Category: computer

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For the kiddos

Yep – John Goerzen’s story made me smile, as it has a lot of parallels to my own one. Ok for me it was a 300 baud acoustic coupler, a C64, and the first network to speak about was probably Datex-P, but still… these were the not so good old times if you think about it, and “Gen-Z” as they are called have so much power in their hands now (but also so many possible distractions). A very interesting read, but who knows – maybe only for me?

And yes, sure I remember DEC computers, or Novell’s Netware – a company like Microsoft didn’t even know how to spell TCP/IP at that time 😉

Found via Planet Debian. Thanks for reading.

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“You must use Linux”

Made me smile:

“This section describes how to set up your local work environment to build the Android source files. You must use Linux; building under either MacOS or Windows isn’t supported. Keep in mind the important change to the /usr/bin/python binary as well.”

https://source.android.com/docs/setup/build/initializing

And yes, that’s Google, on how to build your own version of Android for phones or tablets…

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Syncthing

Currently trying out Syncthing on both my mobile phones and on my machine. And it works beautifully on all devices; now photos taken with one of the phones are sent to my machine automagically…

PXL_20220811_123333028.PORTRAIT
Cookie’s pic transferred with Syncthing, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

As always, thanks for reading & viewing.

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Now that sounds like progress on the ARM front

The Linux kernel 5.19 is out. And it seems that Linus wrote his announcement on a Mac (with the newer M1 architecture) running Asahi Linux…

See also on lwn, The Register, or Phoronix – and probably soon all over the media… but don’t run and buy Macs for that right now, Apple does still not support Linux. And buying the latest and greatest hardware is – as we say in Germany – like “stitching with a hot needle”.

As always, thanks for reading.

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Bits from DebConf ’22 in Prizren, Kosovo

The Debian developer team have been uploading videos from their latest conference, and so far I’ve seen two of them which I found very interesting, these were

The current state of Debian on smartphones by Guido Günther, and

Lenovo Linux 2022 by Mark Pearson.

See the whole list of talks in case you are interested, which I’ve found via Planet Debian and Bits from Debian. Always interesting to see some faces I know, even if I haven’t seen them in years (hello Steve!) 🙂 And thanks to all of you Debianistas for all of the great work you’re doing!

Edit, from July 31st, 2022: Phoronix also reported about Mark’s talk from above.

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Computer as a fridge?

Looking at my screen today, I noticed that the average temperatures inside of my computer were lower than the ones outside:

37°C outside, 34°C in the machine…

So is your computer actually a fridge? No, of course not – our room temps at the moment are under 26°C, and of course the computer, like any electrical device, adds to the heat, even an older and slower one like mine (without a graphics card or a 200+W CPU monster from Intel). Which means that the best thing you can do is to actually power everything off which isn’t needed, oh and “surfing” with a mobile phone also takes lots less power than running your typical PC. Just saying…

As always, thanks for reading.

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Being a cat

I guess most cat friendly people asked themselves how it would be to be a cat, and to see the world from that perspective. Well now you can; just found this:

STRAY | Release Date Trailer

STRAY is a game developed in Southern France, and it seems to run not only on a Playstation but also on Steam – see here. But although the system requirements seem to be quite modest, I still don’t know whether this would run on Mitchie’s AMD Ryzen 5700G (with built-in graphics, we haven’t spent the money for a discrete graphics card), and on Linux of course. Maybe some of you know, and if so you could tell us…

Found via its review in The Guardian.

As always, thanks for reading.

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Google knows Debian pretty well…

Earlier this month, I wrote about the different flavours of Debian, and noted that you could take (and stay with) Debian ‘testing’ or even ‘unstable’ to have something like a rolling release.

And that’s exactly what Google is doing since a while, and like their article about it shows they understand Debian pretty well. They know about the problems with mixing stuff from ‘testing’ and ‘unstable’ (which is btw what Ubuntu is doing as well), they know about the Debian security team *not* updating ‘testing’, and that not every package from upstream which ends up in ‘unstable’ has CVE reports. And they also supply packages themselves, which is how it should be.

So in that regard, Google was thinking like me – you don’t have to take Arch or Suse’s ‘Tumbleweed’ if you want rolling releases, and going back from using Ubuntu to its own parent can only be a good thing. Good to see professionals working and thinking like oneself 🙂

Found via the Debian micronews blog where Debian developer Laura Arjona Reina posted it.

As always, thanks for reading.