2016 — 5 April: Tuesday
A nice, sunny start1 after a full (indeed, generous) ration of time with Morpheus, a fresh cuppa, the Humax finally reset to auto-start on BBC Radio 3 instead of 6Music (a little something I'd been meaning to "get around to" for over three years if I can believe the date shown in its setup menu) and further 'proof' that the miniscule NUC only wakes back up properly either if it's briefly unplugged or explicitly powered off by holding down its power switch for its overnight rest.
Evidence firmly suggests...
... selecting "Shutdown" from a NoMachine Remote Desktop session on BlackBeast doesn't quite have the effect it says on the tin. Apparently, selecting Shutdown may just leave2 the NUC at a different "run level". It just irritates me slightly that I have to march over to the thing and give it the finger whereas all my other interactions with it are "virtualised". If I'd buried it away up in the loft, for example, and then forgetfully selected Shutdown — such things have been known to happen — I'd be more than slightly irritated.
I shall experiment. Since I also have Skylark currently chirping away in another NoMachine window I will now see what happens when I try Shutdown on it from BlackBeast...
And down it goes. Lights off. Nobody at home. Without perturbing the flow of Fiona's music from the NUC in its adjacent NoMachine window.
Post-lunch and walk...
... crumbs of comfort as I sup my next, very welcome, second cuppa after a ramble around the Durley loop near where Iris teaches one of her yoga classes:
- A pre-sliced fresh "well-fired" loaf left on my doorstep. Thanks, Len!
- emailed hints and tips on the mysteries of 'shutdown' (the "old" method I know) v 'poweroff' (the even "older" deprecated method I didn't know)
- a hint of evidence that Intel may actually have failed to teach their NUCs how to play "nice" in this (one would think/hope) simple arena
- a nice book of Kage Baker's short stories fleshing out (if that's an appropriate term where cyborgs are involved) characters from her "Company" milieu
Experimentation (with the Kuro switched on, so that I can get two opinions as to what's going on; one from the Kuro, the other from the NoMachine window on BlackBeast) has just confirmed that, if I type:
sudo shutdown -h now
in a terminal on the NUC it does, indeed, shutdown. Quite a long way down, in fact. It remains completely and stubbornly braindead (though with its little blue light on) until such time as I physically unplug and replug its juice supply.
At which point it finally responds to its power switch and I can confirm, by watching sluggish displays on the Kuro for the next minute or more, that it undergoes a rather sulky full-blown power-on startup sequence. Eventually,3 a login splash screen deigns to appear on the Kuro.
Pausing only long enough...
... to start my laundry, I now attempt to reconnect to the NUC via NoMachine4 on BlackBeast. I fire up NoMachine, see the NUC's login splash screen on BlackBeast, type in the password there, and then watch, baffled, as the Kuro display proceeds to a normal NUC Linux desktop while the NoMachine control panel just spins its little 'hourglass' and fails to connect, with a message I've not previously seen about "waiting for user permission" before allowing the login. (Which has clearly already been accepted!)
A couple of further NoMachine "Connect" attempts produce the same message. The Kuro continues to show a perfect (logged-in) Linux desktop from the NUC.
At that point — Life being too short to dance with ugly software — I nuke the NoMachine session on BlackBeast, restart it, point it at the NUC again, and this time off we go, straight in, login accepted, and back to the races (or, in this case, starting a further burst of the divine Fiona and her musical "Late Junction" selections streamed in from my NAS).
Being a devil-may-care mad cap experimenter, I now switch off the Kuro to revert to, and see what happens in, "headless" mode. Not so much as a burp in the music stream that I'm actually listening to as analogue audio from the NUC rather than as the HDMI digital audio that I have a long history of problems with.
I believe I can safely conclude...
... that physically disrupting the flow of electrical juice to the NUC needs to be a vital part of its morning pre-flight checklist from now on. Odd, but not intolerable. Poorish show, Intel. Worth knowing that NoMachine sometimes gets things wrong, too.
Even I...
... could understand, and enjoy, the simplified explanation here (though I still recall reading an in-depth report by "Private Eye" on shell companies, and their very widespread adoption that [actually] I also understood).
From the original "explanation" on Reddit:
