Posts by amacater

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.

Another Debian dust-up with Firefox dependencies – but there is an annoying and awkward workaround

Firefox and Debian ...

So: Part of the problem is FF building requiring Rust - and thus effectively a new toolchain per distro per release - stable, oldstable, oldoldstable, potentially.

That also extends to building FF on non-Intel 32/64 bit versions but also all the other architectures that Debian supports. It's in hand: it will be done soonest.

There's a long thread in the debian-user mailing list at the moment: perhaps the most germane comment is https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2021/12/msg00344.html from Roberto C. Sanchez.

Folk who have solved this by updating to FF95 themselves are finding issues with having to back up and restore profiles as new FF does things slightly differently.

As Roberto says, Ubuntu can afford to do things differently, not least because thy only have two primary architectures to worry about. There's also been a long comment thread on Phoronix which largely degenerated to general Debian bashing. Every distro has a trade off: the trade off of knowledgeable developers and the Firefox release cycle might be to push Firefox out eventually. It's actually very similar problems with chromium cross-distro when you dig into it. It will be a problem if we don't have distribution maintainers around for whoever are sorting out FF builds on a regular basis. [Full disclosure: I'm a Debian developer and help reply to questions on Debian-user but other than wanting a decent web browser, I've no great desire to participate in blame wars here.]

Leaked footage shows British F-35B falling off HMS Queen Elizabeth and pilot's death-defying ejection

Re: And in some of the Western Press

If we have self-surfacing video - can we have self-surfacing planes that will ease the burden on the recovery flotilla?

The climate is turning against owning our own compute hardware. Cloud is good for you and your customers

There's a carbon cost in transferring your data to and fro - it may not be much: it's cheaper for me to keep a local machine running to point machines at for Linux updates than it is to point 6 x machines at "the Net" - it's cer4tainly faster if it's on the local loop. Updates to that machine transfer minimum data - but there is the cost of keeping 4x disks spinning.

Paying for data transfer is the killer, I think, for bulk data. You pay once to transfer it and many times to access it. Silly example: Spotify used AWS then moved off and back to a cloud better under their own control. And I can't force a cloud provider to use power-effective hardware.

AWS commits to update its own Linux every other year

Hmmm

No extras by default: no security updates applied by default. This is sub-Red Hat, supported for two years and vaguely maintained for five. Not good enough.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/preview-amazon-linux-2022/

CentOS Stream^W^W Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 emerges in beta form

RHEL 9

If you like Cockpit - nice sysadmin through the Web - it'll be lovely. If you like minimal change it'll be fine for the next five years - but RHEL 10 will be here in 2024 just as RHEL7 dies ...

If you want to do up to date software - meh, as always. If you've users who want to do stuff that isn't in core RHEL and demands third party repositories -- well, at least in RHEL 9 they will have sorted out some of the modules hell.

I've said it for a long time: support is a movable feast. Rather than migrate to "one of the Debian-based distros" - just use Debian (unless your bean counters want large scale support in which case pay for Ubuntu, maybe).

.NET Foundation admits it 'violated the trust of project maintainers'

No matter whose cock-up: Devs - Run, don't walk, away from this Foundation now and drop .Net as a tainted ecosystem. It really doesn't matter that it was Microsoft, is now an independent Foundation's mistake. Once you have reason to lose trust - move away.

Raspberry Pi's trading arm snags £33m investment as flotation rumours sink

Re: "the list of investors "

That was called OLPC :(

30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat

Re: Linux on the desktop - what about on the server?

Tell me: Where can you get commercial training for CentOS? Commercial support? LPI will train for all Linux. To be honest, there's almost no difference between Red Hat and Debian now: same systemd, same apps, same desktop environment. [I've CentOS 8/ 8Stream / Rocky / Almalinux and Debian 11 on one set of VMs - put a user in front of any of them and you'd only notice that the Debian is more up to date and slightly more jazzy than Rocky]. RHCE is a course which demonstrates how to pass an exam.

Dell and HPE will support Ubuntu and Debian now: Lenovo are preinstalling other Linuxes - and second hand Thinkpads are the stock machines for savvy users.

Re: Linux on the desktop

Don't bother with the clones: come and talk to the Debian developers. Step forward six or so years from CentOS 7 to Debian 11. The reason there are 200 Debian derivatives rather than 15 or so for Red Hat?

Community - which Red Hat have rather squandered and fragmented in the last year or so. If Fedora is too fast pace - you've nothing. (Though the Fedora developers and users are a great community in themselves).

MATE - no problem - you don't even have to find a different install medium. www.debian.org will give you a download link for the netinstall medium.

Re: Linux is not an OS

Oh, Red Hat, the latecomers - remind me when they make it to 28 :)

Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

Re: FFS

What's last, what's first? Travelling in Indonesia with a tour group, I got my food first - Mr.Andy

What's a family name? Why do you have to have more than one name ...

UK celebrates 25 years of wasteful, 'underperforming' government IT projects

It works the other way too: I _think_ that the goverfnment website in Slovakia (.sk) is still using .gov.uk templates and structure very successfully. [Hat tip to a Debian colleague for that info.]

Huh, it's as if something happened that made people not like CentOS so much

Re: Too much choice?

There are three packaging solutons: tgz/git/build from source - Gentoo/Arch/LFS - .deb - Debian and Ubuntu and derivatives - .rpm - Fedora/RHEL and clones, and SUSE.

Apt wins dependency management for packages, I think but the others don't always have as many packages to care about anyway.

Of these for third party packages: .rpm is good for some third party commercial packages too but .deb and the Debian package universe has more or less won everything else.. [See, for example, the relative pain of producing a full bootstrap and rebuild of Rocky/Almalinux onto an ARM system like Raspberry Pi.]

Add in the horror of Red Hat subscription/license entitlement and .rpm is likely to die out in the long term, IMHO.

Re: Not exactly a surprise.

A note from IRC last night: for 7, some CVEs are already being marked as WONTFIX ... 7 is on "last few years" support now.

Not all CVEs are created equal, but you'd hope that they'd all be patched in a distribution where you pay significant $$$ for support

Big Blue's big email blues signal terminal decline – unless it learns to migrate itself

Surely you can set up a mail sever using Red Hat ...

Ah, yes, see how well the return on the $34Bn is going ...

Rocky Linux release attracts 80,000 downloads as ex-CentOS users mull choices

Supercomputers and non-RPM?

I would suggest you go over and subscribe at Beowulf.org. A tiny mailing list full of very bright people who've been doing supercomputing / HPC for 30 years or so. It was an accident that they started out with Red Hat packages to form Extreme Linux all those years ago: it's really not easy to build something from scratch but it is do-able. There are some supercomputing facilities running on Debian and Ubuntu, I think, and genomics sequencing is largely Ubuntu at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, for example.

Re: Another indication of support is that Google has made a customised Rocky Linux

Facebook are apparently using CentOS Streams - so on something that doesn't stabilise fully. What will be more interesting will be to see which CentOS fork Amazon picks as the basis for Amazon Linux which is the elephant in the room.[and the largest scale user of the Red Hat ecosystem.]

Fermilab and CERN were using Scientific and were mulling switching to CentOS after Scientific decided to not do CentOS 8 and to recommend CentOS 8. They're now, apparently, considering other options - one suggestion is that they might go to Ubuntu. Internal advice shows that a whole host of Linux distributions are made available internally.

Jump to Debian or Ubuntu and leave RPM Hell behind? :)

Secure Boot - both Alma and Rocky are in the space of having to wait for shim packages etc. to be signed by Microsoft.

Intel to put SiFive's latest CPU cores into 7nm dev system to woo customers to RISC-V

7nm - yes, why not for SiFive new chips.

These may be significantly simpler than an Intel Xeon or whatever and so a good proving ground for a 7nm process.

Wanted: Brexit grand fromage. £120k a year. Perks? Hmmmm…

We have our own candidate ritght here on El Reg ...

Can I nominate amanfrommars - [they?] will make sense of everything done in this post if duly appointed.

Dependable Debian is like a rock in a swirling gyre of 'move fast and break things', and version 11 is no different

Re: Pi's

You can, potentially, have vanilla 64 bit arm64 Linux on the Raspberry Pi now with minimal effort.

I'm writing up how it was done when I did it the other day - if not, use your favourite search engine to find Pete Batard UEFI Raspberry Pi

Almost identical instructions will allow you to put Debain straight on an external SSD for yoru RPi 4.

openSUSE leaps to 15.3 – now built with 'same binary packages' as SUSE Enterprise

Re: way back...

Depends fairly much where you are: if you're in some universities / many big enterprises it's "Red Hat or nothing at all" and all sorts of reasons will be put forward for that including support and security.

Using both fairly regularly: there's nothing** you can do on a Red Hat based system that you can't do on a Debian based system: if you go the other way round, you quickly discover that Red Hat has very fewsupported programs and relies on lots of third party sites like EPEL to provide a smaller subset of what's "there but without full Ubuntu support because it's universe/multiverse" / "just works" for Debian.

**FIPS certification / US Govt. security certification / credit card payment data/authorisation may be harder

Some very large sites dropped Red Hat for Debain and/or Ubuntu many years ago eg Wellcome Sanger Institute.

[Full disclosure: Long term Debian user / sysadmin for other Linux at various times: biases are my own]

Apple is happy to diss the desktop – it knows who's got the most to lose

Just give me a Linux desktop

Absent Outlook and now Teams - what has Windows got for the Enterprise per so. If applications become commodities - and Microsoft's push to make them web apps is just that - give me a decent Linux OS, a minimal GUI if I really want it and let me use whatever I want. Regularly updated desktop Linux is at least as secure as corporate Windows updated a while behind anyway.

Compsci boffin publishes proof-of-concept code for 54-year-old zero-day in Universal Turing Machine

So - when should you halt it to patch it?

And, if it's unpatchable/obsolete - when should you stop the production line ...

Audacity 'scared and excited' to be bought and brought under Muse Group's roof, promises to stay free and open source

Re: "Its new management has pledged to keep the platform free and open source."

As someone who got buirnt by buying a leading closed-source musical notation etc. software for daughter's education: Musescore and Audacity will make an awesome combination and could readily produce a supported version for, say, Windows charge a small amount and make money on that.

Everybody wins with the right combinations of things - I wouldn't expect every parent to be able to install Debian to make a music workstation for their child, for example.

Flatcar Linux takes the 520, drives up to Redmond: Microsoft acquires Kinvolk

Connected with Microsoft's own Linux for Azure/WSL?

https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner - Microsoft's Linux that they're using for GUI apps on WSL2 is RPM based. Maybe this helps them with this and with containers on Azure? Tying to RPM - well, somebody has to, despite the fact that the world runs Ubuntu, Debian and over 200 derivatives while there are about 15 RPM based distributions, I think.

More Linux love for Windows Insiders with a kernel update

Re: Things change

When Microsoft acquires Canonical - there's still Debian :)

Why WSL on Windows?

Corporately "secured" Windows device but dev. is developing for Linux - much more straightforward to do this.

Oh hello. Haven't heard much from you lately: Linux veteran Slackware rides again with a beta of version 15

Re: one of?

By about two weeks - 17th July Slackware as against August 16th 1993. On a point of order, however: MCC Interim Linux - founded 1992 - included instructions on how to convert the distribution to Debian. Potentially, any system remaining from that vintage might legitimately claim to be the oldest continuously updated system :)

Island in the Stream: AlmaLinux project issues first stable release of CentOS replacement

Re: Will it have the Mate desktop ?

As I understand it, the only supported desktop in the upstream distribution is now Gnome 3.

You can possibly pull in packages from EPEL for other desktops - but it looks as if MATE requires building from source - https://tylersguides.com/guides/install-mate-on-centos-8/ - or downloading from a repository put up by a Fedora user - https://wdawe.com/index.php/installing-mate-desktop-on-centos?blog=1

I remember your name from a long time ago: you'd have no problem with either but Debian "just works" for me and has done for about 25 years.

Boffins get first measurements of Jupiter's stratospheric storms that show 'unique beast' dwarfing Earth's issues

Great Red Spot?

Big whorls have little whorls

Which feed on their velocity

Those little whorls

Have smaller whorls

And so on to viscosity

or thereabouts - it's a long time since I read it :)

Self-supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server virty users see stealth inflation

Re: After 25 years use ...

You're looking to move to something with a longer track record than Red Hat's entire existence. To a distribution that is also upstream to several projects, maintained on multiple architectures and with a faster MTTR on security. Oh, and also the basis for 200+ other distributions. ...

Red Hat - five years [ of vendor support] for older packages, maybe, and no free clone. As Red Hat moves away from being a Linux provider - why _not_ go for a community supported distribution with the same underlying systemd as Red Hat - and a choice of multiple desktops?

Apache foundation ousts TinkerPop project co-founder for tweeting 'offensive humor that borders on hate speech'

Re: I don't know why there is such a fuss over this.

There is no difference between Russia and America: Both enjoy full freedom of speech.

In America you may also enjoy freedom after speech.

Similar period joke.

European Space Agency open to hiring astronauts with a physical disability

Being picky here - as a wheelchair user myself - but why single out parastoanauts - these folk will be astronauts, pure and simple. If I drive my car, I don't suddenly become a paradriver. If I eat out at a restaurant - I'm not suddenly a paradiner.

This is disguised able-ism drawing attention to disability as "other" in a not so subtle way.

ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 1: Workhorse that does the business – and dares you to push that red button

Re: 16GB LPDDR4x soldered.

Soldered RAM is annoying - but the T14s is the lower profile laptop. On the T14,proper at order time, you can configure the memory - one slot is 16G soldered but the second can take up to 32G for a total of 48G.

No Ethernet is probably standard for the form factor - the T14 has Ethernet - but most people might well use a dock for additional connectivity.

Mouse buttons - if you use the mouse buttons consistently, you don't wear out the trackpad - likewise with the pointing device if that's what you like. For writing a university dissertation length paper - you'll probably use a decent external keyboard / mouse

£30m in contracts awarded in Post Office's £357m ATM overhaul

Fewer ATMs is possibly unsurprising just at the moment in the middle of a pandemic when everything is trying to be cashless - but that assumes you've got debit cards / credit cards, IT to manage some sort of account on line - and that excludes many of the people that bank with the Post Office because there's someone they can talk to to get help / collect benefits / pensions there. Cities are becoming deserts if you need cash machines and corner stores taking £2 per transaction or whatever aren't helping those on the lowest incomes.