Xen supports para-virtualization, which was built into the original GPL version of Xen and remains useful to approach "bare-metal" speed for the virtual machines.
No, para-virtualisation is no longer useful. PV is dead, kiilled by Spectre.
Much of the need for this has been reduced through the development of "docker", which can be treated much like a Xen based para-virtualized VM with instances of even lighter weight.
WHAT???? You can't compare PV with docker (no virtualisation, just process containment via namespaces). HV with accelerated IO drivers has displaced PV.
The very active CentOS Xen community has, as I've observed, been much larger and much more active than KVM in dealing with new server and guest environments.
What???? That might seem to be the case because very few people use Xen, so the CentOS Xen community it the only place there is any open-source concerted effort around Xen. But, that is because all the concerted open-source virtualisation effort is happening on Linux/KVM.
My information may be out of date: this may also just mean KVM worked well since then. But I've seen a number of clients simply give up on KVM and just switch to Xen or Citrix Xen. due to unexpected limitations and the time necessary to spend valuable engineering time tuning their own virtualization servers. It's no longer on my recommended product list.
KVM isn't a full virtualisation solution, in the same way that Xen (not XenServer) is not a full virtualisation solution. It is just the hypervisor. There are a number of full virtualisation solutions that either support KVM only, or where KVM is the first-class hypervisor, namely: - oVirt, or if you want, the commercially supported version from Red Hat, called Red Hat Virtualisation - Openstack - Proxmox - many more
If you were ever punting KVM stand-alone, you've done it a dis-service.
Indeed, for small environments, VirtualBox has proven much better due to its cross-platform services for the virtual servers and its ties to Vagrant testing tools. I'd be very surprised to see another new virtualization toolkit enter the already crowded market.
For most of the uses of vagrant (mainly used for developers to spin up dev VMs on their own machine), docker *is* probably a better tool, but Virtualbox is really not a solution for server virtualisation at all, there are so many better open-source solutions available that are community-owned (not owned by Oracle).
XenServer has a full set of tools and a comprehensive GUI for doing anything and everything with the host and VMs. And this is the free version. The Paid version is very generously priced and provides a few more really nice features.
The last time I tried using KVM, there wasn't a single decent management app for KVM that didn't also cost an absurd amount of money and still couldn't do everything that XenCenter/XenServer could do without extreme fiddling. Whether that's still the the case, I'm not sure.
When was that? 4+ years ago? oVirt, the open-source project that Red Hat Virtualisation is built on, supports all the features (and many many more) that (than) XenServer has in the paid version. In fact, it has all the features that RHV has, except the branding and commercial support.
oVirt has been viable as a complete open-source solution since about the 3.3 release which was in Sept 2013. 3.0 was the first release to ditch the old.Net-based UI that came from Qumranet that was still shipped in RHEV 2.x.
"Build a UI that controls all the VM's with some kind of web front end.
One of the tricks is going to viewing remote systems. There is a remote desktop variant that encodes displays as h264 or similar. That should be viewable in a web page. Better yet, if you can somehow tie into existing paravirtual drivers in common distributions, though there are some details there to work out."
You mean like oVirt (www.ovirt.org), which has all of these (or equivalent features) and more, including live migration, HA support for running the manager as a "managed" VM, support/integration for running Glusterfs on the "nodes" to be used for storing VM disk images (aka hyper-converged) etc.
AWS began with someone noticing that they needed a load of computers to cover their peak demand, but most of the time they were below that peak and wondering if they could sell some of their excess capacity. It was never intended to be a large part of their business, just a way of reducing the costs of operating their store. It turned out to be quite profitable...
No, this is a myth.
Here is the story from one of the people who was there. There is another article somewhere (couldn't find it now) quoting the head of infrastructure at Amazon at the time saying there was no way he wouls have given up any capacity to AWS or their customers.
AWS was primarily envisioned to reduce the time spent deploying new services, and yes, that was something that Amazon thought other people would pay for.
First it is quite important that you understand, very clearly, that I used GIMP just as an example of what usually happens when I try to install or update new applications on Linux.
Sure, and the solutions apply, equally, to other applications too.
This said, my real problem with the process of installing applications on Linux is that usually an installation that has had problems ends up causing system-wide problems (And even installations that have succeeded can cause these system problems) and when you try to fix these issues (especially when using package management) the problem ends up getting even bigger (More than once the package manager required removing the entire GNOME to allow me to return a library to the correct version, WTF?).
Right, but most likely you did something wrong here, e.g. (using Fedora as an example) using Rawhide repos on a non-Rawhide installation in order to try and get updated packages. Some distros specifically provide backport repos which try and provide as many up-to-date packages as possible, but it isn't always possible for all applications.
It's really hard for me to have a problem like this in Windows.
Because you don't try and install Windows 10 components on Windows 7 (because they aren't accessible in the same way as repos for Linux distros are).
And note that I am a developer, sooner or later I end up finding a way around these problems. But imagine the problem for anyone who is not a developer and he wants to use Linux.
Sometimes it seems to me developers think that using software should be easier for them, and they do the wrong things because 'l33t developer'. Or alternatively, maybe some of the tooling should be more idiot-proof.
Anyway, I already provided examples of the current solutions to these problems, that normal users can access easily, AppImages, and Flatpak and Snaps.
For example, Digikam and some other projects publish AppImages on their sites/mirrors, you download the file, and run it (similar to.app bundles on MacOS). The first time you run it, it will ask if it should set up menu entries for you. If you agree, from then on you access the app (run the.appimage) from the normal menu.
Flatpak and Snap require some support from the distro (but most distros ship with the tooling for both), and as far as I know, both make it very easy to install new versions or 3rd-party apps from application repos. I have only used Flatpak, and it worked fine to install Spotify, Skype and Slack. Install gnome-software via your distro's package manager (if it isn't installed by default), start it from the menu, search/browse for apps, click the install button (enter your root password when prompted), launch the app from your normal desktop menu (in my case, KDE, but it should work for any xdg-complaint desktop). I assume Snaps are similar.
KDE's discover, which supports the distro's native package manager, also supports Flatpak in the new version (on Plasma 5.10, I have 5.8.7 on the machine I use most).
Here is the only recent screenshot I could find of gnome-software in a quick search.
Of course, there are still advantages to using the native distro package manager, but if your distro doesn't ship some software, or doesn't have a new version, at present it is often easy to get a new version via Flatpak, and soon it will be seamless on most desktops.
- It is quite difficult to configure, especially if you have a slightly out of the ordinary configuration (And in some cases it may be virtually impossible, I've had more than one case where I've had to look at really obscure forums to solve a hardware problem and all I could find was users asking about the same thing);
Can you give a concrete example? Most things a home user would need work out-the-box.
- The user interfaces are very inconsistent, where usually every application behaves the way it wants instead of respecting the system behavior (copy/paste for example);
cmd.exe doesn't copy when I press CTRL-C, so it's not like Windows is 100% consistent. Mac OS X is better in this regard, but has it's own keyboard-related irritations.
- The process of installing a recent version of an application usually involves updating important system libraries and this operation is not always safe or can be done in a safe way (usually the update ends up breaking the functionality of other applications that you never imagined could have relationship);
If you do things you shouldn't, yes this can happen. Either use your distros repos (e.g. a well-known PPA), or use Flatpak's from flathub.org, or AppImage releases, or snaps. This is equivalent to what happens on Windows (every app ships it's own copy of MSVCRT and all the DLLs it needs, or you have DLL hell).
- Often a more significant system upgrade can leave the entire system inoperable and with no means to go back, so the only secure way to upgrade your system is to reinstall everything from the new version DVD;
Never seen this myself. And in the event you do need to do a new install (like a new system), all your own settings can be easily copied across with minimal effort.
- Have you ever had the need to customize a large application for your use and so you tried to install from the source code? It's a disaster.
Is customising a large app from source code any easier on any other OS? It seems much easier on Linux than, say, Windows.
20 years? I would say 5. Every year I try a new Linux desktop distro (or a new version) to see the state of things and if they finally learned how to make a desktop (the server works fine but I want a desktop okay?), and every year I end up giving up and staying with Windows 7 (Windows 10 is bizarrely following the same path of the linux desktop, so I I'll stick with the Windows 7 until further notice).
You've got 2 years left to get used to Linux...
P.S: Sometimes I almost feel like I've been able to leave my Linux desktop as I would like (using KDE in Linux Mint for example), but then something always breaks down in a disastrous way because of some update or something that should be trivial like installing a new version of GIMP.
1)What happens when you don't upgrade to the latest point-release of GIMP?
2)How *were* you upgrading? I guess not via a distro-vetted
3)These days, if you need a new version of software not available from your distro, you can easily get a (much bigger) version via flatpak or similar (AppImage, snaps etc.). The GIMP is available from flathub.org (as are Slack, Spotify, Skype etc.).
We live in Cape Town, our household (comprising 2 adults, 3 kids aged 3-8) uses 5kl/month, or 33.3 litres / person / day, well below the 87l limit (but there isn't much more we can do to save water in our house). This includes:
Just received our bill for Dec/Jan, and we used 4kl for the month, or ~ 27l/person/day.
Wow. That sounds horrid. You realize it's 2018 not 1018 right? We're in the future. But you're living like some tribe that just figured out huts.
The reason we try and conserve as much water as possible is due to the severe drought in the Western Cape.
Each of the past 3 years we have received less than the 20th percentile of the annual rainfall over the past ~40 years.
Unfortunately, some of the possible mitigations were prevented by the national (ANC-led) government's failure to recognise this as an emergency more than a year ago (or a strategy to undermine the DA-led provincial and local government for political reasons).
We are more advanced than many European countries and probably about 25% of U.S. states...
It reached the state where it should have been declared a national emergency at least a year ago, but the ANC is doing everything they can to withhold drought support because they want people to die so they can point the finger at their political rivals. I wish I was exaggerating.
We're not 100% sure that it is malice, it may be incompetence (they probably spent some of the drought assistance reserves on new expensive SUVs for the minister and deputy minister, and embezzled the rest).
You don't need 19 gallons per person a day to survive.
Ideally, we would like to keep some semblance of an economy, so that people also have food to eat, can pay their rent or home loan etc. If they aren't to buy food, then they would need water to grow crops...
You need less than 1 gallon per day per person of drinking water. If water is going to run out in 3 months then limited everyone to 1 gallon per day gives you almost 5 years to bring more desalination plants online and/or relocate some of the people.
At the moment, I believe the plan is that when there is less than 13.5% water that can be used from the dams (e.g. at the 23.5% level, assuming that it is challenging to extract the last 10% due to silt etc.), they will start water rationing of 25l per person per day, and no homes will have running water (in taps), but have to collect water in person.
The point is that you don't want to run out of water because then you have death by dehydration, mass riots, and chaos. If you really are going to run out of water in 3 months then you better come up with a game plan now that prevents mass hysteria and death.
Solely relying on price just means that the ultra-rich will continue to waste water, even if it costs them $500/month, because they don't feel it. I think they could raise the prices a bit, as that may provide some small motivation to the middle class to save more. However, they are preventing abuse; households that use more than 10.5kl have to pay for the installation of a water demand management device that limits their household water consumption to ~330l/day (unused can accumulate) and 10.5kl/month (unused can't accumulate/roll over to the next month). In order to raise funds for the desalination plant that is being built, the city has proposed a drought levy (based on property value) to be added to normal municipal levies/rates/taxes.
As far as I know, the golf courses are not exempt (no other sports facilities are exempt, and the city has closed most public pools and many schools have closed theirs too).
However, a number of golf courses (including the one near my house) have either access to bore-hole/well water, or have some storage dams of untreated rain water, that they use just to try and keep the grass from dying entirely on the fairways and prevent the greens turning yellow.
My family of two uses 1000 gal per 6 months. Or 3 gals per person per day.
How do you use so much?
Is this your entire water consumption, for all washing (all laundry, all dish washing) all hygeine (no cheating by showering at the gym) and food preparation (no pre-cooked meals)?
We live in Cape Town, and our family of 5 uses 5kl/month or about 33l/person/day, or 8 gallons / person / day for all of our needs (except for the ~ 1l of coffee and water I drink at work).
I don't think it is very feasible to use much less than that...
We really hope some of the short-term mitigation plans (small-scale desalination plants that can be completed before we run out of water, ground-water extraction etc.) are sufficient to get us to Winter (and rain), but we if the trend of the last 3 years continues, we may not make it to Dec.
Isn't December summer in Cape Town?
Yes, it is.
I should have been more clear. If you manage to see the graphs on dam levels in the links I posted before it broke (is slashdotting still a thing?), you would have seen that the dams in the Western Cape had the following min/max levels and the total precipitation for the year in Cape Town: 2014 - 72%-100% 511mm 2015 - 48-65% 235mm 2016 - 30%-62% 221mm 2017 - 20%-38% < 200mm (153mm up to Dec 18, we did get a bit of rain towards the end of Dec., but not very much).
The dam levels are now at about 30%, with 4 months left until we can reasonably hope for rain, we would have just about run out of water. Assuming we get about the same amount of rain, we would have a peak of about 20% in July/August, and have 4 months of water left -> Dec 2018 we will again be short of water.
The target daily water usage is 500m l/day (to avoid running out of water before May), but we aren't managing to reach that, I think the city is using about 580m l/day at present.
The first desalination plant that was planned to be producing drinking water by April will provide about 200m l/day, so if it is finished according to plan, that could help us run out of water in April until it hopefully rains, and then extend the next possible "day-0" by another ~ 100 days.
Of course, this assumes everyone keeps using water as sparingly as they do now.
You each use only 16 gallons per month? Less than half a gallon a day? Is Saturday bath day in your house? Is the last person to bathe the one who drains the tub? I must be misunderstanding what you're saying.
No, he said:
My water bill for a family of 4 is at the 2K gallon rate which is about 16 gallons each for a month
2000 gallons/month/family * 1/4 family/person = 500 gallons / person / month * 1/30 month/day = 16.66 gallons / person / day * 3.785 gallons / litre = 63 litre/person/day
That's not too bad.
We live in Cape Town, our household (comprising 2 adults, 3 kids aged 3-8) uses 5kl/month, or 33.3 litres / person / day, well below the 87l limit (but there isn't much more we can do to save water in our house). This includes: - All personal hygeine (toilet, shower etc.) except obviously anything at work/school (we don't shower at a gym or anything like that) - All washing (dishes, laundry etc.) and cleaning in the house - All drinking water and food preparation - We use grey water (e.g. collect bath and shower water) for our small vegetable garden, but haven't used any water for the rest of the garden since they started water restrictions. - The kids share one small plastic bath tub inside the normal bath tub, adults show with a 20l container in the shower, and don't use more than that, and don't shower every day (2-3 times a week). - We haven't washed our cars in a year.
Lots of people have installed rain collection tanks and complete grey-water systems, and some have had boreholes/wells drilled (but there are long waiting lists with all contractors who install all of these).
I don't know why they haven't reduced the limit further, as it really isn't difficult to use less. 50l/person/day is probably achievable and still relatively fair.
The city has also imposed a 10.5kl limit per household per month, and any household that needs more because they have more than 4 occupants must apply for a higher allocation, but since we are way below we don't apply.
We know of other people who used didn't abide by the restrictions when they were more lenient, they have been forced to pay to have water restriction devices installed, which limit their daily water use (unused daily water accumulates for the rest of the month, but unused monthly water doesn't accumulate/roll over).
There are a lot more issues at play here than described in the BBC article, as the majority (60%0 of the water available in the dams in the Western Cape was allocated by the national government to agriculture. That is understandable, as even that allocation is too little for them (with the amount of rain over the past year), with many farmers having to choose between killing their livestock and taking loans to buy feed (and still possibly have to kill the livestock later anyway).
For some detail on how bad the drought is, see some rainfall stats for Cape Town. The past 3 years we have had less than the 20th percentile of annual rainfall over the last 40 years.
You can also see the trend of water storage in the dams here
We really hope some of the short-term mitigation plans (small-scale desalination plants that can be completed before we run out of water, ground-water extraction etc.) are sufficient to get us to Winter (and rain), but we if the trend of the last 3 years continues, we may not make it to Dec.
it forces corporations to be more vigilant about financial reporting at all levels, which is likely one of the reasons there have been few accounting scandals at major public corporations since Sarbanes-Oxley took effect. In that regard, the law is doing what it’s supposed to, encouraging accountability and deterring fraud.
Yet, this is ANOTHER case where the CEO SHOULD be an MUST be held accountable for allowing their company to produce a clear and dangerous product deficency.
Maybe, but no under SOX, as SOX covers fraud, not product deficiencies that haven't been proven to be knowingly fraudulent.
However, this is why I don't use proprietary NAS systems. If I wanted vulnerabilities in code I don't control to affect the security of my data, I would much rather use a public cloud, whose entire business is data security, than appliances from a disk vendor for whom this is a side business, supposedly trading on the insecurity of the cloud and punting the security of their device "because not cloud" where it's still effectively someone else's computer (running code I can't look at).
Bear in mind that there are two vulnerabilities, Meltdown and Spectre. "Meltdown is currently Intel-only, but Spectre is Intel, ARM and AMD. Both use similar techniques to access kernel memory (Meltdown) and local process memory (Spectre)."
But the patches rolling out now are only for Meltdown, fixes for Spectre are still not merged and are being actively worked on (and require compiler changes, and patched kernels compiled with a suitably-patched compiler).
So, their page says their software is open-source, including the "collector" ( https://github.com/18F/analyti... ). Unfortunately, all that seems to be is some JavaScript to fetch and process Google Analytics data.
I thought the US government would be able to do an adequate job of collecting and processing "meta-data" without giving all of that information to Google...
"And an inch is about the length of the tip of a thumb and a foot is about as long as a size 10 foot."
My size 10 feet are 300mm, my thumb from knuckle to tip is 34mm (so 40% more than an inch). Your justification for using your units doesn't have much merit.
"Of course, everybody knows that a Quarter Pounder with Cheese is called a Royale with Cheese in countries that use the metric system (because they don't know what the fuck a quarter pound is)."
You are using Pulp Fiction as your source of facts?
"You want to know how often I want to convert fl oz to cubic inches? Or find the weight of a gallon of water? The answer to the first is "never", the second is "so rarely that I'll just Google it.""
Americans do none of these because it is too difficult without SI units, where the rest of the world considers this to be elementary and uses regularly.
If you have a pool, how much water does it hold? This is somrthing I have had to quickly calculate without consulting tables, an in SI units it is trivial.
"As long as there is a battle between KDE, gnome and others, as long as every distribution thinks they can do the user interface design themselves (ending up with 10 half-finished system configuration interfaces), as long as Puttering is still allowed anywhere near the Linux code base, the answer is NO."
So you don't like fragmentation (multiple desktops, multiple distros) OR consitency (of init systems)?
Systemd has three fundamental issues: -Piss poor community engagement. Their reaction to any request or security report is to first say the requester or reporter is an idiot. For example: https://github.com/systemd/sys... where he claims that it's perfectly valid for a confused systemd to just run user as root instead of error out.
If I read *just* that bug report, the part of the community engagement that is not working well is from the community of incensed (seemingly Debian) users who insult people in bug reports.
Pottering explained the general approach they took which was:
In systemd we generally follow the rule that when we encounter a unit setting that does not validate syntax-wise we'll log about it and ignore it, for compat reasons. We do the same for User= here as for all other options.
However, he was open to taking a different approach for most security-related settings, and as such the issue is fixed
If you want to boot in interactive mode with systemd, use systemd.confirm_spawn=1 at the kernel command line (see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/...), on production systems I have deployed this would require entering a grub password (hopefully with a version of grub that can't be bypassed:-().
Slashdot Mirror
Xen supports para-virtualization, which was built into the original GPL version of Xen and remains useful to approach "bare-metal" speed for the virtual machines.
No, para-virtualisation is no longer useful. PV is dead, kiilled by Spectre.
Much of the need for this has been reduced through the development of "docker", which can be treated much like a Xen based para-virtualized VM with instances of even lighter weight.
WHAT???? You can't compare PV with docker (no virtualisation, just process containment via namespaces). HV with accelerated IO drivers has displaced PV.
The very active CentOS Xen community has, as I've observed, been much larger and much more active than KVM in dealing with new server and guest environments.
What???? That might seem to be the case because very few people use Xen, so the CentOS Xen community it the only place there is any open-source concerted effort around Xen. But, that is because all the concerted open-source virtualisation effort is happening on Linux/KVM.
My information may be out of date: this may also just mean KVM worked well since then. But I've seen a number of clients simply give up on KVM and just switch to Xen or Citrix Xen. due to unexpected limitations and the time necessary to spend valuable engineering time tuning their own virtualization servers. It's no longer on my recommended product list.
KVM isn't a full virtualisation solution, in the same way that Xen (not XenServer) is not a full virtualisation solution. It is just the hypervisor. There are a number of full virtualisation solutions that either support KVM only, or where KVM is the first-class hypervisor, namely:
- oVirt, or if you want, the commercially supported version from Red Hat, called Red Hat Virtualisation
- Openstack
- Proxmox
- many more
If you were ever punting KVM stand-alone, you've done it a dis-service.
Indeed, for small environments, VirtualBox has proven much better due to its cross-platform services for the virtual servers and its ties to Vagrant testing tools. I'd be very surprised to see another new virtualization toolkit enter the already crowded market.
For most of the uses of vagrant (mainly used for developers to spin up dev VMs on their own machine), docker *is* probably a better tool, but Virtualbox is really not a solution for server virtualisation at all, there are so many better open-source solutions available that are community-owned (not owned by Oracle).
XenServer has a full set of tools and a comprehensive GUI for doing anything and everything with the host and VMs. And this is the free version. The Paid version is very generously priced and provides a few more really nice features.
The last time I tried using KVM, there wasn't a single decent management app for KVM that didn't also cost an absurd amount of money and still couldn't do everything that XenCenter/XenServer could do without extreme fiddling. Whether that's still the the case, I'm not sure.
When was that? 4+ years ago? oVirt, the open-source project that Red Hat Virtualisation is built on, supports all the features (and many many more) that (than) XenServer has in the paid version. In fact, it has all the features that RHV has, except the branding and commercial support.
oVirt has been viable as a complete open-source solution since about the 3.3 release which was in Sept 2013. 3.0 was the first release to ditch the old .Net-based UI that came from Qumranet that was still shipped in RHEV 2.x.
"Build a UI that controls all the VM's with some kind of web front end.
One of the tricks is going to viewing remote systems. There is a remote desktop variant that encodes displays as h264 or similar. That should be viewable in a web page. Better yet, if you can somehow tie into existing paravirtual drivers in common distributions, though there are some details there to work out."
You mean like oVirt (www.ovirt.org), which has all of these (or equivalent features) and more, including live migration, HA support for running the manager as a "managed" VM, support/integration for running Glusterfs on the "nodes" to be used for storing VM disk images (aka hyper-converged) etc.
Including Amazon.
Yes.
AWS began with someone noticing that they needed a load of computers to cover their peak demand, but most of the time they were below that peak and wondering if they could sell some of their excess capacity. It was never intended to be a large part of their business, just a way of reducing the costs of operating their store. It turned out to be quite profitable...
No, this is a myth.
Here is the story from one of the people who was there. There is another article somewhere (couldn't find it now) quoting the head of infrastructure at Amazon at the time saying there was no way he wouls have given up any capacity to AWS or their customers.
AWS was primarily envisioned to reduce the time spent deploying new services, and yes, that was something that Amazon thought other people would pay for.
And Skype was already available as a Flatpak available on flathub (and easily installable from the gnome-software GUI).
The summary could have mentiomed that (and, of course, that Slack and Spotify are also available as Flatpak's from Flathub)
First it is quite important that you understand, very clearly, that I used GIMP just as an example of what usually happens when I try to install or update new applications on Linux.
Sure, and the solutions apply, equally, to other applications too.
This said, my real problem with the process of installing applications on Linux is that usually an installation that has had problems ends up causing system-wide problems (And even installations that have succeeded can cause these system problems) and when you try to fix these issues (especially when using package management) the problem ends up getting even bigger (More than once the package manager required removing the entire GNOME to allow me to return a library to the correct version, WTF?).
Right, but most likely you did something wrong here, e.g. (using Fedora as an example) using Rawhide repos on a non-Rawhide installation in order to try and get updated packages. Some distros specifically provide backport repos which try and provide as many up-to-date packages as possible, but it isn't always possible for all applications.
It's really hard for me to have a problem like this in Windows.
Because you don't try and install Windows 10 components on Windows 7 (because they aren't accessible in the same way as repos for Linux distros are).
And note that I am a developer, sooner or later I end up finding a way around these problems. But imagine the problem for anyone who is not a developer and he wants to use Linux.
Sometimes it seems to me developers think that using software should be easier for them, and they do the wrong things because 'l33t developer'. Or alternatively, maybe some of the tooling should be more idiot-proof.
Anyway, I already provided examples of the current solutions to these problems, that normal users can access easily, AppImages, and Flatpak and Snaps.
For example, Digikam and some other projects publish AppImages on their sites/mirrors, you download the file, and run it (similar to .app bundles on MacOS). The first time you run it, it will ask if it should set up menu entries for you. If you agree, from then on you access the app (run the .appimage) from the normal menu.
Flatpak and Snap require some support from the distro (but most distros ship with the tooling for both), and as far as I know, both make it very easy to install new versions or 3rd-party apps from application repos. I have only used Flatpak, and it worked fine to install Spotify, Skype and Slack. Install gnome-software via your distro's package manager (if it isn't installed by default), start it from the menu, search/browse for apps, click the install button (enter your root password when prompted), launch the app from your normal desktop menu (in my case, KDE, but it should work for any xdg-complaint desktop). I assume Snaps are similar.
KDE's discover, which supports the distro's native package manager, also supports Flatpak in the new version (on Plasma 5.10, I have 5.8.7 on the machine I use most).
Here is the only recent screenshot I could find of gnome-software in a quick search.
Of course, there are still advantages to using the native distro package manager, but if your distro doesn't ship some software, or doesn't have a new version, at present it is often easy to get a new version via Flatpak, and soon it will be seamless on most desktops.
Go have a look at the apps available on Flathub.
- It is quite difficult to configure, especially if you have a slightly out of the ordinary configuration (And in some cases it may be virtually impossible, I've had more than one case where I've had to look at really obscure forums to solve a hardware problem and all I could find was users asking about the same thing);
Can you give a concrete example? Most things a home user would need work out-the-box.
- The user interfaces are very inconsistent, where usually every application behaves the way it wants instead of respecting the system behavior (copy/paste for example);
cmd.exe doesn't copy when I press CTRL-C, so it's not like Windows is 100% consistent. Mac OS X is better in this regard, but has it's own keyboard-related irritations.
- The process of installing a recent version of an application usually involves updating important system libraries and this operation is not always safe or can be done in a safe way (usually the update ends up breaking the functionality of other applications that you never imagined could have relationship);
If you do things you shouldn't, yes this can happen. Either use your distros repos (e.g. a well-known PPA), or use Flatpak's from flathub.org, or AppImage releases, or snaps. This is equivalent to what happens on Windows (every app ships it's own copy of MSVCRT and all the DLLs it needs, or you have DLL hell).
- Often a more significant system upgrade can leave the entire system inoperable and with no means to go back, so the only secure way to upgrade your system is to reinstall everything from the new version DVD;
Never seen this myself. And in the event you do need to do a new install (like a new system), all your own settings can be easily copied across with minimal effort.
- Have you ever had the need to customize a large application for your use and so you tried to install from the source code? It's a disaster.
Is customising a large app from source code any easier on any other OS? It seems much easier on Linux than, say, Windows.
20 years? I would say 5. Every year I try a new Linux desktop distro (or a new version) to see the state of things and if they finally learned how to make a desktop (the server works fine but I want a desktop okay?), and every year I end up giving up and staying with Windows 7 (Windows 10 is bizarrely following the same path of the linux desktop, so I I'll stick with the Windows 7 until further notice).
You've got 2 years left to get used to Linux ...
P.S: Sometimes I almost feel like I've been able to leave my Linux desktop as I would like (using KDE in Linux Mint for example), but then something always breaks down in a disastrous way because of some update or something that should be trivial like installing a new version of GIMP.
1)What happens when you don't upgrade to the latest point-release of GIMP?
2)How *were* you upgrading? I guess not via a distro-vetted
3)These days, if you need a new version of software not available from your distro, you can easily get a (much bigger) version via flatpak or similar (AppImage, snaps etc.). The GIMP is available from flathub.org (as are Slack, Spotify, Skype etc.).
We live in Cape Town, our household (comprising 2 adults, 3 kids aged 3-8) uses 5kl/month, or 33.3 litres / person / day, well below the 87l limit (but there isn't much more we can do to save water in our house). This includes:
Just received our bill for Dec/Jan, and we used 4kl for the month, or ~ 27l/person/day.
Wow. That sounds horrid. You realize it's 2018 not 1018 right? We're in the future. But you're living like some tribe that just figured out huts.
The reason we try and conserve as much water as possible is due to the severe drought in the Western Cape.
Each of the past 3 years we have received less than the 20th percentile of the annual rainfall over the past ~40 years.
Unfortunately, some of the possible mitigations were prevented by the national (ANC-led) government's failure to recognise this as an emergency more than a year ago (or a strategy to undermine the DA-led provincial and local government for political reasons).
We are more advanced than many European countries and probably about 25% of U.S. states ...
Time to move to a place that doesn't suck.
There are very few places that suck less ...
It reached the state where it should have been declared a national emergency at least a year ago, but the ANC is doing everything they can to withhold drought support because they want people to die so they can point the finger at their political rivals. I wish I was exaggerating.
We're not 100% sure that it is malice, it may be incompetence (they probably spent some of the drought assistance reserves on new expensive SUVs for the minister and deputy minister, and embezzled the rest).
You don't need 19 gallons per person a day to survive.
Ideally, we would like to keep some semblance of an economy, so that people also have food to eat, can pay their rent or home loan etc. If they aren't to buy food, then they would need water to grow crops ...
You need less than 1 gallon per day per person of drinking water. If water is going to run out in 3 months then limited everyone to 1 gallon per day gives you almost 5 years to bring more desalination plants online and/or relocate some of the people.
At the moment, I believe the plan is that when there is less than 13.5% water that can be used from the dams (e.g. at the 23.5% level, assuming that it is challenging to extract the last 10% due to silt etc.), they will start water rationing of 25l per person per day, and no homes will have running water (in taps), but have to collect water in person.
The point is that you don't want to run out of water because then you have death by dehydration, mass riots, and chaos. If you really are going to run out of water in 3 months then you better come up with a game plan now that prevents mass hysteria and death.
Solely relying on price just means that the ultra-rich will continue to waste water, even if it costs them $500/month, because they don't feel it. I think they could raise the prices a bit, as that may provide some small motivation to the middle class to save more. However, they are preventing abuse; households that use more than 10.5kl have to pay for the installation of a water demand management device that limits their household water consumption to ~330l/day (unused can accumulate) and 10.5kl/month (unused can't accumulate/roll over to the next month). In order to raise funds for the desalination plant that is being built, the city has proposed a drought levy (based on property value) to be added to normal municipal levies/rates/taxes.
As far as I know, the golf courses are not exempt (no other sports facilities are exempt, and the city has closed most public pools and many schools have closed theirs too).
However, a number of golf courses (including the one near my house) have either access to bore-hole/well water, or have some storage dams of untreated rain water, that they use just to try and keep the grass from dying entirely on the fairways and prevent the greens turning yellow.
My family of two uses 1000 gal per 6 months. Or 3 gals per person per day.
How do you use so much?
Is this your entire water consumption, for all washing (all laundry, all dish washing) all hygeine (no cheating by showering at the gym) and food preparation (no pre-cooked meals)?
We live in Cape Town, and our family of 5 uses 5kl/month or about 33l/person/day, or 8 gallons / person / day for all of our needs (except for the ~ 1l of coffee and water I drink at work).
I don't think it is very feasible to use much less than that ...
We live in Cape Town
We really hope some of the short-term mitigation plans (small-scale desalination plants that can be completed before we run out of water, ground-water extraction etc.) are sufficient to get us to Winter (and rain), but we if the trend of the last 3 years continues, we may not make it to Dec.
Isn't December summer in Cape Town?
Yes, it is.
I should have been more clear. If you manage to see the graphs on dam levels in the links I posted before it broke (is slashdotting still a thing?), you would have seen that the dams in the Western Cape had the following min/max levels and the total precipitation for the year in Cape Town:
2014 - 72%-100% 511mm
2015 - 48-65% 235mm
2016 - 30%-62% 221mm
2017 - 20%-38% < 200mm (153mm up to Dec 18, we did get a bit of rain towards the end of Dec., but not very much).
The dam levels are now at about 30%, with 4 months left until we can reasonably hope for rain, we would have just about run out of water. Assuming we get about the same amount of rain, we would have a peak of about 20% in July/August, and have 4 months of water left -> Dec 2018 we will again be short of water.
The target daily water usage is 500m l/day (to avoid running out of water before May), but we aren't managing to reach that, I think the city is using about 580m l/day at present.
The first desalination plant that was planned to be producing drinking water by April will provide about 200m l/day, so if it is finished according to plan, that could help us run out of water in April until it hopefully rains, and then extend the next possible "day-0" by another ~ 100 days.
Of course, this assumes everyone keeps using water as sparingly as they do now.
You each use only 16 gallons per month? Less than half a gallon a day? Is Saturday bath day in your house? Is the last person to bathe the one who drains the tub? I must be misunderstanding what you're saying.
No, he said:
My water bill for a family of 4 is at the 2K gallon rate which is about 16 gallons each for a month
2000 gallons /month/family
* 1/4 family/person = 500 gallons / person / month
* 1/30 month/day = 16.66 gallons / person / day
* 3.785 gallons / litre
= 63 litre/person/day
That's not too bad.
We live in Cape Town, our household (comprising 2 adults, 3 kids aged 3-8) uses 5kl/month, or 33.3 litres / person / day, well below the 87l limit (but there isn't much more we can do to save water in our house). This includes:
- All personal hygeine (toilet, shower etc.) except obviously anything at work/school (we don't shower at a gym or anything like that)
- All washing (dishes, laundry etc.) and cleaning in the house
- All drinking water and food preparation
- We use grey water (e.g. collect bath and shower water) for our small vegetable garden, but haven't used any water for the rest of the garden since they started water restrictions.
- The kids share one small plastic bath tub inside the normal bath tub, adults show with a 20l container in the shower, and don't use more than that, and don't shower every day (2-3 times a week).
- We haven't washed our cars in a year.
Lots of people have installed rain collection tanks and complete grey-water systems, and some have had boreholes/wells drilled (but there are long waiting lists with all contractors who install all of these).
I don't know why they haven't reduced the limit further, as it really isn't difficult to use less. 50l/person/day is probably achievable and still relatively fair.
The city has also imposed a 10.5kl limit per household per month, and any household that needs more because they have more than 4 occupants must apply for a higher allocation, but since we are way below we don't apply.
We know of other people who used didn't abide by the restrictions when they were more lenient, they have been forced to pay to have water restriction devices installed, which limit their daily water use (unused daily water accumulates for the rest of the month, but unused monthly water doesn't accumulate/roll over).
There are a lot more issues at play here than described in the BBC article, as the majority (60%0 of the water available in the dams in the Western Cape was allocated by the national government to agriculture. That is understandable, as even that allocation is too little for them (with the amount of rain over the past year), with many farmers having to choose between killing their livestock and taking loans to buy feed (and still possibly have to kill the livestock later anyway).
For some detail on how bad the drought is, see some rainfall stats for Cape Town. The past 3 years we have had less than the 20th percentile of annual rainfall over the last 40 years.
You can also see the trend of water storage in the dams here
We really hope some of the short-term mitigation plans (small-scale desalination plants that can be completed before we run out of water, ground-water extraction etc.) are sufficient to get us to Winter (and rain), but we if the trend of the last 3 years continues, we may not make it to Dec.
With Sarsbane-Oxley passed years ago, not a single CEO has been held accountable.
But, many CFOs have been, and while ,there isn't evidence that CEOs have been charged:
Yet, this is ANOTHER case where the CEO SHOULD be an MUST be held accountable for allowing their company to produce a clear and dangerous product deficency.
Maybe, but no under SOX, as SOX covers fraud, not product deficiencies that haven't been proven to be knowingly fraudulent.
However, this is why I don't use proprietary NAS systems. If I wanted vulnerabilities in code I don't control to affect the security of my data, I would much rather use a public cloud, whose entire business is data security, than appliances from a disk vendor for whom this is a side business, supposedly trading on the insecurity of the cloud and punting the security of their device "because not cloud" where it's still effectively someone else's computer (running code I can't look at).
Bear in mind that there are two vulnerabilities, Meltdown and Spectre. "Meltdown is currently Intel-only, but Spectre is Intel, ARM and AMD. Both use similar techniques to access kernel memory (Meltdown) and local process memory (Spectre)."
But the patches rolling out now are only for Meltdown, fixes for Spectre are still not merged and are being actively worked on (and require compiler changes, and patched kernels compiled with a suitably-patched compiler).
So, their page says their software is open-source, including the "collector" ( https://github.com/18F/analyti... ). Unfortunately, all that seems to be is some JavaScript to fetch and process Google Analytics data.
I thought the US government would be able to do an adequate job of collecting and processing "meta-data" without giving all of that information to Google ...
"And an inch is about the length of the tip of a thumb and a foot is about as long as a size 10 foot."
My size 10 feet are 300mm, my thumb from knuckle to tip is 34mm (so 40% more than an inch). Your justification for using your units doesn't have much merit.
"Of course, everybody knows that a Quarter Pounder with Cheese is called a Royale with Cheese in countries that use the metric system (because they don't know what the fuck a quarter pound is)."
You are using Pulp Fiction as your source of facts?
Royale only seems to be used in French-speaking countries ( https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wik... ), many English-speaking metric-only countries (including e.g. South Africa, see http://www.mcdonalds.co.za/men... ).
"You want to know how often I want to convert fl oz to cubic inches? Or find the weight of a gallon of water? The answer to the first is "never", the second is "so rarely that I'll just Google it.""
Americans do none of these because it is too difficult without SI units, where the rest of the world considers this to be elementary and uses regularly.
If you have a pool, how much water does it hold? This is somrthing I have had to quickly calculate without consulting tables, an in SI units it is trivial.
"As long as there is a battle between KDE, gnome and others, as long as every distribution thinks they can do the user interface design themselves (ending up with 10 half-finished system configuration interfaces), as long as Puttering is still allowed anywhere near the Linux code base, the answer is NO."
So you don't like fragmentation (multiple desktops, multiple distros) OR consitency (of init systems)?
Systemd has three fundamental issues:
-Piss poor community engagement. Their reaction to any request or security report is to first say the requester or reporter is an idiot. For example: https://github.com/systemd/sys... where he claims that it's perfectly valid for a confused systemd to just run user as root instead of error out.
If I read *just* that bug report, the part of the community engagement that is not working well is from the community of incensed (seemingly Debian) users who insult people in bug reports.
Pottering explained the general approach they took which was:
In systemd we generally follow the rule that when we encounter a unit setting that does not validate syntax-wise we'll log about it and ignore it, for compat reasons. We do the same for User= here as for all other options.
However, he was open to taking a different approach for most security-related settings, and as such the issue is fixed
Exactly! This is the MASSIVE point that pro-systemd-ers completely fail to address.
If any portion of my sysvinit system fails to process... at the console I can ctrl-c, carry on, and figure the issue out normally.
This sounds like a possible security issue. You shouldn't be able to modify system behaviour without authentication (if required), as it could allow authentication bypass (just reboot your machine and CTRL-C to access a root shell). For example, there is a recent bug regarding LUKS encrypted partitions that I believe systemd isn't vulnerable to. Even if that is not the case, correctly handling untrusted input isn't something that everyone gets right all the time and I believe systemd was designed to *not* take keyboard input at boot time by default.
If you want to boot in interactive mode with systemd, use systemd.confirm_spawn=1 at the kernel command line (see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/...), on production systems I have deployed this would require entering a grub password (hopefully with a version of grub that can't be bypassed :-().