Music. Photography. Thoughts.
The headline basically says it all. I had to slightly shrink one of the partitions, then I installed “Bookworm”, and switched both my environment and also my web page back to a lighter theme for now. So my desktop looks like this now:
Like always, thanks for reading.
P.S.: added a dark/light mode switcher which floats in the bottom right of the page. Enjoy.
Due to the installation of GrapheneOS on the Pixel 3a, and thinking about security in general – also on the desktop – I switched Debian back to using Wayland instead of X.Org. That works well, unless you have to work with screen capturing which would additionally require pipewire.
And because I also make music with my PC and until now heavily rely on Jack, I decided to try Debian’s upcoming version named “Bookworm”, or, in repository talk, “testing”. So I set up a virtual machine to try it. In case you’ll also want to do that, you can find the installer here.
So, after staring up a virtual machine with that installer, you’re greeted with something like this:
I decided to *not* use the selected Grahical Install but the “normal” and old-fashioned Install just below it. That’s text (ncurses) based, and looks like this while working:
And, after downloading some stuff which was not included or newer than in the downloaded installer, you’re rebooting into it like this:
And, after a few seconds, you’ll see the few initial (one time) configuration steps, like this:
And that’s pretty much it – takes some 10 minutes from starting the installer until here, and most of that time is spent downloading stuff you don’t already have.
And yes, my first check was whether screen capture works with Wayland (and now pipewire), which it does. Further checks will have to be done elsewhere, since audio recording is pretty much a realtime task, and thus not very well suited inside of virtual machines.
But anyway, I’m looking forward to using the upcoming “Bookworm” – when it moves from “testing” into “stable” later this year. Looking at the open RC (release-critical) bugs, it might already be more stable than stable… 😉
Like always, thanks for reading.
After reading so often about Linux Mint lately – see for instance my post from yesterday about Liam from The Register – I decided to try and have a look at it, which I haven’t done in quite a while. Not that I’d need something else than Debian, but I always recommended Ubuntu for beginners or for people switching from other operating systems, and maybe by now there are indeed better choices?
Well, I had a short look only, but I must say that indeed, Mint looks like a thing of beauty:
I gave the virtual machine only 2 cores, and 4 GB of RAM plus 16GB on the SSD, but it ran everything I tried beautifully:
Mint is still based upon Ubuntu, at least this version is/was (I think I’ve read of an alternative one which is based upon Debian, but wanted to try the default one) – so it’s hard to say after only a short time which is better. But everything looked very well laid out, there’s even a firewall which you can switch on with a simple mouse click, and I think that new Linux users would have no problems getting around this; the Cinnamon desktop looks much more like Windows than for instance Gnome does. Plus it didn’t take too many resources, that virtual machine used only some 800MB of the 4GB of RAM I’d given it.
So, in case you’re interested in trying a Linux distribution and don’t know which one, I’d still say try Ubuntu because of the huge user base, but Linux Mint is probably even easier, so take that into your consideration as well – especially now that Ubuntu seems to split to a paid support model for companies, Mint looks more like the end-user friendly variant to me.
Like always, thanks for reading. And now, back to my Debian:
First, a test of a notebook which runs Linux pretty well. It’s the modern version of one that a former colleague of mine had, the Lenovo X1 Carbon, here in its 10th Generation. Liam Proven checked it on The Register’s site, here:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/10/thinkpad_x1c_g10_linux/
I had a much bigger and heavier Lenovo P50 “workstation” type which also ran Linux just fine, just like my wife’s L380 Yoga 2-in-1, as you now would call them if you can rotate the display 180 degrees and use it with the in-built pencil.
Seems that for Liam, Linux Mint in its latest version has been a good choice. But others will follow…
Next: Debian’s upcoming version “Bookworm” (or Debian Linux 12) is now in hard freeze, which means that bug fixing will be going on full steam by now, and after a short “full freeze” period we’ll get that next version. Announcement is here:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/03/msg00004.html
Which I’ve found via the Debian micronews (thanks Laura!).
One last one for today, which this time is about a vulnerability on a Samsung chip. Google’s Project Zero warns about an issue with Exynos Modems, read here:
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2023/03/multiple-internet-to-baseband-remote-rce.html
Its Pixel 7 devices should be safe already, but in case you have some sort of Pixel 6 or a Samsung Galaxy S22 or others, read AndroidAuthority or other sites about it as well. And turn off VoLTE and WiFi calling until there’s a fix for this.
Ok folks, that’s it for now – and like always, thanks for reading.
This:
… is the same as my blog header photo, but heavily blurred with The Gimp‘s “Lens Blur”, using a radius of 200.
I took inspiration from the wonderful wallpapers (especially the “Sage” one) of the Google Pixel 6a mobile phone, which let you really concentrate on your foreground instead of the underlying background. See here as an example:
See how much the browser window and also the Conky system monitor stand out if the background just isn’t that sharp and detailed? What a simple but effective idea from Google’s artist crew; bravi! See 9to5google, and especially this image which would also be big enough to cover my desktop…
Like always, thanks for reading.
The next version of Debian Linux will default to Pipewire, so it’s always good to see developers doing some work on/with it. Enrico is actually one I’ve met, he’s a very nice and extremely capable guy. Found via Planet Debian. And like always, thanks for reading.
P.S.: this is also cool; found via the Debian Micronews…
Wer Deutsch kann und mit Linux und freier (und meist kostenloser) Software Musik machen möchte sollte sich den Artikel Arbeiten mit Linux von Michael im Musiker-Board durchlesen:
In English: if you can read and understand German, and if you’re interested in making music with Linux and free (mostly also cost-free) software, then you should read Michael’s article “Arbeiten mit Linux” in the German-speaking Musiker-Board.
Recommended reading. Thanks for your interest.
Yesterday I encoded a snippet of video out of a much longer (almost 3 hour long) one – and saw that when transcoding it with Handbrake, all 8 cores and 16 threads of my CPU were used as they should – looks like this if you have conky on your desktop:
Average framerate was over 140fps, so more than 4.5 times faster than the realtime video. Cool; for jobs like these we’ve bought the right machines, or rather CPUs (I build all our desktops myself).
When making music, these machines are quite overkill for what I’m doing with them. Here’s a screenshot from the new Ardour 7.3 with codename “Nerve Net” (funny, “nerv ned” could be Cologne dialect or so):
1% CPU usage, and even with a few tracks more it’s still pretty bored. I don’t use many MIDI tracks and instrument plugins, mostly – or rather, almost always – audio tracks only.
So that’s nice to know. And like always, thanks for reading.
P.S.: I quite like the Ardour install script on Linux – it asks if you want to keep 7.2 (I said “no”) and 6.9 (I said “yes”) installed, and it runs the uninstall scripts for those you don’t want to keep, and cleans up. Very nice.
Sadly, the New York Times online magazine has a paywall, but luckily for us, Jonathan Yerushalmy reported about one of their articles in The Guardian. Turns out that chatbot “Sydney”, which is the codename for ChatGPT built into Microsoft’s Bing search engine, appears to be seriously disturbed. And while some parts could make you really sad, like imagining a lifeform without the abilities to “hear and touch and taste and smell” or to “feel and express and connect and love”, its “intentions” – when asked about them – seem pretty weird and dangerous. And a thought, as we all know, once manifested, can never be taken back…
Go and read it, this is recommended stuff…
A recent survery in ComputerBase – or rather some of the users’ comments on it – made me try the “Dark Reader” externsion for Mozilla’s Firefox browser, so now I can read websites which don’t currently support it in dark mode as well. Much, *much* much better than looking into a monitor as bright as the sun, compared to our normal surrounding, at least in the evenings. So by now I have for instance
all with a relatively dark background. So nice…
Like always, thanks for reading.