January 2023 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

[GTALUG-Announce] Membership Dues
by Warren McPherson 13 Nov '23

13 Nov '23

With the agm coming up, now is a great time to renew membership and make a small twenty dollar contribution to the organization. For those looking forward to the chance to wind their way through the Interac E-Transfer process again here is my summary of how it works. (Actually I forget each time so the novelty never wears off -- luckily it is easy.) Log in to your bank and look for "Interac e-Transfers" you may need to go to the "Transfers" page and then you will see this option. Select "email method" and use the email address: membership(a)gtalug.org Putting your name in the message can be helpful as the notification I get can sometimes be a touch obtuse. Thank you to those who have already contributed! (I know who you are. Ha ha) Thank you, Warren --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Ubuntu Pro - a new, non-optional walled garden from Canonical
by Stewart Russell 04 Feb '23

04 Feb '23

I should really stop running Ubuntu for the good of my health. This morning, my various Ubuntu systems announced that a whole bunch of packages would be unavailable unless I registered for Ubuntu Pro — https://ubuntu.com/pro Ubuntu Pro is free-of-charge for "personal" users for up to five machines. Otherwise, pay up. I didn't see rates listed: you have to contact Canonical to find out. Whenever I see that, I expect an Oracle-style shakedown in the absence of transparency. The following packages seem to be under 'esmapps', only available through Ubuntu Pro: ansible imagemagick imagemagick-6-common imagemagick-6.q16 libimage-magick-perl libimage-magick-q16-perl libjs-jquery-ui libmagick++-6-headers libmagick++-6.q16-8 libmagick++-6.q16-dev libmagickcore-6-headers libmagickcore-6.q16-6 libmagick++-dev libmagickwand-6-headers libmagickwand-6.q16-6 libmaven3-core-java libopenexr25 libopenexr-dev libpython2.7-dbg libpython2.7-minimal libpython2.7-stdlib python2.7 python2.7-dbg python2.7-minimal Ubuntu Pro also seems to require snapd, my least favourite Canonical 'innovation'. On the system I have it blocked completely it tried and failed to install, hopefully with no hilarious side-effects. Anyone else experiencing this? I suppose I should've seen it coming with all the little messages that Ubuntu had been peppering into my apt chatter every day. Yours in absurdity, Stewart

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RHEL Free Tier vs CentOS Stream vs Alma Linux vs Rocky Linux
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 01 Feb '23

01 Feb '23

They are all kind of the same. Competition is great. They are all, to some extent, parasites living off RHEL. Is that too many parasites? Too many in what sense?: - hurts Red Hat, but that isn't immoral - a free version allows the system to go more places. This should actually help Red Hat. - it sometimes causes Red Hat to take evasive actions that hurt the product + eg. chunking of kernel changes to make more work for Oracle + eg. buying CentOS and then repurposing it - causes duplicated cloning work Without sufficient research, I kind of like the smell of Alma best. How about you?

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war story: firefox performance rathole (matrix.io)
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 30 Jan '23

30 Jan '23

Note: no solution is reached, but it has been an adventure so far. I need to submit a declaration about the City of Toronto Vacant Home Tax. See <https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/property-taxes-utilities/vacant-ho…> I notice that this apparently simple page is taking a lot of resources according to FireFoxes "about:performance" page. Why? I try to find out the best place to ask this question. It seems to be on a channel on Mozilla's Matrix Server. ==== matrix client ==== I guess that I need a Matrix client. This will eventually turn out not to be the case, but lets proceed along this path anyway. Element and Fractal seem to be good choices for client. Both are distributed as flatpaks (grrr.). I try to load each of them from the Gnome "Software" GUI, and when that fails with a quite obscure message (that is not available for copying), I try the command line. Which also fails with an obscure message $ flatpak install https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.gnome.Fractal.flatpakref error: No entry for app/org.gnome.Fractal/x86_64/stable in remote 'flathub' summary flatpak cache I find that adding --user fixes that problem. But look at the tonnes of stuff it also installs! I don't even know where it puts them. $ flatpak install --user im.riot.Riot.flatpakref The remote 'flathub', referred to by 'im.riot.Riot' at location https://dl.flathub.org/repo/ contains additional applications. Should the remote be kept for future installations? [Y/n]: y Required runtime for im.riot.Riot/x86_64/stable (runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/22.08) found in remote flathub Do you want to install it? [Y/n]: y im.riot.Riot permissions: ipc network pulseaudio wayland x11 devices file access [1] dbus access [2] bus ownership [3] [1] xdg-run/keyring, xdg-run/pipewire-0 [2] org.freedesktop.Notifications, org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver, org.freedesktop.portal.Fcitx, org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher [3] org.kde.* ID Branch Op Remote Download 1. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default 22.08 i flathub 135.5 MB / 135.7 MB 2. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default 22.08-extra i flathub 9.5 MB / 135.7 MB 3. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-161-03 1.4 i flathub 273.7 MB / 273.2 MB 4. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale 22.08 i flathub 17.8 kB / 333.2 MB 5. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264 2.2.0 i flathub 887.1 kB / 944.3 kB 6. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform 22.08 i flathub 198.1 MB / 214.6 MB 7. [✓] im.riot.Riot stable i flathub 123.7 MB / 117.9 MB Installation complete. So many megabytes of stuff that duplicates what's already on my machine! No how do you run this thing? Seems to be $ flatpak run im.riot.Riot Seems pretty obscure and silly. ==== using matrix ==== I end up using a web version of Element. I first try Fedora's: matrix is federated so surely I can see mozilla's channels from Fedora's matrix. I cannot figure out how. Then I see that Mozilla runs its own web-based Element so you can use that as a client. <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix> ==== advice from #firefox ==== Turn on FireFox profiling and study the results. <https://profiler.firefox.com/> So far the results are opaque.

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War Story: RCS "blame" command
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 23 Jan '23

23 Jan '23

RCS is a source code control system (a precursor to GIT). History: SCCS, one of the first "source code control systems" was part of UNIX but it was owned by AT&T Bell Labs. There was a need for a similar system for BSD Unix. Walter Tichy created RCS. RCS was the basis for CVS. Whereas RCS (and SCCS) treated each source file as more-or-less independent, CVS dealt with a file tree. All of these have been replaced by Git, a much more powerful system. BUT... I use RCS for system config files because it is pretty reasonable for recording the evolution of a single file. Config files are often independent but in a common directory (eg. /etc) whereas git wishes to track a tree. Besides, I've been using RCS far longer than GIT has existed. Today's topic: blame git-blame is a very useful command. Blame prints each line of a file along with the revision number in which it was last changed. This is very useful when you are trying to figure out how this line came to be. CVS has "annotate". It does the same thing as git-blame. Of course it was created earlier. RCS didn't have a similar function. Someone created rcs-blame but it wasn't generally adopted. I wanted one today to understand a mistake that I made in a config file. rcs-blame was on Sourceforge, but it has disappeared. It is part of debian and Ubuntu, but not Fedora. I found a copy of the source here: <https://invisible-island.net/rcs-blame/rcs-blame.html>. That is Thomas E. Dickey's site and I trust him (he is/was the main maintainer of xterm). I followed the instructions in the tar file's README and it built easily. The upshot: I found which commit had the bug; I checked for similar bugs in that commit but found none.

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GTALUG General Meeting Reminder
by Alan Heighway 08 Jan '23

08 Jan '23

The state of Mozilla <https://gtalug.org/meeting/2023-01/> with Mike Hoye <https://gtalug.org/> 10 January, 2023 at 07:30 PM Mike Hoye will be joining us to talk about where Firefox, Mozilla and the Web are today, and where they're going. We're going to use Big Blue Button for this meeting: *Time:* January 10, 2023 07:30 PM Eastern Time *Join Big Blue Button:* https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl LocationVirtual - Big Blue Button *A*lan *H*eighway <http://heighway.ca/> heighway.ca VA3WAH / VA3YKZ [image: Please consider the environment before printing]

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@gtalug@mastodon.social
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 08 Jan '23

08 Jan '23

I don't know much about mastodon but it certainly has come to the fore recently. GTALUG has an identity on Mastodon (See the Subject). You can look at it here: <https://mastodon.social/@gtalug> Our latest posting was from October 2021: a video of the previous talk by Mike Hoye. Evan says we'll have talks about Mastodon coming up. If anyone would like to manage this resource, do step forward.

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Is there a digest format for the GTALUG talk mailing list?
by sciguy 08 Jan '23

08 Jan '23

I went through the mailing list configuration page and while I found a ton of things that can be tweaked, there appeared to be nothing on getting a daily digest format of this mailing list. Is there such a thing for GTALUG? Paul King

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January Meeting: The State of Mozilla with Mike Hoye
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 08 Jan '23

08 Jan '23

10 January, 2023 at 07:30 PM Mike Hoye will be joining us to talk where Firefox, Mozilla and the Web are today, and where they're going. We're going to use Big Blue Button for this meeting: Join Big Blue Button: <https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl>

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GTALUG update
by Evan Leibovitch 06 Jan '23

06 Jan '23

Hi all, I just wanted to bring some news and issues to your attention. *1) Face-to-face meetings* We're looking to get back to having real meetings again, with eye contact and projectors and all that. The space we have had at TMU (formerly Ryerson) is still on offer, though now the facility requires a card pass to enter the building so someone will need to let non-students in for the meetings. Not an optimal situation. We are looking at alternatives; any ideas you may have are welcomed. *2) Topics for the next few months' meetings* While the January meeting this Tuesday will still be virtual, it will feature the latest (if postponed) annual talk by Mike Hoye of Mozilla. Further into the year we are planning no less than THREE meetings to talk about various components of Mastadon, the open source alternative to Twitter that many are joining and installing. The February, April and June meetings will be about the structure, technical issues and content issues about Mastadon. In March we will have presentations about graphics under Linux, and a few possibilities are being discussed for May. We don't often have six months of meeting topics known in advance. If you have any ideas or can contribute to any of these, please let us know. *3) Technical/software issues* In response to the discussion of GTALUG's online services, a number of people have stepped forward with offers of help. In the new year we'll be bringing this group together and I'm looking forward to its work. If you have any questions or comments, please reply here to the mailing list. Thanks and see you next week! - Evan

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