today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 31, 2023

• Joe Brockmeier: Poking at Distrobox

  I’m probably late to the party, but Distrobox has to be one of the best open source projects to drop in the past few years. No matter which Linux distro I standardize on, there’s inevitably something I want to run that runs best or only on another distro. Or I just want to dip into a shell for $distro real quick to verify whether a certain package exists, or what the package name is, the default config for an application, etc.

  Or I’d like to run two instances of an application with different profiles, without having to set up a whole virtual machine.

  Distrobox provides an easy answer for many of those use cases. Distrobox lets you run “any Linux distribution inside your terminal.” There’s a slight asterisk next to “any” in the form of “the distribution has to have a ready made Docker container you can pull.” But the number of distros I’d like to run and the number of distros that don’t have an official container are few and far between. The only exception that comes to mind is Slackware, which has a container on Docker Hub but it hasn’t been updated in about 7 years.

• GNU World Order 497

  **latte dock** , **layer-shell-qt** , **libgravatar** , **libkcddb** , **libkcompactdisc** , **libkdcraw** , **libkdegames** from the Slackware **kde** package set.

• The Fridge: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 772

• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 772

  Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 772 for the week of January 22 - 28, 2023.

• Firefox Nightly: A Variety of Improvements At January’s End – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 131

• Reading & Parsing JSON Data with Python: A Simple Tutorial

  JavaScript Object Notation is a standard format mostly used by APIs and websites to store data objects using text. In simple words, JSON supports data structures that can represent objects as text. Also used in contemporary databases such as PostgreSQL, JSON is derived from JavaScript, as you might have already guessed. Though XML and YAML

• Executive Director Karen Sandler receives honorary doctorate from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven [Ed: Fake doctorate for greedy lawyer who runs over RMS, who made the GPL that she is now monetising]

  Sandler was nominated by the student body in recognition of her outstanding work at Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), her many years of FOSS leadership, and her advocacy and pursuit of software freedom and rights for all.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel: #39: Faster Feedback Systems – A Continuous Integration Example

  Today we have a fairly nice illustration of two aspects we have stressed before:

  • Fewer dependencies makes for faster installation time (apart from other desirable robustness aspects); and

  • Using binaries makes for faster installation time as it removes the need for compilations.