October 2023 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

Feature Highlight - Wayland Compositor Hand-Off
by Scott Sullivan 24 May '24

24 May '24

http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/qt6_wayland_robustness/ This is a robustness improvements that let Wayland clients (applications/programs) gracefully survive and reconnect with the Wayland Compositor after a crash / restart or even complete replacement with a different Wayland compositor. X11 Server, from what I understood in my old explorations, architecturally it would not have been possible to get there from within the limits of X11's design. As someone who daily drives KDE Plasam Wayland, I'm really looking forward to this coming down stream. I've at various time suffered the pain of loosing my whole session over crash bugs. A frustrating, but thankfully brief example was a combination of PrusaSlicer and the QT file dialog triggering a compositor crash. It really takes me back 15 years, when the same level of instability was in X11's ecosystem. But I switched to KDE's Wayland compositor because there are meaningful parts that are already surpassing the prior art, and competing with what the commercial OSes are putting out. -- Scott Sullivan

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[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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"RISC-V technology emerges as battleground in US-China tech war"
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 06 Nov '23

06 Nov '23

<https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-china-tech-war-risc-v-chip-technology…> Grrr. Some US lawmakers want to restrict US companies from working on RISC-V. They are worried it will benefit China (of course it will, and the rest of us too). It is true that ARM's ownership has allowed the US government to make things very difficult for Huawei. No wonder China likes RISC-V.

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(very off topic) where to buy old AM/FM receiver?
by William Park 31 Oct '23

31 Oct '23

Hi, a very off topic... While cleaning my house, I found box speakers and LP record player. Brand name "Sanyo". What's missing is AM/FM receiver that came as a set. Do you know where I can buy an old stereo AM/FM receiver? --

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Old (mostly) O'Reilly books available free
by Giles Orr 30 Oct '23

30 Oct '23

I have a number of O'Reilly books that I haven't used in years (and a couple other tech titles as well). It's time I got rid of them, and it seems a waste to toss them in the recycling. If any of you are interested in these, pick up will be in North York: either North York Central Library or nearby. Please see the image below for the titles - and note that if there are modern versions of these titles, the copies you see here are almost certainly NOT the most recent version. https://gilesorr.com/forOthers/books.jpg -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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No keyboard at boot?
by Peter King 28 Oct '23

28 Oct '23

The saga continues. While waiting for a replacement motherboard for my Lenovo T5, I hauled out a computer I had taken out of service about 16 months ago to have a working machine until I finally can install the motherboard. But here's the thing. When it boots up, I can use the keyboard and mouse at the BIOS screen and through most of the process -- but near the end, after enabling the network fails, it loses the keyboard. The mouse stays connected. So I get a login screen but no way to talk to it. Same problem using other keyboards. Eventually I figured out how to boot from a USB stick, and that gets all the way up with the keyboard, so it's something odd in the setup on the computer itself. I haven't tried to ssh in, because at the moment it tries to boot into a static ethernet address which isn't available, and so network connectivity fails. The system runs Arch Linux. The "easy" thing to do is just re-install Arch and start with a clean slate, which is likely what I'll do, but if anyone knows a quick and dirty fix I'd at least be able to save some configuration information from the computer. (Yes, I can do that from an Arch install USB by mounting / chrooting into it, but I'd rather understand the problem first.) Any idea what gives? Obviously a module for running the keyboard isn't being loaded somewhere...

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why I like shared libraries -- no longer a popular position
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 27 Oct '23

27 Oct '23

<https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/09/incomplete-disclosures-by-apple-an…> A bug was found (painfully -- a zero day) in Apple's Safari and (separately) in Google's Chrome. This is a pretty serious bug -- it was used to spy on an opposition politician in Egypt. It is the same bug, and this was not reported. It turns out that the bug is in libwebp. "WebP codec is a library to encode and decode images in WebP format." libwebp is used in a lot of programs. On my Fedora 38 system, it is a shared library so it can be fixed in one update. Except where the library is copied (for example, statically linked, or used in a container of some sort). Electron is one thing that requires copies and the article lists a lot of applications built on Electron What a mess. What a mistake.

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intel etherexpress pro 100+ safe driver download?
by Karen Lewellen 25 Oct '23

25 Oct '23

Hi everyone, My dream machine is being constructed. Thanks to the members here connecting with James. There is indeed a DOS packet driver included with the set Intel provides for the etherexpress pro 100+ Trick seems to be finding a safe source, with my having access to the way of putting things on floppies. For example, I found an option form archive.org, that included a 1.57 .img file. Slightly too large for the 1.44 disks I sought to zip..only for pk zip to suggest the file may have a problem. Any ideas? Thanks profoundly, Kare

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November Meeting Notice
by Alan Heighway 22 Oct '23

22 Oct '23

Hello GTALUG, Due to a misunderstanding we were unable to hold the AGM in October as planned. However we are on track to do so at our November meeting, followed by a talk by our own Dave Collier-Brown titled "You Don’t know Jack about Application Performance." Our AGM proceedings will start with a treasurer's report, then a vote on the merger CLUE, and conclude with filling vacant board positions (with an election if required). Only paid GTALUG members can participate in the voting. This is a perfect time to sign up or renew your membership. To do so send an Interac e-transfer to membership(a)gtalug.org for $20 with your Name and email address. That's it, you are a voting member! Thank you, and I hope to see you at our next meeting. Alan. *A*lan *H*eighway <http://heighway.ca/> heighway.ca VA3WAH / VA3YKZ [image: Please consider the environment before printing]

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sigh, hardware resources?
by Karen Lewellen 21 Oct '23

21 Oct '23

Hi everyone, will ask the question simply, as it is not one I have needed to ask for a good decade. Need a resource for older computer hardware, freecycle was terrific for this sort of thing, as was the talent who would build mine. Unfortunately a visit by someone from renew computer technology Ontario, www.rcto.org damaged my main computer, at least the motherboard, possibly the hard drive. I have a bandaged machine, does not boot to the c drive, using a floppy, with the second drive from my main placed in this unit. Now some of my critical synthesizer files are being damaged as well. screen reader utilities..so far at least. While I do have talent, quality talent to help me with the construction, finding say a p3 or p4 may be the challenge. Any ideas? Cheers, Karen

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