OpenWRT To Mark 20 Years With Reference Hardware

January 13, 2024 by Jenny List 17 Comments

The OpenWRT project is now two decades old. The project has come a long way since Linksys was forced to release the GNU-licensed code for the original WRT54G router from which the project takes its name. They’ve marked the occasion in an interesting manner: by proposing that the plethora of devices supported by the OS be joined by a fully upstream-supported reference hardware platform.

Spec-wise it’s what you would expect for a hackable router platform in 2024. A MediaTek chipset can be found at its centre, but the hardware is not in this case the important bit. Here will be a platform that won’t have to rely on proprietary manufacturer BLOBs, and which will thus likely continue to have up-to-date kernel support long into the future. So many enticing SBCs fall in this regard, and many retain ossified kernel versions after their manufacturers tire of them as a result.

It appears that the future of this project will be subject to an OpenWRT community vote, and we sincerely hope that it will come to fruition. Meanwhile, we couldn’t resist a peek at the status of the router that started it all, by our reckoning the original WRT54G was last supported by the OS over a decade ago.

FLOSS Weekly Episode 764: You Have To Be Pretty Cynical

January 3, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 8 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Katherine Druckman talk with benny Vasquez, chair of AlmaLinux, all about the weird road we’ve been on with Enterprise Linux distributions, and how that’s landed us here, where we have AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and multiple other Red Hat downstream distros. What’s the difference between those projects, and why does it matter?

Projects need more than just developers. How do you keep members doing documentation, bug hunting, outreach, and even graphic design plugged in and feeling like part of the team? How do you walk the narrow line between the different directions a project can drift, setting up your community for long term success? And where’s the most surprising place benny has found AlmaLinux running? And why is benny’s first name never capitalized? Give this week’s show a listen to find out!

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Welcome To The Year Of The Diagonal Linux Desktop

December 31, 2023 by Maya Posch 73 Comments

Sometimes you come across one of those ideas that at first appear to have to be some kind of elaborate joke, but as you dig deeper into it, it begins to make a disturbing kind of sense. This is where the idea of diagonally-oriented displays comes to the fore. Although not a feature that is generally supported by operating systems, [xssfox] used the xrandr (x resize and rotate) function in the Xorg display server to find the perfect diagonal display orientation to reach a happy balance between the pros and cons of horizontal and vertical display orientations.

As displays have gone wide-and-wider over the past decades, some people rotate their displays 90 degrees to get more height instead, which is beneficial when reading documents, yet terrible when watching most video content, barring vertical videos, so you either need more than one display, keep rotating, or settle on an optimal intermediate compromise. Interestingly, this wasn’t found at a straight 45°, but instead at 22° of rotation for [xssfox]’s 21:9 ratio ‘ultra-wide’ display. The xrandr settings for other display ratios can be easily calculated using the provided formula and associated JS-based tool.

So what are the advantages here? You get to keep long line lengths in IDEs, while gaining more vertical pixels in some areas. As disadvantages it only works with Xorg at this time, it’s a terrible setup for people prone to vertigo, and it’s decidedly hostile towards top-of-display mounted webcams. Yet with others picking up on this new trend, Linux might just corner the diagonal desktop.

Gentoo Linux, Now A Bit Less For The 1337

December 29, 2023 by Jenny List 37 Comments

Among users of Linux distributions there’s a curious one-upmanship, depending on how esoteric or hardcore your distro is. Ubuntu users have little shame, while at the other end if you followed Linux From Scratch or better still hand-compiled the code and carved it onto the raw silicon with a tiny chisel, you’re at the top of the tree*. Jokes aside though, it’s fair to say that if you were running the Gentoo distribution you were something of a hardcore user, because its source-only nature meant that everything had to be compiled to your liking. We’re using the past tense here though, because in a surprise announcement, the distro has revealed that it will henceforth also be available as a set of precompiled binary packages.

There may be readers with long and flowing neckbeards who will decry this moment as the Beginning of the End, but while it does signal a major departure for the distro if it means that more people are spurred to take their Linux usage further and experiment with Gentoo, this can never be a bad thing. Gentoo has been on the list for a future Jenny’s Daily Drivers OS review piece, and while we’re probably going to stick with source-only when we do it, it’s undeniable that there will remain a temptation to simply download the binaries.

Meanwhile this has been written on a machine running Manjaro, or Arch-for-cowards as we like to call it, something that maybe confers middle-ranking bragging rights. Read a personal tale of taking off those Linux training wheels.

* Used a magnifying glass? You’re just not cutting it!

Linux Fu: Preprocessing Beyond Code

December 28, 2023 by Al Williams 15 Comments

If you glanced at the title and thought, “I don’t care — I don’t write C code,” then hang on a minute. While it is true that C has a preprocessor and you can notoriously do strange and — depending on your point of view — horrible or wonderful things with it, there are actually other options and you don’t have to use any of them with a C program. You can actually use the C preprocessor with almost any kind of text file. And it’s not the only preprocessor you can abuse this way. For example, the m4 preprocessor is wildly complex, vastly underused, and can handle C source code or anything else you care to send to it.

Definitions

I’ll define a preprocessor as a program that transforms its input file into an output file, reacting to commands that are probably embedded in the file itself. Most often, that output is then sent to some other program to do the “real” work. That covers cpp, the C preprocessor. It also covers things like sed. Honestly, you can easily create custom preprocessors using C, awk, Python, Perl, or any other programming language. There are many other standard programs that you could think of as preprocessors, for example, tr. However, one of the most powerful is made to preprocess complex input files called m4. For some reason — maybe because of its complexity — you don’t see much m4 in the wild.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 763: Fedora Fixes Everything

December 27, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 18 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Dan Lynch talk once again with Neal Gompa of Fedora, CentOS, openSUSE and more. This time the focus is Fedora, with sprinklings of Immutable Linux, KDE 6, and the new Linux stack of Pipewire, Portals, and Wayland. Neal gives us a rundown of what exactly makes Fedora Atomic so interesting, and why you probably don’t want it running on your desktop. But in a computer lab, or on a public machine? Fedora Atomic might be exactly what you need.

Up next there’s Pipewire, the userspace sound server that replaces Pulseaudio and Jack. Should we think of Pipewire as Jack 3.0? And what’s the secret to getting really reliable low-latency performance for Pipewire in Fedora? It might not be what you expect.

There’s a popular rant online, that Wayland breaks everything. And for years, that’s been a relatively accurate statement, in that Wayland hasn’t been ready for prime-time. Fedora 40 has gone all in on the belief that Wayland’s time has come, with KDE and Gnome no longer having an X11 native option. It’s Wayland all the way. And as one that has run Rawhide, I can say that the future there is bright. Literally, if you have an HDR capable monitor.

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Wine Is For Windows And Darling Is For MacOS

December 1, 2023 by Lewin Day 44 Comments

Wine has become a highly optimized and useful piece of software for those that live in Linux, but occasionally need to walk on the Windows side. In case you’d wondered, there’s a similar tool for when you need to run a MacOS program in your Linux environment. Enter Darling, the translation layer you’ve needed all along.

Just as Wine is not an emulator, nor is Darling. As a translation layer, it duplicates functions of the MacOS operating system that programs need to operate but within Linux. It’s fast, because it’s effectively running the MacOS software directly. Initially, Darling was mostly only capable of running MacOS apps at the console level. However, there is rudimentary support for running graphical applications that are based on the Cocoa framework.

Hilariously, if you’re into weird recursive situations, you can go deeper and run Darling within Windows Subsystem for Linux, itself running within Windows. Why? Well, you’re probably bored or just trying to for the sake of it. Regardless, we don’t judge. If you’ve got your own nifty translation or virtual machine hacks in the works, don’t hesitate to let us know!