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TSAC: Very Low Bitrate Audio Compression — from fabrice bellard.
Various symbols in the 3rd level and up — There is a feature in Linux that allows you to enter various Unicode symbols by typing level 3 key + letter or level 5 key + letter (possibly with shift also held). DEs usually have an option to turn on additional typography characters or Unicode arrows on numpad this way. That wasn’t enough for me, so I made my own, err, table or whatever files in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols are called. It has superscript and subscript digits, Esperanto letters,...
So, I tried to fumble a little with Linux syscalls and tried to implement a program that restarts the computer. [preformatted] After a quick, successful test, I checked how others implement the reboot. To my surprise, busybox tries to send a signal to init instead of using the reboot syscall, like I did. This makes me wonder, why that is.
Void Linux! So far so good! — I've become a distrohopper in spite of myself. And so I blew away Alpine and installed Void, which, so far, is great. Installing it was actually a lot easier than getting Alpine from barebones to XFCE. I had to rerun the ncurses-based installer a couple of times because of some disk partitioning confusion, but it was about 30 minutes from nothing to LibreWolf and Lagrange working. I don't know if it's really more minimal than Xubuntu, but at least it's a...
Alpine: No tor-browser? No librewolf? — The honeymoon is over. I tried to install librewolf, my go-to browser with no telemetry, but could not get it to work, even with libc-6 compatibility apk installed. Next I tried to install tor browser. There is a tor package which ran once, but apparently it is just the transport, no browser, which is a serious security problem. And after a ctrl-c, I was unable to restart tor at all. All of it is weird: I know Firefox is a bit weird with libc, but...
Alpine Linux it is... — Well, I moved my main machine to Alpine Linux. I installed XFCE for now, to get a better sense of it. Alpine seems to not automount USB drives, which was something that annoyed me to no end with FreeBSD... Maybe there is a way to do it, as I have a stack of backup drives that I need to work on... I botched the XFCE install a little by screwing around with X a bit, so the login screen flashes for a second and disappears... It's still there and I can log in, but I can't...
Ubuntu Pro: WTF? — I've been using XUbuntu for over a decade now, I think... Mostly OK, my main complaint was that it's getting bigger than I am comfortable with - way too many processes running that I cannot explain, etc... But it appears that it is hoding back released updates of opensource software unless I pay them, or at least register (why?) as an individual. I think it's time for me to go to a simpler distro that is not collecting personal information.
Wanted: a step up from dwm... — I am looking to upgrade from dwm to something a little bit easier to configure. I love dwm, and am generally happy with it. But I need a little more flexibility -- just a little. Maybe different kind of layouts in different windows (or tags or whatever). And while I am fluent in C, I find the way configuration works clumsy and hard to maintain, especially when patches are involved. However, it seems that every time I look at other tiling wms, they instantly...
Experiment: /etc/ in Git — I’ve read about NixOS and I like the idea of putting OS configuration in Git. But I’m not sold for the package management of NixOS, it seems like kind of wrapper for traditional Linux? I’m not fan of wrappers as they usually are lacking some functionality of wrapped environment or simplify things too much and lacks flexibility in result. But is there anything preventing me from creating Git repository for whole /etc/? I’ve decided to test it on my Arch machine. The...
Linux Foundation now spends only 2% of their revenue on Linux. The Linux Foundation has released their 2023 Annual Report... and it is an absolute doozy. The first big headline? As of 2023, The Linux Foundation now spends just 2% -- that's two percent -- of their revenue on their namesake: The Linux Kernel. "Ask yourself this: If there is a foundation named after a specific thing... what percentage of that foundation's revenue would you expect to be spent on said thing? Let's say... "Save...
Suggestions for Trinity Desktop — I am planning to reinstall the OS on my ThinkPad T400, and I'd like to try using the Trinity desktop environment. Can you suggest some distributions that work well with TDE?
Pinebook Pro — Background: I've been a desktop Linux user for the past 10+ years. I've had an ARM Chromebook for the last 6. My Chromebook is basically just a web browser/ssh terminal with a keyboard attached, I don't use it for anything else. I'm thinking about replacing the Chromebook with a pinebook Pro, mostly in anticipation of chrome not allowing adblockers anymore, but also as part of a longer term goal of degoogling my life. Does anyone have any experience with the pinebook? My main...
Newsboat RSS reader acting weird — Hi there! Any Newsboat users here? I'm trying to force myself to learn how to use the Terminal, and Newsboat is the first app I installed... But there's a command that doesn't seem to work... Hitting Shift + E is supposed to open the urls file in a text editor, but nothing happens... As I'm very new to all of this, I have no idea what I should be looking for in order to fix this... Any ideas please? I'm on an Ubuntu based machine... Thank you in advance....
Fedora SilverBlue first try — I spent some time trying out Fedora SilverBlue today. That is a version of Fedora the has an immutable system install. You install apps on top of the system as Flatpaks or containers so you aren't modifying the base system itself. I had installed it on a Zima Board PC which has a lower powered Celeron with 8GB RAM. I did this last month, so when I fired it up again today there was a system update available. I ran the upgrade via command line and it went well,...
Enabling Subpixel Hinting for dwm — Recently I switched to dwm on all my machines which were originally XUbuntu. On 4K monitors things look fine, but recently I set up a box with a 2560 x 1080 LG monitor, and I noticed that fonts look crappy. Switching to an LXDE or XUbuntu session makes LibreFox look fine again, so it has to do with how dwm starts up. After much searching and I found that I don't have a .fonts.conf file for fontconfig, and creating one seems to solve the problem (if you...
Address Randomization Tribulations — So, I have a tiny 32-bit application (a Forth) taking up about 4K, written in fasm. Pure minimalism, including an iffy elf header that fasm creates, with a fixed load address. More on that later. It's been unstable, and I tracked the instability down to the initial memory allocation. Right at the start I add my desired memory size to the code base (the top label in asm code), and invoke `brk` system call. This worked as long as I allocated a largish...
binary file reported as 'no such file or directory' upon execution — This has to be the weirdest behavior ever. A small utility that works fine on my main machine was copied over to my Thinkpad, running identical XUbuntu. Fails on ThinkPad only I can ls it, permissions are fine, even HD and objdump look reasonable. When I try to invoke it from command line, bash reports that it does not exist. strace shows execve with correct path, craps with ENOENT (no such file or directory) It's like it...
XDG, default apps, mess... — I am having way too much trouble doing something very simple. I have two machines with XUbuntu but dwm'ed. I want to be able to look at files. I started with PCManFM (from inertia), and using xdg-mime configured text/plain to open vim.desktop (5Kb of yuck!). On one box it works, on the other it opens vim in a 80x24 space, after which status text gets printed at the bottom, arrows scroll past the editable 80x24 region, and the whole thing is a mess, although in a...
I used to love distro-hopping, but for the last couple of years I've been so satisfied with Arch that I haven't been trying anything else. This morning one of my PCs needed a new OS because of power issues. I was shopping around, tried NixOS since people have been talking about it lately. I even booted into Manjaro since it's basically Arch anyway. But then I finally installed plain old Arch and it's just what I want. 🤷 It's nice to find something I'm happy with, but I did enjoy...
Did anyone else get a Beepy, aka Beepberry? — I just got one a few days ago and it's pretty cool. Kind of like a smaller PocketCHIP. I'm using a Pi Zero W in it for now because I already had a few on hand but would like to try the RISC V MangoPi MQ Pro eventually. I wrote up some first impressions on my gemlog.
Posting this from Amfora running on a linux distro contained entirely within the kernel image, bit hacky but it works
Anybody have useful git aliases they would like to share? One that really helps me that I've defined is `co = !git checkout "$(git branch -a | fzf)"`. This lets me type `git co`, pick a branch interactively from the list, which then checks out that branch. (I know if I properly set up shell completions I'd get suggested branch names by hitting tab, but the fuzzy search behavior from fzf is really nice.)
Question: How do I compile the Linux kernel? — By which I mean, what compiler flags, options and configs should I look out for, such that my kernel will actually succesfully run? I am talking about QEMU without KVM as the platform.
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