LWDW 207: Wi Fly?

Linux Kernel 5.5 is a Kleptomaniac Octopus! Solus 4.1 enables ESync support, clearing up Pinephone misconceptions, and Qt alters the deal.


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Timestamps:
03:53 Pinephone misconceptions
07:43 Linux Kernel 5.5
10:48 Solus 4.1 Fortitude
14:43 Android-based clouds
17:48 QT changes for 2020
22:23 Thunderbird’s new home
24:48 Terminal stress test
28:23 Open-source Windows 7
31:58 Shameless self promotion
34:03 Pi powered Cyberdeck


Colour key – Venn Jordan Pedro

Pinephone misconceptions 

  • So, the things that absolutely need blobs on the pinephone, are the same which need blobs everywhere else.
  • Cool.
  • Is this Librem’s doing? Is this the work of people who invested into the Librem and are now playing “Console Wars” with their choice of Linux phone?
  • Whatever the case… Really?
  • WiFi and Bluetooth firmware must be uploaded to the Realtek RTL8723cs on initialization… the horror. 
  • That said, there is no RAM or flash storage shared between systems. 
  • Privacy hobbyist.
  • Great article Lukasz Erecinski!  I am happy you wrote this because I have run across articles that said that the phone hardware was closed source, but I knew it was open, and as Pedro said, with the exception of a few proprietary blobs.
  • Yes, and the LTE modem, which runs its own black boxed Linux system has proprietary blobs to run the cellular radio.
  • This is to be expected for security, but it still runs Linux. 

 

Linux Kernel 5.5

  • Linux Kernel 5.5, Kleptomaniac Octopus, has been released with better hardware support.
  • The ext4 filesystem now supports encryption on file systems where the block size is less than the page size and gains direct I/O via iomap.
  • AMD OverDrive overclocking support via command line is also added for Linux gamers using Navi GPUs.
  • Nice!  Now my older Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard with the built in LCD screen will work on Linux.
    • I remember wanting one of those back in the day, I wonder how much they are on eBay.

 

Solus 4.1 Fortitude 

  • Look at the, ESync support.
    • Literally anything would be better than the hard 4096 noop file limit that used to be there.
  • Cloudflare DNS is now used as a fallback secondary to Google.
  • Shipping with ffmpeg 4.2.2.
  • Improvements to systemd, which include future improvements to Solus around EFI support.
  • Yeah, there is an issue with Solus when you install it in a dual boot configuration with another OS, such as Ubuntu, Solus refuses to boot if EFI is enabled.
    • Solus doesn’t use GRUB, it uses the Clear Linux boot manager which just hands it off to systemd-boot directly from the UEFI.
  • And Solus, ships with Linux Kernel 5.4.12, which includes hardware support for newer AMD RX GPUs, such as the 5700 and 5700XT.
  • Also support for AMD Ryzen 3rd gen processors, new Intel Comet Lake and Ice Lake CPUs, as well as Newer NVIDIA GPUs such as the RTX 2080Ti.
  • Solus 4.1 also has much faster installation, thanks to the new Zstandard compression for the SquashFS images.
  • Solus is a rolling release; if you already have it installed, you’re already running this version.

 

Android-Based Cloud

  • The Anbox Cloud is the next step into a Software as a Service cloud computing model, and we become closer to just needing a web browser to access our apps.
    • Jack M. Germain states “Graphical output is streamed back to the client via webrtc. Direct access through a Web browser makes it possible to deliver Android applications to any device that can run a browser.”
  • Pretty soon all our computers and devices will just be thin clients, even our mobile phones!
  • So this is what Canonical has been working on!
  • Oh. Is this how they intend to introduce android app compatibility in Ubuntu phones/laptops in the future?

 

Commercial T

  • “We are making this change to encourage open-source users to quickly adopt new versions.”
    • “We want the open source community to literally become our unpaid beta testers”
    • “We will hold the stable releases behind the paywall.”
  • Something tells me this isn’t going to go down terribly well.
  • Apparently they also removed the old blog post apologizing after the last time they tried this.
  • It’s been seemingly reinstated now.
  • For $499 a year you can get the start-up/small business edition of Qt, which has all the benefits of a commercial license.
  • Well, if the cost of Qt and loss of features is to great for an open source project they can switch to the open source framework of GTK, which is a bit problematic for KDE projects.
  • According to The Qt Company, it is “making this change to encourage open-source users to quickly adopt new versions”. 
  • A general Qt account will be needed to download Qt binary packages. Source packages will stay available to all.
  • QT started as Trolltech in 1995, was acquired by Nokia in 2008, sold to Digia in 2011/2012, and demerged from Digia in 2016.
  • And no, you can’t simply fork software of this complexity.

 

Thunder Tech

  • Very glad to hear the amount of donations has grown for Thunderchicken!
  • As a result, Thunderbirb will be moving to its own subsidiary of Mozilla.

 

Terminal CPU stress test

  • One of the great features of s-tui is that when a certain threshold is exceeded you can have it run a shell script for greater monitoring capabilities.
  • I just recently installed a new GUI stress tester GTKStressTesting a few days ago which is very similar to s-tui.

 

Open Windows

  • If only. 
  • Alphabet agencies from around the world will never let that happen. 
  • Not that online petitions do anything I like the gesture.
  • This would be wonderful, but as Microsoft has stated, they don’t really care about the desktop anymore. 
  • By all means, keep all the backdoors and bits reused in Windows 10 proprietary.
  • Just release everything else.

Slice of Pi

Terminal Pi 

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