Re: [Discuss] RMS in the news
On Thu, Sep 19, 2019, at 17:03, Jerry Feldman wrote: > I was an emacs guy. Learned vi in about 1980, but when I worked for cadmus > I learned gosling emacs. Used it for all my development until I switched > to atom Remember the epithet "eight megabytes and constantly swapping"? I grew up with CUA applications (Alt+[letter] or F10 to activate menus, shift+[cursor movement] to select, ctrl+[cursor movement] to move more). Now my editor of choice is Visual Studio Code. I don't want to tell you how many megabytes it is. But it works great for me. :^) ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] RMS in the news
On Wed, Sep 18, 2019, at 06:40, Jack Bennett wrote: > Later on, one professor in the department, a member of my dissertation > committee, was quietly leaving the talk a little bit early. rms noticed and > called her out directly for leaving early so she retorted, "well, you know, > I gotta pick up the KIDS". It's funny to hear a story of that kind of disrespect now. Just last week before the current drama erupted, I was talking to a friend who is a radio host in New York City. My friend said that he'd invited RMS to give a keynote at some event, and RMS not only ignore the parameters of the time slot -- he COVERED the clock. So, apparently RMS's talk is the most important thing in the world. He'll end when he feels like it, and you may not leave when you're satisfied. I've given talks, myself, where I end with 80% of the audience I started with and I literally didn't notice anyone left. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] PirateCon Saturday, 6/29
I will probably attend, and my wife Rebecca sounded interested in the agenda. We'll probably register tonight and we'll be looking out for you, to say hi. On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 10:49 AM, Will Rico willr...@gmail.com wrote: Any BLU'ers planning on attending PirateCon this Saturday (6/29)? http://masspirates.org/blog/conference/ Looks like an interesting cross-section of free open source software, social justice, and politics. The speakers include Wendy Seltzer (of W3C and Tor) and David House, and others. The topics seem particularly timely given the recent news about the NSA. Will ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] The Windows tax
On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 12:47 PM, Rich Pieri richard.pi...@gmail.com wrote: That's evidence of Google subsidising the hardware in expectation of a return through the Google Play store. Compare Samsung's Galaxy-branded products with the Samsung-manufactured Nexus products. You'll see similar subsidizing from Google. I wonder how many people buy a Chromebook and don't even look at the Google Play store before erasing the whole thing and putting a free OS on it. Will this be a problem with Android handhelds, too, when Canonical unleashes its plan to take over the world next year? (If if is, it will probably be less so than with the Chromebooks.) Do we know they're really being subsidized? Or are they just cheap? Last Sunday on This Week in Tech, I think it was Leo who said he thought most Chromebook owners aren't running ChromeOS; he didn't cite a source though. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] The Windows tax
On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 11:22 PM, Brendan Kidwell bren...@glump.net wrote: I wonder how many people buy a Chromebook and don't even look at the Google Play store before erasing the whole thing and putting a free OS on it. Really I probably should have said 'ANOTHER free OS on it'. I understand you can download Chrome OS and Chromium OS by themselves free of charge. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] USB thumbdrive, Linux only usage: FAT vs NTFS vs other? TRIM support?
I bought a 16GB USB thumbdrive from Staples last week to use as a shuttle for some documents, scripts, and programs' data folders that will be used on my desktop and my laptop in turns. I'll probably be giving Stan's Data Bag project ( http://www.data-bag.org/ ) a spin, too. I feel like a cargo cult programmer trying to figure out the best way to format and mount this thing and I'm looking for some advice. On the other hand, I know that I'm getting ridiculously theoretical about a what amounts to an $11 piece of paper. :^) But that's what we sometimes like to do in BLU. First, I know that SSD devices -- the term seems to be reserved for things that connect to your computer over a faster bus than USB -- like to use the ATA TRIM command for the OS to let the device know a block/sector is switching from used to unused state. hdparm does not indicate that my thumbdrive supports it. It's a PNY 16GB USB Flash Drive that says Key \n Attaché at the bottom of the package. Should I care that TRIM doesn't seem to be supported? For Linux-only use, what filesystem should I use? vFAT/FAT32 is clearly the standard, but doesn't it use unreasonably large allocation block sizes? I have had trouble with using Unix-native filesystems on portable drives in the past, instead of vFAT, because the OS wants to record owners to objects and those owners don't make any sense on another machine. Is there a simple workaround for that? So I think I'm deciding between vFAT and NTFS, but I have heard suggestions in the past that some thumbdrives' firmware might use their knowledge of FAT to do high level, filesystem-specific cleanup with respect to TRIMming, even though the client OS is treating it as a dumb block device that happens to have a FAT filesystem. Is there any truth to that and should I avoid NTFS as a result? ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] USB thumbdrive, Linux only usage: FAT vs NTFS vs other? TRIM support?
On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 4:31 PM, Matthew Gillen m...@mattgillen.net wrote:
On 02/25/2013 12:18 PM, Brendan Kidwell wrote:
I have had trouble with using Unix-native filesystems on portable
drives in the past, instead of vFAT, because the OS wants to record
owners to objects and those owners don't make any sense on another
machine. Is there a simple workaround for that?
Create a single directory in the root of the thumb drive, and give that
world-write and group-write, then give it set-group-ID bit ('chmod g+s
dirname').
Thanks for that tip. Shirley Dúlcey also pointed that out in a private
email and I'll give it a try if I decided not to use FAT.
___
Discuss mailing list
Discuss@blu.org
http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] [OT] Dumbing down of the population
On Jan 15, 2013 8:35 AM, Mark Woodward ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote: Why do I need to know that? In my experience this often occurs when I'm already engaged in an unrelated highly intellectual pursuit and my next thought is I thought this was a solved problem. I don't have time for this. You have to draw a line somewhere between interesting tangents and yak shaving. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Interesting rant about Gnome 3
On Wednesday, January 9, 2013, John Abreau wrote: This blog post sheds some interesting light on some of the issues many of us have been having withj gnome 3. Wow. This explains a lot. Like why Netbeans was broken in Gnome 3 and Cinnamon, reported fixed, and in my experience this weekend, broken again! (Probably Swing, not Netbeans, that has the conflict with GTK 3.) Glad I made the switch to KDE at work. Need to make time to complete the Linux Mint upgrade and desktop switch on my laptop soon. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] How to mount an Android device in Linux -- solution
[ ... Android 4.x removes USB mass storage server; requires you to use MTP protocol over USB. Support for that in Linux is immature. ] On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Derek Martin inva...@pizzashack.orgwrote: On those devices, you now are required to use MTP to access the device via USB, which until somewhat recently had little or no support under Linux, since solved by libmtp. I didn't look at this project, but I'm guessing it's a FUSE filesystem based on libmtp. Yes that's what it looks like here https://github.com/hanwen/go-mtpfs/blob/master/mtp.go . It references libmtp. And in answer to an earlier question, the point of my original post was to point out go-mtpfs from Google as an alternative for mtp-fuse ( https://launchpad.net/mtp-fuse ). I found mtp-fuse to be crashy and unworkable. My original post could have been a little more clear on that point; sorry I wrote it in a rush. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Linux Mint Cinnamon Home Permissions
Also, when doing a lot of things at once, for example backup/reinstall/restore... (Or even scarier, upgrade a VPS's OS in place, remove several user accounts, replace one web app with another, and upgrade WordPress -- you get the idea.) I've found it's a good idea to take things slowly and reboot a lot. The Linux OS ecosystem has a lot of hidden traps where you can seriously break your system and not actually find out until a reboot or a power failure; an intentional reboot is a kind of smoke test for that kind of user error or packager error because you find out pretty soon after the failure occurred. On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 7:28 AM, Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org wrote: Most crashes are caused by cockpit error. On 12/13/2012 09:43 PM, Will Rico wrote: Well, I tracked down the culprit in this mystery and the trail pointed to dumb user, not bad video driver. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Running Android on a PC such as Android X86 Project
I've got an Asus EEE netbook that I was considering installing Android X86 on. I went as far as trying to install the latest build in VirtualBox and I had no trouble whatsoever getting it up and running in that. I gather from the Android X86 docs that a lot of people do actually run it on things like the EEE netbooks for day-to-day use. What's holding me back is Zim Desktop Wiki (a desktop-native personal wiki/outliner). It requires GTK and there are no plans to make an Android or web version. With hundreds of pages in Zim, I'm not ready to make my netbook incompatible with it. :^( (Disclosure: this wasn't meant to be a plug, but just to be clear, I am the official Windows package maintainer for Zim.) On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 9:52 AM, Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org wrote: I was recently asked a question about running Android on a PC or on a virtual environment. There is the Android x86 project: http://www.android-x86.org. Basically, the guy has a tablet and he wants to use a bigger screen and keyboard ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Boston Linux Meeting Reminder, tomorrow, Wednesday, July 18 , 2012 - The Virtual Desktop
(I probably shouldn't have addressed my reply to 'announce' -- I assume that's not allowed. Sending again to Jerry and to 'discuss'.) On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 7:32 AM, Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org wrote: When: July 18, 2012 7PM (6:30PM for QA) Topic: The Virtual Desktop Moderator:Jerry Feldman Location: MIT Building E51, Room 315 ... I'm also looking at running a VMM as a service. Depends if I have the time to check it out or not. When this BLU meeting was first announced, I mentioned that I have a howto for running VirtualBox as a service in Linux and that the init.d script in the article needed updating. I polished up the script last night and it should work just fine now in current Ubuntu and Fedora installations. https://github.com/bkidwell/vbox-service-template . Later today I'll remove the old script from the howto article and point the article and script to each other. If there's time this evening I can spend 5 to 10 minutes walking through a demo if the audience is interested. Running desktop-hosted VMs on servers other than VirtualBox is left as an exercise for the reader. :^) Brendan ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Opera vs Chrome for safety/security
On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 6:10 AM, Scott Ehrlich srehrl...@gmail.com wrote: Noscript doesn't exist for Opera or Chrome, but at least Chrome reportedly has good-enough technology to counter it. There is an Opera Extension similar to NoScript called NotScripts. https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/notscripts/?display=en It's a little clunky, but it gets the job done. For security and speed and usability I can't recommend Opera over Chrome or vice versa -- I'm unhappy with both but I like them a lot better than any other browsers out there. (And I haven't even passed 40 years old yet!) ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] ssl certs
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Ward Vandewege w...@pong.be wrote: On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 01:21:04PM -0400, Stephen Adler wrote: $70/year after that. What's the cheapest ssl certificate I can get? Besides a self signed one. http://startssl.com Free, but the interface is a bit clunky. They don't hold your hand, but I had no trouble or complaints setting up a Startssl.com certificate for my VPS. See https://vicky.glump.net for an example deployment if want to see what their cert looks like. In an era where there are hundreds or thousands of uncounted and unregulated certificate providers that (AFAIK) can sign a cert for any domain in the world, the AUTHENTICATION provided by the system as a whole is worthless, so why pay for it? (Note, I am not actually responsible for any enterprise deployments of an SSL certificate right now, so that makes me not an expert.) ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Creating a Wiki server
On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 11:44 AM, David Miller davi...@gmail.com wrote: Definitely take your time and vet out a few different wiki solutions before choosing one. Migrating a wiki from one platform to another is a big pita. While MediaWiki is probably the most well known in my opinion it falls short for corporate use b/c it's lacking two major features. That's ACL's and a WYSIWYG editor... If you want WYSIWYG/visual editor, FogBugz' Wiki is nice. FogBugz is of course a complete issue tracking system, and it's $25/user/month hosted -- maybe less if you bring your own hosting. Works great for us in my company. (I do not have any financial interest in the vendor Fog Creek Software.) ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] TrueCrypt with SSD
On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 6:26 PM, John Abreau j...@blu.org wrote: Yes, they also standardized on a 6-character TrueCrypt password for all laptops. I pushed hard against that, as a password that weak meant we were only pretending to encrypt the machines, but the guys in Europe wouldn't budge on that. Wow. Just wow. Were they at least unique 6-character passwords per user? Even so, how long would that take to crack on a beefy desktop with 4 GPUs? ... a few days at most? I'd say the same thing as you: what the point of spending all those CPU cycles if the data is effectively not encrypted?! ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: White balance for the whole X desktop
On Sat, Apr 2, 2011 at 10:29 PM, Dan Ritter d...@tao.merseine.nu wrote: There are proprietary things that can be done with NVidia or Radeon's closed drivers, but the only native all-X11 color change system I know about is xgamma. Yep, I was aware that some tools exist attached to binary blob X video drivers, but in my case I'm using the open source Intel GPU driver and I don't see anything similar NVidia's control panel. :^( I found xgamma too. I wonder if it can be extended to allow specifying three separate channels and correction curves that aren't a simple exponential function. I'll look into it (after checking that xgamma actually works as-is on my system). If I get anywhere with that I'll put it up on launchpad and report my progress here. On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 6:38 PM, Tom Metro tmetro-...@vl.com wrote: Brendan Kidwell wrote: - my new Dell Vostro v130 with a decidedly blue backlight that's rather depressing Is this a trend? My ASUS VW266H also has a cold color temperature. Something I saw noted in several reviews. Easily noticeable when placed along side my laptop's display and a window spans across both displays. I think it's a tradeoff among reliability, cost, and color temperature. The blue color probably comes from an array of white LEDs that provide more even, longer-lasting and lower power illumination than the old electro-fluorescent backlights. And unfortunately their color temperature is ugly, but they probably tested well enough with focus groups to warrant the change considering all the upsides. At first I found it objectionable, and tried adjusting the monitor's built-in settings, which I was never able to get to match the laptop's display. Now I've gotten used to it, and by comparison the laptop now appears unnaturally yellow (warm). My issue really became obvious when I used my laptop next to my family's desktop PC over the weekend while doing some troubleshooting and cleanup there. Their 7-year-old free-standing LCD display is quite yellow/red, but I find it less objectionable than the blue tint of the LED-lit one I have. Brendan Kidwell ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
White balance for the whole X desktop
What is the general procedure for creating and applying a white balance formula in modern GNOME/KDE/XFCE desktops? What I have: - KDE (Kubuntu 10.10) - my new Dell Vostro v130 with a decidedly blue backlight that's rather depressing What I want: - Create a profile as I'm shown some reference images and answer questions in a wizard - (Or create a profile manually while following a howto) - Apply the profile to everything in X - text, pictures, and video Any suggestions? Thanks in advance. Brendan Kidwell ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
new computer report: Dell Vostro v130 13.3 laptop with Ubuntu 10.04 preloaded
On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 8:29 AM, Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org wrote: On 03/15/2011 01:41 AM, Brendan Kidwell wrote: I placed a mail order for the Vostro 130 and I'll let you know how it goes when I get it. Please do. On Thursday I received my Vostro v130 with Ubuntu 10.04 preloaded. I spent Friday night and Saturday testing it and setting it up. The Vostro v130 with Ubuntu is a 13.3 thin and light laptop (no optical drive). It has a dual core Intel Celeron CPU, 2GB of RAM and a 2GB hard disk. It weighs about 4.25 pounds including the external power adapter. It sells for $430 plus shipping. Bluetooth hardware is included but it doesn't work in Ubuntu, despite what the product page implies. But I knew this from a message on the Ubuntu forums before I place my order. Everything else works great. It didn't come with any bloatware except for a Firefox toolbar. All the hardware and drivers that worked before I did a fresh Kubuntu 10.10 install continued to work afterward the fresh install; you don't have to jump through any hoops to get Ubuntu installed. http://www.itproblemchild.com/2011/03/unboxing-dell-vostro-v130-with-ubuntu-preloaded/ Brendan Kidwell ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
My BLU Installfest project followup: I returned the Toshiba Satellite T235D and bought a Dell Vostro 130
For anyone who was following my attempt to get Ubuntu running on my Toshiba Satellite T235D at Saturday's Installfest, and those of you shopping for a new light laptop, here's my final report: I gave up and returned the damned thing (bought less than a week ago) and paid the restocking fee. Back on Saturday, after fiddling with the Linux kernel ACPI switches, I settled on pci=noacpi which allowed the system to boot completely, but failed to provide any access to or even evidence of a backlight control. What good is a claimed 6 or 7 hour battery life if I can't adjust the display power? (Also as an aside, out of the endless stream of studies in the news this week comes advice to not be reading harsh bright computer or smartphone displays at bedtime, so there's a legitimate medical reason I need a brightness control.) :^) Following some old advice archived here http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/ACPI/Fix_common_problems I pulled the ACPI DSDT information out of the firmware and had a look at it in disassembled view. Using Intel's ACPI machine language compiler whose pickiness is reportedly similar to that of the Linux kernel, I found there were tons of errors and undefined symbols in it. I didn't want to become an ACPI expert and spend days debugging it; I just wanted a working computer. More recent advice confirms: you don't want to be mucking about with ACPI if you're not an expert. I discovered that a lot of Toshiba Satellite computers are compatible with the Omnibook ACPI driver, the computers themselves having been apparently made by HP. Some more poking around in my machine revealed that the Omnibook driver was always trying to load at boot time but didn't know what to do with my firmware anyway. I wouldn't recommend anyone buy the Satellite T235D except as a Windows 7-only machine. So I returned that on Sunday and went back to square one. Sunday night I found out about the Dell Vostro 130, which is recent update of the Vostro 13 from the previous year. It's a thin, light 13.3 widescreen no-optical-drive laptop, and ships with Ubuntu or Windows. The updated 130 model that ships with Ubuntu 10.04 ($430 if anyone's shopping...) has a dual core Arrandale-based Intel Celeron, which is basically an Core i5 Lite (no hyperthreading). The Windows model has an actual Core i5 processor. I'm aware that reviews complain the battery is weak, but I live tethered most of the time anyway. I figured I can't go wrong with compatibility if Ubuntu's web site says the it works. I placed a mail order for the Vostro 130 and I'll let you know how it goes when I get it. -- Brendan Kidwell ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
