LINUX

Rumours are swirling in Linux circles that some prominent distributions are preparing to remove the Open Source Chromium web browser from their archives.

This appears to have come about because of a change being made by Google, which reduces functionality in third party chromium-based browsers. Chromium (perhaps unsurprisingly) falls into this category. While the proprietary Google Chrome is built on the same technology as the open source Chromium browser, they’re not the same.

It’s just a month into the new year and we have our first controversy in the Linux community for 2021. In a recent update to Raspberry Pi OS, the official operating system for the diminuative computers, a new repository was added to the default install. This change means new and existing Raspberry Pi devices, running the officially maintained and blessed Operating System will check in with an additional software repository when updated, which will offer more software to the consumer.

I am not a fan of rebooting my computers. As you can see:

alan@robot:~$ for host in $(cat computers.txt); do ssh "$host" "uptime"; done
 20:24:53 up 117 days,  5:06, 10 users,  load average: 5.85, 6.07, 5.48
 20:24:55 up 113 days,  4:56,  7 users,  load average: 0.95, 0.68, 0.72
 20:24:56 up 66 days,  9:05,  5 users,  load average: 1.06, 0.58, 0.51
 20:24:57 up 2 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.60, 1.09, 0.51
 20:24:58 up 4 days,  7:05,  3 users,  load average: 1.83, 1.22, 0.77
 20:24:58 up 18 days, 21:31,  9 users,  load average: 1.86, 1.86, 2.00
 20:25:35 up 374 days,  1:18,  6 users,  load average: 1.01, 1.01, 1.11

One is a desktop, two are laptops and the others are headless servers. The servers tend to be left up mostly because I don’t see any need to reboot them. However I’m also a little scared to, in case they don’t come back and I end up having to faff about to fix them.

Last year ( 😄 ) I wrote an article called Snap Along With Me in which I detailed how I approached snapping a rust application called t-rec. Well, I’m back with another “Snap Along”, this time we’re snapping an application written in Golang.

During a meeting to on-board a new member of the team at work today, I went through a similar process as my last blog post. This time I chose a different application, so I thought I’d write it up here. I’ve previously explained how I browse the various GitHub Trending pages for each language. Today was no different, we browsed the trending rust projects then moved on to trending Go projects.

I was recently interviewed by Joe Ressington for Late Night Linux Extra episode 14. Here’s a transcription I typed up, which may be useful. I used an automated tool to create the transcription, then tidied it up myself. If you spot anything which doesn’t match the audio, and is materially important, do feel free to propose an edit on GitHub (link at the top of the page).

Joe: This episode is about snaps, quite the controversial topic in some circles, and who better to talk about it than Alan Pope - “popey” as he’s affectionately known by almost everyone. According to his twitter bio he is a Developer Advocate at Canonical working on Snapcraft and Ubuntu. Now, in case you don’t know popey is a good friend of mine and I’ve done many podcasts with him over the years, but this, he’s Alan, he’s Alan Pope of Canonical, he’s not my friend. It’s a work thing for him, because you know, I wanted to ask him some fairly difficult questions and try and clear up some of the misapprehensions and just get to the bottom of what is going on with snaps.

I’ve mentioned before that I ‘suffer’ from xkcd 386. I’m trying to improve, and maybe writing this post will help me. If it helps you, that’s awesome too. Let’s work on this together. 🤝

There’s a strong prevalence among some in the Linux community for people correcting others. Specifically correcting pronunciation. I have been guilty of this in the past, but I’m trying to be the change I want to be. It’s a struggle!

Three years ago I bought a Magewell USB HDMI capture device (affiliate link). It’s a neat, reliable and well made, if expensive device. I use it to capture the output of computers, mostly to get pixel perfect bug reports, and to make some videos for YouTube. I prefer these hardware solutions over the software screencasting counterparts, as they tend to be more reliable, and don’t consume resources on the computer being recorded.

This is an early PSA aimed at developers who publish snaps in the Snap Store. They can probably skip this preamble, but for anyone else here’s some backstory in case you’re bored interested.

Preamble

Snaps are confined software packages for Linux. They were originally designed / intended for IoT use cases so are optimised for size, bundling dependencies, are compressed on disk and auto update. They can also be used to package server software, like NextCloud, and desktop software like Signal Desktop. There’s millions of desktops, routers, servers and other interesting devices with snaps installed.

10 REM TL;DR

My Raspberry Pi 400 boots from this:

To this.

BBC BASIC!

This blog post is what parts I smashed together to make this work and why.

20 PRINT “HELLO”

40 years ago this Christmas, I got my first “personal computer”. It was a Sinclair ZX81 with 1KiB of RAM and a tape deck for storage. Every time I powered it on, like all ‘81 owners, I was greeted with this.

Last week I posted about my guilty collection of unplayed games in Digital Hoarding: Gaming Edition. In short, I have a ton of games I’ve bought over the years and never played, even once. I set myself an internal goal to play more of the games I already have, and reign in my game purchasing.

I used the dynamic collection feature of Steam to show me the unplayed games, sorted by their steam review score. The idea being I want to play games that are actually likely to be fun. I don’t doubt I have very many good games, but I bet I have the odd stinker in there too. Might as well start at the top.