GNOME backpedals, Electron is the future, RISC-V fanfiction and the ultimate container format has arrived.
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Matt K (new patreon)
Yishan (new patreon)
Madhi19 (USB DAC from our wishzone)
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Colour key – Venn Pedro Jill
News
Abort, ABORT!
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/merge_requests/229
- Turns out people who use their system to do more than post screenshots on the internet need wacky things like basic functionality.
- Also, I can imagine an Enterprise sponsor (or three) politely asked them to perform a reverse rectal cranial inversion.
- As we talked about last week, and what Pedro said, that this is expected functionality that was already there and then was taken away.
- GNOME, learn from this mistake please and don’t take features away!
- Yeah, as it turns out, this was a significant enough bit of functionality that people didn’t take kindly to GNOME just scrapping it.
Power to the 9
https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL1BC1/intro.html
- IBM “POWER” or “Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC” was a competitor to Digital Equipment Corporation’s Alpha RISC processors, Sun’s SPARC RISC processors and Silicon Graphics MIPS RISC processors to name a few.
- Sweet! You can get a hold of an IBM Power9 RISC Processor workstation for under $15,000.
- It is completely enhanced for LInux!
- The firmware is open source, and can be completely edited all the way down to the cpu microcode.
- The Talos II Lit motherboard only comes with 1 Proc slot though, to reduce cost.
- And so true, Katana_Steel in chat, having 22 cores on a single cpu is awesome!
- Here is a Power 7 RISC 16 Core processor from my collection!
- Them PCIe 4.0 slots, though.
- 8 slots of DDR4, which support 16GB DIMMs.
- But only 2 built-in USB3 ports with a header for 2 more in the case.
RISC-V Fanfic
https://www.loomio.org/g/THbo1zmX/risc-v-laptop-working-group
- An open source laptop running a RISC-V workstation level processor would be wonderful!
- Much more powerful than ARM based RISC laptops.
- I’m afraid to ask, how much would this laptop cost?
- $5k for the low end model.
- Currently Nvidia’s Falcon microcontroller used in our GPUs is proprietary, and they want to move over to the RISC-V open source standard.
- If this laptop ran a RISC-five based CPU and GPU, the performance could be incredible!
Welcome to the future
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/16/17361696/chrome-os-electron-desktop-applications-apple-microsoft-google
- With everything being Electron these day it’s a good thing RAM prices are so chea… wait.
- Remember when Flash was the hot new thing?
- Remember when that all came crashing down and now we’re living in the embers of Adobe’s stranglehold of the web?
- Those embers have went out.
- Let’s not let that happen again.
- Electron apps should work nice in ChromeOS, because reasons: Linux.
- And use more CPU/RAM/Battery because reasons.
- Hmm, currently do Electron apps work better in Crostini as compared to Crouton? Looking forward to testing that.
Linuxbook
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/what-linux-apps-on-chrome-os-means-for-open-source/
- It means you might as well buy a lappy.
- What I don’t get is, since crouton works as a chroot, why do Linux apps have to be fully containerized to run on top of what already is Linux?
- I get that in doing so, you’re saving the base OS and allowing it to remain as stable and functional as when it was deployed
- But people who just want the basic ChromeOS functionality aren’t going to be installing the other Linuxy stuff.
- Not to mention you’re adding a non-negligible overhead to run even the simplest applications.
- But again, Google did well with the Android app functionality, so my worries are probably going to be squashed.
- This could mean a much wider audience using Linux apps!
- The author of the article, Jack Wellen, says that Crostini will be pointless to the average user if Linux apps aren’t easy to install via a software repository or Google Play. Most users won’t open a terminal and apt-get install.
- I disagree, only that it is time to teach the average user command line skills as in the early days of computing, and not having to rely on a gui.
- Interesting note: I have noticed that Crostini, Crosh and Crouton all start with a “Cro.” Is there a new naming convention that Google is trying to tell us about?
SnapImageFlat.tgz
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/blog/2018/tarballs-the-ultimate-container-image-format/
- So, Slackpacks?
- No matter the container (Snap, App, Flat) they are all competing with *.deb *.rpm AUR and the like which are good enough.
- You ever try to compete with good enough?
- The way this is implemented is far more modular and cross compatible than what we have with Snaps or Flatpaks.
- So much so, you can have one of these tarballs extract itself into a loadable Docker format.
- That’s great until you realize you’re celebrating another, albeit agnostic, container to work with the other container systems.
- It’s what happens when XKCD 927 meets Inception.
- Makes sense, tarballs have been used since the early days of Unix computing, 1979.
- guix pack –relocatable produces tarballs with automatically relocatable binaries.
- You no longer have to unpack the tarball in the root file system or play tricks with the unshare command.
- guix pack’s are bit-reproducible, anyone can rebuild them to ensure they do not contain malware #OhSnap
Shocking
https://electrek.co/2018/05/19/tesla-releases-softwar-open-source-licences/
- Better late than never, right?
- At least they did it.
- Where’s that Minecraft open source release? Where’s Lightworks open source?
- Elon Musk is no slouch to open source and Linux.
- SpaceX anyone?
- Some of the copyright holders have been complaining that Tesla hasn’t been complying with their licenses.
- It’s a first step toward Tesla fulfilling their legal obligations
- Released two github repos.
- The source code is going to be useful for Tesla owners with root access
- Yes, you can root a Tesla… why do you think I am getting one?
Complete Office Support?
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/05/softmaker-freeoffice-2018-download
- To its credit, I did open one of the most complex excel spreadsheets I use at work and everything worked.
- Well, once I installed the microsoft fonts that is.
- It respected cell sizes and even some custom formatting I had done.
- I’m sure there are people with far more complex spreadsheets than mine, though.
- That said, it also opened the laptop review spreadsheet I have with the results of all the laptops I’ve tested so far.
- But that was made with Libreoffice so it freakin’ well better.
- Runs fast and file size is smaller than LibreOffice and uses less memory.
- It is nice to have another office suite that works well.
- Why would anyone actually choose the Microsoft like Ribbon Menu instead of Classic Menus? At least it’s an option though.
Waka waka
https://www.ostechnix.com/pacvim-a-cli-game-to-learn-vim-commands/
- I remember playing with this several years ago, to refresh my vim command skills. Fun and effective.
- I should play PacVim again, since today I mostly use Nano.
- Nano gets stuff done!
Terminal VIM (RTheren)
https://www.vim.org/vim-8.1-released.php
- Now that’s a neat feature.
- Interactively editing a script and running it in terminal at the same time in VIM, awesome!
IPO on hold
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/dont-expect-ubuntu-maker-canonical-to-ipo-this-year/amp/
- Canonical is taking it’s time before it goes IPO, and that is a good thing.
- No IPO in 2018.
- Mark Shuttleworth, “We know what we need to hit in terms of revenue and growth and we’re on track.”
- Getting rid of Ubuntu pho4ne and the Unity Desktop was the first thing.
- Canonical’s focus is now cloud infrastructure.
- The only way Canonical is going to catch up in the cloud is if they have a time machine.
- They are hopeful for IoT and the Ubuntu Core Snap management system?
Slice of Pi
Luggage Pi
https://hackaday.com/2018/05/17/suitcase-computer-reborn-with-raspberry-pi-inside/
- And now several orders of magnitude more powerful and possibly lighter.
- This required a Pi and an Arduino to do the translation between the old keyboard and something the Pi would recognize.
- If those stupid bluetooth keyboards they call the ZX Spectrum Recreated weren’t so expensive, I would totally shove a Pi in one of those.
- The cheapest Osborne 1 working computer on eBay I could find is $265.
- That is a steal!!! They are usually $500 and up for a working one.
- Non working Osborne’s can be found as low as $120. Using a Pi and Arduino to get it working would be the best way to upcycle these old computers.
- I have .several so called “portable” computers in my collection that were Osborne clones. Including a rare Texas Instruments 90 pound beast, that still works, but I may never find replacement parts for. RasPi to the rescue!!!!!!
- The one thing missing here is a way to get the floppy drives to work
MeaowPi
http://www.instructables.com/id/Green-Means-Go-10-Light-Up-Clock-for-Kids/
- Cool! A cheap way to make a color changing clock that little kids can read.
- There is a Flash app on my Chumby that can do this as well ;-D
- Mine only flashes red, odd.
OBDIIPi
https://www.electromaker.io/blog/article/tune-your-car-with-a-raspberry-pi-obd-ii-tablet
- No, every car made after 1996 has a OBD-II port.
- Right now it only kinda-sorta work with a BMW Mini.
- In the future this could be a cheap device for clearing codes and the like.
Feedback
Switch
https://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?NQrkmnD
Wayland live
https://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?8Opkqgq
- You all look the same to me.