Posts by Altrux

Leaked memo suggests Red Hat's chugging the AI Kool-Aid

I'm about to switch back to Fedora, years after leaving Red Hat Linux behind and moving to (yes!) Gentoo and then Ubuntu/Mint. Fedora is a great project, although perhaps I should be nervous that it's controlled by Red Hat's tiller.

Ubuntu 26.04 beta arrives packing GNOME 50, which no longer supports Google Drive

Re: architecturally wrong

GRUB was fine until GRUB2 came along. They decided to make it 'extensible' and made it ludicrously over-complicated and much harder to configure. It seems to have happened with too many projects.

Wow - who on earth created a 1GB Word document? Is that 20 years of tracked changes? I'm actually downright impressed that Word can even open such a thing.

Time for a Change

After several years and a few LTS upgrades, I think I've had enough of Ubuntu and GNOME now. I'm going to switch to Fedora 44 when that arrives shortly. It'll be a special birthday present for me! I'm already running F43 on my travel machine, and it runs really well, with cutting edge features and no snap nonsense. Just to be radical, I'm going to try the COSMIC desktop as well, which looks cool and so far runs very nicely.

Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack

Re: What a bunch of mistakes

Some fair points, including #3 and #6 - working in enterprise IT, I see #6 as being the biggest blocker. Centralised enterprise management of big fleets is an A1 priority for corporates, and I cannot see anything in the Linux world that's genuinely capable of that. We tried, a couple of years ago, with FreeIPA and the like (Red Hat Directory - doesn't look on the same level, but unsure), but it was an unfathomable nightmare and we got nowhere.

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

Goodbye

I'm overdue to say goodbye to GNOME - this will be my final trigger. Yes, I should have done it years ago, but enough of this nonsense now. BUT, what to switch to? So many choices, but no perfect answers. KDE is too huge and over-complex, and the others are over-simplistic or a little ugly. Maybe Fedora with Cinnamon? Time to experiment...

The last supported version of HP-UX is no more

Yuckspeak

What does "Mature Software Product Support without Sustaining Engineering" actually mean? Basically emergency fixes but zero new engineering effort on anything? What a clumsy pile of waffle-speak!

IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn’t taken over the world, but don't call it a failure

Too long?

I think 128 bits is just tooooooo looooooong. I'd have gone for 80 bits myself: a fixed 48-bit network number and a 32-bit host number (the usual 4 billion) within that. Does any organisation, really anywhere, need more than 4 billion addresses across its networks? All the other benefits of IPv6 could be basically the same, but maybe we could chuck in a few improvements. Bingo, IPv7!

Hong Kong’s newest anti-scam technology is over-the-counter banking

Re: Physical banking is definitely on-trend this year

What goes around. I received a hi-fi CD player for Christmas in 1991, and a portable CD player (super exotic, even with skip protection) in 1992!

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

Re: The reason is Office

It's not Office - it's AD / domains and Group Policy, etc. Enterprise management features. That's the reason Linux desktops don't exist in corporate-land. My company is chock full of Linux gurus, developers and every other kind of techie, and all would love to have Linux desktops. But we can't, because enterprise management, innit. Until the free software world comes up with some kind of equivalent, it'll never happen in that sphere.

Re: Mint

Incredibly unlucky, I would say. I install various Linux flavours on a vast array of (mainly modern) hardware, and I can't even remember when a driver last didn't work. Perhaps around 5 years ago, I had to manually dibble a Wi-Fi driver on a 'no name' laptop; but other than that, everything has worked 100% out of the box on every bit of hardware I've tried. Linux has the best and widest driver support of any OS these days.

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Re: Of course Linux users

Mint overall is a much of a bloat-fest as anything else these days. Of course, there are genuinely small, fast, and efficient Linux alternatives available. With Windows, no such luck!

Too True

Go and find a classic 90s 4k demo (coded for 386 or 486!), which might even still run on modern(ish) Windows. Marvel at what could be achieved with 4 freaking kilobytes of compiled code. Then wonder why ever a bare-bones text editor consumes mountains of megabytes today. Modern Linux-based systems are obviously just as over-bloated as Windows, although at least it's /possible/ to build an ultra-minimal cut down implementation of the former.

Your car’s web browser may be on the road to cyber ruin

Re: Embedded insecurity

My satnav (2023 VW group car, fully updated, Aug 2025 maps) still has points of interest that ceased to exist 30 years ago. There was an old petrol station towards the city centre that was redeveloped into apartments in the 90s, but it's still on the map. And a pharmacy that closed at least 12 years ago. Curious where they get their data from!

Networking students need an explanation of the internet that can fit in their heads

Re: A little background.

Well, even though of us moderately well-versed in security do use the net for those things, with the usual precautions. I've been shopping and banking online (but not on my phone) for over 20 years, without a blip. Is your level of paranoia worth the pain?

Re: The Internet hasn't really changed since 1995.

A lot more IPv6, a bit less IPv4, unless you count the explosion of things like CGNAT. Which exists due to the slowness or transitioning to the former. And now the growth of new and exciting transport protocols like QUIC. And yes, the fact that in 1995, probably 90% of the internet's traffic was "useful" stuff, and 10% was e-mail spam. Now, 90% of a vastly higher torrent of traffic is junk / nonsense / malware / attacks / slop, and only 10% is actually useful. But that's a whole different story!

'Keep Android Open' movement fights back against Google sideloading restrictions

Duplicitous

Ah yes, this is the same Google that proclaims "no monopoly here!" because Android is free and open and people can install apps from anywhere, not just from us, right?! Google is both the home and away team, and referee, in its great game to take control of almost the entire web and all of its on-ramps.

AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane

TBTF

AWS is now critical infrastructure for humanity. Too big to fail. And, oops, it failed. It only takes one small corner of AWS to create this much chaos, worldwide? We kid ourselves that we have conquered the resilience problem...

Re: HMRC

They may well have no /data/ stored there - it should all be in the UK region (eu-west-2). But as the article explains, it turns out that the entire global AWS cloud still has critical dependencies on its 'mothership' region, the original hub in N Virginia.

Ubuntu 25.10 lands: Rustier and Wayland-ier, but Flatpak is broken

Wow, there's a lot in there. Interesting stuff - I actually wondered why RISC-V is getting so much attention, and lots of the software world is devoting serious effort to it, if it's not even half-cooked yet. There must be something else in it? A burning desire to get away from proprietary ARM as well as getting away from cranky but ubiquitous x86? An underlying sense that it will one day still take over the world, just like Itanic was going to, back in 1999?! Whereas Linux was never going to take over the world, but accidentally did. Funny how things turn out...

Bloat

Honestly, how does Gnome keep up the bloatfest so effectively? They take out more and more, strip down the interface more and more, but it just keeps getting bigger and fatter all the same. Linux fundamentally suffers the same bloat as any other platform, though at least lightweight distros still exist.

Make Windows 11 more useful and less annoying with these 11 Registry hacks

Re: It's easier than doing all that. [1]

I'm responsible for platforming engineering and maintaining clouds of Linux machines. But of course, I still have to do it from a Windows 11 Enterprise laptop. Because enterprise, or something. To be fair, the Linux and open source world hasn't yet come up with a reliable or familiar way of centrally managing almost 100,000 machines in a vast global directory. Or has it? I once had a go at trying to do some user management / directory stuff with FreeIPA/389DS (in a much smaller company), but it was a hopeless cause and we got absolutely nowhere.

Re: Super helpful...

I ditched Windows from my home PC in 2002, and funnily enough, I've never gone back. Doing 'real' work in Windows, as an infrastructure engineer, is like working in a straitjacket. Very annoying.

Re: Super helpful...

It's mad, isn't it? My work laptop is 50x as powerful as the one I had 20+ years ago, but actually takes /longer/ after startup to be usable, running Windows 11 Enterprise. Software bloat is off the scale, but only ever gets worse, not better.

Windows 10 turns 10: Dying OS just worked, lacked compatibility chaos

Ugly

But it was (and is) just so ugly - that horrible, flat, dead-looking interface with incredibly wasteful space usage. At least Win11 is slightly nicer to look at. But yes, what the world actually wants is Win7 with updated drivers and tools, all the data-harvesting telemetry ripped out, and nothing more. But the world, of course, won't ever get that.

Science confirms what we all suspected: Four-day weeks rule

Re: Translation

A brilliant summary - I did 4 days (80% pay) for years and it was brilliant. I'm temporarily back on 5 days, in a new job, as I need to get up to speed. But it's brutal and you can really feel the difference. No time to do anything, and the weeks go by in a blur. I hope to revert to 4 days next year...

GParted: Still the best free partitioner standing – unless you're on a 32-bit box

Handy indeed!

A great little tool, and always a permanent member of my 'ISO collection', kept on my media partition, ready to be burned to a stick at any time. I've used it for lots of machine-upgrading and disk-shuffling games. I'm curious how many people are really working on it - there's a few on the 'Contact' page, but a couple are already noted to be inactive. I think this project is worthy of a donation...

Exif marks the spot as fresh version of PNG image standard arrives

Re: Still relevant?

And so do the new formats, whilst offering much better compression, with a choice of lossy or lossless. Why would anyone go back to PNG or JPG now?

Still relevant?

Is PNG still relevant or is it largely supplanted by WEBP and AVIF, these days? Are there any scenarios where it still has an advantage (apart from universal support, but really almost anything supports the newer formats these days)?

Larry Ellison is still not the world's richest person

The lesson: you don't get rich by being nice!

Need for speed? CityFibre punts 5.5 Gbps symmetrical broadband at ISPs

Re: I would be happy...

BT have offered IPv6 for many years now. Lots of others still don't!

RHEL 10 quietly leaks ahead of Red Hat Summit

RHEL 8 will be supported well into 2029 - what's the rush? Other than the fact that 10 will be much better, of course!

Kernel goodness

Oooh, are they actually aligning with the rest of the universe and using an LTS kernel, this time around? If this kernel is based on the real upstream v6.12, that appears to signify a change in policy. Or is it actually 6.12 with half of 6.13 grafted in and vast stack of other random patches on top? Anyway, looking forward to Rocky 10 for work purposes, and about to give Fedora 42 a proper work-out for non-work purposes, as it were...

OpenBSD 7.7 released with updated hardware support, 9Front ships second update of 2025

Re: Re. OpenBSD's partitioning scheme

I've used LUKS for many years, on my /home partition, and never had an issue. It's generally setup post-install, certainly on Ubuntu, but I use a 'stub' /home in the root partition to do the OS installation, then map in the encrypted home partition later on. This means if you ever lose/break the encrypted /home, you can at least still boot and login to the machine without it complaining about a missing /home dir.

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

23 years of penguin

I've used Linux (various flavours) as my daily home driver since as far back as 2002. It was slightly more painful in those days, but still a superior experience to Windows. I've used Linux as a daily driver in some jobs too, though not my previous one, where I suddenly had to re-acquaint myself with the ways of the borg. In a new role starting today, which is entirely focused on Linux / infrastructure / cloud stuff, I'm slightly disappointed to be handed a fully corporatised, ultra locked-down Win11 laptop. It's like being in a digital straitjacket. I'm hoping I can eventually install a real OS on it, as 90% of the corporate stuff is web-based and should work anywhere. We shall see - otherwise I'll probably just be living in WSL, or maybe even a nice VM if I'm lucky...

Asia reaches 50 percent IPv6 capability and leads the world in user numbers

And Malaysia

I'm here in Malaysia, rocking on IPv6, as confirmed by a number of ping tests and ipify.org.

I'm also on fast fibre, which appears to be everywhere here: in fact, my in-laws home in northern Malaysia had full fibre many years ago. Back in SW England though, in a city of 130,000, no such luck. It looks like I'll still be on copper until well into 2026....

Hm, why are so many DrayTek routers stuck in a bootloop?

Teltonika - OpenWRT with extra features on top, and regular updates. Really nice little 'industrial' rugged routers.

Confusion

The UK firmware site (and wider Draytek UK site) has been intermittently available for the last few days. International sites seem to offer different variants, and different latest versions, for a range of common router models. When presented with a list of alternatives for a given version (e.g. _std, _MDM1, MDM2, .... MDM7), which are we supposed to go for? I'm not going to upgrade until I'm sure, as I don't want to mess up the 'modem code'...

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

Well, there have been a few slightly embarrassing breakages in the 'stable' series recently. I know Greg K-H has a very challenging job juggling lots of kernel series at once, but you wonder if the whole process is a little too ragged, in terms of accepting things that really aren't just small, obvious fixes. The stable series kernels, especially LTS ones, should /never/ break!

No big changes to UK broadband regs, despite no real competition for BT

FTTP chaos

The fibre rollout continues to be a mad free-for-all, with some areas having 2, 3 or even more separate FTTP networks. While other areas, including in major cities, still have zero. We're still waiting, waiting, waiting, nearly 5 years after CityFibre announced their arrival in town. When it finally, finally happens, my broadband will get cheaper (even with OR) as well as much faster...

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Re: Humm - really?

It also won't import AVIF, although Gimp 2.10 does. I might be doing something silly, but it's already slightly broken my workflow, and I can't get tool settings to actually, erm, save their settings!

Euro techies call for sovereign fund to escape Uncle Sam's digital death grip

EuroCloud

Any chance OVHcloud can become the next AWS? It's incredible to think how much money must be flowing to Trumpland, continent-wide, just via these cloud titans alone.

Microsoft will kill Remote Desktop soon, insists you'll love replacement

Genius

Microsoft used to be known as geniuses at marketing - if not software development. But how silly is this? No more Remote Desktop app, but you still have to use Remote Desktop to use remote desktop (RDP) connections? And for everything else you use "Windows App"? Coming soon: Office (sorry, MS 365) will now be renamed as "Info Fiddling App". Flight Sim 2024 will be "Boundary Layer App"...

Stuff a Pi-hole in your router because your browser is about to betray you

Great tool

I've had it running on a Pi4 for a few years now - never a blip. Some minor wobbles with the upgrade to v6, but easily fixed (I waited for the first few point releases to come out). It's really nicely designed and so easy to setup. Now, where's that allowlist the El Reg? Happy to add that in if someone can provide pointers. Or I suppose I can just load a few pages on here, watch the block logs and build it up that way?

Re: Much as I’d like, not for me, not this lifetime

Oh dear - I've run about 30 of them, at home and work, without a blip. Very reliable little things, although the SD card is usually the weak spot.

JetZero teams up with Delta to drag aviation into the future

The long wait

I've been seeing pictures very similar to this BWB since I started my aerospace degree. That was in 1995 - it feels like we're gone nowhere much in a very long time. I know everything's got more efficient and more automated, but the really radical changes in aircraft configuration and energy source still remain well into the future...

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

She go boom

Musk's big rockets are disintegrating at the same rate as his Tesla sales...

How Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an app

Phone fun

I got a new Pixel phone today, but I've not fully committed to switching over yet. It's interesting to see what you can actually do on a pristine Android phone with a) no SIM and b) no Google account logged in. The answer, of course, is very little. The Google News app thing works, and you can open YouTube and Photos, but that's about it. You can't even open other apps like Messages, without the login prompt, and of course you can't install anything else. It does let you install system software updates and fiddle with settings, but it's fundamentally highly crippled. No great surprise, just an interesting experiment that I hadn't tried for many years.

The Register gets its claws on Huawei’s bonkers tri-fold phone

Retail overload

Malaysia really is the world capital of phone shops - all the malls are jammed with them! What you don't see so much is endless pre-owned phone stores that litter our UK high streets, although doubtless they're out there in the backstreet areas. I once even bought a retail Huawei phone in Malaysian mall, some years back, before deciding to switch to non-Chinese made Samsungs later.

But yes, on this device, I cannot see many people shelling out over $3,500, even in wealthy nations - quite insane! That would buy you a high end Macbook...

Under Trump 2.0, Europe's dependence on US clouds back under the spotlight

Re: "It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds"

Mercury is fine to drink. Just don't inhale the vapour!