LWDW 122: Venn's Basement

Gitlab scales the Slashdot effect, Red Hat enables Wacom firmware updates and editing pixel art inside the terminal. All this, plus your emails.

Special thanks to:
Bithir (new patreon)
Yosef B (new patreon)
Wintercel (new patreon)

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Colour key – Venn Pedro Jill

News

Plasma 5.13.0
https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.13.0.php

- They don’t mention any fixes for general KWin crashiness.
- And that’s been happening since 5.0.
- I don’t give a tiny rat’s ass if it takes 2 full GB of RAM to accomplish this, just effing do it.
- It’s not difficult to have a desktop which doesn’t crash when playing an isometric 2D roguelike from 2002.
  - Stock·holm syn·drome

- feelings of trust or affection felt in certain cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking by a victim toward a captor.
Plasma Browser Integration, System Settings Redesigns, New Look for Lock and Login Screens and and initial support for screencasts and desktop sharing.
There is also a tech preview of GTK global menu integration but it’s so new even the page it’s linked to doesn’t work.

Thunar 1.8.0
https://andreldm.com/2018/06/06/thunar-1.8.0-release.html

Full gtk3 support.
Redesigned path bar.
They say you may want to update XFCE and the Thunar plugins you may be using to be able to take advantage of the full feature set, since they had to change the API for GTK3.
Will all Xfce components get ported to GTK3 before the release of GTK4… or will it be 5.
Buttons next/previous/up/home added but are currently available in 1.8.
If you update to 1.8 you should also update all installed thunar-plugins and xfdesktop.

Scaling GitLab
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/cloud/how-did-gitlab-scale-slashdot-effect-point-and-click

GitLab is a remote-only company with no office powered by virtual machines.
Microsoft vs Linux is only a Hatfields vs McCoys thing if they were in a level playing field.
Gitlab was still doing their migration to Google Cloud Services when they got hit.
Part of the reason they were moving is the support for Kubernetes and its scaling features.

It’s all cool, right
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/microsoft-buys-github-the-linux-foundations-reaction/

Full disclosure: Microsoft is one of their platinum sponsors.
Yes, Microsoft buying Github is good in the sense of money.
Microsoft has been making a lot of money for the past decades.
So true: “Buying GitHub does not mean Microsoft has engaged in some sinister plot to “own” the more than 70 million open source projects on GitHub. Most of the important projects on GitHub are licensed under an open source license, which addresses intellectual property ownership.”
Again, as we have talked about in the last few months, our penguin army marches on and Microsoft cannot change the GNU General Public License or the laws that protect it.

No D
https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork/ascii-stable-announce-060818

Devuan is a fork of Debian that eschews the Red Hat-developed systemd init system in favor of alternatives such as sysvinit, among others.
It’s nice to have continued support of an unbloated init distro, besides Slackware.
I was happy when Debian development split because of systemd so that we could continue both the core philosophy of Linux and that of a more unified one.
And ultimately, see what changes it would make, good or bad, to our favorite operating system.
Debian is the swiss army knife of all the linux distros, and supports every architecture, both modern and vintage, and its important to keep it as lightweight and flexible as possible.
There are still systemd-free distros out there, support them if you care.
And no, I do not live in a fantasy world where init startup scripts were not a hot mess.
No problems with systemd on my end, yet.
Unless you call fast startup and shutdown a problem.
Devuan, pronounced “dev one,” is available for 32- and 64-bit PCs, with specialized ARM images available for certain Chromebooks, as well as the MeeGo-era Nokia N9, N900, and N950 phones, and the Motorola Droid 4.

Wacom Firmware
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/06/coming-soon-wacom-firmware-updates-on-linux

Like we talked about last week with Linux support of the Dell Canvas.
Red Hat does it again with native Wacom firmware update support in Linux.
Further proving that Linux adoption in the art, animation and gaming industries is growing by leaps and bounds :-D

…hipsters
https://github.com/dylanaraps/pxltrm

Oooh, this brings back memories of my ANSI art days of BBSs :-D
A pixel art editor inside the terminal written in Bash and no mouse required!
PNG export will be coming, so just use “cat” in terminal to view your saved files.
Does it support mouse input?

TTL
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/8p5tug/bypassing_verizons_unlimited_plans/

A handy little life hack by a fellow Linux human.
Run an ssh server in termux to use as a socks proxy
Mobile thinks the data is coming out of an app on the phone other than the hotspot app, so its treated like normal data.
Another “hack” is to increase the default TTL on your PC by 1.

MS 💖 Linux Segment

WinePAK
https://winepak.org/

I guess something good came out of that story of piracy using a flatpak.
Winepak is a Flatpak repository for Microsoft Windows applications bundled with Wine.
Several games are already available: Overwatch, WOW, League of Legends, World of Tanks, Path of Exile . . .
- You can already use Strider’s Lutris to install these though :-D https://lutris.net

Enter name
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/07/redmond_renaming_gvfs/

If it’s not Git Virtual File McGit Virtual File Face the internet will know its been lied to.
Especially since the new CEO of GitHub, Nat Friedman, is the co-founder of Gnome.

How is Microsoft’s failure at packaging news?
Everyone Googles and downloads random exes on Windows and every time they’ve tried a store or central repo, they’ve failed miserably.
rm -rf Microsoft

Slice of Pi

Open Synth
https://hackaday.com/2018/06/08/a-fully-open-source-raspberry-pi-synthesizer/

Zynthian is an open platform for sound synthesis.
Build your own Raspberry Pi 3 synthesizer! The least expensive way to own a synth.
Kits range from 250.00 € and up and include all parts needed.
MIDI over IP using a web interface.
Uses Jack Audio.
Uses some of my favorite music apps: ZynAddSubFX, FluidSynth, Dexed, NoizeMak3r.
These apps have come a long way, and it’s wonderful seeing them being used professionally in this arena, and will help the much needed adoption of linux in the music industry.

Feedback

Upgrades
https://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?ulxW1mf