• 2 Posts
  • 58 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • I honestly don’t know how this could turn out.

    It could be an amazing change that results in much more progress for hardware acceleration on guests of various types (since that is what vmware is good at) in kvm…

    Or it could mean that they are dropping that feature from vmware altogether.

    Regardless, I like this change because it means I would be able to run vmware machines and libvirt kvm machines at the same time, at least when I am forced to use vmware workstation.

    I also dislike proprietary software in general, so I think less proprietary software and more FOSS is a good thing.



  • I disagree, because they are not the same thing.

    Immutable means read only root.

    Atomic means that updates are done in a snapshotted manner somehow. It usually means that if an update fails, your system is not in a half working state, but instead will be reverted to the last working state, and that updates are all or nothing.

    I create a btrfs snapshot before updates on my Arch Linux system. This is atomic, but not immutable.*

    There is also “image based” which distros like ublue (immutable, atomic) are, but Nixos (also immutable and atomic) are not.

    *only really before big updates tbh, but I know people do configure snapshits before all updates.





  • Termux recently got moved off of the play store (kinda), and is now only available on f-droid/github, because Google was further locking down what they allowed on their store.

    And in addition to that, they recently added a restriction in later versions of Android: “Child process limit”. Although this limit used to not there, when enabled, it prevents users from truly running arbitrary linux programs, like via termux.

    Although the child process limit can still be disabled in developer options, it doesn’t bode well for how flexible base android in the future will be, since many times corpos like Google move stuff into the “secret” options before eventually removing that dial all together.

    TLDR: Termux has been, and is a thing… for now.

    Also, I want to shout out winlator. It uses a linux proot, similator to termux, and has box64 and wine inside that proot that people can use to play games. I tested with Gungeon, and it even has controller support and performance, which is really impressive.


  • So I don’t know how much you know about the shell, but the way that the linux command line works is that there are a set of variables, called environment variables, which dictate so me behavior of the shell. For example, $PATH variable, refers to what directories to search through, when you try to execute a program in your shell.

    The documentation you linked, wants you to create a custom shell variable, called SCALE_PATH, consisting of a folder path, which contains the compiled binaries/programs of scale you want to run.

    This command: export PATH="${SCALE_PATH}/bin:$PATH"

    temporarily edits your PATH variable to add that folder with the scale programs you want to run to your path, enabling you to execute them from your shell.



  • OP is on OpenWRT (a router distro), and Alpine. Those distros don’t come with very much by default, and perl is not a core dependency for any of their default tools. Neither is python.

    Based on the way the cosmo project has statically linked builds of python, but not perl, I’m guessing it’s more difficult to create a statically linked perl. This means that it’s more difficult to put perl on a system where it isn’t already there, and that system doesn’t have a package manager*, than python or other options.

    *or the the user doesn’t want to use a package manager. OP said they just want to copy a binary around. Can you do that with perl?


  • Not quite a scripting language, but I highly recommend you check out cosmo for your usecase. Cosmopolitan, and/or Actually Portable Executable (APE for short) is a project to compile a single binary in such a way that is is extremely portable, and that single binary can be copied across multiple operating systems and it will still just run. It supports, windows, linux, mac, and a few BSD’s.

    https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/ — this is where you can download precompiled binaries of certain things using cosmo.

    From my testing, the APE version of python works great, and is only 34 megabytes, + 12 kilobytes for the ape elf interpreter.

    In addition to python, cosmopolitan also has precompiled binaries of:

    • Janet 2.5 MB
    • Berry 4.0 MB
    • Python 34 MB
    • Php 11 MB
    • Lua 2.1 MB
    • Bash 5.1 MB

    And a few more, like tclsh, zsh, dash or emacs (53 MB), which I’m pretty sure can be used as an emacs lisp intepreter.

    And it should be noted these may require the ape elf interpeter, which is 12 kilobytes, or the ape assimilate program, which is 476 kilobytes.

    EDIT: It also looks like there is an APE version of perl, and the full executable is 24 MB.

    EDIT again: I found even more APE/cosmo binaries:







  • https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Graphics_tablet

    The Arch Linux kernels include drivers by the linux-wacom and DIGImend projects. linuMLx-wacom supports Wacom devices, while DIGImend supports devices from other manufacturers. Both projects publish a list of supported devices: linux-wacom, DIGImend

    Due to how many devices are supported, your best bet is to simply go to your nearest store that sells them and then checking if Linux supports it against those two lists, which there is an extremely high chance it does.

    Then you should also check reviews, to make sure you get a good one.

    I have a Wacom Intuos CTL-4100WL, and it’s served me well for math notes using Xournal++ (app for handwritten notetaking), but I truly have no idea how good it is for actual drawing related applications, as I don’t do it for that at all.




  • Yeah, I read that manual but it didn’t answer my question.

    The big problem is that the arch wiki describes a setup with nested subvolumes first (in a subvolume below @ or whatever your root subvolume is), but then suggests in a tip to use a subvolume directly below the top level subvolume. The limitations mentioned in that manual don’t seem to apply to either setup, as they would prevent swap from working, which is not the case. I have tested both setups and they work fine — or so it seems. I’m worried there is some hidden gotcha I’m missing.

    in addition to that, some of those limitations simply don’t apply to my setup, as I only have a single device.