Is It Microsoft Or Intel Blocking Linux?

I heard about this story somewhere else, but this is a brief write up on the situation.

People have not been able to install Linux on recent Lenovo laptops. The immediate response was an attack on Microsoft. Considering that Microsoft made it clear they wanted to block Linux install, via secureboot, in the past, makes this an understandable reaction.

However, it was later discovered that Intel, of all compaines, decided not to make sure their new power management features are supported by Linux.

Two things strike me as odd about this. It’s true that in the past Microsoft has made many attempts at controlling what software people can use on computers, but since Satya Nadella has been CEO of Microsoft, the company has taken a cloud centric focus and has been working with Linux instead of against it.

Similarly, since Intel has started creating somewhat competent graphics processors, the company has been contributing open source code back to Linux to support their graphics system. An unheard of, at the time, concept for a graphics vendor to do.

We believe this may be due to Intel being fairly new to the game, and older companies have certain code, possibly in the form of license violations or trade secretes, that they don’t want discovered.

So this really doesn’t make sense, at least with the current state of affairs, for either company to want to block Linux support (or even stall to add support). Even though Lenovo laptops have been known to work well with Linux since before Lenovo even acquired its line of laptops from IBM, has anyone considered that Lenovo may be somehow behind this block?

Some companies (I’m looking at you HP)  void warranties if Linux is installed. Could this just be a new line of processors designed to give vendors more control? I doubt it, but we should always be skeptical.

The Dragonbox Pyra

Every month it gets  closer and closer. I was hoping to get it before the end of the year, but that’s looking less and less likely every update.

The Dragonbox Pyra is the successor to the Open Pandora. These devices are pocket sized, Arm based, Linux computers.

Ever since I was young, I’ve wanted a computer that I could fit in my pocket. A real one. Not this bogus Android crap, or even worse, iPhone, but more like what people say about their Nokia N900. A real computer.

The Pyra mostly focuses on being a handheld retro gaming device, which should be obvious considering the built in gaming controls, but it will also features a keyboard which turns it into an amazing mini-computer.

The Pyra will ship with a 1.5ghz dual core Arm processor, 2/4GB of ram, and can optionally ship with a GSM chip that will give it all the features of a modern mobile device that are now built into the GSM modem such as GPS and the accelerometer.

Interestingly, the designer of the  project has designed everything to be easily taken apart and put the CPU on its own board. Provided enough units are sold, new CPU boards will be created to sell to users as a drop in replacement.

The biggest problem most people (read: non-enthusiasts) will have is the price. The prices range from the 2GB WiFi only version (500 EUR/ 561.13 USD) to the 4GB mobile edition (626 EUR/ 702.53USD).

The Pyra is currently being sold as a pre-order in two payments. The first is 330/400 EUR which is the WiFi and the mobile versions respectively, and the second payment is the rest of the price of the unit once they are ready to ship.

 

 

dtrx Makes Me Happy

Many distributions have a nifty little tool called “dtrx” hidden in their repository.

What is dtrx? One word. Happiness.

dtrx takes all the thinking out of dealing with extracting and uncompromising archives. Seriously, all of it.

Let’s say I have a zip file. All I have to do is run “dtrx foo.zip” and dtrx will extract it.

I created a test zip file and uninstalled unzip and p7zip for demonstration purposes. So in this case I don’t have anything that can unzip my test file. What does dtrx say about that?

logen@plagling ~/D/fuck> dtrx testzip.zip
dtrx: ERROR: could not handle testzip.zip
dtrx: ERROR: treating as Zip file failed: could not run unzip
dtrx: ERROR: treating as 7z file failed: could not run 7z
logen@plagling ~/D/fuck>

Oh, I apparently don’t have 7z or unzip, guess I need to get one of those to get it to work.

Download one of those and it works now. No more remembering to use unzip/tar -xvzf/tar -xjvf or whatever else. dtrx handles it all of that for us.

But that’s not all it does.

If the archive doesn’t extract to the place that dtrx expects it to extract to, so if the folder name isn’t the same name as the archive,  dtrx will bring up a prompt asking if we want to do.

For example:

logen@plagling ~/Downloads> dtrx dogecoin-1.10.0-linux64.tar.gz
dogecoin-1.10.0-linux64.tar.gz contains one directory but its name doesn’t match.
Expected: dogecoin-1.10.0-linux64
Actual: dogecoin-1.10.0/
You can:
* extract the directory _I_nside a new directory named dogecoin-1.10.0-linux64
* extract the directory and _R_ename it dogecoin-1.10.0-linux64
* extract the directory _H_ere
What do you want to do?  (I/r/h)

So no more issues with crappy zip files that want to dump everything into the current directory instead of creating a new one to dump the files.

Of course, that’s not the issue found in the above example, but it does help illustrate how dtrx can be a headache saver.

If you use the command line at all, and you haven’t discovered dtrx yet, get it. It’s nothing short of amazing. In fact, it’s usually the first package I get on any new install.

Wouldn’t it be cool if….

Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a live Linux distro that we could put onto a USB that was for gaming? That’s what I would like to do. Specifically, a live distro that loads into ram that can accomplish this.

Now, I realize that a substantial amount of memory would be needed to do something crazy like load a huge steam library into memory, but if it’s only a few games, I don’t see why this would be too much of an issue.

Currently, I only have access to computers that have, at most, 8GB of RAM. Not very much, but even a KDE based live distro is only going to be around half a gigabyte, assuming there are not a ton of unnecessary packages anyway. With a smaller games, this is certainly possible.

I went around looking at a few Linux distros that are known to work well in a live environment. Specifically, PcLinuxOS, Alpine, and Porteus.

The first two I only tried in QEMU. With Alpine, I wasn’t able to get X to boot, but it seems more focused towards routers anyway, and PcLinuxOS I couldn’t get to boot into its live environment. A couple days later I found Proteus.

Perhaps I’ll write a review on Proteus later, but let’s just say it is similar to SLAX in that it’s based on Slackware and uses modules instead of normal packages, and it’s exceptionally easy to convert DEBs, RPMs, and even folders into modules.

So far I’ve managed to install steam and run a game called “99 levels to hell”. However, as usual, running Linux from a USB stick doesn’t work very well because they don’t seem to have the best i/o when it comes to reading/writing multiple locations at once, but I was able to play the game with no significant lag out side of starting it up and the title screen.

So, I think it may be possible.

Porteus does have a RAM mode, but it did not load my steam folder directly into ram and the stick seemed to work as a home directory (couldn’t access it once I removed the stick). I think if I convert the .local/steam folder into a module, I might be able to get it to load into memory as well. Hopefully I’ll have tried it by my next post.

Enjoy!

EOMA68

First a link to the video I’m referencing:

 

And a link to the crowdsource:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop

In short, this is a fully functioning arm based computer that fits in a PCMIA housing. In addition to the computer, people can get various housings to plug it into.

There is currently a desktop housing which is basically a laptop dock and a laptop housing.

The goal behind these computers is “plug it in and it works” with a sub goal of following the libre philosophy.

Sounds like a cool mini-Linux computer, but it just doesn’t work for me.

Copied from what I said on google plus:

I don’t know why I should care about this. I can buy a fully functional laptop from ebay and use that everywhere. In fact, that’s what I did.

So the libre part is cool, but other than that, why would I care?

The 3d printed laptop is too expensive for a shell.

The “micro desktop” thing seems interesting, but this is an arm device. Why do I want a desktop arm device? I can just use the laptop.

I just don’t get it.

So yea, why do I care? Instead of lugging my laptop around, a Lenovo T-420, I get to carry around a laptop shell and a computer card? What’s the difference?

Possible future Upgrading is cool, but if I’m going to have an ARM computer it better have killer battery life, but it doesn’t. They figure around 8 hours.

That sounds good, but there have been reports of old Lenovo laptops running for 24 hours on battery mode only. Granted, it requires using a battery in the ultrabay port and a battery in the dock port, but it can do it.

So I have a 2011 laptop, and I’d argue this also applies to the 2007 R61 laptop, that I can carry everywhere, have more power, and have longer battery life.

Sure, not having binary blobs would be nice, but that’s not enough of an incentive to switch to an overall worse computer.

Heck, if I really wanted to, I could buy a bus pirate and flash coreboot on my T420. It still won’t be completely libre, but close enough.

As for desktop mode, I can just buy a dock for my laptop. Problem solved.

I guess my real problem is, what does this product solve for me that an old laptop can’t?

My laptop is not all that upgradable, I’ll give it that, but I’m sure it’ll be a decade before these computers will be close to the power of my laptop. Even then, their goal is to provide “good enough computing” and it would surprise me if the Lenovo t-420 can’t supply that 10 years from now.

Oh, I didn’t yet address their “earth friendly” goal. What’s more “earth friendly” than using old hardware? I suppose it would be good for the future of hardware, but then they are going to have to have high end components if people are going to buy into it.

If I can play the latest AAA games on it, I might be interested. But for a low end computer? I may as well just pick up a 4 year old laptop.

Why did I decide Void Linux?

Hmm, that’s a great question.

I happened upon it while looking for an escape from systemd, and all other distributions I was using at the time were disappointing me. systemd was just the push over the edge.

Before Void I was using Sabayon and Arch Linux. Sabayon worked pretty well for me, but only in a very limited capacity. I like the idea behind using pre-compiled Gentoo and the concept of “updates every Saturday yet still rolling release” is very compelling to me.

But, installing and updating packages was an incredibly time consuming process (and at time confusing and difficult), and it was very prone to catastrophic failure if I decided to install the wrong thing in the wrong way or if Xorg decided to update.

Before that I was big into ArchLinux, but Arch ended up being too unstable for me. Any distribution that requires me to regularly check the news to make sure I don’t break it by updating at the wrong time isn’t for me.

So, I started using Void Linux because I was looking for something better, but why did I stay?

XBPS (the package manager) is fast. Runit (the systemd alternative) is fast. Everything about Void is fast. That’s reason enough alone to use it. And to top it off, it’s a rolling release distribution that doesn’t break every third update.

Though I must admit XBPS is a bit of a pain to use due to the “Unix Philosophy” approach it seems to embrace.

xbps-install, xbps-query, xbps-remove, and more. That’s too many commands (and too many letters) to deal with for basic package management which is why I originally wrote “xacman” which allows me to install/search/remove software in a way similar to Arch Linux’s “pacman”.

Aside from that little issue, void comes in a variety of desktop flavors(Enlightenment, Cinnamon, LXDE, Mate, XFCE and a base install with no GUI) and runs on multiple platforms.

If Void had a graphical updater and started shipping with octoxbps for package management, I would recommend it to new users without a second thought.

So why am I sticking with Void Linux today? Simple, everything about it is fast, and it doesn’t break on me every third update.

Freewrite #1

I am not going to flood sudotask with freewrites so only links will be posted.

Check me out on D*.

Yet Another Failure

So it would seem as though I am still extra terrible lately at coming up with posts. What is even worse is that I am simply not enjoying trying to research viable topics.

I believe if this was the only thing I took care of, I would be doing much better. But it is not. So what does this mean? This means that I am going to stop posting regular relevant posts. Any posts worth viewing will likely be tagged as How-To. However, I will be attempting to freewrite every time I have nothing properly posix to write about.

I have failed myself

Well, it would seem as though I have failed to make a post approprate for my own site. So therefore this post will be nothing more than a freewrite. What is freewriting? Freewritting is simply writing whatever hits my mind, and typing it. Grammar, spelling, whatever. It does not matter. So long as I am writing.

Now I plan to hit my typical 500ish word post with … well … this post. Unlike normal I will not be correcting typos, grammar, or whatever. Typically I would of course. But this is a special type of post… The freewrite.

2013 Year of Linux

2013 has been an incredible year for Linux. Not only has Linux seen a fairly large adoption in the hardware realm, we have seen massive improvements to the Linux desktop. Graphics, games, support, the year of the Linux desktop may not be so far off.