We ponder the implications of Fedora possibly going rolling & LTS, get schooled by the mumble room about the state of linux on the Raspberry Pi & debate about the effectiveness of mesh networking.

Plus we talk about Clonezilla, one of our favorite backup tools & more!

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Show Notes:

Fedora May Go Rolling / LTS

The simple answer there is that Rawhide becomes your (gated) rolling release, and the releases deviate from it by stability and lifecycle. This is essentially what SuSE has done with Tumbleweed and Leap, Respectively.

What if, instead of two releases a year, we updated the Generational Core on a cycle aligned with the kernel — roughly every three months — and had one June release of Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server every year, with an optional “.1” update in November or December? Fedora Atomic would keep to two-week updates as a rolling release.

DigitalOcean

Arch on a PI

RaspArch is a remix of Arch Linux ARM for Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computers, and the latest release is shipping with the long-term supported Linux 4.4.35 kernel and the latest package versions released upstream as of December 5, 2016.

Those of you who want to install packages from AUR (Arch User Repository) will be glad to know that RaspArch Build 161205 is shipping with Yaourt, the pacman frontend. Also, the PulseAudio sound system is installed by default to improve the sound experience in RaspArch, as many users reported it as broken.

The latest release from openSUSE has new images available for the Raspberry Pi and joins SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Raspberry Pi in becoming the initial distributions with 64-bit for the Raspberry Pi 3.

Mueller said having the stable code base of Leap images, which provides fewer updates than the Tumbleweed Raspberry Pi 3 images, give people more stability and expands user opportunities for those who are wanting to use the Raspberry Pi 3 for home automation, mail services or as a small-, low-power server.

TING

Mesh Networking

After over 30 hours testing five mesh networking kits in a large, complicated, multilevel home, we’re confident the Netgear Orbi kit is the best choice for most people—if you need a mesh kit at all. The Orbi system and other mesh networking kits are great for large and troublesome homes where a single powerful router won’t cut it, but our testing showed that most people will still be fine with our current router pick.

Linux Academy

Clonezilla

Clonezilla is a partition and disk imaging/cloning program similar to True Image® or Norton Ghost®. It helps you to do system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the hard disk. This increases the clone efficiency. With some high-end hardware in a 42-node cluster, a multicast restoring at rate 8 GB/min was reported.

Post Show

Improving HiDPI Support

Last week System76 engineers participated in a call with Martin Wimpress of the Ubuntu Desktop team to discuss HiDPI support in Ubuntu, specifically Unity 7. HiDPI support exists in Unity 7, but there are areas that could use improvement, and the call focused around those.

Some patches that improve HiDPI support are in review and they are expected to land in Ubuntu soon. In order to accelerate this process HiDPI bugs in Launchpad are being tagged accordingly and will make it easier for contributors to focus their efforts more easily. System76 will be contributing heavily to this process, but many other Ubuntu community members have expressed interest.

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