Debian: Popularity Contests, Sparky 2020.05 Special Editions and Remote Access
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Popularity Contests & Data Analysis for the Masses
Yesterday, for instance, we came across an interesting service offered by a well-known Free Software project. Turns out the people of the Debian project, creators of probably one of the oldest and most famous Linux distributions, collect data from users that tells us how popular each package in their distro is.
The service is called the Debian Popularity Contest. Although I was aware of it and had been mining it for several years, what I hadn’t realised is that they also have this nifty graphing service. Type in the name of a package; for example, plasma-workspace, set the period you want to see (say, from 2015-01-01 to 2019-12-31), press the [Go] button, and you get a nice simple graph that shows you its rate of adoption.
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Sparky 2020.05 Special Editions
Special editions of Sparky 2020.05 GameOver, Multimedia & Rescue released.
It is based on the Debian testing “Bullseye”.Changes:
• upgrade from Debian testing repos as of May 11, 2020
• Linux kernel 5.6.7 (5.6.12 & 5.7-rc5 in Sparky unstable repos)
• Calamares 3.2.23
• added additional support of Sparky installation on UEFI machines with Secure Boot: the live system should be launched with Secure Boot off as before; but after installation the Secure Boot can be turned on; both installers: Calamares and Sparky’s Advanced provides support of such installation
• disabled package list updating, during installing Sparky via Calamares; even you install Sparky with active Internet connection, the Debian or Sparky server can be temporary off, so it could stop the installation
• added new packages to all iso images: ‘pulseaudio-module-bluetooth’ and ‘fuse3’ insead of ‘fuse’; thanks to Richard
• replaced ‘ktsuss’ by ‘sparky-su’ which is used by ‘sparky-aptus-upgrade-checker’ link
• Multimedia edition – removed packages: idjc, radiotray, camorama, hydrogen, phatch, ffado-mixer-qt4, flowblade, gscreenshot
• Rescue edition – removed packages: redobackup, gscreenshot; edded packages: xfce4-screenshooter
• GameOver edition – removed packages: holdingnuts -
Q: Remote Support Framework for the GNU/Linux Desktop?
When bringing GNU/Linux desktops to a generic folk of productive office users on a high scale, graphical remote support is a key feature when organizing helpdesk support teams' workflows.
In a research project that I am currently involved in, we investigate the different available remote support technologies (VNC screen mirroring, ScreenCasts, etc.) and the available frameworks that allow one to provide a remote support infrastructure 100% on-premise.
In this research project we intend to find FLOSS solutions for everything required for providing a large scale GNU/Linux desktop to end users, but we likely will have to recommend non-free solutions, if a FLOSS approach is not available for certain demands. Depending on the resulting costs, bringing forth a new software solution instead of dumping big money in subscription contracts for non-free software is seen as a possible alternative.
As a member of the X2Go upstream team and maintainer of several remote desktop related tools and frameworks in Debian, I'd consider myself as sort of in-the-topic. The available (as FLOSS) unterlying technologies for plumbing a remote support framework are pretty much clear (x11vnc, recent pipewire-related approaches in Wayland compositors, browser-based screencasting). However, I still lack a good spontaneous answer to the question: "How to efficiently software-side organize a helpdesk scenario for 10.000+ users regarding graphical remote support?".
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