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nyan

@ nyan @sh.itjust.works

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  • Deleted

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  • We're talking about a kernel whose user-visible error messages have historically included things like "lp0 on fire" . . .

  • Gentoo vs any other distro

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  • There's an old joke from a couple of decades ago about what operating systems would be like if they were airlines:

    Linux Airlines

    Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”

    Gentoo is still very much a "You had to do what with the seat?" distro, while most others have retired that concept to varying degrees, at the cost of the seats being less easy to perform unusual adjustments on.

  • Rust in Linux lead retires rather than deal with more “nontechnical nonsense”

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  • Assuming that it works out, yes, this might fix the problem. On the other hand, I remember gcj, which kind of quietly vanished after a while, so I prefer to reserve judgement until gcc's Rust implementation is ready for production use.

  • Rust in Linux lead retires rather than deal with more “nontechnical nonsense”

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  • You say that as though it's a bad thing. 😆

  • Rust in Linux lead retires rather than deal with more “nontechnical nonsense”

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  • One detail about Rust in the kernel that often gets overlooked: the Linux kernel supports arches to which Rust has never been ported. Most of these are marginal (hppa, alpha, m68k—itanium was also on this list), but there are people out there who still use them and may be concerned about their future. As long as Rust remains in device drivers only this isn't a major issue, but if it penetrates further into the kernel, these arches will have to be desupported.

    (Gentoo has a special profile "feature" called "wd40" for these arches, which is how I was aware of their lack of Rust support. It's interesting to look at the number and types of packages it masks. Lotta python there, and it looks like gnome is effectively a no-go.)

  • Rust for Linux revisited (by Drew DeVault)

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  • Large organizations always have politics—it's human nature. 1700 people is quite a large organization. Therefore, the kernel maintainers have politics. The presence of politics always means that some people will get stomped on unfairly.

    This is all business as usual, in other words, and it will not go away. At best, you can shift the culture of the group and the politics along with it, but that takes time and effort and people-handling.

  • Whats your go-to naming convention?

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  • For files? An unholy amalgam of snake, kebab and dot, depending on what exactly I'm trying to convey. (I still have much-ported files around with DOS 8.3 filenames, so they're truncated scream case (SCREAMIN.NAM), but I don't actively name files like that anymore.) The important thing is to separate the words/sections while using characters that are valid without escapes in both ext4 and vfat if at all possible.

    For variable names, camel or Pascal case (depending on language convention) if I think anyone else is going to read it. Flat case for code I don't think anyone else is ever going to see (don't do this—it has left teethmarks in my ass from time to time and will do the same to you).

  • Easy WM based desktops to use

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  • Some individual window managers are full-featured enough to be somewhat usable as program launchers all by their lonesome, such as awesome, fluxbox, and openbox. There's also Enlightenment, which is somewhere between a bare WM and a DE. If you really want to play with standalone WMs, start with something from this paragraph.

    Other WMs need a bunch of other things like dmenu and feh piled on top of them to get a useful environment. i3 is one of these. You can find and fit together enough software pieces to get a fairly full-featured environment out of one of these setups, but it's more work than just installing the core portions of a DE.

    Figure out first whether you're dealing with X or wayland (hyprland is a wayland compositor, which is slightly different from a window manager). Read guides, and especiallly stay away from things that say they're "lightweight" or "minimalist" until you've read the documentation and know exactly what you're getting into, as they tend to be for advanced users. If you just want to play around and have no particular problem you're trying to solve, just look for live CD/DVD/USB images you can boot inside a VM and save yourself some work.

  • X11 WMs as plugins for a wayland compositor?

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  • TDE has had occasional discussion and ruminations, but no action yet. Porting it is complicated by the fact that it has its own widget set (TQT, forked from QT3), which would have to be worked on first and is currently undergoing some unrelated rewriting.

    The likelihood of any wayland milestones for TDE being set before the end of 2024 is very low unless some major distro completely drops X support.

  • How do you secure your bootloader without secure boot or why doesn't it matter?

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  • I consider bootloader attacks a very low-probability threat, and quite honestly I don't trust the average board vendor to produce anything that's actually secure anyway. If I were in the habit of carrying a laptop back and forth across international borders I might feel differently, but for a desktop stuck in a room in Canada that hardly anyone enters when I'm not present, Secure Boot is a major hassle in return for a small security gain. So I just don't bother.

  • Recommend me a scripting language

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  • Dude, I've worked with all these interpreters. The JVM's startup is slow, although there's been some improvement since the version 1.1 that I started out with. The interpreter speed is quite good once it gets going, so it remains a good choice for long-running or interactive programs where the startup is insignificant as a fraction of total program run-time, but if you're running a script that takes only a fraction of a second to execute, the JVM's startup can lengthen the time by an order of magnitude or more. Horses for courses and all that—I wouldn't write a complex interactive GUI program in Perl, either.

  • Recommend me a scripting language

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  • Technically, you could bundle a Perl script with the interpreter on another system using pp and run the packed version on systems with no installed Perl, but at that point you might as well just use a compiled language.

  • Recommend me a scripting language

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  • Last I checked, the JVM was larger than the standard Perl and Python interpreters, and had a much worse startup time (which is bad for short scripts).

  • Do any of you have M$ Word running in present form?

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  • If it really is a .doc file and written in an ASCII-compatible encoding as most English-language documents are, opening it in a hex editor (or a non-codepage-aware text editor like the Notepad on a W10 or earlier Windows machine) will show an indecipherable proprietary header followed by the text in the file, possibly with a single space or "junk" character between each letter depending on the exact version of Word and system encoding it was written with. There may be occasional additional stretches of markup junk. At the end, there will be a footer with occasional decipherable text strings like "MSWordDoc" and font names.

    If you open a .docx file in such a program, you should get a typical zipfile signature: the letters "PK" at the beginning of the file, followed by a lot of gobbledegook. If you don't get that "PK", it probably isn't a .docx.

    (I've looked at a lot of MS file guts, for both curiosity and information extraction purposes.)

  • “Something has gone seriously wrong,” dual-boot systems warn after Microsoft update

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  • Because they don't want ignorant end users to blame them if the ancient, unpatched version of GRUB that's at issue is used as part of an exploit attacking Windows boxes.

  • Are there any distros that could run on a pentium 2?

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  • I wonder if there's a Gentoo binpkg host for i486 specifically, since it might almost be practical then. (Or you could set up your own.)

  • Why Wayland adoption to have official support in programs is so slow?

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  • Also out of the loop, but my guess is that Wayland hasn't defined a specific API for the purpose yet, and their security model doesn't allow programs to see the content of other programs' windows. X11 doesn't attempt to keep programs from seeing what other programs put on screen, so no specific API is needed there.

  • Gentoo Linux Ending Itanium IA-64 Support

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  • Actually, if you check deep down in the list of installables, you'll find that Gentoo still supports the even less capable i486 variant. A laptop from 2010 is positively a spring chicken compared to some of the things it can be made to run on. Itanium is only being desupported because it's being dropped upstream by the kernel and other chunks of the toolchain (and the only actual hardware they had to test on died a while ago).

  • Basic examples for the Linux date command

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  • date is the command for setting the system date and time from the command line. Nothing to do with formatting, beyond the fact that it presumably applies system locale settings when echoing date-time info.