If ever getting to administrate non systemd boxes, and in need to deal with the system logging mechanism, then syslog-ng comes close to the most probable mechanism use. And no, non systemd gnu+linux distributions are not legacy, there are quite a few out there, just not the major or mainstream ones, like Artix, Void, Guix, and several others, not to count non gnu+linux OSs like BSDs…
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Cake day: November 3rd, 2021
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I don’t get this comment. Again, the virtio-win is an ISO that’s easily mounted on a qemu (whether libvirt environment or not, which is not required, it just helps making the qemu configuration easier), which comes with several virtualized drivers that accelerate the windows experience quite a bit.
Changing the storage driver is complex on plain qemu (I don’t think it’s easier through libvirt just because the heck of it, the issue is the windows guest), first one need to run qemu with a dummy storage driver using virtualized driver, so that windows detects it. On the guest one needs to install the driver for the discovered storage from the ISO, then reboot and the dummy disk can go away and windows will find a driver for the main disk). Other drivers like the ethernet one, graphics cards, memory baloon, and other stuff need to change the corresponding driver manually, but no need for immediate reboots, but for sure several reboots are expecting while changing the windows drivers.
I no longer use a VM for windows, thankfully, but here it’s a command line meant not to use a GUI qemu front end, but rather a Spice backend (requires virtualized special serial driver and special graphics driver):
qemu-system-x86_64 \ -name win-10 \ -enable-kvm \ -machine type=q35,accel=kvm \ -cpu host,hv_relaxed,hv_spinlocks=0x1fff,hv_vapic,hv_time \ -smp cores=1,threads=2,sockets=1 \ -m 4G \ -device intel-iommu \ -device virtio-balloon \ -drive file=/home/vasqueja/.qemu/imgs/win10-coe.qcow2,index=0,media=disk,if=virtio,aio=native,cache.direct=on,l2-cache-size=10M \ -drive file=/usr/share/virtio/virtio-win.iso,index=1,media=cdrom \ -drive file=/usr/share/spice-guest-tools/spice-guest-tools.iso,index=2,media=cdrom \ -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0 \ -netdev tap,id=net0,ifname=tap0,script=no,downscript=no,vhost=on \ -usb \ -device usb-tablet,bus=usb-bus.0 \ -display none \ -vga qxl \ -device virtio-serial-pci \ -chardev spicevmc,id=spice0,name=vdagent \ -device virtserialport,chardev=spice0,name=com.redhat.spice.0 \ -spice unix,addr=/tmp/win10_spice.socket,disable-ticketing \ -chardev socket,path=/tmp/win10_qga.socket,server,nowait,id=qga0 \ -device virtserialport,chardev=qga0,name=org.qemu.guest_agent.0 \ -device intel-hda -device hda-duplex \ -rtc base=localtime \ -monitor stdio \ -k es \ -device usb-host,bus=usb-bus.<...>,vendorid=<...>,productid=<...> \ -device usb-host,bus=usb-bus.<...>,vendorid=<...>,productid=<...> \ -device usb-host,bus=usb-bus.<...>,vendorid=<...>,productid=<...>Some investigation on your side is required if wanting to use spice (to add copy/paste cabalities on the guest, but perhaps that’s not needed anymore with libvirt and some of the popular forntends from GTK/QT), and the QLX dirver needs to be chosen correctly since it depends on the windows version (there was one for windows 10, not sure if there’s a 11 one).
Again, all this just to improve the windows guest experience. Some of this might have been made easier through libvirt, but the windows side of the drivers is a manual windows process, one driver at a time, and using virtualized storage is tricky on windows guests…
BTW I was setting a tap interface, with IP tables, because I found it to be the easier way to share my host VPN connection with the guest, without the need to establish a host and a guest VPN connection…
virtio-win allow for much better performance using virtualized drivers rather than plain emulation from qemu. Virt Manager doesn’t offer windows guest paravirtualized drivers, that’s on the guest side, and virtio-win ISO helps a lot with this.
There’s no need to jump into conclusions when it’s too early to tell.
If later, it so happens it gets removed, and you don’t want use out of tree stuff, which is still possible through several means, including building your own linux (your own kernel), then you can back all contents of your partitions up, create new partitions with the FS of your preference (ext4, btrfs, whatever), and finally copying over the contents of that last backup. No need to stress out this early, :)
Arch and Arch based distros like Artix have linux-libre available from AUR if one doesn’t have an issue with building from source. Also see my other comment about Guix, there’s a non official repo with ucode and hardware firmware…
Not sure why you mentioned this. At least on Arc, or any distro based on it like Artix, the ucode per CPU is offered as a separate package:
% pacman -Ss ucode system/amd-ucode 20241111.b5885ec5-1 Microcode update image for AMD CPUs world/intel-ucode 20241112-1 [installed] Microcode update files for Intel CPUs world/iucode-tool 2.3.1-5 Tool to manipulate Intel galaxy/amd-ucode-xz 20230625.ee91452d-4 Microcode update image for AMD CPUs extra/intel-ucode 20241112-1 [installed] Microcode update files for Intel CPUs extra/iucode-tool 2.3.1-5 Tool to manipulate IntelIf your distro doesn’t help with ucode packages, you can ultimately download it from intel/amd/whatever. And the same applies for the hardware firmware in general.
So it’s true that some hardware won’t properly work out of the box by using libre-linux, but nothing prevents you from getting the required firmware from other packages or sources. Granted that doesn’t make things easier. And granted that might defeat the purpose of using linux-libre, but you might at least only add only strictly required binary blobs for your current hardware.
linux-libre is harder because if you want cpu ucode plus hardware firmware support in general so that you can make your bad citizen hardware work, you’ll need to add it out of the linux package.
Someone mentioned Guix as a gnu + linux distribution was hard, and in general that’s true, but not because of linux-libre since there’s a non official Guix repository providing non libre/free cpu ucode plus hardware firmware, see:
https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix
The complex part of Guix comes from it being a inmutable distribution based on the ideas from NixOS, though it’s not a fork from Nix since it’s even based on Guile rather than the Nix language, but their packages and configurations are quite different than any other distribution, the same as its inmutable system and I believe on both reproducibility is a thing…
But bottom line, for Guix you can even get packages to make linux-libre work with your hardware provided you find the corresponding firmware in the non official repo, and in general (not just Guix) as long as you find the firmware somewhere else (not in linux-libre) you would be OK, and depending on your distro that might be a really hard task.
I use Artix, and though I haven’t explored it yet, I’ve been wondering how hard it’d be to install linux-libre, and get the strictly required firmware from the AUR, perhaps it’s possible. The package is actually offered from AUR:
% aur search linux-libre aur/linux-libre 6.11.9-1 (+37 0.35%) The Linux Libre kernel and modules aur/linux-libre-docs 6.11.9-1 (+37 0.35%) Documentation for the Linux Libre kernel aur/linux-libre-firmware 1.4-1 (+3 0.00%) (Orphaned) Firmware files for Linux-libre aur/linux-libre-headers 6.11.9-1 (+37 0.35%) Headers and scripts for building modules for the Linux Libre kernel aur/linux-librem5 6.6.57-1 (+0 0.00%) The Linux kernel for Purism Librem 5 aur/linux-librem5-docs 6.6.57-1 (+0 0.00%) The Linux kernel for Purism Librem 5 (documentation)
21·1 month agoNeither servo rendering engine (like gecko), nor verso (an actual rust based web browser based on servo) are quite ready for prime time. But I’m hoping they will be there sooner rather than later. I don’t use Firefox directly, but rather wrappers based on it, Librewolf for the desktop and Mull in part because I’m lazy (I prefer the ankerfox stuff and other to be done for me), and if I want to avoid chromium based browsers, dominating big time (MS browser edge is as well chromium base, electron is chromium in disguise, and now a days QT web engine underneath is chromium as well) well there’s no option yet.
On the other side, nothing guarantees servo and verso (or whatever other servo based browsers in the future) will care about net free advocacy, neither user freedoms, just be concerned about being better technical solutions, :( But I still have high hopes as you might…
Just being a good technical alternative is not good enough now days, :(
This is sad, not just because it’s a trend on Mozilla, but because it shows how mozilla has embraced the corporative kind of mindset. The advocacy team was fundamental for net free principles.
Mozilla based browsers keep being the only practical alternative to web browser dominance, but it itself has degrading its status of resisting bad practices against users and the web in general. And emerging alternatives are also technical alternatives only, with no intention of net freedom advocacy, GPL sort of principles to protect the user and so on.
Sad days indeed, :/
Ohh, do you have miniflux self hosted somewhere so it does the feeds collection, and then on newsflash you hook with the miniflux reader?
What I do to sync (I don’t read feeds on the phone) between desktops is to
rsyncthese 3 dirs:~/.config/news-flash ~/.local/share/news-flash ~/.local/share/news_flashThat so I don’t lose the feed subscriptions neither the history of what I have already looked at, neither what I’ve kept as starred (there are interesting feeds I want to keep). If miniflux had sort of a client, similar to newsFlash, but that set everything in miniflux rather than locally, so that no matter different desktops (even phones) will have the same starred kept feeds, and the whole history and the like on miniflux… There’s a python client, but I don’t know if it gets any closer to newsFlash. I guess having miniflux, one can hook to it through any web browser as well, but I really like newsFlash interface, hehe.
The sad thing is needing to somehow keep miniflux running somewhere, which is not feasible for me, and perhaps for others, but it’s interesting…
Is it because Fedora doesn’t enable zswap by default?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Improving_performance#zram_or_zswap
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zswap
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zram
One down side of zram is that you won’t be able to hibernate to swap, if that’s a requirement. On consoles this might be totally irrelevant though.
ok, thanks
what stopped you from using it? Or did you stop following rss/atom feeds?
Anyone using NewsFlash? I really like it, specially to keep the seeds locally.
71·3 months agoArkenfox user.js, or derivative broswers like Librewolf on the desktop and Mull on android are there for a reason. Firefox default settings are not the safer, although it has all the knobs to make it a much better experience.
Sorry about that. I was not aware of other meanings. I’ll try to remember to use the complete “software” word instead of its acronym I was used to since the 90s… Hopefully under the context what I wrote doesn’t get misinterpreted. Thanks !
If talking about non proprietary kernels’ drivers, such as linux, then again, profit is what regulates it. No wonder why now nvidia finally cares about linux, being the most used kernels behind the cloud, behind servers of whatever. Meaning, it’s not profitable not to support linux now a days for Nvidia.
The other fundamental factor is lock-in, which is abused by some big corps, such as MS.
But the profit idea es even wrong, but it’s what we have been educated with. For an OEM, providing FOSS drivers or FOSS FW doesn’t mean to have less profit, but somehow it’s interpreted as such. And there’s also our culture, backed by corps again, that tends to make us believe that everything profitable enough has to be corporate secret, and if not, others would take advantage of you business. That way of thinking really prevents for more FOSS adoption at the OEMs level. I don’t agree with it. It might be the presence or lack of some HW features might be inferred by the drivers/FW, but it doesn’t mean your competitors will know how exactly you provide such feature, and even less how to make it with the performance you do. And usually once released, you really want to show off your features, your innovation and so on, not keep it secret. So in general, really see no issue for OEMs not to offer drivers and FW as FOSS, even as free/libre SW.
I can imagine OEMs offering FOSS drivers and FW, but that not being as convenient for the major players in the market, since that would risk their position in the market. Just a thought…
Remember the lock-in mechanisms by the corps that feel being threatened if open sourcing dirvers… Some of which no longer say it out loud, but still think GPLed licences are a cancer…
I have never bought the idea that free/libre SW in general is just not as easy, including GNU+Linux. I’ll leave out open source initially, and come back to it later, not because it doesn’t experience the same, but because corporate wide it doesn’t suffer the same fate. And linux itself is one of the most widely used kernel if not the most, it happens similarly to openssl, and so many other open source components. So I see no issue with linux adoption, I can’t think of any kernel more adopted than linux…
To me what has really affected free/libre SW is the monopolistic abuse of the corporations, plus their ambitions, and how in Today’s world, they have created the illusion that being a technologist is the same as being a technology consumer, which gets into the hearts of governments and education systems (more hurting, public education systems). Let me try some practical examples:
- Educations systems translate the need to educate students about technology into making them familiar with MS different SW, like the windows OS, MS outlook, MS office, MS project, MS visio. Even on the higher levels of education, colleges and universities prefer to use matlab over octave for example, even for just matrix operations scripting. Office covers spread sheets BTW, so people specialized on accounting know excel, but no other spread sheet.
- On public education systems, where one would be inclined to think it might get more interest on developing the expertise to not depend on proprietary SW only, it’s where corporate reach deeper offering “cheap” educational licences.
- From the prior two keep in mind that educational licenses from proprietary SW usually means future professional and people depending on proprietary SW in general. They are meant not to educate, but rather generate the future dependent population.
- Governments, whether local or nation wide, instead of adhering to open standards, for any kind of form submission, and even further to adhere to use of free and open source SW, to build the technical and competency expertise required to have a criteria about different technologies, about SW, infrastructure, DBs, and so, they prefer to require citizens to use non free or open source SW to create required forms, and prefer to pay for SW solutions which totally lock in the entire solution, usually coming from big corps, or other companies actually making use of SW and technologies coming from big corps.
- In their effort to discredit free/libre SW, the idea that the fundamental principles behind free/libre SW hurt the SW industry, or that are irrelevant to Today’s world or even worse than that, there were claims that the GPLed kernel was a great threat and GPLed SW a cancer. Now that open source usage has totally overcome free/libre SW, there are no such claims, but the damage is done. There’s nothing wrong with people wanting some compensation from corps, when developing SW, and thus not using free/libre licenses like GPL-3+ or AGPL, but in the end that eventually might hurt the users rights protected by such licenses, which such corps don’t really care that much (their profit has higher priority for sure), and experience shows that just because SW is licensed open source doesn’t guarantee any compensation for the development whatsoever, so if volunteering SW, doing so as open source is not even close to get every developer a decent income out of their contributions. Well, except for the big corps backed SW, linux included, but that’s not the majority of open source SW.
- The discredit of free/libre SW, which allowed the eventual creation of open source, is such that the banning of individuals ends up being an attack to the organizations behind it and even their principles and motivation.
- Moving away from the free/libre SW observations, even now with open source, from the big corps, which barely compensate the open source developers, complain about the open source supply chain, campaigning against not well maintained SW and such, there’s the famous image of a complex and heavy structure depending on a weak and deficient leg. Whatever truth around that figure, it of course hides the overall picture of the developer of such leg not ever being compensated (not to mention paid) for his library or SW component, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons the project got even abandoned, but now it’s easy to blame such situation when talking about FOSS in general.
Paid SW might be more intuitive to use at times, I can understand that. There are paid developers making the UIs more intuitive and attractive, in the end it needs to be bought or massively consumed to get earning through its use. But if you look deeper, perhaps it’s not just that free/libre or open alternatives are non intuitive at all, perhaps people gets used to that UI when attending basic or high school, or college/university. Perhaps even when exposed to mobile devices even when they can barely walk. Everything else, different in nature, will look alien to the future “technologists”…
On a sad (lacking hope) note, I don’t think there’s any indicator of things changing. My only hope is changes in educational systems, which are nowhere happening, and not the parents, as mentioned they are already convinced that using google, ms, apple, oracle or whatever prepare their kids for the future and will make them the technologists of the future.
On a funny note, I would answer the motivating question with: Linux is so good that it’s actually most probably the most used kernel world wide, :)
betterbird tray solution doesn’t work on wayland, given a bug on common code (affects both, Firefox, Thunderbird and derivatives). Just in case that’s one of the motivations of using betterbird. That by the way was the only feature that really made me look at betterbird, and as it didn’t work, I went back to TB. And if you’re wondering, birdtray doesn’t work on wayland, 😑.
First of all, it’s been a while since it’s no longer his code, and the contributions from whatever amount of people must be respected. That was used some time back as justification to never moving to GPL3 or latest.
Second, there’s now a huge foundation behind it. Although he has gating approval for whatever he wants, the money coming from big enterprises would cease. Remember now MS already claims it loves linux.
Third, although it’s pretty linked to second, the project is not an independent community project anymore. Even risc-v people took care not to create a so nation specific project (even though its origins are totally linked to the academy from a particular one), that it doesn’t matter which country imposes sanctions to others, no country can prevent another from using its open ISA to build their own stuff. Linux, and its linux foundation failed on this, and as it’s pretty dependent on the big tech and enterprise, now it has no options to be compliant. Which you could see recently from banning developers and the legal reasons involved (well done, as risc-v, that would have had minimal impact, or better yet, if a community project not linked to any country, then that would have gone differently).
All in all, linux’s success has lead it to be a non community driven, non independent project, and I would guess the enterprise and big tech, which is pretty reliant on linux now a days, wouldn’t let linux go away unless they already have an alternative.
Though never say never right? But my take on this is both, no single person owns linux, so no single person can take it away, and there’s too much reliance on it from big tech and enterprises as to let such important project, and key on their software supply chain (years back thinking on software supply chain was in no one’s mind) or so they say.