today's leftovers

• Adding Your Cringe Stickers To Matrix

  Unlike discord, Matrix doesn't make you pay to use your own custom emotes or stickers, you just need to go and host them yourself. Luckily doing so is surprisignly [sic] easy and can be done for free.

• FLOSS Weekly 613: EteSync and Etebase - Tom Hacohen, EteSync and Etebase

  Etebase is a set of client libraries and a server for building end-to-end encrypted applications. Tom Hacohen, who previously appeared on FLOSS Weekly episode 524 to talk about securely syncing contacts, calendars, tasks and notes with his product EteSync, is back to talk about his new baby: Etebase. This is a great discussion as more and more consumers and users are interested in encryption and securing their private information across all platforms they use today.

• My 10-year-old HP Pavilion doesn't boot modern distros anymore

  I like round-number milestones. Especially if they allow one to showcase nice things. For example, sometime ago, I managed to revitalize my fairly ancient LG laptop by installing MX Linux on it. This restored a great deal of speed and nimbleness to the system, allowing it to remain modern and relevant for a bit longer. Now that my HP machine has reached its double-digit age, I thought of upgrading its Linux system. At the moment, the machine dual-boots Windows 7 (indeed, relax) and Kubuntu 20.04. Things work reasonably well. Spec-wise, the 2010 laptop comes with a first-gen i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM, 7,200rpm hard disk, and Nvidia graphics. Technically, not bad at all, even today. Well, I decided to try some modern distro flavors, to see what gives. [...] Trawling through the online forums, I've found a few other mentions of similar problems. Of course, almost every legacy system issue is rather unique, so I can't draw any concrete conclusions here. But it does feel like Linux is leaving old stuff behind. 'Tis a paradox really. On one hand, Linux is well-known for being able to run (and pride itself for being able to do so) on ancient, low-end hardware. On the other hand, providing and maintaining support for an infinite amount of ancient systems is difficult. And if you do recall my older content, I had a somewhat similar problem on my T42 laptop. Back when it had its tenth birthday, I booted it up after a long pause, and tried using Linux on it yet again. And I had problems finding Linux drivers for its ATI card - Windows drivers were easily and readily available. The problems aren't identical, but they are definitely indicative. Oh well. I may continue testing and playing with the old HP Pavilion, but I might not be able to really show you how well it carries into modern age. Hopefully, you found something useful in this wee sad article.

• Madeline Peck: January Blog Post (New Year New Bloggin!)

  Today I actually also attended the super low key design team video chat, which involved a brain storm session for Fedora 35 that was exciting!

• Accessing the Public Cloud Update Infrastructure via a Proxy

  SUSE provides public cloud customers with PAYG (Pay-As-You-Go) images on AWS, Azure, and GCP. Instances created from these images connect to a managed update infrastructure. So if you need to update your instances with the latest software updates or install that needed package using zypper, usually you can be assured that the underlying repositories are there with no further hassles. There are exceptions, though. Instances configured to utilize a proxy server or traverse firewalls, NAT gateways, proxies, security rules, Zscalar, or other security and network devices may run into problems. The purpose of this post is to address some of the more commonly occurring configuration issues seen with public cloud environments.

• How SUSE builds its Enterprise Linux distribution - PART 5 | SUSE Communities

  This is the fifth blog of a series that provides insight into SUSE Linux Enterprise product development. You will get a first-hand overview of SUSE, the SLE products, what the engineering team does to tackle the challenges coming from the increasing pace of open source projects, and the new requirements from our customers, partners and business-related constraints. [...] Based on our joint schedule, openSUSE Leap and SLE have a predictable release time frame: a release every 12 months and a 6 months support overlap for the former and new release, thus when the time is ready a snapshot of openSUSE Tumbleweed is made and both openSUSE and SLE will use this snapshot to create our next distributions versions. With this picture, we are not talking about our distribution per se yet, it’s only a pool of packages sources that we will use to build our respective distribution. But before going into how it’s built, note that it’s a simplified view because of course, there is always some back and forth between for instance openSUSE Leap/SLE and openSUSE Tumbleweed; it’s not just a one-way sync because during the development phase of our distributions, bugs are found and of course fixes are submitted back to Factory so openSUSE Tumbleweed also receives fixes from the process. For the sake of simplifying the picture we did not add these contributions as arrows. Also at SUSE, Open source is in our genes so we have always contributed to openSUSE but, since 2017, our SUSE Release Team had enforce a rule called “Factory First Policy“, which force code submissions for SLE to be pushed to Factory first before it lands in SLE. This is a continuation of the “Upstream First” principle on the distribution level. It reduces maintenance effort and leverages the community.

• Valve have multiple games in development they will announce says Gabe Newell

  Gabe Newell of Valve Software (Steam) recently spoke to 1 NEWS in New Zealand about everything that has been going on and teased a few fun details. For those who didn't know, Newell has been staying in New Zealand since early 2020 and decided to stay after a holiday when COVID-19 got much worse. Newell continues to talk very highly of New Zealand, even somewhat jokingly mentioning that some Valve staffers appear to strongly want to move their work over there now too. Newell mentioned why there's no reason other game companies couldn't move to New Zealand, and joked how they're a producer of "not-stupidium" seemingly referring to how well New Zealand has dealt with COVID-19. [...] Nice to see they continue to keep Linux in their sights for games too with all their recent games (Artifact, Underlords and Half-Life: Alyx) all having Linux builds, although Alyx is not directly mentioned on the store page for Linux it is available.

• Vietnam joins Civilization VI in the next DLC for the New Frontier Pass on January 28

  Firaxis has confirmed the next DLC that forms part of the New Frontier Pass for Civilization VI will be releasing on January 28. Here's some highlights of what's to come. While the full details are yet to be released, Firaxis did a developer update video to tease some of it. There's going to be a new civilization with Vietnam joining the world, two new leaders for existing civilizations (China and Mongolia), a new "Monopolies and Corporations" game mode with expanded economic options which sounds really quite interesting.

Linux Kernel Space and Graphics: Linux Memory Management, Dbus-Broker 26, Vulkan Wayland Compositors

• The Maple Tree, A Modern Data Structure for a Complex Problem

  The Linux Memory Management layer supports the very common technique of virtual memory. Linux splits blocks of virtual memory into areas specified by the c structure vm_area_struct. Each vm_area_struct contain information associated with mapped memory and are used to find the associated pages of memory which contain the actual information. Virtual memory areas (VMAs) could be the contents of a file on disk, the memory that contains the program, or even the memory the program uses during execution. Literally everything that is run on Linux uses vm_area_struct for memory mapping. This vital area of the kernel needs to be quick and avoid contention whenever possible.

• Dbus-Broker 26 Released For High Performance D-Bus

  With the BUS1 in-kernel IPC not panning out and not seeing any major code work in nearly two years, the user-space based, D-Bus compatible DBus-Broker remains the performant and current option for those looking at something faster and more reliable than D-Bus itself.

• Vulkan Wayland Compositors Are Nearing Reality - Phoronix

  One of the last pieces of the puzzle for supporting an entirely Vulkan-based Wayland compositor is coming together with a new extension that looks like it will be merged soon and there already being work pending against Sway/WLROOTS to make use of the Vulkan path. The VK_EXT_physical_device_drm extension to Vulkan has been in the works for a number of months and is for allowing the mapping of Vulkan physical devices and DRM nodes. VK_EXT_physical_device_drm allows for querying DRM properties for physical devices and in turn matching the with DRM nodes on Linux systems.

• Mesa's R600 Driver Nears Feature Complete NIR Support For Radeon HD 5000/6000 Series - Phoronix

  For those still making use of pre-GCN AMD graphics cards supported by the R600 Gallium3D driver (namely the Radeon HD 5000/6000 series), the open-source "R600g" Gallium3D driver now has nearly feature complete NIR support. Gert Wollny has been near single handedly working on NIR support for the R600g driver to make use of this modern graphics driver intermediate representation as an alternative to the long-standing Gallium3D TGSI IR.

GNOME: outreachy, flexbox and restrictions

• Nasah Kuma: My Journey to GJS’ Backtrace “full” Option

  My outreachy internship has definitely taught me a lot of things including writing blog posts, reporting tasks, expressing myself and of course improving as a developer. When we developed a project timeline before submitting the final application weeks back, my mentor and I underestimated some of the issues because there were some hidden difficulties we only found out later. Initially, my timeline was set to using the first week to understand the inner workings of the debugger, using week 2-4 on the backtrace full command, using week 5-7 to display the current line of the source code when displaying the current frame in the debugger and the task for week 8-13 were still to be decided upon by my mentor and I within the course of the internship.

• Sergio Villar Senin: Flexbox Cats (a.k.a fixing images in flexbox)

  In my previous post I discussed my most recent contributions to flexbox code in WebKit mainly targeted at reducing the number of interoperability issues among the most popular browsers. The ultimate goal was of course to make the life of web developers easier. It got quite some attention (I loved Alan Stearns’ description of the post) so I decided to write another one, this time focused in the changes I recently landed in WebKit (Safari’s engine) to improve the handling of elements with aspect ratio inside flexbox, a.k.a make images work inside flexbox. Some of them have been already released in the Safari 118 Tech Preview so it’s now possible to help test them and provide early feedback.

• GNOME Software Jailbreak

  As many users have noticed, you cannot install all the software you want on your computer via gnome-software. This restriction has been imposed by the developers...