September 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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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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Raspberry Pi 5 announced (shipping starting near the end of October)
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 28 Sep '23

28 Sep '23

<https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/> Faster. Some new capabilities. US$5 increase in base price over original Raspberry Pi.

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Do you use Diaspora or Threads?
by Evan Leibovitch 27 Sep '23

27 Sep '23

Hi all. I'm compiling a comparison chart <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NBU5_4ZBBr9k3CcpfeNmvJzLFNXn89XBOtM…> for the major various Xitter alternatives, including Mastodon, Bluesky and T2/Pebble. I don't use Threads or Diaspora and am asking for a little help from anyone with experience on either of these platforms. If you use one of the other platforms and have something to offer, if my current info is wrong or incomplete, that is also welcomed. All help is appreciated. Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56

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help moving a hard drive into a different computer?
by Karen Lewellen 27 Sep '23

27 Sep '23

Hi folks, Sorry rather behind. request is simple, as my short term computer solution is starting to fail. while a new one is being built for me, I have no idea of that timeline. between the landline issue and my cell phone having someone accessing its sim code to dial it remotely, my computers are my contact with the outside world. Task will be simple for a knowledgeable person. Any ideas? Freecycle cafe used to be terrific for such small tasks, no idea of a good door now however. Thanks, Karen

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looking for a general purpose boot media to keep in case of distasters
by bitmap 24 Sep '23

24 Sep '23

I'd really like to have a good USB key to boot from when some kind of problem happens. Typically I use whatever installation media is lying around but they have really limited tools available. Not to mention tres obnoxious defaults like transparent terminals. Drive me nuts when some catastrophe is going on and the terminal is resetting to 50% opacity at every reboot. Is there some kind of general purpose image that has a variety of programs, maybe even foundational documentation on board, etc, that is designed for this? There are images like clonezilla to solve specific problems but that's another story. I would like a multi tool on hand. My research tells me that by booting from USB media, it's possible to install on a connected drive of any sort. Normally you use the internal hd but can use another external drive. Then you have a persistent bootable USB where you can install stuff + store files. *However* it is unique to that device so it'd be required to set up a USB key for each one. Not ideal although possibly worthwhile for the main computer. Any advice on this issue? Seems like I wouldn't have been the first person to have this idea. Is it a bad idea? Why? If not, how to set up?

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Should we slow down AI
by Warren McPherson 24 Sep '23

24 Sep '23

https://joshuagans.substack.com/p/should-we-slow-down-the-development?r=oc6… There is a race on to secure as many chips from NVIDIA as possible, the question of stopping AI certainly suggests not participating very vigorously in the race. It implies losing any influence over the direction of AI. The question of "alignment" is a hard one, and I'm not sure we have a solid handle on the question of regulating social media.

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Re: [GTALUG] looking for a general purpose boot media to keep in case of distasters
by James Knott 22 Sep '23

22 Sep '23

On 2023-09-20 13:50, bitmap wrote: > IME the bootable linux systems are typically read only. Sure you can > install anything transiently. Once you connect to the internet, > configure the repos, add keys, update the package lists, possibly run > an update of the whole system, and idiosyncratic troubleshooting per > distro/release/platform. Then you can install something, probably. > But, if you reboot, it is all gone and you have to do it all over > again. And when it comes to repairing the system there is a lot of > rebooting. > > I might try it if you are saying the open suse behaves in a different > way than the others, but are you? This one does what you want. I just installed Wireshark on it and it survives a reboot. https://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/iso/openSUSE-Tumbleweed-KDE-Live-x…

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Ad Hoc network Question On Ubuntu
by Jim Ruxton 21 Sep '23

21 Sep '23

I have some small devices that usually connect to a WIFI router and send data to my laptop which is also connected to that router. I thought I would try setting up an ad hoc network from my laptop without the router and have the devices connect directly to my laptop. I set up the network with the same SSID and password as the router. The devices are programmed to send to a specific IP address that my laptop is set to when on the router. The problem I'm having is when I set up the ad hoc network I don't see any way to set the IP address of my laptop on that ad hoc network. Is what I'm trying to do possible. Is there a way to set the IP address for the ad hoc network via the command line? Thanks for any tips. Jim

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