LWDW 137: Hat Free

OpenShot 2.4.3 plays with threads, zombie Mir gets a point release, learning ARM assembly with the Raspberry Pi and Peertube gets an app?

Special thanks to:
Colsta (new)
Mlangston (increased pledge)

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Colour key – Venn Pedro Jill

Hacktoberfest 2018

There is an excellent guide to “How to Contribute to Open Source.” for first-timers and veterans alike linked in the article!
- There are many ways to contribute to Open Source, not just writing code, but helping organize a project, planning events and conventions, creating artwork and writing documentation.
“Last year, 30,000+ people from over 100 countries (119 to be exact!) submitted almost 240,000 pull requests to all kinds of projects”
- Last year you were not owned by Microsoft.
I’m looking forward to seeing the number from 2018

The ability to select which files to download and which to keep online only is a very good thing to have.
Especially in the age of SSDs where space is still at a bit of a premium.
Sync performance improved by reducing unnecessary file scanning.
- Such as, if you change a small file in a directory with lots of files it will upload much faster.
The ownCloud client also does checksumming with the server. When you upload and download a file it checks if the file was corrupted during the sync, thus preventing lost files.

The CLIP OS Project is based on Gentoo Hardened, which is a Gentoo project that offers multiple additional security services on top of Gentoo Linux.
Gentoo Linux makes sense because it is very fast, modular, configurable and runs well on embedded systems.
- If Google used it to make ChromeOS it can’t be all that bad!
Security focused distro from the lands of the Comandon.

So Mir has been reduced to providing a display for digital signage and the like?
I guess maintaining as a compositor/window manager for wayland is not a terrible idea.
Could have gone with that from the start.
This makes sense for IoT, because Mir was originally announced by Canonical in March 2013 as part of the development of Unity 8 and the future of convergence between Ubuntu mobile and desktop.
The Display Configuration file for mir-kiosk reminds me of a text version of the nvidia-settings panel, and looks much easier to edit and configure than the xorg.conf file.

I use YouTube to play music all the time and have started using Rey instead.
Rey has a beautiful user interface and is organized like a good music player should be.
Being able to create proper music playlists which you can sync to Google Drive is wonderful.
And no adds play with the YouTube videos, so it makes a good YouTube video player as well.
Cloud sync and being able to reliably play moosik for the Tubes is good, but Youtube itself already lets me do that.
I don’t think I ever felt the need for a dedicated Youtube music player.
Then again, I only have the need for music player on the desktop in the sense that I may need to sort through MP3s to put on my phone.

P2Play is an Android Application for Peertube, the federated video streaming platform which uses WebTorrent we have been talking about since April.
Downloaded and installed the P2Play apk on Android and searched linuxg[email protected], and it played our LGC/LWDW vods!
P2Play is a work in progress, and will include a search videos feature in the next version, which it really needs.
Really good progress thus far and a much needed application if PeerTube is to gain any actual traction.
It puts the media consumption app in the media consumption device or it gets the hose again.

Basically, if you’re running Solus you already have all of this.
On a side note, the Nvidia driver beta in the Solus repo is now on version 410.
Don’t install them. They kept crashing my X session and dumping me back at the login screen.
I would like an option in between using the crashy beta drivers and the long lived branch, to be honest.
Ships with Linux kernel 4.18.5 which provides the latest support for AMD and Intel CPUs, including support for high core count CPUs like AMD Threadripper 2.
Improved Realtek wireless card and dongle support with enablement of the RTL8XXX/RTL8XXXU modules.

OpenShot 2.4.3 adds support for creating animated masks and transitions using images and videos. A powerfully creative feature for artists, and a crucial element for any editor to be taken seriously, like that of Kdenlive.
And, as in the last release, there are more improvements to audio as the creator Jonathan Thomas has promised:
- Waveform display rendering is much more precise and easier to edit.
- Fixed audio wave not rendered after completion, which would cause the audio track to stutter when navigating it in the timeline.
FFmpeg 3 and 4 support which will result in faster rendering of video and audio codecs.
I can finally click through the tooltip window and get to the editor, progress!
I loaded a 1.9GB *.mkv and a 88.4MB *.wav to test it out.
After about three minutes of unresponsive UI OpenShot added the clips.
Then I dared to trim the clips and waited another solid minute before the edits appeared.
Deleting the trimmed clips froze X and I was forced to TTY and kill -9.

Being able to view a preview of the pictures in terminal is a nice feature and quick. And you do have an option of launching a picture in a separate web browser tab as well with the “view content” command.
This is really cool, but I think would prefer it on a local shell instead, like the Reddit Terminal Viewer: https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv
- ^
Putting it in a browser is just so someone feels justified to make an electron app out of it.
If you are forced to use something like this to fwart your employer overlords you are probably not in a position to install software on your machine.
But that’s none of my business.

Slice of Pi

;neat

Learn assembly with the ARM based Raspberry Pi!!!
Assembly is a low-level programming language whos statements correspond to machine code architecture.
It is great for SoC and embedded programming, and is also used in our computers BIOS.
Assembly was one of the first languages I learned on a C64, Atari ST, my Apple II and x86 PCs.