LWDW 119: Free As In Beard

GNOME backpedals, Electron is the future, RISC-V fanfiction and the ultimate container format has arrived.

Special Tanks:
Matt K (new patreon)
Yishan (new patreon)
Madhi19 (USB DAC from our wishzone)

Subscribe:

Listen:

Download:

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!!!!!!