Posts by Steve Graham

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Nobody has pointed out yet that track metadata should have been included in the 1980 Red Book audio CD specification, but wasn't.

Vultures rake our claws over COSMIC as Pop OS 24.04 LTS with 'Epoch 1' emerges

Re: "Pop!_OS still does not play nicely with dual boot"

GRUB tries to cope with many, many scenarios, which makes it quite large and complex, whereas extlinux can only boot a Linux kernel running with an unencrypted ext4 root partition*. Since that is exactly what I need, I opt for that simplicity. It has meant that I needed to write a custom script to replace the usual one started by "make install" in a kernel build, but, excellently, the kernel developers have put in the hooks to enable you to do just that.

*(Actually, I think it might work with more partition formats, but I've never used anything else. Oh, it supports an initrd too, but I've eliminated that.)

Re: "Pop!_OS still does not play nicely with dual boot"

Ah, I created the EFI boot partition at what seemed to me to be a "tiny" 2Gb on a 2Tb drive. That's why I didn't come up against the shortcomings of gparted. I then installed extlinux as the boot manager, with the (custom) kernel in the EFI partition, which df shows as 10% full. Since I've not used anything other than Linux on the metal for 20 years now I've never had much to do with dual-booting, although I'm sure it would be straightforward. Obviously, I'm not the typical computer user. Not even the typical Linux user. Installers? Who needs 'em?!

Linux 6.18 crowned LTS kernel – and Alpine 3.23 wastes no time adopting it

I tried Alpine a short time ago, first on an old 32-bit netbook, and then on a Pi Zero 2. It worked perfectly well -- no hiccups -- but on the netbook, I found that after 20 years of apt-get and dpkg, I'm too set in my ways to get used to apk. On the Pi, I installed the camera, which required the rpi-cam apps and libraries, and I was too lazy to compile from scratch with musl. Currently, I have that as a Devuan install with the Raspian repositories added. I thought that might cause dependency problems, but it hasn't.

Oh, the old netbook now has Peppermint, the Devuan flavour. They haven't updated that in a while, but have continued to keep up with their Debian-based one.

Cheaper 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5 lands as memory costs go through the roof

When the AI bubble bursts, there will be loads of gear available at knock-down prices.

You are likely to be eaten by the MIT license: Microsoft frees Zork source

"Kick the grue." worked at all times. It didn't achieve anything though.

Retro Games opens pre-orders for THEA1200, a full-size working Amiga replica

Re: PiDP maybe?

Uni OS course assignment (1980s) where I used the console switches to load a bootstrap by hand

Me too. Edinburgh, 1977.

Ubuntu 25.10's Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut

Re: ninjed me!!!

Giving the default user full root access to everything is a Ubuntu thing. (Inherited in derived distros.) Many other Linux distros stick to the traditional Unix-y permissions regime. So, if I need to do system admin, I log in as root. That's the way I've always done it, and that's the way I like it.

To 'Infinity' ... and beyond: MX Linux 25 has arrived

I also managed to mis-spell "excalibur" when I tried to upgrade. Maybe it's dementia creeping in.

mucked about with the kernel

I do build a custom kernel for my desktop and laptop machines. No initramfs, and necessary drivers compiled in. The only time I ever made one that didn't boot was when I forgot to include the newfangled SATA disk drivers. That would have been about 20 years ago.

It's Devuan 7 now.

The help for the package kde-full says:

"This metapackage includes all the official modules released with KDE Sotware

Compilation that are not specific to development and as well other KDE

applications that are useful for a desktop user. This includes multimedia,

networking, graphics, education, games, system administration tools, and other

artwork and utilities."

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

Re: Password rules make for weaker passwords

A short maximum password length is a red flag. It suggests that they are storing the password, not a hash.

Pop!_OS deejays prepare to release holiday remix along with Cosmic v 1.0

So you need special code in (effectively) your window manager to "night-light" Wayland? In Xorg, it's a single xrandr command.

A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees

is that how people normally do load balancing?

In my career (of distant memory) we'd have a layer of boxes behind a single IP address that distributed "work" one layer down to the servers.

Mobian makes Debian's latest 'Trixie' release pocket-sized

Re: If only...

My current phone and its predecssor are Pixel devices from the Evil Empire. Unlocking the bootloader is a standard option on them.

I couldn't get the AMD64 image to boot on a virtual machine either, but burned to a USB stick, it booted a physical machine (a Thinkpad T470). However, running from the USB device, it was too slow even to tinker with, so I gave up. (The PIN is 1234. I guessed it.)

Mozilla is recruiting beta testers for a free, baked-in Firefox VPN

Architecture? That's houses, isn't it?

Great. A VPN in the browser. And a mail client. And a Bitcoin wallet. And a Calendar. And an e-book reader. And a pop-up toaster. And a rechargeable vacuum cleaner. We won't rest until we've ticked off the entire list of things that users haven't asked for.

Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily

Re: Eh

Yes, I think this article jumps to the conclusion that the setting turns back on by itself, and that isn't what the Microsoft description says.

I imagine that users turning it on and off repeatedly would burn a lot of AI calories, which is why Microsoft restricts it.

Google's dev registration plan 'will end the F-Droid project'

Re: Android is dead to me.

The vast majority of Android devices have "non-Google ROM images", from Samsung, Xiaomi, Fairphone and so on. And yet they all work with banking and goverment apps. Enough of the FUD, please. I've been using LineageOS/microG for several years and never had a problem.

Linux's love-to-hate projects drop fresh versions: systemd 258 and GNOME 49

Re: Systemd

"it doesn't conform to my idea of the way Linux should be" in that it aspires to become an operating system, and that's what we have Linux for.

I've been using unixy systems since the mid-1980s and never liked vi. I did learn the basics when it was the available lightweight editor for tweaking config files, but now I always remove it and install nano.

I don't have a "desktop environment". Just openbox and a pick'n'mix array of applications. Up until I read this article, I had Evince as the default application for PDF files. I thought its text rendering looked better than other ones I tried originally. But if it's being retired I'll use something else. I've just installed Atril from the Mate desktop. Looks fine.

ChatGPT joins human league, now solves CAPTCHAs for the right prompt

I'm a human (honest) and I find captchas really difficult. I think it's partly because some of them, Google in particular, are American-centric, but also because I'm on the autistic spectrum, and my logic doesn't match that of the captchas creators.

If I had a desktop or online agent that would do them for me, that would be great.

UEFI Secure Boot for Linux Arm64 – where do we stand?

The initial code runs on the GPU, not CPU. If I've understood correctly, this is beacuse RAM isn't available on power-on, but the GPU has onboard cache where it can run code. Enough to enable RAM and hand off to the CPU, which can load an operating system.

I'm not sure it applies to Raspberries. The boot process is started by proprietary Broadcom code in the EEPROM, and ends up loading the linux kernel, without (as I understand it) running any open-source bootloader.

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

fumblefingers

I once meant to type rm -R /tmp/* but accidentally touched the space bar. What I actually typed return on was rm -R / tmp/*.

AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content

The window is closing

I think that although we may be in a period when AI results are useful sometimes, this is because they have been trained on human-generated content. As a larger proportion of the internet becomes filled with AI slop, the bots will ingest more of it and the "answers" will become progressively worse. At some point, the bubble will burst.

Re: Cloudflare FTW

Cloudflare have products to trap LLM bots in a labyrinth of nonsensical rubbish. It poisons the learning base.

Re: A monetized internet might be the only way to solve this

I've been trying to use DDG as my preferred search engine for a few years, but the absolute worst thing it does is to return "hits" which don't include all my search terms. I wasted time reading irrelevant web pages until I was sure it was happening. Now I can recognize unlikely hits and try Google instead.

Project Banana ripens into a pre-alpha for KDE Linux, and you can test it

"updating is managed directly by systemd"

...which we are told is "an init system".

First release candidate of systemd 258 is here

Re: Gotta love the sarcasm

The core function of systemd is to act as a service manager... which is why it is factually inaccurate to describe it as an "init system".

I've been using Linux exclusively on my own machines, and then exclusively-exclusively when I retired, for almost 25 years. And I have never had an essential system process that crashed and needed to be restarted. OK, I'm just a home user, but none of my machines need a "service manager".

Although a long-time Debian and eventually Devuan user, I've started trying out Alpine on low-spec machines. From doing "ps -ax" I see that it seems to have a "service manager". I'll bet that its codebase is a tiny fraction of systemd's.

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

My sister's elderly laptop stopped working the other day, and she emailed me to ask what replacement she should buy. I pointed out that Windows 10 was on its way out, and Windows 11 laptops would likely be more expensive htan she was expecting. "Would a Chromebook suit your purposes?" I asked.

A hour later, she had gone to Currys, bought a Lenovo Chromebook, and was on line. She is completely clueless about technology, and has only ever used Windows.

I, on the other hand, have been using Linux almost exclusively for 25 years, and I bought a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 and camera module to use as a security camera. Apalled at the amount of bloat in Raspberry Pi OS when I did a test install, I decided to use Alpine instead. It took me 4 goes to get it right.

That's the difference between ChromeOS and Linux.

Google's Android boss suggests ChromeOS could be on borrowed time

Android-x86

I've tried Android-x86 in the past, and it worked well, but development appears have ceased. BlissOS-x86 (which I didn't know about until now) has a release from last year. I might give it a go.

Wayback gives X11 desktops a fighting chance in a Wayland world

Re: Love Wayland

"X11 never used to work with my multiple monitors with different refresh rates."

You're doing it wrong.

Former US Army Sergeant pleads guilty after amateurish attempt at selling secrets to China

I asked my system for dependencies on libxml: a whopping 518 packages would have to be removed. On the other hand, it's not vulnerable to the udisks issue because neither it nor polkit (which provides this vulnerability, and potentially many others) are installed.

Europe slams online tat bazaar AliExpress for dodging obligation to stop dodgy traders

I've bought a good few odds and ends from AliExpress, and the only dodgy items I can remember seeing are "chef's knives" or "knife for fruit", or similar, which are obviously vicious-looking combat knives.

/e/ OS 3.0: Slightly less clunky, slightly more private

I use a Pixel 5a with LineageOs/microG. Installing Play Store apps was clunky, until a fellow Reg reader pointed me to the Aurora store. After that, the phone does everything I require and has an excellent battery life. I haven't come across any app that failed from lack of Google services (microG provides an emulation).

Google's unloved plan to fix web permissions gathers support

nagging

This proposal seems to mean that you will be asked if you wish to enable an access every time you visit a website that wants it.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Re: They keep removing features. When was the last time they added one?

I don't know when it happened, but ALSA support is back. I previously used Chromium for streaming radio on my "music server" (a Pi 4) but after an update, sound was dropping out regularly. I installed Firefox ESR and it works perfectly.

(I use Vivaldi on the desktop PC for everyday browsing, Librewolf in a virtual machine for banking, and Chromium with previous data wiped when a site won't work with ads and scripts blocked.)

Apple fixes zero-click exploit underpinning Paragon spyware attacks

Re: I remember

I have a Pixel 5a running LineageOS/microG. Monthly updates download and install painlessly. When the Android main version changes, you have to install the update manually, but I've done that five times now (currently on 13) and nothing has broken.

LineageOS is available for the Pixel 7 Pro, so you could easily get your previous phone working again.

Other sources I've read say that Paragon terminated the contract with the Italian government for violating the terms (i.e. targetting journalists). This article says the opposite. (Possibly quoting from a government spin statement?)

Ease the seat back and watch some video in your car with next Apple CarPlay

Re: A good example of when new is not better

Plus, on RHD cars you have to do touch-screen with your left hand, and 80% of drivers are right-handed.

On my car's Android-based screen, "Enable video play while in motion" is a selectable option. Distinctly dodgy.

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

I think Weigelt is even less likely to stick with something than the average solo forker. His "unusual" opinions suggest that he might just get angry about something else and go off at a tangent.

Blocking stolen phones from the cloud can be done, should be done, won't be done

I assume that the current IP stack on phones doesn't send IMEI in the headers or whatever, given that IP was standardized aeons before anybody thought of mobile phones?

Of course, Google might include it anyway because they love to fingerprint an individual device.

KDE targets Windows 10 'exiles' claiming 'your computer is toast'

Re: Alarmist?

Your problem isn't that Linux doesn't work. Your problem is that you don't know enough to get it to work. But as a Reg reader you must be far better informed than the average Windows punter. That's why I don't see a mass movement to any form of Linux after Windows 10 becomes unsupported.

Re: Alarmist?

I once borrowed a redundant original Mac and a LaserWriter from work, with an AppleTalk cable to connect them, but failed to get them to talk to each other after several attempts.

I remember that there was a great gravity/orbit simulator on it though.

X's new 'encrypted' XChat feature seems no more secure than the failure that came before it

Re: Polite reminder to novice evil geniuses & trainee Sith Lords.

I run a firewall on de-Googled microG Android. It caught the default keyboard trying to contact Google servers. I replaced it with an open-source alternative, Heliboard, which does not hit the firewall at all.

OpenMamba: Eat your greens, they're good for you

Festa della Repubblica

I can read Italian. I checked out the support forums, and the posts typically had just a couple of participants. Liam's point about the distro probably being niche seems to be accurate.

AROS turns any PC into an Amiga with USB-bootable distro

It was my own stupidity that prevented the install from working. It's running now.