Posts by keithpeter

MX Linux 25.1 brings back switchable init systems

Half crowns in the meter

"cuts the number of builds we do"

Quote from OA. Certainly an advantage.

Icon: for ProwlerGr and all

Ready for a newbie-friendly Linux? Mint team officially releases v 22.3, 'Zena'

"My personal laptops mostly run a very old copy of Ubuntu which was originally installed about 13 or 14 years ago, so they originally came with the Unity desktop."

Pretty ancient TLS versions then unless you have updated the system and kept the DE. Best of luck.

Re: Thank you mint for LMDE 32 Bits. Welcome AntiX 25 32 Bits.

@Taliesinawen

"I hadn't realized one had to subscribe to a political philosophy in order to use a computer."

You don't. AntiX is gpl licenced including the tools and scripts. It is free software. There are also plenty of other Linux distributions to choose from and some BSD* derived operating systems with different licencing.

@williamyf

Thanks for an interesting post and best of luck with it all

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

Re: How long could VMS stay up

The urban history has it that Cutler was over ruled by Billie G about aspects of the design of Windows NT regarding perceived GUI performance.

As you were around at the time would that have had anything to do with how NT turned out?

Woman bailed as cops probe doctor's surgery data breach

Re: What for?

Replying to whole chain

There have been cases of people with access to databases of local residents looking up e.g. past partner, or possible future partner to check. Some years ago there was a report on the number of police officers and police civilian employees who had been disciplined for that kind of activity. Now thinking about the medical angle other kinds of information spring to mind e.g. pregnancy status, access to abortion services and so on. We don't know and won't until this comes to court if it does.

So could just be one or two records being accessed inappropriately and presumably copied in some way. Not a large scale data exfiltration.

IceWM soldiers on while Budgie jumps the Wayland ship

Re: Headline Typo?

"Budgie boarded the Wayland Ship"

Debian goes retro with a spatial desktop that time forgot

I think, if I have understood karlkarl's comment correctly, that the page below from Mycophobia's Web site might help clarify her modifications to Caja to enhance its spatial mode inherited from Gnome 2.0's nautilus.

https://mycophobia.org/spatial_nautilus/index.html

I think that Mycophobia is reaching back to before MacOS X to the original system finder.

Re: Elderly curmudgeon here

Choice is good.

My introduction to small computers was the Acorn Archimedes and then an iBook running system 8 something. This looks interesting. I'm especially interested in the extent to which I can iconise windows to the desktop.

Quote from DCS web site

"In the default Icon view mode, you can place files within a folder anywhere within that folder; no sortation is mandatory."

Wondering if a grid alignment is forced or if you can group icons by task. One way to find out I suppose.

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Gnome does as Gnome does and there are alternatives but...

...at some point there may be an opportunity for wider adoption of a desktop/endpoint OS in large organisations as Windows and Microsoft generally may be seen as either too expensive(*), unnecessary, or a possible risk.

Checklists will be produced to govern acceptance. Accessibility as defined by various legal standards will figure in the checklists. A desktop environment hoping for wide acceptance will need to have their accessibility story in order.

(*) on a TCO basis including hardware purchase

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

Bonkers thought of the day: what is to stop Microsoft implementing the idea behind loss32?

Cut out all that huge legacy support. Just spaff some wage money to Wine or buy Canonical and Crossover?

Icon: I'm off out

Re: The EU and the rest of the world

No downvotes here.

The lack of solidarity is a concern, but it does underline the fact that the EU isn't a country or block. It is an association of states that reserve their sovereignty subject to treaties. So the kitten herding continues.

Most of the systems that current $EMPLOYER uses are accessible via Chromium from Linux.

Only the client for the finance/wages portal is a native Windows program, and that has to be run from a box on the organisation's network so one of their computers inside one of their buildings. Which seems sensible for money stuff.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella becomes AI influencer, asks us all to move beyond slop

Re: Slop?

Harry Frankfurt's short book is worth tracking down as it was written well before the current species of AI was available and applies more generally. I sort of guessed it would be referenced in this paper.

Re: "... where we apply our scarce energy, compute, and talent resources will matter"

We need to have the word SHIBBOLEET encoded into all AI Chat customer support systems as a way of routing direct to a human (stuffed penguin dolls optional). Perhaps I am dreaming.

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again

Re: Now, it has grown into a bloated mess millions of times bigger than the OS which inspired it.

Sounds like a good holiday project.

Do it and show us.

Waterfox browser goes AI-free, targets the Firefox faithful

Re: Allow me to FTFY

I'm getting a strong Gerald Ratner vibe from this new Mozilla boss. Hope I'm wrong (he is from a technical background).

Re: demon water, foxes and moons

Yes, ArcticFox is a very old fork and I'm guessing mainly provided on NetBSD for people running ancient hardware. I used it on a 32bit Intel based T42 laptop (one processor, 1Gb RAM). Within those limits it actually works well. Mainly on text based or old-school Web sites.

Yes.

Sadly.

England keeping pen and paper exams despite limited digital expansion

Re: Paper is safer and cheaper.

Written GCSE papers are scanned and then imported page by page into the marking software. Markers can work remotely on standard computers (I'm guessing with a large external monitor). Decisions about each marking point are recorded, and there are facilities to 'flag' particular answers to a more senior examiner for final decision.

I imagine paper is kept for a bit in case of need to examine the actual scripts but I'm not sure about that.

Window Maker Live 13.2 brings 32-bit life to Debian 13

Backported kernel

Quote from (well written) sourceforge download page notes

"...the 32-bit variant of wmlive for i686 class CPU's is provided as an experimental hybrid of the older bookworm installer and backported 6.10.11 kernel, combined with the current trixie/i386 package pool."

I'm downloading the default iso now. If it includes the OpenSTEP textedit then I will be most impressed.

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

Re: THANK YOU, Mr. Proven, simply a really big THANK YOU! :-)

I'm seeing a book in the future. Lots of themes. And, yes, it could be written in MS Word with the outliner.

FreeBSD 15 trims legacy fat and revamps how OS is built

Re: Groff

Yup.

Add in the contents of /usr/share/groff and /usr/share/doc/groff-base/ and half a meg or so for the pre-processors (eqn, tbl, pic, chem).

So looking at around 13 Mb for a full installation that can typeset book length publications as well as man pages, not bad really.

Re: Groff

OK got it the march of mandoc continues (and it is a good system, Ingo Schwarze seems to have an enviable grasp of the details of man page formatting). Thanks for reply chain.

Groff

"As an example, the GNU groff typesetting tool is part of the base image, and few people need that in 2025."

Unless I'm misunderstanding something here, don't you need a basic install of groff with the man macros to be able to render a man page? Unless you have OpenBSD's mandoc installed.

Linux: Debian and downstream distros tend to install a cut-down groff with just what you need to display a man page, so we are talking 10s of Mbytes. I imagine some lean embedded system type application or a bare bones server could do without.

Icon: useful review.

Asda's 'self-inflicted' SAP mess after Walmart divorce stalls financial revival

Re: Availability in stores and online was at an eight-year high of over...

@Lazlo Woodbine

I have eaten the efforts of your work over the years (although I am a lump in a pack geezer rather than sliced cheese) so see icon.

Seriously local largeish ASDA seems to have most stuff in usually. There was a serious shortage of cherry pies some months ago but now resolved.

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

Re: Wait

@elsergiovolador and all

That post gave me big 'L 99 99 99 99 99...' vibes as from a broken Slackware bootloader.

As I tend to post on these occasions, Jack Welch is waving. It is all shareholder value stuff. At the end of the day does Microsoft actually need consumer users? Is Windows on laptops you buy from a high street shop or off Dell or some other retail supplier actually an important part of their revenue?

Soup king Campbell’s parts ways with IT VP after ‘3D-printed chicken’ remarks

Actual long-time vegans and veggies I'm guessing prefer to cook from fresh and avoid heavily processed food.

I'm old school(*) veggie and we do cook from actual fresh ingredients most of the time. I'm up for a Quorn sausage now and again though.

(*) https://the-good-earth.uk-restaurants.com/menu

No connection other than eating there whenever I'm in Leicester.

Re: Hang on a sec ...

Campbell's seem to have decided that the recording was plausible. The senior manager in question looks to have gone quietly. This is a non-criminal issue so balance of probabilities and the idea of a remedy applies rather than guilt beyond reasonable doubt as in a criminal trial, at least here in UK which is a common law country.

Steering back towards a vaguely technical angle. Not sure if anyone in the US keeps mains frequency records...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_network_frequency_analysis

Icon: off out as it isn't raining.

OBR drags in cyber bigwig after Budget leak blunder

chmod 644?

One wonders

VMware isn’t budging in its pursuit of Siemens for alleged unpaid licenses

Re: so june 2027

"If the practice is not illegal"

I think the issue is what country the legality test is based on.

EU and UK have different views to USA on contracts, competition and so forth. Hence as mentioned in OA vmware/Broadcom trying to keep the Siemens case within US.

Food for thought: Maximising shareholder value over a short timescale without regard to medium to long term prospects isn't really a great basis for building a new industrial sector is it?

Dell says Windows 11 transition is far slower than Win 10 shift as PC sales stall

Re: “Dell can survive flat PC growth”

Yes, I think we have reached a point in the western industrial countries where anyone who wants a PC/laptop has got one, so it is a replacement market.

So I think new growth is probably China and India and perhaps parts of Africa? And.... tariffs encouraging import substitution in China and to a lesser extent India.

Am I wrong? Corrections welcome, post evidence so I can learn.

Re: "the potential of the AI PC"

"Oh, and have a coffee and a chat with the customer - something that often leads to additional work."

As we scour the earth to 'drive out costs' and 'double down on lean processes' and 'leverage AI(*)' as much as possible, this is the dimension that tends to get squeezed out. I bet there was no data capture process for recording your conversations and estimating their impact. Humans are basically chimpanzees with a software upgrade. The MBA types tend to forget this.

Icon: good luck with the retirement.

(*) AI has a long and tortuous history from the perceptron onwards. The acronym these days refers to LLM technology, producing plausible prose from sampling the interwebs. Other versions are available.

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Re: Reality is an illusion ...

"It's very difficult to see the truth when your head is worried about your assets!."

Modified your pithy statement a little.

MS has invested $lots on this and perhaps the directors of the corporation think that they need to encourage adoption so as to demonstrate their wisdom to shareholders. Sort of like the directors of railway companies did in late Victorian times here in the UK.

The difference is that when the railway bubble burst, we were left with tangible assets that we are still using (and expensively maintaining of course).

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

Re: Adventureland

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi is waving.

Need to have the difficulty arranged so not too hard to discourage players and not too easy so players get bored.

Has reference to teaching as well as it happens.

Latest Servo release hints at a real Rust alternative to Chromium

Re: There's more to Rust than...

"It's allowing some pretty cutting edge stuff by people whom you wouldn't necessarily have trusted to code defensively enough on C/C++"

So the structures of the language and the compiler rules are preventing issues. That sounds good. I'm assuming that huge swathes of code are not simply marked as 'unsafe'?

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

Re: What was that about APPLICATIONS???

"...but even at work FreeBSD was easier to maintain"

Well there is your solution! Just use FreeBSD and maintain away

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Re: Missing the point

The article is bracketing together large projects such as Gnome and KDE that provide a desktop environment together with the small 'scratching an itch' projects such as (perhaps) JWM.

The large projects tend to want to provide a unified experience with either specially written desktop functions such as file managers or at least 'curated' ones. The smaller ones tend to focus on a window manager or perhaps an add-in panel.

As another poster says, most components of most desktop environments can inter-operate to some extent and there are sets of standards for things like notifications, inter-process messaging and so on.

So what do people think could be a first move towards reducing duplication? Basically which set of standards and protocols does some body or organisation select as ' the standard desktop' and then what do people have to be asked to stop doing? Not sure how you broker those kinds of agreement amongst what are independent (sometimes volunteer) projects upstream of distributions.

Or will it be a 'first-to-market' solution with a hardware package something like steamOS / console or the KDE Linux pre-installed on a mass-market device becoming very popular?

Icon: I'm dubious about how this gets started.

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

"All went well - until they said "Where's mu Outlook ?""

I take the point, but these days, they would be logging into Microsoft365 and using their apps in the Web browser. Can do that from Windows, MacOS or Linux/BSD.

Microsoft apologizes for not explaining cheaper no-AI M365 plans, and all it took was a government lawsuit

Re: Microsoft apologises for getting caught attempting to rip off its customers

Understand the sentiment in these comments, but somewhat doubtful of the wisdom of allowing a quasi-legal procedure to be applied without any appeal or review process. That creates a precedent that might come back to bite in later years.

I'm all for fines that are a % of turnover and I'm all for things like the US consent decrees.

Game on! Penguin levels up as Linux finally cracks 3% on Steam

Re: Slackware, PClinuxOS, strongly flavoured, artisanal.

True, people with recent hardware might have to look at Slackware Current (Kernel 6.12.57 mesa 25.2.6). For some of us with museum quality hardware, the older mesa in Slackware 15 is actually an advantage.

I'm a bit confused about your LibreOffice concern. Alien Bob's package is at 25.8.2 for both Slackware 15 and Slackware Current. The slackbuild.org build scripts point to 25.8.2, both the actual compile script (think 12 hours on fast hardware) and the script that repackages the LibreOffice rpms.

Slackware, PClinuxOS, strongly flavoured, artisanal.

Old school linux distributions still exist. Slackware 15.0 is very stable and can be configured with Pipewire or just alsa as well as the default pulseaudio. Some find applications a tad dated and run Slackware current (the in-development tree). Either way you will have to take charge of configuration (I tend to use mostly out of the box defaults with some slackbuilds).

PClinuxOS has a rolling release model but curated (and, it has to be said, opinionated ), so more recent packages and probably won't break on you.

And for something completely different, there is always OpenBSD.

Snap out of it: Canonical on Flatpak friction, Core Desktop, and the future of Ubuntu

Just do it

" So the question for me is: how do we set the bias between that and delivering a product that for 90 or 95 percent of people, they install it, they boot it up, and it just works, and it's great."

Go for the latter, make the whole desktop stack coherent, and test the lemon juice out of the most common applications that people use and make sure they work. Make SnapKits available for specialised applications. Show us what is possible.

Those who need a high degree of customisation will find something else, Debian, Arch whatever. The river will carry on flowing.

Labor organizers accuse Rockstar Games of 'ruthless act of union busting' after layoffs

Unionisation

Ive tended to work in education settings with union representation, often multiple unions, including usually one 'no strike' non-TUC affiliated union. It isn't a panacea, and a hostile management can still make people's work lives a misery, but at least there are well understood procedures and the govenors (aka board of directors) know what happens if the procedures get rail-roaded.

Wondering what the total upfront wage cost of 300 people for N years is as a fraction of the likely sales revenue?

KDE tidies up Plasma 6.5 with 60-odd fixes and smoother setup for OEMs

Bug fixing

Outrageously selective quote from OA

"[...] which has no new features at all but contains fixes [...]"

More like this please. No features just make it work smoother.

Icon: off out on a wet autumn day

PS: when the KDE Linux project emits something beta-ish and reasonably stable I'll try it out as a potential 'just work' OS.

OpenBSD 7.8 out now, and you're not seeing double, 9front releases 'Release'

That is unusual for OpenBSD. What issues are you finding?

Firefox 144 brings fixes, features, and farewells for 32-bit Linux die-hards

OpenBSD 32bit has no firefox package

"and we are sure that both NetBSD and OpenBSD will continue to maintain their own 32-bit versions"

OpenBSD i386 version had no firefox package in the packages repository last time I checked. Support for i386 is on a best effort basis. Just in case anyone was wondering. Also no Seamonkey (used to be in 7.6). Not sure about NetBSD.

https://www.openbsd.org/i386.html

Bose kills SoundTouch: Smart speakers go dumb in Feb

Perhaps a large sticker with some text like "This product requires an Internet server provided by the manufacturer for full service. The manufacturer may cease to provide the required server at some point in the future".?

Ofcom fines 4chan £20K and counting for pretending UK's Online Safety Act doesn't exist

Re: Geoblock the UK

"Fine, we'll build our own internet with blackjack and hookers."

and age verification lol