I found this cool trick on how to temporarily set your music production to a sampling rate of 44.1kHz instead of the usual 48kHz using pipewire. See Ardour discourse about it.
More Debianistas
After seeing Bill’s screenshot of his virtual Debian instance on his Chromebook, I looked at mine again:
And even if he’s using Debian in a VM only, it’ll give him freedom, that’s also what he was writing about. Welcome to the best of all operating systems, Bill… 🙂
As always, thanks for reading.
Brenden Matthews explains conky
If you have seen screenshots of my desktop, you have seen conky – it’s the one thing which is always and on all of my desktops. Looks like this:
or, a bit bigger, like this:
It’s a beautiful piece of software, avaliable for almost all Unix-like systems including MacOS and the BSD family. I just found a video where its maker explains it:
Of course, on a modern Linux system you don’t have to compile it, since it’s usually in all software repositories of the available distributions – my example from above for instance was on Arch, but I have the same on Debian or on my login on Mitchie’s Ubuntu desktop.
There’s a Wikipedia page about conky where you can find more info. And its homepage is on GitHub as you might have seen.
As always, thanks for reading and for viewing – and thanks to Brenden for his nice little program.
Modern day Linux on an older machine
Recently I reported about another article on why people run Linux on their machines. And one of the reasons is always: because it doesn’t make your hardware obsolete, like Windows or MacOS both are doing. Proof of the pudding: here is Mitchie’s old Lenovo SL500, a dual core (Intel T5670) 2GB notebook from ca. 2008, running a current Arch Linux with the latest 5.18.2 kernel, the same which I have on my main machine:
If you enlarge the photo on Flickr you can probably see that its CPU is at 1%, which means it’s doing nothing except wait for any user input. And the system together with the very nice and modern XFCE desktop consumes just about 750MB of the total 2GB main memory – so it’s perfectly usable. Well maybe not for real number-crunching, video de- or encoding, or music production, but you get the point – as an everyday surf machine or even to watch videos on your lap, it’s perfectly fine.
I always encourage friends to try this, and we have converted many older machines in the greater family to Linux, no need at all to constantly spend any money just to stay “current”. As you can see, the version of Linux I’m running here is as current as it can get, much more modern, safe, and stable than your typical consumer OS.
We only boot into Windows if we absolutely must, and we’re all doing that since years (and Zuleikha since she was born). So this is an easy recommendation from friends to friends, ’cause that’s what we’re doing here. Oh, and by the way: thanks again to my son Jeremy who first suggested trying Arch to me some years ago. If you need “current”, that’s a nice one!
As always, thanks for reading.
On ByteXD: Why people use Linux
There’s a nice article over at ByteXD on “13 compelling reasons why people use Linux“. In case you aren’t, you still are – you only don’t think about it 😉 And that article also sets some numbers straight.
Good to know that some of us had a vision even more than 30 years ago 🙂 And I knew why some 25 years ago (or more? forgot) I was turning away from closed source because it’s simply not worth your time…
Recommended reading.
A brief history of the internet
Here‘s a good short article by Dionysia Lemonaki, about a time even before Sir Tim Bernes-Lee invented the “web” as we know it today. Recommended reading.
Ubuntu 22.04: pipewire, wayland and flatpak – A small guide
Found these helpful tips on the LinuxMusicians forae – so in case you’d like to try a setup for music on a nice and LTS (long term supported) version of Linux, go ahead and try. This contains everything I’m using myself. And thanks to Senbee for the tips (you need to login to see user profiles there).
Activities on a Sunday in late April…
Today I upgraded Mitchie’s computer to ‘Jammy Jellyfish‘, and I also installed a small WLAN repeater which we bought yesterday so that both Zuleikha and Mitchie have better WiFi coverage in their rooms.
Oh, and the new and LTS (long term supported) Ubuntu desktop is also covered here. Personally, I am running Debian and Arch, but I’m still a big proponent of Ubuntu. It is in fact the better business desktop, just as Steven writes.
As always, thanks for reading. And good night.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols about the Linux desktop
SJVN writes about “Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop” in The Register, found via LXer. Enjoy.
Please update your kernels
See the article about it in ArsTechnica and elsewhere – Golem for instance, in case you want to read about it in German. And then update your kernels, please. I cannot speak for all distros, but both Debian and Arch provide kernels which aren’t vulnerable against ‘DirtyPipe’. So don’t get bitten by this please.
Thank you.