Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday – Uberbuntu

Ubuntu powered cars! Let’s Encrypt Dehydrates, Lenovo locks down RAID, and a Pi Zero mini MAME.

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Notes:
Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu

News

I tried the 5.7 version on VirtualBox, using their KDE Neon distro, I was actually positively surprised.
Hopefully this 5.8 “LTS” will be made available on Fedora 25 at some point.
I might just go back to KDE.
Told you a few weeks back that Plasma 5 was getting good!
Took them 7 releases to reach that point but hopefully they don’t have plans to release Plasma 6 anytime soon.

So, who do the old school taxi drivers get to take their frustrations out on now?
Google’s self driving car was also running on Ubuntu
I hope they open source they software before making self driving cars a common thing
Just because it’s running unity it uses Linux?
Good to see the vehicles using LIDAR *glares at Tesla*

“What you’re seeing is a full install of Ubuntu (12.04 LTS at the time of this writing) with the Xfce desktop environment running.”
- WAT? Is Crouton really that outdated?
- It’s the default but there are other options available, 14.04 seems to work ok and 16.04 can be hit or miss
I like how they mention not being able to run CS:Go or Rocket League in Crouton Integration, I doubt they would even run with the regular Crouton
- You can play several 2D games without issue.
Androidcentral.com writers must get payed by the word.

Especially after fighting Comodo on that trademark, they’d need to be somewhat aggressive in defending their name.
- Show title incoming.
Because otherwise, according to the American judicial system, they could risk losing if they didn’t.
And changing the name of a smaller project is preferable to changing the name of the project providing several million certificates to the WWW.
Not only they want to protect their brand but it prevents LetsEncrypt like me to get confused (I’m easily confused). Now it is clear that what used to be letsencrypt.sh is not related with the original project.
Well, at least they sent a really really nice “change the project name or we’ll sue you out of existance” email.

Maybe the Unity DE will stop sucking so much now?
Oh, who am I kidding?! For as much respect as I have for the work Martin has done with Ubuntu MATE and the MATE desktop itself, not even he can unfudge the mess that is Unity.
The only mess I want fixed (and the only reason I’m running Gnome Shell right now) is resolution switching in games and window management for wine games.
- Run WINE in VD mode.
- Which is the workaround I use but doesn’t work for games that won’t run at native resolution.
If that gets fixed, I’m switching back to Unity right away.
Are you familiar /w koala.gif?
Because that should happen to the UI team on your first day.

How about dropping those lawsuits regarding “patent infringement” against Linux? How about those Microsoft?
This is only about server-side Open Source products, Microsoft understood that they couldn’t catch up with Linux if they stayed with their usual IIS / .NET / SQL Server, being Open Source friendly was they only hope to join the party.
On the desktop, it’s a different matter and Microsoft is more like the one we know from the early 2000s
Or maybe even worse, it seems they are actively trying to make the PC a locked down platform.
This is MS getting FLOSS software to work /w their proprietary warez, right?
That, and some .NET stuff.

One Lenovo employe says the device is locked to Windows 10 because agreements with MS
And another one says it is not locked but it’s up to kernel developers to make it work with this RAID
“fully committed to providing Linux certifications and installation guidance” but sending patches to the kernel for our products? Noooo
It’s a bit worrisome that the company that makes the most recommended models of Linux laptops (Thinkpads) is also one of the shadiest when it comes to their other models.
Something something Superfish.

Electron story of the week
https://insomnia.rest/

This is mostly for developers who are using REST APIs or are developing some
It can be a neat replacement to online services and you can use it for localhost
And it sure beats curl in usability!
I’m kinda surprised this would be a closed source product but there is a paid “plus” version which is surprising since the free version is already very complete.
- The Plus version is worth it for the sticker pack alone.

Slice of Pi

From the Youtube comments: WHAT IS THIS??? AN ARCADE CABINET FOR ANTS???
This is seriously a bit too small to be really usable
But you can have a working arcade cabinet on your keychain and nothing can beat that
It’s totes neat… and completely useless.

Brought to you by Canonical and Western Digital
That’s the second time WD has released a Pi related product
That’s $80 *without* the Pi but it’s not that bad given it comes with a 1TB drive
It’s a neat little home server.
All code available on github
You are buying an external 1 TB HDD for $79.99.
3D printers are your friend.