Posts by Steve Graham

OneFileLinux: A tiny recovery distro that fits snugly in your EFI system partition

Re: Nothing new under the sun* :)

I compile my own kernels with most drivers built in, and the rarely needed ones as modules. The last obstacle to removing the initramfs was building a few binary blobs into the kernel (for Intel microcode and Intel graphics firmware).

I mount my EFI partition at /boot, which means the kernel build copies the finished item there, but that's OK since I made the partition 2Gb. The kernels should be bootable directly by the EFI firmware, since CONFIG_EFI_STUB is set, but I haven't tried that yet. The boot currently is set to use syslinux.efi with its basic VGA menu, but it allowed me very happily to de-install GRUB2.

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

Re: Reminds me of TV sets

And oh, how they danced

The little children of Stonehenge

Is 49hrs a typo? I ask because I've just done a file count of my library and there are almost 14,000 tracks. Guess a minimum of 3 minutes each, and that's at least 700 hours.

Raspberry Pi 4 bugs throw wrench in the works for Fedora 41

Re: no Real-Time Clock

I once had a Linux boot fail at the fsck stage because the Superblock last mount time was December 1901 "which is in the future".

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

I think it was a technology for getting data in or out of Directory Services. I think it was also around the time when Microsoft brought out Active Directory which doomed Novell's offerings. Late 1990s?

Mention of Novell Netware reminded me that Novell were trying to sell us directory software, and that resulted in my taking 3 weeks of training with them on XSLT. I never really understood it. (I didn't get Lisp or Prolog either. My brain must be strictly algorithmic.)

It was just at the time when Novell had decided to abandon Microsoft Windows and give all employees (except senior managers, naturally) Linux laptops. Which was nice.

Fortunately, I've never, ever had to go back to Bracknell.

Zen Browser is a no-Google zone that offers tiling nirvana

On a Linux PC, it is possible to have ad-free YouTube, but I only got there through years of experimenting with Ublock Origin rules, and I can't say for sure which are the ones that are actually effective.

The Vivaldi browser can "cast" YouTube from the PC to either my relatively modern television or older Freesat box, and will send successive videos without ads. Good for parties. If I had parties.

Tired of airport security queues? SQL inject yourself into the cockpit, claim researchers

Re: Exploits of a Mom (Again)

That's CAPTAIN Bobby Tables, reporting for duty.

It's 2024 and we're just getting round to stopping browsers insecurely accessing 0.0.0.0

Will this work?

# /usr/sbin/iptables -v -A INPUT -d 0.0.0.0 -j DROP

The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

Re: Standardization

One of my fellow managers had a team leader who was the most brilliant programmer I have ever encountered. For the project he led, he developed his own language and compiler (over a weekend, probably) which emitted C. All of his team were taught the new language and had to code in it, and never look at the C code.

Being more experienced than my colleague, I could anticipate the ensuing train wreck.

Apple Maps escapes orchard into web browser wilds

Remember the days...

...when browsers had no adherence to standards, and web sites had to check user agent text to work out how to send them content that would appear correctly? Or would send only "Your current browser isn't supported." if the coders couldn't work out what to do?

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

Re: Secure boot?

"The details don't make clear if these data files were signed and validated by the driver in any way"

Clearly not. The file that caused the driver to fall over was corrupt. (I think I read somewhere that it was full of zeroes, but I might be mis-remembering that.)

Intel to deliver fix for Raptor Lake CPUs made 'unstable' by voltage snafu

Re: Too much complexity

I compiled the latest Linux kernel this morning, and noticed that all 16 "CPUs" (real cores and hyperthreaded, um, threads) were running pretty consistently at full speed.

Life, interrupted: How CrowdStrike's patch failure is messing up the world

OK, so the OS has failed to boot. But note that it has the residual cognitive capacity to paint up the BSOD with some text. Couldn't that processing power instead be put into use to set the machine into some secure network listening mode so that remote technicians can do what's needed?

Answer: Windows was written as a single-user, standalone system, and still carries the consequences.

Google Translate now fluent in 110 additional languages from Abkhaz to Zulu

Gura mie ayd

My neural network guesses that "Gura mie ayd" parallels the Irish "Go raibh maith agat" or "Thank you".

Re: I wanted to gitve it a go with afrikaans

Cherokee has its own script, and it's in Unicode.

The X Window System is still hanging on at 40

Re: The only problem with Wayland is that ...

If I understand correctly, Wayland depends on evdev for input events. Recent Xorg installations do too, but I've never got it to work. I have to use the legacy keyboard and mouse drivers, and these do not exist for Wayland.

I think my problem is that I nuked udev when it got absorbed into the systemd codebase, and installed mdev (a busybox aspect) instead. It works fine for most things (like automounting USB drives) but something about the /dev/input/eventX devices it creates doesn't make Xorg happy.

Every month or so I have another poke around, but no progress on that front, although, since it's working fine, I can stick with Xorg the way it is. Maybe for the next 10 years, yes.

T-Mobile US drags New Jersey borough to court over school cell tower permit denial

It's not often that my sympathies lie with a large corporation. Particularly a large telecoms corporation. (I used to work for one.)

Disenchanted Windows user? Pop open a fresh can of Linux Lite

unwelcome GNOME accessories

Debian-based distros (and probably others) have a couple of packages that disable the CSD thing either globally or per program. Search for "nocsd".

I actually use evince because I like the rendering and fonts but I'd find it very annoying without the noCSD option.

In Debian, APT 3 gains features – but KeepassXC loses them

I tried keepassxc but it takes 15 seconds to start up on my system (8-core i7). There is a debug command-line option, but it doesn't print anything useful, so I've always meant to grab the source code and try to work it out. I don't think there's much point submitting a bug report if I have no idea what's wrong, but I'm guessing that there is a very long timeout waiting for something which I haven't got. Like PolicyKit, or consolekit, or a session manager. Something Ubuntu.

Programmers always always make timeouts vastly too long. "Hmmm. Let's try five seconds. With three retries." It's the 21st century: if something doesn't talk to you in half a second, it's not going to talk to you at all.

Linux 6.9 arrives, plus Torvalds indicates Arm64 will get a bit more love

Re: cheeky appeal for advice

I don't have a /proc/config.gz but then I always copy the .config from the previous kernel and do yes "" | make oldconfig (not make olddefconfig). If you have no previous source tree, you'll usually find a copy of the config file in /boot.

I've stopped using an initrd. They only exist to hold a shedload of drivers that distros need to support diverse hardware, so I only compile drivers which my machine actually requires. I suppose there might be a call for an initrd in some circumstances, like encryption.

(I won't be building 6.9 until they find some bugs in it and release 6.9.1).

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

Re: "these characters have specific meanings in computer systems"

I worked for BT when they owned Cellnet, and Cellnet had the idea of providing a web-to-SMS service, giving registered customers the ability to send a small number of messages per day. (Obviously, limited to prevent spamming.)

I didn't work on that, but the group next door did. It was due to go live on Monday, and on the Friday afternoon they sent an email to colleagues "This is about to be released. Do you want to have a go and see how it works?" Well, I knew they were using Perl for CGI (that dates it) so I tried a few messages with special characters to see what arrived on my phone. I was able to work out how to get the code to execute a shell command which emailed me the password file. (Not very interesting. It was a test server with no actual users.)

As I passed their office on the way to the pub, the place was a hive of activity. Apparently, they were at it until late that night.

Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it as a tax write-off

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

My Pixel 5a needs charging less than once a week. It currently shows 26% and estimates 3 days and 22 hours left.

With some experimentation, I discovered that wifi was by far the most voracious battery-eater. So unless actively using it, I turn wifi off. Bluetooth on or off didn't make much difference. It's running LineageOS/MicroG, so isn't wasting energy sending stuff to Google.

Previously, I used a Nokia (HMD) 5, which was a very good budget smartphone. It ran their stock Android, and I was intrigued to see that even when I turned wifi off, my home router showed a permanent 1Mhz association with the device. Not that I'm paranoid or anything.

The eight-bit Z80 is dead. Long live the 16-bit Z80!

Before I graduated, I did a lot of 6502 coding. I wrote structured extensions (WHILE, IF-THEN-ELSE etc.) to the Basic interpreter on my Ohio Superboard. But when I started work it was on Z80 embedded systems. We only had an 8080 compiler though, and I wrote a peephole optimizer that replaced common 8080 sequences with Z80 instructions.

Of the two, I preferred the 6502. "Page Zero" essentially gave you a bank of extra registers, and most of the instructions were regular, or "orthogonal", as I believe the experts say.

Later, I did VAX 11-780 assembly coding, and that instruction set is very orthogonal. So the best 32-bit microprocessor CPU was definitely the Nat Semi NS32032, which was "inspired" by the VAX.

CISA in a flap as Chirp smart door locks can be trivially unlocked remotely

Re: I actually wouldn't worry all that much about this

What are the odds that car thieves would have the equipment to deceive your car's "keyless entry" system? It happened to a friend of mine a few weeks ago, and it wasn't high-tech hacker car thieves, just a couple of local yobbos. (They were arrested.)

VMS Software prunes OpenVMS hobbyist program

In 1981, I was an early recruit to one of BT's fledgeling software centres. The group I was seconded to for my software (ahem) skills had a budget surplus, so they bought a VAX 11/780, only to realize that they didn't have anywhere to keep it. It was installed in the software centre's otherwise empty machine room, and I had my own personal VAX for a couple of years.

It would be fun to have a VMS VM to play with again.

Opera browser dev branch rolls out support for running LLMs locally

It's like attaching a coffee machine to a lawnmower. Technically possible, but not what the users want.

Linux for older phones postmarketOS changes its init system

proof

This is proof that systemd is achitecturally wrong. GUI frameworks being dependent on what some people insist on calling an "init system"?

Venturing beyond the default OS on Raspberry Pi 5

I bought a pair of Pi 4 last year. One plays music through its jack socket to the hifi (so no upgrades to Pi 5 for that one) and displays on the 4k television. The other has no display and runs my cameras and alarm.

Being a systemd-hater, I installed Devuan on both, although there is no official distro release. (There are unofficial images.) It looks as though MX might have been a more supported option.

Tiny Core Linux 15 stuffs modern computing in a nutshell

it works

In minutes, I've just downloaded the Coreplus ISO, dd'd it onto a USB stick and booted it on an old 32-bit netbook. Screen, touchpad, keyboard and wifi all worked straight away. It even found the swap partition on the hard drive.

FOSS replacement for Partition Magic, Gparted 1.6 is here to save your data

Actually, on my machine, /boot/efi/EFI contains only debian. It's always good to learn stuff, but I won't be messing with it.

(Kernels, custom compiled, are on the ext4 partition, in /boot).

Is there really a "special" partition for EFI? I have a relatively recent NUC, and installed Devuan via the standard installer. The drive has a GPT partition table, with one small partition formatted to VFAT with the UEFI files in it. Why couldn't I modify it with the old gparted? [Not that I have any reason to.]

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

Re: In the absence of files...

"How can one generate a file with one program and open it with another?"

This was exactly what Android and iOS initially tried to prevent. "Files? I see no files, just apps and their data." Obviously, that was nonsense.

Crunchbang++ versus Bunsen Labs: The pair turn it up to 12

Re: Openbox is No Go on 4K

I don't know what you're doing wrong, but OpenBox works fine on my 4k screen. All I had to do was use Obconf to adjust font sizes. Oh, and install "big-cursor" to make the mouse pointer visible.

I've tried tint2 but prefer xfce4panel (which does come with a system menu). You don't need the full xfce4 suite, but can pick and choose.

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

OPD

I have a vague memory of having the OPD on my desk at BT, but I think I only used the telephone part of it.

In surprise move, Gentoo Linux starts offering binaries

Re: How to compile from source

Whoosh! The sound of someone completely missing the point.

Suffering from tab overload? Vivaldi unveils Session Panels

I've been using Vivaldi as my main general-purpose browser for a while now, but it's looking as though I'm not the target audience. A previous "feature", stacks of tabs, came enabled after one update, and I had to search the internet to find out how to disable it. We'll see if this new, superfluous facility is "opt-in" or "opt-out".

At most, I might have 3 open tabs at once, and even then, I can only read one of them at a time.

Kernel kerfuffle kiboshes Debian 12.3 release

Man, you squares are so out of touch. I'm currently compiling festive Linux 6.6.6 (Santa is an anagram of Satan.)

How to deorbit the Chromebook... and repurpose it for innovators

When my armchair-based netbook kicked the bucket, I took a look on eBay for recently support-expired Chromebooks, expecting them to be cheap. But sellers were paying no mind to the end of updates, and expired ones were around the same price as ones with a year or two of updates remaining.

Systemd 255 is here with improved UKI support

Doing it wrong

There are still people who refer to systemd as an "init system". Why should an init system give a flying fig about the directory structure its OS is using? Actually, why should anything care about the underlying directory structure? A distro which perversely renamed or restructured the entire heirarchy would still be Linux.

(I have no strong opinions on /bin vs /usr/bin etc. My latest fresh Devuan install left them separate.)

17% of Spotify employees face the music in latest cost-cutting shuffle

If they can lay off this percentage of the staff...

Have you heard of "Twitter"?

Actually, Bandcamp explicitly forbids cover versions which are not licenced. Anyway, who wants Big Labels' music, apart from the musically illiterate public?

HP printer software turns up uninvited on Windows systems

They ARE out to get you

Call me paranoid, but my reaction to that news was the suspicion that HP are paying Microsoft to ensure that everyone gets the latest drivers. The ones that brick your printer if it doesn't have genuine HP cartridges.

Re: Maybe there's an HP device visible from wifi or bluetooth?

My previous house was quite isolated in a rural area. My nearest neighbours were about half a kilometre away across the fields, and I could "see" their wifi printer.

Canonical shows how to use Snaps without the Snap Store

All these packaging products exist because it's "too hard" to maintain dependencies these days. Or is it just that the developers aren't smart enough to come up with a better solution?

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 6.6 after running out of excuses for further work

Being retired now and just a hobbyist, I like to have a very recent kernel on my main machine. It's not doing anything vital. But I do always wait for the x.x.1 release or later.

(And I will certainly not be including the SMB nonsense.)

How 'AI watermarking' system pushed by Microsoft and Adobe will and won't work

It's a great database for training their AI.

Make-me-root 'Looney Tunables' security hole on Linux needs your attention

If you have a hostile entity logged in to your box you're screwed anyway.

iPhone 15 is too hot to handle – and not in any good way

Shirley if it's getting hot in your pocket, it's doing some heavy processing at a time you'd expect it to be idle? Paranoia ensues.

These days you can teach old tech a bunch of new tricks

Booting DOS?

Just as a matter of interest, why can't you boot DOS on a UEFI machine? (In spite of the length of my grey beard, I am UEFI newbie, having acquired my first such PC only a couple of months ago.)