 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1006, 13 February 2023 |
Welcome to this year's 7th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Do you have any old computers, phones, or other devices in your home, collecting dust? Do you ever ponder what you might like to do with those under-powered, but still functional computers? This week Jesse Smith talks about revisiting his PinePhone and exploring different methods for turning the low powered smart phone into a working media server. He also discusses limitations of the PinePhone's hardware and software while trying to stream media from the phone. Then, in our News section, we talk about Fedora expanding third-party software support to include the entire Flathub repository. Plus we share a status update from the Gentoo project as the team looks back on progress made in 2022 and also report on Vanilla OS expanding its package compatibility. We then explore three questions about using the command line and scripts, providing quick and simple solutions in this week's Questions and Answers column. Plus we are pleased to share the releases of the past week and list the torrents we are seeding. Speaking of torrents, do you use bittorrent to download the ISO files of Linux distributions? Over the years we have noticed a decreased interest in using bittorrent for fetching install media and we'd like to hear, through our Opinion Poll, whether this is a service you feel we should continue providing. We wish you all a terrific week and happy reading!
Content:
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Playing (music) with the PinePhone
As some of you may recall, I got my hands on a PinePhone about a year ago. After testing a few operating systems on it, including Manjaro Linux, postmarketOS, and UBports, I discovered the hardware wouldn't work with my local mobile carriers. I also found the device was a bit slow to react to input and this combination of limitations meant I was unable to use the PinePhone as a daily smartphone device. I was, however, able to set up the PinePhone to be a local backup and test server.
The PinePhone runs UBports fairly well and, through this mobile GNU/Linux operating system, I was able to set up OpenSSH access, rsync, Python, and other tools which allowed me to test scripts and backup work files. The device's built-in battery meant I had a highly portable, low energy, power-outage-resistant computer which I can use to backup and transfer files. The PinePhone has been mostly sitting in my office, quietly working (with the occasional interruption for upgrades) for about a year.
Recently, I'd been thinking about setting up a new project on the PINE64 device, but hadn't made room in my schedule or found a project I was motivated to start. Then, dear reader, my dinner plans got cancelled one evening and I found myself inside on a rainy day, considering how it would be convenient to be able to play music in the living room from one of the devices in my office.
As you may have worked out already, this is going to be more of a story of exploration than a review. I hope you'll join me for the journey.
A situation which sometimes crops up for me is I'll have media on a computer in my office or on my laptop in the bedroom. I'll be in the living room or kitchen, talking with someone about music, swapping new favourite songs, and then want to play something I think we'll both find interesting. My media collection doesn't fit on my primary smart phone, I don't want to lead people into my office on the far side of the house just to play a song, and it's going to break the conversation flow to pause, go power up my laptop, and launch a media player. Unless they have a streaming account, such as Spotify, and the song is available on their service, it's going to be inconvenient for us to swap music recommendations.
With this in mind, I've sometimes thought it would be worthwhile to set up a streaming media server, but just haven't got around to it. Not a local media service like Kodi, Plex, or the Music Player Daemon. These services are remotely controlled music players that use the local device (the server) to actually play the media. What I wanted was more like an on-demand Internet radio. Something I could leave active, but not constantly streaming, in the background, and access it remotely from my laptop or phone whenever I wanted. Ideally, it would be something with web access or work with a popular, remote media player. I wanted Something that I could use to search for and play music using my phone or laptop from any room in the house.
There I was, a quiet evening to myself with a spare, low-power device that had enough spare room to hold my music collection, and which was just waiting for me to find a new use for it. I decided to set out to see how much of a challenge it would be to set up my PinePhone as a remotely controlled, streaming media player. What would follow would involve multiple false starts, lots of out of date documentation, failed dependencies, broken links, and hours of troubleshooting. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
My first thought was to try Nextcloud. Nextcloud is a mature product which is open source. It offers web-based services which can synchronize files, edit documents, play music, manage files, and it has clients for just about every desktop and mobile operating system. This seemed like an easy solution, assuming I could get the necessary dependencies (such as a web server and database) running easily on UBports. You see, UBports is an immutable operating system and changes to the root filesystem are overwritten at each upgrade. This means we need to be careful, or at least conservative, when it comes to making changes to the base operating system. I didn't want to install too many packages which would get overwritten or make changes to too many configuration files.
Fortunately, for me, Nextcloud is available as a Docker container. This meant, as long as Docker was installed, and as long as Nextcloud had a Docker container for ARM-powered computers, I should have been able to download the container and run it with minimal fuss. This seemed like an easy solution!
I put my PinePhone's root filesystem in read and write mode so I could make changes to the system:
sudo mount -o remount,rw /
Then I downloaded the Docker software:
sudo apt-get install docker.io
sudo service docker start
I then tried to install and run the Nextcloud container. This involved a long command I found a few pages into the documentation:
sudo docker run \
--sig-proxy=false \
--name nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer \
--restart always \
--publish 80:80 \
--publish 8080:8080 \
--publish 8443:8443 \
--volume nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config \
--volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro \
nextcloud/all-in-one:latest-arm64
This process failed, reporting there was not enough room on my filesystem. Docker tried to pull new containers into /var/lib/docker which was part of the root filesystem. Since I had very limited space on the root partition, the 680MB download, plus Docker, plus decompression meant I quickly ran out of space. I cleaned up the files and worked around the issue by binding the directory Docker was using to a location on my home and data partition:
sudo service docker stop
sudo mkdir /userdata/user-data/docker
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/docker
sudo mkdir /var/lib/docker
sudo mount --bind /userdata/user-data/docker /var/lib/docker
sudo service docker start
Checking my mount points showed the Docker service was running and now had several gigabytes of free space. I ran the giant fetch command again...
sudo docker run \
--sig-proxy=false \
--name nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer \
--restart always \
--publish 80:80 \
--publish 8080:8080 \
--publish 8443:8443 \
--volume nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config \
--volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro \
nextcloud/all-in-one:latest-arm64
This time the container failed to run, reporting my version of Docker was too old. This was frustrating, but fair. I was using the version of Docker which shipped with Ubuntu 16.04 over six years ago. I removed the Nextcloud container and went looking for another solution.
* * * * *
The next challenge I faced was it was difficult to find recommendations. Performing searches for "streaming media player for Linux" or "web-based Linux media player" or "simple streaming media player for Linux" turned up dozens of hits and articles. But they're mostly "Top 5" or "Top 10" lists. I was overwhelmed with short blurbs about any or all projects the author could find that in any way involved media players running on Linux. Most of the results were not helpful, didn't involve streaming, or were for projects which were abandoned years ago.
I eventually found one article which was actually pretty relevant and covered media streaming from Linux servers. Some of the options were closed source, or required a lot of resources, or would require setting up a full web server stack manually. Once these were eliminated from the list, one project stood out: Gerbera.
The Gerbera project was described as a free, low-resource, web-based media streaming platform which could work with virtually any client operating system. Like Nextcloud, Gerbera provides a Docker container we can download and run.
I followed the instructions, running the following commands to fetch and run Gerbera:
sudo docker pull gerbera/gerbera
sudo docker run gerbera/gerbera
The experience was off to a good start, the container ran and seemed to be functioning, though the IP address it published was not one valid for my local network. According to the documentation, I'd need to change settings inside the container and edit a configuration file, or specify an IP address on the command line. The tips I found for doing this seemed out of date and threw errors. When I accessed the running container to view the configuration file, the section for an IP address seemed to be missing. Trying to force an IP address from the Docker command line failed, perhaps due to not being compatible with my older version of the container technology.
After reading more Docker documentation and some trial and error, I came up with a solution to work around the issue, binding a network port on my phone to the Docker instance:
sudo docker run --publish=8080:49494 gerbera/gerbera
Accessing Gerbera's web portal
(full image size: 52kB, resolution: 1640x1025 pixels)
At this point, any network connections coming into my PinePhone on port 8080 would be forwarded to the running copy of Gerbera which used port 49494. I was making progress. I was able to connect to Gerbera using my web browser, browse its empty folders, and confirm its settings. However, the container had no access to my music collection. The container was, of course, empty and unable to see files on my host system. I had to stop the Gerbera container and then run it again, this time passing it the path to the multimedia folder on my PinePhone. The directory on my PinePhone where I keep my music is called, unimaginatively, Music. The directory where the Gerbera container looks for media is called /content. I linked them together as follows:
sudo docker run -v /home/phablet/Music/:/content/ --publish=8080:49494 gerbera/gerbera
At this point I could browse to my PinePhone's network port using any web browser pointed to http://pinephone:8080.I could see my music collection and import music into my Gerbera library. The only problem was, I could not find a way to play the music. I could see tracks, I could download tracks through the web interface, but not play them.
With a little digging, I found out Gerbera requires a third-party client. Any software which can detect and play UPnP streams should work. Such players can include Totem, VLC, and Rhythmbox on desktop Linux systems or BubbleUPnP on Android. However, despite trying all four of these options (and a few others), none were able to detect my PinePhone running on the same network. I confirmed my phone wasn't running a firewall and that I could remotely scan its open ports, but Gerbera failed to show up in the network scans of all four media players. None of the media players offered a method for forcing a connection attempt to a specific host and port -- presumably that's not the "plug and play" way. This meant I'd hit yet another roadblock and it was time to start fresh once more.
* * * * *
After removing Docker from my PinePhone, I decided to start fresh. After some more web searches and reading more "Top 10" lists, I found another project which looked promising: Subsonic. The Subsonic project offers web-based streaming, requires no client (other than a web browser), and should run on any platform with OpenJDK 8 or higher. As it happens, UBports 16.04 had a package for OpenJDK 8.
Following the install instructions, I performed the following commands, which used about 167MB of my PinePhone's limit root partition:
sudo apt-get install openjdk-11-jre
wget https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/subsonic-public/download/subsonic-6.1.6.deb
sudo dpkg -i subsonic-6.1.6.deb
sudo service subsonic start
The above commands fetched Java, downloaded the Subsonic package, installed the package, and started the Subsonic service. At first, connecting to my phone on the default Subsonic port (4040) produced an error: "503, service unavailable". This was disappointing, but at least I was getting some form of response from the Subsonic service.
With a little trial and error, I ended up stopping the service, editing its configuration file (located at /etc/default/subsonic), and launching the service again. In short, the sequence of commands looked like this:
sudo service subsonic stop
sudo vi /etc/default/subsonic
sudo service subsonic start
There were two key lines in the configuration file (/etc/default/subsonic) which I wanted to change. One was to change the default user from root to the UBports default user which is called phablet, so the last line in the configuration file looked like this:
SUBSONIC_USER=phablet
The other change was to set the default HTTP and HTTPS connection ports. The defaults are, according to the documentation, to use ports 80 and 443, which are too low for a regular user to enable. I changed the ports to 8080 and 8043. My line in the configuration file looked like this:
SUBSONIC_ARGS="--max-memory=150 --port=8080 --https-port=8043"
Subsonic 6.1.6 -- Searching for media files
(full image size: 146kB, resolution: 1640x1025 pixels)
At this point visiting either of the network ports on my PinePhone using a web browser displayed a website with a login page. The username/password combination is displayed under the login box. I logged in, selected the option to change my password, and began looking around.
The next thing I did was go into a section call Settings and changed the location of the media folder from its default to my user's Music directory. The system then scanned my music folder and... no tracks appeared in the media library.
Puzzled, I checked the Subsonic logs and confirmed multiple files had been found during the scan. Which left the questions of what happened to them afterwards and why were they not in my library? I tried triggering another scan, confirmed the files were found in Subsonic's log, but still couldn't see any music in the subsonic library.
Through some exploration I eventually stumbled across an option which fixed the issue. After scanning the media directory I had to go to the Settings panel, then click the Users tab. Then select my username, then check a box to grant my user (the admin user) permission to access the music folder. Suddenly tracks appeared in my library! I'm not sure why the admin user cannot see the contents of their own media folder by default, but things were starting to move forward.
Subsonic 6.1.6 -- Granting the admin user access to the media library
(full image size: 129kB, resolution: 1640x1025 pixels)
Through the Subsonic portal I was able to play music, create playlists, and mark songs as favourites. The interface can take a little period of adjustment. The player appears at the bottom of the screen and our playlist only appears when the mouse pointer is over the player. I also found the player would stop playing occasionally, about once every dozen songs, and I'm not sure why. Otherwise, Subsonic was exactly what I was looking to install. It automatically scans for new files in my media directory, it can play music over the network to any device with a modern web browser, and it can serve multiple clients at the same time. Basically, it takes no set up or configuration on the client side, so long as we know the device's name or IP address on our network.
Subsonic 6.1.6 -- Playing a music track
(full image size: 84kB, resolution: 1640x1025 pixels)
The Subsonic settings page suggests it is possible to play video files in some form, though when I added a video to the media folder and did a scan for new material it was not found. The settings page has a section which allows us to select which folder is used to save video files and I tried changing this to my media directory, which caused Subsonic to throw an error with a Java traceback. It seems, in my instance at least, I'll need to be content with streaming audio files and not video. Which is okay, this is what I set out to do.
As a bonus, I was pleased to discover I could use KDE Connect to remotely control my browser based media player remotely. This means my PinePhone can stream audio to my desktop or laptop and, when I get a phone call, KDE Connect will pause the audio currently playing.
* * * * *
Conclusions
Having spent an evening hunting for software, experimenting, reading documentation, troubleshooting, reading log files, and trying various client applications I came to a few conclusions, most of which won't surprise anyone.
One of the more obvious is that "Top 10" lists of applications are usually useless. They typically don't provide a list of features or drawbacks, they never provide dependency information, most of them don't mention a license, whether the software is still maintained, or (in some cases) even include a link to the software's website. Most of them feel like copy and pasted blurbs from a Wikipedia list.
Docker can be a useful piece of technology if a person is using the latest version, has lots of free space on their root partition, isn't using a long-term support distribution, and has up to date documentation with which to work. When any one of these stops being true, Docker suddenly becomes a lot less useful. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there isn't any clearly presented information to tell the user which version of Docker a container requires or how much space it will use once installed.
When doing any amount of terminal-based work on a PinePhone it is a huge benefit to do the work over OpenSSH rather than try to interact with the phone directly.
In hindsight, I wish the root partition of the UBports installation was larger. I don't remember seeing an option for that during the setup process but it would be helpful to have a way to easily increase the size. People like me, who use a package manager, would benefit from being able to reduce the user data partition in favour of the root partition.
Out of date documentation is the bane of many open source projects and a regular source of frustration for people hoping to build or work with software.
Plug in play is rarely as straight forward as the name implies.
The PinePhone can be a handy media server with decent performance if you can find a media service which runs on ARM64 processors and doesn't require much disk and memory. Subsonic, for its occasional hiccups and unusual configuration defaults, fits the bill and has a pleasantly uncomplicated configuration file when compared next to the alternatives.
One of the few downsides to using a web-based media player, as opposed to a local application, is the loss of shortcut keys. I'm unable to use my usual media keys to pause or skip songs and it's one of the few things I miss while using Subsonic through my web browser.
* * * * *
Visitor supplied rating
UBports has a visitor supplied average rating of: 7.8/10 from 9 review(s).
Have you used UBports? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Fedora expands third-party software repository support, Gentoo project looks back on 2022, Vanilla OS adds support for Nix packages
The Fedora distribution famously tries to avoid shipping any non-free software or even providing easy access to non-free components. The project is considering a change to the upcoming release of Fedora 38 which would allow users to have unfiltered access to the Flathub package repository. A summary of the proposed change reads: "Fedora Workstation's existing third party repo feature allows users to enable a selection of software repos that are hosted by external organizations. This selection has included a filtered version of Flathub since F35, which provides access to a small number of Flathub apps. This change would remove the filtering from our Flathub offering, so that users can enable a complete version of Flathub using the third party repositories feature. In the graphical software manager app, Flathub packages will only be selected by default when no Fedora package is available."
* * * * *
The Gentoo project has published a look back on 2022 to share new developments and changes. The project shares commit statistics, a list of new contributors to Gentoo, and some key changes to the project which happened over the past year. One of the key features is a live disc running the KDE Plasma desktop: "LiveGUI Gentoo ISO download: For an instant, full-fledged Gentoo experience we now have a weekly-built 3.7GByte amd64 LiveGUI ISO ready for download. It is suitable for booting from DVDs or USB sticks, and boots into a full KDE Plasma desktop based on stable Gentoo. A ton of ready-to-use software is included, from dozens of system utilities, LibreOffice, Inkscape, and TeXLive all the way to Firefox and Chromium. Also, all build dependencies are installed and you can emerge additional packages as you like!" Further information is provided in the project's blog post.
* * * * *
One of the core features of Vanilla OS is the Apx package manager, a utility which can install software from multiple distributions, such as Arch Linux, Fedora, and Ubuntu. The developers have added support another source of packages: the advanced Nix package manager. "Nix has now integrated with Apx using a flag, which allows users to install software from Nix repositories. Unlike other supported distributions in Apx, Nix does not use containers and has it's own --nix flag similar to the usual Apx flags. Packages installed using the Nix flag in Apx are located in the home directory, keeping the root clean and free from changes. This implementation requires a dedicated implementation of package management methods incompatible with the existing framework." Additional details can be found in the project's announcement.
* * * * *
These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Quick command line and shell script questions
Checking-the-load asks: The top command displays three numbers for load average. Is there any way to get these values and just these values so I can collect the load average periodically?
DistroWatch answers: The first three numbers in the /proc/loadavg file are the current load average statistics for your system. You can see them, without any other information, by running the following cut command:
cut -f 1-3 -d ' ' /proc/loadavg
* * * * *
Cannot-get-this-thing-running asks: I created a shell script, but now it doesn't run when I type its name. I just get the error "permission denied".
DistroWatch answers: Typically when a new shell script does not run at all, one of two things is happening. The first is you might be typing the name of the script without its relative path. For example, if I created a script called my-script I should run it this way:
./my-script
I should not try to run it this way:
my-script
The latter seeks any program called my-script in a list of common directories, referred to collectively as the user's path (or $PATH). For security reasons, the current working directory is not necessarily part of the path. Specifying the relative name of the script (./my-script instead of my-script) tells the system where the script is.
The other common issue is the script has not been made executable. In other words, you have permission to read and edit the script, but not run it. Most Linux distributions block executable permission on new files by default which prevents things like dangerous document files or scripts from being run when downloaded from the Internet.
We can allow the script to be executed by running the chmod command:
chmod +x my-script
* * * * *
Accessing-everything-everywhere asks: Are there any filesystems which both Windows and Linux can access for sharing files?
DistroWatch answers: There are several. The exFAT, FAT32, and NTFS filesystems can be used by both Linux and Windows. There are drivers which Windows can use to read ext4 filesystems too, though I have not confirmed whether Windows can write safely to ext4 filesystems.
* * * * *
Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
SparkyLinux 6.6
SparkyLinux is a Debian-based distribution which provides several desktop editions accompanied by convenient tools. The latest release from the project is SparkyLinux 6.6 which includes persistent storage when run live from USB drives. "A Sparky tool to create live USB disk (sparky-live-usb-creator) has gotten a new feature which lets you make a live USB disk with persistence. It means you can use Sparky Live system from a USB disk and save your work and new installed applications to the same USB disk. The 6.6 ISO images received some small changes of live boot lists (isolinux and GRUB) to make it compatible with the persistence feature. Make sure that ISO images older than 6.6 are note compatible with the persistence feature. The ISO images compatible with persistence feature are (in this moment) Stable 6.6 and higher and Rolling 2023.01 and higher." Additional information and a list of key package updates can be found in the project's release announcement for version 6.6.
Endless OS 5.0.0
João Paulo Rechi Vita has announced the release of Endless OS 5.0.0, a significant upgrade of the project's app-centric, Debian-based distribution featuring the EOS Shell (a fork of GNOME Shell), available for x86_64 and arm64 (including Raspberry Pi and Pinebook) computers. The new version introduces a refreshed desktop experience, multiple workspaces and an all-new app centre. Users of Endless OS 4 will need to upgrade to version 4.0.14 before they can upgrade to version 5.0.0. Endless OS 5.0.0 is out. Endless OS 5 continues to be the app-centric operating system you've come to know and love, but the experience has been refreshed based on user testing and feedback. At a glance, you'll notice the grid of apps and search are largely the same, while the taskbar a the bottom of the screen in Endless OS 4 has been split into two more purposeful elements in Endless OS 5 - the bottom dash for your favorite and running apps at the bottom of the screen, and the top panel with more information and system status at the top of the screen." See the release announcement and the release notes for more information and screenshots.
Endless OS 5.0.0 -- Application launchers and dock
(full image size: 6.6MB, resolution: 3840x2400 pixels)
Univention Corporate Server 5.0-3
Univention Corporate Server (UCS) is an enterprise-class distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux. The distribution's 5.0 series has been updated, bringing new features, improved performance, and some new security options. "Determine group membership of users faster: The group membership of a user in UCS is now conveyed via the 'memberof' attribute of the user. This means you no longer have to search across all groups for a user but can access a cache on the user object that contains this information. This considerably speeds up the search for group membership. Synchronisation of password history: With the new UCS version, to prevent the use of passwords that have already been used, a user's passwords that have been used in the past are stored in a history. For this purpose, UCS saves hashes of the passwords in the history. In the past, the history was saved individually by the system that processes the password change - this can be OpenLDAP (for changes via UDM and Kerberos), Samba4 (for changes via desktop systems in the UCS domain) or Active Directory (when using the AD connector). From now on, these different histories will be synchronised, so it doesn't matter which system the user changes their password on since the same overarching password history now applies." Additional information can be found in the distribution's release announcement and in the release notes.
* * * * *
Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 2,829
- Total data uploaded: 42.9TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
Should DistroWatch be seeding torrents?
Years ago DistroWatch began the practise of downloading install media for new releases of open source operating systems and seeding the media through bittorrent. Over the years, this site has seeded over 2,800 torrents for new Linux and BSD releases and uploaded over 42TB (42,000GB) of ISO files.
While a lot of people found our torrents useful in the first few years we were providing this service, interest in torrents seems to be dropping off. Early on, we would usually upload hundreds of gigabytes of ISO files each week and have dozens of people downloading torrents from our server at any given time.
In the past year interest in torrents as a download method seems to have waned. These days we might only have a few dozen clients download torrents from us over the span of the entire week and most weeks we upload less than 50GB of data via torrents.
At this point it seems almost all of our readers download install media directly over HTTP or HTTPS rather than using the bittorrent protocol. As a result we are curious to hear whether you feel our bittorrent seeding service is worth keeping?
You can see the results of our previous poll on using the CDE desktop and its modern clone in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Should we continue to seed torrents?
| Yes: | 879 (47%) |
| No: | 990 (53%) |
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| Website News |
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Article swap with FOSS Force
This week DistroWatch and FOSS Force partnered to perform an article swap. Christine Hall has offered to review the latest release of the elementary OS distribution for us, and we'll have that for you here next Monday. In exchange, our Jesse Smith wrote an overview of KDE, its KDE Plasma desktop, and its cool features such as KDE Connect. The article on KDE has been published on FOSS Force for your enjoyment.
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DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 20 February 2023. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Weekly Archive and Article Search pages. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews/submissions, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, donations, comments)
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| Archives |
| • Issue 1100 (2024-12-09): Oreon 9.3, differences in speed, IPFire's new appliance, Fedora Asahi Remix gets new video drivers, openSUSE Leap Micro updated, Redox OS running Redox OS |
| • Issue 1099 (2024-12-02): AnduinOS 1.0.1, measuring RAM usage, SUSE continues rebranding efforts, UBports prepares for next major version, Murena offering non-NFC phone |
| • Issue 1098 (2024-11-25): Linux Lite 7.2, backing up specific folders, Murena and Fairphone partner in fair trade deal, Arch installer gets new text interface, Ubuntu security tool patched |
| • Issue 1097 (2024-11-18): Chimera Linux vs Chimera OS, choosing between AlmaLinux and Debian, Fedora elevates KDE spin to an edition, Fedora previews new installer, KDE testing its own distro, Qubes-style isolation coming to FreeBSD |
| • Issue 1096 (2024-11-11): Bazzite 40, Playtron OS Alpha 1, Tucana Linux 3.1, detecting Screen sessions, Redox imports COSMIC software centre, FreeBSD booting on the PinePhone Pro, LXQt supports Wayland window managers |
| • Issue 1095 (2024-11-04): Fedora 41 Kinoite, transferring applications between computers, openSUSE Tumbleweed receives multiple upgrades, Ubuntu testing compiler optimizations, Mint partners with Framework |
| • Issue 1094 (2024-10-28): DebLight OS 1, backing up crontab, AlmaLinux introduces Litten branch, openSUSE unveils refreshed look, Ubuntu turns 20
| | • Issue 1093 (2024-10-21): Kubuntu 24.10, atomic vs immutable distributions, Debian upgrading Perl packages, UBports adding VoLTE support, Android to gain native GNU/Linux application support |
| • Issue 1092 (2024-10-14): FunOS 24.04.1, a home directory inside a file, work starts of openSUSE Leap 16.0, improvements in Haiku, KDE neon upgrades its base |
| • Issue 1091 (2024-10-07): Redox OS 0.9.0, Unified package management vs universal package formats, Redox begins RISC-V port, Mint polishes interface, Qubes certifies new laptop |
| • Issue 1090 (2024-09-30): Rhino Linux 2024.2, commercial distros with alternative desktops, Valve seeks to improve Wayland performance, HardenedBSD parterns with Protectli, Tails merges with Tor Project, Quantum Leap partners with the FreeBSD Foundation |
| • Issue 1089 (2024-09-23): Expirion 6.0, openKylin 2.0, managing configuration files, the future of Linux development, fixing bugs in Haiku, Slackware packages dracut |
| • Issue 1088 (2024-09-16): PorteuX 1.6, migrating from Windows 10 to which Linux distro, making NetBSD immutable, AlmaLinux offers hardware certification, Mint updates old APT tools |
| • Issue 1087 (2024-09-09): COSMIC desktop, running cron jobs at variable times, UBports highlights new apps, HardenedBSD offers work around for FreeBSD change, Debian considers how to cull old packages, systemd ported to musl |
| • Issue 1086 (2024-09-02): Vanilla OS 2, command line tips for simple tasks, FreeBSD receives investment from STF, openSUSE Tumbleweed update can break network connections, Debian refreshes media |
| • Issue 1085 (2024-08-26): Nobara 40, OpenMandriva 24.07 "ROME", distros which include source code, FreeBSD publishes quarterly report, Microsoft updates breaks Linux in dual-boot environments |
| • Issue 1084 (2024-08-19): Liya 2.0, dual boot with encryption, Haiku introduces performance improvements, Gentoo dropping IA-64, Redcore merges major upgrade |
| • Issue 1083 (2024-08-12): TrueNAS 24.04.2 "SCALE", Linux distros for smartphones, Redox OS introduces web server, PipeWire exposes battery drain on Linux, Canonical updates kernel version policy |
| • Issue 1082 (2024-08-05): Linux Mint 22, taking snapshots of UFS on FreeBSD, openSUSE updates Tumbleweed and Aeon, Debian creates Tiny QA Tasks, Manjaro testing immutable images |
| • Issue 1081 (2024-07-29): SysLinuxOS 12.4, OpenBSD gain hardware acceleration, Slackware changes kernel naming, Mint publishes upgrade instructions |
| • Issue 1080 (2024-07-22): Running GNU/Linux on Android with Andronix, protecting network services, Solus dropping AppArmor and Snap, openSUSE Aeon Desktop gaining full disk encryption, SUSE asks openSUSE to change its branding |
| • Issue 1079 (2024-07-15): Ubuntu Core 24, hiding files on Linux, Fedora dropping X11 packages on Workstation, Red Hat phasing out GRUB, new OpenSSH vulnerability, FreeBSD speeds up release cycle, UBports testing new first-run wizard |
| • Issue 1078 (2024-07-08): Changing init software, server machines running desktop environments, OpenSSH vulnerability patched, Peppermint launches new edition, HardenedBSD updates ports |
| • Issue 1077 (2024-07-01): The Unity and Lomiri interfaces, different distros for different tasks, Ubuntu plans to run Wayland on NVIDIA cards, openSUSE updates Leap Micro, Debian releases refreshed media, UBports gaining contact synchronisation, FreeDOS celebrates its 30th anniversary |
| • Issue 1076 (2024-06-24): openSUSE 15.6, what makes Linux unique, SUSE Liberty Linux to support CentOS Linux 7, SLE receives 19 years of support, openSUSE testing Leap Micro edition |
| • Issue 1075 (2024-06-17): Redox OS, X11 and Wayland on the BSDs, AlmaLinux releases Pi build, Canonical announces RISC-V laptop with Ubuntu, key changes in systemd |
| • Issue 1074 (2024-06-10): Endless OS 6.0.0, distros with init diversity, Mint to filter unverified Flatpaks, Debian adds systemd-boot options, Redox adopts COSMIC desktop, OpenSSH gains new security features |
| • Issue 1073 (2024-06-03): LXQt 2.0.0, an overview of Linux desktop environments, Canonical partners with Milk-V, openSUSE introduces new features in Aeon Desktop, Fedora mirrors see rise in traffic, Wayland adds OpenBSD support |
| • Issue 1072 (2024-05-27): Manjaro 24.0, comparing init software, OpenBSD ports Plasma 6, Arch community debates mirror requirements, ThinOS to upgrade its FreeBSD core |
| • Issue 1071 (2024-05-20): Archcraft 2024.04.06, common command line mistakes, ReactOS imports WINE improvements, Haiku makes adjusting themes easier, NetBSD takes a stand against code generated by chatbots |
| • Issue 1070 (2024-05-13): Damn Small Linux 2024, hiding kernel messages during boot, Red Hat offers AI edition, new web browser for UBports, Fedora Asahi Remix 40 released, Qubes extends support for version 4.1 |
| • Issue 1069 (2024-05-06): Ubuntu 24.04, installing packages in alternative locations, systemd creates sudo alternative, Mint encourages XApps collaboration, FreeBSD publishes quarterly update |
| • Issue 1068 (2024-04-29): Fedora 40, transforming one distro into another, Debian elects new Project Leader, Red Hat extends support cycle, Emmabuntus adds accessibility features, Canonical's new security features |
| • Issue 1067 (2024-04-22): LocalSend for transferring files, detecting supported CPU architecure levels, new visual design for APT, Fedora and openSUSE working on reproducible builds, LXQt released, AlmaLinux re-adds hardware support |
| • Issue 1066 (2024-04-15): Fun projects to do with the Raspberry Pi and PinePhone, installing new software on fixed-release distributions, improving GNOME Terminal performance, Mint testing new repository mirrors, Gentoo becomes a Software In the Public Interest project |
| • Issue 1065 (2024-04-08): Dr.Parted Live 24.03, answering questions about the xz exploit, Linux Mint to ship HWE kernel, AlmaLinux patches flaw ahead of upstream Red Hat, Calculate changes release model |
| • Issue 1064 (2024-04-01): NixOS 23.11, the status of Hurd, liblzma compromised upstream, FreeBSD Foundation focuses on improving wireless networking, Ubuntu Pro offers 12 years of support |
| • Issue 1063 (2024-03-25): Redcore Linux 2401, how slowly can a rolling release update, Debian starts new Project Leader election, Red Hat creating new NVIDIA driver, Snap store hit with more malware |
| • Issue 1062 (2024-03-18): KDE neon 20240304, changing file permissions, Canonical turns 20, Pop!_OS creates new software centre, openSUSE packages Plasma 6 |
| • Issue 1061 (2024-03-11): Using a PinePhone as a workstation, restarting background services on a schedule, NixBSD ports Nix to FreeBSD, Fedora packaging COSMIC, postmarketOS to adopt systemd, Linux Mint replacing HexChat |
| • Issue 1060 (2024-03-04): AV Linux MX-23.1, bootstrapping a network connection, key OpenBSD features, Qubes certifies new hardware, LXQt and Plasma migrate to Qt 6 |
| • Issue 1059 (2024-02-26): Warp Terminal, navigating manual pages, malware found in the Snap store, Red Hat considering CPU requirement update, UBports organizes ongoing work |
| • Issue 1058 (2024-02-19): Drauger OS 7.6, how much disk space to allocate, System76 prepares to launch COSMIC desktop, UBports changes its version scheme, TrueNAS to offer faster deduplication |
| • Issue 1057 (2024-02-12): Adelie Linux 1.0 Beta, rolling release vs fixed for a smoother experience, Debian working on 2038 bug, elementary OS to split applications from base system updates, Fedora announces Atomic Desktops |
| • Issue 1056 (2024-02-05): wattOS R13, the various write speeds of ISO writing tools, DSL returns, Mint faces Wayland challenges, HardenedBSD blocks foreign USB devices, Gentoo publishes new repository, Linux distros patch glibc flaw |
| • Issue 1055 (2024-01-29): CNIX OS 231204, distributions patching packages the most, Gentoo team presents ongoing work, UBports introduces connectivity and battery improvements, interview with Haiku developer |
| • Issue 1054 (2024-01-22): Solus 4.5, comparing dd and cp when writing ISO files, openSUSE plans new major Leap version, XeroLinux shutting down, HardenedBSD changes its build schedule |
| • Issue 1053 (2024-01-15): Linux AI voice assistants, some distributions running hotter than others, UBports talks about coming changes, Qubes certifies StarBook laptops, Asahi Linux improves energy savings |
| • Issue 1052 (2024-01-08): OpenMandriva Lx 5.0, keeping shell commands running when theterminal closes, Mint upgrades Edge kernel, Vanilla OS plans big changes, Canonical working to make Snap more cross-platform |
| • Issue 1051 (2024-01-01): Favourite distros of 2023, reloading shell settings, Asahi Linux releases Fedora remix, Gentoo offers binary packages, openSUSE provides full disk encryption |
| • Issue 1050 (2023-12-18): rlxos 2023.11, renaming files and opening terminal windows in specific directories, TrueNAS publishes ZFS fixes, Debian publishes delayed install media, Haiku polishes desktop experience |
| • Issue 1049 (2023-12-11): Lernstick 12, alternatives to WINE, openSUSE updates its branding, Mint unveils new features, Lubuntu team plans for 24.04 |
| • Issue 1048 (2023-12-04): openSUSE MicroOS, the transition from X11 to Wayland, Red Hat phasing out X11 packages, UBports making mobile development easier |
| • Issue 1047 (2023-11-27): GhostBSD 23.10.1, Why Linux uses swap when memory is free, Ubuntu Budgie may benefit from Wayland work in Xfce, early issues with FreeBSD 14.0 |
| • Issue 1046 (2023-11-20): Slackel 7.7 "Openbox", restricting CPU usage, Haiku improves font handling and software centre performance, Canonical launches MicroCloud |
| • Full list of all issues |
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FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a UNIX-like operating system for the i386, amd64, IA-64, arm, MIPS, powerpc, ppc64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC platforms based on U.C. Berkeley's "4.4BSD-Lite" release, with some "4.4BSD-Lite2" enhancements. It is also based indirectly on William Jolitz's port of U.C. Berkeley's "Net/2" to the i386, known as "386BSD", though very little of the 386BSD code remains. FreeBSD is used by companies, Internet Service Providers, researchers, computer professionals, students and home users all over the world in their work, education and recreation. FreeBSD comes with over 20,000 packages (pre-compiled software that is bundled for easy installation), covering a wide range of areas: from server software, databases and web servers, to desktop software, games, web browsers and business software - all free and easy to install.
Status: Active
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View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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