It's been exactly one year since I've done the foolish thing and changed my blog backend to write more. And to my own surprise it worked. Let me look back at 2021 from a rather narrow perspective of what I usually write about. Perhaps to your disappointment most of it is personal, not professional.

I've produced a fraction of my drone videos from the past years in 2021 and haven't practiced or raced nearly at all this year. This void has been fully filled by music and synthesizers. After two decades of hiatus I enjoy making music again. Fully aware how crude and awful I am at it, there isn't any other medium where I enjoy my own creations as much as music.

I've also come back to pixel art, even though the joy is a lot tainted by the tools I use. Very convenient, very direct, so much fun, very proprietary.

In 2022 I'd like to

• Replace my reliance on iPad and Apple Pencil. Would be nice to use a small screen tablet on my Fedora instead. Just plug it when I need it, run GIMP or Aseprite in the same time it takes me with Procreate and Pixaki.
• Embrace Fedora for music making. While I'm not a heavy Ableton Live user, I should totally embrace Bitwig instead as it's conveniently available as a Flatpak. The Pipewire revolution also made Renoise usable for me again, so maybe I'll give it another stab.
• Continue using the gear I have and not buy any more. I have way more gear than I need. I'm going to sell some I don't actually enjoy using anymore, but even splitting time between the Digitone, Digitakt, Polyend Tracker and Dirtywave M8 is making me feel unfocused. If I only had a synth room where I could just walk in and jam :)
• Continue posting on this ancient platform called WWW. Before I figure out a replacement for comments, feel free to tweet at me or toot.

A little late with wishing you a better 2022 than 2020 was! I didn't even catch 2021 fly by.

It’s been exactly one year since I’ve done the foolish thing and changed my blog backend to write more. And to my own surprise it worked. Let me look back at 2021 from a rather narrow perspective of what I usually write about. Perhaps to your disappointment most of it is personal, not professional.

I’ve produced a fraction of my drone videos from the past years in 2021 and haven’t practiced or raced nearly at all this year. This void has been fully filled by music and synthesizers. After two decades of hiatus I enjoy making music again. Fully aware how crude and awful I am at it, there isn’t any other medium where I enjoy my own creations as much as music.

I’ve also come back to pixel art, even though the joy is a lot tainted by the tools I use. Very convenient, very direct, so much fun, very proprietary.

In 2022 I’d like to

• Replace my reliance on iPad and Apple Pencil. Would be nice to use a small screen tablet on my Fedora instead. Just plug it when I need it, run GIMP or Aseprite in the same time it takes me with Procreate and Pixaki.
• Embrace Fedora for music making. While I’m not a heavy Ableton Live user, I should totally embrace Bitwig instead as it’s conveniently available as a Flatpak. The Pipewire revolution also made Renoise usable for me again, so maybe I’ll give it another stab.
• Continue using the gear I have and not buy any more. I have way more gear than I need. I’m going to sell some I don’t actually enjoy using anymore, but even splitting time between the Digitone, Digitakt, Polyend Tracker and Dirtywave M8 is making me feel unfocused. If I only had a synth room where I could just walk in and jam :)
• Continue posting on this ancient platform called WWW. Before I figure out a replacement for comments, feel free to tweet at me or toot.

A little late with wishing you a better 2022 than 2020 was! I didn’t even catch 2021 fly by.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

First off, welcome to twenty-twenty-two, the year of the Linux desktop (wasn’t it?). The year is kicking off strong with openSUSE Tumbleweed – but not with daily snapshots: openQA did not agree with some of the changes (i.e one snapshot caused all non-x86_64 architectures to fail to boot, one snapshot had a broken virtualization stack, and of course, none of that made it to you, our users). Despite all that, we published 4 snapshots during this week: 20220101, 0102, 0103, and 0106.

The major changes include:

• Mozilla Firefox 95.0.2
• Linux kernel 5.15.12
• GTK 4.6.0
• Python 3.10 has been added to the list of python versions to build python<X>-modules.
• fmt 8.1.0

Things being worked on, that should reach Tumbleweed rather sooner than later:

• Python 3.6 modules will no longer be built (snapshot 0107+). We now build modules for python 3.8, 3.9 and 3.10. For now, python 3.8 is still the distro default python interpreter
• openssl 1.1.1m
• meson 0.60.3: since meson 0.59, the build system became much stricter. Meson now fails if invalid paramters are passed to it (most of the issues found were typos that were silently ignored, or config parameters that no longer eixtsed and thus had no effect anyway)
• KDE Plasma 5.23.5
• KDE Gear 21.12.1
• Switch to Ruby 3.1: all tests passed, only apparmor fails to build
• Python 3.10 to be promoted to the distro default interpreter (tests to start soon)
• PHP 8 as the default php flavor
• zstd 1.5.1: this was responsible in an earlier snapshot for the non-x86_64 boot failures; issue should be fixed, rebuild in progress

For the past few days, the IT news has been abuzz with announcements from CES. As usual, I’m following them on Engadget. I must admit, that there were just a very few announcements which really caught my attention. And my favorite announcement is the most boring of them all :-)

• Foldable tablet by ASUS: I still use my Google Pixel C tablet almost every day. It’s almost six years old and waiting for replacement. The ASUS tablet is larger and has more accurate colors, two features for the photography maniac in me. Being folded gives it a more book-like feeling when using it for reading. It also has an optional keyboard accesory, just like the Pixel C, so it’s not just a content consumption device.

• Color changing car is a promising concept by BMW. You can express your mood by the color, but it has more practical useses as well: turning it light in bright sunshine and dark in cold can also help in regulating temperature.

• Autonomous tractor by John Deere is more about my university research: precision agriculture. I worked on some of the foundations, like soil sampling and correlating the results with aerial photographs. Those and much more are already in practice today. This tractor brings precision farming concepts even further.

To me the best of show is something completely boring: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D. It is a CPU. Why is it interesting? It has 100MB of cache. I do regular peak performance testing of syslog-ng. It seems to me, that performance is correlated both to single core performance and cache size. I did not have a chance to test syslog-ng on the latest EPIC or Power10 CPUs, but my AMD Ryzen 7 5800X desktop CPU I use for photo editing beats any ARM, Intel or Power CPUs I tested previously with syslog-ng. And the 5800X3D has almost 3x as large cache, as my current CPU. I must say that I am amazed about the advancement of semiconductor technology and how it helps to deliver more capabilities with less power.

I have been enjoying running openSUSE Tumbleweed on the Raspberry Pi 400 (and 4, I kind of mean the same thing, I just happen to appreciate the fun of the keyboard with containing the computer of the 400). The point of this blathering is to use the Raspberry Pi 400 in the same way as […]

So the OBS supports packaging Debian packages for a while now. Is it perfect? No. But it works well enough. Though one problem I recently ran into …

How to get past lintian?

The obvious answer is of course: Fix the errors it spits out. And I agree. I have done that. For all but one …

bad-distribution-in-changes-file

For many of the debian packages, I helped to start, we used:

pkgname (1.2.3-1.1) unstable; urgency=medium

We had two candidates for two available seats. As per the board election rules, in such a case, each candidate should receive at least 50% of the total number of votes to be considered as elected.

Both Attila Pinter and Maurizio Galli received good support from the community members. We had 542 eligible voters, out of which 147 voted in the election.

Attila Pinter received 122 votes in his favour which represents 83%, 22 votes against and 3 abstentions.

Maurizio Galli received 120 votes in his favour representing 82%, 21 votes against and 6 abstentions.

Congratulations to both of them! 👏 🎉

If you are a longtime FreeBSD user, you probably know everything I have to say, and, what’s more, you can probably add a few more points. But hopefully, there will be some Linux or even Windows users among readers who might learn something new!

FreeBSD is not just a kernel but a complete operating system. It has everything to boot and use the system: networking utilities, text editors, development tools and more. Why is that a big deal? Well, because all these components are developed together, they work perfectly together! And a well-polished system is also easier to document. One of my favorite pieces of documentation is the FreeBSD Handbook which covers most of the operating system and is (most of the time) up to date.

Of course, not everything can be integrated into the base operating system, and this is where FreeBSD ports and packages can be useful. The ports system allows a clean separation of the base system and third-party software which allows you to install third-party software on top of a FreeBSD base system. There are tens of thousands ready-to-use software packages to choose from. For example, all the graphical desktop applications are in ports, just as various web servers or more up-to-date development tools.

You can read the rest of my article in the FreeBSD Journal at https://issue.freebsdfoundation.org/publication/?m=33057&i=733207&p=14&ver=html5

A lot of people use Linux for their servers. In this article, we’ll guide you through the best Linux distros for servers. With a comparison, recommendations, tips, features, and more. Quick overview of the best Linux distros for servers You can use pretty much any Linux distro as a server, however, some distros are specialized […]

Source

The holiday season hustle and bustle is through and I am able to concentrate on reorganizing the messes I have made in getting ready for the season. As the fall time projects finished up, the Christmastime projects kicked into full gear between programming my Christmas light display, baking cookies and making Gingerbread houses with the kids. There come a bunch of other miserable cold weather chores that go along with living on a subsistence farm.