Cat siesta

It’s warm, and so the cats are resting. Here are Cookie from yesterday, and Wilma from today:

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Cookie resting, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022
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Wilma resting, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

Cookie just came back and is eating while Wilma is on the sofa still…

As always, thanks for viewing.

Try before you buy

I read last week already that Lenovo seems to be selling notebooks now which don’t allow to boot Linux or any other operating system from USB sticks anymore. Matthew Garrett, a Debian developer had discovered this, and I’ve found his blog post about it via Planet Debian. Now The Register also reports about it. And who asked Microsoft to “support” secure boot in the beginning? A bad idea in not only my opinion… this should be fixed, ASAP please.

So the best advice at the moment is that you should try before you buy – any new notebook or computer which comes pre-installed with Windows or with MacOS is generally a bad idea, and the best solution would be to build it yourself, and install your OS of choice. Since not everyone can do that, look out for vendors who pre-install Linux or other Libre software. This is possible and advisable even on “smart” phones, as this article from the FSFE shows. See here about what is possible with a phone, and with some good intentions…

We shouldn’t let the wrong people decide about the future, we’ll have to do that ourselves…

In case you’ll go to any big consumer electronics store/chain to try out notebooks, this would be a good OS to test them with.

As always, thanks for reading.

Update, from Friday July 15th, 2022: here’s an update from Michael Larabel on booting a new Lenovo X13 with Linux. You still have the problem that the reason for first boot failures is not even shown, thanks to Micro$oft. Fix this, guys… we don’t need that crap. Thanks.

Everybody owns a Jazz Snare…

Have a listen to this, from 25 years ago:

Superbass: Two for the Blues (1997)

The bassists are, from left to right: John Goldsby, Christian McBride, Ray Brown, and John Clayton, four real superstars on bass. Note that John Goldsby (who plays the first and longest solo) was the student of John Clayton and Ray Brown, and John Clayton was also Ray Brown’s student. I don’t know that much about Christian McBride, but he’s also a monster player, no questions there…

Edit: just read that all three “other” bass players were students of Ray Brown who invented the group “SuperBass”. See Wikipedia.

Also note that John Riley plays on a Telephone book from the city of Cologne, Germany. And bravo to Carmen Bradford on vocals as well, what a lovely performance 🙂 Proves again how well a human voice goes together with upright bass, a fact that Ray Brown knew very well – he was married to Ella Fitzgerald…

Found via Bonedo who in turn got it from No Treble.

As always, thanks for viewing.

A Linux system you should have with you

Tails

see and read more at tails.boum.org – you can thank me later 😉

No joke: put this onto a bootable USB stick, if you must then make a persistent (and of course encrypted) storage on the same, and use it wherever you might be. The machine you are using wouldn’t even know that you’ve been there. Recommended by top security experts, and feared by the NSA and other non-privacy guys.

As always, thanks for reading. Oh, and in case you were wondering: yes, I’ve written this blog post using Tails exactly as you see it above.

Should you run ‘testing’?

Bill, a photographer friend from Florida who is also a programmer recently decided to try Debian, and, some days later, decided to upgrade it from ‘stable’ to ‘testing’. I commented on his blog that I had done so as well for a while, but in the end I decided that ‘stable’ was more than good enough for me, so I stayed with that until now (and probably always will).

In case you don’t know, Debian comes in mainly three different ‘flavours’, namely ‘stable’ and ‘testing’ as noted above, and also ‘Sid’, with the latter being the ‘unstable’ branch (with ‘Sid’ being the ‘bad boy’ from the neighbourhood who breaks toys from time to time, so ‘unstable’ Debian will always be called ‘Sid’). If packages don’t get any error reports after being uploaded by developers to ‘unstable’, they usually get into ‘testing’ after about two weeks, for use in a wider audience, and thus with the chance of getting more bug reports.

So ‘testing’ isn’t as ‘stable’ as ‘stable’, but also not as ‘unstable’ as ‘unstable’, but are that all differences besides having newer packages?

No. While there are many good reasons to use Debian, running ‘testing’ still has some risks; its page for instance names the biggest one as: ‘Please note that security updates for “testing” distribution are not yet managed by the security team.’ It’s also work in progress, and as such lacks a lot of documentation, and to even get it, you’ll have to move to the Debian-Installer page which is *not* the one for the official ‘stable’ installer. You’ll have to follow the Debian Release Management team and their pages to get some updates on it from time to time other than their famous and proud quote “quando paratus est” (=”when it’s ready”). And the team’s release-critical bugs page lists the number of problems which are still to solve until the freeze for the next version of Debian, which at the time of this writing will be called ‘Bookworm’ (like always, after a character from the “Toy Story” movies).

Release critical bugs for Debian ‘testing’ as of today. Release dates are when RC bugs (the green line) are zero, that’s where the “when it’s ready” comes from, and Debian can be rightfully proud of that…

Don’t get me wrong – Debian ‘testing’ isn’t ‘unstable’, or worse than any other Linux distribution, even those with some kind of “Enterprise” in their names. But it’s also not ready, and as such not meant for all of us. If you’re a developer, you’ll run both ‘stable’ and ‘unstable’, simply because you’ll have to send in and upload new packages against the latter (I did so for a while as well, but never became an official Debian Developer due to lack of time). If you’re an average Joe (or Jack or Wolfgang) like me, you’d probably be better off with ‘stable’.

So to run ‘testing’ has some risks you’ll have to cope with, and as such in my opinion isn’t recommendable for the greater audience, most people who want newer packages than ‘stable’ has would be better off with adding the ‘backports’ repositories to ‘stable’, and so get some stuff earlier than with having to wait for the next big release date.

But as I said, Bill is a programmer himself, and like every developer he has read the documentation and so he knows what he’s doing. If that’s you as well, then go ahead and run ‘testing’, or anything you like. For me these days (approaching retirement), it’s too much effort to constantly care about my operating system, so I’m happy to have ‘stable’.

My 2 (Euro-) Cents of course, and as always, thanks for reading.

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… (pssst – no words and no title), Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

Whispering: thanks for viewing… 🙂