge cinnamon* muffin* nemo*.

It’s been a while since I installed xfce4 on anything, but if things haven’t changed I think the metapackage doesn’t include xfce4-goodies and some other packages, so if you’re missing something it’s likely that you just need to ‘apt install xfce4-whatever’. Additionally you can keep cinnamon around as long as you like as a kind of a backup, just change lightdm (or whatever login manager LMDE uses) to use xfce4 as default. And then there’s even lighter WM’s than XFCE, like LXDE, which is also easy to install via apt and try out if that works for you.

Absolutely. Maybe leave Gnome/KDE out and use a lighter WM, but they’ll be just fine. Specially if they have 8GB or more RAM. I suppose those have at least dual core processors, so that won’t be a (huge) bottleneck either. You can do a ton of stuff with those beyond just web browsing, like programming/text editing/spreadsheets and so on. I’d guess that available RAM is the biggest bottleneck on what they can do, specially if you like to open a ton of tabs on your browser.

I don’t know about homeassistant, but there’s plenty of open source software to interact with odb2 at least for linux. With some tinkering it should be possible to have bluetooth enabled odb2 adapter where you can dump even raw data out and feed it to some other system of your choise, homeassistant included.

If you want live data from the drive itself you of course need to have some kind of recording device with you (raspberry pi comes to mind) but if you’re happy just to log whatever is available when parking the car you could set up a computer with bluetooth nearby the parking spot on your yard and pull data from that. It may require that you keep the car powered on for a while after arrival to keep bus active, but some cars give at least some data via odb even when without the key being in ignition lock.

Most, but not all, do. So it might be as simple as setting a static address, or it may overlap in the future.

You could ask from ISP (or try it out yourself) if you can use some addresses outside of DHCP pool, my ISP router had /24 subnet with .0.1 as gateway but DHCP pool started from .0.101 so there would’ve been plenty of addresses to use. Mine had a ‘end user’ account too from wehere I could’ve changed LAN IP’s, SSID and other basic stuff, but I replaced the whole thing with my own.

If I remember correctly, 1000Base-T standard has a requirement that device has to negotiate pinout on the fly. No matter which pin is connected to which. Obvioiusly just randomly wiring a cable up has other problems, like signal-to-noise, but in theory it should work even if you make a cable that’s as unstandard as you can make it.

I’d first recommend that you think about what you need.

This is the absolutely correct option. I’ve set up way too many things without a use case and lost interest shortly after. If you have a real world use case for your project, even if it’s just for yourself, you’ll have the incentive to keep it going. If you’re just setting things up for the sake of it the hobby loses it’s appeal pretty quickly. Of course you’ll learn a thing or two on the way but without a real world use case the things you set up will either become a burden to keep up with or they’re eventually just deleted.

Personally, tinkering with things that are just removed after a while gave me skills which landed me on my current job, but it’s affected myself enough that I don’t enjoy setting things up just for the sake of it anymore. Of course time plays a part on this, I’ve been doing this long enough that when I started a basic LAMP server was a pretty neat thing to have around, so take this with a grain of oldtimer salt, but my experience is that setting up things that are actually useful on a long term is way more rewarding than spinning up something which gets deleted in a month and it’ll keep the spark going on for much longer.

Seafile. I’ve used it for years, but I’m moving over to nextcloud as I could use other features it provides. They have paid options too, but unless you need LDAP or something more sophisticated for user management the community edition works just fine.

I personally like mikrotik routers. They have all the features you could wish for and then some and they’re relatively cheap for the things they can do. I have RB4011iGS+ (I don’t think that exaxt model is available anymore) and it’s been rock solid. As I have fiber I just pulled the SPF-module from ISP’s box and plugged it in on my own hardware, so the router ISP provided is just gathering dust right now.

But it depends on what you’re really after. If you just need basic firewall/NAT/DHCP functionality and your connection speed is below 1Gbit pretty much any router will do. If you have fast connection and/or need for totally separate networks/VLAN/something else it’s a whole another matter.

have seen some people have networking issues with them.

I’ve been a happy customer for hetzner for almost a decade and I haven’t had any issues with their networking. If you’re running virtualization you need to take care of you MAC addresses or they won’t allow traffic and eventually will kick you off from their platform (and they have a good reason to do so). As long as you play by their rules on their hardware it’s rock solid, specially for the price.

I used to have old ThinkStation as a home server. Even older ones like S20 I have couple of laying around is still pretty capable system (I’m typing this on one) and as they’ve been CAD workstations and things like that when they were new many have 12+GB of RAM already. I got mine for free troguh a work contact, but they should be available via ebay or (preferably) your local version of it for pretty cheap.

Then you just need new drives and their prices have dropped too. 100€ is a bit of a stretch, but if you can get a whole computer from someone in the industry it should be possible. I have a few systems laying around I could get rid of for a case of beer or something, but shipping alone from here would eat up majority of your budget (if anyone is interested in x3550 m3 throw me a message, located in Finland, I might remember the model wrong but that’s roughly in the ballpark).

Other than thinkstations I’d say you’ll want a xeon CPU with at least 4 hyperthread cores, 16GB RAM and all the drives your budget has left. SSD for a boot drive(s) is nice to have, but spinning rust will get you there eventually.

Many rack mounted servers only accept SAS-drives which are a bit more expensive. Tower mounts generally use SATA so you can just throw in whatever you have laying around. The main concern is amount of RAM available. For older systems it might be a bit difficult to find suitable components, so more you have already in place the better. For VM server I think 16GB or above is fine for learning and it might be possible to shoehorn most of the stuff in even with 8GB. Performance will definetly take a hit with less RAM, but with that budget some compromises are necessary.

So, in short, with that budget it might be possible if you have a friend who has access to discarded workstations or happen to stumble in a good deal with local companies. It’ll require some compromises and/or actively hunting for parts and with old hardware there’s always possibility of failure so plan accordingly.

Depends on whom you ask from. For me selfhosting is all about the software and renting hardware is a perfectly fine solution for that. You don’t need to worry about UPS’s, maintaining hardware and all the jazz which comes with your own gear. Sure, then you’re depending on your VPS provider that services actually stay up, but even a small VPS provider has more people working on things than just yourself. And they have power solutions, like industrial scale power solutions with generators, multiple connection points to the internet and things like that which are either impossible or very expensive to set up just for your own hardware.

And then there’s the other side, like home automation, where relying on internet connectivity to get your lights on is, in my opinion, a bit silly thing to do for yourself and running server for that locally makes perfect sense. So, right solution depends on your needs, but if you want to define what counts as self hosting in my opinion it boils down to who has the root/administrator credentials on your server. Other may have different opinions.

While I agree with @rglullis@communick.news, this isn’t strictly speaking on-topic for this community, that kind of knee-jerk response is very much out of the topic as well. The first community rule is to be civil and in general I, perhaps optimistically, would like that conversation over fediverse in global would be civil, or at least well argumented, a bit like it used to be (more or less, YMMV) back in the usenet days.

And on the topic of self-hosting, that’s a line drawn in the water. I run various of things by myself (postfix+dovecot, LAMP, bitwarden, seafile, nextcloud…) on a rented servers running linux+kvm. And I get money by doing that, it’s a very much a business case, so I’m a bit reluctant to ask questions about the setup I have in here as I think it wouldn’t be fair to ask for advice from hobbyists in a project where money is directly involved. But for me personally that setup checks both sides of things. I get money by doing it, but at the same time I personally can get out of the walled gardens like M365 or Gsuite.

TL;DR: There’s no need to be rude, you can choose to politely point people in the right direction.

I do wonder about when VPNs started being used as proxies…

About at the same time operators at the US noticed that they could profit from profiling users behaviour. In here that’s very much illegal thing to do and most use cases for VPN is to connect yourself into corporate network. VPNs are of course useful to protect you from MITM attacks at open wifi networks and things like that, but hiding your behavior from your ISP is very much an US thing.

While I think you could techincally spoof your originating IP at the VPN server to match your clients IP it wouldn’t do anything useful. That’s not how IP routing works. What you’re trying to achieve with a setup like that?