312: What Modern Linux Looks Like

07/31/19 • 57 min

Manjaro takes significant steps to stand out, and the shared problem major distributions are trying to solve, and why it will shape the future of Linux.

Plus macOS apps on Linux, and our first impressions of the Raspberry Pi 4.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Drew DeVore, Martin Wimpress, Neal Gompa, and Philip Muller.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

ThinkTiny — The ThinkTiny is a miniature laptop computer with a 0.96 inch display and a design that’s heavily inspired by Lenovo/IBM ThinkPad style. There’s even a TrackPoint-like pointing nub.
Darling Picks Up New Contributors For Its macOS Compatibility Layer On Linux — Darling is the long-standing (albeit for some years idling) effort to allow macOS binaries to run on Linux that is akin to Wine but focused on an Apple macOS layer rather than Windows. This summer it's been moving along and seeing some new developer contributions.
Darling Progress Report Q2 2019 — We are very excited to say that in Q2 2019 (April 1 to June 30) we saw more community involvement than ever before. Many pull requests were submitted that spanned from bug fixes for our low level assembly to higher level modules such as the AppKit framework. Thanks to everyone for your contributions and we hope for this level of engagement to continue.
Raspberry Pi 4 Desktop Kit — Full desktop computer kit - just connect to HDMI display(s)
Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now from $35 — A 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 CPU (~3× performance)
Raspberry Pi 4 Ubuntu Server 18.04.2 Install / Config Guide — Right now there is a memory limitation of 1 GB in 64 bit mode on the Raspberry Pi 4. This is apparently due to the SD card driver breaking when more than 1 GB of RAM is present. This will all be solved eventually but until then I recommend using the 32 bit version of Ubuntu or waiting until the Raspberry Pi 4 support catches up. If you want to run the 64 bit one now anyway it works fine other than the memory limitation.
Raspberry Pi 4 on Arch Linux ARM
Fedora 30 - Rasbberry Pi 4 support - arm - Fedora Mailing-Lists
Manjaro announces partnership, will start shipping closed source FreeOffice suite by default — Additionally we ship FreeOffice 491 by default. This is possible since we partnered up with Softmaker 70.
[Testing Update] 2019-07-29 - Kernels, XFCE 4.14-pre3, Haskell - Announcements / Testing Updates - Manjaro Linux Forum
Phil's GitHub
Ubucon Europe 2019 – Sintra, 10th-13th October — Ubucon is an event organized by the Ubuntu Communities from all around the world. The focus of the event is Ubuntu, an open source, community-driven and free linux distribution, and other free and open source technologies. This year, this event will be organized in Sintra, Portugal, in October 2019. We are preparing four full days of sprints, workshops, conferences, talks an...

Manjaro takes significant steps to stand out, and the shared problem major distributions are trying to solve, and why it will shape the future of Linux.

Plus macOS apps on Linux, and our first impressions of the Raspberry Pi 4.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Drew DeVore, Martin Wimpress, Neal Gompa, and Philip Muller.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

ThinkTiny — The ThinkTiny is a miniature laptop computer with a 0.96 inch display and a design that’s heavily inspired by Lenovo/IBM ThinkPad style. There’s even a TrackPoint-like pointing nub.
Darling Picks Up New Contributors For Its macOS Compatibility Layer On Linux — Darling is the long-standing (albeit for some years idling) effort to allow macOS binaries to run on Linux that is akin to Wine but focused on an Apple macOS layer rather than Windows. This summer it's been moving along and seeing some new developer contributions.
Darling Progress Report Q2 2019 — We are very excited to say that in Q2 2019 (April 1 to June 30) we saw more community involvement than ever before. Many pull requests were submitted that spanned from bug fixes for our low level assembly to higher level modules such as the AppKit framework. Thanks to everyone for your contributions and we hope for this level of engagement to continue.
Raspberry Pi 4 Desktop Kit — Full desktop computer kit - just connect to HDMI display(s)
Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now from $35 — A 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 CPU (~3× performance)
Raspberry Pi 4 Ubuntu Server 18.04.2 Install / Config Guide — Right now there is a memory limitation of 1 GB in 64 bit mode on the Raspberry Pi 4. This is apparently due to the SD card driver breaking when more than 1 GB of RAM is present. This will all be solved eventually but until then I recommend using the 32 bit version of Ubuntu or waiting until the Raspberry Pi 4 support catches up. If you want to run the 64 bit one now anyway it works fine other than the memory limitation.
Raspberry Pi 4 on Arch Linux ARM
Fedora 30 - Rasbberry Pi 4 support - arm - Fedora Mailing-Lists
Manjaro announces partnership, will start shipping closed source FreeOffice suite by default — Additionally we ship FreeOffice 491 by default. This is possible since we partnered up with Softmaker 70.
[Testing Update] 2019-07-29 - Kernels, XFCE 4.14-pre3, Haskell - Announcements / Testing Updates - Manjaro Linux Forum
Phil's GitHub
Ubucon Europe 2019 – Sintra, 10th-13th October — Ubucon is an event organized by the Ubuntu Communities from all around the world. The focus of the event is Ubuntu, an open source, community-driven and free linux distribution, and other free and open source technologies. This year, this event will be organized in Sintra, Portugal, in October 2019. We are preparing four full days of sprints, workshops, conferences, talks an...

Previous Episode

311: 32 Hours of Outrage

Keynote presenter from Texas LinuxFest and established industry expert Thomas Cameron joins us to discuss the end of the distro wars, the future of Linux jobs, his personal take on IBM's acquisition of Red Hat, some really great Linux job tips, and much more.

Plus we catch up on some community news from old friends, complain about a few Linux bugs, and share a "magical" app pick.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Martin Wimpress, and Thomas Cameron.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

Hiding Data In Music Might Be The Key To Ditching Coffee Shop WiFi Passwords | Hackaday — By encoding data into the audible range of music, coffee shops could broadcast their WiFi passwords inside their Sia-heavy playlists. (Why is it always Sia?) Cell phones could then detect the password and automatically connect.
Dropbox added support for zfs, eCryptFS, xfs, and btrfs filesystems — The latest version 77.3.127 Dropbox added support for zfs (on 64-bit systems only), eCryptFS, xfs (on 64-bit systems only), and btrfs filesystems.
Fedora To Stop Providing i686 Kernels, Might Also Drop 32-Bit Modular/Everything Repos - Phoronix — Under this secondary proposal, Fedora 31 would stop producing and distributing Modular and Everything i686 repositories.
Changes/Noi686Repositories - Fedora Project Wiki — Stop producing and distributing the Modular and Everything i686 repositories.
Kernel 5.2 KVM VFIO Bug
LinuxServer Joins Open Collective
Download – Endeavour OS — We’re proud to present you our very first stable release
Passing the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam — Whether you need the Cloud Practitioner certification for work or as a personal goal, studying and staying on track is hard because life gets in the way. Join this study group and we’ll help you pass the exam by meeting on a bi-weekly basis and going over the main topics covered in the certification exam.
Free Cloud Courses at Linux Academy
Thomas Cameron at Texas Linux Fest 2019 — Thomas Cameron has been an IT Professional since 1993. He's worked with Linux at multinational financial services companies, transportation companies, manufacturing, and more. He's a Red Hat Certified Architect, and was a regional chief architect at Red Hat. He's currently on the Amazon Linux team at Amazon.
Serverbuilds.net
The Perfect Media Server - 2019 Edition — There's a ton of resources on serverbuilds but you should definitely take a few minutes to browse the excellent CPU spreadsheet before buying a new CPU. You'll probably think twice about that Sandy Bridge chip now (in a good way).
croc: Easily and securely send things from one computer to another — croc is a tool that allows any two computers to simply and securely transfer files and folders.
GPD Products

Next Episode

313: I Spy With My Little Pi

We put the Raspberry Pi 4 to the desktop test, and try it as our daily driver.

Plus some neat and powerful uses for recent Pis, and our thoughts on Manjaro's change of heart.

Special Guests: Alan Pope, Alex Kretzschmar, and Brent Gervais.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

Millions of Books Are Secretly in the Public Domain. You Can Download Them Free — Prior to 1964, books had a 28-year copyright term. Extending it required authors or publishers to send in a separate form, and lots of people didn't end up doing that. Thanks to the efforts of the New York Public Library, many of those public domain books are now free online.
About FreeOffice - it's not being installed by default - Announcements - Manjaro Linux Forum — Manjaro will not be installing FreeOffice by default. This isn't happening.
Join the new Minimization Team - devel-announce - Fedora Mailing-Lists — I'm starting a Minimization Objective focusing on minimising the installation size of some of the popular apps, runtimes, and other pieces of software in Fedora.
Google Engineers Get Windows Booting When Kexec'ed Under Linux - Phoronix — An interesting summer internship at Google has led to an experimental effort to get Microsoft Windows running via Kexec from Linux. The engineers involved have been implementing enough of the EFI Boot Services to be able to kexec Windows from Linux.
Roy Hopkins on Twitter — That's a coincidence. Today I managed to boot Windows 10 directly from Linux on a real platform using a kernel module to emulate UEFI. I hate to say it but achieving ExitBootServices is only the beginning...
LinuxBoot — LinuxBoot is a firmware for modern servers that replaces specific firmware functionality like the UEFI DXE phase with a Linux kernel and runtime.
The 2019 SeaGL CFP is open for business! | Seattle GNU/Linux Conference — Calling all speakers or speakers-to-be! Our 2019 Call for Proposals is open!
Chris Fisher on Instagram — Raspberry Pi 4 desktop kit unboxing
Benchmarking the Raspberry Pi 4 - Gareth Halfacree — Although appearing similar at first glance, the new board is slightly larger thanks to ports extending further from the PCB for improved case compatibility, the Ethernet and USB ports have been switched around, the power input is now a USB Type-C connector, and the full-size HDMI output has been swapped out for not one but two micro-HDMI connectors.
Chris' pi4 Benchmarks
Rpi4-sql Benchmarks - OpenBenchmarking.org
RPI4-CPU-PERF Benchmarks - OpenBenchmarking.org