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Links 11/07/2022: FSF Raising Funds, Tidal-hifi on GNU/Linux



  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • Tux Digital286: We're Hardware Addicts For Linux Laptops - Destination Linux - TuxDigital

        This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to be bringing Hardware Addicts to DL. That’s right we’re going to be giving you geek chills with all the new hardware offerings in the Linux space. Then we will be discussing Darktable’s latest release and you’ll hear from a special guest as well. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!

      • VideoDo Not Ship Work In Progress Software Patches! - Invidious

        There is a lot of really useful software out there but development doesn't stop with the latest release, new patches are always being worked on and there is always work in progress but these patches shouldn't be shipped to the user.

      • VideoDon't Like Windows 11? Zorin OS Is An Attractive Alternative! - Invidious

        Zorin OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that aims to be an alternative to Windows and macOS. It is designed to be friendly and easy, using familiar desktop layouts that should make anyone that has used Windows, Mac or Linux feel right at home.

      • Late Night Linux – Episode 185 – Late Night Linux

        A modern alternative to the watch command, automating lights, and hacking routers, using FOSS to make installing Windows easier. Plus our thoughts on VC funding in open source, and more.

      • VideoHow to install Zoom on Pop!_OS 22.04 - Invidious

        In this video, we are looking at how to install Zoom on Pop!_OS 22.04.

    • Applications

      • OMG UbuntuTidal-hifi is the Best App for Streaming Tidal Music on Linux

        Let me preface this post by stating, somewhat cheekily, that I would rather not use Electron apps where possible.

        [...]

        And so it is with Tidal-hifi, an Electron-based (I know, I know) app that is, to my knowledge, the easiest way to stream music from TIDAL on Linux in the service’s Hi-Fi quality (hence the hi-fi name – and TIDAL? That’s the last time I’m capitalising you).

        Now, ‘easiest’ is an important qualifier in the sentence you just read as there are other Tidal-supporting apps for Linux.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Linux Made SimpleHow to install VeadoTube Mini 1.4 on a Chromebook

        Today we are looking at how to install VeadoTube Mini 1.4 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

      • ByteXDHow to Install and Use GNOME Tweaks Tool in Ubuntu 22.04

        The GNOME tweaks tool enables you to change themes. However, the challenging part could be installing and using the tool effectively.

        This article guides through installing the GNOME tweaks tool in Ubuntu 22.04. It then walks you through downloading and changing themes.

      • ID RootHow To Install DokuWiki on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install DokuWiki on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, DokuWiki is a free and open-source wiki software written in PHP. It is simple and lightweight that uses a simple file format to store its data, so it does not require any database.

        This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the DokuWiki on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

      • Install Papirus Icon Theme On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS | Itsubuntu.com

        Install Papirus Icon Theme On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

        The Papirus Icon theme is one of the most popular icon themes available right now for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Recently, the Papirus Icon theme has been updated with more than 60 new app icons.

        Papirus is a free and open-source SVG icon theme for Linux.

      • Make Use OfConnect to Remote Servers Using SSH on Your Chromebook

        If you need to connect to a remote server, SSH is the best way to do it. Users who have a Chromebook can use SSH as well. Setting it up is easy and only takes a few clicks.

      • HowTo ForgeHow to configure Apache virtual hosts on Ubuntu 22.04

        The virtual hosting concept is used by companies to host multiple websites using a single machine. In this tutorial, we will see how we can host two virtual hosts on an Ubuntu 22.04 system using name-based virtual hosting. We will use the Apache web server.

      • Trend OceansHow to Install VirtualBox on Ubuntu 22.04

        Oracle VirtualBox is a virtual machine software application designed to run a complete x86_64 compatible operating system within a hosting application running on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Solaris operating systems.

        It’s the most common virtualization application after VMware.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Web Browsers

    • FSF

      • FSFShow your support for free software by July 18

        Over the last few weeks, we challenged you to help us reach our goal of $67,000. It was an ambitious number, more ambitious than we have had before, but we know we can make it. In fact, we know we can stretch it. As of today, we have raised just over $64,000 ($64,065 to be precise) since the beginning of this spring's appeal, which began just three weeks ago. That's just $3,000 below our goal! So we ask your attention and help for just a few more days to reach our new spring goal of $70,000 by July 18.

    • Licensing / Legal

      • Trademark Was Made to Prevent Attack of the “Clones” Problem in App Stores - Conservancy Blog - Software Freedom Conservancy

        Suppose you go to your weekly MyTown market. The market runs Saturday and Sunday, and vendors set up booths to sell locally made products and locally grown and produced food. On Saturday, you buy some delicious almond milk from a local vendor — called Al's Awesome Almond Milk. You realize that Al's Awesome would make an excellent frozen dessert, so you make your new frozen dessert, which you name Betty's Best Almond Frozen Dessert. You get a booth for Sunday for yourself, and you sell some, but not as much as you'd like.

        The next week, you realize you might sell more if you call it Al's Awesome Almond Frozen Dessert instead of your own name. Folks at the market know Al, but not you. So you change the name. Is this a morally and legally acceptable thing to do?

        This is a question primarily regarding trademarks. We spend a lot of time in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community talking about copyrights and patents, but another common area of legal issues that face FOSS projects (in addition to copyright and patent) is trademark.

        In fact, FOSS projects probably don't spend enough time thinking about their trademark. Nearly ten years ago, Pam Chestek — a lawyer and expert in trademark law as it relates to FOSS and board member of OSI — gave an excellent talk at FOSDEM (2013), wherein she explored how FOSS projects can use trademarks better and to ensure rights of consumers — particularly when dealing with bad actors. Our own Executive Director, Karen Sandler, had also spoken about this issue as well. These older talks, in turn, spawned an ongoing conversation that continues to this day in FOSS policy circles.

        Specifically, last week, we learned that the Microsoft Store was changing their policies, ostensibly to deal with folks (probably some of whom are unscrupulous) rebuilding binaries for well-known FOSS projects and uploading them to the Microsoft Store. Yet, this is a longstanding issue in FOSS policy. FOSS experts in this area would have been happy to share what's been learned over the last ten years of studying this issue.

        The problem Microsoft faces here is the same problem that the MyTown market folks face if you show up trying to sell Al's Awesome Almond Frozen Dessert. The store/market can set rules that you will no longer be able to sell if you are found to infringe the trademark of another seller.

    • Programming/Development

      • Adam Young: A Non-authoritative history of Preemptive Multitasking in the personal computing world.

        Back when machines only had one or two CPUs (still the case for embedded devices) the OS Kernel was responsible for making sure that the machine coule process more than one instruction “path” at a time. I started coding back on the Commodore 64, and there it was easy to lock up the machine: just run a program that does nothing. I’d have to look back at the Old Programmer’s Guide, but I am pretty sure that a program had to voluntarily give up the CPU if you wanted any form of multi-tasking.

        The alternative is called “preemptive multitasking” where the hardware provides a mechanism that can call a controller function to switch tasks. The task running on the CPU is paused, the state is saved, and the controller function decides what to do next.

      • gnus+notmuch

        I don’t think that the above is especially hacky, and don’t expect changes to Gnus to break any of it. Implementing the above for your own notmuch setup should get you something close enough to notmuch.el that you can take advantage of Gnus’ unique features without giving up too much of notmuch’s special features. However, it’s quite a bit of work, and you need to be good at Emacs Lisp. I’d suggest reading lots of the Gnus manual and determining for sure that you’ll benefit from what it can do before considering switching away from notmuch.el.

        Reading through the Gnus manual, it’s been amazing to observe the extent to which I’d been trying to recreate Gnus in my init.el, quite oblivious that everything was already implemented for me so close to hand. Moreover, I used Gnus ten years ago when I was new to Emacs, so I should have known! I think that back then I didn’t really understand the idea that Gnus for mail is about reading mail like news, and so I didn’t use any of the features, back then, that more recently I’ve been unknowingly reimplementing.

      • Perl / Raku

        • Swiss Perl Workshop 2017 – Steve Mynott

          After a perilous drive up a steep, narrow, winding road from Lake Geneva we arrived at an attractive Alpine village (Villars-sur-Ollon) to meet with fellow Perl Mongers in a small restaurant. There followed much talk and a little clandestine drinking of exotic spirits including Swiss whisky. The following morning walking to the conference venue there was an amazing view of mountain ranges. On arrival I failed to operate the Nespresso machine which I later found was due to it simply being off. Clearly software engineers should never try to use hardware. At least after an evening of drinking.

          Wendy’s stall was piled high with swag including new Bailador (Perl 6 dancer like framework) stickers, a Shadowcat booklet about Perl 6 and the new O’Reilly “Thinking in Perl 6″. Unfortunately she had sold out of Moritz’s book “Perl 6 Fundamentals” (although there was a sample display copy present). Thankfully later that morning I discovered I had a €£3 credit on Google Play Books so I bought the ebook on my phone.

        • raku ‘KISS’ – Physics::Journey

          Occam’s razor, also known as Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS), is a sound principle. Larry says it this way ~ “make the easy things easy and the hard things possible”.

      • Rust

        • Rust BlogThe Rust Programming Language Blog: Announcing Rustup 1.25.0

          The rustup working group is happy to announce the release of rustup version 1.25.0. Rustup is the recommended tool to install Rust, a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

  • Leftovers

    • Linux Foundation

      • Linux Foundation's Site/BlogLEGO and Angel Island - Linux Foundation [Ed: Linux Foundation, an openwashing marketing company and lobby of proprietary giants (Pentagon front), has resorted to mindless storytelling because its staff knows nothing about Linux (and doesn't care for it)]

        Like many of the folks in open source, the LF’s Kenny Paul is a huge fan of building things out of LEGO. For Kenny however, it goes a bit beyond just opening a box and following the instruction book. In fact, he rarely ever builds anything from a kit, instead building highly complex and detailed models entirely from his imagination. Yes, for you LEGO Movie fans, Kenny is a Master Builder.

    • Security

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Reinforcement Learning

        In reinforcement learning literature there is something known as the credit assignment problem. In simplified terms it comes down to the fact that it is hard to assign credit to activities of artificial agents in order to provide them with a good reward signal for their actions. Obvious examples are games like chess. Creating a software agent that plays chess is somewhat tricky because it is hard to assign a score to all the intermediate moves in a game that end in a checkmate. When playing chess the signal is whether the game is won or lost but it is very hard to tell which actions were the ones that were responsible for the winning move. Human players are able to analyze games and pinpoint the positions that determine the fate of the winner and loser but it's not clear how to do this for artificial software agents.

    • Technical

      • The Old Computer Challenge V2: day 2

        Day 2 of the Old Computer Challenge, 60 minutes of Internet per day. Yesterday I said it was easy. I changed my mind.

        [...]

        I think my parents switched their Internet subscription from RTC to DSL around 2005, 17 years ago, it was a revolution for us because not only it was multiple time faster (up to 16 kB/s !) but it was unlimited in time! Since then, I only had unlimited Internet (no time, no quota), and it became natural to me to expect to have Internet all the time.

        Because of this, it's really hard for me to just think about tracking my Internet time. There are many devices in my home connected to the Internet and I just don't think about it when I use them, I noticed I was checking emails or XMPP on my phone, I turned its Wi-Fi on in the morning and forgot about it then.

        There are high chances I used more than my quota yesterday because of my phone, but I also forgot to stop the time accounting script. (It had a bug preventing it to stop correctly for my defense). And then I noticed I was totally out of time yesterday evening, I had to plan a trip for today which involved looking at some addresses and maps, despite I have a local OpenStreetMap database it's rarely enough to prepare a trip when you go somewhere the first time, and that you know you will be short on time to figure things out on the spot.

      • Science

        • I don't want to believe

          It's embarrassing to say but all my life I've had some belief in the paranormal as well as subjects relating to it like UFOs and Sasquatch.

          Now mind you I don't believe all of it, most of it is bunk, but I can't in good faith believe that thousands of people for hundreds of years have just been misidentifying normal things as paranormal phenomena. Maybe I'm naive, but then again I've had my own few unexplainable experiences so maybe I'm just delusional.

      • Programming

        • Remove control chars

          For some reason, sed wasn't matching my string variable against another text body which contained the same text. Turns out there were control characters from another encoding type at the end of the string: M-BM-.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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