* Posts by keithpeter

2057 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jul 2007

Two new Linux desktops – one with deep roots – come to Debian

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Display postscript?

@ -bat and Liam

Looks like I'm going to have to explore this more.

Thanks

keithpeter Silver badge

Re: Display postscript?

Thanks bombastic

The non-linking to Cairo does suggest that the GSDE project may be using something else to do what Cairo and all does so perhaps it is display ps.

keithpeter Silver badge

Re: Debian?? Really??

@AC

I don't think that the two projects mentioned in the article are making any kind of 'statement' about Red Hat by using Debian.

Perhaps the project developers just used the system that they are familiar with and for which they know how to install the (many and complex) dependencies?

The precursor of one of the projects was using CentOS 8 so there will be build scripts around to modify and enhance if you wish to explore GSDE. It was explained that the maintainer of that older project has had other stuff to think about recently.

Lomiri's upstream project was developed on Ubuntu of course so aspects of the architecture would probably work best on a Debian based distribution. I don't recollect widespread porting of Unity to other distros back in the Unity 8 times. The DE does require the replacement of the entire graphical display system so installing it is not a trivial project.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Display postscript?

I ought to install Debian on a test machine and find out for myself, but perhaps knowledgeable people can tell me...

Is GSDEs rendering of the screen based on display postscript or similar as was NeXTSTEP?

If so is it limited to the postscript fonts or can ttfs be linked/converted?

(MacOS uses PDF under the hood which is why Preview can copy arbitrary sections of pdf files and you can paste them into appropriate applications - Textedit/Tinderbox &c as actual pdfs. There used to be a program that someone wrote where you could type a LaTeX formula into one half of the window and it would render in the other half, then you could drag it into a document as a compete vector image).

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: A bit of advance warning wouldn't have gone amiss

@Will Godfrey

Irony: A company whose unique sales proposition is long term stability pulls a fast one not once, not twice, but three times.

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Freeloaders crying...

Red Hat should have done this years ago!!

@Anon

How many years ago?

(Some here may guess why I'm asking)

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Springdale Linux

Springdale Linux formerly PUIAS Linux does a rebuild of RHEL. Springdale is mainly for internal use at Princeton and the IAS, but the University IT staff who work on it chuck the binaries over the wall and have been doing for some decades.

https://springdale.math.ias.edu/

They have their thinking caps on...

https://groups.google.com/g/springdale-users/c/53hFsR7oLEQ

So three times the rug has been pulled part way through a planned support period without warning or time to adjust budgets. CERN, FermiLab and various University project staff will be most amused I'm sure.

Icon: for those who have been made redundant and for those having to make guesses...

One person's trash is another's 'trashware' – the art of refurbing old computers

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

i5 and 8Gb ram with 240Gb ssd...

...is oddly enough the specification I used for most of the last two academic years working from home. Zoom, Teams, Chromium logged into the corporate MS 362±2.5 while running Impress, Write and Geogebra. Worked fine along with a dozen Chromium tabs open and all - mains connection of course, the Thinkpad X220 battery would have lasted about an hour with that lot running.

I can see why the project suggests that for Linux machines being handed out to civilians (i.e. not IT experts). Sounds like a nice practical idea to widen participation in work related activities. See icon.

Multi-tasking blunder leaves UK tax digitization plans 3 years late, 5 times over budget

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: The civil service went to a brewery but left thirsty and sober despite wanting to party

@ragnar and all

I'm guessing the COVID workload for HMRC was furlough payment processing? That would have been a biggy.

Wider point: I work(ed) in the public sector but not in civil service. We carried out government policy as best we could given resources. Election. New government. Different policies - like U turn level change. We have organisational inertia - can't turn the ship as fast as you can type a press release - coming from staff hired specific to previous government policies and buildings/plant. Add in pay freeze, austerity, and actually getting blamed for the old policies as if they were our ideas.

Fun times.

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Linux is going down the bloat path

" whole Linux community cannot come up with one definitive way to package apps and libraries"

@Voice

Who is the 'linux community'?

What organisation is there that could manage the standardisation process?

How could standards be enforced?

How would the thousands of different independent upstream projects ensure that their development cadences coincided to ensure compatibility with standardised libraries?

Best of luck

Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Still trying.

@43300

Nope, but Andy Street does, indirectly, pay my wages.

(teacher in Adult education, my students need good well-paying jobs locally, a few nice big FAANG type office complexes would actually create significant employment)

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Still trying.

Should any managing directors be reading this, may I point out that Birmingham has a good supply of sheds as well.

Available in a range of sizes, rental arrangements, locations, and building types (early Victorian brick built canalside to 2020s steel clad sheds).

Red Hat to stop packaging LibreOffice for RHEL

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

@b0llchit

Most of those 374 files are internationalised help files and language packs for a UN-worthy selection of languages. The actual executable is around 250Mb compared with 5Gb+ for a full texlive install.

I imagine most users would be installing the main executable plus a much smaller selection of the language files.

OA did make the point that many people are now finding the basic Office applications in Microsoft 365 and Google Apps good enough for the tasks they normally do. I have to raise my palsied fist in agreement with this point as *almost* everything I do at the current employer can be done fine in MS 360±2.

The main exceptions are decent mathematical equations and diagrams. To be honest I could probably use groff/eqn and export to eps for that then just insert them but I find Writer to be quicker and easier.

Yaccarino takes wheel at Twitter early as advertising woes become public

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Absolutely nothing new under the sun...

I was thinking that plus a substantial golden hello, paid into the bank, and non-returnable with appropriate contracts all signed and deposited with solicitors.

Oh Snap... Desktop Ubuntu Core to arrive in 2024

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: This is probably worthy of an article on its own

You won't approve of this observation, but Microsoft's 365 portal thingy works fine(*) in chromium under Linux. Been using it for online classes all this year.

(*)Teams is a bit odd/clunky but that's the same for the ones using Windows.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Desktops

I'd like any views on these new desktop systems aimed at large organisations.

The prospect of having to replace large quantities of kit because of TPM2 may not be appealing.

Many organisations are now using Web browser based applications.

Election Excel blunder declared a 'low point' for Austrian social democracy

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: 600 votes

There is a lot to be said for ticking a box and putting the folded paper in a tin box.

I'm assuming this had to be done online or something.

Twitter loses second head of Trust and Safety under Musk

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

@CHF

"[snip]...or interviews with them..."

If I was made redundant by a -er maverick proprietor with deep pockets and a history of vindictive behaviour, I think that I would be inclined to avoid interviews with journalists. And focus on getting another job.

Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: I live in Birmingham

The city budget is a tad under £4k per head if my mental arithmetic is still ok

They are still voted in because of the alternatives...

Brummies ain't thick and don't vote for Christmas if you take my meaning.

PS: previous system paid my wages ok. Current system pays my wages OK.

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen now works on Linux

keithpeter Silver badge
Coat

VueScan no good?

Icon: actually a rucksack with my Canon LiDe 20 scanner which works perfectly with xsane on Linux but which the missus could not use on Windows 10)

Edit: apparently VueScan is no good.

xsane for the win

First ever 64-bit version of Windows rediscovered … and a C compiler for it too

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: ...the people creating NT were poached from DEC

"NT started going downhill when they moved the GDI into kernel space, to speed it up at the risk of stability"

@Fred

Do you think the idea of moving GDI into ring 0 occured as a result of Cutler's insisting on programmers actually running NT builds (aka dogfooding)? And realising the slowness?

Thanks for your insights

Another security calamity for Capita: An unsecured AWS bucket

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

“We expect a full explanation and remedy from the company and for them to apologize directly to those affected.”

Quote from OA itself quoting a Council spokesman. My emphasis.

"Remedy" in a context like this means solicitors in a civil law context.

Asahi Linux developer warns the one true way is Wayland

keithpeter Silver badge
Trollface

@karlkarl

An industry standard in Linux? Really?

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Quote from OA

"Xwayland will be supported, so that X.org apps will run under Wayland based desktops"

So when these Apple Silicon Macs start to appear on the second hand market, people will be able to run any of the software they need. Sounds fine as a starting point. I'm sure people will start tinkering...

Question: will this work on Asahi for the version of ARM that Apple have produced have a knock on to lesser kinds of ARM by generic laptop makers? I'd like some of this 15 hour battery life.

Icon: obvious really

Ubuntu 23.04 welcomes three more flavors, but hamburger menus leave a bad taste

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Stop the KDE and Gnome trains, I want to get off

"...and the software is written with Xfce in mind"

That is going to be the tricky bit.

The distros others have posted will give ideas as to lighter applications but the inexorable march of time / turn of the wheel will mean more and more software will be written against huge widget libraries. Those libraries will do all the wayland / client side decorations stuff.

I'm using Seamonkey and OpenOffice(*) on an old single core M series Thinkpad with a lovely keyboard and crisp large screen. Just for typing stuff. Seamonkey has issues with a few modern sites and the legacy ublock origin is very advisable.

Best of luck.

(*) Yes, I know, don't reply about how I really should be using LibreOffice. On a dual core upwards machine and for new installs I would always recommend whatever version of LibreOffice is provided by the distro.

WordPress plugin hole puts '2 million websites' at risk

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: DejaVu all over again...

@Captain

Any chance of convincing Cloudbase Commander to try a static blog system running on a staging server inside the firewall?

(ducks to avoid coffee mug) No? Ok thought it might be worth a try.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

DejaVu all over again...

https://idlewords.com/2009/09/how_to_not_get_your_blog_hacked.htm

Legacy zombie blog: wget mirror the static html files to local directory.

Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

@General

About 20 feet easily. Good pavlovian conditioning to close kitchen door when heating croissants on the toaster wire thingy.

I call it the monthly test.

Microsoft may charge different prices for Office with or without Teams

keithpeter Silver badge

Re: Deja vu all over again

@Non

Yes, surprisingly useable using Chromium on a Linux laptop for online teaching.

Was able to operate as far as I can see as well as a native Windows laptop that did not have locally installed Office.

Teams is of course the tricky bit: screen annotation is flaky.

When it comes to Linux distros, one person's molehill is another's mountain

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: work around or move on

@AC

No flames from round here.

I had a lot more interest in the further education colleges I worked in about application software for the Windows student image (Inkscape, GIMP, LibreOffice, Audacity) and about server applications that could save money to put it bluntly (Moodle VLE as opposed to £5k/yr plus loading by numbers for the commercial alternative du jour).

Employer provides me with the tools to do my job. If the tools are blunt then I'm just working less efficiently. Basically not my problem.

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

"My own quirk is that I dislike bloat. I've used Debian, and then Devuan for about 20 years, and I constantly strip out stuff that isn't necessary."

I've gone the other way (Ubuntu -> Debian + DWM -> Slackware full install with XFCE4 or Fluxbox on one really old Thinkpad).

Many libraries, compilers and build systems just there. A lot of more specialised stuff (maxima, reduce, octave) builds straight off slackbuilds.org. No tight dependency graph so can remove/add stuff without apt wanting to remove half the system. Needs about 18Gb so not for tiny disks on netbooks &c.

Wider reflection: I think the kind of people who install linux on their computer tend to be interested in the computer as a thing rather than simply using it as a tool. Hence exploration and churn.

Icon: Nice we have the choice isn't it?

Oracle's examplar win over SAP for Birmingham City Council is 3 years late

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

@Comical

Throw widespread use of remote desktops into the mix for extra fun.

IBM pauses counting its billions to trim Red Hat staff

keithpeter Silver badge
Black Helicopters

"...gutting of CentOS and pulling the rug out from CentOS 8 support lifespan"

Two new and (apparently) well-funded clones sprung up to fill the void created with great suddenness.

Perhaps those inside knew what was coming down the pipe? Radical move to stimulate the ecosystem? Ensure that clones with foundation-like wider participation mechanisms in place?

Musk tells Twitter advertisers: You're welcome back, but don't make demands

keithpeter Silver badge
Joke

Re: I have been meaning to ask ...

I'm going for Squitter (aka Seagull)

Chromebook expiration date, repair issues 'bad for people and planet'

keithpeter Silver badge
Childcatcher

Re: Perceptions

@disgruntled and all the posters on this little sub-thread

"Calculators are great, but an intuition for the rough size of the results is a useful check on them, or rather on the results of one's entry of the factors"

Bingo!

But just try substituting 'arithmetic algorithm' in the sentence above for 'calculator'. Drop one figure, or forget to cross out a carry and add it twice, or forget to put the zero down and it all goes pear shaped, just like fat-fingering the buttons on a calculator.

Even more fun: find the one person in the class who can actually work out something like 457 x 31 correctly first time and ask them to explain why each step works...(you have to be careful with that one and be prepared to scaffold the answers)

So the rest of my lesson goes into estimation techniques and how to stand back and see if the answer is plausible. And place notation and all that stuff.

Icon: more measuring and weighing things and colouring squares to make patterns and making 3d shapes in primary school. Bring back Spirographs and turtles (the ones with motors and pens)... as well as the tables and arithmetic.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Perceptions

Fun activity(*): ask a group of normal well-adjusted adults to come up with a list of what every 16 year old should know about maths.

The result will be a shopping list of topics including mental arithmetic and paper and pencil arithmetic. Often impassioned diatribes against the use of calculators.

So then ask when they last did a long multiplication sum. Or added some fractions.

Then ask when they last did a rough estimate of how much paint they needed, or measured a window for curtains, or scaled a recipe...

The result is puzzlement, confusion and a slow realisation that mathematical thinking is not just arithmetic.

(*)Ice breaker for adult basic education maths classes. Never fails)

Substack copied Twitter so Twitter is copying Substack

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Talking of Substack...

Substack subscriptions seemed (initially anyway) to be mainly about getting the articles by email. I quite like getting a couple of longer form considered articles each week by email. Which being awkward I read on alpine.

OA quotes a Twitter comment about 'newsletters' being one of the features promised for the future. Would not advise holding your breath for that one.

Icon: There used to be email servers that if you sent them an email with the URL of a Web page in the subject, the server sent the plain text dump of the page back. I'm talking early 90s.

Double BSD birthday bash beckons – or triple, if you count MidnightBSD 3.0

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: TWM?

"Only Theo still uses TWM although he threatens to make it the default occasionally."

It has always struck me as a bit strange that an ancient and complex code base like fvwm is kept in the OpenBSD base. TWM is also ancient but a lot less complex and so I'd assume easier to audit?

Icon: Old man end user

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Installing OpenBSD 7.3 on your laptop is really hard (not)

Thanks for noticing (see icon). But...

"...and booted straight into the xenodm display manager, logging into which took us straight into a very retro TWM session"

I suspect it was a fvwm 2.2.5 session that you booted into. That is what the screen shot is of.

Takes but 20 minutes and a few config files to set up a nice xfce4 4.18 desktop (and that is allowing for my flaky Internet). Google 'OpenBSD on a laptop' (see post title) for a walk-through with links to FAQ and man pages.

The 7.3 installer also now asks if you want to encypt the main disk and prompts you through the steps. Suggest asking for more info (? at the prompt - you get a listing of the size of the devices) to make sure you end up installing into the encrypted softraid device. Works fine.

@Bitsminer: Top tells me 86 processes: 85 idle, 1 on processor with xfce4, firefox, and thunar, terminals and all. Wasn't aware of appmanager - will have a look. Quite like pkg_add/pkg_info -Q though.

Red Hat at 30: Biggest Linux company of them all still pushing to become cloud power

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Irony

"The change also upset many users who felt Red Hat was abandoning its original customers. However, enterprise clients had a different perspective."

The decision to charge an annual subscription per CPU core resulted in the start of Scientific Linux, which was fun while it lasted. The story of all that is out on the Web somewhere. (PUIAS/Springdale linux was already there)

Irony in view of one of the founder's appreciation of supercomputers running Linux.

Three quarters of UK tech pros are ready to leave their jobs

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Error bars

So the self-selecting sample and the randomly selected sample were disjoint?

i.e. noone returned two questionnaires? One randomly assigned and one self-selected?

Best of luck with it all.

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: So?

"I've since had to hire (unrelated to my arrival) and the market is a mess... poor offerings, at huge demands, and little interest. I don't do high-end IT but I've never seen it that bad."

Is there any remedy?

keithpeter Silver badge
Pint

Re: Error bars

"Polling and other sampling inaccuracies nearly all come from suboptimal sample selection (and suboptimal questions), rather than too small a sample size."

Good post.

Might be worth adding that the effects of sample bias and of poorly worded questions are harder to quantify than the margin of error.

One also has to keep an eye on the extent of cross-tabbing of the sample.

A sample of 1000 turns into a sample of 290 if you start trying to analyse the responses to the other questions for 29% who said they were looking for jobs that paid more.

Techie called out to customer ASAP, then: Do nothing

keithpeter Silver badge
Childcatcher

Re: SLAs make work for idle hands...

The whole target thing just does not work for things like health care, education and policing/emergency services.

Goodhart's law and all.

Plus the fact that you need to have slack in systems (perhaps education not so much because you usually know who is coming into the institution well in advance) to deal with transients and politicians always see this as 'waste'.

Going out to walk in the woods to ease my blood pressure (35+ years of this crap).

When Google cost cutting goes molecular: Staples, sticky tape, and PC sweating

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Buses...

...are tricky.

Are you paying a contract or per trip?

Do you have to run a bus with no passengers from the City centre to the suburb early in the morning so people can get into the centre on the return journey?

If you cancel the bus because there is only one passenger how does that passenger get home?

(In Google's case a park and ride pre-order system would suggest itself. Nice little form filled in a week ahead. Vehicle sized appropriately).

Ubuntu 23.04 'Lunar Lobster' beta is here in all its glitchy glory

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

"...in the background, something was going wrong as the System Problem Detected pop-up kept reappearing, no matter how many times we closed the warning."

Remember that from years ago, like 10.10 days onwards. Never did find out what it was. Never seemed result in any issues on the actual reboot into the fresh install.

It's official: Ubuntu Cinnamon remix has been voted in

keithpeter Silver badge
Childcatcher

edubuntu

Suggestions...

ubuntu-edu-secondary: Maths Geezer says - geogebra, a decent graph plotting program, some kind of skills based flash-card proggy, desktop logo/snap/turtle thing [See Brian Harvey's home page]. Octave and an algebra package such as maxima for the A level Maths people.

A lot of lessons online now in video form with handouts [e.g. https://corbettmaths.com/] so not sure what the USP of edubuntu is these days.

Best of luck

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

keithpeter Silver badge
Windows

Re: Please see the British education system"

@Terry 6 and anyone else who has an interest

"Gove told Sky News the so-called “limiting judgment,” which means that a failure in one area means failure everywhere else, should be examined."

Politico newsletter quote above is actually quite hopeful. Gove and Cummings are responsible for the current omnishambles in education. Perhaps this is the dawning of insight?

For those 'not in the system' basically it is an INC OR at present on about 15 strands. If your school/college/nursery gets a 'unsatisfactory' on any one of them then the overall grade is 'unsatisfactory'. Irrespective of the grades on the other 14 which could have been outstanding. Dig a little deeper, and you find that an 'unsatisfactory' grade can come down to one student saying the wrong thing in one group interview once.

Now, I'd like to appologise to the vast majority of commenters how came into this thread for some light hearted fun and to share war stories.

keithpeter Silver badge
Childcatcher

Re: Please see the British education system"

A volunteer placement can be organised if you would like to walk a few km in the shoes of a classroom teacher in a school near the centre of one of our larger cities.

Hint: it isn't about metrics.

Tails 5.11: Secure-surfing 'amnesiac' live distro arrives

keithpeter Silver badge
Joke

Re: Worth reading just for

"a Bitcoin wallet for the terminally gullible"

Command line wallet? Liking it