LWDW 167: Swapping Linux

Ubuntu releases a Disco Dingo, Kdenlive refactors all the things, Fermilab kills Scientific Linux, and why almost always add swap space.

Timestamps:
02:41 Ubuntu 19.04
06:24 PopOS 19.04
09:53 Debian 10
12:51 RIP Scientific Linux
14:57 Kdenlive 19.04
19:10 Linux and swap
26:23 Freedom Box
28:37 Shameless self promotion
30:41 Tracking Raspberry Pi’s
33:15 GUI programming with Pi
37:10 Listener feedback

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Colour key – Venn Jill Pedro

Ubuntu 19.04

Kernel 5.0.
NVIDIA drivers made in this century? Madness!
Yall still forgot to compile ffmpeg with nvenc for some bizarre moon reason.
Loved it so much I installed Xubuntu 18.04.
As we have been talking about the last few months, the much improved GNOME desktop 3.32 ships with Disco Dingo, which brings lots of performance improvements, bug fixes, and overall is a lot faster.
The latest development release Mesa 19 comes pre installed.
The proprietary NVIDIA graphics drivers can be installed during installation.
- That should have been an option a long time ago!
I still have my install of default 19.04 on the X230, I think I’ve given GNOME enough of a chance to change my mind and it still hasn’t.

PopOS 19.04

Pop!_OS 19.04 is available for download with all the improvements and updates of the Ubuntu 19.04 release, but with some wonderful new features.
Pop!_OS is not just beautiful, but has become one of the best distros to game on because of its thoughtful innovations to classic Ubuntu.
Pop!_OS has two seperate ISOs that you can download, one AMD/Intel for the latest MESA graphics drivers and one NVIDIA which includes the proprietary NVIDIA 418 graphics drivers.
Lutris and Gamehub are now available in the Pop!_Shop.
And for something amazing! Using the Live USB of Pop!_OS 19.04 NVIDIA edition, I was able to game spanning 3 monitors with games I downloaded from Steam and Lutris with full NVIDIA hardware acceleration!! The Talos Principle running Vulcan and Unreal Tournament in Lutris were tested as well as Proton.
Ok, it takes a lot of work editing configs normally to game in Gnome spanning 3 monitors in a full install, let alone in a live CD. Way to go System76! From now on my base Ubuntu install will be Pop!_OS :-D
Since Strider likes this distro so much, I’m obligated to remind everyone they made another Ubuntu spin distro when they could have simply released a PPA.
- But they have that, too.

Debian 10

4.19 is a good call for a Kernel.
That’s the kernel that turned the RNG crapshoot simulator that was modesetting at boot on the Steambox, into a system that booted reliably every single time.
AppArmor… I’m no fan of SELinux, but AppArmor? Really?!
Also, why do distros keep playing to the of and paying Microsoft for that Secure Boot piece of junk?
A faster GNOME Desktop 3.30.
- Packages moved from libgtk2+ to libgtk3+
- Gstreamer1.0-packagekit for automatic codec installation for playing movies etc.
The old OpenJDK 8.0 is finally being replaced by OpenJDK 11.0.

End of Scientific Linux (RTheren)

This is going to cement Cent as the distro for any kind of large scale deployment.

Kdenlive 19.04

Video clips use separate tracks for audio/video by default now instead of needing to be split in the timeline.
Video and audio tracks can now be resized in the timeline.
Keyboard navigation in the timeline and with keyframe movement.
All of these new features are industry standard in non linear video editors and help Kdenlive in a professional workflow.
CUDA accelerated rendering and effects when?
I know that’s a MLT issue but it needs addressing.
The AppImage works quite well.

Linux and swap

One of the best reasons to create swap space: “Even if there is still available RAM, the Linux Kernel will move memory pages which are hardly ever used into swap space.”
The amount of swap space you need to allocate is greatly dependent on the memory usage of the applications you are running.
My workstations and servers that I render animation on have a much larger swap space than computers I just use for daily tasks.
For regular Desktop use, swappiness of 10 is more than enough.
In my use case, since I never leave the PC on overnight or let it sit idle all that long, I found that 1 perfect.
I would say, in the current day, and with SSDs getting cheaper, swap should be at least 8GB.
That’s a big enough buffer that you won’t run out of memory if something (Chrome) starts nomming all your RAM.

Freedom Box

It’s a RasPi sized box with a couple of USB ports and an ethernet connection.
It lets you set up a home server which you can use external storage for and it’s all built on open source hardware and software.
82€ seems a bit much…
Especially when you think that RasPi 3 B+ has 4 USB connections and a Quad Core ARM 64bit SoC, all for €35.
Sure, you’re paying for the work that went into creating an OS specifically for this purpose and in which the setup will be minimal to accomplish what you need.
The thing here is, how much do you value your time?

Slice of Pi

Seeking Pi’s

Moral of this story, change the default credentials on your Pi!

Introduction to C GUI programming

You know, I wish I’d had a book on C that I could have understood going through University.
That first semester and programming was such crap I couldn’t even.
Still finished it with an 18/20 because the whole grade came down to the final project, which was to build a fast sudoku solver.
K&R introduced “Hello, world” to the programming ethos, and I remember learning C in middle school in the early 80’s.
I don’t understand why it’s based on GTK2… GTK4 will soon be a thing.

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