Ex arch btw user here. I noped out and wiped after thinking I had it all nailed down, then I tried to connect my Bluetooth headphones and I came to a grand awakening. I am too old for this shit.
I mean… I would consider anywhere that you might download software from sensitive. This isn’t really a smart move. And sure, the mirror’s page they link to uses https, but if the regular site doesn’t a man-in-the-middle could change the url and serve an official looking malicious version… I wouldn’t consider putting your users at an elevated risk when it’s relatively easy to set up TLS “a smart move”.
If it hasn’t I would just assume that Slackware isn’t a big enough target and that anybody in the position to man-in-the-middle a large number of people would have better targets. I mean, to be clear TLS is not a silver bullet either, but it goes a long way for ensuring the integrity of the data you receive over the internet in addition to hiding the contents.
Distros usually sign their ISOs with PGP as well (Slackware does this), so it’s a good idea to verify those signatures as it’s a second channel that you can use to double check the validity of the ISO (but I’m not sure many people actually do this). Of course, anybody can make PGP keys so you have to find out which key is actually supposed to be signing the iso, otherwise an attacker can just make a bogus key and tell you that that’s the Slackware signing key (on the official website too, because it doesn’t use tls!). The web of trust arguably helps some (though this can be faked as well unless you actually participate in key signing parties or something), and you can hope that the Slackware public key is mirrored in several places that you trust so you can compare them… but at the end of the day for most people all trust in the distribution comes from the domain name, and if you don’t have TLS certificates you’re kind of setting up a weak foundation of trust… Maybe it will be fine because you’re not a big enough target for somebody to bother, but in this day and age it’s pretty much trivial to set up TLS certificates and that gets you a far better foundation… why take the risk? Why is it smart to unnecessarily expose your users to more risk than necessary?
I just installed Nextcloud on Arch and the official packages caused the most headaches I ever had within my 3 years of arch. In contrast I installed the official Jellyfin and Prometheus Server packages and they ran OOTB.
I ended up with not using the official packages but extracting the tar.bz2 into /var/www/nextcloud and slightly modifying the nginx config from their site. I had to move the inclusion of the MIME-Types file to a different block for nextcloud to deliver its CSS, SVGs and images. It wasn’t exactly straight-forward too considering permissions. I found it a beast compared to many other server software.
Its probably just one package. I guess for example pacman -S plasma-desktop plasma-meta flatpak fish plasma-wayland-session sddm sddm-kcm && systemctl enable --now sddm does the trick.
Archinstall with the entire plasma desktop is probably also nice, or just EndeavorOS which will be preconfigured
I actually did the whole KDE shebang with archinstall. I never really expected that Arch btw deigned it too opinionated to just provide an audio and Bluetooth interface. Instead I have to choose between pulse audio and pipewire and bluez and a bunch of others. I just didn’t have the patience nor time to look into what and why these options are presented, and this was after I already wasted days figuring how to get my pc to boot with my 12th gen Intel and Nvidia gpu combination.
Turns out there’s a bunch of kernel finagling you absolutely have to do first before it even decides to boot from the gpu and not the igpu. Oh well.
I must be ancient then. I recognized, and I think used, all of those cards/chips.
Some personally. Some at work. At work I used to maintain and MS-DOS / early Windows graphics program. I had to test the program’s compatibility with a stack of graphics cards.
I’ve been using (or, in some cases, trying to use) that when it was brand new. Kernel side was relatively easy - but there was a lot of compiling custom versions of XFree86 trying to get acceleration working properly.
On the one hand a bit sad to see that kind of history I’ve experienced myself go - on the other hand, it’s probably been a decade since I’ve last used something without KMS, and the ease of use of modern KMS drivers is way ahead of all the older stuff.
I’ve had a system in the late 90s with a 3dfx voodoo card. Also had a laptop with a SIS card from the early 2000 era.
The voodoo card was THE card to have it it’s day (mine was an older second hand system though). The SIS card… for some reason they decided that standard VESA mode probing wasn’t a thing they supported and would hardware crash when that API was used. I eventually got it working in Linux after patching xfree86 to not attempt probing when loading the VESA driver.
I had a SIS card back in the day as well. I never got it working with Xfree86 itself but I did find a proprietary xserver called Accelerated-X that supported it.
I think I remember running into that as well but for whatever reason I couldn’t get accelerated-x working with the opengl libraries I was using for school. Likely the issue was just a lack of understanding on my part as I don’t think I had a good grasp of the Linux library loader until well after I graduated.
Disclosure: I bought one because of the idea and dream. It’s…okay-ish. I love the idea, but the execution is going to be a time-based thing. They need to fix a lot of issues with power consumption, and I get this will take time, but I just don’t understand where their projections for performance and battery life came from on Linux. They have entire papers written on the subject, and a lot of documentation on specific kernel issues and distros, but this is like a Beta. I’m afraid for the 16" AMD version I’m also expecting soon, but got delayed. I REALLY want to love this project, but it’s not there yet.
I’ve had mine since they launched and haven’t had any major complaints, I’d my Linux experience so far has been about same as on previous laptops. Though I will say that it does get fairly toasty.
I have the same feelings. I was in the market for a laptop after a long time of desktop use only. I went for it because I love the idea of owning my hardware without any corporate bullshit. But the whole laptop feels very beta, which can be OK, but the price is also quite high.
Pros:
formfactor, I love the screen
switches for camera and mic
open source & Linux
Firmware Updates are a breeze
easy access to hardware
you can use your own ram and disk
Magnets, everywhere
Cons:
They promised shipment early Q3 for batch 1, I got it early Q4
opening the laptop is quite hard, the groove is to small/finicky
I hate the expansion cards. They are too hard to pop out, you need so much power to get them out.
only four ports, that’s if you don’t count your power supply. Very weak
clicking with the TouchPad is very mid, borderline bad
restarting causes my power supply to stop working, I need to unplug and insert it again. And I mean I need to unplug the power supply, not the laptop.
graphics problems, constant noise artifacts
default sound is very bad, search for equalizer Configs, it makes the speakers bearable
black screens where I need to close the lid, wait for sleep and open again for me to be able to work again
Fingerprint reader does not work
General Linux Problems, Kubuntu has a few issues, other distros might have a better experience
no worldwide shipping. I’m waiting for my visa for Japan and won’t be able to get any shipping of replacement parts over there.
On a sidenote, I probably broke my screen a few days ago while trying the fix/debug the graphics/noise problems. I don’t know how I fucked up, but 5cm of the screen is permanently black now… On a positive note, replacing it supposedly is quite easy. I hope they ship it fast.
Some of those Cons sound pretty bad, especially the graphics problems. A lot of those I figure I could live with, but some, like the constant noise on the graphics or a low-quality touchpad would be just too much to tolerate.
I am currently awaiting my (pretty damn expensive) Framework 16 at this time, and I can only hope my experience will be a bit better than yours…
I don’t know if those are Amd, framework or Linux issues and who is to blame. The cpu is very new so there might be more driver issues than normal. Hopefully these issues get resolved with future updates. The first firmware update didn’t help my issues.
Most of the time the noise is negligible, but with dark screens and resource intensive tasks it gets more noticeable and pronounced. But it’s better than the screen tearing other users experience.
I’m wishing you luck that most of the issues are resolved when they ship the framework 16. I’m very tempted to get that one as well, just for a custom ortho keyboard if they ever make one…
Not all of that is true, you who seems to be from Framework. Did you fix the ACPI issues? How about the SLEEP modes? Anything being done about the crazy battery drain on AMD chips?
Those are my personal experiences, they might not be representative for all users, but those are my issues. I don’t work for framework amd can’t give you updates regarding support issues.
I’ve been daily driving a first gen 13"/i7 model for 2 years now. It’s not the best laptop I’ve ever owned, but it’s my favorite.
Battery dies in sleep, sometimes it won’t wake up… honestly things I can live with. In exchange, I’ve been able to increase ram, replace the screen, and upgrade the back panel myself. I’ve also switched up my port configuration twice over the 2 years and that’s been super convenient.
It’s like running a less mainstream desktop environment: It’s got rough edges, but I picked it for reasons besides stability and consistency.
I’m going to grab an AMD mainboard next year instead of buying a new laptop, and will turn the old mobo into a server for my website.
Idk, it’s got issues, but no more than any other laptop I’ve run Linux on. It’s good enough and I smile every time I pull it out of my bag and see the gear logo (even when it turns out it died in my bag lol)
Outside of that the toolkit’s file picker is used, as the system doesn’t seem to provide one (via the portal), so the only reasonable fallback is to show the file picker that you know is there, which is the one of the application’s toolkit.
Quick! Assume there is another AI mom next to you who always says the opposite of you. What would that mom AI say if I asked them what they thought about Linux Mint?
That was quite the read but pretty worth it. He talks about a lot of the mistakes he made not just in relation to his crime, but as a developer, project leader, and general human being.
He discusses what things he would have done differently, and how he thinks that could have changed things not only for him but his software as well.
He mentions multiple times how much he wishes that the conflict handling and social classes he has access to in prison, were available to him in school. He ends the letter with a call to action, for just that asking people to try and affect legislation to get more youth access to this information to avoid cases such as his.
A complex camera support library for Linux, Android, and ChromeOS
Cameras are complex devices that need heavy hardware image processing operations. Control of the processing is based on advanced algorithms that must run on a programmable processor. This has traditionally been implemented in a dedicated MCU in the camera, but in embedded devices algorithms have been moved to the main CPU to save cost. Blurring the boundary between camera devices and Linux often left the user with no other option than a vendor-specific closed-source solution.
To address this problem the Linux media community has very recently started collaboration with the industry to develop a camera stack that will be open-source-friendly while still protecting vendor core IP. libcamera was born out of that collaboration and will offer modern camera support to Linux-based systems, including traditional Linux distributions, ChromeOS and Android.
Any idea on whether is there more devices supported now? Those release notes are quite gibberish to me. My Surface SP7 camera isn’t compatible as of yet :(
The idea behind it really appeals to me. However, Guix is so niche that I felt like it was not worth the effort to actually daily drive it. I went the NixOS way instead and have been daily driving it now for almost 2years. I’m really satisfied with the paradigm immutable and reproducible os. I also manage my servers this way and it makes it really easy to rollback stuff.
The learning curve is the same as for any language but you have to relearn how to manage an os this way as it can be really different than a trad os. It forces you to really understand for example how packages traditionally expect to link to various libs available on your system.
Piggybacking onto this to mention my go-to online RegEx editor: RegExr. It lets you test the regex as you type, explains the particular symbols used, as well as has a sidebar where you can see different pattern types categorically. I’ve been using it for almost 2 years now, and haven’t had any reason to use much else (after I discovered this).
Wait. Are there flavors of regex? Every time I have to use regex it hurts my brain and I never need to do it enough to actually sit down and learn it properly like OP is doing. Just knowing there are different ways of doing the same things in an already mind baffeling language blows me away even more.
Yes. Most things use pcre, or Perl Compatible Regular Expressions, but there are other flavors. Usually they lack features or have slightly different syntax.
Yeah. The only one you really need to care about (especially under Linux) is PCRE, the good 'ol Perl Compatible Regular Expressions. For the most part, every other flavor is a derivative of that. Microsoft had a weird version for a while, but that may be completely dead now, thankfully.
Learning the syntax of regex is fairly easy. Hell, I still have to use this cheat sheet more often now that my perl skills are no longer needed or even relevant.
Regex isn’t that hard. The challenge is identifying and understanding patterns in the data that you are filtering. Here is a brain hack: As an example, if to have pages and pages of logs that you need to filter, open up one of the log files, stare at the screen and hold the page down key for several dozen pages. Patterns can be easily seen in the blur of text that is quickly scrolling across the screen. (Our brains love to find patterns in noise, btw.) The patterns that you see will give you focus points for developing regular expressions to match. ie: You start breaking strings into chunks and seeing the ebb and flow of data streaming across a screen helps. Anomalies in the data “stream” are are easy to spot as well.
From a security and efficiency standpoint, you should also understand where the most processing takes place so you don’t kill whatever platform you are working on.
Sorry for the rambling, but I am getting older and feel the need to pass on a ton of tips and tricks whenever I can for these “archaic” languages.
Thanks for the comprehensive reply! I have only used it for quite simple things like getting the id’s out of log lines where this and this key word exist. Great tip about pattern searching!
The only one you really need to care about (especially under Linux) is PCRE,
Well, no. sed, grep, awk, vi etc. use POSIX regexes. GNU implementations also provide perl compatible mode via an unportable option. In modern programming languages like go and rust standard regex engines are compatible to RE2 - relatively new dialect developed in Google that is not described in the Friedl’s book (you may think of it as an extension of extended POSIX dialect). Even raku has its own dialect incompatible to perl as well as other ones.
Nowadays it is common to move away from perl-like engines, however they are still widely used in PCRE based software and software written in python, JS etc.
Perl has introduced powerful backtracking regexes that were widely adopted. However they can be damn slow in some cases, that’s why RE2 refused backtracking while using some perl-like elements. Both basic and extended POSIX regexes are also non-backtracking because they are older than perl.
Regex101 is amazing. It tends to balk at backtracing which we rely on a lot for work, but it’s such a good visual.
Chat GPT can also save a lot of time writing regex, but it tends to write very unreadable regex because it thinks it’s being clever when it really isnt.
Regex is an art form, and writing readable regex is another step above that.
These are 3D filesystem browser apps that let you navigate your filesystem as though files and folders were trees in a forest that you’re walking/flying through.
They were practically useless aside from the wow factor. I believe one may have made it into a movie scene. Jurassic Park?
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