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tl;dr: I wanted to test one of my snaps on riscv64. I don’t own any RISC-V hardware. I set up a QEMU VM on my ThinkPad, installed Ubuntu desktop inside it, and it actually worked. Slowly. Very slowly. But it worked.

I maintain nearly 50 snaps in the Snap Store. Most of the time I test things on my ThinkPad running Ubuntu 24.04 (amd64), or my MacBook Air running Ubuntu Asahi (arm64). That covers the two architectures most people care about. But some of my snaps are built for more… exotic architectures. Things like s390x, ppc64el, and riscv64.

I use Publer to post identical content across Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Same words, same time, same bloke. It’s a massive time-saver, and means I can reach people wherever they happen to hang out online without having to faff about copying and pasting between apps.

I wasn’t running some grand social media experiment. I was just having a moan about Windows updates like any reasonable person would. But the results were so stark they opened my eyes to exactly what these platforms reward - and it’s not what you might think.

tl;dr: There’s a relentless campaign by scammers to publish malware in the Canonical Snap Store. Some gets caught by automated filters, but plenty slips through. Recently, these miscreants have changed tactics - they’re now registering expired domains belonging to legitimate snap publishers, taking over their accounts, and pushing malicious updates to previously trustworthy applications. This is a significant escalation.

Context

Snaps are compressed, cryptographically signed, revertable software packages for Linux desktops, servers, and embedded devices. They use standard security primitives in the Linux kernel alongside technology developed by Canonical for Ubuntu.

tl;dr I’m hosting a Community Spotlight Webinar today at Anchore featuring Nicolas Vuilamy from the MegaLinter project. Register here.

Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of working with organizations that create widely-used open source tools. The popularity of these tools is evident through their impressive download statistics, strong community presence, and engagement both online and at events.

During my time at Canonical, we saw the tremendous reach of Ubuntu, along with tools like LXD, cloud-init, and yes, even Snapcraft.

Parasocial chat

On Linux Matters we have a friendly and active, public Telegram channel linked on our Contact page, along with a Discord Channel. We also have links to Mastodon, Twitter (not that we use it that much) and email.

At the time of writing there are roughly this ⬇️ number of people (plus bots, sockpuppets and duplicates) in or following each Linux Matters “official” presence:

Preponderance of chat

We chose to have a presence in lots of places, but primarily the talent presenters (Martin, Mark, and myself (and Joe)) only really hang out to chat on Telegram and Mastodon.

This is mostly an informational PSA for anyone struggling to get Windows 3.11 working in modern versions of QEMU. Yeah, I know, not exactly a massively viral target audience.

Anyway, short answer, use QEMU 5.2.0 from December 2020 to run Windows 3.11 from November 1993.

An innocent beginning

I made a harmless jokey reply to a toot from Thom at OSNews, lamenting the lack of native Mastodon client for Windows 3.11.

tl;dr

I bodged together a Python script using Spotipy (not a typo) to feed me #NewMusicDaily in a Spotify playlist.

No AI/ML, all automated, “fresh” tunes every day. Tunes that I enjoy get preserved in a Keepers playlist; those I don’t like to get relegated to the Sleepers playlist.

Any tracks older than eleven days are deleted from the main playlist, so I automatically get a constant flow of new stuff.

This is another blog post lifted wholesale out of my weekly newsletter. I do this when I get a bit verbose to keep the newsletter brief. The newsletter is becoming a blog incubator, which I’m okay with.

A reminder about that newsletter

The newsletter is emailed every Friday - subscribe here, and is archived and available via RSS a few days later.

I talked a bit about the process of setting up the newsletter on episode 34 of Linux Matters Podcast. Have a listen if you’re interested.

I initially started typing this as short -[ Contrafibularities ]- segment for my free, weekly newsletter. But it got a bit long, so I broke it out into a blog post instead.

About that newsletter

The newsletter is emailed every Friday - subscribe here, and is archived and available via RSS a few days later. I talked a bit about the process of setting up the newsletter on episode 34 of Linux Matters Podcast. Have a listen if you’re interested.

A few weeks ago, in episode 25 of Linux Matters Podcast I brought up the subject of ‘Coding Joy’. This blog post is an expanded follow-up to that segment. Go and listen to that episode - or not - it’s all covered here.

Not a Developer

I’ve said this many times - I’ve never considered myself a ‘Developer’. It’s not so much imposter syndrome, but plain facts. I didn’t attend university to study software engineering, and have never held a job with ‘Engineer’ or Developer’ in the title.