Episode 092 – Partly Cloudy

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Total Running Time: 1:35:15

Un-edited Live session – http://www.youtube.com/embed/mSf8vlzUzEo

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Summary

Kernel News: Mat
Time: 14:45
Distro Talk: Tony
Time: 18:15
Mary Distro Review
Time: 32:50
Tech News:
Time: 50:05
Toolbox
Time: 1:18:25
Listener Feedback
Time: 1:24:15
Outtro Music
Time: 1:30:30

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Intro:

Tony Bemus, Mat Enders, and Mary Tomich
Sound bites by Mike Tanner

Kernel News: Mat

Time: 14:45

Release Candidate:
None

Mainline:
3.10

Stable Updates:
On Sat, 13 Jul 2013 10:47:27 PDT
Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.0.86
With 12 files changed, 26 lines inserted, and 10 lines deleted

On Sat, 13 Jul 2013 11:52:40 PDT
Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.4.53
With 15 files changed, 27 lines inserted, and 16 lines deleted

On Sat, 13 Jul 2013 11:54:17 PDT
Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.9.10
With 21 files changed, 94 lines inserted, and 40 lines deleted

On Sat, 13 Jul 2013 11:55:03 PDT
Greg Kroah-Hartman released kernel 3.10.1
With 25 files changed, 108 lines inserted, and 57 lines deleted

Kernel Developer Quote:
The 3.10.1-rc1 kernel is out for review. Bonus is a rant from me about the patches being submitted for the stable trees.

To view his rant see this post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List

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Distro Talk: Tony

Time: 18:15

Distrowatch.com

• 7-8 – Legacy OS 2.1 “Gamer” – “Gamer” edition, a Puppy-based distribution designed for, you’ve guessed it, PC gaming enthusiasts
• 7-9 – SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP3 – commercial enterprise-class distributions for desktops and servers
• 7-9 – Clonezilla Live 2.1.2-20 – specialist live CD designed for disk cloning tasks
• 7-10 – IPFire 2.13 Core 70 – open-source software solutions for routers and firewalls
• 7-12 – Linux Mint 15 “Xfce” –

Distro of the Week: Tony

5. MidnightBSD – 1412
4. Ubuntu – 1472
3. Fedora – 1541
2. Debian – 1649
1. Mint – 3336

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Mary Distro Review – LegacyOS 2 (Gamer Edition)

Time: 32:50

Never have I seen so much stuff jammed into one location, except maybe the time I saw Mat attempt to consume a 20-scoop ice cream dessert at Ohio Linux Fest last year. Remember that Schooner, Mat? I’ve got pictures. Of course two months later we know the rest of the story.

This week’s review is of a Linux Distro that I would actually call KitchenSinkOS. It has everything. You want to play videos– there are five different tools. You want to play CDs—there are three different tools. Need a file manager– there are four (yes, including Dolphin). Three different options to organize your life (Xournal, Didiwiki, Osmo)
And you know something’s up along those lines when Amarok, the main KDE audio player is listed in Miscellaneous menu!

So, would LegacyOS be retro cool gamer’s paradise…or should Duke Nukem take his trusty Devastator and tendorize this dog of a distro?

The Vitals:
Name: LegacyOS 2.1 “Gamer” edition (I found out that LegacyOS used to be known as TeenPup)
Maintainer: John Van Gaans
Distro Latest Birthday: 7/8/2013
Derivative: Puppy Linux
Kernel: According to uname -a, the kernel is 2.6.18
Review Desktop: IceWM

LegacyOS is designed for older computers, hence the Legacy reference.

Live Environment:

The boot process to go live allows you to supply particular boot parameters and LegacyOS lists them out for you.

Graphics: ✘ ( i915)
Wireless: (ipw3945)

Goes through a keyboard and screen resolution process before you are booted to the live desktop. When it completes, I am presented with a nice-looking IceWM desktop. Single panel at the bottom holds all of the typical icons, including a quick launch menu that takes two clicks to launch anything (one to activate the menu, a second to start the program.

The Defaults
Browser: Opera, Konqueror, (According to the maintainer, Seamonkey, Firefox, Google Chrome and others are no longer compatible with Legacy OS)
Office Suite: None – Gnumeric, Abiword
Mail Client: None that I could see.
File Manager: Konqueror, Rox, Dolphin, Krusader. That’s right this distro has some KDE added. KDE 3.5.4. Now that is retro!

The Install Process:

Installer was tucked away in Applications > Setup > Install-Remaster > Legacy OS to Hard Drive Installer. In addition to this type of install, you can remaster to Live-CD, create a boot floppy, or “Dougal enhanced CD remaster.”

The install kicks off by starting two tools: The first was MUT (Media Utility Tool) which essentially manages the mounting of media and partitions on your system. Initially, there was a bit of confusion associated with this tool. I was under the impression that my CD was mounted but it showed that it was not. The second tool was Gparted. I also was instructed to make sure the install media was inserted. It was.

There are several options for install, including installing to USB drives as well as a hard drive. I selected hard drive and clicked OK. There was a notice from the installer regarding my chosen drive (it was the only option on the previous screen).

The first time I installed, it warned me by asking if I wanted to install Legacy OS2 in “super floppy” mode, i.e. no MBR and no partitions? The downside to a Superfloppy install is that it contains no boot partition, so it’s impossible to boot from the device. For one of my several install attempts, Supperfloppy was my only option (despite the fact that I repartitioned my 80gb hard drive). After selecting it, I had the option of reformatting as ext3 or vfat. I chose ext3. It wasn’t clear why I was offered a format option for a second time—remember, Gparted was one of two tools started after I chose to install to hard drive.

But wait…another window. It went into quite a bit of detail as to the consequences of my choice. At this rate, the review would not be finished by Sunday. Option 1: means copying the kernel, initrd and pup_214.sfs to the drive in a way that allows the previous content to coexist. Of course the partition format must be FAT32.

Option 2: was the normal install. I selected that choice and the file copying began.

However, at the conclusion of the install, a window flashed before me stating “if all went well, Legacy OS 2 has been installed to sda. But now we have the sometimes difficult part, how to make Legacy OS 2 bootable.” It went on to offer me a couple of choices: A boot disk—Use a floppy disk or USB pen-drive to boot LegacyOS or boot from Grub. I chose boot from Grub…another window. (This distro has more dialog windows than Imelda Marcos had shoes!) It’s telling me what to choose “defaults” except when it asks where to install Grub…in that case, I should choose the MBR. OK, fine.

Then another window describing Grub and offering two options: Simple or expert. By this time I was so worn down, I chose simple… Next window presented frame buffer console options and this question (Would I like to risk a failed install and use the frame buffer console or play it safe and use the recommended standard Linux console? Hmmm…I pick safe. Now, Safe this time…on to the install. But wait, where do I want GRUB to go. My choice is /dev/sda and after a little back and forth, I thought I had successfully installed grub on the MBR, although I tested the other options, including . I was sadly mistaken. I rebooted…except the reboot didn’t work. I had a backlit screen and that was it…

Installed Environment:

There was no installed environment for me because was unable to get LegacyOS2 to boot. Update: I finally was able to get Legacy OS to boot to a IceWM desktop.

Other interesting Programs:

As I noted at the top of the review, LegacyOS2 contains quite a few programs. It’s strength is the number of games that have been included. The game menu container has five categories: mind games, card games, arcade games, puzzle games, and misc. Pacman works great.

Rating:
My rating has a Jekyll/Hyde aspect to it. For the benign Dr. Jekyll’s live environment: It was very nice and well laid out. The Live CD was jammed packed with a ton of apps and programs. It’s amazing that so much was crammed on to a single CD. You really have options. 2.8.

For the install process crafted by the insane Mr. Hyde: The install process for LegacyOS2 had to be one of the worst I have witnessed. I tried at least three times to get LegacyOS2 to install properly, and almost thought I had it but to no avail. Perhaps it was my Dell laptop, but the disorganized plethora of Windows makes LegacyOS confusing for anyone new to Linux and frustrating for others. 1.3

 

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Tech News:

Time: 50:05

Hit And Run Driver Kills Seth Vidal

Seth Vidal the amazing man who brought us YUM and Fedora was run down by a hit and driver on July 8th. He will be sorely missed, but he will live on in his contributions. For more information use Google, and see these:

An excellent eulogy by his friend Konstantin Ryabitsev:
http://blog.mricon.com/2013/07/in-memoriam.html

And Red Hats announcement:
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2013/7/thank-you-seth-vidal

His official obituary here:
http://www.clementsfuneralservice.com/memsol.cgi?user_id=1032792%20for%20full%20obituary.

Small Linux Gadget Delivers Practically Unlimited Storage

The device called simply “Plug” is about 10.6×4.3×0.79in. They set a goal of $69,000 but after their first 24hrs of being on kickstarter they had raised $118,000, almost doubling their goal. The small Plug device forgoes cloud storage for a local approach. Where a driver installed on each computer or mobile device, that you wish to have access to the drive or drives, intercepts filesystem accesses and redirects the data reads and writes to drives attached to the user’s Plug device. The Plug does not rely on any Cloud-based storage services. It gives the user in complete control of all storage devices. It is planned to work even across the Internet. This is what their kickstarter page said:

“when Plug is installed on your computer, our application intercepts all the input/output operations performed on your files, using several patent pending technologies.”

The Plug uses an OpenWRT-based Linux distribution using an unnamed x86-based processor. It includes a USB 2.0 port and a 10/100 Ethernet port averaging a transfer rate of 30Mbps. All those pledging $69 will receive a unit, however the retail pricing is estimated at $150.

 

Reviews don’t matter?
http://ostatic.com/blog/why-linux-reviews-dont-really-matter

Microsoft/NSA Collaboration

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data

http://ostatic.com/blog/libreoffice-4-0-manuals-published#buzz

Arch Linux Reinventing the File System Structure?

http://www.unixmen.com/arch-linux-reinventing-the-filesystem-structure/

Replacement for phpmyadmin?

http://www.adminer.org/en/phpmyadmin/

KDE Korner

Dolphin bugs fixed in June 2013
Bug 317676: Dolphin freezes/hangs when copying large files!  FIXED!!

http://freininghaus.wordpress.com/2013/07/13/dolphin-bugs-fixed-in-june-2013/

Octopi 0.1.9 was released this week.

http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Octopi?content=158620

Silicon

Silicon (KDE CD/DVD software). Silicon is set of OpenSource tools to manage and organize your optical discs like CDs ,DVDs and Blu-rays..

http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Silicon?content=106128

Amarok Apollo WebUI 1.0

native apps for mobile devices: the Android app is coming soon…
http://mudar.github.io/Amarok-Apollo-WebUI/

KDE Releases every 3 months (Proposed by Alex Fiestas)

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.kde.devel.core/79888

http://community.kde.org/KDE_Core/ReleasesProposal#Releases_from_KDE_SC_4.12_and_beyond

Other item:

http://linuxgizmos.com/tiny-linux-device-offers-free-distributed-storage/

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The Toolbox

Time: 1:18:25
TTYrec
Manpage http://man.cx/ttyrec(1)

Tutorial on ttyrec: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7znzFsc0P8M

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Listener Feedback:

show (at) smlr.us or 313-626-9140
Time: 1:24:15

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Outtro Music

Time: 1:30:30

There Is Science In This ChildAlbum by Intercontinental Music Lab

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