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FSOSS: last day for early-bird registration!
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 04 Oct '17

04 Oct '17

I don't remember seeing an announcement here. FSOSS is a conference put on by Seneca @ York each year. I've found it well worth going. Tomorrow the registration fee doubles! <http://fsoss.senecac.on.ca/2017/index.html> Date: Oct 26-27 (Thursday and Friday) Location: the Seneca buildings on the Campus of York University

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[GTALUG-Announce] Upcoming Board Elections
by Christopher Browne 03 Oct '17

03 Oct '17

It's coming the time of GTALUG's annual election, and we are seeking candidates to serve on the board of directors. GTALUG terms are two years, with elections so that in "even" years, two candidates are elected, and in "odd" years, there are three. This being 2017, an odd year, three seats need to be filled. Further, two of the incumbents, Myles Braithwaite, and Stewart Russell, have indicated that, due to changes in their personal responsibilities, they cannot run for another term. We are very thankful for all they have done in their years of support. This provides an opportunity for others to come in and help. There are formal qualifications that must be satisfied: - Must be a member in good standing - Must not have any undischarged bankruptcy It is also important to be able to be available most months for Board/Operations meetings where we plan GTALUG meetings and activities. We really do need to have board members that are involved, as that is how we are able to continue to plan the presentations that have occurred regularly since 1994. In addition, there are ongoing system adminstration responsibilities to manage our Internet infrastructure, mostly for managing web activity at http://gtalug.org and our mailing lists. If you are interested, we'd appreciate it very much if you can submit indication of your interest to board(a)gtalug.org -- Chris Browne When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?" --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Firefox memory usage (was GTALUG Meeting on Tuesday 10 October at 7:30pm)
by Myles Braithwaite 👾 01 Oct '17

01 Oct '17

o1bigtenor via talk wrote: > Am a serious browser user - - - in the past have had up to 18 windows > open and from 3 to 50+ tabs on any one window. There isn't a browser out > there that can handle that kind of usage especially NOT FF! ( I have > north of 20 GB of RAM plus a system to match so its really not a > resources issue). The issue is that browsers are quite memory wasteful > and somehow can't use ram neatly. When can we expect the present malaise > to change - - - - 2030? > > Maybe his response to my comment/question could be transmitted back - - > - please? > > Yes I've tried using the 'help' section but dev types don't seem to ever > read anything there. Resource usage in web browsers depend on a given web site. The greatest example is The Verge[0] a technology blog that requires 274 HTTP requests and 3.0 MB of data[1]. According to the Firefox extension Tab Data[2] on first load that take ~30MB of RAM and comes down to ~17MB after all the requests get processed. Interesting side note this article[3] can use anywhere from 40MB to 100MB of RAM. Browser developers build better optimized browsers while web developers make heavy web pages which use up all the resources (usually with ads). Extensions also take out a lot of memory as while, checkout about:memory. Though your question is warranted, it's not really appropriate as it will result a bunch of questions from the speaker (i.e. what web sites are you visiting, how many extensions are you using, what's your internet connection, etc). [0]: <https://www.theverge.com/> [1]: <https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/dbE4hE/https://www.theverge.com/> [2]: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-data/> [3]: <https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16387706/wonder-woman-batman-dc-expanded…>

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[GTALUG-Announce] GTALUG Meeting on Tuesday 10 October at 7:30pm
by hi＠gtalug.org 01 Oct '17

01 Oct '17

<http://gtalug.org/meeting/2017-10/> # The State of Mozilla with Mike Hoye In November, Mozilla will release Firefox 57, a major update to the browser with a lot of new technology and features under the hood. Mike Hoye will be joining us to talk where Firefox, Mozilla and the Web are today, and where they're going. ### Annual General Meeting After Mike's talk GTALUG will be doing it's annual general meeting. * **GTALUG Update** -- 5 minutes * **Treasury Update** -- 5 minutes * **ICANN & CAG** -- 5 minutes * **Board Elections** -- 20 minutes ## Location George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre 245 Church Street, Room 203 Ryerson University <http://goo.gl/maps/16oJ2> <http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/23447525> ## Schedule * 6:00 pm - Please discuss on the general mailing list (i.e. <talk(a)gtalug.org>) where you want to go for dinner. * 7:30 pm - Meeting and presentation. * 9:00 pm - After each meeting, a group of GTALUGers move to The Imperial Pub (54 Dundas St East) for refreshments and more socialising. # Code of Conduct We want a productive happy community that can welcome new ideas, improve every process every year, and foster collaboration between individuals with differing needs, interests and skills. We gain strength from diversity, and actively seek participation from those who enhance it. This code of conduct exists to ensure that diverse groups collaborate to mutual advantage and enjoyment. We will challenge prejudice that could jeopardise the participation of any person in the community. The Code of Conduct governs how we behave in public or in private whenever the Linux community will be judged by our actions. We expect it to be honoured by everyone who represents the community officially or informally, claims affiliation or participates directly. It applies to activities online or offline. We invite anybody to participate. Our community is open. Please read more about the GTALUG Code of Conduct here: <http://gtalug.org/about/code-of-conduct/>. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about the GTALUG Code of Conduct please contact the GTALUG Board @ <board(a)gtalug.org>. --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Programming Atmel Microprocessor from Linux
by phiscock＠ee.ryerson.ca 29 Sep '17

29 Sep '17

I'm currently developing a program in assembly language, using a Linux platform to host the development. The development environment is very simple. My notes on this are now on my academic web page at http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~phiscock/ in the 'papers' subdirectory. Peter -- Peter Hiscocks Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto http://www.syscompdesign.com USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator 647-839-0325

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Wireshark question -- script to extract data in TCP stream?
by William Park 27 Sep '17

27 Sep '17

To network experts... >From Wireshark, I can click "TCP Follow" tab and extract one-way data flow from a tcp stream. I can do this manually, one by one. But, I have many many streams. Does anyone know how to extract one-way data stream via script? Google says tshark -q -r capture.pcapng -z follow,tcp,raw,0 where '0' is the tcp stream number 0. But, it gives me data moving both ways. I just want data moving one-way. -- William Park <opengeometry(a)yahoo.ca> .

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SUSE Linux turns 25: From business distro leader to cloud power | ZDNet
by James Knott 26 Sep '17

26 Sep '17

"SUSE, one of the oldest Linux and open-source businesses, celebrated its 25th birthday while setting its eyes on its future in the cloud and software-defined infrastructure." http://www.zdnet.com/article/suse-linux-at-25/

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Big banks and telcos backing digital identity supercluster bid | IT World Canada News
by James Knott 22 Sep '17

22 Sep '17

I wonder if they'll provide X.509 certificates for individuals. While many people use them (and some use PGP/GPG) the big issue for so many is convenience. In companies that use a directory server, it's a simple matter to get the certificates for anyone else in the company, making it real easy to send encrypted email. Otherwise, you have to arrange for certs on your own and then send a signed message, so that the other person can send you an encrypted email. Of course, many people haven't even heard of email encryption. A few years ago, CIBC was offering X.509 certificates for customers, but I believe they could only be used for banking business, such as applying for loans etc. I don't know if they're still doing it. What we need for encrypted email to really take off is a server where you can automatically find anyone's public certificate, when you send an email, just as can be done with directory servers. BTW, my first experience with this was at IBM, 20 years ago, when the Lotus Notes servers supplied the certificates to anyone sending email. Previously, I had experimented with PGP, as others at the OS/2 users group had, but never really used it for much. http://www.itworldcanada.com/article/big-banks-and-telcos-backing-superclus…

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war story: EFI System Partition is fragile
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 15 Sep '17

15 Sep '17

The EFI System Partition (EEFS) is an important component in a UEFI-booting system. The EFS is a FAT32 partition that contains all the programs that can be run by the firmware. So to boot Windows or Linux, the system runs some *.efi files from this partition. FAT32 isn't a very forgiving filesystem. I just had one damaged by Windows updates. I was left with a system that just went to a grub prompt when booted. Diagnosis: I booted a live Fedora USB stick. First I had to figure out which partition was the EFS. I did that by using "disks" (gnome-disk-utility). There might have been lighter-weight tools, but I'm used to this one. I did an fsck on the partition. Lots of bad news. "Fixing" resulted in grubenv and grub.cfg becoming empty. This, of course, left grub quite confused and ignorant. Fixing: I did some tricky things, as advised by the internet. They might only work because the live USB stick's Fedora matched the installed Fedora in some way. The general idea is to create a chroot world with the Disk's system (bur running the USB stick's kernel). Then use grub2-miconfig to install a new and useful grub.cfg in the EFS. - mount all the necessary partitions of the disk system + root on /mnt/x + I don't have a /boot partition but many would + EFS on /mnt/x/boot/efi + home on /mnt/x/home + swap is already handled. Use bind mounts to create necessary bit: mount -bind /dev /mnt/x/dev mount -bind /sys /mnt/x/sys mount -bind /proc /mnt/x/proc get into this world su chroot /mnt/x fix the grub.cfg su chroot /mnt/x cd /boot/EFI/fedora ls -l grub.cfg grub2-mkconfig -o grub.cfg It should now be fixed, but do have a look around for other problems. Lessons: - /boot/efi is fragile. - Consider backing it up. - Consider leaving it unmounted at rest.

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war story: mixing up UEFI and Legacy Booting
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 15 Sep '17

15 Sep '17

==== background (feel free to skip) "Legacy Booting" means the old fashioned way that PCs booted: - read the first sector of a disk into RAM ("the Master Boot Record" AKA MBR) - jump to that RAM copy: start executing 8086 instruction there. (This is the same way the original IBM PC operated and completely ignores memory management, 32-bit mode, and 64-bit mode. - the BIOS provides routines for crude I/O (but they only work in 8086 mode) - by convention, the MBR "understands" the traditional kind of partitioning, in part because the partition table is within the MBR itself (but only the four primary partitions). Thus it can chain to the boot record on the "active" partition. UEFI booting is more, uh, sophisticated. The UEFI firmware (it should not be called BIOS since it isn't a BIOS) understands GPT partitioning and it understands the FAT32 filesystem. There is a distinguished partition called the EFI System Partition that is FAT32. Or multiple such partitions, but that confuses at least Windows. The firmware can run programs from that partition in a fairly rich environment. Stupid regression: 32-bit UEFI can only run 32-bit programs; 64-bit UEFI can only run 64-bit programs. Why is that a regression? Because good old 16-bit BIOS never got in the way of 32-bit or 64-bit modes. But the 64-bit Linux now can run on a 32-bit UEFI system if the underlying processor supports 64-bit mode. Most modern PC processors can handle 64-bit mode. The exceptions seem to be dying (Intel's Edison comes to mind). For market-segmentation reasons there are a number of 32-bit UEFI systems at the low end but those have 64-bit processors (eg. low-end notebooks and tablets). Generally UEFI mode is better: + supported by all modern PC systems + naturally supports GPT partitioning and large drives + supports Secure Boot Why would you want to use Legacy mode? + you want to run MS-DOS or FreeDOS or BeOS or some other ancient system. Really: this is sometimes necessary if you want to flash new firmware and you cannot or don't want to use Windows for this. (But some systems allow flashing from the UEFI firmware itself.) + you don't want to learn about the new world of UEFI + you want to port an old installed system directly to new hardware (using old disks or at least old disk images). + you want to dual-boot with a system already installed in Legacy Mode. ==== foreground There is another use case for Legacy Mode: you accidentally install Linux in Legacy mode. This is especially unfortunate if you wish to dual boot with Windows that has been installed with UEFI booting. This is probably a big mistake, and I don't know a better fix than re-installing. This happened to my son. Why? >From a certain amount of experience, I've found that too many systems have firmware that is coy about exposing the UEFI / Legacy boot option. - some systems just plain don't offer Legacy Mode (eg. most Windows tablets). Problem solved. - on my son's Asus notebook, there is a firmware configuration choice "Launch CSM". That really means "Legacy Mode Booting". This confused me since I have several systems that have a similar choice that doesn't cause Legacy Mode Booting. - on my MSI Cubi's firmware the undocumented option is called something like "Windows 8/8.1" mode. - other systems I have allow more flexibility. The boot menu offers to boot a device either way if it looks as if it could be booted either way. - if you can enable or disable CSM, you must enable it for Legacy Booting but on most systems it doesn't force Legacy Mode booting. When Fedora installation medium is booted in Legacy Mode, it will install a Legacy Mode system; when booted in UEFI Mode, it will install a UEFI Mode system. It doesn't wave flags about this decision. It would be nice if Fedora noticed that it was installing a Legacy system on a disk with a EFI System partition and warned about this.

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