Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday – GPL Decline

NVIDIA opens DRIVE! Picard hits 1.4, Terminix enables “Quake” mode, and DietPi dispenses Lightweight Justice.

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Notes:
Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan

News

Make it so
https://blog.musicbrainz.org/2017/02/14/picard-1-4-released/

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

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.

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.

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/

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.