mccain

Today, the text of John McCain's posthumous farewell statement was posted at The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/27/us/politics/john-mccain-farewell-statement.html

Here's my favorite part:

We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.

Thank you, Mr. McCain, and may you rest in peace.

twenty-eight

Pale Moon 28.0 was released back on August 16. Release notes can be found here.

Linux users can get the Pale Moon web browser in a few different ways. Some distros have it in their default repos, and Steve Pusser has builds available for Debian and Ubuntu, for example. I see it in the Arch User Repository (AUR), too (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/palemoon/). For more info, see the Pale Moon for Linux page.

Some folks are disappointed that the much-loved installer for Pale Moon, called pminstaller, is no longer being maintained "and will not work for installing or updating any version of Pale Moon 28+", as noted here. The browser can now be updated via the internal updater (for the settings, navigate Preferences > Advanced > Update tab):

Or updates can be brought in from the repos, if those are being used.

I've successfully used the following steps to get Pale Moon 28.0 for my Linux systems here (YMMV, and many users will prefer not to do things this way):

First, I download the bzipped tarball, which can be found here, to my ~/Downloads directory. Then, using the Double Commander file manager, I extracted the tarball into the same directory.

Next, I did the following to delete the old /opt/palemoon directory:

$ cd /opt
$ sudo rm -Rv palemoon/

Then, from the ~/Downloads directory, I moved the new palemoon directory into /opt:

$ sudo mv palemoon /opt

I ran the following to change ownership of the /opt/palemoon directory, to allow Pale Moon's internal updater to work:

$ sudo chown -R "$USER:$USER" "/opt/palemoon"

After those steps, I've been able to start up Pale Moon 28.0.0 with no problems. Then I deleted the now unnecessary ~/pminstaller directory. Done.

excellent anthology

A few weeks ago, I finished reading The Multicultural Southwest: A Reader (Editors: A. Gabriel Melendez, M. Jane Young, Patricia Moore, and Patrick Pynes). Fascinating compilation of works, and one of the most interesting books I've ever read. Here's the blurb from the book's back cover:

As Americans debate what it means to be a multicultural society, one need only turn for lessons to the Southwest, where distinct peoples have coexisted over centuries. Here difference has not only survived but thrived in a melting pot of races and customs.

This book presents a montage of differing perspectives demonstrating that there is no single, definitive description of the Southwest. It brings together a host of writers, from early travelers and historians to contemporary commentators, who explore a region diverse in its people and ecology and show it to be not just a segment of the nation, but rather a border contact zone.

The editors have assembled an interdisciplinary composite, drawing on history, sociology, anthropology, and geography. Fiction, essays, poetry, newspaper articles, and interviews with local inhabitants add a colorful dimension to the coverage. All of the contributions reveal the tremendous impact that everyday occurrences can have and show how life in the Southwest is affected by the interweaving of social, cultural, and ecological forces.

For more, see: https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/the-multicultural-southwest

helpers?

In the article "Yaourt is Dead! Use These Alternatives for AUR in Arch Linux" (https://itsfoss.com/best-aur-helpers/), Ambarish Kumar wrote:

So, how do you use AUR then? Well, you need a different tool to install software from AUR. Arch’s package manager pacman doesn’t support it directly. These ‘special tools’ are called AUR helpers.

Actually, it isn't really necessary to use "AUR helpers" to install software from the Arch User Repository (AUR). The manual build process is laid out at the Arch wiki's "Arch User Repository" page:

Installing packages from the AUR is a relatively simple process. Essentially:

    1. Acquire the build files, including the PKGBUILD and possibly other required files, like systemd units and patches (often not the actual code).
    2. Verify that the PKGBUILD and accompanying files are not malicious or untrustworthy.
    3. Run makepkg -si in the directory where the files are saved. This will download the code, resolve the dependencies with pacman, compile it, package it, and install the package.

However, many users enjoy the convenience of AUR helpers, which are discussed at the Arch wiki's "AUR helpers" page. Note the following warning highlighted and emphasized at the top of the page:

Warning: AUR helpers are not supported by Arch Linux. You should become familiar with the manual build process in order to be prepared to troubleshoot problems.

That page also has some important tables that users should check before choosing an AUR helper to use. Note that yaourt is listed in the "Discontinued or problematic" table.

I don't use much software from the AUR, but I've been using yaourt sometimes, when I don't go with the manual build process. I don't think that yaourt is actually "dead" because there's been some commit activity as recently as this past March (see: https://github.com/archlinuxfr/yaourt). Still, I decided to install aurman to use instead of yaourt, in Arch as well as in Antergos.

aurman is kinda cool in that it employs a lot of the same options as pacman. I didn't find a manpage for aurman, but usage info can be found with the aurman --help command (or with aurman -h).

aurman does seem to work fine here, but I prefer to use the manual build process for installing AUR packages, and for installing newer versions of those packages. I'll continue to use aurman for query operations, and maybe for checking for available updates (although it's no big deal to simply check a package's AUR page to see if a newer version is available).

invisible people

The United States of America, the Land of Plenty, supposedly the greatest nation on earth... Yet, there's so much that isn't right about this country. One heart-breaking example: All the people living in the streets, the people we see but try not to see... the homeless.

How-To
by Anders Carlson-Wee

If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl,
say you’re pregnant––nobody gonna lower
themselves to listen for the kick. People
passing fast. Splay your legs, cock a knee
funny. It’s the littlest shames they’re likely
to comprehend. Don’t say homeless, they know
you is. What they don’t know is what opens
a wallet, what stops em from counting
what they drop. If you’re young say younger.
Old say older. If you’re crippled don’t
flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough
Christians to notice. Don’t say you pray,
say you sin. It’s about who they believe
they is. You hardly even there.


This poem sparked controversy -- of the wrong kind, in my opinion -- after it was published in The Nation last month (see The New York Times opinion piece by Grace Schulman, "The Nation Betrays a Poet — and Itself"). I decided to reprint the poem here anyway... because of what it says, about us.

another fluxbox trick

I don't know how to add a "Show Desktop" button to Fluxbox, but I found that it's possible to set up a keystroke that will do the same thing. I added the following line to my ~/.fluxbox/keys file:

Mod4 d :ToggleCmd {ShowDesktop}

After saving the changes to that file, it was necessary to select either "Reconfigure" or "Restart" from the Fluxbox menu. Now, the Mod4 + D keystroke ("Mod4" being the "Windows" key on my keyboard) toggles the "ShowDesktop" command.

news from the lubuntu team

Posted at the Lubuntu blog:

Taking a new direction

During the transition to LXQt, we have received mixed feedback about Lubuntu's perceived direction going forward, so we decided it would be good to make a blog post explaining what's been happening during the transition, and where our focus will be.

Creating a Linux distribution which is specifically meant for older hardware is beginning to become a challenge. As time progresses, the definition of "older machines" has been changing. At one point, our rule of thumb was to support machines ten years old. If you look at computers that were released ten years ago, for example, a computer with the AMD Phenom X3 processor, you will note that computers, give or take, supported two gigabytes of RAM and two processor cores, and were also 64-bit at this time.
More Linux distributions today can run on the computer of ten years ago than Linux distributions made five years ago with a 15 year old computer.
As an example, on a fresh amd64 (64-bit) Kubuntu 18.04.1 install with two gigabytes of RAM and one CPU core (in QEMU), the idle usage with LibreOffice open and Firefox open to Lubuntu.me is about 1 GB of RAM and 6% idle CPU usage. With the same specifications/programs and an i386 (32-bit) install, 790 MB of RAM and 7% of idle CPU usage is used.
While there is something to be said about i386 resource usage and how much more efficient it can make a system, the point is that other distributions can now do what only Lubuntu was once able to do with ten year old hardware. You are welcome to also draw your own conclusions and leave them in the comments of this post.
Furthermore, imagine what these statistics will look like in 2021, when Lubuntu 18.04, which has kept our traditional focus, reaches its end of life phase.
These statistics brought much internal debate within the Lubuntu team, but we decided that going forward, we need to adapt for the current state of the market. Therefore, our main focus is shifting from providing a distribution for old hardware to a functional yet modular distribution focused on getting out of the way and letting users use their computer.
In essence, this is leveraging something we have always done with Lubuntu; providing an operating system which users can use to revive their old computers, but bringing this to the age of modern computing.
For the forseeable future, here are our core goals:

• Lubuntu will leverage modern, Qt-based technologies and programs to give users a functional yet modular experience.
• In collaboration with others, Lubuntu will continue to be a transparent and open distribution which makes it a priority to keep the community informed about the development when possible.
• Lubuntu will create and maintain complete documentation which will be included by default in the operating system, and can guide anyone from beginner to expert on how to use Lubuntu to its full potential and contribute to the further development of it.
• Lubuntu will keep a light experience by default but enable users to utilize more heavy and featureful components as desired.
• Lubuntu will have the ability to be used in any language across the world, and enable contributors to easily translate all components of the operating system.

This means that Lubuntu will stay light, and for users with old systems, should still be usable. But we will no longer provide minimum system requirements and we will no longer primarily focus on older hardware.
This is a large endeavor as you might expect, and we're still working on catching up to other distributions in terms of feature parity, but with 18.10 being the first LXQt-only release and 20.04 being the first LTS LXQt-only release, we are confident that Lubuntu will be ready for whatever the future holds.

Link: https://lubuntu.me/taking-a-new-direction/