Series 4 Episode 6 – In this episode, the binary times podcast welcomes Paul Clyne to the show, we speak about graphics card woes, Wayne talks about perceptions and first impressions, more amazing under the hood tips and an Aussie saying in this fortnights episode, have a listen…
00:24 Wayne introduces Series 4 Episode 6 of the Binary Times podcast from a slightly overcast but nice and mild Bristol. Mark joins us from an overcast, autumn definitely on the way, Kilkishen, while also introducing a new word “fantabalásach”, a mish mash of Irish/English meaning awfully great. While Wayne loves Autumn and Spring, Mark implores us to embrace all of life’s aspects. Wayne thinks this is weird.
01:19 Wayne asks Mark what he’s been up to for the last two weeks. Mark tells us he’s been busy with various things, one of those things being programming in Python (the book he’s forgotten the name of is Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python). He’s doing this along with Hugh, a regular attendee at the Ubuntu Hours in Ennis. He tells us that they are meeting up again next week to compare notes and is looking forward to that.
02:19 Mark goes on to tell us about some of his recent trials and tribulations with Steam and proprietary Nvidia drivers. He tells us first about Valve’s latest initiative to bring Window’s games to Linux via Steam Play and what needs to be done to enable Windows only games on Steam for Linux. To start you need to ensure you’re participating in the Beta, you can check this by clicking on Steam, Account and checking to see if Beta participation is “Steam Beta update”, if not click on the change button and choose Steam Beta Update from the drop down options. Once this is done (you’ll need to restart if Steam Beta Update wasn’t chosen), you need to click on Steam Play from the Steam Settings menu, and under advanced, check Enable Steam Play for all titles. All your windows games will now be available for install. Thanks to the Dublin Linux Group Telegram Channel for the tip. Mark goes on to tell us that games are freezing on him when he runs games, so he is planning on moving to the beta nvidia driver 396 provided by the graphics-drivers ppa, which Mark thinks may prove to provide exciting days ahead. Wayne offers the helpful advice that you can only fall over so many times before it becomes enough.
08:26 Wayne tells us that he’s had a few weeks where he’s finding it hard to look at the screen and so he hasn’t been doing an awful lot. He tells us about an insight he got from his manager’s reaction to Libre Office’s splash screen about the importance of software looking good to make people want to use it. Wayne goes on to talk about how he runs the servers for the Binary Times and after a call out to our Telegram Channel looking for decent log file analysis software, Maurizio informed us of an application called lnav. Wayne tried it out as a snap first, found problems due to the containerized nature of snaps, so he installed the statically linked binary available from the website. Wayne goes on to discuss the limitations that snaps bring with them. He follows this with some of the handier keystrokes available in lnav – d to skip forward 24 hours, shift d, o will go to the next and previous day. Wayne suggests reading the documentation available on the lnav website for further information. Wayne is impressed with lnav and thanks Maurizio for the tip.
16:48 Mark brings the conversation back to Libre Office and the recent blogpost on the busy month Libre Office has had last August. The guys discuss this and licensing issues with other proprietary office suites. Mark mentions the Register article about 1/5 of IT spending in Britain is going to Microsoft. Wayne and Mark applaud Microsoft’s business acumen.
21:02 Wayne introduces an interview that Mark did with Paul Clyne, a man who reclaims old disused PCs, refurbishes them and upgrades the operating system to Ubuntu MATE, before giving them away back into his community. An article about what he does can be found here. Well done Paul, keep up the great work!
Paul gives us our Aussie Saying of the podcast, which is “G’day, mate!”, which translates as “Good day to you friend”.
44:58 Under the Hood! Mark starts off with a simple one.To find out what the two characters mean at the start of the dpkg -l, type dpkg -l | head -3. Mark explains that head and tail are used to look at the start and end, respectively, of the output of a command.
48:04 Waynes under the hood is around GNS3, and it is a book on pfsense that he found which was produced by Netgate.
We hope you enjoyed the episode as much as we did making it!
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