GNU/Linux and Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 09, 2024

• GNU/Linux

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ 2024-12-01 [Older] Linux Weekly Roundup #305

  • Games

    • Hackaday ☛ Microchess Remembered

      Playing chess has always been a bellwether for computers. The game isn’t trivial, but the rules are managably simple. However, the game is too complex to be easily solved entirely, so you have to use tricky software to play a credible game. Big computers do have an advantage, of course. But Microchess — arguably the first commercial game for home computers — was able to play on tiny machines like the Kim-1. [Joachim Froholt] interviewed [Peter Jennings] — the man behind Microchess to learn the whole story of its creation.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Barry Kauler ☛ EasyOS Français translations updated

    JJM (esmourguit in the forum) has contributed French translations right from the early days of EasyOS, and before that, Puppy Linux. Today he has sent me updates for EasyOS 6.5. Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub commits: [...]

  • Martijn Braam ☛ Conjuring a Linux distribution out of thin air

    I decided I had to get something with slightly more CPU power than my Thinkpad x230 for a few tasks so I got a refurbished x280, aside from the worse keyboard the laptop is pretty nice and light. It shipped with Windows of course so the first thing I did is to install Ubuntu on the thing to wipe that off and verify all the hardware is working decently.

    I was wondering if I should leave Ubuntu on the thing, it works pretty well and it's still possible to get rid of all the Snap stuff, it's not my main machine anyway. The issue I ran into quickly though is some software is pretty outdated, like I don't want to use Kicad 7 anymore...

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

    • PCLOS Official ☛ PCLinuxOS Recent Updates

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Fedora Magazine ☛ 2024-11-29 [Older] Fedora Magazine: Contribute at the Fedora Linux Test Week for Kernel 6.12 [Ed: Volunteer at IBM]

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • The New Stack ☛ An Introduction to the Snap Universal Package Manager [Ed: Universal? Canonical controls it and the back end is proprietary, i.e. it is a monopoly]

      Package managers simplify the process of installing and managing applications on the GNU/Linux operating system.

    • Ubuntu News ☛ 2024-11-27 [Older] Call for nominations: 2024 Ubuntu Membership Board [Ed: But Canonical, a private company, makes all the key decisions]

    • Ubuntu News ☛ 2024-11-27 [Older] Call for nominations: 2024 Ubuntu Technical Board

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Our personal home database

      I’ll admit we’re doing nothing special, it’s literally a PostgreSQL database hosted on a NetBSD box at home, with pgAdmin as the frontend on our machines (thanks to Adam@ for maintaining). Until this year it was a MariaDB/MySQL server, and long before that it was a SQLite3 file sync’d with Dropbox. That last one still makes me nervous thinking about even now.

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ Raspberry Pi Connect for Organisations, plus full-screen support

      Earlier this year we told you all about our awesome new remote access service, Raspberry Pi Connect. We said we wanted to make it as useful as possible for our individual users, and provide it for free on Raspberry Pi devices. But we knew our industrial and embedded customers would like to use the functionality it provided, and more. Since launching Raspberry Pi Connect, we’ve been gathering information from these customers to understand what they are using it for and what they’d like to see.