Search Results: "ed"

5 June 2024

Alberto Garc a: More ways to install software in SteamOS: Distrobox and Nix

Introduction In my previous post I talked about how to use systemd-sysext to add software to the Steam Deck without modifying the root filesystem. In this post I will give a brief overview of two additional methods. Distrobox distrobox is a tool that uses containers to create a mutable environment on top of your OS. Distrobox running in SteamOS With distrobox you can open a terminal with your favorite Linux distro inside, with full access to the package manager and the ability to install additional software. Containers created by distrobox are integrated with the system so apps running inside have normal access to the user s home directory and the Wayland/X11 session. Since these containers are not stored in the root filesystem they can survive an OS update and continue to work fine. For this reason they are particularly suited to systems with an immutable root filesystem such as Silverblue, Endless OS or SteamOS. Starting from SteamOS 3.5 the system comes with distrobox (and podman) preinstalled and it can be used right out of the box without having to do any previous setup. For example, in order to create a Debian bookworm container simply open a terminal and run this: 
$ distrobox create -i debian:bookworm debbox
Here debian:bookworm is the image that this container is created from (debian is the name and bookworm is the tag, see the list of supported tags here) and debbox is the name that is given to this new container. Once the container is created you can enter it: 
$ distrobox enter debbox
Or from the Debian entry in the desktop menu -> Lost & Found. Once inside the container you can run your Debian commands normally: 
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install vim-gtk3
Nix Nix is a package manager for Linux and other Unix-like systems. It has the property that it can be installed alongside the official package manager of any distribution, allowing the user to add software without affecting the rest of the system. Nix running in SteamOS Nix installs everything under the /nix directory, and packages are made available to the user through a new entry in the PATH and a ~/.nix-profile symlink stored in the home directory. Nix is more things, including the basis of the NixOS operating system. Explaning Nix in more detail is beyond the scope of this blog post, but for SteamOS users these are perhaps its most interesting properties: The only thing that Nix needs from SteamOS is help to set up the /nix directory so its contents are not stored in the root filesystem. This is already happening starting from SteamOS 3.5 so you can install Nix right away in single-user mode: 
$ sudo chown deck:deck /nix
$ wget https://nixos.org/nix/install
$ sh ./install --no-daemon
This installs Nix and adds a line to ~/.bash_profile to set up the necessary environment variables. After that you can log in again and start using it. Here s a very simple example (refer to the official documentation for more details): 
# Install and run Midnight Commander
$ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.mc
$ mc
# List installed packages
$ nix-env -q
mc-4.8.31
nix-2.21.1
# Uninstall Midnight Commander
$ nix-env -e mc-4.8.31
What we have seen so far is how to install Nix in single-user mode, which is the simplest one and probably good enough for a single-user machine like the Steam Deck. The Nix project however recommends a multi-user installation, see here for the reasons. Unfortunately the official multi-user installer does not work out of the box on the Steam Deck yet, but if you want to go the multi-user way you can use the Determinate Systems installer: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer Conclusion Distrobox and Nix are useful tools and they give SteamOS users the ability to add additional software to the system without having to modify the base operating system. While for graphical applications the recommended way to install third-party software is still Flatpak, Distrobox and Nix give the user additional flexibility and are particularly useful for installing command-line utilities and other system tools.

4 June 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: ulid 0.4.0 on CRAN: Extended to Milliseconds

A new version of the ulid package is now on CRAN. The packages provides universally (unique) lexicographically (sortable) identifiers see the spec at GitHub for details on those which offer sorting which uuids lack. The R package provides access via the standard C++ library, had been put together by Bob Rudis and is now maintained by me. Mark Heckmann noticed that a ulid round trip of generating and unmarshalling swallowed subsecond informationm and posted on a well-known site I no longer go to. Duncan Murdoch was kind enough to open an issue to make me aware, and in it included the nice minimally complete verifiable example by Mark. It turns out that this issue was known, documented upstream in two issues and fixed in fork by the authors of those issues, Chris Bove. It replaces time_t as the value of record (constrained at the second resolution) with a proper std::chrono object which offers milliseconds (and much more, yay Modern C++). So I switched the two main files of library to his, and updated the wrapper code to interface from POSIXct to std::chrono object. And with that we are in business. The original example of five ulids create 100 millisecond part, then unmarshalled and here printed as a data.table as data.frame by default truncates to seconds: 
> library(ulid)
> gen_ulid <- \(sleep) replicate(5,  Sys.sleep(sleep); generate() )
> u <- gen_ulid(.1)
> df <- unmarshal(u)
> data.table::data.table(df)
                        ts              rnd
                    <POSc>           <char>
1: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.588 CSQAJBPNX75R0G5A
2: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.688 XZX0TREDHD6PC1YR
3: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.789 0YK9GKZVTED27QMK
4: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.890 SC3M3G6KGPH7S50S
5: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.990 TSKCBWJ3TEKCPBY0
>
We updated the documentation accordingly, and added some new tests as well. The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.4.0 (2024-06-03)
  • Switch two functions to fork by Chris Bove using std::chrono instead of time_t for consistent millisecond resolution (#3 fixing #2)
  • Updated documentation showing consistent millisecond functionality
  • Added unit tests for millisecond functionality

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Jonathan Dowland: Quake (soundtrack)

I haven't done that much crate digging recently, but I did stick this on last week: Trent Reznor's soundtrack for Quake, originally released (within the game) in 1996, and finally issued for the first time independently in 2020.
Quake LP cover and inner covers Quake LP cover and inner covers
I picked it up the Nine Inch Nails gig in Cornwall, 2022. An interesting factoid about the original release was the CD was mastered with the little-known pre-emphasis flag set to "on". This was relatively unusual at the time (1996) that it was never clear whether it was deliberate or not. CD ripping back then usually used an analog audio path from the CD-ROM drive to the PC sound card, and the CD-ROM would apply the necessary pre-emphasis. Therefore, ripping software didn't need to deal with it, and so most of it (then and now) doesn't, even though the path had long since changed to a purely-digital extraction. Thus, the various copies of the soundtrack circulating may or may not have had pre-emphasis correction applied, and if they did, it may or may not have been required to hear the soundtrack as it was intended. I spent a bit of time a few years ago, before the reissue, trying to determine what was "correct". There is certainly an audible difference with pre-emphasis applied (or not), but it wasn't clear which was the intended experience. The reissue should have cleared this up once and for all, but I haven't gone back to check what the outcome was.

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 270 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 270. This version includes the following changes: 
[ Chris Lamb ]
* No-change release due to broken version 269 tarballs.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

2 June 2024

Colin Watson: Free software activity in May 2024

My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian. The bulk of my Debian time this month went towards trying to haul more Python packages up to current versions, but I got a few other bits and pieces done as well. You can support my work directly via Liberapay.

Jacob Adams: What to Do When You Forget Your Root Password

Forgetting your root password would initially seem like a problem requiring a full re-install, one that you can t easily recover from without wiping everything away. Forgetting your user password can of course be solved by changing it as root, as in the following, which changes the password for user jacob: 
# passwd jacob
but only the root user can change their own password, so you need to somehow get root access in order to do so.

Changing Root s Password with Sudo This one is probably obvious, but if you have a user with the ability to use sudo, then you can change root s password without access to the root account by running: 
$ sudo passwd
which will reset the password for the root account without requiring the existing password.

Boot Directly to a Shell Getting root access to any Linux machine you have physical access to is surprisingly simple. You can just boot the machine directly into a root shell without any access control, i.e. passwords.

Why You Should Always Encrypt Your Storage1 To boot directly to a shell you need to append the following text to the kernel command line: 
init=/bin/sh
(You could use pretty much any program here, but you re putting your system into a weird state doing this, and so I d recommend the simplest approach.)

GRUB GRUB will allow you to edit boot parameters on startup using the e key. You ll then be presented with a editor2 that you can use to change the kernel command line by appending to the linux line. E.g. If your editor looks like this: 
        load_video
        insmod gzio
        if [ x$grub_platform = xxen ]; then insmod xzio; insmod lzopio; fi
        insmod part_gpt
        insmod ext2
        search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root abcd1234-5678-0910-1112-abcd12345678
        echo    'Loading Linux 6.1.0-21-amd64 ...'
        linux   /boot/vmlinuz-6.1.0-21-amd64 root=UUID=abcd1234-5678-0910-1112-abcd12345678 ro  quiet
        echo    'Loading initial ramdisk ...'
        initrd  /boot/initrd.img-6.1.0-21-amd64
Then you would add init=/bin/sh like so: 
        load_video
        insmod gzio
        if [ x$grub_platform = xxen ]; then insmod xzio; insmod lzopio; fi
        insmod part_gpt
        insmod ext2
        search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root abcd1234-5678-0910-1112-abcd12345678
        echo    'Loading Linux 6.1.0-21-amd64 ...'
        linux   /boot/vmlinuz-6.1.0-21-amd64 root=UUID=abcd1234-5678-0910-1112-abcd12345678 ro  quiet init=/bin/sh
        echo    'Loading initial ramdisk ...'
        initrd  /boot/initrd.img-6.1.0-21-amd64
Once you ve edited it you can start your machine with Ctrl+x, as you can see from the prompt text under the editor.

Raspberry Pi cmdline.txt On a Raspberry Pi you ll want to append the above to only line of the cmdline.txt file on the boot partition of the SD card. This is the first partition of the disk, the one that is FAT32. You ll need to do this on another machine, since if you had root access to edit cmdline.txt you could also just change your password. As it is a FAT32 partition on an SD card, it should be editable on any other machine that supports SD cards. E.g. If your cmdline.txt looks like this 
console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=fb33757d-02 rootfstype=ext4 fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet
Then you would add init=/bin/sh like so: 
console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=fb33757d-02 rootfstype=ext4 fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet init=/bin/sh

Mount Read / Write Since you re replacing the init process of the machine with a shell, no other processes will be running. Also, your root filesystem will be mounted read-only, as init is expected to remount it read-write as needed. 
# mount -o remount,rw /

Change Root Password Once you ve remounted the root filesystem, all that s needed is to run the passwd command. 
# passwd
Since you re running the command as root you won t need to provide your existing password, and will only need to type a new password twice. Now of course you simply need to remember that password in order to ensure you don t need to do this again.

Reboot Safely You now cannot follow the standard reboot process here, as you re only running one process. Therefore it s important to put your root filesystem back into read-only before powering off your machine: 
# mount -o remount,ro /
Once you ve done that you just need to hold down the power button until the machine completely powers off or pull the plug. And then you re done! Boot the computer again and you ll have everything working as normal, with a root password you remember.
  1. Not that this is the only reason, anyone with physical access to your machine could also boot it into another operating system they control, or just remove your storage device and put it into another computer, or probably other things I m not thinking of now. You should always encrypt your devices.
  2. The editor uses emacs-like keybindings. The manual includes a list of all the options available.

1 June 2024

Guido G nther: Free Software Activities May 2024

A short status update of what happened on my side last month. A broken gcovr in Debian triggered a bit of busy work but 0.39.0 came out nicely nevertheless. We also reduced build time quiet a bit in phosh and phoc. If you want to support my work see donations.

Ian Jackson: What your vote is worth - a back of the envelope calculation

tl;dr: Your vote really counts! Each vote in a UK General Election is worth maybe 100,000 - to you and all your fellow citizens taken together. If you really care about the welfare of everyone affected by actions of the UK government, then it s worth that to you too. Introduction It seems a common perception that one vote, in amongst all those millions, doesn t really matter. So maybe it s not worth voting. But, voting is (largely) what determines what the government does - and the government is big. It s as big as all the people. If you are the kind of person who cares about what happens to everyone in your polity and indeed everyone its actions affect, then even your one vote is very important indeed. A method for back of the envelope calculation It would be nice to give a quantitative estimate. Many things in our society are measured in money, so let s try taking a stab at calculating the money value of your vote. The argument I m going to make is this: the government (by which I include the legislature), which is selected by our votes, decides how to spend the national budget. So, basically, I m going to divide the budget, by the electorate. UK Parliament UK Parliamentary elections decide not only the House of Commons, but, through that, the government. The upper house, the House of Lords, has very limited influence. So I think it s fair to regard the Parliamentary election as, simply, controlling that budget. Being lazy, I m going to use Wikipedia data. We have the size of the electorate, for 2019, 47.6 million. But your influence isn t shared with the whole electorate, only with the other people who also vote. Turnout in 2019 was 67.3%. The 2019 budget isn t listed but I ll just average the 2018 and March 2020 figures 842bn and 873bn, so 857 billion. (Strictly speaking I should add up the budgets for the period of the Parliament, but that seems like a lot of effort.) There s a discrepancy in the timescale we need to account for. Your vote influences the budgets for several years, depending how long it is until the next election. Taking Wikipedia s list of elections this century there ve been 7 in 24 years. So that s an average of about 3.4y. So, multiplying it through, we have ( 857b * (24 / 7)) / (47.6M * 67.3%), giving a guess at the value of your UK General Election vote: 92,000. European Parliament 2022 budget for the European Union (Wikipedia again) was 170.6 bn. The last election, in 2019, had a turnout of 198,352,638. Each EU Parliament lasts 5 years. The Parliament, however, shares responsibility for the budget with the European Council, which is controlled, ultimately, by national governments. We have to pick a numerical value for the Parliament s share of the influence. Over the past years the Parliament has gradually been more willing to exercise its powers in this area. I m going to arbitrarily call its share 50%. The calculation, then, is 170.6 bn * 5 * 50% / 198M, giving a guess at the value of your EU Parliamentary Election vote: 2150. This much smaller figure reflects simply that the EU doesn t spend very much money, for a polity of its size. (Those stories in the British press giving the impression that the EU is massively wasteful are, simply, lies.) The interaction of this calculation with the Council s share of the influence, and with national budgets, is a bit of a question, but given the much smaller amounts involved, it doesn t seem worth thinking about that too hard. Only if you care about other people as much as yourself! All of this is only true for you if you value and want to help everyone in your society. That includes immigrants, women, unemployed people, disabled people, people who are much poorer or richer than you, etc. If you think about it in purely personal terms, your vote is hardly worth anything - because while the effect of your vote, overall, is very large, that effect is shared by everyone in your polity. So if you only care about yourself, voting is a total waste of time. The more selfish and xenophobic and racist and so on you are - caring only about people like yourself - the less your vote is worth. This is why voting is rightly seen as a civic duty. I just spent 30 to courier my EP vote to Den Haag. That only makes sense because I m very willing to spend that 30 to try to improve the spending of the 2000 or so that s my share of the EU budget. This is a very rough analysis These calculations neglect a lot of very important things: politics isn t just about the allocation of resources. It s also about values, and bad politics can seriously harm people. Arguably many of those effects of your vote, are much more important than just how the budget is set and spent. It would be interesting to see an attempt at a similar analysis but for taking into account life and death questions like hate crime, traffic violence, healthcare, refugees welfare, and so on. I m not sure how to approach that. Maybe some real social scientists have done so? References welcome. Also, even on its own terms, this analysis is very rough and ready. We haven t modelled the ability of the government to change its tax rates; perhaps we should be multiplying GDP (or some other better measure) by 90% percentile total tax rate amongst countries like this one . The amount of influence that can be wielded by one vote is probably nonlinear in the size of the political faction, but IDK in which direction. In unfair voting systems like the UK s, some people s votes are worth much more than others. In a very marginal constituency, which is a target seat, your vote might be worth tens of millions. In a safe seat, it might only be worth a few thousand. And in practical terms you don t get to choose precisely the policies you want; you have to pick a party, which is sometimes very much a question of the lesser evil. So, there is much I haven t modelled. But the key point stands: Conclusion Although your vote is diluted by everyone else s votes, together, we control the government, which affects us all. So if you care about the whole of society, the big numbers in the divisor, and the numerator, cancel out. You can think of your vote as controlling one citizen s worth of government activity.
edited 2024-06-01 09:40 Z to fix a grammar botch


comment count unavailable comments

Russ Allbery: Review: I Shall Wear Midnight

Review: I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett
Series: Discworld #38
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 2010
Printing: 2011
ISBN: 0-06-143306-3
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 355
I Shall Wear Midnight is the 38th Discworld novel and the 4th Tiffany Aching novel. This is not a good place to start reading. Tiffany has finished her training and has returned to her home on the Chalk, taking up her duties as the local witch. There are a lot of those, because there's a lot that needs doing. In some cases, such as taking away the pain of the old Duke, they involve things that require magic and that only Tiffany can do. In many other cases, other people could pick up some of the work, but they lack Tiffany's sense of duty and willingness to pay attention. The people of the Chalk have always been a bit suspicious of witches, in part because the job was done for so long by Tiffany's grandmother and no one thought she was a witch. (She was a witch.) Of late, however, that suspicion seems to be getting worse. It comes to a head when Tiffany is accused of theft and worse by the old Duke's maid, a woman with very fixed ideas about the evils of witches. Tiffany has to sort out what's going on and clear herself, all while navigating her now-awkward relationship with the Duke's son Roland, his unimpressive fiancee, and his spectacularly annoying aunt. Ah, this is the stuff. This is exactly the Tiffany Aching novel that I have been hoping Pratchett would write. It's pure, snarky competence porn from start to finish.
"I'm a witch. It's what we do. When it's nobody else's business, it's my business."
One of the things that I adore about this series is how well Pratchett shows the different ways in which one can be a witch. Granny Weatherwax out-thinks everyone and nudges (or shoves) people in the right direction, but her natural tendency is to be icy and a bit frightening. Nanny Ogg is that person you can't help but talk to, who may seem happy-go-lucky and hedonistic but who can effortlessly change the mood of a room. And Tiffany is stubborn duty and blunt practicality, which fits the daughter of shepherds. In previous books, we've watched Tiffany as a student, learning the practicalities of being a witch. This is the book where she realizes how much she knows and how much easier the world is to navigate when she's in her own territory. There is a wonderful scene, late in this book, where Pratchett shows Nanny Ogg at her best, doing the kinds of things that only Nanny Ogg can do. Both Tiffany and the reader are in awe.
I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people.
And it's true that Nanny Ogg can do things that Tiffany can't. But what makes this book so great is that it shows how Tiffany's personality and her training come together with her knowledge of the Chalk. She may not know people, in general, but she knows her neighbors and how they think. She doesn't manage them the way that Nanny Ogg would; she's better at solving different kinds of problems, in different ways. But they're the right ways, and the right problems, for her home. This is another Discworld novel with a forgettable villain that's more of a malevolent force of nature than a character in its own right. It's also another Discworld novel where Pratchett externalizes a human tendency into a malevolent force that can possess people. I have mixed feelings about this narrative approach. That externalization of evil into (in essence) demons has been repeatedly used to squirm out of responsibility and excuse atrocities, and it neatly avoids having to wrestle with the hard questions of prejudice and injustice and why apparently good people do awful things. I think some of those weaknesses persist even in Pratchett's hands, but I think what he was attempting with that approach in this book is to show how almost no one is immune to nastier ideas that spread through society. Rather than using the externalization of evil as an excuse, he's using it as a warning. With enough exposure to those ideas, they start sounding tempting and partly credible even to people who would never have embraced them earlier. Pratchett also does a good job capturing the way prejudice can start from thoughtless actions that have more to do with the specific circumstances of someone's life than any coherent strategy. Still, the one major complaint I have about this book is that the externalization of evil is an inaccurate portrayal of the world, and this catches up with Pratchett at the ending. Postulating an external malevolent force reduces evil to something that can be puzzled out and decisively defeated, thus resolving the problem. Sadly, this is not how humans actually work. I'll forgive that structural flaw, though, because the rest of this book is so good. It's rare that a plot twist in a Discworld novel surprises me twisty plots are not Pratchett's strength but this one did. I will not spoil the surprise, but one of the characters is not quite who they seem to be, and Tiffany's reactions once she figures that out are one of my favorite parts of this book. Pratchett is making a point about assumptions, observation, and the importance of being willing to change one's mind about someone when you know more, and I thought it was very well done. But, most of all, I enjoyed reading about Tiffany being calm, competent, determined, and capable. There's also a bit of an unexpected romance plot that's one of my favorite types: the person who notices that you're doing a lot of work and quietly steps in and starts helping while paying attention to what's needed and not taking over. And it's full of the sort of pithy moral wisdom that makes Discworld such a delight to read.
"There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can't, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having."
This was just what I wanted. Highly recommended. Followed by Snuff in publication order. The next (and last, sadly) Tiffany Aching book is The Shepherd's Crown. Rating: 9 out of 10

Russell Coker: Links May 2024 (late)

VoltageDivide has an interesting article on Unconventional Uses of FPGAs [1]. Tagline Every sensor is a temperature sensor, nearly everything is a resistor or a conductor if you try hard enough and anything is an antenna. Datasheets are just a suggestion, and finally, often we pretend things are ideal, when they often are not. Interesting blog post about the way npm modules that depend on everything exposed flaws in the entire npm system [2]. The conclusion should have included use a fake name for doing unusual tests . Krebs on Security has an interesting article about MFA bombing [3]. Looks like Apple has some flaws in their MFA system, other companies developing MFA should learn from this. Joey wrote an informative blog post about the Vultr hosting company wanting to extract data from VMs run for clients to train ML [4]. If your email is stored on such a VM it could be generated by an AI system. John Goerzen wrote an interesting post looking at the causes of the xz issue from a high level [5]. Interesting article about self proclaimed Autistic pro-natalists [6]. They seem somewhat abusive to their kids and are happy to associate with neo-Nazis. :( Joey Hess wrote an interesting blog post about the possibility of further undiscovered attacks on xz [7]. Going back to an earlier version seems like a good idea. The Guardian has an interesting article about Amazon s 2 pizza rule and the way the company is structured [8]. It s interesting how they did it, but we really need to have it broken up via anti-trust legislation. John Goerzen wrote an informative post about Facebook censorship and why we should all move to Mastodon [9]. Facebook needs to be broken up under anti-trust laws. Kobold Letters is an attack on HTML email that results in the visual representation of email changing when it is forwarded. [10]. You could have the original email hide some sections which are revealed with the recipient forwards it for a CEO impersonation attack.
Related posts:
  1. Links January 2024 Long Now has an insightful article about domestication that considers...
  2. Links March 2024 Bruce Schneier wrote an interesting blog post about his workshop...
  3. Links April 2024 Ron Garret wrote an insightful refutation to 2nd amendment arguments...

31 May 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.4.0 on CRAN: Upstream Bugfix

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1151 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 34.6 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 584 times according to Google Scholar. Conrad released a new upstream bugfix yesterday (to improve views of sparse matrices). We uploaded it yesterday too but it once agfain took a day for the hard-working CRAN maintainers to concur that the two NOTEs from reverse-dependency checking over 1100 packages were in a fact false positves. And so it appeared on CRAN earlier today. We also increased the versioned dependency on Rcpp to match the use of optional entry-point headers Rcpp/Light, Rcpp/Lighter and Rcpp/Lightest. No other changes were made. The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.4.0 (2024-05-30)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.4 (Cortisol Injector)
    • Faster handling of sparse submatrix views
  • Update versioned Depends on Rcpp to 1.0.8 or later to match use of Light/Lighter/Lightest headers.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (March and April 2024)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

Joachim Breitner: Blogging on Lean

This blog has become a bit quiet since I joined the Lean FRO. One reasons is of course that I can now improve things about Lean, rather than blog about what I think should be done (which, by contraposition, means I shouldn t blog about what can be improved ). A better reason is that some of the things I d otherwise write here are now published on the official Lean blog, in particular two lengthy technical posts explaining aspects of Lean that I worked on: It would not be useful to re-publish them here because the technology verso behind the Lean blog, created by my colleage David Thrane Christansen, enables such fancy features like type-checked code snippets, including output and lots of information on hover. So I ll be content with just cross-linking my posts from here.

Petter Reinholdtsen: The 2024 LinuxCNC Norwegian developer gathering

The LinuxCNC project is still going strong. And I believe this great software system for numerical control of machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers, cutting machines, robots and hexapods, would do even better with more in-person developer gatherings, so we plan to organise such gathering this summer too. The Norwegian LinuxCNC developer gathering take place the weekend Friday July 5th to 7th this year, and is open for everyone interested in contributing to LinuxCNC and free software manufacturing. Up to date information about the gathering can be found in the developer mailing list thread where the gathering was announced. Thanks to the good people at Debian as well as leftover money from last years gathering from Redpill-Linpro and NUUG Foundation, we have enough sponsor funds to pay for food, and probably also shelter for the people traveling from afar to join us. If you would like to join the gathering, get in touch and add your details on the pad. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 269 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 269. This version includes the following changes: 
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Allow Debian testing continuous integration builds to fail right now.
[ Sergei Trofimovich ]
* Amend 7zip version test for older versions that include the "[64]" string.
  (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#376)
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

30 May 2024

Matthew Palmer: GitHub's Missing Tab

Visit any GitHub project page, and the first thing you see is something that looks like this: screenshot of the GitHub repository page, showing the Code, Issues, and Pull Requests tabs Code , that s fairly innocuous, and it s what we came here for. The Issues and Pull Requests tabs, with their count of open issues, might give us some sense of how active the project is, or perhaps how maintained . Useful information for the casual visitor, undoubtedly. However, there s another user community that visits this page on the regular, and these same tabs mean something very different to them. I m talking about the maintainers (or, more commonly, maintainer, singular). When they see those tabs, all they see is work. The Code tab is irrelevant to them they already have the code, and know it possibly better than they know their significant other(s) (if any). Issues and Pull Requests are just things that have to be done. I know for myself, at least, that it is demoralising to look at a repository page and see nothing but work. I d be surprised if it didn t contribute in some small way to maintainers just noping the fudge out.

A Modest Proposal So, here s my thought. What if instead of the repo tabs looking like the above, they instead looked like this: modified screenshot of the GitHub repository page, showing a new Kudos tab, with a smiley face icon, between the Code and Issues tabs My conception of this is that it would, essentially, be a kind of yearbook , that people who used and liked the software could scribble their thoughts on. With some fairly straightforward affordances elsewhere to encourage its use, it could be a powerful way to show maintainers that they are, in fact, valued and appreciated. There are a number of software packages I ve used recently, that I d really like to say a general thanks, this is awesome! to. However, I m not about to make the Issues tab look even scarier by creating an issue to say thanks, and digging up an email address is often surprisingly difficult, and wouldn t be a public show of my gratitude, which I believe is a valuable part of the interaction.

You Can t Pay Your Rent With Kudos Absolutely you cannot. A means of expressing appreciation in no way replaces the pressing need to figure out a way to allow open source developers to pay their rent. Conversely, however, the need to pay open source developers doesn t remove the need to also show those people that their work is appreciated and valued by many people around the world. Anyway, who knows a senior exec at GitHub? I ve got an idea I d like to run past them

29 May 2024

Antoine Beaupr : Playing with fonts again

I am getting increasingly frustrated by Fira Mono's lack of italic support so I am looking at alternative fonts again.

Commit Mono This time I seem to be settling on either Commit Mono or Space Mono. For now I'm using Commit Mono because it's a little more compressed than Fira and does have a italic version. I don't like how Space Mono's parenthesis (()) is "squarish", it feels visually ambiguous with the square brackets ([]), a big no-no for my primary use case (code). So here I am using a new font, again. It required changing a bunch of configuration files in my home directory (which is in a private repository, sorry) and Emacs configuration (thankfully that's public!). One gotcha is I realized I didn't actually have a global font configuration in Emacs, as some Faces define their own font family, which overrides the frame defaults. This is what it looks like, before:
A dark terminal showing the test sheet in Fira Mono Fira Mono
After:
A dark terminal showing the test sheet in Fira Mono Commit Mono
(Notice how those screenshots are not sharp? I'm surprised too. The originals look sharp on my display, I suspect this is something to do with the Wayland transition. I've tried with both grim and flameshot, for what its worth.) They are pretty similar! Commit Mono feels a bit more vertically compressed maybe too much so, actually -- the line height feels too low. But it's heavily customizable so that's something that's relatively easy to fix, if it's really a problem. Its weight is also a little heavier and wider than Fira which I find a little distracting right now, but maybe I'll get used to it. All characters seem properly distinguishable, although, if I'd really want to nitpick I'd say the and are too different, with the latter (REGISTERED SIGN) being way too small, basically unreadable here. Since I see this sign approximately never, it probably doesn't matter at all. I like how the ampersand (&) is more traditional, although I'll miss the exotic one Fira produced... I like how the back quotes ( , GRAVE ACCENT) drop down low, nicely aligned with the apostrophe. As I mentioned before, I like how the bar on the "f" aligns with the other top of letters, something in Fira mono that really annoys me now that I've noticed it (it's not aligned!).

A UTF-8 test file Here's the test sheet I've made up to test various characters. I could have sworn I had a good one like this lying around somewhere but couldn't find it so here it is, I guess. 
US keyboard coverage:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890-=[]\;',./
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ~!@#$%^&*()_+ :"<>?
latin1 coverage:  
EURO SIGN, TRADE MARK SIGN:  
ambiguity test:
e coC0ODQ iI71lL! 
b6G&0B83  []() /\. 
zs$S52Z%   '" 
all characters in a sentence, uppercase:
the quick fox jumps over the lazy dog
THE QUICK FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG
same, in french:
Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume.
d s no l, o  un z phyr ha  me v t de gla ons w rmiens, je d ne
d exquis r tis de b uf au kir,   l a  d ge m r, &c tera.
D S NO L, O  UN Z PHYR HA  ME V T DE GLA ONS W RMIENS, JE D NE
D EXQUIS R TIS DE B UF AU KIR,   L A  D GE M R, &C TERA.
Ligatures test:
-<< -< -<- <-- <--- <<- <- -> ->> --> ---> ->- >- >>-
=<< =< =<= <== <=== <<= <= => =>> ==> ===> =>= >= >>=
<-> <--> <---> <----> <=> <==> <===> <====> :: ::: __
<~~ </ </> /> ~~> == != /= ~= <> === !== !=== =/= =!=
<: := *= *+ <* <*> *> <  < >  > <. <.> .> +* =* =: :>
(* *) /* */ [   ]     ++ +++ \/ /\  - -  <!-- <!---
Box drawing alignment tests:
                                                                    
                                 
                           
                                                   
                                       
                                                 
                               
                                
Dashes alignment test:
HYPHEN-MINUS, MINUS SIGN, EN, EM DASH, HORIZONTAL BAR, LOW LINE
--------------------------------------------------
 
 
 
 
__________________________________________________
Update: here is another such sample sheet, it's pretty good and has support for more languages while being still relatively small. So there you have it, got completely nerd swiped by typography again. Now I can go back to writing a too-long proposal again. Sources and inspiration for the above:
  • the unicode(1) command, to lookup individual characters to disambiguate, for example, - (U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, the minus sign next to zero on US keyboards) and (U+2212 MINUS SIGN, a math symbol)
  • searchable list of characters and their names - roughly equivalent to the unicode(1) command, but in one page, amazingly the /usr/share/unicode database doesn't have any one file like this
  • bits/UTF-8-Unicode-Test-Documents - full list of UTF-8 characters
  • UTF-8 encoded plain text file - nice examples of edge cases, curly quotes example and box drawing alignment test which, incidentally, showed me I needed specific faces customisation in Emacs to get the Markdown code areas to display properly, also the idea of comparing various dashes
  • sample sentences in many languages - unused, "Sentences that contain all letters commonly used in a language"
  • UTF-8 sampler - unused, similar

Other fonts In my previous blog post about fonts, I had a list of alternative fonts, but it seems people are not digging through this, so I figured I would redo the list here to preempt "but have you tried Jetbrains mono" kind of comments. My requirements are:
  • no ligatures: yes, in the previous post, I wanted ligatures but I have changed my mind. after testing this, I find them distracting, confusing, and they often break the monospace nature of the display
  • monospace: this is to display code
  • italics: often used when writing Markdown, where I do make use of italics... Emacs falls back to underlining text when lacking italics which is hard to read
  • free-ish, ultimately should be packaged in Debian
Here is the list of alternatives I have considered in the past and why I'm not using them:
  • agave: recommended by tarzeau, not sure I like the lowercase a, a bit too exotic, packaged as fonts-agave
  • Cascadia code: optional ligatures, multilingual, not liking the alignment, ambiguous parenthesis (look too much like square brackets), new default for Windows Terminal and Visual Studio, packaged as fonts-cascadia-code
  • Fira Code: ligatures, was using Fira Mono from which it is derived, lacking italics except for forks, interestingly, Fira Code succeeds the alignment test but Fira Mono fails to show the X signs properly! packaged as fonts-firacode
  • Hack: no ligatures, very similar to Fira, italics, good alternative, fails the X test in box alignment, packaged as fonts-hack
  • Hermit: no ligatures, smaller, alignment issues in box drawing and dashes, packaged as fonts-hermit somehow part of cool-retro-term
  • IBM Plex: irritating website, replaces Helvetica as the IBM corporate font, no ligatures by default, italics, proportional alternatives, serifs and sans, multiple languages, partial failure in box alignment test (X signs), fancy curly braces contrast perhaps too much with the rest of the font, packaged in Debian as fonts-ibm-plex
  • Inconsolata: no ligatures, maybe italics? more compressed than others, feels a little out of balance because of that, packaged in Debian as fonts-inconsolata
  • Intel One Mono: nice legibility, no ligatures, alignment issues in box drawing, not packaged in Debian
  • Iosevka: optional ligatures, italics, multilingual, good legibility, has a proportional option, serifs and sans, line height issue in box drawing, fails dash test, not in Debian
  • Jetbrains Mono: (mandatory?) ligatures, good coverage, originally rumored to be not DFSG-free (Debian Free Software Guidelines) but ultimately packaged in Debian as fonts-jetbrains-mono
  • Monoid: optional ligatures, feels much "thinner" than Jetbrains, not liking alignment or spacing on that one, ambiguous 2Z, problems rendering box drawing, packaged as fonts-monoid
  • Mononoki: no ligatures, looks good, good alternative, suggested by the Debian fonts team as part of fonts-recommended, problems rendering box drawing, em dash bigger than en dash, packaged as fonts-mononoki
  • Source Code Pro: italics, looks good, but dash metrics look whacky, not in Debian
  • spleen: bitmap font, old school, spacing issue in box drawing test, packaged as fonts-spleen
  • sudo: personal project, no ligatures, zero originally not dotted, relied on metrics for legibility, spacing issue in box drawing, not in Debian
So, if I get tired of Commit Mono, I might probably try, in order:
  1. Hack
  2. Jetbrains Mono
  3. IBM Plex Mono
Iosevka, Monoki and Intel One Mono are also good options, but have alignment problems. Iosevka is particularly disappointing as the EM DASH metrics are just completely wrong (much too wide). This was tested using the Programming fonts site which has all the above fonts, which cannot be said of Font Squirrel or Google Fonts, amazingly. Other such tools:

28 May 2024

Russell Coker: Creating a Micro Users Group

Fosdem had a great lecture Building an Open Source Community One Friend at a Time [1]. I recommend that everyone who is involved in the FOSS community watches this lecture to get some ideas. For some time I ve been periodically inviting a few friends to visit for lunch, chat about Linux, maybe do some coding, and watch some anime between coding. It seems that I have accidentally created a micro users group. LUGs were really big in the mid to late 90s and still quite vibrant in the early 2000 s. But they seem to have decreased in popularity even before Covid19 and since Covid19 a lot of people have stopped attending large meetings to avoid health risks. I think that a large part of the decline of users groups has been due to the success of YouTube. Being able to choose from thousands of hours of lectures about computers on YouTube is a disincentive to spending the time and effort needed to attend a meeting with content that s probably not your first choice of topic. Attending a formal meeting where someone you don t know has arranged a lecture might not have a topic that s really interesting to you. Having lunch with a couple of friends and watching a YouTube video that one of your friends assures you is really good is something more people will find interesting. In recent times homeschooling [2] has become more widely known. The same factors that allow learning about computers at home also make homeschooling easier. The difference between the traditional LUG model of having everyone meet at a fixed time for a lecture and a micro LUG of a small group of people having an informal meeting is similar to the difference between traditional schools and homeschooling. I encourage everyone to create their own micro LUG. All you have to do is choose a suitable time and place and invite some people who are interested. Have a BBQ in a park if the weather is good, meet at a cafe or restaurant, or invite people to visit you for lunch on a weekend.
Related posts:
  1. Creating a Micro Conference The TEDxVolcano The TED conference franchise has been extended to...
  2. BLUG This weekend I went to the Ballarat install-fest, mini-conf, and...
  3. Recruiting at a LUG Meeting I m at the main meeting of Linux Users of Victoria...

27 May 2024

Thomas Koch: Thank you Republika Srpska

Posted on May 27, 2024
Tags: debian, peace
In 2011 I went to my first DebConf and was very overwhelmed not only by DebConf, Debian and all the interesting sessions. I was also overwhelmed by the hospitality of the Republika Srpska. Our venue was the cultural center Banski Dvor in Banja Luka, the most important cultural center of the city of Banja Luka and the Serb Republic 1. We were accommodated across the street of the venue in the four star Hotel Bosna . The DebConf dinner was in a government building. I learned, that in addition to the sponsorship of the venue and accommodation, the financial sponsorship was gracious enough that there was money left for the following DebConfs. I remember this now, because the United Nations General Assembly voted on a resolution that might have very severe implications in the coming weeks for the Republika Srpska. The matter is extremely tricky, complex and not a topic for Planet Debian. I think it is the least I can do to thank my former hosts, to get myself informed about what is going on there.
  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banski_Dvor

Thomas Koch: Minimal overhead VMs with Nix and MicroVM

Posted on March 17, 2024
Tags: debian, free software, nix
Joachim Breitner wrote about a Convenient sandboxed development environment and thus reminded me to blog about MicroVM. I ve toyed around with it a little but not yet seriously used it as I m currently not coding. MicroVM is a nix based project to configure and run minimal VMs. It can mount and thus reuse the hosts nix store inside the VM and thus has a very small disk footprint. I use MicroVM on a debian system using the nix package manager. The MicroVM author uses the project to host production services. Otherwise I consider it also a nice way to learn about NixOS after having started with the nix package manager and before making the big step to NixOS as my main system. The guests root filesystem is a tmpdir, so one must explicitly define folders that should be mounted from the host and thus be persistent across VM reboots. I defined the VM as a nix flake since this is how I started from the MicroVM projects example: 
 
  description = "Haskell dev MicroVM";
  inputs.impermanence.url = "github:nix-community/impermanence";
  inputs.microvm.url = "github:astro/microvm.nix";
  inputs.microvm.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
  outputs =   self, impermanence, microvm, nixpkgs  :
    let
      persistencePath = "/persistent";
      system = "x86_64-linux";
      user = "thk";
      vmname = "haskell";
      nixosConfiguration = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem  
          inherit system;
          modules = [
            microvm.nixosModules.microvm
            impermanence.nixosModules.impermanence
            ( pkgs, ...  :  
            environment.persistence.$ persistencePath  =  
                hideMounts = true;
                users.$ user  =  
                  directories = [
                    "git" ".stack"
                  ];
                 ;
               ;
              environment.sessionVariables =  
                TERM = "screen-256color";
               ;
              environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
                ghc
                git
                (haskell-language-server.override   supportedGhcVersions = [ "94" ];  )
                htop
                stack
                tmux
                tree
                vcsh
                zsh
              ];
              fileSystems.$ persistencePath .neededForBoot = nixpkgs.lib.mkForce true;
              microvm =  
                forwardPorts = [
                    from = "host"; host.port = 2222; guest.port = 22;  
                    from = "guest"; host.port = 5432; guest.port = 5432;   # postgresql
                ];
                hypervisor = "qemu";
                interfaces = [
                    type = "user"; id = "usernet"; mac = "00:00:00:00:00:02";  
                ];
                mem = 4096;
                shares = [  
                  # use "virtiofs" for MicroVMs that are started by systemd
                  proto = "9p";
                  tag = "ro-store";
                  # a host's /nix/store will be picked up so that no
                  # squashfs/erofs will be built for it.
                  source = "/nix/store";
                  mountPoint = "/nix/.ro-store";
                   
                  proto = "virtiofs";
                  tag = "persistent";
                  source = "~/.local/share/microvm/vms/$ vmname /persistent";
                  mountPoint = persistencePath;
                  socket = "/run/user/1000/microvm-$ vmname -persistent";
                 
                ];
                socket = "/run/user/1000/microvm-control.socket";
                vcpu = 3;
                volumes = [];
                writableStoreOverlay = "/nix/.rwstore";
               ;
              networking.hostName = vmname;
              nix.enable = true;
              nix.nixPath = ["nixpkgs=$ builtins.storePath <nixpkgs> "];
              nix.settings =  
                extra-experimental-features = ["nix-command" "flakes"];
                trusted-users = [user];
               ;
              security.sudo =  
                enable = true;
                wheelNeedsPassword = false;
               ;
              services.getty.autologinUser = user;
              services.openssh =  
                enable = true;
               ;
              system.stateVersion = "24.11";
              systemd.services.loadnixdb =  
                description = "import hosts nix database";
                path = [pkgs.nix];
                wantedBy = ["multi-user.target"];
                requires = ["nix-daemon.service"];
                script = "cat $ persistencePath /nix-store-db-dump nix-store --load-db";
               ;
              time.timeZone = nixpkgs.lib.mkDefault "Europe/Berlin";
              users.users.$ user  =  
                extraGroups = [ "wheel" "video" ];
                group = "user";
                isNormalUser = true;
                openssh.authorizedKeys.keys = [
                  "ssh-rsa REDACTED"
                ];
                password = "";
               ;
              users.users.root.password = "";
              users.groups.user =  ;
             )
          ];
         ;
    in  
      packages.$ system .default = nixosConfiguration.config.microvm.declaredRunner;
     ;
I start the microVM with a templated systemd user service: 
[Unit]
Description=MicroVM for Haskell development
Requires=microvm-virtiofsd-persistent@.service
After=microvm-virtiofsd-persistent@.service
AssertFileNotEmpty=%h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/flake/flake.nix
[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/sh -c "[ /nix/var/nix/db/db.sqlite -ot %h/.local/share/microvm/nix-store-db-dump ]   nix-store --dump-db >%h/.local/share/microvm/nix-store-db-dump"
ExecStartPre=ln -f -t %h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/persistent/ %h/.local/share/microvm/nix-store-db-dump
ExecStartPre=-%h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/tmux new -s microvm -d
ExecStart=%h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/tmux new-window -t microvm: -n "%i" "exec %h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/nix run --impure %h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/flake"
The above service definition creates a dump of the hosts nix store db so that it can be imported in the guest. This is necessary so that the guest can actually use what is available in /nix/store. There is an effort for an overlayed nix store that would be preferable to this hack. Finally the microvm is started inside a tmux session named microvm . This way I can use the VM with SSH or through the console and also access the qemu console. And for completeness the virtiofsd service: 
[Unit]
Description=serve host persistent folder for dev VM
AssertPathIsDirectory=%h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/persistent
[Service]
ExecStart=%h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/virtiofsd \
 --socket-path=$ XDG_RUNTIME_DIR /microvm-%i-persistent \
 --shared-dir=%h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/persistent \
 --gid-map :995:%G:1: \
 --uid-map :1000:%U:1:

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