Ubuntu

tl;dr. The OBS Studio snap is now updated to the latest stable release, 29.1.3, after a “brief” hiatus.

Another day, another updated snap, which had been languishing a bit. I wrote about updating Spot yesterday, and today, as per the title, it’s OBS Studio. As I mentioned previously, there’s a bunch of outdated snaps in the store, and I want to help fix that. Hopefully, with these blog posts, others might learn how, and be motivated to either publish new applications or step up and update existing ones.

I recently lamented that there’s a bunch of broken and outdated snaps in the snap store. Well, some of them are my responsibility, so in the spirit of “be the change you want to see”, let’s get them fixed and updated.

I thought I’d highlight one or two as I go through them, to highlight any important or interesting changes. Today I took a look at Spot, which is a very decent native GNOME Spotify client by Alexandre Trendel.

I was a guest host on Late Night Linux podcast, episode 249 last week, filling in for Will. We each bring along a ‘discovery’, I brought snapcraft metrics to talk about. I thought I’d write up how I use them, for listeners of the show as it’s hard to articulate this very well verbally.

My snaps

I have about twenty snaps in the snap store. Some, like Bombsquad and ncspot have been published for years now. Others such as Classicube were more recently built and published.

I wrote previously about debugging a broken x16emu snap. In short, something went wonky with ld. I started a thread on the snapcraft forum and Ken VanDine came to my assistance with an answer and a pull request.

I grabbed that pr, and it did indeed build successfully..

$ snapcraft --use-lxd
Launching instance...
Executed: pull alsa-pulseaudio
Executed: pull gnome/sdk
Executed: pull x16-roms
Executed: pull x16-emulator
Executed: build alsa-pulseaudio
Executed: build gnome/sdk
Executed: build x16-roms
Executed: skip pull x16-roms (already ran)
Executed: skip build x16-roms (already ran)
Executed: stage x16-roms (required to build 'x16-emulator')
Executed: skip pull alsa-pulseaudio (already ran)
Executed: skip build alsa-pulseaudio (already ran)
Executed: stage alsa-pulseaudio (required to build 'x16-emulator')
Executed: build x16-emulator
Executed: skip stage alsa-pulseaudio (already ran)
Executed: stage gnome/sdk
Executed: skip stage x16-roms (already ran)
Executed: stage x16-emulator
Executed: prime alsa-pulseaudio
Executed: prime gnome/sdk
Executed: prime x16-roms
Executed: prime x16-emulator
Executed parts lifecycle
Generated snap metadata
Created snap package x16emu_b16509b_amd64.snap  

Even better, it’s smaller. The build I had in the store was 6MB in size:

I thought I’d “live blog” (not live) my way through fixing a snap which I noticed was broken this morning. How did I notice? I happened to look at the build page for it. Maybe my spidey sense was tingling, because I wouldn’t ordinarily have zoned in on this particular snap.

I could have some kind of alert that lets me know when this happens, but I currently don’t. I might use my new-found love of GitHub Actions, but that sounds like a future blog post!

For the last six months, I’ve been a presenter on Linux Matters. Prior to that, I spent thirteen years presenting the now-defunct Ubuntu Podcast. Both shows have/had multiple presenters,

We record every other week, and send our individual audio files to Joe. He does all the magic post-recording production including editing, audio processing and mastering. That file is then uploaded and eventually makes its way into the Patreon “all episodes” ad-free feed, then to our feed a day or so later.

NextCloud Box

I just stumbled on an old NextCloud Box in my loft. It’s a quiet Sunday in the house, so I thought I’d see if it still works, and if there’s any data on it. I’m pretty sure I did use it for a while, so there must be something on it.

Here’s my NextCloud Box in a cardboard box labelled “NextCloud Box”.

Here’s what the NextCloud box looks like once installed.

Lies

Neither of these are “App Stores” in the way average people know them. You can neither buy or sell products in these so-called ‘stores’…

…yet.

The wording on those two screenshots above is both hilarious and sad. It’s very reminiscent of People’s Front of Judea or Slim Shady.

Anyway, here follows a bit of a moan about all this (the app stores, not Monty Python or Eminem).

Background

I have previously lamented on the following subject as a stream of tweets. The topic has been on mind mind again recently though. So I thought I’d revisit and expand my thoughts.

SOMETIMES I PRESS THE CAPS LOCK KEY BY ACCIDENT, USUALLY WHILE PLAYING A VIDEO GAME. I THEN FIND MYSELF UNABLE TO TYPE A PASSWORD OR I AM ACCUSED OF SHOUTING ONLINE.

OVER COFFEE, MY FRIEND MARTIN EXPLAINED THAT IT’S POSSIBLE TO DISABLE THE CAPS LOCK KEY COMPLETELY IN LINUX. I’D NEVER CONSIDERED DOING THIS, MISTAKENLY THINKING THE ONLY OPTIONS WERE TO REMAP IT TO SOMETHING ELSE.

IT TURNS OUT GNOME TWEAKS HAS AN OPTION. IN ‘KEYBOARD & MOUSE’, CLICK THE ‘ADDITIONAL LAYOUT OPTIONS’, THEN CHOOSE ‘CAPS LOCK BEHAVIOUR’.

My work computer is a ThinkPad Z13. It’s on most of the time, including overnight and during the weekend. I’m one of those horrible people who like to just wiggle their mouse, unlock, and get working. I often leave a ton of windows open, so I quite like to sit down and start working without having to wait for boot up, and subsequent app launch.

So when I arrive at my desk on a Monday and discover my GPU has crashed, that’s a poor start to the week. The GPU crashing doesn’t completely kill the machine, just my desktop session and all the applications that were open. 😭