- Talk - lists.gtalug.org

python sweetness — The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table
by Russell 05 Jan '18

05 Jan '18

Here's an interesting read; as the author says, it looks like it's an intriguing start to the new year. http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/169166980422/the-mysterious-case-of-… -- Russell

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another example of why you want drivers with nice licenses
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 04 Jan '18

04 Jan '18

Nvidia is forbidding the use of consumer graphics cards in datacentres. They do that by terms in the driver licensing. <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/03/nvidia_server_gpus/>

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ASCII table (FYI)
by William Park 28 Dec '17

28 Dec '17

Here are 2 tables: <https://wiki.gtalug.org/user:william:start> - ASCII table -- {man ascii} is good enough for one-off lookup. But, if you need a permanent PDF table, here is something I created: {ascii.pdf}. The control character names are mostly generics, but what's included are the names used by Epson's ESCPOS interpreter. - Netmask -- I could never remember the decimal number for various netmasks. So, I created a little table: {netmask.pdf} Enjoy! -- William Park <opengeometry(a)yahoo.ca>

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"Ubuntu 17.10 Temporarily Pulled Due To A BIOS Corrupting Problem"
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 25 Dec '17

25 Dec '17

<https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-17.10-BIOS-Corru…> <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1734147> This is scary but hard to evaluate. The best guess is that there is an oddity in the Lenovo firmware that interacts with a recent Linux kernel change in a bad way. - it is not specific to Ubuntu: it also effects some Acer, Toshiba, Dell, and other notebooks. See the list in the Launchpad report. - Maybe the problem is fixed by this or something related <https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/d9018976cdb6eefc62a7ba79a405f6c966…> We should let wizards work on this. If it hits you, it seems that your current setup will be very important to preserve until there is a fix. In particular, you will only be able to boot from the current boot entry, and that means your EFI partition's GUUID is important and the path to the .efi file (shim?) that gets booted is important. If you wipe your disk you may never be able to boot again. Much of this is guesswork on my part.

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personal webpage for GTALUG members?
by William Park 24 Dec '17

24 Dec '17

Hi, I have ASCII tables (PDF) that I created and used over the years, and I would like to make it available to public. Is there "user" section in the wiki, where I can create entries with file attachments? I wouldn't mind paying "premium" membership for that. I don't really feel like getting a domain for few static pages. -- William Park <opengeometry(a)yahoo.ca>

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Apache Traffic Server HA
by Greg Martyn 22 Dec '17

22 Dec '17

Has anyone run Apache Traffic Server in production? I've used it for a proof-of-concept before, and I like it overall, but I'm about to recommend its use and would like to hear any horror stories. I'm planning on using it as a reverse proxy cache for a site that is expected to have a couple tens of thousands of active users at peak. I'd have HAProxy in front for HA, with a mirror setup of everything below it, talking to ATS, with another HAProxy behind ATS for load balancing the origin servers. Any comments welcome. Thanks! Greg

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Re: [GTALUG] Programming languages (in comparison?) - -was Learn Swift for Apple/iOS. Learn ??? for Google/Android.
by o1bigtenor 18 Dec '17

18 Dec '17

On Sun, Dec 10, 2017 at 12:06 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk < talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: > | From: ted leslie via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> > > snip > > I spend most of my programming time in C. The next language I intend > to use is Rust. I like its ideas but proof of the pudding is in the > eating. The cases where I would recommend C for new projects are few > and far between. > So I know precious little about programming languages. I looked up 'Rust programming language'. Wikipedia (which can often be useful if not always totally accurate) listed it as: " . . . a systems programming language sponsored by Mozilla Research, which describes it as a "safe, concurrent, practical language," supporting functional and imperative-procedural paradigms. Rust is syntactically similar to C++, but its designers intend it to provide better memory safety while maintaining performance." OK - - - sponsored by Mozilla (AIUI that sort means that its their baby) and its to '. . . provide better memory safety . . ." . Well given how Mozilla products work for me - - - they don't really know anything about how to use memory. The only way I can keep using FF is to kill it every couple three days and then restart it. Somehow that isn't my idea of memory usage done well so if that's Rust - - - well then that's a total non-starter for me! Dee

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which fits in better with Gnome3 -- MATE or Cinnamon?
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 16 Dec '17

16 Dec '17

[Second try at posting this to the list.] In my world (mostly Fedora), the normal desktop is Gnome3, including its shell. Sometimes people ask me for a good old desktop, and I know the answer must be MATE or Cinnamon. Originally MATE was a fork of GNOME 2 and so I assumed that it would conflict with an already-installed Gnome 3 in some ways. Since Cinnamon was a fork of Gnome 3, I similarly assumed it would co-exist well with Gnome 3. I'm not sure of that any longer after reading the wikipedia pages. Some criteria for co-existance: - (pretty basic) can both be installed at one time. So no make conflicts. - (asperational) installed GNOME applications can run under the other shell - (asperational) installed applications for the other environment can run under the GNOME Shell Most comparisons are old. Here's a recent one, but it doesn't seem that useful: <https://www.slant.co/versus/1123/1125/~mate_vs_cinnamon>

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Laptop (very) weirdness
by Evan Leibovitch 16 Dec '17

16 Dec '17

My dual-boot Asus laptop now exhibits very strange behaviour. Under Windows 10 all is normal (well, its form of normal). Under Linux (current mint KDE) at work, all seems ok. At home, all hell breaks loose. The only difference is the wifi. After a normal login not only does networking not come up but the KDE menu bar doesn't display upon startup, all I have is the KDE wallpaper and a working xterm. Simple commands work but 'sudo bash' hangs. If I try to shutdown the system hangs. ALT-F1 gives me some kind of massive dump starting with the lines: BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 000000000000011c IP iul_num_add_sta+0x49e/0x720 [iwlmvm] Can anyone make sense of why simply using a different wifi router would cause this? An inability to connect is one thing, but this is nuts. (And people ask me why I hesitate to recommend desktop Linux to non-techies...) Happy to bring it in to Tuesday's meeting if anyone can help... - Evan (on mobile)

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Solimedia has free shipping for Mikrotik routers
by William Park 15 Dec '17

15 Dec '17

For those who are interested in Mikrotik routers, but were reluctant to pay $25 shipping... Solimedia.net now has free shipping. -- William Park <opengeometry(a)yahoo.ca>

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