Podcast Season 2 Episode 15
Podcast RSS feeds: Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and Opus.
Title: La Moustache
In this episode: We’ve got XBMC shapeshifting fun, Debian running on all 64-bits of ARM CPUs, super-safe two factor authentication making it into the kernel and everything’s (probably) alright in Munich. There’s conference news, perhaps our longest ‘Finds’ section, a tripple neuron spectacular and a super-ace Voice of the Masses.
What’s in the show:
- News:
The XBox Media Center is no more. Long live Kodi! There’s now a Debian port for the ARM 64-bit architecture. Freshmeat, the defunct software release aggregator of olde, has been reborn as fresh(code). Two factor authentication has been added to the kernel source tree. Munich and its Linux-migration has been in the news again with reports the city council is considering switching back to Windows. And the next release of Qt (version 5.4) will use LGPLv3. We’re also media partners of the big data Span conference being held at the end of October in London, and we’re still proud sponsors of this year’s OggCamp un-conference being held in Oxford.
- Finds of the Fortnight:
- From the LV community:
- Huw: A 1kb hardrive in Minecraft.
- Stilvoid: Associative arrays in Bash.
- pwaring: You ca have local variables and functions in Bash.
- Tim Fitzgerald: Elementary OS
- Graham:
- You can open a bottle of wine by putting it into the heel of a shoe and banging the shoe against the wall.
- Fez is a wonderful game.
- Ben:
- Virgin Media upload speeds aren’t great. But rsync can be made to work around poor connectivity with a Bash script.
- Mint Cinnamon works surprisingly well on old graphics hardware.
- Visualise algorithms with VisuAlgo.
- Mike:
- Demystify your cron table with cronchecker.net
- Build a completely free computer with help from h-node.org
- Andrew:
- UNetbootin can mangle Tails.
- But CrunchBang doesn’t have that problem.
- From the LV community:
- Vocalise Your Neurons:
- Voice of the Masses: What is your #1 reason for using Linux?
-
Many thanks to all our neurons this episode! Don’t forget, you can give your brains a northern accent by emailing them to mike@linuxvoice.com.
Presenters: Ben Everard, Andrew Gregory, Graham Morrison and Mike Saunders.
Download as high-quality Ogg Vorbis (56MB)
Download as low-quality MP3 (74MB)
Download the smaller yet even more awesome Opus file (24MB)
Duration: 1:10:28
Theme Music by Brad Sucks.
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About The Author
Graham Morrison
A free software advocate and writer since the late 1990s, Graham is a lapsed KDE contributor and author of the Meeq MIDI step sequencer. @degville on Twitter.
Hi Guys,
Thanks for speaking about my submission (about open source social networks). But I think (understandably) in your rush you did not quite get my point.
Up until recently, I completely agreed with your excuse for using facebook / twitter – everyone uses those, so trying to use alternatives is a waste of time until they get critical mass adoption. It is circular logic, but it is also valid enough. However, it seems to be a similar argument often used against Linux and most of here ignore that.
Furthermore, many of the open source social networking tools now allow your account to be linked to facebook and / or twitter so it takes no essentially no extra effort to support / use an open source alternatives. This alone may not help these alternative services get critical mass, but it can only help. It seems like the open source community / linux voice would want to do this – rather than solely promote twitter and facebook. Especially given how facebook sometimes treat their userbase – especially in the area of privacy.
Just a thought,
Michael
Hi Michael. I do agree that we should be using open systems alongside the usual social networks. I like the FSF’s reasoning for a Twitter account (https://www.fsf.org/twitter) and also its stance against Facebook, but the reality is that Facebook brings many, many people together and there’s no easy alternative to that kind of emotional engagement (I don’t have a Facebook account).
It would be great if there was an open system that made it as easy to post content as with the networks now wedded to our mobile operating systems, and perhaps a system that offered more features and usability to attract power-users, but I don’t have any real ideas on how best to make that happen.
I’d love to hear from anyone with ideas on this. Maybe we should get in touch with Evan Prodromou (identi.ca/pump.io) and ask for his thoughts on getting around this limitation.
Hi Graham, Hi Michael,
Is it feasible to cross link to some
decentralized services ? I’m using
diaspora and am happy about the traffic/chatter
you get with just following #linux.
Of course it would be far more superior
with linuxvoice.
Frank
About to listen – noticed Tim Fitzgerald’s link for Elementary OS actually goes to the bash associative arrays page.
Thanks Chris. I’ve just changed the link and an atrocious typo where I’d typed ‘heal’ instead of ‘heel’…
Here’s where they came up with the Kodi name:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Kodi_name_change_FAQ#How_did_you_come_up_with_the_new_name.3F_What_does_it_mean.3F
AFAICT you *cannot* declare local *functions* in bash. Both the link above and the bash manual indicate that the keyword ‘local’ is for variables only. Please correct me if I’m wrong, it would be a fantastic discovery. Or find, rather.
Pending correction of the link above, here’s Elementary OS:
Home | elementary OS
http://elementaryos.org/
Just to second Michael Davis’ point above about Diaspora: the links to Facebook and Twitter are a real killer feature, IMO, that can and should be used to promote D* (that’s what the 7331 kids call Diaspora). It means that you can post to all three with one post, a great time-saver. It even gives you a Twitter-alike character countdown.
Here’s the LibreBoot reflashed ThinkPad X60 mentioned in the podcast:
LibreBoot X60 | GNU/Linux Computers
http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/ibm-lenovo-thinkpad-x60-coreboot/
Would it be possible to have your podcast added to the Windows Phone Marketplace. That would make listening much more convenient for me. Presently, I cannot multitask on my phone while listening. If I even take a phone call while listening, I have to seek back to where I was.
Good idea; the wider the penetration, the better. I am not sure how multitasking works on the windows phones, but I wonder if there are apps that download podcasts for you from the RSS feed URL might be a reasonable interim solution. I use one on my Android phone, and am sure equivalent ones exist for WinPhone.
Since Mike mentioned sites that make writing FOSS Picks easier, I thought I would point out the following, in case he hasn’t heard of them.
1. Debian has a list of packages being worked on at http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/being_packaged
2. Debian also has a list of software that has been requested to be packaged at http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/requested
I reckon that between the two, you end up with a good list of stuff that is either quite new or quite obscure.
I’ve got a thinkpad x60 which we got refurbished. They are pretty nice actually. Great keyboard, particularly for the size. The only problem I had with them was battery life – getting new, branded batteries cost almost as much as the laptop – but using cheap batteries on it defeats the purpose of the small lappy.
I was with Virgin fibre for 1 year, and I wouldn’t go back. Despite claimed high speeds, youtube always buffered. If you ever used bittorrent to download a distro, your connection would slow to less than dialup for the rest of the day.
I was using crunchbang for the past 5 months. It’s great! But I have to admit I’m back in the comfort of ubuntu. There were little teething difficulties which I think is more to do with debian than crunchbang. Currently running ubuntu gnome, and, actually, gnome 3 is shaping up. I’m liking the modernised applications with buttons in the toolbar.
I think H-Node specifically tests on fully-free distributions for practical reasons. It’s not just a feel-good resource for building ultra-free computers. Comparing hardware against such a database can help ensure that it’ll “just work” out-of-the-box without any fiddling with any GNU/Linux distro.
Not really a learning tool, but this is one is pretty funny, it tries to make you visualize sorting algorithms as folk dances: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/2255-sorting-algorithms-as-dances.html