not all change is progress
March 31, 2014
Direct download links:
MP3 &
Ogg
Bridge Linux – a wasted decade? – ShellCheck, vnstat
NewsShuttleworth: ACPI, firmware and your security …but… Can we have an open phone please? The case of the Ubuntu Phone
Ubuntu GNOME and
Lubuntu get LTS status (probably will negatively impact
Linux Lite, which
is a shame as it’s a nice little OS Correction: Linux
Lite runs XFCE, not LXDE)
Sharing what’s up our sleeve: Android coming to wearables
Better integration for open web apps on Android
Free eBook Download: Android on x86 An Introduction to Optimizing for Intel Architecture
GNU C Library Alternative Musl Libc Hits 1.0 Milestone
European Union in talks to move to the Open Document Format
Linux and botnets: It’s not Linux’s fault! (apparently it’s all your fault, dear Linux administrators and users…)
Linux Mint might use the same LTS base for Mint 17, 18, 19 AND 20
KDE community refutes Canonical developer’s claim “the display server doesn’t matter”
First Impressions
A couple of shows back, DistroWatch’s random distribution button gave Paddy Bridge Linux. We dropped the segment last show to make time for our interview with Rob Landley; was the wait worth it? And, breaking with tradition, Paddy ignored DistroWatch and chose Q4OS for Joe to look at on the next show.
Feedback
Thanks to Mikael Inscius, Johan Vervloet, and our usual anonymous Flattrers for their help in supporting the show. And a special thank you to Martin Greenfield and Lawrence Bain for their PayPal donations.
Also, thanks as usual to Rob Mackenzie, and to Julian (@julian_overall), for their Twitter comments.
A lot of positive feedback on our interview last time with Rob Landley. Even when folks didn’t agree with everything Rob said, they were all pleased that we had aired the segment.
Ian Barton and Rob Walker both said that they don’t usually hear pieces like this on other podcasts, with Rob contrasting our interview with “the regular fluff that Linux podcasts cover”. Fin and Stilvoid seconded and thirded Rob Walker’s comment, and Greg said that whilst he wouldn’t want this sort of segment every show, he’d found it “a great insight into the OSS/Linux back rooms”.
Richard offered some thoughts about the incompatibilities between GPLv2 and GPLv3, and also speculated that Google may eventually move Android over to a BSD licensed kernel to totally remove GPL code from that ecosystem. Rob Landley responded, suggesting that the development methodology that Linux brought to the party (as discussed in Eric S. Raymond’s ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar‘) is probably a larger factor in the success of the Linux environment than any licensing choices.
HankB, Oskar and SonOfNed also said some positive things about the interview, again with Rob Landley chiming in with helpful links for further reading.
Finally, Ken Fallon from Hacker Public Radio heard the show, and asked if he could replay it on HPR. The episode is currently scheduled to air as HPR1486, on 14 April 2014. Thanks for that, Ken!
In general show feedback, Steve Engledow asked if we’d come across GoboLinux. We have, but only in passing, so will think about featuring it on a future show; and probably contrasting it with NixOS, which goes in totally the opposite direction.
Jack Dennahower gave us an update on his tablet experiences, and Dave is still sitting in an empty IRC channel; sorry, Dave, but it doesn’t seem as if any other listeners are interested in us picking that up.
Ray Woods is having issues rolling back to a prior GVFS on
his laptop, as the current version isn’t working for him. Any
offers, or are we talking DLL library hell?
Richard Kline asked us for suggestions of a good Debian-based distro with a Steam client, as he was struggling to get it running under CrunchBang. Paddy proposed SolydXK, an increasingly popular semi-rolling distro which comes with Steam pre-installed.
Gimp questioned Joe’s continuing use of proprietary audio software, whilst Hank Barta wondered if we could do a segment on WMs/DEs. Stephen Martinez said some nice things about us, Hank B wondered how much pre-installs are responsible for the ongoing dominance of Windows, and Robert Horn pointed out that, yes, installing Linux on a Chromebook is actually very straightforward.
We asked on Chris Leffelman’s behalf last show if any listeners has suggestions for good, generalist, trainee sysadmin texts. Jed Reynolds suggested the “UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook“, whilst philnc recommended Æleen Frisch’s “Essential System Administration“. Both are a few years old now, but good reviews abound elsewhere.
Reto from Zurich asked why we encode our shows at 128kb/s. Joe tossed this back to the audience – what do you guys think? Is this too high? Would you prefer a smaller download?
SonOfNed offered some thoughts on the shakeups currently going on in the Linux world, in particular in the mobile space and regarding the Wayland/Mir issue.
Ian Barton gave us a link to his look at some online Markdown editors, and wondered if Paddy isn’t sometimes a little hard on developers. This thought was also picked up by Campbell Barton from Blender, who let us have his feedback born of working on a complex, cross-platform, and million line project. Campbell also linked to an interesting interview with Hans-Joachim Popp, CIO at the German Aerospace Centre, on the amount of effort put into software quality for space missions.
A Wasted Decade?
Our show’s strapline is “Not all change is progress”. But is that necessarily true? We decided to see how the thesis stood up regarding the Linux desktop by taking a look at two distros released 10 years ago – the very first Ubuntu (Warty Warthog) and Mandrake 10. Were they really usable? How much better are modern distros?
Over a Pint
May 2014 will mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of “The UNIX-Haters Handbook“. Following on from our theme this show of looking at how much things have changed over the years, Paddy read out a provocative quote from the book, and explained that we’d be taking a look at some of the criticism that it contains in a show during May. We’d very much welcome your thoughts on this; although polemical in tone, the book is actually quite amusing, so why not give it a read and tell us how well you think it describes the Linux we all love and use today?
Off the Beaten Path
Again thinking about the aspiring sysadmin, we briefly talked about a shell script checking utility called ShellCheck (source on GitHub), and vnstat, a very lightweight network traffic monitor.
Joe and Paddy, thanks for mentioning Linux Lite, which looks like a very nice distro, indeed — especially for new users.
During the show you said that it used LXDE, but it looks like it uses your favorite and mine, Xfce, as its desktop environment: https://www.linuxliteos.com/manual/
Well, that’s embarrassing. You’re quite right Steven, it is XFCE not LXDE. And that kind of renders the point I was making moot (although it remains a nice light distro).
Thanks for the catch. I’ve altered the show notes, and will indulge in some self-flagellation next show (I hate putting out incorrect information).
Another fine show Joe and Paddy, many topics of interest for me. Paddy was absolutely right about The Unix-Hater’s Handbook, I had forgotten completely about it. UHH was hugely popular in the shop where I was coding in the 90’s and I shared many a laugh over it with buddies. So glad you included a mention in the show and the link in the show-notes. I’ve (re-)had a few good laughs already :-)
“Unix, the World’s First Computer Virus”
FWIW, the ogg audio is fine, and the file size seems about right. In fact overall LL is well recorded and edited I’d say. Regarding Warty-era vs 2014: GNU sort now has the -h flag, so you can run “du -h | sort -h” to find the directories using the most space and have the result printed in human-readable format. Try doing that in 2004! ;-)
When you mention SLAX – it used to weigh about 189 MB; I
used to carry it around in a pocket of my Moleskine on
one of the small 3-inch 200 MB CDs.
Good call on bringing up the UHH, BTW.
Hello from across the pond!
I’m brand new to Linux but feel right at home with you “luddites”! The idea of changing things that work just to show innovation is a pet peeve of mine. My home PC had Windows XP so it was necessary to change and I decided to take the plunge. I installed LXLE 12.04.4 and so far so good.
I listen to the podcast on my iPhone using an app called Capriccio. As I don’t have an Android device I’d prefer you discuss Linux topics but it is probably good for me to learn about Android so no worries there.
I really enjoy most parts of the show but “First Impressions” and “Over a Pint” are by far my favorites.
Thank you for all your time and effort.
Jason in Virginia
With regards to Linuxmint basing the next of couple releases on the LTS, I was wondering if it could be Clem doesn’t want to get involved in the whole debugging/testing/breakages that switch Mir will inevitably bring.
Paddy,
I may be totally off here (and butting into a conversation without knowing the details) but I think Mint going with LTS releases is partially an attempt to attract new (read Windows XP) users. I know when I decided to leave XP for Linux I looked at the LTS releases and initially settled on LXLE. For someone who wants email and Internet without needed to constantly fiddle with their system the LTS releases are very attractive.
Jason in Virginia
Thanks for mentioning the relative speed (or is it “lightness”) of desktop environments in the older versions of Ubuntu and Mandrake.
It’s something distro developers today should take into account when overloading their systems with increasingly heavy DEs.
GNOME 2 used to get a bad rap for being heavy when, in fact, it was pretty darn light in comparison to KDE. I guess GNOME 3 is making up for that.
It would be nice to have functionality, speed and configurability in a single desktop environment. I guess that’s why there’s Xfce.
Greetings guys,
Have not tried this respin myself, but I saw on
Distrowatch that ExTiX is Ubuntu 12.04 with Gnome 3.
“ExTiX is a desktop Linux distribution and live DVD based
on Ubuntu and featuring a customised GNOME 3 desktop. “
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