LWDW 149: Automatic For The Penguin

MIPS goes open source, Raspberry Pi powered hamsters, AMI joins LVFS, and a look at the Linux powered XPS 13 Developer’s Edition.

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Colour key – Venn Jill Jordan

18.04 vs 2018 XPS

It is so wonderful to see that the new XPS 13 with Ubuntu 18.04 is getting even better reviews than even the older 16.04 models that are so well loved.
Dell’s Project Sputnik has not just achieved creating a model developer edition Linux laptop but an awesome Linux laptop for everyone that we can all be proud of.
“Ubuntu 18.04, which is perhaps the best mainstream version of Linux ever released.”
- Isn’t that right, internet.
It’s well built but the UHD display option is power hungry.
Bit of warning about DPI scaling in GNOME, you have option 1 and option 2.
Still ships with up-your-nose cam.
USB c all the things but you get an adapter.
For the most part things work out of the box.
Price: $890 / $1,680
They remind me a bit of those old white clamshell macbooks
Lacking at least one vanilla usb 3 port is a bit of a misstep IMO
I know a lot of people with the last gen XPS and they’re solid laptops.
Curious if the ram is soldered onboard

KDEnLive update

Kdenlive 18.12 has been released with many bug fixes, and some news on the upcoming 19.04 release!
Fixed backport crash on image sequence import! This is extremely important, as this form of import is industry standard and I often import image sequences of PNGs and TGAs for higher quality instead of video file formats.
Looking forward to the 19.04 release which will include the ability to use parallel processing for render speed improvements.
A new developer joined the team and is fixing MOVIT (GPU effects) support.
The team has also started brainstorming the interface redesign.
I keep forgetting a windows build exists and by all accounts is still a steaming pile of nope.

Open MIPS

Neat, and a welcome addition but I think the RISC-V train has already left the station.
MIPS SoCs have the advantage though, because they are already an industry standard, are already in most devices and have been around for years.
- They are in many embedded devices and routers, and historically in our video game consoles, such as the Nintendo 64, Sony PlayStation, PlayStation 2 etc., and early computer workstations and servers, such as in the DEC Alpha and SGI machines
This is really great to have a competitive open source system on chip alternative to RISC-V.
MIPS is practically a dead architecture.
There is no standard 64 bit architecture for MIPS and the incompatibility between the different implementations is massive.
They are in a gang of routers, even my nighthawk V2 sports a MediaTek MT7621.
That now makes three. Sparc, MIPS and RISC-V.
The last thing I think I owned that used a MIPS processor was the n64
It’s good to see some additional competition in the architecture space, if only for people to scavenge it from parts

AMI joins LVFS (Rtheren)

Richard Hughes has brought us yet another important announcement about the LVFS!
American Megatrends, the world’s largest BIOS firmware vender, who supplies firmware and tools to customers such as Asus, Intel, AMD and many others, joins the Linux Vendor Firmware Service!
This is huge, and means “LVFS Support” becomes a first class citizen alongside Windows Update for the motherboard manufacturers.
- Whatevs, we do what we wanna –System76
Also, expect another large vendor announcement soon? SPECULATE!
Honestly, if they didnt’ expand the initialism I wouldn’t have made the connection
This is good though. It’d be nice to have BIOS updates as easily as a yum update away
Specially cuz some vendors will just straight up require you to DD a bootable CDROM ISO to a flash drive in order to update their bios *cough* lenovo*cough*

Accelerated demise of G+

Sad, really.
I have seen several small but active communities go poof over the past few months.
Google+ and all Google+ APIs will be deprecated earlier than expected, from August 2019 to April 2019.
Another bug was detected in November with a software update of Google+ affecting a Google+ API.
It was fixed within a week and no third party compromised Google’s data, nor is there any evidence that the app developers who had access to this data misused it in any way.
This also hit their enterprise customers using G suite.
At the end of the day I’m surprised G+ lasted as long as it did.

MS Linux

How about a DX12 accelerated Xserver?
After reading this article I had a horrible dream that we would be complaining about Microsoft’s implementation of Linux with Windows like we complain about Google’s implementation of Linux with Chrome OS :-(
Windows apps can be containerized on Linux, a lot like what Chrome OS is doing with native Linux apps.
Windows is already doing the reverse with Linux apps with their Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Hmm, maybe Microsoft will just open source the NT Kernel instead?
And yes, gaming on Linux would be king!!!
Steven is correct that 2017 was the year of the Linux desktop on windows.
Also, having a premade compatibility layer (WINE) being a thing would ease such a transition.
However this is wishful thinking and all for naught since any serious development at Redmond is being done to make Windows as a service a thing.
Microsoft is throwing serious R&D behind Project xCloud (their game streaming service) because when they get that sorted delivering a desktop experience will be trivial.
I mean, microsoft has already released a linux distribution for virtual switching
We’ve long known that MIcrosoft wants desktop as a service to be a thing, and forking chrome is likely the first step in creating something like a Edgebook
Even that still needs a kernel to boot off of, and I don’t see why they wouldn’t just use the NT/MINWIN/whatever microsoft’s minimal install is

Google being Edgy

Did MS really need help sabotaging Edge?
YouTube has never played that great on Internet Explorer or Edge.
And yes, recently at work have experienced Edge not playing YouTube videos.
- Had to turn off “Use Adobe Flash Player” in settings and “Clear browsing data.”
  - Really Microsoft, in today’s day of HTML5 you still have Flash enabled by default to play videos!
  - Every other browser has no problem with this.
  - Yeah, as Venn said, your sabotaging yourself . . .
Microsoft couldn’t keep up with patching Edge, because it could only update its browser with official Windows 10 updates and not independently.
Now that Edge is on Chromium and independent of the OS the developers can update it as often as they want.
It honestly amazes me that tying Edge to the OS was considered a good design choice at any point, ever.
Do I think Googs is up to dirty tricks? Absolutely!
They have the market dominance that Microsoft held (and abused) in the 90’s.
And you know what, they abuse that power, often.
While I aspire to be a good person this is one of those situations where I can look the other direction and if we’re being totally honest… smile.
And ye, microsoft did not learn the lesson that targeting google is like targeting GTK. Don’t expect what worked a week ago to work today
And yes, 100% google is trying to make their webapps run poorly on non-chromium browsers. It’s how they’re trying to keep their market share captive

Slice of Pi

Project floof

So cute! Everything else is getting data logged to the internet, so why not Hamsters to!
A magnetic door sensor (like the kind used in alarm systems) is used to detect each time the wheel makes a complete rotation.
The sensor is hooked up to the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi, where it’s read by a Python script.
Using MQTT IoT software on the Pi, the data is then uploaded every minute to a ThingSpeak channel that graphs the date for easy readability.
It’s a bit messy looking, not very accurate but you don’t do projects like this out of need, nay.
You do them as a testament to humankind’s arrogance.
Do you think floofball is cute?
This is a testament to what sort of wacky crap people get up to when they have access to a open hardware platform
Is your gerbil to fat? We gotcha fam

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