August 2025 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

Take 2: Anyone have experience with CatchyOS?
by Evan Leibovitch 01 Sep '25

01 Sep '25

My experiment with Brazzite has been, to me, a failure. For something touted to be a key player in the rise of the Linux Desktop, I'm not impressed. There are so many "so long as you don't" restrictions that I imagine it works fantastic in a handful of very specific scenarios but is pretty bad at anything else. So, time to move on rather than continue to fight with it. Life's too short. From one extreme to the other, I'm going to try CatchyOS. It promises multiple new tech for me to learn, notably Arch and btrfs. Plus this thing is massively configurable, to the point of specifying how advanced is your CPU's instruction set and what kind of kernel schedular to use(!). I'm using AI tools to figure out the optimal settings for Catchy for any given CPU/GPU combo. Any tips and caveats are appreciated. -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56

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Why I Don't Use #!/bin/bash - Shebangs Explained! (Another one by Dave at YSAP)
by Ron 31 Aug '25

31 Aug '25

It's a long weekend, a good time to play in the garden, ride bicycles up and down hills, and watch some `bash` videos. Dave at YSAP discusses "shebang" lines and does his deep-dive into them. Shebang lines are those lines at the top of a script that bash processes, right? Wrong. Bash ignores that line, it's the kernel that processes the shebang. Node / v8 also are smart enough to ignore the shebang line, even though lines starting with # in JS are *not* comments. Cool! He compares behaviours on Darwin, Void Linux, and IllumOS / SunOS. Differences show up when passing options in shebang lines. Lots of interesting tricks can be had by tweaking that line, and after some 10 minutes of general explanation, he heads down the rabbit hole starting with his favourite distro, Void Linux. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoHMiCzqCNw TL;DR: use: #!/usr/bin/env bash (or, since I'm a new convert) #!/usr/bin/env fish

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VoIP.ms Softphone -- opinion?
by William Park 31 Aug '25

31 Aug '25

Hi all, Anyone using "VoIP.ms Softphone" app from Google store? Why does it have low review on Google store? I'm thinking about moving my landline number to VoIP.ms. I would need another ATA box, because my current one is locked to Teksavvy. With "VoIP.ms Softphone", I can avoid buying another ATA box, and my usage will be the same as now. The only new feature would be having SMS on "homephone".

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any robocaller blocking answering machines?
by CAREY SCHUG 30 Aug '25

30 Aug '25

When I do a web search, I find devices "preloaded with xxx thousand numbers" or room for me to add xxx thousand numbers, but IME, spam/robo calls never come from the same number twice, so that is a waste of me pressing the "block call" feature. I want an answering machine including multiple cordless phones, and maybe that will connect to bluetooth to handle mobile calls too, that will: 1. if the number is in my local directory (names I have saved as friends), act like a normal answering machine: wait 2-6 rings (selectable) while ringing all my cordless phones with the "friend" ringtone and maybe saying the name, and then answer and take a message. (This would be a short, casual, friendly message) "Hi, it's <my name>, please leave a message" 2. If the callerid is an actual name, act like a normal answering machine: wait 2-6 rings while ringing all my cordless phones with a "stranger" ringtone and saying the name. If I don't pick up, answer with a formal business-like message: "You have reached 847-333-4444, the phone of Carey Schug. He is away or busy at the moment. After the tone, please leave your name, number, and purpose for your call." 3. If the callerid is "PRIVATE", "UNKNOWN", "TOLL FREE CALL", "CELLULAR CALL", "WIRELESS CALLER", or "ILLINOIS CALL" (which can be programmed for different local service providers' defaults), answer immediately with "hello" and wait a second. A real person, admittedly including some spammers, will respond immediately. A robocaller will have a 2-second delay until they connect their end to a person, so my device will hang up. If there is an immediate voice response, record it, then when they pause, respond "please wait while I locate <my name>" and continue ringing my phone(s), with an "anonymous" ringtone. 4. If I pick up, play the message it recorded and give me the options --connect live --play a message to "remove me from your phone list and do not call back" and hang up --respond as if I did not pick up (below 5. After a while, if I do not pick up, return to the caller and say "<my name> is not available. if are you happy with the message you left, just hang up, or press 1 to leave no message, or press 2 to record a new message." 6. bonus #1 (maybe). Long ago, I saw (or had?) a phone which had a button, press it and it would emit the tones the phone company uses to indicate a non-working number, purportedly would cause the spammers to remove the number from their list. Maybe that doesn't work anymore, as I have not seen it as a listed feature. I think I have recently gotten a special tone when I called a non-working number. 7. bonus #2: let me record a special message for a specific number, e.g. Sam is coming over today, so for Sam ONLY, a message plays "I may be 15 minutes late getting home, please wait for me." 8. bonus #3: like bonus #2, but for names in my directory in a group, e.g. family members or members of a club, the message could be "our next gathering is Sunday at 4 PM". 9. the special messages above should be selectable to be for 24 hours or until I delete them. Or maybe till the person calls. Carey

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Do you recognized valid email addresses? NO, you do not.
by Ron 29 Aug '25

29 Aug '25

For everyone complaining that $tech is too complicated or makes no sense (I'm guilty sometimes), here's a fun quiz to test your knowledge about something simple - email address formats. A tip when going into this, "Valid" can mean "Was Once Valid per RFC". https://e-mail.wtf/ > I scored 12/21 on https://e-mail.wtf and all I got was this lousy text > to share on social media. What's your score? 100% == liar Bonus: https://jsdate.wtf/ > How well do you know JavaScript's Date class? Worth looking at even if not interested in JS. I forget my score on that one, but it wasn't great.

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(Sort of off topic) High School courses
by William Park 29 Aug '25

29 Aug '25

Does anyone know how High School courses are selected? I don't think Ministry of Education staffs write the textbooks, exercises, and curriculum. They probably review it and stamp approval. Because I have an idea for a course at K-12 market.

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lighttpd problem with systemd configuration file
by Michael Galea 28 Aug '25

28 Aug '25

Hi All, Around late spring the cgi-bin components of web pages I wrote started failing under lighttpd with what looked like permission problems. After much debugging I tracked the problem down to a configuration file lighttpd installs for systemd, namely /lib/systemd/system/lighttpd.service which is symlinked by /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/lighttpd.service. The lighttpd developers added a configuration parameter (ProtectHome=read-only) that completely disables cgi-bin access. My problem is that the file is not treated by lighttpd as a configuration file, the next install of lighttpd ( I use Debian) rewrites the file. This behavior seems puzzling to me as lighttpd went to a lot of trouble to support cgi-bin and the debian package is disabling it every update. Does anyone know of a work-around? -- Michael Galea

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let's be a bit more polite
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 28 Aug '25

28 Aug '25

Recently several messages struck me as too heated and too directed at people. It's great to disagree but be respectful when doing so, Don't attack people. We do have a code of conduct <https://www.gtalug.org/?page_id=14>

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Linux distros for specific goals?
by Karen Lewellen 27 Aug '25

27 Aug '25

Speaking of interesting ideas..perhaps, I have a question. Given how many many Linux distributions exist, I am wondering if it is say a basic aspect of the os to be scripted for specific goals? For example a distribution that combines tools important to accounting, or home security or music making or so forth? Karen

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narrow/condensed monospace font?
by CAREY SCHUG 26 Aug '25

26 Aug '25

1. Recommendations for a more-characters-per-inch monospace font, preferably sans serif? 2. Is there an editing program that I could take a font I like and with just a few clicks make a narrower version of all the characters? Back in Windows days, many fonts just came in multiple versions including "narrow" or "condensed". I have a table where I want to get the maximum information in an area (spreadsheet cell), but I want to have columns line up, and there are too many columns to have each in it's own cell (plus I need to move or edit one line at a time, including adding/removing lines Carey

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