This post is not a tutorial or a walkthrough or comprehensive introduction or anything else that would probably be beneficial or helpful to those you reading it.
Instead, it’s a bit of a waffle.
I’ve just spent a few hours playing with something very cool on my over-powered and under-used Acer Chromebook Spin 13. I’ve scratched an itch I’ve had for the longest time and it’s so satisfying. So, a bit like when I resurrected an ancient Chromebook, I want to tell someone about it — but this time without any weird spooky gifs
A Linux distribution (distro) is an operating system based on the Linux kernel.
Operating systems require many programs other than the kernel to be functional, and Linux distributions typically rely on tools released by the GNU Project.
GNU founder Richard Stallman has long contended that Linux distros should be referred to as GNU/Linux systems.
However, his suggestion never caught on, and “Linux” remains the widely-used shorthand for these operating systems.
Linux distros are attractive because they are free to use, open-source, and often have lower hardware requirements.
Many Linux distros also allow users to preview the operating system by booting it from a USB drive before committing to installing it.
Here are some of the most lightweight Linux distributions that could breathe life into even some of the oldest laptops.
Google is rolling out ChromeOS Flex as an enterprise option to replace operating systems on old Macs and PCs, letting users turn their aging hardware into Chromebooks.
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With ChromeOS Flex, Google hopes to help businesses keep older computers around for longer. The lightweight operating system is designed to work well on older hardware to extend the life of a product, which can lead to reduced e-waste.
The OS can be quickly deployed via a USB stick or over a network connection. Systems running ChromeOS Flex can be managed via a Chrome Enterprise Upgrade using the Google Admin Console.
Google has approved 295 devices so far for ChromeOS Flex. However, it can be installed on other hardware, but non-certified hardware may run into performance issues.
People are looking for shortcuts in aspects of life, and there is no exception while operating computers. Shortcuts are usually applied by the keyboard, which saves more time for inputting commands in another way. We are familiar with keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Mac computers that help our everyday tasks easier and faster. Similarly, you can use keyboard shortcuts on Chrome OS. A few Windows reliable keyboard shortcuts can work on Chrome OS, but there some many commands set differently here. We have listed 30 essential Chromebook keyboard shortcuts to navigate better and operate Chrome OS.
Learn about Chrome OS keyboard shortcuts for text editing, taking a screenshot, faster lock screen, web browsing, and more to produce your work more quickly. So bookmark this keyboard shortcut ultimate guide to decreasing cumbersome tasks of moving the mouse and increasing your productivity.
The company reported earlier this month that it is working on patches for the Meteor Lake graphics driver inside the unreleased Linux 5.20 kernel. Readers will remember that Meteor Lake is the successor to Raptor Lake, which will be released later this year.
AMD is reported to publish the last feature updates planned for the AMDGPU and AMDKFD drivers to the DRM-Next for Linux 5.20 to prepare for RDNA 3's release. The merge window will open later this month, so companies such as AMD and the recently reported Intel additions are being finalized to prepare new generations of graphics for the two tech giants.
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The Linux AMD pull updates also saw the integration of DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST), numerous audio patches, and the modification of the GART size on recent APUs to add Scatter and Gather display support. Finally, AMD also integrated the querying of the GFXOFF status for VanGogh series APUs, enhanced buffer object domain pinning, and a few AMDKFD modifications.
This article features four quick ways to fix the everlasting Laptop brightness problem in Ubuntu.
Ubuntu plus most of the Linux distributions always had issues with Laptop brightness. The default hardware controllers never in the Laptop keyboard worked most of the time after a fresh install.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nginx Web Server on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Nginx (short for Engine X) is a free and open-source web server that serves as a reverse proxy, HTTP load balancer, and email proxy for IMAP, POP3, and SMTP. Thanks to its ability to handle massive numbers of connections, it is the preferred web server of many websites that deal with high traffic.
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 Nginx web server on Rocky Linux. 9.
Samba is a fantastic tool; with it, Linux desktops, laptops, and servers can host Windows/Mac OS compatible file shares. This guide will show you how to install and configure Samba on Debian 11 Bullseye.
Note: this guide assumes you are using Debian 11. However, the instructions should be the same if you use Debian 10 or older. Feel free to follow along.
Sound does not work in your Ubuntu 22.04, and happen to have Everest ESSX8336 sound card in your machine? This tutorial may help!
ESSX8336 is one of the common used chips in recent laptops and tablets, such as Huawei Matebook D14~16, Gemini Lake laptop, and Chuwi Hi10X tablet. But, the current Linux Kernel does not support this sound card, though there seems to have patches (here and here) for it.
Until Linux Kernel officially adds the device support, you may build Kernel manually with the patch. Or use yangxiaohua’s custom kernel files to fix the issue.
Cinnamon is a desktop environment for the Linux operating system that offers advanced features and a traditional user interface. It is available for download from the Cinnamon website. It is based on the GNOME desktop environment and includes a number of features that make it more user–friendly and customizable than other desktop environments.
A desktop environment’s importance is tuning an OS to suit a user’s needs. From accessing the menu, managing applications, selecting folders, performing a search, and opening and closing a program.
So, an environment helps to efficiently manage our files and apps, keeping our desktop organized and enabling the user to incorporate less effort and time to navigate the desktop.
This article will look at how we can install the Cinnamon environment on a Debian 11 OS. There are three ways we can install a Cinnamon desktop environment on Debian.
Getting another IP address has many advantages. If you have many IP addresses, you can operate multiple apps in just a single port. Running apps can sometimes be conflicting, especially if they are tied to one IP address. This way, you can avoid this hassle and access them with ease.
If you're having problems with web content servers, you might want to address this through a reverse proxy. This particular server places the content in other locations under one port.
This guide is about how to install and configure Logstash 8 on Ubuntu/Debian as a continuation of our guide on how to setup Elastic Stack 8. We have already covered the installation of Elasticsearch and Kibana.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Emacs Text Editor on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, GNU Emacs is a programmable text editor. It is a very comprehensive and platform-independent editor that can be expanded with its own Lisp dialect (Emacs Lisp). At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. This makes Emacs highly extensible and users can add new functionality by writing their own Emacs Lisp code or installing packages that add new features.
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 Emacs Text Editor 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.
Want to secure remote access to a private network? In this series of technical posts, we will share step-by-step instructions to create a Linux bastion host and create an audit trail by logging SSH commands.
System76 released the Pop OS 22.04 LTS on April 25, 2022. We unwrap the new features and updates in this post.
System76’s POP OS is based on Ubuntu releases, and the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release is just released. Following the release schedule, the Pop OS 22.04 is now available for download and upgrade. You can now do some hands-on and find out the new features.
Smart locks are a highly convenient way to secure a house, and they can have their number of connectivity options expanded even further by connecting them to an IoT home assistant service such as Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa.
Jithin Sanal’s project uses Amazon’s Alexa skill to automatically secure a custom door locking mechanism without the need for Bluetooth or a fingerprint. It is based around a Nano RP2040 Connect, and due to its onboard connectivity suite, can talk with the Arduino Cloud. Other than the Nano, Sanal designed a simple PCB with pads for a buzzer, voltage regulator, and several LEDs for monitoring its current status. The circuit also includes a relay that applies power to a solenoid which acts as a deadbolt when power is applied.
CANduino v3 is the third revision of MassiveButDynamic’s CAN bus board with Arduino Nano form factor based on Microchip ATmega168PA 8-bit AVR microcontroller, Microchip MCP2515 CAN controller with an SPI interface, and Microchip MCP2551 CAN transceiver suitable for 12V and 24V systems.
The CANDuino v3 board is now slightly narrower in order to give access to two rows on each side when installed on a breadboard, comes with a USB Type-C port to reduce the number of cables needed, and the CAN bus function can be deactivated via a jumper in order to use the CANduino as a normal Arduino Nano.
A big chunk of Fuchsia-related code has been removed from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) this week, but Google’s two operating systems are still set to have an intertwining relationship.
In its most public form, Google’s in-house operating system, Fuchsia, powers two of the company’s smart displays, the Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max. But having watched it develop over the last few years, we know that Google has much larger ambitions for the Fuchsia project.
Easily the most ambitious of these is a clear intention for some Fuchsia devices to be able to run apps from other operating systems like Android and Linux. This could — in theory! — allow a Fuchsia-powered device to seamlessly replace a Chromebook or Android phone, keeping older apps running as normal.
There are a few ways to achieve that goal, one of Google’s earliest attempts was to run a full instance of the Android operating system in a virtual machine. This is how Chrome OS and Google Play Games for PC bring support for Android apps, but it comes with some potential performance drawbacks.
GNU rush version 2.3 is available for download. This is a bug-fixing release.
This is the first major release of the INN news server package since 2015. It incorporates tons of work on just about every part of INN, ranging from a brand new overview backend contributed by Bo Lindbergh through Cancel-Lock support contributed by Julien Ãâ°LIE to numerous smaller changes in configuration files, protocol support, and overall simplification.
Well GSoC’22 coding period actually started from 13th June, 2022, but at the same time my end semester exams started too. What a time to give exams ! Well because of that I had to take 2 weeks of break from my project. During community bonding period, I gathered resources and jot them down at one place, so as soon as my exams were over, I would get back to my project easily.
During community bonding period, I went through all the content written on the site and made a rough draft of FAQs section. I also checked out the images which we are supposed to include in the website to make the pages more relevant. Changed a few CSS styles, updated outdated packages and fixed a few accessibility errors.
Currently I am developing a form for the website which allows users to easily create profiles and add themselves to the website. Since the site is based on Jekyll, a static site generator, the challenge here was how to make it easier for the newcomers to add themselves easily and save the fuss of navigating through the file system, make merge requests according to content formatting standards, required fields and all sorts of stuff. They might even need to spin-up the site locally, to ensure the content looks right.
We were using the mailman2 instance provided by Dreamhost for many years as the mailing list for dgplug. But, over the years many participants had trouble with receiving emails. In the last few years, most emails were landing in spam.
The 1.62.1 pre-release is ready for testing. The release is scheduled for July 19. Release notes can be found here.
A few times a week, someone asks on the #gui-and-ui channel on the Rust Discord, “what is the best UI toolkit for my application?” Unfortunately there is still no clear answer to this question. Generally the top contenders are egui, Iced, and Druid, but web-based approaches are in the running, and of course there’s always the temptation to just build a new one. And every couple or months or so, a post appears with a new GUI toolkit.
This post is something of a sequel to Rust 2020: GUI and community. I hope to offer a clear-eyed survey of the current state of affairs, and suggestions for how to improve it. It also includes some lessons so far from Druid.
The piece is largely about Rust, but Raph Levien's blog post about Rust GUI toolkits contains some of the most thoughtful writings on GUI toolkits that I've seen in a while, regardless of language. Recommended.
Nestled among the impressive domes and spires of Yale University is the simple office of Daniel Spielman. His shelves are lined with tall black notebooks, containing decades of handwritten notes, and against a wall sits a large, comfortable couch that looks particularly well used. “I’m sort of built for sitting still and thinking,” he admitted. What he thinks about, amid the gothic grandeur of the campus, is a slightly more modern topic: computer science. And over his career, Spielman has produced a slew of influential results, although as he describes it, failure has been his most common outcome. “The key point is you have to enjoy the process of working,” he said. “As long as I enjoy that process, then it’s OK — as long as there’s success once in a while.”
Tiny robots made of metallic powder stuck to plastic tape and controlled by magnetic fields could one day crawl inside internal organs and repair injuries
Me not being a "real person" then, I couldn't agree more. :)
In my humble opinion paying cash is a nice puzzle piece of resistance. I routinely pay cash for almost everything, that I buy locally. I have bought a number of fairly expensive things (for my personal definition of fairly expensive, that is) and payed several of them cash, e.g. a new motorcycle, an old car, a vinyl turntable plus amplifier and speakers. Fortunately none of those vendors objected to cash. The point is: paying cash does to my knowledge not neccesarily produce a digital record of who pays how much for what to whom and where. Even more so, if this is a second hand deal from a private person. The authorities do not need to know, whether I spend my cash on more or rather less questionable things. The assumption always seems to be "more questionable things", like weapons, hard drugs and child porn. Well, I don't. And I estimate more than 95% of folks don't. But of course, if you jail them all, the questionable 5% will be with them. Don't get caught by this flawed reasoning!
Arduino libraries are particularly egregious when it comes to coupling. The SPI code is mixed in with the device logic. I'm also lukewarm to the "abstract interfaces" approach. People tend to overdo the C++-isms wrt classes, so you end up with a lot of "onion skins" (you peel back one layer of the onion only to reveal another, with the result that you end up confused and crying. As some wag put it: you can solve every problem in computing by adding a layer of abstraction, except for the problem of having too many layers of abstraction).
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If you look at the standard C library, it is remarkable that the libraries have little coupling. That's not 100% accurate, as under the hood print functions might need memory allocations. What I do when writing the equivalent functions for mcus I try to not use any memory allocations at all. If you use mallocs, then you are effectively saying that my buffers might be of unbounded size. Well, you don't have unbounded memory. Figure out what is reasonable, and use that. If you found that assumption too narrow, then increase it. It may be iffy in a general-purpose computing environment, but you are likely to yield much greater simplicity when writing for memory- or time- contrained environments.
Stupid is as Stupid Does
I've been, stupidly, using an email account that came with a free web page account. I figured - what harm could it be, it's free, it's been around... Now I want to get rid of it, but I am away from home, and there are some accounts I can't access to update the email address... So I am stuck.
I've been using a webmail client, maybe roundcube (why nonsensical names?). Somehow the interaction of the webmail client with my browser causes repeated logins with a wrong (or no) password. Bahm, my account gets locked out by whatever security software they run. I don't know about it until a few days later, when I can't log in.
The recovery process involves going on Discord and begging the disgruntled sysop to unban my IP address. That usually takes a whole day, sometimes two, and involves some groveling.
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Top shows that, running in the background with automatic email fetching shut off -- in other words, doing absolutely nothing -- it eats up about 5% CPU and 5% memory. That is a ridiculously large fraction of my machine -- for doing absolutely nothing. I have 8GB RAM), so the sleeping beauty needs 400 MB to do nothing. Is this a bad joke?
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.