A Bearded Thinkpad | LAS 422 | Jupiter Broadcasting

A Bearded Thinkpad | LAS 422

Posted on: June 19, 2016

Posted in: Featured, Linux Action Show, Video

We review the ThinkPad x260 with Linux & compare it to the XPS 13.

Then we discuss Snaps, AppImage, Flatpak & the Universal Package war that’s brewing, what the major downsides are & why we think this concept of universal Linux apps is not going away.

Plus our picks of the week, a laptop giveaway & more!

Thanks to:

Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

Direct Download:

RSS Feeds:

Become a supporter on Patreon:

— Show Notes: —

Brought to you by: Linux Academy

ThinkPad x260

Intel 8260AC+BT 2×2 vPro
Sierra EM7455 WAN Adapter
SIM Card for WWAN 2
Accessories 2 NONE
X260 IGPU i7-6600U
Camera 720p HD Camera
AC Adapter and Power Cord 45W 2pin US
Intel Core i7-6600U MB
12.5 FHD IPS Non-Touch
Smart Card Reader
Hard drive 512GB SSD SATA3
Backlit KYB ENG
16GB DDR4 2133 SoDIMM
Battery 2 6cell 72Wh Rear
Battery 3cell 23.2Wh Front

— PICKS —

Runs Linux

ASM™ IV Series Automatic Scrap Monitoring System, Runs Linux

The ASM IV radiation detection system is designed to monitor a variety of
vehicles and/or scan for undesirable sources of radiation commonly found
in scrap metal and reject them before hey can cause harm to people, property or product.

Desktop App Pick

Taskwarrior

Taskwarrior is Free and Open Source Software that manages your TODO list from the command line. It is flexible, fast, and unobtrusive. It does its job then gets out of your way.

tasknc is a ncurses wrapper for task warrior written in C. It aims to provide an interface like the excellent ncurses programs mutt and ncmpcpp.

TaskWhisperer – GNOME Shell Extensions

Taskwhisperer is a extension for TaskWarrior Application https://taskwarrior.org to manage todos.

Spotlight

Deep->Derp Browser Extension

— NEWS —

https://slexy.org/view/s29Xzr9wZr

Nextcloud 9 Available, Enterprise Functionality to be Open Source

Well ahead of the early July promise, today Nextcloud makes available Nextcloud 9. With this release we also announce to release all enterprise functionality as open source. Building on top of the open source ownCloud core and adding functionality and fixes, this release provides a solid base for users to migrate to. All enterprise functionality users and customers need will be made available over the coming weeks, fully developed in the open and under the AGPL license.

Introducing the Nextcloud bug bounty program

We offer some of the highest bounties in the open source software industry, rewarding responsible disclosure with up to $5,000 for qualifying vulnerabilities!

We have partnered with the HackerOne platform because of its extraordinary popularity among IT security professionals. More than 3,000 hackers have reported over 24,000 bugs via the platform. Running a program on HackerOne allows us to quickly leverage the collective knowledge of a huge amount of these security experts.

Snaps vs AppImage vs Flatpak

What am I missing (as a user) regarding the excitement over all these competing new universal packaging standards?

App distribution for Linux just got way better

Ubuntu’s “snap” package format now works on a bunch of other popular Linux distros, including Arch, Debian, Fedora, and most of the Ubuntu flavors. It’s also coming to CentOS, Mint, OpenSUSE, and even OpenWrt, among others.

Ubuntu’s ‘Snap’ packages may be the future of software installation on every Linux PC

This is big news. The Linux community has seen a constant stream of projects attempting to provide an easy software installation system across Linux distributions for more than a decade. But Ubuntu’s Snap package format is the first one that looks like it has some serious traction.

Ubuntu Snappy-Based Package Format Aims to Bridge Linux Divide

According to Shuttleworth, the “stunning” and “surprising” emergence of snap as a universal package format was not even on his roadmap a few months ago. He said that when he told ISVs that Canonical was extending snap to classic Ubuntu, the response was overwhelming.

Shuttleworth conceded that there are other universal open source packaging solutions available, such as AppImage and the newer Flatpak, but argued that most lack the security and/or transactional nature of snap. “The snap mechanism has sophisticated capabilities in the way it delivers updated versions,” he said. “Snaps are perfectly transactional.”

Kirta Packager on Appimage/Flatpak/Snap

The old rpm/deb way of packaging is excellent for creating the base system. For software where having the latest version doesn’t matter that much for productivity. It’s a system that’s been used for about twenty years and served us reasonably well. But if you are developing software for end users that is regularly updated, where the latest version is important because it always has improvements that let the users do more work, it’s a problem. It’s a ghastly drag having to actually make the packages if you’re not part of a distribution, and having to make packages for several distributions is not feasible for a small team.

uApp Explorer

Community Reaction

Flatpak is the new name for GNOME’s XDG-App initiative, though ‘…95% of the commits come from one Red Hat employee,’ Shuttleworth cheekily noted.

flatpack currently has 29 different committers, most of them not Red Hat employees; one is even a Debian developer.
Alexander Larsson has 78% of the commits, not 95%.
snappy has 5 only committers, all of them Canonical employees.
If you want people to help you with your snaps, don’t require them to sign Canonical’s CLA, open all snap components (including the server side) and stop spreading FUD in first place.

Chris’ note: The above has some mistakes. He is confusing Snappy and snapd. Snapd has 30 contributors.

Typical Linux Shit Show with Evil Cononical Behind it All, Time for WAR

What’s going on is that Canonical beat us to market in development… and now their marketing folks have beat us in marketing, too. We of course have zero plans to adopt Snappy in Fedora, and in fact multiple Fedora developers
are working on a competing solution, Flatpak

On Snappy and Flatpak: business as usual in the Canonical propaganda department

That’s not being constructive or working together with others. That’s being a bunch of asshats and trying to present the rest of the community with a fait accompli – and notably, a fait accompli in which Canonical holds all the strings (by means of the Canonical CLA controlling contributions to the client end, and the closed source, closed shop server end that is owned entirely by Canonical).

Flatpak doesn’t have sandboxing enabled by default

Currently Flatpak doesn’t have sandboxing enabled by default, since
substantial parts of the implementation of interfaces that allow the
applications to access resources outside the sandbox in a secure way
(“Portals”) are missing.

Sandbox · flatpak/flatpak Wiki · GitHub

Mail Bag

10 Year Old ThinkPad T43 Rocks Today’s Tasks

Lenovo T43 Laptop Intel Pentium M 1.73GHz 2GB RAM 80GB HDD
1.73 GHz
2GB RAM
80GB Hard Drive
DVD +/-RW Optical Drive

Call Box

Chris’ call out for the community to help him with his background

Catch the show LIVE SUNDAY:

— CHRIS’ STASH —

Chris’s Twitter account has changed, you’ll need to follow!

Chris Fisher (@ChrisLAS) | Twitter

Hang in our chat room:

irc.geekshed.net #jupiterbroadcasting

— NOAH’S STASH —

Noah’s Day Job

Altispeed Technologies

Contact Noah

noah [at] jupiterbroadcasting.com