LWDW 115: RIP C.H.I.P.

Plasma records Wayland, NVIDIA gets a top, Ubuntu 18.04 is almost ready and the C.H.I.P. is no more. All this, plus your emails.

Special thanks to:
Frostclaw20 (new patreon)
Jrullio (increased pledge)
Truggs (arts & crafts from the wishzone)

Subscribe:

Listen:

Download:

Subscribe Spotify | Pandora | TuneIn | RSS | More

Colour key – Venn Pedro Jill

News:

Das cloud
https://www.techradar.com/news/german-government-goes-open-source-with-open-source-cloud-firm-nextcloud

Great! At least Microsoft won’t be running on the backend and they will be using a proper web server “LAMP” with NextCloud.

Munich goes back to Windows and the government goes “Maybe there’s something to this open sauce, thing!”
has been running a pilot of 5,000 users with Nextcloud since October 2016
the focus of the tender was “the construction of a private cloud for the federal government
fully GDPR compliant

RIP CHIP
https://getchip.com/pages/store

My Steve_Husband has been inadvertently following this story for well over a year.

When he first tried to buy it for me two winter holidays ago it was on backorder. Then when he tried to get it for my birthday there were angry posts in the forums. I really wanted one for my collection, but I am glad he didn’t preorder and loose money.
The chip was an interesting concept in packing as much horsepower into as small an SoC as possible.
But when you have the Raspberry Pi compute module, which fits into a standard SO-DIMM slot you’ve lost the race.
I’m still not fully convinced they were able to manufacture these for $9.
Especially when you factor in R&D + packaging.
Might explain the initial run and nothing after.

Plasma progress
http://www.subdiff.de/2018/04/21/progress-on-plasma-wayland-for-513/

Font aliasing, who ever took that screenshot has clearly never heard of it.
Would be useful to have that per display scaling on X.
Lots of Wayland stuff.
Including not defaulting the QT_QPA_PLATFORM variable to Wayland to minimize breakage.
Screen recorders don’t need to add support for whichever Wayland compositor you use but instead xdg_desktop_portal…
- Which, if you’ve been using flatpaks, should be more familiar.
…and PipeWire.

NVIDIA top
https://github.com/abhishekbajpayee/nvidia-top

Setup a CUDA GPU animation render in Blender 2.79 to track memory usage in nvidia-top, which like top or htop tracks stats continuously.

And compared the results with the nvidia-smi utility which tracks stats statically, and has to be launched every time you want to monitor the GPU.

Here is a screenshot of nvidia-top and nvidia-smi running while rendering in Blender. Also notice the memory usage of X, like Pedro stated above, but with the lightweight
Fluxbox window manager:

X1 marks the hole
https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/04/24/tegra-x1-processor-vulnerability-discovered-affects-nvidia-shield-pixel-c-nintendo-switch/

Arbitrary code injection through the USB stack.
The Switch, SHIELD (No not that one, or that one, or that one), and the Pixel C are all vulnerable.
Hey! Someone found a way to maybe make the Pixel C useful.
And it can’t be fixed because it is hard wired by a crispy fuse!

New hotness
https://www.zdnet.com/article/whats-the-most-popular-linux-of-them-all/

The “New Hotness” to the Linux leet is Ikey’s Solus.
Mint was dethroned by an infinitely more user friendly distro, Manjaro.
Solus seems to have gotten to the point where I’m running out of excuses to just use it.

Linux Subsystem For Linux
https://www.slashgear.com/chrome-os-terminal-app-hints-at-upcoming-linux-support-23528192/

I can’t help but be slightly annoyed with the news articles coming out title “Linux support coming to ChromeOS”
- Yu wot?
Now, if it were ChromeOS Android app support coming to Linux, that’d be news!
There was already a terminal for the Chromebook in the Chrome Browser that could be accessed by enabling developer mode at boot and pressing Ctrl+Alt+t.
I used it to install Crouton with Ubuntu on my original Samsung Series 5 Chromebook in 2011.

Rebound
https://github.com/shobrook/rebound

Eager Beaver
https://itsfoss.com/ubuntu-18-04-release-features/

Tomorrow April 26th is the release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver!
- I know what I am going to be doing tomorrow! Installing 18.04.
- Ubuntu warns “Eager Beavers” to wait a month before a reinstall.
  - But what if I don’t want to wait that long to apt-get dist-upgrade to 18.04.1 LTS on my 16.04 box of business? :-(

Important new features in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS:
- GNOME 3.28 is the default Display Manager, and Unity is no more.
- Boot speed boost using systemd libraries.
- A new minimal installation option, which installs the base Ubuntu, a web browser and utilities.

- Installing PPAs requires one less line in terminal. When running add-apt-repository apt-get update is automatically run.
  - Good.
- Linux Kernel 4.15
- Xorg will be the default display server again. Not all apps worked in Wayland, which was the default display server used in Ubuntu 17.10. You do have the option though to switch from Xorg to Wayland in 18.04.