LWDW 218: Grilling With C

AV Linux has a new release! System 76 goes full-lemur, WindowMaker gets an update, and open-source virtual backgrounds for webcams.

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Timestamps:
04:43 Lemur 76
07:03 GNOME community challenge
08:48 AV Linux
12:33 Window Maker 0.95.9
15:33 Git turns 15
18:13 RT quick scan
21:48 Fast FAT
23:58 Open-source backgrounds
27:58 Shameless self promotion
29:38 BBQ Pi
23:13 Pi ventilators
34:13 Emails

System 70 Lap

Up to 14 hours of battery life per charge
10th Gen Intel Core i5 and i7
Up to 40GB Dual Channel DDR4
System76 Open Firmware with Coreboot
Up to 4TB NVMe drives
Open FW is all very good, but how about them Ryzens?
At only 2.2 lbs, it packs a punch!
And you can connect two monitors to it, via HDMI and USB-C.

Gnome Community Challenge

- I have been looking forward to talking about this wonderful event!
“The GNOME Foundation, in partnership with Endless, is proud to announce the inaugural Community Education Challenge, an exciting new opportunity to engage beginning coders with the free and open-source software (FOSS) community.”
They are looking for individuals or teams to submit creative, fun and engaging ideas to encourage new coders and developers to contribute to the FOSS community and stay engaged.
It is a 3-part challenge offering $65,000 in cash prizes and other rewards to the winners of each phase:
- Phase One: Written proposal with entry description and team background
- Phase Two: Proof of Concept
- Phase Three: Sample Project
Phase One is now open for submissions till July 1, 2020 and can be submitted online from the link in our show notes.
At SCaLE 18x I talked to Melissa Wu, the Program Coordinator at the Gnome Foundation, who told me all about the challenge and stayed in contact with me. I let her know I would tell the community all about it on LWDW.

AV Linux new release

This is a good distro that has most of the right bits flipped for RT audio production.
The new hotness is based on Debian Buster with a 5.4 RT & low latency kernel.
Nuked KDE.
- The ‘K’itchen sink was making the iso a chonky boy.
Updated noise repellent.
Several years ago, when I first tried this distro, I had played around with the Cinelerra-GG Video Editor and noticed how stable it was in AV Linux.
The AV Linux user manual is one of the best and most detailed that I have ever seen for any distro.
NVMe support for even lower access latency.

WindowMaker 0.95.9

Yeh, it has been more than 3 years since the last stable release, but now WindowMaker 0.95.9 is here, with lots of bug fixes, improvements and visual cleanup!
There are lots of updates to the WPrefs configuration window, including a new advanced option to ignore decoration changes from clients in the advanced tab.
I have had issues with apps like Steam crashing, because there is a bug in wmaker with apps that do not use window decorations by default.
Also system fonts are properly read in the font configuration panel now, and are not visually garbled.
And there is a fix to missing appicons after restarting Window Maker.
WindowMaker is one of my favorite X window managers and I have been using it since the late 90’s, because I love living the NeXTSTEP and OpenStep lifestyle.
SwitchPanel is now more configurable.
New user configuration directory environment variable.
libXmu is now an optional dependency.

15 years of GIT

Ctrl+F Microsoft yields no results.
There goes my interest!
The Git distributed version-control system and collaboration changed the way developers, and the world build software.
Linus not only created Linux, but built an open source framework for maintaining it.

RT quick scan

Do you have pips & pops in your audio like Pedro did on Monday?
This handy little script will point you in the right direction.
It’s even good for checking if you forgot something obvious.
Like allowing access to HPET.
I got less “Not goods” than I expected:
- https://i.imgur.com/gXg2wrC.png
- 1. It has a GUI #TIL.
- 2. In terms of “things that will cause issues” that scores a solid 3 …out of 100.
- I can’t do anything about the last one with either the Xanmod or default kernels
- https://i.imgur.com/4SqzTH2.png
This worked great for me, especially since I am using a newly installed distro that still needed some tweeks.
And like Venn said, forgetting something obvious, like setting CPU Governors to ‘performance’ on my Ubuntu Mate install.

Fast FAT

Bad article title is bad!
Increasing the speed of the legacy FAT16/FAT32 file system reads and writes is most welcome, especially for using digital cameras and for accessing EFI partitions from our computers.
This is only for FAT?

Virtual green screen