Episode 108 – Tortilla Día
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Total Running Time: 1:49:15
Un-edited Live session – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoRWgF_WAR4&feature=share
Contact Us:
show (at) smlr.us or the Contact us page
Summary
Kernel News: Mat
Time: 7:05
Distro Talk: Tony
Time: 10:15
Mary Distro Review
Time: 29:00
Tech News:
Time: 56:00
Security Bit
Time: 1:11:55
Convention Sceen
Time: 1:14:40
Is it Alive? – Mary
Time: 1:17:40
Listener Feedback
Time: 1:22:50
Outtro Music
Time: 1:39:52
Intro:
Tony Bemus, Mat Enders, and Mary Tomich
Sound bites by Mike Tanner
Kernel News: Mat
Time:7:05
Distro Talk: Tony
Time: 10:15
- 5-22 –
- 5-22 –
- 5-23 –
- 5-24 –
- 5-25 –
- 5-27 –
- 5-27 –
Distro of the Week: Tony
- Fedora – 1815
- LuninuX – 1834
- Ubuntu – 2534
- Mageia – 3194
- Mint – 5157
1 Mint 3718<
2 Debian 2256<
3 Ubuntu 1961<
4 MakuluLinux 1834>
5 Ultimate 1643>
Mary Distro Review – Voyager Linux
Time: 29:00
This week I take a look at a newly debuted Distro, Voyager Linux. Voyager Linux is French based, and when Google Translated the French language web site, I discovered that Voyager Linux became Traveler Linux. But Voyager sounds better so I’ll stay with that.
I was curious to see how customized this Ubuntu-based distro would be. I know, I know…I said I was moving away from Ubuntu-based distros but the description in the release notes intrigued me.
So would Voyager Linux be a trip to the fun house or would Voyager Linux be a roller-coaster trip to the haunted house of horror? Let’s find out…
The Vitals:
Name: Voyager Linux
Maintainer: Rodolphe7 (Voyager is a French distro)
Distro Latest Birthday: Monday, October 28, 2013
Derivative: Ubuntu (Xbuntu)
Kernel: 3.11.0-12
Review Desktop: Customized XFCE desktop
Live Environment:
Voyager boots to an attractive desktop. It’s clean—showing a Conky display, the Plank dock at the bottom, a task panel at the top, and another dock-like panel on the right. The task panel included the standard notification icons, a standard menu launcher, and a variation of slingshot full-screen launcher called slingscold. The default wallpaper was mostly white so the default transparent terminal showing white text made for an unreadable experience until I changed the background.
Since I booted to a virtual machine, I was unable to test the wireless network. But it’s Ubuntu based and I suspect it would have worked just fine.
The Defaults
Browser: Firefox
Office Suite: Abi-numeric (AbiWord, Gnumeric)
Mail Client: Thunderbird (opens to a wizard to configure an account with either gandi.net or hover.com.
File Manager: Thunar
The Install Process:
Voyager is based on Ubuntu and uses Ubuntu’s installer, so there is nothing much to say here. Predictably, I missed the Grub configuration option….
Installed Environment:
After Voyager Linux was installed and rebooted, I updated the installed software. I was ready to explore. I noticed the right-click menu had some additional options. Three that caught my eye were a utility to configure Conky, It would work even better if it were in English. There also are three Voyager Linux utilities: Voyager Box (various configurations) and Wall (desktop look). The only problem with the Voyager utilities was that the information was in French when you clicked on a selection. It was difficult for me to know what each option meant
The toolbar/panel on the right was a little perplexing. There were two columns of simple icons – 1 through 4 for each desktop, terminal, pidgin, Cmus, FreeTuxtv, and two arrows the purpose of which escaped me. Clicking the left pointed arrow did nothing, and the vertical arrow when clicked shifted the top of the screen but nothing else was there.
I tested the Ubuntu software center by installing Dolphin. It took a while to install, no doubt pulling in the requisite libraries. After dolphin successfully installed, I confirmed the .kde etc directories were there. It was time to test Timeshift, an application that provides functionality similar to the System Restore feature in Windows and the Time Machine tool in Mac OS. Timeshift takes incremental snapshots of the file system at regular intervals using rsync and hard-links. I had created a Timeshift backup prior to the dolphin install which was stored in a system level folder called, surprisingly, timeshift! I opened Timeshift and highlighted my snapshot and clicked restore. There were a couple of warnings about overrighting files and a dialog box asking if I wanted to create a snapshot. After a minute or two of files rapidly scrolling past, the system rebooted. I checked for the presence of Dolphin and the icon was no longer in the menu. Dolphin was gone. But a few things were left behind including .kde file which was still in my home directory. I confirmed later that Voyager is not installed with a .kde directory. So the system restore function doesn’t appear to overwrite configuration files.
Other interesting Programs:
Cover Gloobus – displays information about the now-playing song on your desktop.
Boot Repair – Performs GRUB reinstall, restore UEFI, Secureboot, RAID, LVM MBR restore, Filesystem repair. Boot Repair also is a separate, 508-megabyte iso on Sourceforge.
OS-Uninstaller – a utility that should only be used in a live environment, or so I was told when I clicked on the icon in the menu.
Synapse – a screen-centered search window that allows you to search your desktop for everything from A to V. ( actions to video)
Skippy XD – An exposé-like task switcher. It seemed a little kludgy to me.
FreeTuxTV – I decided to connect with Persian TV’s Channel one– Lo and behold, I was thrust into the Iranian version of Home Shopping Network. I almost bought a Persian rug!
Bleachbit – cleans all manner of kruft from your computer, but does it do windows.
Vokoscreen – Easy to use screencast creator with audio support.
Ranger – ranger is a file manager with VI key bindings. It provides a minimalistic and nice curses interface with a view on the directory hierarchy. The secondary task of ranger is to psychically guess which program you want to use for opening particular files.
Ranger – a file manager with VI key bindings. It provides a minimalistic curses interface with a view on the directory hierarchy. The secondary task of ranger is to psychically guess which program you want to use for opening particular files.
Rating:
Voyager Linux brings the power of Ubuntu/XFCE Xbuntu to the table. It includes more customization that I have seen with Ubuntu derivatives. My biggest knock on this distro is the transparency fetish it seems to have. It was difficult to tell where some tool work spaces ended and the desktop began. The second issue I have with it is that in some cases, beneath a thin veneer of English, lies a whole bunch of French.
So Voyager isn’t exactly a trip up the river without a paddle but there certainly are some things that need to be smoothed out before this distro feels completely comfortable.
I give Voyager Linux a 2.7
Tech News:
Time: 56:00
http://google.com/+SmlrUs/posts
http://google.com/+SmlrUs/about
http://google.com/+SmlrUs/photos
http://google.com/+SmlrUs/videos
http://google.com/+SmlrUs/plusones
Dark Mail Alliance aims to offer Email 3.0, with built-in end-to-end encryption
Google and Samsung sued for patent infringement by major tech consortium
Cisco open sources its H.264 codec, foots licensing bill
http://www.osnews.com/story/27399/Cisco_open_sources_its_H_264_codec_foots_licensing_bill
The Hacker News – Cryptolocker Ransomware
http://thehackernews.com/2013/10/Cryptolocker-Ransomware-Bitcoin-malware-remove-software.html
Security Now
http://twit.tv/show/security-now/427 (video Podcast about security talks about this)
The Security Bit
Time: 1:11:50
Subject:
GPG Stuff
Message:
Dear SMLR Crew,
first, very shortly: love the show, keep it up.
Next, a few things regarding GPG. First of all, to sign each others’ key (i.e. on a keysigning party) you need to check the *whole fingerprint* not just the last eight hexdigits. You can show your fingerprint on the commandline with
gpg –fingerprint [key id]
second, regarding encrypting e-mail to a bunch of people: you indeed encrypt it with every single private key. But it doesn’t take as long as you think. Why is that, you ask? Because GPG uses hybrid encryption. The e-mail itself is encrypted (usually using AES encryption) with a randomly generated symmetric passphrase. And only said passphrase is encrypted with every recipient’s private key, making the whole process less ressource heavy.
pretty much all the keyservers synchronize with each other. So even though I always upload my keys to keys.gnupg.net, you can find them on the sks-keyservers. Also, I found your keys on the keys.gnupg.net servers.
So long, keep it up,
lfodh in the IRC
Linux Convention Scene – November 2013
Time: 1:14:40
LISA 2013
Washington Marriott Wardman Park
2660 Woodley Road NW
Washington, D.C. 20008
https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13
Join us in Washington, D.C., November 3-8, 2013, for the 27th Large Installation System Administration Conference. The annual LISA conference is where the Web operations, DevOps, enterprise computing, educational computing, and research computing communities come together to discuss the present and future of system and network administration
Korea Linux Forum
Ritz-Carlton Seoul
Seoul, South Korea
November 13 – 14, 2013
http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/korea-linux-forum/program/about
The Korea Linux Forum brings together a unique blend of core developers, system administrators, users, community managers, and industry experts. It is designed to foster a stronger relationship between South Korea and the global Linux development community.
Is it Alive?
Time: 1:17:40
Listener Feedback:
show (at) smlr.us or 313-626-9140
Time: 1:22:50
Apropos the sysvinit vs systemd vs upstart questions in Debian.
http://www.braincells.com/debian/index.cgi/search/item=286
Outtro Music
Time:1:39:52
Halloween night by Efrem Scacco
1:18:00
This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
1 Comment
Thanks for the show, entertaining as usual, and really appreciate the compressor, not many squeaky sounds now, I’ll be listening in from the ogg download each week, cheers 🙂