Skip to content

{ Category Archives } Systems

Ubuntu, Linux, Networks, and software systems

latency

Why Modern Computers Struggle to Match the Input Latency of an Apple IIe By Joel Hruska — “The system with the lowest input latency — the amount of time between when you hit a key and that keystroke appears on the computer — is the Apple IIe, at 30ms.” There is a table of measurements that […]

Torvalds priorities say a lot about success

At the Register: Linus Torvalds on security: ‘Do no harm, don’t break users‘ By Simon Sharwood — “Fixing for the sake of security alone means ‘all your work was just masturbation’“ Torvalds was angry that developers wanted to kill dangerous processes in Linux, a measure that would have removed potential problems but done so in ways […]

Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) adjustments and workarounds for the Beta

October is around the corner so a new Ubuntu version is getting ready. See the Release Notes. The control buttons for each window are moved back to the right top after seven years and Unity has been replaced by Gnome 3.26 so you might be a bit discombobulated by user interface changes. The standard issue image […]

The system file API

Python libraries use the system API for fundamental file operations and I encountered one example of subtlety in this with the program to scan for duplicate files that had been merged by Fslint using links. A restored tarball had symbolic links that were no longer valid. That caused problems. OSError: [Errno 2] No such file […]

So what’s wrong with 1975 programming?

Notes from the Architect picks up Varnish as his application example to highlight that things have changed since then. You can extrapolate from his examples to, say, Python or Java versus BASIC or C. I have spent many years working on the FreeBSD kernel, and only rarely did I venture into userland programming, but when […]

Linux reinstalled: samples from 1993 – 2003

How Linux got to be Linux: Test driving 1993-2003 distros — “Enjoy a trip down Linux memory lane as we take early distros for a spin.” Posted 20 Dec 2016 Seth Kenlon. By the early 2000s, it’s clear that Linux has well and truly hit its stride. The desktop is more polished than ever, the […]

Linux growth in 2016 – developer’s numbers

Phoronix picks up on the latest Linux kernal release and takes a look at how much it has changed in 2016. Linux 4.10-rc1 Gained 488k Lines, Kernel Up 1.9+ Million Lines For 2016. For those wondering how much weight the kernel gained in 2016, comparing the 4.10-rc1 kernel to 4.4-rc8 (released on 3 January 2016, […]

Rallynet: Proof of Concept guidance

The first question was what to do with this thing (the Raspberry Pi or just pi). The NOOBS (new out of box software) install process worked well and provided a multi-boot pi with Raspbian, LibreELEC, and OSMC. Nice. Worked. Made a nice media center for the RV. Now what? How about a web services host […]

Tofu and the NoTo font project

Perhaps you’ve seen it? Some document on the web or PDF or a word processing document with characters that look like little boxes of tofu? That’s what happens when a called for font or the substitute for it does not have a proper glyph for the character code. All text is to a computer is […]

What do I do with this rPi?

An Amazon deal, the Vilros kit was on sale a while back, so I now have a Raspberry Pi 3 B to see what all the fuss is about. First thing up was to boot NOOB  (New Out Of the Box software) and install a basic Raspbian system, the LibreElec (just enough Linux for Kodi) and […]