not all change is progress
August 22, 2016
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00:04:10 News
00:52:07 GalliumOS
01:00:19 Feedback
01:13:45 Lumina Desktop Environment
First impressions matter, so it’s a bit of a shame that the new Lumina desktop looks fugly out of the box. Something it shares with Xfce which, smartened up in GalliumOS, is proving a real keeper on Joe’s Chromebook. So is there hope for Lumina?
00:04:10 NewsSoftware Should Be Free: The FSF’s first Annual Report
Christoph Hellwig’s case against VMware dismissed
Hellwig
Announces He Will Appeal VMware Ruling After Evidentiary Set
Back in Lower Court
Libgcrypt/GnuPG Hit By Critical Security Problem Since
1998
Btrfs RAID 5/6 Code Found To Be Very Unsafe & Will Likely
Require A Rewrite
We Have Come to an Agreement to Get VeraCrypt Audited
VeraCrypt Audit Under Way; Email Mystery Cleared Up
Study Highlights
Serious Security Threat to Many Internet Users
Linux bug leaves USA Today, other top sites vulnerable to
serious hijacking attacks
Linux bug leaves 1.4 billion Android users vulnerable to
hijacking attacks
Canonical Makes It Easy to Port Native iOS and Android Apps
to Ubuntu Mobile OS
Canonical Becomes a Patron of KDE e.V.
Introducing the Qt Lite project — Qt for any platform, any
thing, any size
Almost every Volkswagen sold since 1995 can be unlocked with
an Arduino
75 Percent of Bluetooth Smart Locks Can Be Hacked
“Smart” Electrical Socket Leaks Your Email Address, Can
Launch DDoS Attacks
Omega2: $5 Linux Computer with Wi-Fi, Made for IoT
Turn Your Motorola Android Phone Into a Raspberry Pi
London cops waste £2.1m on thought crime unit – and they want volunteer informers
PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux
Lithuanian
police switched to LibreOffice
Government of India Banks on ownCloud for DigiLocker
Project
00:52:07 GalliumOS
Joe gave us his first (and uncharacteristically positive) impressions of this Xubuntu-based replacement OS for x86 Chromebooks.
01:00:19 Feedback
We’ve mentioned a few times on the show how PayPal junks existing subscriptions when your credit card details change. So a huge thank you to Lars Falk-Petersen for noticing that this had happened, and for not only updating his details but also more than back-filling the missing months. Thanks, Lars, and to all of our other Monthly Supporters for your continuing support.
Desktop email clients clearly matter to a lot of you, and we heard from Will, Ian Barton, CubicleNate and Rob Landley on this topic.
Our FOSS Talk Live chat touched upon issues around freedom, and both m a r and Magnus pitched in with thoughts on licensing and holding manufacturers to account.
Wrapping things up, it was great to hear from Gavin, who told us about how at least some libraries in the UK are being used to help spread the word about free software.
01:13:45 Lumina Desktop Environment
Having just reached the 1.0 milestone, we took the *nix-agnostic Lumina desktop environment for a spin. There’s clearly a pressing need for some expert UI/UX input to the project, but even with a bit more spit and and polish could we see it becoming one of our go-to desktops?
I’d think the Core Infrastructure Initiative cares about
software used to run infrastructure: SSH, BGP, DNS, … (at
one point probably OpenStack…)
OSTIF having Veracrypt audited might be because they’re a
bit more enduser oriented.
I thought I commented already but maybe it got eaten.
Having obviously poor security should not be tolerated, but I wonder how secure a smart lock really needs to be to be comparable to a physical lock. Some of the security flaws in that article require fairly targeted attacks, and if someone really wanted to get into a house they could just break through a window instead.
BTRFS might be a good poster child for Paddy’s argument that many open source projects are too open and should take more of a “throw it over the wall” approach. It seems like BTRFS should not have been thrown over the wall yet. As it is, it will probably never gain traction because of the reputation these pretty egregious bugs have given it.
On the BSD Now podcast, the developer of Lumina (the brother of the developer of TrueOS) said that having a BSD-centric desktop environment was one of his main motivations. Licensing might have been part of it, but I think just having better integration into the OS (compared to porting over a Linux-focused desktop) was more important to him.
I just remembered something else I had wanted to comment on though I can’t remember the full context of the conversation. When Jesse was trying to get some concession from the other Luddites on the limits of free speech, I think he would have been better served by using the classic example of shouting fire in a crowded theater or in some other way intentionally misleading the public, or perhaps posting detailed instructions on how to build a dirty bomb. Peaceful protest should be protected, so I don’t think there is any free speech issue with shouting in someone’s face. There may be issues related to assault or something similar if the shouting person stays in close proximity to the other person and touches or obstructs him as he tries go about his business but that would be separate from free speech.
I tried out Lumina on openSUSE Leap 42.1 (one-click install, nice and easy to try) and I agree that it isn’t ready for mainstream but it is off to, what I think, is a good start. Obviously, there are some UI issues but looking aside to that, I do like their approach, so, I don’t believe it to be a wasted effort or just another Desktop Environment. The one thing I WOULD like for the developers to do would be to use Dolphin as the file manager instead. I also hope that the work they do with Lumina helps to continue the development and refinement of Qt. For my main machine, it probably wouldn’t replace my daily driver of KDE, as I like all the things that KDE does for me. For an older, less capable system, this would compete with LXQt which is what I run on my 5 year old netbook and it works smashingly.
Thanks for your highly entertaining Podcast!
I got the impression from Ken (said developer and brother
of pcbsdkris) an important part of Lumina is to have a
native DE without any Linuxisms or, probably even more
important, any dependencies on systemd (*cough*
PoetteringOS *cough*) other OSes had the work around.
Remember the GSoC project to implement shims for systemd
interfaces GNOME 3 required to make it run on OpenBSD?
Maybe we could get Ken on your show so he can tell you (and your audience) more about Lumina and reply to your feedback.
Thanks for the tip on GalliumOS. Just tried it out on my C720 and agreed its a keeper.
Did one of you chaps wonder what to do with Samsung Galaxy s3? Looks like good progress on new version Replicant – starting with s3 – but may not be based on ‘recent enough’ android.
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