* Posts by Steve Graham

648 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2007

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Linux for older phones postmarketOS changes its init system

Steve Graham

proof

This is proof that systemd is achitecturally wrong. GUI frameworks being dependent on what some people insist on calling an "init system"?

Venturing beyond the default OS on Raspberry Pi 5

Steve Graham

I bought a pair of Pi 4 last year. One plays music through its jack socket to the hifi (so no upgrades to Pi 5 for that one) and displays on the 4k television. The other has no display and runs my cameras and alarm.

Being a systemd-hater, I installed Devuan on both, although there is no official distro release. (There are unofficial images.) It looks as though MX might have been a more supported option.

Tiny Core Linux 15 stuffs modern computing in a nutshell

Steve Graham

it works

In minutes, I've just downloaded the Coreplus ISO, dd'd it onto a USB stick and booted it on an old 32-bit netbook. Screen, touchpad, keyboard and wifi all worked straight away. It even found the swap partition on the hard drive.

FOSS replacement for Partition Magic, Gparted 1.6 is here to save your data

Steve Graham

Actually, on my machine, /boot/efi/EFI contains only debian. It's always good to learn stuff, but I won't be messing with it.

(Kernels, custom compiled, are on the ext4 partition, in /boot).

Steve Graham

Is there really a "special" partition for EFI? I have a relatively recent NUC, and installed Devuan via the standard installer. The drive has a GPT partition table, with one small partition formatted to VFAT with the UEFI files in it. Why couldn't I modify it with the old gparted? [Not that I have any reason to.]

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

Steve Graham

Re: In the absence of files...

"How can one generate a file with one program and open it with another?"

This was exactly what Android and iOS initially tried to prevent. "Files? I see no files, just apps and their data." Obviously, that was nonsense.

Crunchbang++ versus Bunsen Labs: The pair turn it up to 12

Steve Graham

Re: Openbox is No Go on 4K

I don't know what you're doing wrong, but OpenBox works fine on my 4k screen. All I had to do was use Obconf to adjust font sizes. Oh, and install "big-cursor" to make the mouse pointer visible.

I've tried tint2 but prefer xfce4panel (which does come with a system menu). You don't need the full xfce4 suite, but can pick and choose.

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

Steve Graham

OPD

I have a vague memory of having the OPD on my desk at BT, but I think I only used the telephone part of it.

In surprise move, Gentoo Linux starts offering binaries

Steve Graham

Re: How to compile from source

Whoosh! The sound of someone completely missing the point.

Suffering from tab overload? Vivaldi unveils Session Panels

Steve Graham

I've been using Vivaldi as my main general-purpose browser for a while now, but it's looking as though I'm not the target audience. A previous "feature", stacks of tabs, came enabled after one update, and I had to search the internet to find out how to disable it. We'll see if this new, superfluous facility is "opt-in" or "opt-out".

At most, I might have 3 open tabs at once, and even then, I can only read one of them at a time.

Kernel kerfuffle kiboshes Debian 12.3 release

Steve Graham

Man, you squares are so out of touch. I'm currently compiling festive Linux 6.6.6 (Santa is an anagram of Satan.)

How to deorbit the Chromebook... and repurpose it for innovators

Steve Graham

When my armchair-based netbook kicked the bucket, I took a look on eBay for recently support-expired Chromebooks, expecting them to be cheap. But sellers were paying no mind to the end of updates, and expired ones were around the same price as ones with a year or two of updates remaining.

Systemd 255 is here with improved UKI support

Steve Graham

Doing it wrong

There are still people who refer to systemd as an "init system". Why should an init system give a flying fig about the directory structure its OS is using? Actually, why should anything care about the underlying directory structure? A distro which perversely renamed or restructured the entire heirarchy would still be Linux.

(I have no strong opinions on /bin vs /usr/bin etc. My latest fresh Devuan install left them separate.)

17% of Spotify employees face the music in latest cost-cutting shuffle

Steve Graham

If they can lay off this percentage of the staff...

Have you heard of "Twitter"?

Steve Graham

Actually, Bandcamp explicitly forbids cover versions which are not licenced. Anyway, who wants Big Labels' music, apart from the musically illiterate public?

HP printer software turns up uninvited on Windows systems

Steve Graham
Big Brother

They ARE out to get you

Call me paranoid, but my reaction to that news was the suspicion that HP are paying Microsoft to ensure that everyone gets the latest drivers. The ones that brick your printer if it doesn't have genuine HP cartridges.

Steve Graham

Re: Maybe there's an HP device visible from wifi or bluetooth?

My previous house was quite isolated in a rural area. My nearest neighbours were about half a kilometre away across the fields, and I could "see" their wifi printer.

Canonical shows how to use Snaps without the Snap Store

Steve Graham

All these packaging products exist because it's "too hard" to maintain dependencies these days. Or is it just that the developers aren't smart enough to come up with a better solution?

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 6.6 after running out of excuses for further work

Steve Graham

Being retired now and just a hobbyist, I like to have a very recent kernel on my main machine. It's not doing anything vital. But I do always wait for the x.x.1 release or later.

(And I will certainly not be including the SMB nonsense.)

How 'AI watermarking' system pushed by Microsoft and Adobe will and won't work

Steve Graham

It's a great database for training their AI.

Make-me-root 'Looney Tunables' security hole on Linux needs your attention

Steve Graham

If you have a hostile entity logged in to your box you're screwed anyway.

iPhone 15 is too hot to handle – and not in any good way

Steve Graham
Big Brother

Shirley if it's getting hot in your pocket, it's doing some heavy processing at a time you'd expect it to be idle? Paranoia ensues.

These days you can teach old tech a bunch of new tricks

Steve Graham

Booting DOS?

Just as a matter of interest, why can't you boot DOS on a UEFI machine? (In spite of the length of my grey beard, I am UEFI newbie, having acquired my first such PC only a couple of months ago.)

Intel NUCs find fresh life in Asus, but rights are 'non-exclusive'

Steve Graham

Reader, I bought one.

I bought a 12th-gen one recently, to replace my ancient i5 laptop. I'm very happy with it. There is a fan, but it only kicks in occasionally and is quiet enough for me, even sitting on the desk 50cm from my ears. I had no problems installing Linux on it, and Intel even maintain (currently) a .deb archive for firmware and video drivers.

Version 5 of systemd-free Debian remix Devuan is here

Steve Graham

It CAN be easy

Here's how I installed Devuan on 2 new Raspberry Pi 4s recently.

1. Downloaded a 4Gb system image.

2. Used the dd command to write it to a micro SD card.

3. Used gparted to resize the 4Gb partition to fill the 64Gb card.

4. Booted it.

What DARPA wants, DARPA gets: A non-hacky way to fix bugs in legacy binaries

Steve Graham

Re: Forgive me, please

Wouldn't Brendan "jumps-the-cheese" be closer translation?

Western Digital sued over claims of data-trashing SanDisk, My Passport SSDs

Steve Graham

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

"my data recovery company" means the company he selected to recover his data. That's where the "580$" comes in. (Oddly putting the currency sign after the digits. Not something a dollar user would do?)

Alarm raised over Mozilla VPN: Wonky authorization check lets users cause havoc

Steve Graham

Decrease the attack surface.

This is why I de-install polkit on any new Linux installation, and if any package imports it as an essential dependency, I nuke all the executables.

Orkney islands look to drones to streamline mail deliveries

Steve Graham

The Hebrides have tried rocket mail. In 1934, two solid-fuel rockets packed with letters exploded in the sky over Harris & Scarp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mail

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

Steve Graham

There were "versions" which weren't "released"?

Steve Graham

Re: Of course, hibernation predates systemd (been around a long time in Linux)

I have a little netbook which I use if I don't want to get out of the armchair...

The power button toggles suspend-to-ram, which means that it "boots" in less than a second if I need it. Obviously, if I don't charge the battery for a week, or however long it takes, once recharged, pressing the power button will do a normal cold boot.

I do have a script that does a suspend-to-disk if the battery gets very low, but of course, that only works when the device is alive. Historically, I've always created swap partitions larger tham memory size, but I'm pretty sure that suspend-to-disk does compression anyway.

Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

Steve Graham

Re: Off topic

I wrote a script which polls the council's website and scrapes the bin collection dates. It then changes an icon on my home page to tell me which bin to put out. It must save me literally seconds every month.

Of course, it will break if they make even a tiny change to the format of their page.

OctoX is a radical Rust implementation of a very old OS for RISC-V

Steve Graham

Re: Silly comments

Pertinent to Silly Comments but not v6: one of my colleagues prefaced a 60-character regular expression with the comment "Work this one out, you bastard."

Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023

Steve Graham

Re: nostalgic start

A couple of years ago I found a stash of installation floppies and even a CD in the attic (I was moving house) and got OS/2 Warp working except that if I booted it a second time, it thought it was being installed from scratch again and asked for all the floppies in turn. I fiddled with it for a while but didn't get any further before I lost interest.

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Steve Graham
Trollface

Re: I'd just like to interject for a moment

It's not the real GNU operating system unless it runs on the GNU Hurd.

Steve Graham

If ChromeOS is Linux...

...why have I never been able to get it running in a Qemu/KVM virtual machine? To install ChromeOS Flex, you had to tell it what the hardware was, and only some specific machines would be accepted.

Or has that changed?

If it's open source, I suppose I could build a version from scratch.

Intel pulls plug on mini-PC NUCs

Steve Graham

Just as I was thinking of buying one...

I've just replaced 2 home "servers" -- security and media streaming -- with Raspberry Pis. Both were antique laptops. (I was spurred into action by the fan failing on the Thinkpad for the second time.)

My everyday computer is also a laptop, driving two screens, but also long in the tooth. I was thinking that a small, fanless unit would be a good upgrade, but I'd want more power than a Pi.

I wonder what this decision will do to prices.

Free Wednesday gift for you lucky lot: Extra mouse button!

Steve Graham

Re: mouse that has a non-wheel middle key

Mine has a button behind the wheel, plus two more for the thumb (if you're right-handed). £4.99 from Home Bargains or somesuch.

What it takes to keep an enterprise 'Frankenkernel' alive

Steve Graham

Re: Missing fixes are hard to detect, one must not use these dangerous kernels

These were my thoughts too. Why not spend the same effort testing, and if necessary, debugging a kernel release from Torvalds?

I've been compiling my own kernels from kernel.org for almost 20 years now and have never had one that crashed or wouldn't boot. (Except once when I forgot to include the new-fangled ATA drivers.) OK, so I'm a hobbyist, not an enterprise.

Raspberry Pi production rate rising to a million a month

Steve Graham

Bugger

I just bought a second-hand Pi 4 4Gb at about £10 over the new price, if you could obtain one.

(It arrived today. I booted it up, and of course, it has systemd. I felt unclean until I downloaded and installed a Devuan image.)

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

Steve Graham

Apple did this themselves

I remember that a version of iTunes would delete music files from local storage and use the "cloud" version instead. It worked from the song title and artist, and so it upset people who had an alternate or rare version of the music, and found that it had been deleted forever and replaced by a pointer to the mainstream version.

First ever 64-bit version of Windows rediscovered … and a C compiler for it too

Steve Graham

...the people creating NT were poached from DEC

Primarily Dave Cutler. We had the VMS source code and he had written most of it.

Asahi Linux developer warns the one true way is Wayland

Steve Graham

Re: Nope

Come back to me when I can run it across a network like I do with Xorg every day.

YouTube's 'Ad blockers not allowed' pop-up scares the bejesus out of netizens

Steve Graham

Re: The internet is in it's death throws.

Also, it's "its".

When it comes to Linux distros, one person's molehill is another's mountain

Steve Graham

My own quirk is that I dislike bloat. I've used Debian, and then Devuan for about 20 years, and I constantly strip out stuff that isn't necessary. Things like Avahi, which is installed by default, and appears to be a piece of software that runs constantly, waiting for me to buy a new printer. Consolekit claims to "keep track of seats". I have one seat. And so on.

Recently, I installed Devuan from scratch on an old laptop from the official ISO, and then spent about 2 days removing packages.

This led me to my current little project, which is to create a bootable image which has busybox, dpkg and apt-get, so that I can install a system by adding, rather than subtracting, packages.

Google halts purge of legacy ad blockers and other Chrome Extensions, again

Steve Graham

Re: user scripts, which allow the execution of arbitrary JavaScript

User scripts are installed by the user and live on his or her device. They aren't random bits of code that download and run.

On these web pages, I have one called "WiderReg", which I wrote to expand the content and remove useless white space on The Register.

Privacy fail: Pictures cropped, redacted by Google Pixel phones can be recovered

Steve Graham

The bug is in the image manipulation software, not the phone. I point this out because my phone is, in fact, a Google Pixel, but it runs the extensively de-googlified microG version of Android, and has no Google image-editing tools.

Vessels claiming to be Chinese warships are messing with passenger planes

Steve Graham

Chinese military: "Chinese warships are conducting sensitive manouevres in this area. Please divert."

Australian military: "Oh, a target for our suveillance aircraft."

Steve Graham

Re: Air safety is an International issue

In pre-GPS times, my first solo flight away from my home airport took me over the wide open, uninhabited areas of Georgia (USA). When I turned around to come home, the sun was lower and there was a haze and I couldn't see a fucking thing. The airport had an omnidirectional beacon at the end of the runway though, leading to happy landings.

A new version of APT is coming to Debian 12

Steve Graham

But hasn't non-free software always been available in the Debian repos? I used Debian from pre-1.0 days until moving to Devuan to avoid systemd. If I count the packages now with "nonfree" or "non-free" in their one-line description, there are 27 hits.

$ apt-cache search ""|grep -c "nonfree\|non-free"

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