mintCast 283 – Gentoo: Round 1
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Bi-weekly Wanderings:
- Isaac has been helping people out with their resumes, building a RetroPie, and found a computer garage sale
- Rob’s about to start gaming a new RPG project on Roll 20 based on Paizo’s “Starfinder”
News:
- New Raspberry Pi released!
- Top Linux distros for developers
- Linux Foundation announces open source ACRN hypervisor for the Internet of Things
- Faster app-launching in Cinnamon
- Mintbox Mini 2
Linux Innards:
- Rob talks about his first looks and attempts into Gentoo. Isaac discovers he knows nothing about MBR and GPT.
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I’m glad I had a useful suggestion for you! It was cool to hear that the IRC channel was ready to give a lot of guidance regarding Gentoo. I’ll try not to take up too much of your time this wekk, but I might fail —
Regarding the Pi’s networking speed, Joe covered this some on Linux Action News. There are a couple issues with the ethernet port. One is that the Pi has a single USB hub internally and the ethernet is on that hub along with all the ethernet ports. So if you are doing I/O to a USB device (like downloading a file to a USB driver) that will slow down ethernet traffic. When the 3 first came out, some people were speculating that the wifi might be faster than ethernet because the wireless chip has a dedicated route on the circuitboard, but searching now I can’t find any benchmarks that support this speculation. The other issue is that the Pi had poor thermal management and would start to overheat under sustained network traffic. It would then slow traffic down to avoid overheating. So the sustained transfer speed was lower than the burst. The new Pi 3 is supposed to have better thermal management.
I have another suggestion for a future show topic — snap packages. I think it would be a good follow up topic to LFS and Gentoo because the goal of snap packages is to provide a system for installing new applications on a system without interfering with the base system. It would be interesting to dig into the internals and see how they compare to the kinds of things you would when building an LFS system inside a chroot on a host system. To tie together with another request you mentioned — you could have Martin Wimpress on as a guest to talk about snap packages. From what I can tell, his day job at Canonical is to advocate for snaps and help developers make new snaps, so I’m sure he would be interested in coming ont he show to talk about them.
Another set of things you could look at if you look into clang is musl (alternative to glibc) and busybox and toybox (alternatives to GNU coreutils). These projects came up in the comments for the last Late Night LInux (https://latenightlinux.com/late-night-linux-episode-33/#comments). It seems that Alpine Linux is an example of a GNU-free Linux (uses clang/musl/busybox instead of gcc/glibc/coreutils). The author of toybox was interviewed on Linux Luddites twice. He’s another possibility for a podcast guest.
Isaac, here is a cool free book about Bayes that I came across: http://camdavidsonpilon.github.io/Probabilistic-Programming-and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers/