Posts by amacater

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

Businesses are obsessed with Exchange and Outlook. Everything else is an app - and LibreOffice would be usable by a lot of people if they'd actually seen it.

Me, I'm on Debian long term at home but suffer Windows 11 at work

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

Someone else's computer, someone else's rules - YOUR data, YOUR business

This is instructive - run, don't walk away from major major cloud providers. Still cheaper, quicker, less dangerous to do this yourself if you need five nines and do it on prem if that's contained and what's needed.

Raspberry Pi OS, LMDE, Peppermint OS join the Debian 13 club

32 bit OS

Don't forget that the Pis are ARM - Debian 13 is still supporting both armel and armhf at this point. 32 bit on Intel/AMD - a bit less so - no 32 bit installer but 32 bit userland still available (though, really, why would you at this point when Intel/AMD 32 bit-only hardware is pretty much 15 years old)

Intel's open source future in question as exec says he's done carrying the competition

Re: If intel wants to monetize their foss efforts

Didn't they already do that - they took the Intel linux distro round the back of the barn a few months ago.

Oracle will have to borrow at least $25B a year to fund AI fantasy, says analyst

Massive bankruptcy might take out Oracle as the AI bubble bursts. Does that leave IBM untouched - I've been waiting for years, popcorn at the ready, for the ultimate IBM vs Oracle legal battle which would fund American lawyers for half a lifetime at the bar.

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

Re: Been there, done that

alias rm to rm -i

Works great until you have to delete a hundred files. If you know what your doing, calling /usr/bin/rm will override the alias. Don't just "unalias rm" - or someone else who expects the rm -i behaviour

may have a nasty shock.

Red Hat - this alias (and blue text on black background in a console) are just two of the thousand reasons I don't like Red Hat based distros.

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

Re: How did you get in here?

Or as the Internet has it

As I was walking up the stair

I met a man who wasn't there

He wasn't there again today

I *think* he's from the NSA

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Re: Windows and I...

Depends on the Linux - I use Debian on a daily basis and have walked people through upgrades from one version of Debian to the next. Debian has an approximate two year release cycle with one further year of support - so that's your three years plus a fairly well organised way to upgrade to the next major version. Ubuntu LTS versions work similarly - you should always be able to move from one Ubuntu LTS to the next.

Disclaimer: I have >25 years of experience with Linux and use it as my primary operating system everywhere I can.

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

Big problems need bigger people.

Let me give folks a bad analogy. There are large numbers of garage mechanics making a living servicing cars, changing oil and generally fixing things generally at a cheaper rate than main dealers and distributors. This has been the case for many years: arguably since before there were enough cars on the road to justify main dealers,almost back in the days when every driver was their own mechanic by necessity. Somebody knowledgeable could probably fix your car more effectively than you could as a driver and it was worth paying them to do so and save time and effort.

Now there are hybrid and all-EV cars and the argument for these to be serviced is being led by a bunch of folk proclaiming the future and nay-saying everything previous.

Clearly, unless you want every driver to pay top dollar to main distributors, be locked out from knowledge, understand nothing and have no choice - it's in the interest of all small mechanics to find common ground and learn from each other. That could happen - and both sides would benefit - but one side or other are constantly ridiculing the others experience or expertise. It would make sense for both factions to realise that ~85% of the labour is common and transferable and practical experience can help. Unfortunately, it's easier to undermine each other than to work on the ~15% that is new, difficult, challenges existing practices.

'Tis the season to test the RHEL and AlmaLinux 10 betas

Re: Who Is This Discussion Aimed At?

if you can't get systemd to work with your peripherals - did you raise a bug with Debian? If you didn't, the situation will never improve. [Disclaimer: Debian user for a long time here. DO raise bug reports and comments for any given distribution. If you don't, you've only yourself to blame when stuff doesn't get fixed for a long time because people aren't aware.]

Veteran Microsoft engineer shares some enterprise support tips

Re: Well....

Linux allegedly suffers from viruses - but I wouldn't know because all of the AV software I've ever seen running under Linux is a bad port of Windows software and generally searching only for known Windows viruses.

Vendor: We have an AV product that runs under Linux

Me: Show me that it *actually* scans .deb, .rpm, arbitrary size .tar.gz

Vendor: You what, mate??? = then silence

All AV software running under Linux has ever shown me is false positives - but I might be very wrong here.

Two years after entering the graphics card game, Intel has nothing to show for it

Parabolic Arc

The hype was high, the launch spectacular - up like the rocket, down like the stick.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Re: been there..

I have a radio amateur friend who is dyslexic - cue *long* phone calls with me dictating Linux commands down the 'phone in NATO phonetic alphabet with occasional "press enter now". Then him reading back to me what he had on screen, only for me to discover a mistyped command. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I now have a work colleague who sits beside me who is bright but can't type and relies on me as the Linux guru - same system, with fewer phonetics ...

Re: Remembering dialogue boxes, and responses

If the UI is consistent, that works even for (some) non-Latin cnaracter sets. Then you end up installing in Arabic or Hebrew and have to reverse all the instructions so that you Accept rather than Cancel - at which point it's almost easier to swap hands and do it with your opposite hand :)

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday borks dual-boot Linux-Windows PCs

Re: We Fixed the Problem Which is Important to Us

SUSE as custodian of keys for Linux - depends which SUSE and who owns it. SUSE GmbH is now owned by a Swedish private equity company EQT. SUSE is also arguing over what should be SUSE Enterprise and what should be OpenSUSE and how OpenSUSE should probably split off their own community

Not a lot of accountability there, even if the folks at SUSE remain good, sorted people and committed to free and open source software.

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

The comment about Red Hat / IBM forked Linux ...

Has already happened. The end of this month will see the end of CentOS 7 which (still) powers large numbers of servers. Upgrading means cross-grading to another more modern Red Hat derivative with a (relatively) short pedigree / security track record / relatively few industry certifications or paying Red Hat large amounts of money.

Enterprise Linux - no one ever got fired for buying Red Hat / IBM - just got much more expensive but where you need "certification" for security or regulatory purposes you may only have one choice just at the moment.

The smart money started moving to Ubuntu / Debian / (maybe) *BSD two years ago when the writing was on the wall. If you understand systemd, then administering Debian might be as simple as learning apt instead of dnf ... the problem comes for everyone else and the services that rely on older Red Hat technology.

Disclaimer: Debian developer and advocate (who has been arguing for more use of Debian for too many years now ... :)

Qualcomm warms bed for Linux on Arm PCs

Raspberry Pi bootloader?

No - just no. UEFI and ACPI is *definitely* the way to go if you can - it gives you the identical install experience on ARM and amd64. Pi 4 already has this possible and is so much nicer than using Raspberry Pi bootloader. edk2 / Tianocore is a good foundation that's readily understandable.

All this IMHO, YMMV etc.

Dell kills sweetheart distribution deal with Broadcom's VMware

Run, don't walk away from VMWare

if you're not on Broadcom's list of highest paying customers - you're a nobody. Restricting resellers really doesn't help endear you. If proxmox doesn't have certifications and Dell were to throw its entire weight behind getting certifications to help proxmox? Broadcom make some good chips - and some really *annoying* chips - but they've no need, interest or use for VMWare except as a cash cow from the richest customers.

If your staff can't adapt to using a virtualisation interface that's different - retrain or fire your staff - it's not rocket science ...

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

Every windows pc that has to be junked becomes landfill. One iso of Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint / Fedora ... it becomes a valid machine again. If Windows applications become web based then everything is possible. I

Kernel kerfuffle kiboshes Debian 12.3 release

Re: Oh flippin' great...

Yes, you've got the fixed version

Re: Fixed, done and dusted

uname -a will give you both:

Linux [hostname].home.arpa 6.1.0-15-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.66-1 (2023-12-09) x86_64 GNU/Linux

There is an ABI bump, yes, hence the Debian referencing of Debian kernel image numberings.

6.1.67 is being worked on as I speak - but I don't know when it will be released.

[Debian images release team member]

Atlassian predicts its on-prem products will grow faster than cloud

Re: Depends on use case

For Confluence I can't understand why anyone would want it

There, FTFY

if you are a large organisation (say > 1000 employees) or constrained by regulatory pressure, how can you EVER migrate to cloud successfully?

For an individual, yes - having a small website / Wordpress instance hosted in cloud may cost less than running a machine at home - but not at scale.

VMware reveals critical vCenter vuln that you may have patched already without knowing it

Given the uncertainty on how this takeover plays out ..

Are we at the point where it's "run, don't walk from established VMWare infrastructure" to avoid costs/lack of future support?

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Re: But surely

mho of this please - I'm susceptible to it

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Re: A MILLION different Linuxes,...

Of the three or four hundred Linux distributions known to Distrowatch - 200 odd are minor derivatives of Debian or Ubuntu. It's not a million Linuxes, it's about five. Red Hat is definitely an also-ran with only Slackware being much older than Debian - there's a month between them.

Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font

Lovely - a new typeface and font. I assume accessibility studies have been conducted - it's appropriate for dyslexia, neurodiversity. It's available in every Latin language and for shaping glyphs in CJKV?

If not, go away again, Microsoft. If it's inappropriate for dyslexics and is a default, expect actions under s504 / s508 ADA at the very least. Have you run it past WCAG 2.1 AAA standards?

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

Red Hat - lots of small "do they ever test this" moments ...

I have "proper" Red Hat around to check how it goes. A couple of times they've broken their update process - broken certificates, DNF that didn't. At least once they reverted the certificate without telling anybody particularly.

One RHEL release had a bug where you couldn't complete the initial install without contacting subscription servers which was impossible in the installer itself for that point release. I could demonstrate that it

was broken because the corresponding CentOS installed perfectly. As someone on self-support, I had the devil's own job actually reporting that one and being taken seriously

Quality control just isn't quite there even when the amount of covered software is small and updates (relatively) infrequent.

Just my €0.02

Why a top US cyber spy urges: Get religious about backups

VMs, containers and "it'll just work"

VMs and containers are the new frontier of things to bite you, I suspect. Chucking stuff into a VM, then regarding it as vital - now you've got another 10GB or whatever to snapshot and backup regularly.

VMs as cattle not pets - now you've got the problem of knowing *which* VM. Chucking it into the cloud and adding S3 storage or equivalent - did you remember to specify and pay for backup of that???

Creating an ephemeral VM - easy - I can do it 20 times a day. Maintaining a VM ...

And that's before you decide to base your ecosystem on Docker or similar: "I can't be bothered to build locally, I'll just pull down the latest from Dockerhub, sight unseen ... it'll be fine."

Likewise depending on GitHub repositories to be there ...

if you *are* relying on VMs - document the process for rebuilding them, go through and do that once in a while: archive the metadata in version control. For the stuff you care about, archive *all* the software that you need and build in SPDX or similar so that you know which bits depend on which, not just for your VM but also for software bill of materials ...

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

Debian Cinnamon works fine.

Debian and Cinnamon is a decent compromise - all the apps (and maintainers behind them) from Debian and a fairly vanilla Cinnamon. And no need for flatpak or snapd unless you want to install them.

As the universal operating system, our priorities are our users and Free software.

A new version of APT is coming to Debian 12

Re: Crap

Non-free firmware *offered* as standard. This means, amongst other things, that WiFI stands a chance of working out of the box. if you're visually impaired, it means that the speech installer might speak to you on a modern Intel laptop. It's still being finalised - Debian Bookworm should hit another freeze round about today - but the way it's meant to happen is that the installer will use non-free firmware to get your Linux installed then offer you the option to uninstall any non-free firmware used in the install. This would leave you in the same position as having installed Debian using only fully free software.

It moves Debian to where Ubuntu and Red Hat and OpenSUSE have been for years, I think. It is an acknowledgement of reality that people need to be able to install Debian but it's not really an abandonment of Free Software ideals. We'd still much rather have fully free software - but after 30 years, it's getting harder not easier.

Note: This also makes it easier to divest yourself of non-free software other than firmware. You no longer have to potentially open your machine to all the non-free software offered in non-free, it is quite OK to have a /etc/apt/sources.list with just main and non-free-firmware for Debian 12 (Bookworm). See also https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList

Running it here on three machines: I'd suggest that anyone who wants to tries out the Bookworm Alpha 2 .iso will find it at https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/bookworm_di_alpha2/amd64/iso-cd/debian-bookworm-DI-alpha2-amd64-netinst.iso

Full disclosure: I work in the team testing Debian media for each point release - this makes it easier rather than harder for real people to install Debian.

Corporations start testing Windows 11 in bigger numbers. Good luck

Re: No beef with with Win11

Not a faff to run - it "just works" for things like gedit and Firefox. This using Debian 11.6 - Ubuntu integration may be even better.

It's certainly OK and will also now support systemd which is nice to have (cue all the systemd haters now :) )

Windows 11

Windows 10 downgrade for the win - it's amazing how many business laptops were sold that way. Otherwise it's Linux all the way for me and for the savvy folk that I work with.

Office integration with email and calendar is the only reason MS stay in business - and even that is slipping now that you can't get Office so easily on a perpetual licence. Decouple apps from the underlying OS - as MS has done with Microsoft 365 - and you might as well run Linux everywhere. Nearly 30 years with Linux as my main driver here - and it's been the year of the Linux desktop since about 1995 - see Lars Wirzenius quoted in LWN.net and at https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2022/goalposts/

Don’t expect a Raspberry Pi 5 in 2023, says Raspboss Eben Upton

I wish the Pi universe was a bit more cooperative and played well with others.

It would be lovely if three things were to happen:

* Raspberry Pi to upstream all their kernel mods and dtbs

* Pi hats of all kinds to work out how to interoperate with each other and work with other platforms - hats are great but tied entirely to Pi as an ecosystem

* Raspberry PiOS to actually talk to Debian about how to build an OS

As a Debian dev, I'm very biased but the first and last points are very important - Pi 4 and earlier models can (nearly) work with vanilla Debian but it is bondage and discipline - and there may be things that depend on a 32 bit armhf distribution that Raspberry Pi don't really care about.

SBCs from China and Armbian - don't even go there....

GCC 13 to support Modula-2: Follow-up to Pascal lives on in FOSS form

Poor old Wirth: as he said - US people called him Nickel's worth while Europeans called him Niklaus Wirth - one called him by name, the other by value reference.

Longstanding bug in Linux kernel floppy handling fixed

tomsrtbt 1.722M on a 1.4M floppy ... probably the most useful thing since sliced bread.

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

See also the various Swedish attempts to switch from Julian to Gregorian calendar over about 30 years and February 30th ...

Liquid and immersion is the new cool at Supercomputing '22

Re: Interesting one way trend.

Nobody yet loves ARM _enough_ to build a supercomputer out of ARM cores - and even then, supercomputing is its own strange world.

If you've got a weather forecasting model cranking on PB of stored data, you need grunt processors to do the number crunching - it's not like VMs and webhosting where you can get away with some level of underprovisioning / overselling based on bandwidth used - _all_ your customers don't turn up at once :)

Strong support for Snap and Ubuntu Core as Canonical meet IRL

Re: Snap is an infection

I'm a partisan - I've been running Debian for a *very* long time - but at least much of the non-free firmware hassle with Debian should go away relatively soon with the outcome of the Debian General Resolution to include non-free firmware in the installer as from the next major release.

Fedora includes non-free firmware by default. Ubuntu includes firmware - but not necessarily non-free firmware.

I like .deb - but it's definitely because of software curation and because a lot of people are working very hard indeed to make it work behind the scenes. There's not much to choose from .rpm and .deb - the quality of software curation makes a big difference and the long tail of Debian or Ubuntu derivatives have too few developers to keep them all going.

LastPass source code, blueprints stolen by intruder

Re: "We're told that these master passwords are still safe"

Unless your data is snarfed by someone from Y Wladfa :)

Disentangling the Debian derivatives: Which should you use?

Re: APT was a killer feature

Glad you like it - I'm fondest of the name, myself ...

Broadcom's VMware buy got you worried? Give these 5 FOSS hypervisors a spin

Re: Lackluster article

Ovirt is stalled, I think - it's no longer Red Hat's primary focus. Similarly with Spice virtualisation, I believe.

NASA delays SLS rollback due to concerns over rocky path to launchpad

That's one way to produce quartz crystals for RF gear ...

Lonestar plans to put datacenters in the Moon's lava tubes

Data centres on the moon - go read The Star by Arthur C Clarke

Maybe they will end up like the data left by the civilisation in the story ...

Atlassian boasts strong Q3 revenue growth in wake of two-week outage

Q3 revenue growth but still a fairly massive loss each quarter

However successful the figures - this is a major corporate/cloud "thingie" - quarterly losses on that level are not wonderful. How much of that money is going into support burden / vulnerability remediation / building sustainable code for the future (and unifying product codebases and features as necessary) and how much is just loss?

Debian faces firmware furore from FOSS freedom fighters

Debian - being firm about firmware

So: if you head over to Debian mailing lists and see what the fuss is about. One of the maintainers of the Debian media has asked: Can we split off firmware into its own subset of non-free software - which stops you having to suggest the whole of non-free to users? If users want a fully working PC, can we then add the contents of the firmware repository to the install medium so that it works out of the box for most users?

This reflects most people's reality with installing Debian without firmware: it's really hard, stuff doesn't then work and people complain that Debian is at fault. Almost all the other distributions already accept firmware as absolutely necessary. The ones that don't - the FSF approved ones - are mostly three or more years old / unmaintained / are switching to a BSD base. Many - including myself - suggest installing with the firmware .iso file to save trouble you might have.

Our priorities are our users and free software: the discussion (and various options proposed) are as to how we best serve that. Both Steve McIntyre and Andy Simpkins have also written blogs on this subject syndicated to Planet Debian.

[Disclosure: I am a Debian developer: I work on the CD release team with both Steve and Andy].

Apple dev logs suggest 'nine new M2-powered Macs'

Debian arm64 should run natively, for example - it was used as the demo for Parallels when the Mac M1 was first shown.

Atlassian comes clean on what data-deleting script behind outage actually did

Lessons learned: backups, test DR, institute a two person rule - everything no-one does

This is a "We'll keep some of our data in our own data centre, thanks" moment for anyone looking to move to cloud offerings from Atlassian.

This is an "Instigate a two-person rule for major changes - and test, test and test again" scenario for anyone vaguely competent as a lessons learned.

This is "Keep your instances of production, dev and reference on the same version" scenario for anyone using Atlassian data centre versions at the moment - and probably a "distrust the sales droid from Atlassian who will try to upsell you cloud".

This is a "Run, don't walk, from a major purchase or future deployment of Atlassian" for many considering this.

Backups and DR don't solve everything - a pint for the poor Atlassian folk saddled with unfsck'ing the mess in spite of everything.

One decade, 46 million units: Happy birthday, Raspberry Pi

Re: Where are they?

Please, please, please - consider a Pi Five - >8G memory UEFI SATA and PCI-e slot in a mini-ITX form factor/ the equivalent form factor of something like an Intel NUC

UK science stuck in 'holding pattern' on EU funding by Brexit, says minister

Re: Brexit got done

Technically, Ireland was united as one state for about a day, then NI opted out on 7th December 1921.

The most straightforward border to adopt would be down the Irish Sea and the Channel - bilateral

borders for England/Scotland/Wales with checks for all goods entering and exiting the EU. If Brexit means Brexit then it means hard maritime borders for all trade with the EU, surely.

As for fishing in the North Sea and Channel - that's been shared for at least 450 years.

Online retailers delaying sales of Raspberry Pi 4 model until 2023, thanks to a few good chips getting scarce

Hmmm - Pis were being built in Wales

At the Sony factory - don't know what happened to them.