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ZDNet Calls Rhino Linux 'New Coolest Linux Distro'
by Peter Reutemann 08 Jan '24

08 Jan '24

'If you're starting the new year with a new Linux distro, ZDNet just ran an enthusiastic profile of Rhino Linux, calling it "beautiful" with "one of the more useful command-line package managers on the market." Rhino uses a modern take on the highly efficient and customizable Xfce desktop (dubbed "Unicorn") to help make the interface immediately familiar to anyone who logs in. You'll find a dock on the left edge of the screen that contains launchers for common applications, access to the Application Grid (where you can find all of your installed software), and a handy Search Bar (Ulauncher) that allows you to quickly search for and launch any installed app (or even the app settings) you need... Thanks to myriad configuration options, Xfce can be a bit daunting. At the same time, the array of settings makes Xfce highly customizable, which is exactly what the Rhino developers did when they designed this desktop. For those who want a desktop that makes short work of accessing files, the Rhino developers have added a really nifty tool to the top bar. You'll find a listing of some folders you have in your Home directory (Files, Documents, Music, Pictures, Video). If you click on one of those entries, you'll see a list of the most recently accessed files within the directory. Click on the file you want to open with the default, associated application... Rhino opts for the Pacstall package manager over the traditional apt-get. That's not to say apt-get isn't on the system — it is. But with Rhino Linux, there's a much easier path to getting the software you want installed... [W]hen you first run the installed OS, you are greeted with a window that allows you to select what package managers you want to use. You can select from Snap, Flatpak, and AppImages (or all three). Next, the developers added a handy tool (rhino-pkg) that makes installing from the command line very simple. When the distro launched in August, 9to5Linux described it as "a unique distribution for Ubuntu fans who wanted a rolling-release system where they install once and receive updates forever." The theming looks gorgeous and it's provided by the Elementary Xfce Darker icon theme, Xubuntu's Greybird GTK theme, and Ubuntu's Yaru Dark WM theme. It also comes with some cool features, such as a dedicated and full-screen desktop switcher provided by Xfdashboard... ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/01/07/2036245 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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RIP: Software Design Pioneer And Pascal Creator Niklaus Wirth
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Jan '24

06 Jan '24

Famed computer scientist Niklaus Wirth has passed away, just a few weeks before reaching his 90th birthday <https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/04/niklaus_wirth_obituary/>. He is known for being a champion of simplicity in programming language and system design. He had a falling out with the committee that was coming up with a successor to Algol-60 (itself a driver for many important language-implementation techniques), and so went off and created Pascal. And then a few more languages after that. In his criticism of the language, Algol-68, that the committee eventually came up with, I found this excerpt illuminating on the milieu of the time: I am discouraged! I thought I had recognized the short-comings of the commercially available languages; they provide no guidance to programming discipline, and lack a logically coherent structure. Algol 60 had provided an answer and a solution. Unfortunately, it lacked some features which many practitioners badly need. It was relatively easy to remedy some defects and some defaults of Algol 60. We had implemented such an extension of Algol; it contains the data types long real, complex, and character strings, along with one other major extension. But guess how many requests we received for this system. None! Nobody is interested in a new language, particuarly if it is not supported by the big manufacturers or has received the blessing of some standards committee. But I see no chances that either a big manufacturer or a committee will ever produce a language acceptable to our standards or clarity, simplicity, and rigor. Remember, this was published in November 1968. Notice the assumption that the only sort of language implementation that might be worth using is a “commercially-available” one, with the backing of a “big” company behind it. There was no thought that an implementation with source code freely available could ever be considered “commercial”, either in usage or quality. And on top of that, every OS was different; there was nothing like the near-universality of POSIX-type OSes we enjoy today. And some of the differences were downright--quirky, shall we say. So even if such a source code project were available, porting it to all the platforms in common use would likely have been a nightmare.

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Since the Demise of Atom, 'Pulsar' Offers an Alternative Code Editor
by Peter Reutemann 01 Jan '24

01 Jan '24

'On December 15 GitHub declared end-of-life for its "hackable text editor" Atom. But Long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM wants to remind everyone that after the announcement of Atom's sunset, "the community came together to keep Atom alive." First there was the longstanding fork Atom-Community. But "due to differences in long-term goals for the editor, a new version was born: Pulsar." >From the Pulsar web site: Pulsar [sometimes referred to as Pulsar-Edit] aims to not only reach feature parity with the original Atom, but to bring Pulsar into the 21st century by updating the underlying architecture, and supporting modern features. With many new features on the roadmap, once Pulsar is stable, it will be a true, Community-Based, Hackable, Text Editor. "Of course, the user interface is much of the same," writes the blog Its FOSS, and it's cross-platform (supporting Linux, macOS, and Windows). "The essentials seem to be there with the documentation, packages, and features like the ability to install packages from Git repositories..."' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/01/01/016215 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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How a Cray-1 Supercomputer Compares to a Raspberry Pi
by Peter Reutemann 01 Jan '24

01 Jan '24

'Roy Longbottom worked for the U.K. covernment's Central Computer Agency from 1960 to 1993, and "from 1972 to 2022 I produced and ran computer benchmarking and stress testing programs..." Known as the official design authority for the Whetstone benchmark), Longbottom writes that "In 2019 (aged 84), I was recruited as a voluntary member of Raspberry Pi pre-release Alpha testing team." And this week — now at age 87 — Longbottom has created a web page titled "Cray 1 supercomputer performance comparisons with home computers, phones and tablets." And one statistic really captures the impact of our decades of technological progress. "In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1." ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/12/31/0017205 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Source-Based Gentoo Linux Goes Binary
by Peter Reutemann 01 Jan '24

01 Jan '24

'While Gentoo Linux is best-known as source-based Linux distribution, "our package manager, Portage, already for years also has support for binary packages," according to its web page. It notes that source- and binary-based package installations can be freely mixed. But now... To speed up working with slow hardware and for overall convenience, we're now also offering binary packages for download and direct installation! For most architectures, this is limited to the core system and weekly updates — not so for amd64 and arm64 however. There we've got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker. Gentoo stable, updated daily. Enjoy! "We have a rather neat binary package guide on our Wiki that goes into much more detail..." the announcement points out. The packages are cryptographically signed with the same key as the stages.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/12/30/1756208 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Peppermint OS Builds Single-Site Browsers for Debian Systems
by Peter Reutemann 31 Dec '23

31 Dec '23

'They create a dedicated desktop icon for your favorite web-based application — a simplified browser that opens to that single URL. Yet while Linux usually offers the same functionality as other operating systems, "Peppermint OS's Ice and its successor Kumo are the only free software versions of Site-Specific Browsers available on Linux," according to Linux magazine. "Fortunately for those who want this functionality, Peppermint OS is a Debian derivative, and both can be installed on Debian and most other derivatives." Since SSBs first appeared in 2005, they have been available on both Windows and macOS. On Linux, however, the availability has come and gone. On Linux, Firefox once had an SSB mode, but it was discontinued in 2020 on the grounds that it had multiple bugs that were time-consuming to fix and there was "little to no perceived user benefit to the feature." Similarly, Chromium once had a basic SSB menu item, Create Application Shortcut, which no longer appears in recent versions. As for GNOME Web's (Epiphany's) Install Site as Web Application, while it still appears in the menu, it is no longer functional. Today, Linux users who want to try SSBs have no choices except Ice or Kumo. Neither Ice or Kumo appears in any repository except Peppermint OS's. But because Peppermint OS installs packages from Debian 12 ("bookworm"), either can be installed to Debian or a derivative... To install successfully, at least one of Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, or Vivaldi also must be installed... Because both Ice and Kumo are written in Python, they can be run on any desktop. The article concludes that Site-Specific Browsers might make more sense "on a network or in a business where their isolation provides another layer of security. Or perhaps the time for SSBs is past and there's a reason browsers have tried to implement them, and then discarded them."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/12/30/0527205 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Firefox: scrollbar buttons gone
by Peter Reutemann 30 Dec '23

30 Dec '23

Hi everyone Call me old-fashioned, but I do like the arrow buttons on scrollbars. Especially on very long pages (eg OpenWRT's hardware table) where I want move the view port only a little bit... On my Linux 20.3 MATE, I managed to get them back by using these CSS settings: scrollbar { -GtkScrollbar-has-backward-stepper: true; -GtkScrollbar-has-forward-stepper: true; } In the following config file: ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css -- source: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1420887 Also, if you don't like the thin overlay scrollbars, then set the following FF option ("about:config") to "false": widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Open Adventure (Latest Reboot Of An Ancient Classic)
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Dec '23

23 Dec '23

Just doing some random browsing on my system, and came across a Debian package called “open-adventure”. Finding my way to its home page at Eric Raymond’s site <http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-adventure/>, I discover that it is a project to modernize the source code for the original “ADVENT” game dating from 1976-1977, the one that originated the whole concept of text-based adventure games. The original code was written in Fortran; this one rewrites it all in clean, almost-idiomatic C (as opposed to automatically-translated GOTO-ridden C), and incorporates such innovations as using YAML as the source code for the maze format (translated to C structures at build time). It has been carefully regression-tested against the Fortran original(s) to ensure the gameplay is identical (and the few conscious deviations can be disabled if you want). The developers also kept in mind the possibility of porting the code further, to more modern languages like Python or Go. In the meantime, they have declared the project “finished” as of earlier this year, with all known bug reports closed and all compatibility tests passed.

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LMDE
by john 21 Dec '23

21 Dec '23

After enduring a few minor health issues over the past months I have finally got round to installing Linux Mint Debian edition 5 Bullseye. I think due to the Cinnamon Desktop environment it is marginally slower than the Mate DE I was using with my Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish distribution. I didn't find the minor difference to be any problem for me. I am well pleased with the performance, look and feel of it and have not (so far) found anything unpleasant or difficult. It appears to me to be well suited to a first time user or for someone migrating from Windows. Cheers John..

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Fedora Asahi Remix Officially Released For Apple Silicon Macs
by Peter Reutemann 21 Dec '23

21 Dec '23

'9to5Linux: Announced in early August and initially planned for the end of the month, the Fedora Asahi Remix distribution is finally here for those who want to install the Fedora Linux operating system on their Apple Silicon Macs. Previously a remix of Arch Linux ARM, the Fedora Asahi Remix distribution is the result of a multi-year collaboration between the Asahi Linux project and the Fedora Project, enabling you to have a proper daily driver on your Apple Silicon Mac thanks to Fedora Linux's excellent 64-bit ARM support. The distro is based on the latest Fedora Linux 39 release and ships with the KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment by default, using Wayland. This promises a smooth Linux desktop experience on Apple hardware similar to macOS. Fedora Asahi Remix also comes with XWayland for those who want to run X11 apps. In addition, it features non-conformant OpenGL 3.3 support including GPU-accelerated geometry shaders and transform feedback, PipeWire by default with WirePlumber, as well as the Calamares graphical installer. ' -- source: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/23/12/20/0357233 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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