February 2015 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

“*ERROR* pipe is still busy with an old pageflip”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 May '15

24 May '15

I’ve been hitting an occasional display freeze that matches this description <http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7675146.html>. Looks like a known problem with the 3.16 kernel. I thought things had got better with a system update I did 11 days ago, but this afternoon the freeze recurred. Unlike the previous times, killing all my user processes succeeded in unfreezing the display, so I was able to log in again without rebooting.

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New Multi-Core Raspberry Pi 2 Launches
by Peter Reutemann 01 May '15

01 May '15

'Coming in at the same $35 price-point that has come to be expected from the Raspberry Pi, it looks like the new Model 2 will be packing a quad-core ARM processor with a GB of RAM. From the article: "The Raspberry Pi Foundation is likely to provoke a global geekgasm today with the surprise release of the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B: a turbocharged version of the B+ boasting a new Broadcom BCM2836 900MHz quad-core system-on-chip with 1GB of RAM – all of which will drive performance "at least 6x" that of the B+."' -- source: http://build.slashdot.org/story/15/02/02/0134211 And also in the news: "Microsoft Announces Windows For Raspberry Pi 2 Microsoft is expanding their Windows Developer Program for Internet of Things by delivering a version of Windows 10 that runs on the Raspberry Pi 2. This release of Windows 10 will be free for the maker community through the Windows Developer Program for IoT. With an official partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Microsoft is bringing development tools, services and ecosystem to the Raspberry Pi community. More details will be shared in the coming months. You can already join the program and be amongst the first to receive product information and beta software releases." -- source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/02/02/1326225 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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Android-x86 -- the story continues
by Ian Young 24 Feb '15

24 Feb '15

Who knew? Android doesn't play nicely with a 2nd display. However investigation continues. Some say the internal display should be turned off, before the outside screen will go. Watch this space. Meanwhile some may like to read an interview with English as not the primary language featuring Chih-Wei Huang, main man of Android-x86. Snip > Why Android-x86? Runs on PC(x86). Original Android runs on ARM. Android - Teoreticaly could run on every present and future device, PS4 and Xbox one included (in pure theory). Is everytime better develop for only one OS (even with some platform differences), that for bunch of them. Mac OS or iOS are too closed and fixed on Apple device and its unlikely to change it. Linux market is realy fragmented and its development is relatively slow. Android - is without doubt OS with faster development speed and it counts. Android is open and free. Today, when i can buy good living room pc for 200$ i realy dont wan to pay next 100 bucks to Microsoft for crippled OEM licence, or 200$ for retail (HW independed licence) .... > How many of users know you think that tried Android-x86, at least through live distro and how many installed it into physical computer? Do you have some stats about usage? I don't have the stats and I don't really care about that. Just checked. The 4.4-RC1 release has 584,441 downloads and the 4.3-test release has 1,365,182 downloads. > Are you in contact with Google? Do you know why Google isn't developing Android-x86 for desktops itself? Is affair of Microsoft or something else? ChromeOS looks like duplicity. I have no official contact window of Google. But I have many friends in Google including the android team. I'll also contact Google android engineers directly for issues clarification or patches submission. I don't know Google's plan. But as you said, ChromeOS is probably the right one for its desktop roadmap. This is a common guess. < stop snipping http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RuthanielVandenNaar/20140612/219170/Current_…

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Debian’s Reproducible Binary Project Reaches 83% Mark
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Feb '15

24 Feb '15

For a while now, Debian has been running a project to try to allow anyone to independently confirm that a particular Debian package was indeed built from a particular set of sources, by being able to reproduce the exact build steps themselves. (The security rationale for wanting to do so should be obvious.) As you can imagine, this is seriously non-trivial to achieve, since the least little difference in the version of your compilers or libraries can cause the binaries to differ, maybe not in any important way, but the idea is to end up with no differences at all. The Register has a report on the status of the project here <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/23/debian_project/>. More background here <https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/02/msg00007.html>.

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Linus Torvalds Debuts First Linux 4 Release Candidate
by Paul Wilson 24 Feb '15

24 Feb '15

"The Linux 3.x kernel family is no more. Long Live Linux 4! The Linux 3.x kernel family first officially debuted <http://www.datamation.com/open-source/linux-3.0-debuts-with-xen-integration…>on July 22, 2011. Linux 3.0 was the first major version change for Linux since the 2.6 kernel debuted in December of 2003. While Linux 2.6 was a major milestone that signified a break with the past, Linux 3.0 really was just the renumbered Linux 2.6.40 kernel. In the same manner the Linux 4.0 kernel is the continuation of Linux 3.x and is the renamed Linux 3.20."

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How I upgraded my garden’s ugly drip system with a sexy OpenSprinkler
by Peter Reutemann 23 Feb '15

23 Feb '15

"After a few hours of work alongside an electrical engineering buddy this week, my home garden drip system became powered by a Raspberry Pi. I can control the entire thing locally from my iPhone and, to be frank, it’s pretty flippin’ cool." -- source: http://goo.gl/sDPGsr Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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“SSL hijacker” behind Superfish debacle imperils large number of users
by Peter Reutemann 21 Feb '15

21 Feb '15

I know, this is not strictly Linux related, but scary nonetheless and worthy of sharing, IMHO: "Thursday's revelations that Lenovo PCs ship with adware that intercepts sensitive HTTPS-protected traffic have focused intense scrutiny on Superfish, the company that markets the intrusive software. But lost in the furor is the central role a company called Komodia plays in needlessly exposing the passwords and other sensitive data of not just Lenovo customers but also a much larger base of PC users." -- source: http://goo.gl/KhA4KT Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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Empire of the Gates
by Ian Young 20 Feb '15

20 Feb '15

Better snap back to reality. On Arstechnica I see the following data as of 11/2014. OS share worldwide -- Windows allsorts 91.28%, OS X 7.27, all others [weeps] 1.45. Windows breakdown XP 13.57%, Vista 2.65, Win 7 56.41, Win 8 6.55, Win 8.1 12.1. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/01/you-can-offer-people-windows-10-for-… All hail his Billness. Though the figures for systems other than desktops must show a different story, and in phone and tablet world Windows is pretty well a joke apart from some misguided corporate purchases. (I stand to be corrected on that). Meanwhile back in the day, I had GEOS installed and it was passable. Even ran it within OS/2, freaky or what? Speaking of OS/2 last time I looked there were still some zealots keeping it working after a fashion. -quote- Unfortunately, OS/2 had a crucial flaw in its design: a Synchronous Input Queue (SIQ). What this meant was that all messages to the GUI window server went through a single tollbooth. If any OS/2 native GUI app ever stopped servicing its window messages, the entire GUI would get stuck and the system froze. OK, technically the operating system was still running. Background tasks continued to execute just fine. You just couldn’t see them or interact with them or do anything, because the entire GUI was hung. Some enterprising OS/2 fan wrote an application that polled the joystick port and was supposed to unstick things when the user pressed a button. It rarely worked. Ironically, if you never ran native OS/2 applications and just ran DOS and Windows apps in a VM, the operating system was much more stable. -quote- http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triump… And now we return to our normal programme and wonder whether Linux v4 is soon to arrive. 19 million lines in the kernel and counting. http://linuxgizmos.com/is-linux-heading-toward-the-big-4-0/

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Raspberry π 2 Ships Half Million In First Two Weeks
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Feb '15

20 Feb '15

The next-generation Raspberry π seems to be doing rather well right out of the starting gate <http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2395948/raspberry-pi-2-sales-top-5…>. Meantime, while total sales of both old- and new-generation π models have wildly exceeded expectations, there is some dispute over the Foundation’s claim that it has become the best-selling British PC maker ever <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/18/raspberry_pi_5_million_sold/>.

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A History Of Photoshop
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Feb '15

19 Feb '15

Quite a few articles around to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Photoshop 1.0, but this one at The Register <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/19/feature_25_years_of_adobe_photoshop/> seems to offer the most background detail. And some nice (or not-so-nice) examples of its use...

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