Fedora KDE Plasma spin is dropping X11! 2 million Raspberry Pi’s prepare to ship, reverse-engineering IRIX, and building a ISA sound card with PicoGUS.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:08 Linux isn’t for everyone
05:51 Fedora KDE Plasma drops X11
14:35 Reverse-engineering IRIX
28:46 2 million Pi’s on the way
37:38 Homebrew ISA sound cards
Plasma 6 is Wayland only
https://linuxiac.com/fedora-plans-to-drop-x11-support-in-plasma-6/
https://pagure.io/fedora-kde/SIG/issue/347
- Fedora plans to drop X11 and go all Wayland when Plasma 6 comes out in the Fedora KDE Plasma spin.
- If the proposal is approved it won’t come out until the Fedora 40 KDE Plasma release, which will happen around late April 2024, along with the main Fedora 40 release.
- One of the reasons for X11 being deprecated in the Fedora KDE Plasma 6 release is that the Xorg display server has been deprecated since the release of RHEL 9.0 in May 2022, and will most likely be removed in future major RHEL releases.
- And Fedora being “upstream” of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
- Also, Wayland is now being actively updated, unlike X11, which developers have spent years working around X window system’s bugs and issues since the UNIX days in 1984.
- Fedora has a great track record for spearheading technology forward in their distro, and has already been offering Wayland as default in GNOME, but you could always switch back to X11 when needed.
- Also, Wayland was created by Kristian Høgsberg while he was working for Red Hat, but at that time Red Hat didn’t have the resources to replace X.
Zombie IRIX
https://tedium.co/2023/05/27/sgi-irix-revival-efforts/
- IRIX has a special place in my heart because I learned Alias Wavefront 3D animation software, which is now Maya, on SGI machines.
- Also, I still have my Silicon Graphics Octane and Indigo2 workstations with Alias on it that still work!
- When I think of SGI, I think about the boot chimes.
- The Indy had the best one out of the box but there were 4 to choose from in the prom monitor.
- The 1600SW monitor was always something to lust after as well.
- Then there was the OS, IRIX.
- Some of the folks at Irixnet want to raise $6500 “going towards the goal of technical documentation.
- This could be used as the basis of a new open-source IRIX-derivative kernel.
- It’s going to require a clean room implementation since no code leaks have surfaced in the last fifteen years.
- If you want a taste of SGI check out MaXXdesktop.
Plugs
Kyjorei/KyLinux sent me this mini, cute, great sounding and powerful penguin Bluetooth speaker from my Amazon wishlist! :-D
Kyjorei new patreon
Slice of Pi
The end is Pi
https://www.howtogeek.com/894161/the-great-raspberry-pi-shortage-might-be-coming-to-an-end/amp/
- 2 million units are planned for the second quarter of 2023!
- Are you willing to pay MSRP for 4-year old hardware?
- This is something we have been talking about a lot here on LWDW since the pandemic hit and hardware shortages abound, where are the Raspberry Pis?
- As Ebon Upton said last year, the Raspberry Pi shortage may be coming to an end this year.
- The Raspberry Pi company put together 750,000 Raspberry Pi units in the first quarter of the year.
- And is on track for building 2 million units this second quarter, helping it fill backlogged orders and paving the way for “unconstrained” supply during the remaining half of the year.
- But don’t expect to get your hands on a decent priced Raspberry Pi 4 until the end of the year.
- The Raspberry Pi ecosystem and community is fantastic, and is setup great for schools and tinkeres, thanks to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
- The chip shortage has been catastrophic for the Raspberry Pi company, and other manufacturers of alternative boards have been able to get product out despite the shortages.
- People will be willing to pay MSRP for hardware that is older to remain in its ecosystem.
- And we hopefully will get a Raspberry Pi 5 announcement soon, as they probably were working on one during the pandemic.
ISA Pi
https://github.com/polpo/picogus
- PicoGUS can emulate Gravis, Tandy, AdLib, and game blaster.
- Sound Blaster might be added at some point?
- DMA support isn’t perfect but close.
- About $30 in parts + Pico.
- The original project used a Raspberry Pi 3/4/CM4.
- Toss a game port on it.
- This is awesome considering how much Gravis Ultrasound sound cards go on eBay these days, around $420 and up, and how expensive they used to be when they came out.