- Talk - lists.gtalug.org

Network down after reboot
by William Witteman 31 May '16

31 May '16

I recently rebooted my Debian desktop, and there is no working network now. Networking has "just worked" for so long that I am at a loss as to what to do. I haven't changed /etc/network/interfaces in forever, but ifconfig -a shows that eth0 is not being configured, and if down eth0 confirms it. I tried fiddling with the Network Tools thing in Gnome, but it hasn't changed anything. Did I miss a change to how this is done and need to learn a new approach? Thanks!

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looking to identify two books in these images
by Dave Cramer 31 May '16

31 May '16

The white book in this one. http://beaver1.fastcrypt.com/~davec/book1.png the orange book in this one http://beaver1.fastcrypt.com/~davec/book2.png Dave Cramer

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pigs with wings
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 29 May '16

29 May '16

I'm going to do the unthinkable: throw out a working notebook tomorrow. An NEC Versa SX from 1999. Running Fedora Core 1. Pentium 2 @ 233MHz 256M of RAM 10G HDD [an upgrade from something considerably smaller] Video: Trident Cyber 9388 Screen: 1024x768. No built-in networking (that's what PCcards are for). Swappable bay for CD writer and floppy drive (I have both). Came with a Windows NT 3.5 license (if I remember correctly). but with Win98 installed. The video is a problem: it is only "TrueColor": 16 bits/pixel. The X driver has a long-standing bug where at each power-on the video might be in a state where the colours are screwed up. The only cure is to power cycle. The fundamental problem is that X doesn't know how to fully initialize the device. Kind of 50/50, if I remember correctly. I'm playing with it now. The screen is bright and clear. I quite like the feel of the keyboard. There is a constant fan noise. The machine was quite nice for its day but things are mostly better now. I bought this 17 years ago, lets say 8 doublings by Moore's law. Current nice notebooks vs this: RAM: 16G (2^6 better) SSD/HDD: 256G vs 10G (2^5 more capacity but a lot faster) HDD/HDD: 2T vs 3.2G (2^10 more capacity and a bit faster) screen: 3200x1800 vs 1024x768 (2^3 better) CPU: 2.4GHz vs 233MHz (2^3 faster clock but more instructions/second too) So: Growth is impressive but Moore's law doesn't seem to have applied.

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Printing Problem - Can't find printer
by Stephen 27 May '16

27 May '16

I am using Ubuntu 14.04 Printer is Epson WF-2630 Wi-fi connection. Hard coded IP address When I try to print, I get a Gnome pop-up saying printer is off-line. Using the web interface to CUPS the reported error is printer not found. I can always ping the printer. I can always print from a windows computer on the same network. I can, from the CUPS web interface "modify" the printer settings. I click through without changing anything. When I am finished, the stalled print job is printed. Any ideas how I can print without "modifying" the printer settings? -- Stephen

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Metapackages for "security testing" ?
by William Park 26 May '16

26 May '16

Does anyone know any Ubuntu metapackage names for security auditing and testing? I'm currently downloading Kali (Debian based) and Backbox (Ubuntu based) to be installed on VM later. But, it would be nicer to "apt-get install xxx". At the moment, I don't know what "xxx" might be. -- William

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NVidia GTX 1080 annoucement
by William Park 24 May '16

24 May '16

Howdy, I only caught the last 30min of the live stream. Made me wonder... Is there way to use its 2560 GPU cores as substitute for the usual 4 CPU cores? -- William

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example of why RISC was a good idea
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 22 May '16

22 May '16

<https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/google-vp9-optimization> Intel describing how they improved the performance of the VP9 decoder for Silvermont, a recent Atom core. The meat is several not-really-obvious changes to the code to overcome limitations of the instruction decoder. The optimizations seem particular to Silvermont but the article says: Testing against the future Intel Atom platforms, codenamed Goldmont and Tremont, the VP9 optimizations delivered additional gains. These optimizations did nothing for Core processors as far as I can tell. I don't know if it affects any AMD processors. A RISC processor would not have a complex instruction decoder so this kind of hacking would not apply. I will admit that there are "hazards" in RISC processors that are worth paying attention to when selecting and ordering instructions but these tend to be clearer. Another thing in the paper: The overall results were outstanding. The team improved user-level performance by up to 16 percent (6.2 frames per second) in 64-bit mode and by about 12 percent (1.65 frames per second) in 32-bit mode. This testing included evaluation of 32-bit and 64-bit GCC and Intel® compilers, and concluded that the Intel compilers delivered the best optimizations by far for Intel® Atom™ processors. When you multiply this improvement by millions of viewers and thousands of videos, it is significant. The WebM team at Google also recognized this performance gain as extremely significant. Frank Gilligan, a Google engineering manager, responded to the team’s success: “Awesome. It looks good. I can’t wait to try everything out.” Testing against the future Intel Atom platforms, codenamed Goldmont and Tremont, the VP9 optimizations delivered additional gains. Consider 64-bit. If 16% improvement is 6.2 f/s, then the remaining 84% would be 32.55 f/s. Not great, but OK. For 32-bit, 12% is 1.65 f/s; the remaining 88% would be 12 f/s. Totally useless, I think. Quite interesting how different these two are.

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FF 46 Locking Ubuntu 14.04
by Stephen 21 May '16

21 May '16

I posted this on the Ubuntu forums. Just got one reply, from someone experiencing the same problem. I am hoping someone here can offer some advice: Prior to the latest update (within last week) I was getting FF crashing on some web sites. My best guess is that the sites had lots of javascript. Now, after the update, I am getting FF locking up my desktop. I need to do a soft reset to get going again. Very much no fun. CPU is Intel i5, 64 bit, 16 GB ram CPU temperature app shows good numbers. I run the Gnome shell. I use the machine as a LAMP and SAMBA server. I have never had trouble like this before. Suggestions and advise requested. Thanks -- Stephen

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[GTALUG-Announce] Meeting on 14 June 2016 - Nerd Money with Warren McPherson
by Myles Braithwaite 19 May '16

19 May '16

<http://gtalug.org/meeting/2016-06/> # Nerd Money with Warren McPherson The outrage, the greed, the cryptography, the possibilities! **Crypto Literacy** - a quick kindergarten class of the foundational ideas that enable the current crop of "Applied Cryptography" applications. **Innovation of Bitcoin** - After a hundred failed attempts to create digital money the innovations of Hashcash and Bitcoin Mining turn out to be the enablers for a new internet epoch. **Blockchains and Society** - Polarising emotional debates where people arguing contradictory positions all imagine themselves to be defending the little guy. The dichotomy between open Bitcoin community and advocates of private, permission led blockchains. ## 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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the wicked waste that is closed Android hardware
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 15 May '16

15 May '16

Factory Direct is selling the Hobo Arc HD for $119 (with a coupon). On paper, this is great hardware. It has a 10" 2560x1600 pixel IPS display! Just like my Nexus 10. The Kobo comes with Android 4.2 and is frozen in time at 4.2.2. The Nexus 10 gets frequent updates (but not to Andoid 6). No third party firmware projects seem to exist for the Kobo. So this wonderful hardware cannot be recommended. Most Andoid devices seem to be abandoned way too young. Nexus devices have a better track record. If a device is well supported by Cyanogen Mod then there is real hope.

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