Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 06/08/2023: Games, GNOME, and IBM History With GNU/Linux



  • GNU/Linux

    • Kernel Space

      • Dave AirlieDave Airlie: nvk: the kernel changes needed

        The initial NVK (nouveau vulkan) experimental driver has been merged into mesa master[1], and although there's lots of work to be done before it's application ready, the main reason it was merged was because the initial kernel work needed was merged into drm-misc-next[2] and will then go to drm-next for the 6.6 merge window. (This work is separate from the GSP firmware enablement required for reclocking, that is a parallel development, needed to make nvk useable). Faith at Collabora will have a blog post about the Mesa side, this is more about the kernel journey.

    • Applications

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • Boiling SteamDave the Diver Review on the Steam Deck

        Dave the Diver was an Early Access game that just jumped to a 1.0 Release within the past month. It’s been doing very well since then and passed the million sales mark, which is awesome for an indie game.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Akademy 2023

          (German version of this post: https://wordsmith.social/felixernst/akademy-2023)

          37 €°C were the average daily temperature heights during the Akademy week in Thessaloniki. When you walk outside at these temperatures, your first thought is that you would rather go back inside. This used to be a temperature that one would hardly ever see there. 38 €°C has not been exceeded in Thessaloniki in the 5 year span 1980 to 1984. But actually we were lucky, because the real heat wave only came around when we already left with around 44 €°C in Thessaloniki and forest fires everywhere. It is a shame that with the current global political landscape none of this seems likely to become any better (to put it mildly) within our lifetimes. The nature in Greece is very nice aside from that.

        • Nate GrahamKDE: Bug fixes are a good thing, not a bad thing

          Occasionally I see online comments saying things like, “more bugfixes week after week; KDE must be a real train wreck!” or “15 years of Wayland and it’s still needing bug fixes; it’ll never be ready!”

          It can be a bit funny to see people interpret normal code maintenance as evidence of critical bugginess. But this does make some sense; most objects and systems you’re familiar with around your house and in your life don’t require constant fixing to avoid collapsing, right? They have a bounded problem space; the scope of what they’re expected to do is fixed. Your coffee maker just needs to make coffee! Tomorrow you aren’t going to ask it to make juice, and the electrical outlet it plugs into isn’t going to morph overnight into something physically incompatible with the plug. So the people who built that coffee maker just have to make sure it brews coffee correctly and reliably given the current arrangement of the world around it. Its problem space is bounded.

        • Harald SitterHarald Sitter: Windows Store Crashes in Sentry

          At KDE we make software for many different platforms. One of them is Microsoft Windows. But what if an application crashes on Windows? New tech enables us to track crashes right in Sentry! Time to learn about it.

          When an application crashes on Windows the user can submit crash data to Microsoft. Later KDE, as publisher of the app, can retrieve the crashes from there. This is the standard crash handling for the platform and it works incredibly well. What’s more, it means we don’t need to engineer our own custom solution for the entire process. So, that is all lovely.

          Alas, since we are rolling out a KDE-wide crash tracking system called Sentry it would be even nicer if we had Windows crashes in there rather than third party service. That is just what I’ve built recently.

          Crashes for our Windows applications now get imported into Sentry!

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • This Week in GNOMEThis Week in GNOME/Felix Häcker: #107 Reduced Overheads

          Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 28 to August 04.

        • GNOMEChristian Hergert: More Sysprof’ing
          GWeather

          Last time I wrote we talked about a new search index for libgweather. In the end I decided to take another route so that we can improve application performance without any changes. Instead, I added a kdtree to do nearest neighbor search when deserializing GWeatherLocation. That code path was looking for the nearest city from a latitude/longitude in degrees.

          The merge request indexes some 10,000 lat/lon points in radians at startup into a kd-tree. When deserializing it can find nearest city without the need for a linear scan. Maybe this is enough to allow significantly more data into the database someday so my small hometown can be represented.

          Nautilus
          I found a peculiarity in that I was seeing a lot of gtk_init() calls while profiling search. That means processes are being spawned. Since I have D-Bus session capture in Sysprof now, I was able to find this being caused by Nautilus sending an org.freedesktop.DBus.Peer.Ping() RPC to kgx and gnome-disks.
  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • Josh JusticeInstalling Haiku on Apple silicon Using UTM

      Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. It’s inspired by BeOS. To learn about the history of BeOS and Haiku, check out the video The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of BeOS.

      Haiku runs on Intel processors, but what are your options if you have an Apple silicon Mac? You can actually run Haiku in UTM, a virtual machine platform that supports emulating other processors.

      Let’s walk through the process of installing Haiku on UTM. You can go through the steps in this blog post or watch in video form: [...]

    • HaikuOS[GSoC 2023] VPN Support Project Update #5
      Tempered Optimism

      So great news everyone, OpenVPN and the TUN/TAP driver is working on Haiku! While this is great news for the development of the project, I need to temper it with some problems that the project has encountered now. So first thing that I had to change first was going from TUN to TAP since OpenVPN wanted a Point-to-Point connection for the TUN driver and Point-to-Point isn’t quite a thing on Haiku yet. I had a lot of trouble with routing with TUN, so I moved onto TAP, and that seems to work… sort of. The main thing is that Haiku can be a client fine but it has some trouble being a server as OpenVPN can set the server up, and have a client OpenVPN connect to it (let us say the client is running Linux), but the client cannot ping the Haiku server. When I try to ping the server, ping will just say Destination Host Unreachable. Looking further into it using tcpdump, I realized that the client is trying to send ARP request to try and find the server and the Haiku server isn’t responding. Checking the Haiku side of things, I noticed that it wasn’t receiving the ARP requests to begin with so I have a hunch it might be the VirtualBox NAT Network I am using but I am not ruling out the possibility of the TAP driver or the TAP interface.

    • Barry KaulerParcellite and Qlipper clipboard managers compiled in OE

      Commits. Parcellite:

      https://github.com/bkauler/oe-qky-kirkstone/commit/a1bca6f38dcfe5c21fa919ff46676a2363bb7b70

      Qlipper:

      https://github.com/bkauler/oe-qky-kirkstone/commit/1a1c99f1bae70b1600b77c6fd083a7596c0fa24d

      I have removed Glipper-lite clipboard manager from the inbuilt package-list for EasyOS, as it is English-only. Have replaced it with Parcellite.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

      • PCLOS OfficialPCLinuxOS: Firefox updated to 116.0.1

        Mozilla Firefox has been updated to 116.0.1 for PCLinuxOS. This is a bug fix update to the 116.x series. Now available in the software repository.

    • SUSE/OpenSUSE

      • Dominique LeuenbergeropenSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the weeks 2023/30 & 31

        Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

        As so often during the vacation season, I take some Fridays off and am punished for it by having to do reviews spanning more than one week. The same thing happened this time, so you had to wait an extra week again to find out what happened in Tumbleweed. A total of 10 snapshots have been published since my last review (0719, 0724, 0727..0731, 0801, 0802, and 0803). Between 0719 and 0724, there was a more significant gap due to SUSE moving some infrastructure between data centers.

      • SUSE's Corporate BlogCentOS Alternatives: Migrating Workloads From CentOS To OpenSUSE Leap – Automating With Ansible Part 1

        In this blog posts, we’ll dive into adapting your Ansible code made for CentOS to openSUSE Leap, ensuring seamless compatibility. In this first part, we’ll provide advice and a general introduction to ease your way into the process.

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • ! Avi Alkalay €¡: My time on the IBM Linux Impact Team, and legacy

        In this extensive article, Jon “MadDog” delves into the behind-the-scenes narrative of how Linux and Open Source gained acceptance within the corporate sphere, eventually establishing itself as the dominant platform in today’s enterprise information technology. It has become the operating system powering contemporary cloud infrastructure and, most notably, has transformed into the primary methodology for driving software innovation.

        Interwoven throughout the article are accounts of my personal journey during my time at IBM, specifically during the unforgettable years as a member of the IBM Linux Impact Team. Our mission achieved remarkable success, evident today every time a non-desktop IT professional interacts with a computer system, which is now commonly built entirely on dependable, enterprise-ready Open Source software.

        While people tell success stories in specific projects, what we did between 2001 and 2008 changed the entire IT industry! Without that evangelism and adoption of Open Source work, you as an IT professional would probably be using only Windows and Solaris today. You wouldn’t have embraced the cloud, wouldn’t know what DevOps is, and would likely be completely 100% dependent on software licensing.

        My blog is full of stories from that time.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

      • LinuxiacIncus Project: A Breakaway from Canonical’s LXD
        In the fast-paced world of technology, open-source projects often experience changes in leadership and direction.

        One such instance occurred when Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, recently took over LXD, a widely-used container and virtual machine manager, which was part of the Linux Containers Project for years.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • Linux GizmosAvalue launches 3.5” SBC with Hybrid design

        Avalue launched this week a 3.5” Single Board Computer that supports both 12th Gen CPUs and Intel 13th Gen i5/i3 processors. The ECM-ADLS is also equipped with multiple peripherals including dual 2.5GbE ports and NVMe support.€ 

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • ArduinoProject Hub highlights: There’s something for everyone!

        The three great projects selected in May for our Arduino Project of the Month competition are a reminder that making allows anyone to work (or play!) with technology – regardless of their goal, skill level, budget or inspiration.

      • Tom's HardwareUnihiker Single-Board Computer Review: Fun for Beginners, Less-so for Makers

        Another Raspberry Pi alternative but this time the form factor is all about the screen.

      • peppe8oRaspberry PI Pico W Weather Monitor with e-Paper

        This tutorial will show you how to create a cool Raspberry PI Pico Weather Display with an e-Paper (e-Ink) monitor showing the weather status...

      • James StanleyThe Egyptian coin box

        I have invented a new magic trick. It involves a very thin wooden box with 5 locations for coins inside, each labelled with one of the 5 bodily senses. A spectator places a coin inside, without telling the magician where it is. The magician then makes a show of listening to the box, sniffing the box, etc., and successfully determines where the coin was placed.

      • Ken ShirriffA close look at the 8086 processor's bus hold circuitry

        This blog post explains in detail how the bus hold feature is implemented in the processor's logic. (Be warned that this post is a detailed look at a somewhat obscure feature.) I've also found some apparently undocumented characteristics of the 8086's hold acknowledge circuitry, designed to make signal transition faster on the shared control lines.

      • Andrew HutchingsAmiga 4000 Restoration x2: Part 2

        Both Amiga 4000s are missing covers for the bottom drive bay. There are STL files to 3D print for these readily available, so the question is, what colour?

      • Tom's HardwareRaspberry Pi Lightsaber Puts the Force in Your Hands

        The housing for the project is available for anyone to download and 3D print at home. You can find them on the project page over at the Adafruit website. In addition, you’ll need an Adafruit RP2040 Prop-Maker Feather with I2S Audio Amplifier, a push button, an LED strip, a slide switch, a speaker module and in this case, they recommend a 3.7V Lithium-Ion cylindrical battery.

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Medevel15 Open-source Free Self-hosted Survey Poll and Vote Generator Solutions

      A survey generator is a tool that allows users to create and distribute surveys to collect data from a specific audience. These generators can be built into a website or hosted separately, and offer various features such as customizable questions and templates, skip logic, and data analysis tools.

    • Programming/Development

      • Balthazar RouberolHow to profile a FastAPI asynchronous request

        I have been experimenting with FastAPI recently, a Python API framework self-describing as "high performance, easy to learn, fast to code, ready for production".

        One of the features I wanted my project to have is to be fully asynchronous, from the app server to the SQL requests. As the API is mostly I/O bound, this would allow it to handle many concurrent requests with a single server process, instead of starting a thread per request, as one commony seen with Flask/Gunicorn.

        However, this poses a challenge when it comes to profiling the code and interpreting the results.

      • Gilles ChehadePlakar: vfs importer interface

        I reworked the virtual filesystem layer in plakar, making it possible to write custom importers of data: use plakar to backup an s3 bucket, for instance.

      • QtQt Creator 11.0.1 released

        We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 11.0.1!

      • TecAdminChanging default Host and Port in React.JS

        React.js, a powerful JavaScript library developed by Facebook, is used to build user interfaces, especially for single-page applications. You’ll often use it to build complex UIs out of small, reusable pieces called “components”.

      • HackadayMicroLisp: Lisp For Microcontrollers Now Has Lisp-Based ARM Assembler

        In a way it feels somewhat silly to market a version of Lisp as targeting resource-constrained platforms, considering the systems it ran on back in the 1960s, but as time goes on, what would have given 1970s Big Iron a run for its money is now a sub-$5 microcontroller that you can run uLisp (MicroLisp) on. This particular project now even has an ARM assembler that is written in Lisp whose source code (GitHub) fits on a mere two A4-sized pages.

      • Python

      • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

        • Carl SchwanReuse annotate automation

          Someone pointed out that it would be great to automate the addition of the metadata inside the files based on the git repository.

          So here is a small script that does exactly that. It goes over all your .cpp and .h file and will add the header based on the list of authors as well as the first commit on that particular file.

        • University of TorontoHow the rc shell handles whitespace in various contexts

          I recently read Mark Jason Dominus's The shell and its crappy handling of whitespace, which is about the Bourne shell and its many issues with whitespace in various places. I'm a long time user of (a version of) Tom Duff's rc shell (here's why I switched), which was written for Research Unix Version 10 and then Plan 9 to (in part) fix various issues with the Bourne shell. You might ask if rc solves these whitespace issues; my answer is that it about half solves them, and the remaining half is a hard to deal with problem area (although the version of rc I use doesn't support some things that would help).



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