For quite a while now, I’ve been annoyed by the system notification
volume going to 100% on my Debian systems, regardless of my attempts to
set it to a lower level. For example, when I open the KDE System
Settings app, change something, then try to close the window, the sound
that accompanies the save/discard/cancel alert is always startlingly
loud.
I think I have finally found a fix: in your /etc/pulse/daemon.conf,
put in a line saying
flat-volumes = no
(You should find an existing comment “; flat-volumes = yes” that
indicates the default.)
You can make this new setting take effect in the current session
immediately without having to logout or reboot, by executing the
following as the currently-logged-in user:
pulseaudio -k
(This kills and restarts the PulseAudio daemon for your user session.)
There are several discussions of the pros and cons of this issue online,
going back some years. For example, here
<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1265267>. Also a mention
about the “flat-volumes” setting in the ever-reliable Arch Linux Wiki
here <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio>.
Been looking at various settings changes you can make in the
“about:config” page in Firefox. Here are a couple I have found useful:
* keyword.enabled -- set to false to stop Firefox trying to
do a search on the contents of the address box if it doesn’t match
a URL. This is why I have a search box separate from the address
box.
* browser.fixup.alternate.enabled -- set to false to stop it
helpfully tacking on “www.” and “.com” if the original URL you type
doesn’t work. I have occasionally been confused by it complaining
about not finding a URL, but showing a different one from the one I
typed.
By the way, when you first try to view this page, Firefox shows you a
warning to ensure you understand the consequences of messing
about with settings at this level. It remembers it has shown you this
warning by adding the following line to the prefs.js file in your
profile:
user_pref("browser.aboutConfig.showWarning", false);
Firefox seems to overwrite this file when it quits, and reloads it when
it is launched again.
'Hobbyist developers are trying once again to get a Motorola 68000
back-end merged into the upstream LLVM compiler. Phoronix reports:
The Motorola 68000 series processors have been around since the 80's
thanks to the likes of the early Apple Macintosh computers. Fast
forward to 2020, the Motorola 68000 is still a popular target for
vintage computer enthusiasts and hobbyists. Community developers have
worked on improving the Linux kernel support for M68k hardware like
early Apple Powerbooks as recently as a few years ago and the compiler
support is a continued target. GCC 11 due out next year was looking to
drop the M68k target over its unmaintained status. Hobbyists though
stepped up there so the M68k support will remain in GCC. Now
developers are also looking at adding M68k support to the LLVM
compiler.
This isn't the first time that M68k support for LLVM has been brought
up albeit never successfully landed to date. Building off the past
failures to get the Motorola 68000 series support upstreamed,
developers last week sent out new patches proposing this back-end --
this time they are showing more clarity about the developers involved
and being committed to supporting the code, the sustainability of the
code, and responding quickly to code review comments. This patch
series is the latest attempt at upstreaming Motorola 68000 series
support in LLVM. Besides all the back-end specific code there is also
some common LLVM code changes that fall under greater scrutiny. '
-- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/09/30/225226
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
'The Xen Project has ported its hypervisor to the 64-bit Raspberry Pi
4. The Register reports:
The idea to do an official port bubbled up from the Xen community and
then reached the desk of George Dunlap, chairman of the Xen Project's
Advisory Board. Dunlap mentioned the idea to an acquaintance who works
at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and was told that around 40 percent of
Pis are sold to business users rather than hobbyists. With more than
30 million Arm-based Pis sold as of December 2019, and sales running
at a brisk 600,000-plus a month in April 2020, according to Pi guy
Eben Upton, Dunlap saw an opportunity to continue Xen's drive towards
embedded and industrial applications.
Stefano Stabellini, who by day works at FPGA outfit Xilinx, and past
Apache Foundation director Roman Shaposhnik took on the task of the
port. The pair clocked that the RPi 4's system-on-chip used a regular
GIC-400 interrupt controller, which Xen supports out of the box, and
thought this was a sign this would, overall, be an easy enough job.
That, the duo admitted, was dangerous optimism. Forget the IRQs, there
was a whole world of physical and virtual memory addresses to
navigate. The pair were "utterly oblivious that we were about to
embark on an adventure deep in the belly of the Xen memory allocator
and Linux address translation layers," we're told. [The article goes
on to explain the hurdles that were ahead of them.]
"Once Linux 5.9 is out, we will have Xen working on RPi4 out of the
box," the pair said. [...] Stefano Stabellini told The Register that
an official Xen-on-RPi port will make a difference in the
Internet-of-Things community, because other Arm development boards are
more costly than the Pi, and programmers will gravitate towards a
cheaper alternative for prototyping. He also outlined scenarios, such
as a single edge device running both a real-time operating system
alongside another OS, each dedicated to different tasks but inhabiting
the same hardware and enjoying the splendid isolation of a virtual
machine rather than sharing an OS as containers. George Dunlap also
thinks that an official Xen-on-RPi port could also be of use to home
lab builders, or perhaps just give developers a more suitable
environment for their side projects than a virtual machine or
container on their main machines.
Stay tuned to Project EVE's Github page for more details about how to
build your own Xen-for-RPi. Hacks to get it up and running should also
appear on the Xen project blog.'
-- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/09/29/2025213
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
'Fortune:
Cloudflare is launching a privacy-friendly rival to Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a free toolkit that's used by website
administrators across the globe to help them track the behavior of the
people visiting those sites -- how they find them, what they do there,
the devices they're using, and so on. However, the service -- the most
popular of its kind -- also helps Google track websites' visitors, so
it can better profile them for advertising purposes. This
privacy-invasive aspect makes many people squeamish. And that's where
Cloudflare would now like to step in.
Around its birthday every year, the decade-old company -- which went
public last year -- announces a move intended to "give back" to the
wider Internet community. These moves are often related to privacy. On
Tuesday, it unveiled Cloudflare Web Analytics, a free-to-use toolkit
that largely replicates what Google Analytics offers -- minus the
invasive tracking, and thus the ability to assess the performance of
targeted ads carried on websites. Cloudflare Web Analytics is
immediately available to the company's paid customers, but any website
owner will be able to use it from some point in the coming months.
Cloudflare's scale is crucial here [...] because it takes substantial
resources to run a free analytics platform, and Cloudflare already has
a giant network that can support the load.
Cloudflare Web Analytics isn't the company's only big announcement
this week. "On Monday, Cloudflare launched a beta testing program for
a cloud technology called Durable Objects," the report adds. "You can
read the technical explanation here, but in essence this is a tool
that allows developers of online services to make those services
comply with the increasing number of data-localization and
data-protection laws that limit where users' data is supposed to go."
"With Durable Objects, Cloudflare says, it is possible to specify
where particular data will reside on Cloudflare's network, so -- for
example -- a German user's data does not have to leave Germany. Or,
with an eye to other current news, a service such as TikTok could
ensure that U.S. users' data never leaves the U.S., without having to
create a separate version of its service for that country." '
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/09/29/2011226
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
'Google has recently removed 17 Android applications from the official
Play Store because they were infected with the Joker (aka Bread)
malware. ZDNet reports:
"This spyware is designed to steal SMS messages, contact lists, and
device information, along with silently signing up the victim for
premium wireless application protocol (WAP) services," Zscaler
security researcher Viral Gandhi said this week. The 17 malicious apps
were uploaded on the Play Store this month and didn't get a chance to
gain a following, having been downloaded more than 120,000 times
before being detected.
Following its internal procedures, Google removed the apps from the
Play Store, used the Play Protect service to disable the apps on
infected devices, but users still need to manually intervene and
remove the apps from their devices. But this recent takedown also
marks the third such action from Google's security team against a
batch of Joker-infected apps over the past few months. [...] The way
these infected apps usually manage to sneak their way past Google's
defenses and reach the Play Store is through a technique called
"droppers," where the victim's device is infected in a multi-stage
process. Malware authors begin by cloning the functionality of a
legitimate app and uploading it on the Play Store. This app is fully
functional, requests access to dangerous permissions, but also doesn't
perform any malicious actions when it's first run.
Because the malicious actions are usually delayed by hours or days,
Google's security scans don't pick up the malicious code, and Google
usually allows the app to be listed on the Play Store. But once on a
user's device, the app eventually downloads and "drops" (hence the
name droppers, or loaders) other components or apps on the device that
contain the Joker malware or other malware strains. '
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/09/28/236245
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
Hi All,
I mentioned last night at the WLUG meeting that there had been a delay in releasing the Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04.1 online upgrade.
As of today, the Focal Fossa (20.04.1 LTS) Point-Release Status Tracking webpage<https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/focal-fossa-20-04-1-lts-point-release-status…> is still showing
Status
20.04.1 Released!
Upgrades from 18.04 to 20.04.1 still disabled
...but with...
Upgrade blockers
None
Previously two bugs, 1891680<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1891680> and 1876506<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/focal/+source/os-prober/+bug/1876506> had been shown as the "upgrade blockers". These bugs were fixed in the last few weeks.
Despite the above message, today on my Ubuntu Mate 18.04 laptop, I ran the GUI application "Software Updater". When it completed it stated:
The software on this computer is up to date. However, Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS is now available (you have 18.04).
I clicked on "Upgrade". There were 384 new packages to install and 1547 packages to upgrade requiring about 1.4GB of downloading.
On my rather slow 1.4GHz CPU, but with reasonably fast internet and a SSD it took 50 minutes to do the upgrade.
cheers,
Ian.
PS: The upgrade kept my python Version 2 at V2.7.18 and upgraded Python3 to 3.8.2. If I had done a fresh install from DVD/USB of Ubuntu 20.04.1 it would not have installed Python 2.
'Most of Microsoft's money now comes from its cloud service Azure,
points out open-source advocate Eric S. Raymond. Now he posits a
future where Windows development will "inevitably" become a drag on
Microsoft's business:
So, you're a Microsoft corporate strategist. What's the
profit-maximizing path forward given all these factors? It's this:
Microsoft Windows becomes a Proton-like emulation layer over a Linux
kernel, with the layer getting thinner over time as more of the
support lands in the mainline kernel sources. The economic motive is
that Microsoft sheds an ever-larger fraction of its development costs
as less and less has to be done in-house. If you think this is
fantasy, think again. The best evidence that it's already the plan is
that Microsoft has already ported Edge to run under Linux. There is
only one way that makes any sense, and that is as a trial run for
freeing the rest of the Windows utility suite from depending on any
emulation layer.
So, the end state this all points at is: New Windows is mostly a Linux
kernel, there's an old-Windows emulation over it, but Edge and the
rest of the Windows user-land utilities don't use the emulation. The
emulation layer is there for games and other legacy third-party
software. Economic pressure will be on Microsoft to deprecate the
emulation layer... Every increment of Windows/Linux convergence helps
with that — reduces administration and the expected volume of support
traffic.
Eventually, Microsoft announces upcoming end-of-life on the Windows
emulation. The OS itself , and its userland tools, has for some time
already been Linux underneath a carefully preserved old-Windows UI.
Third-party software providers stop shipping Windows binaries in favor
of ELF binaries with a pure Linux API...
...and Linux finally wins the desktop wars, not by displacing Windows
but by co-opting it. Perhaps this is always how it had to be.'
-- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/09/27/193250
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
'LWN.net re-visits the emacs-devel mailing list, where the Emacs 28
development cycle has revived discussions about how to make the text
editor more "modern" and attractive to new users:
A default dark theme may not be in the future, leading one to think
that there may yet be hope for the world in general. But there does
seem to be general agreement that Emacs could benefit from a better,
more centralized approach to color themes, rather than having color
names hard-coded throughout various Elisp packages. From that, a
proper theme engine could be supported, making dark themes and such
easily available to those who want them...
Another area where Emacs is insufficiently "modern", it seems, has to
do with keyboard and mouse bindings. On the keyboard side, users have
come to expect certain actions from certain keystrokes; ^X to cut a
selection, ^V to paste it, etc. These bindings are easily had by
turning on the Cua mode, but new users tend not to know about this
mode or how to enable it. Many participants in the discussion said
that this mode should be on by default. That, of course, would break
the finger memory of large numbers of existing Emacs users, who would
be unlikely to appreciate the disruption. Or, as Richard Stallman put
it:
It is not an option to change these basic key bindings to imitate
other, newer editors. It would create a different editor that we Emacs
users would never switch to. It is unfortunate that the people who
implemented the newer editors chose incompatibility with Emacs....
The situation with mouse behavior is similar; as several participants
in the discussion pointed out, users of graphical interfaces have come
to expect that a right-button click will produce a menu of available
actions. In Emacs, instead, that button marks a region ("selection"),
with a second click in the same spot yanking ("cutting") the selected
text. Many experienced Emacs users have come to like this behavior,
but it is surprising to newcomers. The right mouse button with the
control key held down does produce a menu defined by the current major
mode, but that is evidently not what is being requested here; that
menu, some say, should present global actions rather mode-specific
ones.
Stallman suggested offering a "reshuffled mode" that would bring the
context menu to an unadorned right-button click, and which would add
some of the expected basic editing commands there as well. This would
be relatively easy to do, he said, since mouse bindings are separate
from everything else. Besides, as he noted, the current mouse behavior
was derived from "what was the standard in X Windows around 1990";
while one wouldn't want to act in haste, it might just be about time
for an update.
Other proposed changes involved "discoverability," including the
default enabling of various modes, although to incorporate them into
GNU Emacs "would often require the author to sign copyrights over to
the Free Software Foundation, which is not something all authors are
willing to do..."'
-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/09/25/2213230
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/