Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday – We’re Not The Devil

Mozilla gets Quantum! Lenovo unlocks Yoga, mesa_glthread equals true, and building a wi-fi drone disabler with Raspberry Pi.

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Notes:
Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan

News

Cursing
https://precursorapp.com/blog/precursor-is-now-open-source

Online collaboration has always been sticky, considering this sort of discussion often has a visual component
This is basically google docs style whiteboard and now you can roll your own
“Hey, everyone, we opensourced our product”
“YAAAAYY”
*clicks gihub page, sees Clojure code*
“AAAAAAH” *runs away*
So, being in Lisp and all, can it run in Emacs now?
For a small company/project looking to prototype something, this is great.
And letting people spin their own removes those privacy concerns with Google Docs.

Quantum
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum

So the plan is to rip out gecko and replace it with Crow T Robot…erm Servo components in chunks (eg,compositor, renderer, DOM)
Theoretically, this should result in better threading support and all around better performance
Changing how frames work as well, becoming shared userspace threads as opposed to separate processes
If this can help put an end to the Chrome monopoly, I’m all for it!
But it doesn’t change the fact that no one uses Rust except Mozilla.
That June alpha didn’t exactly sell me on it.
It took a long LONG time to render even a simple page and Youtube was unusable in any resolution above 144p.

YOLO
https://www.linuxbabe.com/linux-server/install-arch-linux-on-kvm-vps

This is useful when your hosting provider doesn’t offer Arch Linux in one-click install.
- Quick! Someone pull up that reddit thread venn Screencapped last week
Running Arch on a production server is useful if you sleep too well and wish to spice up your life.
I would have liked a few examples of hosting services that support that kind of operation.

Virtual
https://linuxgamecast.com/2016/10/l-g-c-how-to-creating-a-virtual-webcam-on-linux/

Some illiterate asshole put a stupid guide up on the internet
Good. Now I just need to port EffecTV to V4L2 and I’ll do the weekly show with the Predator effect enabled.

Good ol’ firmware raid. Making people scream “WHY?!” since 1992
Something something Hanlon’s Razor
Not running a SSD RAID is not “sub-optimal”. I’ve never used one and I’m doing just fine.
Locking people to that stupid RAID may have lowered the storage variance options in the Yoga in question and allowed Intel/Lenovo/Microsoft to optimize it.
Of course, doing that for what is a very niche machine only means the people who use it for niche cases (like running Linux on it) it’s going to hurt more than it helps.

Apparently, it’s possible to have a system running Mir without having grep, cut and sed installed because the script checks if those are present before running anything.
- That’s probably more of a sanity check than anything.
- Especially since mirscreencast is also available on Ubuntu Phone and those may have been lopped off for the sake of lowest possible footprint.
It creates a fifo file between mirscreencast and ffmpeg using a few dark voodoo tricks.

A change to GL multithreading support for Gallium/Radeon resulted in a 70% performance bump on borderlands
It’s a good step in the right direction, what with Mesa practically being feature complete
Also good that someone from the AMD camp proper is WORKING ON IMPROVING THEIR DRIVERS
“mush.. mush.. mush… mushrooms!!”
Who knows? Maybe one day in the near future, Radeon cards will work just as well as Nvidia’s and this will mean a lot of GTX cards being put on ebay because everyone would rather have open source drivers.
There was also some initial threading support introduced to i965 which lets OpenGL workloads be offloaded to a different thread.
Which, in a mix between Vulkan applications and OpenGL backends, this probably makes sense.

With Fedora 25 you’ll be able to have both the proprietary drivers and the mesa drivers installed without futzing around with the libraries, so that GLVND can do its thing between multiple displays and GPUs.
You can also use the nouveau VND to do this, assuming the GPU in your laptop is supported by nouveau.
You’ll also be able to use the proprietary NVidia drivers in Wayland from Fedora 25 but Hybrid Graphics will only be available natively in Fedora 26, supposedly.
- The installer will also check for optimus support and default to X if it detects it
It looks like this also means that the Wayland shipping on fedora 25 can work with the Nvidia proprietary drivers, although xwayland is not working just yet.
- From the gaming side of things, this won’t affect any games using SDL2 for drawing windows
I’m glad to see fedora actually getting their shit together to start properly supporting wayland, including sorting out the nightmare fuel that is managing openGL drivers under linux
One other interesting development worth mentioning is that since Mesa Supports the d3d state tracker, will you be able to use that in conjunction with the Nvidia blob driver? Cuz that would be super cool

Poor MBP users. There is no escape
This is probably mostly developers. CAD people/Digital artists/ETC need their special software that doesn’t run on the linuxes
- That’s still a lot of people since most developers use Apple hardware (in the US at least)
- And I’ve never understood why. I tried OSX, I had a pretty bad time.
Also, the System76 machine does not have Apple’s revolutionary Touch Bar.
- MAH EMOJIS!111
- Revo-what, now?! Razer’s been doing that with their touchpads on the Blade laptops for years! Not to mention, on those same laptops, they even let you customize each individual keyboard key.
- And all things considered, you’re about as likely to get the lightbar to work under Linux as you did with the Razer Switchblade.
And everyone can stop with the vim jokes. Any respectable vim user has swapped Escape with Caps Locks.
The ElementaryOS project has just published a blog post explaining the basics of switching to Elementary for OSX users.

Slice of Pi

Coming up this week on domestic terrorism cast
Seriously though. Telnet? Really? TELNET?
- Would you expect a device that opens an open wifi hotspot to ship with SSH?
“Be sure that no people or fragile items are below the drone when you’re testing.”
I see they are using the famous Alfa wireless adapter. Good to know it’s still available.

Feedback

KPAX
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?uFo35OR
http://jensd.be/651/linux/linux-live-kernel-patching-with-kpatch-on-centos-7