LWDW 298: iNotch for GNOME & Linux in Rust

StarLite releases a slick little netbook, GNOME gets the Apple iNotch, rewriting the kernel in Rust, a trash bin for terminals, and a $1000 sound card gets some Linux love. 

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Notch extension

https://github.com/AlynxZhou/gnome-shell-extension-inotch

• This is something fun, this is the gnome-shell-extension-inotch, so you can add a useless notch to your screen like Apple laptops!
• From the developer Alynx Zhou FAQ on the readme:
  • Question:  “Why you create such an ugly extension?”
  • Answer:  “Please ask Apple why they create such an ugly notch on their laptop.”
  • Question:  “My cursor disappears when it enters the notch!”
  • Answer:  “This is the same behavior as hardware notch.”
• The developer said that this was his most popular project.
• That’s a fun way to stick it to Apple. 
• Although I do find it ironic that this is for the Gnome desktop, the DM you have to customize with extensions. 
• With Apple products, the notch is just built in ;-) 
• And people say there are no good Gnome extensions. 
• If Apple can “adopt” GNOME 3’s poor UI design, I suppose a little quid pro quo was in order?

RCE Lab (RTheren)

https://security.humanativaspa.it/gitlab-ce-cve-2021-22205-in-the-wild/

• There was a massive privilege escalation and remote code exploit discovered in Gitlab.
• If you are running your own gitlab, update yesterday!
• This was a bad one.
• Like: create an account with all default settings and upload an attachment to get full admin access, bad!

StarLite 11

https://starlabs.systems/pages/starlite

• Power button between backspace and delete.
  • Ah, yes. More questionable design choices ripped from Apple.
• Gallium Nitrate? You mean Nitride?
• $400 netbook. 
• The StarLite, a small laptop from Star Labs with an 11″ 1080p matte IPS display has been released:
  • It has an Intel Pentium Silver Processor, up to 3.1GHz quad-core processing 
  • 8GB RAM
  • Aluminium chassis
  • A 2MP webcam
• It is fanless, has a backlit keyboard and a glass touchpad.
• And an estimated 8 hours of battery life.
• And at £400, it is a great price point for an ultra portable, and a great alternative for a Chromebook.
• Also StarLabs has an ‘open warranty’ that lets you disassemble the device without voiding the warranty.
•  £400 for a Pentium N5030 and 8GB of Memory.
• At least it comes with an M.2 SATA SSD and a 1080p iPS 11” screen.
• That’s a little too much though.
• Especially being fanless, that’s going to throttle worse than my Chromebook.
• Don’t buy that, it’s not going to be a good experience.

A simple hobby project

https://seiya.me/writing-linux-clone-in-rust

• Seiya Nuta needs developers to help him write this Rusty Kernel! 
• This would look great on anyone’s resume, and Linus would be impressed ;-) 
• You know what else started as a hobby project? 
• TempleOS. 

Terminal bin

https://gitlab.com/rydal1/save-my-bacon

• So you never have to worry about typing rm -rf ever again in the terminal ;-)
• If you accidentally rm -rf /* you might still have a chance at recovering.

Interfacing Linux: Focusrite Scarlett Solo (Gen3)

https://linuxgamecast.com/2021/10/interfacing-linux-focusrite-scarlett-solo-gen3/

• The Scarlett Solo is a budget interface from Focusrite sporting USB connectivity and two preamps capable of delivering 56 dB of gain. 
• Moral of the story is this. 
• Most modern USB interfaces are class compliant and will work out of the box with Linux. 
• The Scarlett line, like the Motu M2/4, Behringer 2/4X, and Audient idX are budget interfaces. 
• The good news is that you get a lot for a little in 2021. 
• If you want an extra lot for your little look into firewire interfaces. 

RME AIO PRO Drivers

https://github.com/PhilippeBekaert/snd-hdspe

• Good guy RME being good guy RME.
• Keeping up a 20 year tradition. 
• This is a new driver for all HDSPe RME cards minus MADI-FX. 
• It comes with an updated hdpsconfig as well. 
• Now I need to come up with a scheme to get RME to send me one for testing because they are 1 *pinkyfinger* thousand dollars!  

Going to Snap

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/qdm9ke/why_colin_ian_king_left_canonical/

• • That’s the second person to publicly say Snaps were why they left Canonical.
  • Lots of Snaps installed=slow boot times. 
  • That would be one of the reasons why it is recommended to use Snaps for cloud or server when the workstation remains on. 
  • I have been shouting that snaps are bad since I had the displeasure of actually trying to use them.
  • If even the people directly involved with snaps don’t want to deal with it anymore, why insist?
  • Flatpacks have clearly won the full containerized and sandboxed package wars, and AppImages provide a much easier and welcome alternative without the sandboxing.
  • I think it’s okay now, Canonical. You can let them go.
  • With normal debian packaging when a library gets fixed there is zero work required. With snaps one has to refresh the snap. 

• “So apart from the early random sketchy documentation, the unintelligible snapcraft error messages, the loop mount bloat, the slower boot times, the security update pain, the ad-hoc workarounds with scriptlets and multipass breakage it was OK I guess.”

Slice of Pi

Boxy Pi (Rtheren)

https://pibox.io/

• We have talked about Raspberry Pi NASs before, but this one lets you use a standard operating system that you’re used to, like Ubuntu, Manjaro or Raspberry Pi OS.
• Just add a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, a few hard drives and the Linux OS of your choosing!
• You can pre order the PiBox:  A Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server from Kickstarter for $250 that includes the case, circuit boards, LCD display, fan… and the RasPi CM4 already configured.
• Or the hacker bundle for $100 that comes with just the circuit boards, and you provide everything else. 
• The PiBox comes with its own app store, where you can install templates for a PLEX, Minecraft, Nginx or NextCloud server. 
• Thank you RTheren for finding this!
• That’s a very small PiNAS.
• If it’s just $100 for the base board and daughter board, that’s not the worst.

Pi Vulkan 1.1

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-version-1-1-conformance-for-raspberry-pi-4/

• Iago Toral is back with further goodies for Vulkan on the Pi.
• Vulkan 1.1 conformance is here and we still haven’t seen much in the way of software making use of Vulkan on the Pi.
• Having Unreal Engine 4 games on Raspberry Pi 4 is awesome, but don’t expect great gameplay.
• That will be for future more powerful RasPis.

Related:

LWDW 172: The Theme Is GNOME LWDW 327: When DOS is Linux LWDW 300: GNOME In 76 Seconds LWDW 140: Kiss Of A GNOME LWDW 179: Evil Gnome