new metheny

He's still at it. Pat Metheny's latest album, recorded live before the pandemic: Pat Metheny - Side-Eye NYC (V1.IV).

A couple of reviews:

Pat Metheny: Side-Eye NYC (V1.IV) review – new talent and wily reinventions

Pat Metheny: Side-Eye NYC (V1.IV) (Modern) - A review of the guitarist's live album showcasing two gifted rising stars: James Francies and Marcus Gilmore

too many, too much

There's too many men, too many people
Making too many problems
And not much love to go round
Can't you see this is a land of confusion?

-- Genesis, "Land of Confusion"

My personal view is that climate change is occurring. But the primary driver is population and consumption. When my grandfather was born, the world population was about 1.3 billion. When I was born it was 2.2 billion, and today it is 7.5 billion. The UN predicts a population of about 10 billion by 2055. In my opinion this is the primary driver of everything relating to our worsening environment.

-- Ken Croasdale, 82, researcher and engineer at Imperial Oil from 1968 to 1992, as quoted in the article "The scientists hired by big oil who predicted the climate crisis long ago"

a nice idea

So, I am calling for a new national holiday – American Interdependence Day – a celebration of the “us” in the U.S. and acknowledgement of the fact that our individual fates are inextricably linked.

-- Peter T. Coleman, in "Divided States of America: Why we need an Interdependence Day to restore national unity"

a hot and dry future

The writing's on the wall. Article: The drought in US south-west is the worst in 1,200 years. It might be here to stay by Kim Heacox.

Heacox writes:

John Wesley Powell, the one-armed US army civil war veteran who led the first white expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon – a daring boat run in 1869 – later became an ethnographer who wrote a prescient 1878 government paper titled: Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States. In it, he unflinchingly described the scarcity of water, and summarized that much of the American south-west, if it must be settled, should be settled lightly and modestly. Overpopulate it, and it will be unforgiving.

People came anyway:

Decades later, the US Bureau of Reclamation oversaw the construction of two massive arch-gravity concrete dams on the river: Hoover Dam in the 1930s that impounded Lake Mead; and Glen Canyon Dam in the 1960s, that impounded Lake Powell.

And:

When the Bureau of Reclamation planned and designed the dams, they were warned that their data sets were too small; that the desert has moods, that rivers fluctuate, water comes and goes, and the bones of previous civilizations are everywhere.

"secret" ff tips

Article: 11 secret tips for Firefox that will make you an internet pro

The two tips that I think will be most useful here:

4. Reopen a closed tab - Type Ctrl+Shift+T for PC, or Command+Shift+T for Mac.

7. Sample any color with the built-in eyedropper - This lets the user sample colors from web pages and copy the HEX value to use elsewhere. Click the main menu in the upper right corner, scroll to "More Tools", and then select "Eyedropper".

Yay!! Thank you for these!!

 

firefox 89.0 fixes

This webpage has some tips for dealing with the newly released Firefox 89.0, for those who aren't happy with the changes: https://www.askvg.com/tip-restore-compact-mode-density-option-in-firefox-customize-window/

My favorite is to simply use the following about:config fix to set the Firefox window to "compact mode", getting rid of some wasted space at the top:

browser.uidensity = 0 -- change to 1 (for "compact mode")

 

 

For Fluxbox users, if the Firefox window doesn't render correctly in Fluxbox (happened to me in one of my Arch installations), the Restart Fluxbox tool fixes it for the current session only. For a more permanent fix, use the following about:config settings:

gfx.webrender.all = false -- this was the default

gfx.webrender.force-disabled = false -- toggle to true to fix window in Fluxbox

To completely disable the new "Proton" look, toggle the following from true to false:

browser.proton.enabled

browser.proton.modals.enabled

browser.proton.doorhangers.enabled

browser.proton.contextmenus.enabled

 

browser.proton.places-tooltip.enabled

Then restart Firefox.

 

parallel

Article: Enable Parallel Downloading In Pacman In Arch Linux

See man pacman.conf, under the OPTIONS section:

       ParallelDownloads

           Specifies number of concurrent download streams. The value needs to be a positive

           integer. If this config option is not set then only one download stream is used (i.e.

           downloads happen sequentially).

The article linked above describes how to easily enable parallel downloading in Arch Linux. This is kinda cool; I'm trying it in one of my Arch installations. Not sure if it speeds things up or not, or if it's really helpful to me in any way. I think I like it anyway. Found an interesting discussion on the topic at the Arch forums: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=266854

The options I'm currently using in the /etc/pacman.conf file are summarized below:

[options]

HoldPkg     = pacman glibc

Architecture = auto

# Misc options

Color

CheckSpace

VerbosePkgLists

ILoveCandy

ParallelDownloads = 5

# By default, pacman accepts packages signed by keys that its local keyring

# trusts (see pacman-key and its man page), as well as unsigned packages.

SigLevel    = Required DatabaseOptional

LocalFileSigLevel = Optional

too long; didn't read

The tldr-pages project is a collection of community-maintained help pages for command-line tools, that aims to be a simpler, more approachable complement to traditional man pages.

- https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr

(Also see: https://tldr.sh/)

Nice tool. Here's an example:

$ tldr df

  df

  Gives an overview of the filesystem disk space usage.
  More information: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/df.

  - Display all filesystems and their disk usage:
    df

  - Display all filesystems and their disk usage in human readable form:
    df -h

  - Display the filesystem and its disk usage containing the given file or directory:
    df path/to/file_or_directory

  - Display statistics on the number of free inodes:
    df -i

  - Display filesystems but exclude the specified types:
    df -x squashfs -x tmpfs


The tldr tool was mentioned in the article "5 modern alternatives to essential Linux command-line tools".

 

I installed it in Debian and in Kubuntu with:

$ sudo apt install tldr

And, I added it in Arch with:

$ sudo pacman -S tldr

 

Looks like the tldr-pages project will nicely complement the (still) all-important man pages. It's very nice to have a few command examples at the fingertips, no question.

 

trying out some new (to me) software

A couple of apps I'm testing in Linux appear to be winners. Time will tell.

DeaDBeeF, which I mentioned in a post last month, seems to have quickly replaced Audacious as my favorite music player for Linux -- although it's a close call. DeaDBeeF might be the best fit for me, but I'm keeping Audacious installed, as it's definitely worth keeping as well.

I prefer a lightweight audio player over a media player (I don't normally bother with video, etc.). I've gone with Audacious for the past few years, and I think it's generally considered to be the better of the two music players. 

Today I'm taking my first look at the Brave web browser (https://brave.com/). Although I've used a few different web browsers in Linux, most of my time's been spent with Firefox. I can't see myself giving up Firefox anytime soon. But Brave brings an interesting approach, and it seems fine here so far. I added it in Debian Buster, using these commands found at https://brave.com/linux/:

sudo apt install apt-transport-https curl

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg arch=amd64] https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/ stable main"|sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.list

sudo apt update

sudo apt install brave-browser

This adds the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.list and installs the browser.

Brave does seem to be faster than Firefox, but scrolling web pages is slow and clunky. I found something that helped somewhat: I brought up the Flags menu by typing brave://flags/ in the search bar, and then enabled "Smooth Scrolling". Better, but still not quite as quick and smooth as scrolling in Firefox.

I haven't had any issues yet with Brave doing what I think of as "normal" stuff. Happy with it so far.

not a fork!

One of the more interesting Linux distros out there: Void Linux (https://voidlinux.org/)

 

The Void Linux page at DistroWatch: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=void

And, check out the recent review by Jesse Smith: https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20210329#void 

I'm very tempted to try installing and using this distro. My next big project, maybe!

cool date

Lucky day, or what? Today's date:  4/3/21

change can be good

I'm testing out the deb822-style format for control files used by apt, replacing the older one-line-style format used in the sources.list file. I couldn't find any "official" Debian documentation on this topic except for what's contained in man sources.list (see https://manpages.debian.org/buster/apt/sources.list.5.en.html).

I did find a couple of pages online that helped a bit:

"How to use the new DEB822 apt format on Ubuntu" - https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-use-the-new-deb822-apt-format-on-ubuntu/

"Explanation of the DEB822 Source Format" - https://repolib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/deb822-format.html


I tested the new format in Debian Buster. Here are the lines I was using in the /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ buster main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ buster-updates main contrib non-free

I renamed the sources.list file with the following command:

$ sudo mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list-bkup

Then I created the new file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-sources:

$ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.sources

The contents of the debian-sources file:

Types: deb
URIs: http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/
Suites: buster buster-updates
Components: main contrib non-free

Types: deb
URIs: http://security.debian.org/debian-security
Suites: buster/updates
Components: main contrib non-free

Finally, I ran the following to make sure everything worked correctly:

$ sudo apt update


Users can decide for themselves if they like the newer format or prefer to stick with the older one. I think the deb822 format makes it a bit easier to see, at a glance, how things are set up.

 

another simple audio player

I'm taking a look at the DeaDBeeF audio player. I've installed it in Arch, where it's available from the repos, and also in Debian. DeaDBeeF is not available in the Debian repos (same with Ubuntu), but simple instructions for installing it in Debian (and in Ubuntu) can be found at https://deadbeef.sourceforge.io/.

 

 

as viewed from space

Screenshots from Bullseye GNOME. The desktop background is a beautiful shot of what's still the only home for Life that we know of.

 

soft freeze

Debian 11 (Bullseye) went into "Milestone 2 - Soft Freeze" status this month. The plan for Bullseye is a little bit different than for Buster.

The freeze timeline for Debian Buster:

* 2019-01-12 - Transition freeze
* 2019-02-12 - Soft-freeze
* 2019-03-12 - Full-freeze

(from: https://release.debian.org/buster/freeze_policy.html)

The freeze timeline for Debian Bullseye:

* 2021-01-12 - Milestone 1 - Transition and (build-)essential Freeze
* 2021-02-12 - Milestone 2 - Soft Freeze
* 2021-03-12 - Milestone 3 - Hard Freeze - for key packages and packages without autopkgtests
* TBA - Milestone 4 - Full Freeze

(from: https://release.debian.org/bullseye/freeze_policy.html)


I downloaded the Debian Bullseye GNOME live (w/ non-free firmware) image from https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images-including-firmware/weekly-live-builds/amd64/iso-hybrid/, put it on a flash drive, and booted into it. Things looked okay, so I decided to do an installation. From the Activities overview, there was an "Install Debian" icon, so I clicked on that. It started up the Calamares installer. The resulting system was quite loaded with apps and packages -- too "heavy" for my tastes, although the approach, with Calamares, would work out fine for many users, I'm sure.

I prefer a network installation for Debian, so I downloaded the firmware-testing-amd64-netinst.iso image from here and reinstalled using Debian's Graphical Installer. This gave me a lot more control over what went in.

It's best if users wait for the Debian Stable release rather than jumping in during "Testing" status, but there shouldn't be any major issues with Bullseye at this point. Things seem fine here, so far.

 

down to the surface

Awesome! Video from NASA of the Perseverance rover descending to the surface of Mars - https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-mars-perseverance-rover-provides-front-row-seat-to-landing-first-audio

at long last, split view in thunar!

I don't know why it took so long, but: "Xfce’s Thunar File Manager Gets Split View, File Creation Times, and More"

That should take care of the main annoyance I've had with Thunar - the lack of a split view window. I think I'll be able to test it out soon in Arch. Looking forward to it!

ulyssa

For years, Linux Mint (site: https://linuxmint.com/) has been one of the best options for folks new to the Linux world. Released on January 8, Linux Mint 20.1 "Ulyssa" ships in Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce flavors. I downloaded linuxmint-20.1-xfce-64bit.iso and took a look at the Xfce version in a live session.

 

 

"Ulyssa" booted up quickly and easily from a flash drive on the three laptops I tried it on. The Xfce desktop's setup has a pleasant and comfy feel to it. They've loaded the release with a nice selection of tools, making it a breeze for the user to jump right in and get things done. I felt that I was working with one of the best live sessions I've seen.

Linux Mint 20.1 Xfce release notes: https://linuxmint.com/rel_ulyssa_xfce.php