Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday – Debian Stale

Flowblade 1.12 is out! Solus gets bulletproof, XFCE4 destroys a monitor, and self-driving Raspberry Pi’s are now a thing. All this, plus your feedback.

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Notes:
Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan

ARRRRRCH
https://www.linux.com/learn/intro-to-linux/2017/3/manjaro-user-friendly-arch-linux-everyone

I have no idea why we’re talking about Manjaro but we might as well do it once in a while because rolling releases never get any news.
But the article kinda gets it backward. Installing Arch Linux is not *that* hard, especially for people who started with 2 Slackware CDs and a book.
- You had a BOOK!??
The challenge is keeping Manjaro or any Arch based system up and running in the long run.
Truth of the matter is, Easy Mode ARCH!!1! is pretty popular.
And if you want to act smug and claim you’ve installed all the Linuxes, you may even save yourself a few hours of configuring than if you had did it with ARCH!!1! Proper.
Please keep in mind we are not picking on ARCH users, we love ARCH!
Mainly because it’s the chaos-monkey of distros.
We’re picking on those ARCH users.
- ARCH users know the ones I’m talking about.

Penguin Phone
https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2017/03/16/installing-linux-on-an-android-phone/?sc_cid=70160000001273HAAQ

But Android *is* Linux. This is one of the rare case where it doesn’t hurt to say GNU/Linux.
How an android phone would be useful for web development remains a mystery. I personally use Chrome, Chrome for Android and a USB cable.
I always liked the idea of having a full fledged distro running in something which will easily fit into your pocket.
But most of these efforts involve running Linux parallel with Android.
Now I know desktop Linux isn’t exactly ideal for running on a phone, but the concept of having a full fledged computer in your pocket without the limitations or walled gardens you see even with Android, it is very much something I’d like to have.
Maybe after I move to Northumbria, I’ll see about getting my hands on the GPD Pocket.

Flow
https://github.com/jliljebl/flowblade/blob/master/flowblade-trunk/docs/RELEASE_NOTES.md
https://jliljebl.github.io/flowblade/

Alright, that Box tool is wicked neat.
- It’s something that isn’t available in KDEnlive (but you can always Shift+click to multi select)
It now renders with multiple threads.
They haven’t managed to create an AppImage for this version, which is kinda sad for the AppImage technology.
I’ll give it a try once they add thumbnails in the timeline, meanwhile I’ll stick with KDEnlive.

Old man Linux
https://opensource.com/article/16/12/yearbook-linux-test-driving-distros

Nice but I’d like the same article from Bryan Lunduke now.
Linux used to look so bad, it’s no wonder that I didn’t fully switch until 2005.
It didn’t have to look that bad, it was already quite customizable but it’s no secret that there are very few artists using Linux.

Boot Managing
https://solus-project.com/2017/03/26/clr-boot-manager-now-available-in-solus/

Once again, Solus comes and saves the day while other distros are too busy working on mundane projects or fixing problems people do not have.
To be fair, this comes from Clear Linux (Intel)
I wish it also made display drivers bulletproof as well. And LightDM. And a small subset of the GNU tools too. You know, everything needed to make sure you see a desktop when your computer has booted.
One thing that surprised me in that it worked properly, was the UEFI boot menu giving you an option to reboot directly into the UEFI BIOS.
Also, for non UEFI systems this will also handle GRUB2 and all the kernel module loading as well as some basic hardware detection to see if, say you had the NVidia drivers setup and you pulled out the GPU and you’re just using the iGP from your Intel processor or your AMD APU, it would adjust the kernel modules to let you at least boot properly.

XFCE
https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12117

I do like me a clever bug every now and then.
Before seeing the actual bug report, I wondered if we were back in 1997, back when Linux would actually destroy CRT monitors when presented with the wrong XF86Config.
I don’t think the dog “fix” will consistently work, what you need is a picture of a cucumber.

Official Mesa PPA
https://tjaalton.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/mesa-17-0-2-for-16-04-16-10/
https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/ubuntu/updates

About time!! (actually, I don’t use Mesa or when I do it’s on Solus)
Another alternative for people who don’t want to use either the old Mesa version which comes with Ubuntu or even the bleeding edge version from repos such as Oibaf’s, this is good.
Paulo Miguel Dias, aka Padoka0, also has a stable mesa PPA but since it wasn’t “official” some people will outright refuse to use it.

Oh!
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/84396.html

Performance and battery improvements: sounds like a good plan.
It’s currently available for the Nexus 5X, 6P and the Pixel serie

Open Google
https://opensource.google.com/

Nothing really new, but with the massive amount of open source projects Google has, it’s nice to have them indexed somewhere.
Also features some nice documentation for those who build open source software (but it’s very Google-centric)
Another thing for the Googs to kill \:D/

It’s Dead
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3185208/linux/linux-action-show-ends-after-10-year-run.html

At least I was on it.
There’s an opportunity here! We could make this show as big as LAS
- It’s called doing a show for 10 years.
But first we would have to find a proper name for the show. Not something that makes people go “what the hell” and scratch their heads.
- Bold words coming from someone who named a project Lutris.
  - Lutris is a perfectly good name!
Personal opinions about LAS specifically aside, it was a long running Linux show/podcast and a relatively popular one at that.
It would be nice if LWDW could mooch some of those viewers but we’re not exactly the happy, smiley podcasting crew Chris made a point out of having in LAS.

Slice of Pi

PiPhone
https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2017/03/24/handheld-linux-pc-raspberry-pi-iphone

This has to be one of the best uses of a Pi Zero I’ve seen so far.
It’s cheap, it’s as big as 2 phones stacked together and it could even be useful!

Rollin
https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/self-driving-rc-car/

Aaaand we’re back to the usual science project.
That’s said, this one is pretty badass.
Source code will be available soon.

Feedback

ICE
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?pTyB4i3

It should already be in the Unstable repo, you can enable it by adding deb http://http.debian.net/debian unstable main to the /etc/apt/sources.list
And then running sudo apt-get install -t unstable thunderbird

BSD
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?eskmME7