mintCast 151: SolydXK
Listen: mintcast151.mp3 or mintcast151.ogg
News:
- Clem details MDM login screens built with HTML5. (Blog.LinuxMint.com )
- Canonical takes the lid off of Mir. (Phoronix.com )
- HP to offer all-in-one Ubuntu computer for sale in UK. (OMGUbuntu.co.uk )
- Steam for Linux continues to grow, challenges Steam for Mac adoption numbers. (Webupd8.org )
The Main Topic:
- Interview with Schoelje discussing the new SolydXK distro. (SolydXK )
Tip and Website in one:
- notify-sendIt allows you to send notifications to the desktop and works in most DE’s. I use it in my scripts to let me know where they’ve got to and what is being done, also it adds a flair of professionalism to my home-grown code!!
An example use would be;
notify-send -t 5000 ‘Backup Script’ ‘The backup has completed successfully’
Which would then show a title and main notification for 5 seconds;
Title – Backup Script,
Main notification – The backup has completed successfully.You can, as with all Linux commands, get fancy and add variables and other inputs. Thanks to Beardy Jesse for this Tip and Website.(ss64.com )
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With the announcement of a stable release of this new KDE distro,i am very anxious to get it installed on my laptop. So far my testing indicates that SolydXK will replace LinuxMint 13 KDE as the first partition on my dual boot hard drive with Chakra linux being the second.
Thought your interview with Schoelje was very well done.
I downloaded SolydX which is the XFCE version and tried it as a Live USB.
It was stable on my hardware but it does have a large foot print (932 MB) without offering anything more than other XFCE distros. It will be interesting to see how this distribution fares on the Distrowatch list.
One security concern about it though, it has the Java plugin IcedTea enabled in Firefox. Recent security advice says IcedTea should be disabled.
Just what Linux needs, another distro.
On Chromebooks; I just got mine last week (a Samsung for $250) as a semi-replacement for my three-year-old netbook.
1. With all the EUFI nonsense that’s been going on, Google may offer the only place to get an unfettered piece of hardware, seeing how the manufacturers see the Linux community as a very small chunk of the over-all market, and we’re the only one’s complaining.
2. It’s makes good business sense for Google to produce hardware (the Nexus line of phones and tablets, as well as Chromebooks) that’s easily hackable. Google depends on open platforms and a free internet compared to Apple with Safari, or Microsoft with Bing.
3. There’s a pretty extensive history for Google pushing for greater computer literacy (and I don’t mean using a word processor); Google Labs, Summer of Code, giving away a bunch of Raspberry Pi(s) in the UK, etc. I think ChromeOS was meant to be a starter system until the user feels comfortable enough to install a real version of Linux. Google using an in-house version of Linux may be the worst kept secret in the industry…
4. The Pixel isn’t meant to be a machine for the masses, it’s an example of what can, but isn’t being done, in the industry. The Acer is essentially my three-year-old netbook with an extra GB of RAM – easily over-written with any i686 distro, and a great place to start. The Samsung is where the real action is going to take place; light-weight, running on an ARM processor, long battery life – this is where you’re going to see the first merging of Android and ChromeOS.
As always, enjoyed the show, keep up the good work, and Gramp’s Garage needs revisiting!
-jim
P.S. – Bohdi linux has an ARM version that I’m looking into; http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2012/12/bodhi-armhf-alpha-for-samsung-chromebook.html?m=1
I was interested to hear about the ‘notify-send’ command. However, when I tried it out, it didn’t perform, on Ubuntu 12.04 [Gnome 3 Desktop], as I expected.
I could alter the time from 500mS to 15000mS and it made no difference to the time that the notification appeared, which, in both cases, was about 5 seconds. I also tried ‘–expire-time=’ instead of ‘-t’, as shown in the manual, but that performed no differently. In essence, the time option makes no difference at all whether it is included or not in the command syntax.
The reason why your test appeared to work of course is that you chose to try it with a time of 5 seconds 🙂
Great show, as usual, thanks.
I did some skulking about and found this link:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=131258
Apparently, there’s a long-standing bug someplace in the system that means the “expire-time” parameter just gets ignored. I’m not smart enough to figure out exactly where it is, but the link above seems to say there’s a library on Xfce that will fix it. My Mint 13 Xfce had the problem, so I’m not sure what the fix is.
If this is old news, take another bow! 🙂
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/82542
Bill_MI
Thanks for the heads-up Bill_MI. I hadn’t seen this.
🙂