December 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

2 2

short window on a great deal for a mini PC
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 31 Dec '23

31 Dec '23

<https://forums.redflagdeals.com/amazon-com-beelink-ser5-mini-pc-amd-ryzen-7…> For me, it worked out to be $293.39 + tax for a Ryzen 7 5800h system with 16G RAM and 500G SSD. This is a "Lightning deal" so it will be over soon (but I can no longer see when).

3 2

Local-only mail server
by Giles Orr 27 Dec '23

27 Dec '23

I figure this is probably a solved problem, but it's one I've never looked at. And I admit to doing no research yet: I thought pointers from this group would be the place to start. I find I have a lot of mail generated by cron and the like on several local machines, and I'd like to A) centralize that mail on a local server, and B) be able to view that with Thunderbird. Platform is Debian. It's not my intention to handle my Gmail or anything like that: this is meant exclusively for handling mail from local computers. Which would also mean the ability to send mail isn't important. Currently if I want to look at local administrative mail, I have to use the nasty `mail` command from the "bsd-mailx" package. (Yes, I could install mutt - I don't like it much better. I'm well aware it's much more powerful.) But do I remember to look at these emails? No. If instead each host forwarded these mails to a single host, and I pointed Thunderbird at that ... I'd have some hope of managing this problem better. "exim4" is usually (not always) installed on Debian systems. It claims to be an MTA: my knowledge of mail is so bad I don't even know if that means it just "pulls" or is also capable of forwarding local mail to another machine? And what would be the recommended server software? Another possible solution would be to send the mail directly to a folder on the host that has Thunderbird without using a server? With the snag that the host in question isn't always on, and I wouldn't want it to run mail server software. Is that possible? Yes, I know this is probably bigger than I think. I'd still like to start poking around and finding out about it. Suggestions welcomed, thanks. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

7 7

Some questions re. UDP
by Jim Ruxton 21 Dec '23

21 Dec '23

I'm trying to understand some issues I am having using UDP . I'm sending a raw audio stream from a laptop through a dedicated router to a number of WiFi enabled ESP32 modules. The signal is going via Ethernet from the laptop to the router and then out via WiFi to the ESP32 modules. Firstly I'm wondering why I only get about half the range if I send the UDP stream via Broadcast mode vs. Multicast mode, even if I only have one ESP32 connected. Also I see some strange behaviour with a Netgear router vs. a TP Link router. With the Netgear router while sending the stream in Multicast mode I can power up the ESP32 modules one by one and it works fine. However if I disconnect one of the modules when all is running the still connected modules audio stream starts breaking up. This is fixed if I reconnect the disconnected module. This behaviour doesn't occur if I use the tP Link router. I'm assuming the fact it's breaking up using the Netgear router is because the router is looking for the disconnected module? Would there be a setting on the router to stop this behaviour? Wondering if anyone can recommend a book or resource other than madly Googling to help me understand what's going on under the hood in these cases. I haven't tried but maybe Wireshark could shed some light on this, though not sure what I should be looking for. Thanks for any advice. Jim

2 1

Re: [GTALUG] AI Alliance
by Alvin Starr 20 Dec '23

20 Dec '23

On 2023-12-18 09:41, ac via talk wrote: > On Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:33:24 -0800 > Ron / BCLUG via talk<talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: > <snip> >> So, interesting times where only 54 weeks ago, OpenAI devs shocked >> the world with the release of ChatGPT 3.x, and now devs in the field >> are being shocked by open sourced (Apache licensed) AIs. > the time between the world being shocked is becoming shorter > as the singularity approaches :) I am waiting for the arrival of Singularia https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7266 I am more worried that some idiot human will ask an AI for the DNA to a virus that will kill all Christians or Jews or Muslims, and get a virus that kills all humans. > open source models are very cool and deserve broad support. Also > interesting is hardware growth, the h100 with almost 15k cuda cores > (more than twice that of a100) and then AMD with open source ROCm > as machine learning becomes more mainstream, more hardware, faster > hardware and close vs open in that arena is also something interesting > to watch. What actually is or will be 'ai' is also interesting to watch :) It is crazy the amount of new stuff showing up every day now. It is clear that hugingface is the place to watch. -- Alvin Starr || land: (647)478-6285 Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133 alvin(a)netvel.net ||

4 4

AI Alliance
by Warren McPherson 18 Dec '23

18 Dec '23

Should we try to join the AI Alliance? https://newsroom.ibm.com/AI-Alliance-Launches-as-an-International-Community…

4 4

Debian 12 takes too long to boot and login
by Kevin Cozens 18 Dec '23

18 Dec '23

Greetings, all. I have been a contributor to an Open Source project over a number of years. A lot of the devs seems to use Debian testing which means I often find I have to deal with (often minor, fortunately) dependency hell to be able to recompile the program when I haven't done so in a while. I was trying out a Debian based version of Armbian and was impressed by how easy it was to get it up and running. I've been thinking of switching to Debian from Linux Mint. I decided to have another look at the Debian 12 install I have on one of the root partitions I have for other OSs. I was *not* impressed. It took about 7 minutes to from boot to login page. It takes so long that the system that provides the splash screen during boot gave up and it changed to a black screen during the last part of the boot process. After I enter my name and password it took about another 7 minutes to get to the desktop. Under Linux mint boot to desktop takes about 3 minutes. Any clues as to why Debian takes 4 to 5 times as long? I'm hoping there is some bad configuration out of the box causing Debian 12 to be acting so slow. Anyone have any ideas where I should start looking? If I can't get to the bottom of the problem I will be staying with Linux Mint. Perhaps LMDE might be worth a try instead of pure Debian. -- Cheers! Kevin. https://www.patreon.com/KevinCozens | "Nerds make the shiny things that | distract the mouth-breathers, and Owner of Elecraft K2 #2172 | that's why we're powerful" #include <disclaimer/favourite> | --Chris Hardwick

4 4

tiny GNAME change that I don't like
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 17 Dec '23

17 Dec '23

The latest version of GNOME is included in the latest Fedora and Ubuntu. (It's hard to talk about this GUI stuff because I (and probably you) don't know the names of visual components.) On the top bar of the screen, "Activities" is on the far left. Next to it used to be the name of the application that had focus. If you clicked on that name, you would get a list of instances of that application, plus a couple of other potentially useful choices. When I have a lot of windows for a particular application, I sometimes use this to choose the instance I want to have focus. This feature is gone. You can still get a similar effect using Windows-Tab and Windows-DownArrow, but it is kind of awkward having to hold the Windows key. Furthermore, I find the description less useful. Am I the only one who cares about the loss of this feature? The word "Activities" has been replaced with a horizontal oval and a dot. I don't know what that change signifies. I don't even know how to interrogate GNOME about this.

3 2

Meeting tonight?
by Lennart Sorensen 17 Dec '23

17 Dec '23

Is there a meeting tonight given I think it is the second tuesday of the month? Wasn't sure if an annoucement was stuck in a queue somewhere waiting to be permitted through. Just wondering. -- Len Sorensen

3 4

ot: sort of, is it really impossible to get real cable anymore?
by Karen Lewellen 08 Dec '23

08 Dec '23

Hi folks, before simply saying you avoid television, Part of what I do professionally means accessing a great deal, news channels and other things for example. And for me, the, I will just watch it on my computer is a nailed shut door. This entire property is Bell fibe saturated which while it might translate to one of their fibe TV boxes working for me, its almost December and I am no closer to my land line solution..even with photographs of the existing jacks. So,I am wondering if at all, it is still possible from anyone to simply find old fashioned cable box cable. I have all the rest of the equipment, and it all works..even my VCR. I am even wondering if, since the place is so saturated for wireless, if I got an older apple TV, third gen still had optical connectors, or a rocku, I could come up with something. not as good as regular cable, but I am grasping for ideas. thoughts? Kare

8 94