LINUX

Yesterday, I wrote a little about the applications I’ve seen crash on my Ubuntu Linux laptop over the last six months.

Some people questioned why I use Microsoft Edge as my primary web browser on Ubuntu. I thought I’d write up why, and how a couple of the built-in features are appealing to me.

tl;dr it’s multiple profiles, stability, speed, tab sleep, and vertical tabs.

Multiple personality disorder

I have tried to keep work and personal browser profiles separate for some years now. There are two main reasons I do this. Firstly, my work-related search history, recent tabs and other activities are confined to one browser personality. My personal stuff like shopping, email, social media and other fun stuff is sectioned off from work. Secondly, by having work in its own profile, I can just close that profile at the end of the day.

tl;dr: I downloaded the application crash data for my work Laptop. To probably nobody’s surprise, Zoom is the most crashy thing in the last six months on my laptop.

New laptop

When I joined Axiom at the end of 2022, I was given some budget to buy a work laptop. My friend and co-presenter of Linux Matters Podcast, Martin Wimpress was looking for a new company laptop around the same time. He wrote up his thoughts on why he chose a ThinkPad Z13, and we discussed it on episode 1 of the podcast, back in April.

(yet)

tl;dr In a recent thread on Mastodon, it was revealed that Ubuntu 23.04 users can’t install the Steam deb package from the Ubuntu archive without jumping through some technical hoops. It turns out this was a mistake, a bug was filed, and future builds shouldn’t have this problem.

It’s not immediately apparent whether the (currently ‘broken’) ISO images for Ubuntu 23.04 will be rebuilt (unlikely) or if this will stay broken in 23.04, and users will need to ‘cope’.

Just a few thoughts about the origin of Linux Matters podcast.

Prior art

Over the thirteen years of the Ubuntu Podcast the presenter lineup, format, duration and frequency changed here and there. In the early days, we would record a segment, have a cup of tea, and then record another one. It was a long and laborious process that took up most of a Sunday afternoon. After a little while we tweaked things and settled into our stride. Once we did, it helped us focus, and get episodes prepared and recorded with less stress.

Preamble

I recently started working for InfluxData as a Developer Advocate on Telegraf, an open source server agent to collect metrics. Telegraf builds from source to ship as a single Go binary. The latest - 1.19.1 was released just yesterday.

Part of my job involves helping users by reproducing reported issues, and assisting developers by testing their pull requests. It’s fun stuff, I love it. Telegraf has an extensive set of plugins which supports gathering, aggregating & processing metrics, and sending the results to other systems.

The last event I went to before The Event was Linux Application Summit (LAS) in Barcelona, Spain back in November 2019! Time flies.

LAS is a community organised event, sponsored and supported by the GNOME and KDE projects. The conference is “designed to accelerate the growth of the Linux application ecosystem by bringing together everyone involved in creating a great Linux application user experience.”.

In November 2020, the LAS team organised a virtual version of the event. The recorded sessions from both events can be found over on the Linux Application Summit YouTube channel.

I appreciate many people already know how to do this, but I’m surprised how many don’t, or don’t realise what it does. Forgive me if you know about this feature of Google Chrome.

A little while back I managed to win two separate eBay auctions for 16GiB DDR3 SODIMMs to install in my ThinkPad T450. This took it from the previously installed 16GiB to the expansive 32GiB.

Then I opened Google Chrome.

I’ve said many times, I don’t consider myself a software developer. Much like I don’t consider myself a professional chef. I can write code, just as I can cook. What I make isn’t ground breaking, but it won’t poison anyone either, and I enjoy doing it.

Coding for me started on the ZX81 in BASIC then on to the Spectrum and other 8-bit microcomputers. I dabbled with Z80 and 6502 assembly language. At college I did COBOL, InfoBASIC and more Z80. When I eventually got a PC in 1990 I taught myself Pascal, via a free compiler for MS-DOS I got on a floppy disk in the post.

This post is more an aide-mémoire for myself, but may be useful to others.

I recently wrote a little story about bugs, the crash reporter and errors website in Ubuntu. Sometimes a user will want to look for their crash reports, and in fact that question came up today on the Ubuntu Discourse.

Back when we shipped Unity desktop as the default desktop environment in Ubuntu, there was a simple button to take a user to their previously uploaded crash reports. There was also an easy, graphical way to disable crash reporting.

This is a bit of a dayjob post, but as I maintain a bunch of snaps in my own time, I figured it’s not out of place here.

Typically when I (or indeed any developer) uses snapcraft to build a snap, a snapcraft.yaml drives the process. I’ll integrate some kind of CI or build system, and start publishing to the Snap Store. Usually, once created, the yaml doesn’t need much in the way of changes. Back when we first started building snaps, we were using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS systems. At runtime the snap would leverage the base of core. The core snap is a super minimal Ubuntu 16.04 LTS runtime environment.