NVIDIA opens DRIVE! Picard hits 1.4, Terminix enables “Quake” mode, and DietPi dispenses Lightweight Justice.
Notes:
Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan
News
Make it so
https://blog.musicbrainz.org/2017/02/14/picard-1-4-released/
- Two years have gone by since the last release
- Last version before Picard 2, which will be Qt5 and Python 3 based
- I read the entire blog post and still have no idea what a Picard is.
No more Trademark e-Peen swinging
http://news.softpedia.com/news/mozilla-thunderbird-email-client-finally-makes-its-way-back-into-debian-s-repos-513059.shtml
- Icedove and Iceweasel are going away and Thunderchicken and Firefox take their rightful place back in the Debian repos.
- Both firefox and thunderbird are in unstable so unless you’re running sid (which you should) you won’t have then before a while
- Are we pretending that someone actually uses Icedove?
If it’s not broke
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/02/download-ubuntu-16-04-2-lts
- Well, you can and will break it if you enable HWE.
- Took me almost an hour to undo all the fudgery it wrought on my system
- It even changed the Steam Controller udev rules… Who the *beep* had that brilliant idea?
- I was going to try this today, was. Neo.gif
- Comes /w the 4.8 kernel and a barrel of nope.
- Meanwhile, I’m starting to consider updating to 17.04 beta.
GUnity
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/02/ubuntu-17-04-include-gnome-3-24
- sudo apt install xfce4
- Frenchy will tell us all aboot it.
- Good, I don’t like not being able to experiment with the latest version of GTK
- Can’t wait to find out which extension or theme will break!
- Not all GNOME 3.24 apps will be available
- Includes the Night Light feature,
3DQT
http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/02/20/introducing-qt-3d-studio/
- They’re stingy about sharing the sauce on their drivers, but they’ll contribute to other projects.
- NVidia donated the whole NVidia Drive design studio source which includes the 3D GUI, runtime and Qt integration bits, conveniently.
- Currently all closed source and all Windows, but that will change. When? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Erm “But as we have only just received the contribution from NVIDIA, it’ll take use a bit to sort through the source code and mold it into a form that we can publish.”
- Seems they will take use the whole thing.
- Erm “But as we have only just received the contribution from NVIDIA, it’ll take use a bit to sort through the source code and mold it into a form that we can publish.”
GPL decline
https://opensource.com/article/17/2/decline-gpl
- It doesn’t surprise me, for a lot of large projects, the GPL can cause some issues
- The GPL is one of the reasons the Playstation, iOS and OSX are based on BSD and not Linux.
- Complaining the GPL is bad for people looking to protect software development secrets feels a bit like complaining you can’t go off-road with a Lamborghini Aventador.
- Of course, the drop of 0.2% share also accounts for the increasing number of software being developed.
- “In recent years though we have seen a newer generation of developers form for whom there is a less critical, and if I dare say it, less religious focus on freedom.“
- Ding ding ding!
CAM GUI
https://linuxgamecast.com/shatpocalypse/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7791
https://github.com/romlok/x112v4l2
- I like that’s it’s all in Python and Gtk, I could use a coder who knows this stuff :D
- But it seems not everyone likes coding with Gtk, sadly
- X112v4l2 just rolls off the tongue.
The terminal for people with taste
http://www.webupd8.org/2017/02/terminix-150-released-with-initial.html
- You know, Strider, I thought you of all people would prefer a Python based terminal emulator like Terminator.
- Are you cheating on Python with GTK, Strider?
- If there is one thing I absolutely don’t care about it’s what language or libraries a particular uses. (Until I have to send patches that is).
- Terminator is great, I still use it on some machines. Terminix is better.
- Speaking of stuff we don’t care about, Terminix is written in D which is uncommon enough to be noted.
Four ten
https://fossbytes.com/linux-kernel-4-10-released-new-features/
- One thing this article doesn’t mention were the OG Ryzen leaks which came from the update AMD processor microcode to provide Zen support in the 4.10 Linux kernel.
- Maybe the first Linux release where the Nouveau driver is somewhat competitive on the performance and features.
- Bunch of new ARM platforms supported, including better support for the Pi 3.
- Already available in the Ubuntu 17.04 repos.
Slice of Pi
PiMate
https://ubuntu-mate.org/blog/ubuntu-mate-xenial-point-2-raspberry-pi/
- Bunch of updates but not for the kernel which is surprisingly old (4.1)
- Not snap compatible yet, probably for 17.04
Diet
http://dietpi.com/
- It’s difficult to make a raspberry look menacing.
- 400MB image.
- Found out about this while looking into AmiBerry, an Amiga distribution for the Pi
- The setups has tons of different software you can install, desktops, media servers, bittorrent clients, web servers, etc…
- There’s even an option to directly boot into DXX-Rebirth if you like Descent enough to have a whole machine dedicated to it!
Feedback
Ryzen
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?6VJ6cxs
- Ryzen does the chipset interaction differently from Intel and the old AMD processors.
- It includes many of the functionality you usually find in the chipset in the processor dye.
- Which is the case with “IOMMU” support. I don’t honestly know about IOMMU v2, though.
- Thunderbolt 3 on the other hand, is Intel tech and AMD ain’t payin’ to license even more Intel stuff.
- Of course, Thunderbolt 3 is basically a more focused implementation of USB 3.1 Type C.
- If the external GPU market does take off, which it probably won’t, USB 3.1 will give you similar bandwidth with higher latency.