The Binary Times – Series 1 Episode 7

Series 1 Episode 7 – A variey of topics discussed this fortnight, including various distros from Mark, more ssh tips from Wayne, Raspberry Pi, Command Line Linux tools, have a listen.
00:24 Intro, more sunny weather, Wayne and Mark talk about the relativity of time.
01:43 Mark’s been tidying his office, bought an Asus 24″ Gaming monitor to complete his dual monitor setup and has been trying out different distros:
Open Suse Leap 42.2, a nice responsive desktop, but encountered dependancy problems once packman repositories were enabled.
Netrunner, a run everything out of the box using KDE and Debian experience, but found to be slow and unpleasant.
Downloaded Zephyr but didn’t do anything with it. Please note that as of 19/04/2017, Zephyr has been discontinued and is now Crowz.
Deepin, a Debian unstable based distro with a really nice desktop experience based on a dock and hot corners / sides.
Linux Mint, a fantastic out of the box experience where everything works nicely. Mark’s concerns around Mint’s security strategy make him wonder if it is a good idea to use it as a daily driver.
06:48 This leads into a discussion around Ubuntu updates.
09:00 Mark continues his gripe against Gnome 3 and mentions the OMG Ubuntu article petitioning Mark Shuttleworth to make Plasma Ubuntu’s Next Desktop. He plans to sign it.
10:08 Mark goes on to mention the TuxDigital video on Why Ubuntu 18.04 Should Use KDE Plasma Instead of GNOME while Wayne shockingly admits he’s not a KDE fan because he’s into light DEs (eg. MATE) and the terminal.
13:07 Wayne suggests we should both try Gnome 3 in a VM, then realises that you have to install on hardware to get a real feel. Mark says that’s what he did with KDE Neon and tells us that Dolphin is the best file manager bar none.
14:41 Mark mentions TuxDigital is a channel he hadn’t heard of before and intends to spend more time there. Wayne’s looking forward to that!
15:17 Wayne describes the wonderful world of ssh and the authentication errors he has to put up with when setting up systems. His way around it is to type the following:
ssh -o PubkeyAthentication=no pi@[insert ip address of pi]
19:03 Wayne goes on to say that he’s continuing his messing around with raspberry pi, leds, buttons and pull down resistors and gives a shout out to the CamJam Edukit worksheets.
19:45 Wayne talks about ssh, scp and Gigolo. To recursively copy directories with scp, use the following command:
scp -r user@your.server.example.com:/path/to/foo /home/user/Desktop/
21:56 Wayne talks about his experience of upgrading his Samsung Galaxy S3 from cyanogen mod to LineageOS. It wasn’t good.
27:10 Mark tells us his ubuntu phone was ideal for him and he wonders what to do with it and his BQ M10 tablet. For now he’ll just wait and see what progress yunit and the UBports guys make. This leads onto a discussion on the benefits of open hardware and firmware and Mark calling for more movies like the Fast and Furious 8 to create awareness around poorly implemented proprietary firmware, governments legislating against same and a disbandment of the WTO!

33:48 Wayne talks about something that happened a few months ago, FOSSDEM and the videos of the presentations. Mark mentions a keynote given by Aaron Siego back in 2015 at OSC in which he talks about the importance of making great free software.
36:32 This turns the conversation around to how software developers get paid making free software. Elementary OS’ App center is mentioned as a method for getting paid, and Mark points out that most kernel developers are professional software developers in paid employment. Mark also tells us he is an associate member of the FSF, donates to Blender, is a lapsed supporter of KDE and uses Kolabnow as his email provider. He believes the money is in the services around the software rather than the software itself. Food for thought.
42:03 Under the Hood – Wayne mentions the following:
Ctrl+U – to delete from the position of the cursor to the beginning of the line.
Ctrl+R – Recursive search, to clear the result from Ctrl+R use Ctrl+G
Mark tells us about a really cool command that he’s forgotten but has something to do with ps -ea |grep [app that’s causing problems] to find the pid and kill [pid]. His notebook is buried somewhere in the office.
Use id to show the active user id and last to show the last logins on the system
Mark mentions who and Wayne trumps him with w. w tells Mark he’s idling…
48:07 Irish Saying for this Podcast: Go n-éirí an bóthar leat (May the road rise with you)!

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