NASA opens the source! Solus sorts Optimus, General Arcade goes full SDL2, and Razer acknowledges Linux. All this, plus your feedback!
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Notes:
Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan
News
Nasa Soft
http://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-s-just-released-a-bunch-of-its-software-for-free
https://software.nasa.gov/search/software/Linux
- A lot of software available with Linux versions and for multiple different purposes.
- The software is free but it’s not Free Software.
- The NASA also has another collection of software at https://code.nasa.gov/ and it’s all open source
- I’m more interested in the website itself which is built with the Polymer framework.
- “Unless you’re building a rocket or an aircraft in your backyard”
- Hybrid rocket engine annoy the hell out of your neighbors master race!
Badly Shoop’ed Book
https://liliputing.com/2017/03/litebook-249-linux-laptop.html
- The CPU is weak but that’s to be expected for that price range
- Doesn’t seem to have a backlit keyboard so, for me, it’s a no.
- No option for an additional SSD?
- If you order a lappy from a company that has two shooped pictures on their buy page… you deserve what you get.
- Seriously, that’s the kind of grade school shooping Craigslist buyers try to pull to sell their old crusty cars.
- 250 would be a good price point, in a world where Chromebooks didn’t cost as much and gave you android app compatibility.
Beard Certification
https://www.fsf.org/news/three-devices-from-vikings-gmbh-now-fsf-certified-to-respect-your-freedom
https://store.vikings.net/libre-friendly-hardware
- A server grade motherboard, an old refurbished Thinkpad and a cheap USB soundcard, that’s an unlikely combination.
- You can get X200 Thinkpads for half the price on ebay
- You want to charge me 5.95€ for installing Linux?
- What Libre-Friendly CPUs do these critters support again?
- OpenSPARC? LEON?
- I get why people want these type of devices, but I don’t know anyone who actually owns one.
- These would be great not only with a proper Libre CPU but also if they had wider adoption and were made considerably cheaper.
- Seriously, 300€ for a laptop I can get refurbished for €200 in a store down the street?
4.11-RC1
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1703.0/03031.html
- Everyone knows how Linus will react to poor quality patches and yet they keep coming, looks like some people are just looking for trouble
- Does Not Improve Ryzen performance.
- Unless they start shipping kernels with the Brainfuck Scheduler enabled by default, I don’t see too big of a performance boost in the future either.
- Oh, that’s cute :)
- “Yeah, I’ll allow this one too”
- Is it just me or is Torvalds getting a little soft in his old age.
Not Dead Yet
https://fsfe.org/news/2017/news-20170301-01.en.html
- The FSF takes this matter quite seriously
- If Munich wants to shoot themselves in the foot why not let them?
- They have until 2020 to pull a Summer.
- During the “transition” they can continue using LiMux.
- “The administration shall without delay propose a strategy how to unify the city’s client-side IT architecture by 2020-12-31, building on a yet-to-be-developed ‘Windows-Basis-Client‘. Baseline functionality (word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software, PDF reading, e-mail client and Web browser)”
- It’s not looking good, Brad.
- I hope they’ll enjoy having to pay a metric effeton of licensing fees on top of everything else.
- That’s the kind of brilliant decision making that drains municipal coffers.
Razer-thin
https://insider.razerzone.com/index.php?threads%2Fwelcome-to-the-linux-corner.20618%2F
- I was about to say that Razer is Dell but no, I was thinking about Alienware. Good to see another company jump on the Linux train.
- This could almost be considered a Steam machine
- Translation: Quit bugging us about Linux support in the general forums.
- Admittedly the Razer Blade laptop always interested me as a tinker tool.
- TIny LCD screens in every single key, a touchscreen as a touchpad, and the hardware/firmware support to rebind every single key/trackpad motion already baked in.
- I’ve always been curious try… Just not €1100 curious.
Remapping
https://twitter.com/generalarcade/status/839352501824413697
http://generalarcade.com/gamepadtool/
- It’s kinda like sc-controller but it works on more than just the Steam Controller.
- And it can work off of an environment variable as well as replacing the SDL gamecontrollerdb.txt file.
Optimum Solus
https://solus-project.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=4828
- How many years has Optimus been around? Many! And every single distro has failed to provide a working setup for it.
- And from out of nowhere, you have Solus that always does the right thing.
- It’s not working 100% yet, in fact you have no option but to run both GPUs “always on” the whole time for now.
- The end goal and the thing that was always problematic is to allow switching the discrete NVidia chip on and off at will/as necessary to save power.
- Which you still can’t do without logging out and back in yet, anyway.
- This is the result of a distro that cares more about the desktop experience than running the system on an phone.
- At this point, I don’t believe that the big names in the Linux world believe in Linux on the desktop. But Solus, Elementary and Ubuntu Mate, they are true believers.
Slice of Pi
BANG
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/internet-of-things/recipe-legal-firecracker/
- Now your raspberry pi can vape too
- Do NOT go digging around in a E-cig!
- Lithium Ion batteries will melt your face off.
- The 18650s in my vape-o-tron 9K are grenades.
- Got some extra capacitors lying around and nothing to do, here’s a way to make sure they will no longer work.
Signal
http://www.briandorey.com/post/Raspberry-Pi-Zero-W-external-antenna-mod
- This will invalidate the FCC certification.
- I was going to talk some smack about the soldering skills until I remembered how tiny this critter was.
- And if you do want to use a bunch of these as the base for embedded wireless devices, that antenna will help considerably with the signal boost.
Feedback
Testing
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?abtVFcS
https://packages.qa.debian.org/f/firefox-esr.html
