Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday – R.I.P. 32-Bit

SNAP stores made easy! Microsoft visits Red Hat, 32-bit builds are on the way out, and HDMI video capture on the cheap.

Subscribe: Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday


Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu

Snap store
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/06/howto-host-your-own-snap-store.html
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/snapcraft/2016-June/000286.html

  • Last week I made the assumption that setting up a custom snap store was a trivial thing to do. Well, here is proof of that, from Dustin Kirkland.
  • Wow, this blog post is really short.
  • Marky Mark does not expect other distros to use Ubuntu’s snaps
  • Stop trying to make Snap a thing.

 

Let’s steal
https://letsencrypt.org//2016/06/23/defending-our-brand.html
https://forums.comodo.com/general-discussion-off-topic-anything-and-everything

  • Told you last week that traditional CAs would make a drama around Let’s Encrypt
    • You did call it, I’ll give you that.
  • Wouldn’t have thought that one would try to steal their trademark, that’s bold.
    • Yeah, that wouldn’t have been my first guess.
  • Comodo’s CEO is being completely dishonest in their forums, claiming that Let’s Encrypt may have not come up with the name in the first place.
  • He also accuses Let’s Encrypt of stealing their free 90 days SSL certificate
  • But he’s forgetting to mention that he’s comparing forever free certs for as many domains as needed to what is basically a free 90 days trial.
  • Luckily, Comodo has stepped down and abandoned the trademark.

 

DownloadFlix
http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/06/chrome-drm-download-netflix-piracy/

  • Yip, really wanted some of that shite quality 720p Netflix video.
  • Firefox and Soap Opera also use Widevine to stream DRM’ed content so, should the 90 days expire, I would expect people to also be able to use those browsers to download this.
  • And, you know, fork a current version of Firefox, load up the exploit script, and start redistributing it as DownFlix.
  • Of course, like Venn already mentioned, there’s no reason for the common citizen to give a damn.
  • There are already 1080p rips of every TV show of the last 5 years available on the internet, and chances are this isn’t going away any time soon.
  • Also, you would still need a legitimate NetFlix account to access the content. So that won’t even entice the lowest common denominator of internet pirates.
  • This is not going to make any difference in Netflix’s revenue.
  • One could argue that this would be useful for legit customers to be able to watch Netflix offline but it just happens that the streaming service has announced that feature would be available in the near future.

 

Something For Reddit
https://github.com/samdroid-apps/something-for-reddit#something-for-reddit

  • Step #1 for Ubuntu.
  • Step #2 is installing gnome-common but they left that part out.
    • It really angers me that in 2016, developers still don’t provide proper build instructions for their projects. *this* is why we need Snaps/Flats/whatev
    • Please, just provide a build script for *one* distribution! Adapting it for another is easy!
  • But don’t bother since python3-arrow is so damn old it causes autogen.sh to fail.
  • Fedora works OOTB
  • If you install it from the COPR you will have to install either gnome-music or Sugar because someone didn’t set the dependencies properly!
  • Does it send notifications for comment replies? Oh, right, I don’t care, Reddit now sends them by email :)
  • Hope they work on the design part of the app in the future.

 

On the cheap
https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/cheap-hdmi-capture-for-linux
https://blog.danman.eu/new-version-of-lenkeng-hdmi-over-ip-extender-lkv373a/

  • HDMI comes in, CAT6 goes out… can’t explain that.
  • Not a huge surprise since most HDMI cables also include Ethernet
  • So, basically the device is a HDMI to UDP converter
  • Could make a good start for a homemade VCR

 

The Redundancy Fairy that is GTK+
https://blogs.gnome.org/desrt/2016/06/14/gtk-5-0-is-not-gtk-5/

  • I like the admission of GTK3 not being as stable as GTK2.
    • …something that they have been asking for for a long time: a version of Gtk that has the features of Gtk 3, but the stability of Gtk 2.”
    • Not stable as in “the API constantly changes” not as “it crashes”
  • 5+ years and GTK3 is still a mess.
    • How is it a mess? Sincerely asking, not saying you’re wrong.
      • features of Gtk 3, but the stability of Gtk 2”
  • Do they share offices with the Mozilla Foundation or something?
  • As a GTK developer I like the direction they are taking.
  • Some people have concerns with their new versioning system, this could have been avoided by choosing a system similar to Wine but it’s a detail
  • This doesn’t fix the main issue. The reason why GTK application developers have to stick to old GTK releases is Debian (and maybe Red Hat / CentOS).

 

Fedora Licenses Breakdown
https://anweshadas.in/software-licenses-in-fedora-ecosystem/

  • It’s a nice visual representation of the most commonly used Licenses for the packages included in Fedora’s repos.
  • The ones you don’t see there are the ones which didn’t meet a certain number of packages.
  • Of course, this is all for naught.
  • If you want a truly Free and Open Sauce distro, with no blobs or anything proprietary you’re still looking at Trisquel.
  • Because for all the parotting Fedora developers do regarding Free Software and not including certain packages, they’re still using a kernel loaded with blobs.
  • And that’s fine! All I’m asking is that you don’t be hypocrites about it.
  • Call me an heretic but Fedora is too Free for me. And no, RPMFusion is not good enough.

 

Auto Pi
http://thenextweb.com/offers/2016/06/23/tnw-creates-smart-office-experience-raspberry-pi/

  • I like this project but this uses too many closed services (Slack / Sonos)
  • Be old school, use IRC and mpd!

 

They did open the sauce after all
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/net-core-1-0-released-now-officially-supported-by-red-hat/

  • For version 1.0… which is from 2002!
    • Oh no, wait! This is different, this is .NET Core 1.0! Because that’s not confusing at all.
    • But then again, this comes from the people who went from Windows 3 to 95 and from 8 to 10.
  • .NET Core isn’t exactly like the standard .NET, in the same way Android isn’t exactly like the standard Java.
  • If that analogy doesn’t have you running for the hills, it should.
    • I trust Microsoft far more than Oracle to not try to do any funny stuff with .NET.
    • Of course that is until Microsoft stops being relevant, which is the position Oracle is in today.
    • Hope that day doesn’t come, I don’t want Flibit sued over FNA.
  • I’m a bit worried that Unity joined the .NET foundation, they are using Monodevelop in their IDE which makes it possible to have the Unity editor under Linux
  • We still don’t have Visual Studio on Linux (no, **that** one doesn’t count)

 

But … but … what about my Pentium III
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/06/ubuntu-drop-32-bit-desktop-iso-image-installer

  • This isn’t just about dropping ISOs for 32bit but the entire repos as well by 18.10.
  • They said that running 32bit applications would require a VM, a container or a snap
    • I really hope that isn’t their end game with snaps.
  • But here’s the thing: 99% of 32bit applications are games, games require 32bit openGL libraries, 32bit OpenGL libraries require 32bit libc
  • This is why Lutris depends on the libc6 and lib32gcc packages, note that these packages are not in the i386 repos so if they keep that then everyone should be ok.
  • Except that one guy with a Core 1 Duo… There’s always that guy. Just switch to another distro, ok?
  • Will Ubuntu still be around in 2021?
  • If they want to kill the iso, that’s fine. But they can’t kill the 32bit repos.
  • Otherwise, Venn’s implication may hold some water.
  • Ubuntu, as it currently stands already has several issues doing Multilib properly.
  • Just have a look inside the /usr/lib folder of a 64bit Ubuntu install. You’ll see the i386-gnu-lib folder.

Feedback

DM
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?xn6Bbr3

4
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?1nTd7ux

4+1
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?wsE3Czf

0 Comments

Leave Your Reply