James'Techblog

Solus, a descendant of SolusOs, is a Unix-like operating system focused for newer users who want a truly rolling release model. Being independent now(was previously forked from Debian), it offers an Arch-like experience having to only be installed once for most users. It aspires to be a one stop shop for its user base and promises to not constantly have major point releases to get the latest software like in other distributions. The current version is 3.9999 at time of writing this. Solus uses the Adapta-gtk theme by default with Papirus as the icon set. Users who wish to change this in Gnome will have to go into Gnome-tweaks which is readily available and installed on the Gnome desktop version by default. It should also be noted that the default desktop is Budgie and Budgie itself is a derivative of Gnome. Solus uses current packages at least up to the last point version. I noticed on a recent Arch build that I was using kernel 4.20.3 whereas this build was using 4.20...

Antergos, a Spanish produced, Arch-based, Unix-Like operating system, is a modern marvel to say the least, when compared to Ubuntu, Debian, Manjaro, etc. Antergos works similarly to a standard build of Arch in that it doesn’t really offer many bells and whistles itself, whereas Manjaro uses its own repos, and seems self aware of what it is doing in the way it manages SSDs and partitioning schemes. Antergos is a more bare-bones system, which is not to say it doesn’t add something over vanilla Arch, but it does so in a way that doesn’t get in the way of the user, doesn’t effect the user’s ability to use the operating system in any way. As I previously mentioned, partitioning is different between Antergos and other Arch-based distros like Manjaro in that Antergos pays close attention to detail whilst installing. It creates a separate root and boot partitioning schema on the drive with swap taking the rest. It seems to use a more logical and advanced method that I can only a...

With Linux Mint 19.1 coming in November, I decided to switch from arch-based as it was getting kind of buggy, I chose Linux Mint 19 and 18.3 for my drives, mostly because older computers wouldn’t work as well graphically with the new xorg stack in 19. The newer computer, however, works fine. It uses the modesetting driver in place of the standard intel driver that the cpu calls for. This seems to weed out any issues and the performance is at least on par with the brand name version of the driver module. Linux Mint all-in-all works better and smoother with regards to default themes and with optimizing itself for SSD drives. It also has a lot of things that I’m used to with regards to the traditional layout of the desktop, the standard Ubuntu base for packages, and the way that rather than resorting to a terminal every single time I want something done, I can find a graphical component for most things. My one gripe with Linux Mint is that in a short while, many of t...

The Vivaldi browser, a browser built off of HTML, CSS, and backed by the Blink engine most notably found in Google-Chrome, is a bit of fresh air within the browser world. The newest snapshots are no exception. Vivaldi recently jumped their snapshot release to version number 2.0.xx and since have been making a long list of improvements. All of three snapshots in as many weeks seems to be making great strides at ironing out the final little bugs. No one is certain exactly what date the new and improved Vivaldi milestone will be released, however, it is speculated that they are on the home stretch now. Vivaldi recently fixed some mac media issues and other regressions and crashes in their browser, the new Milestone looks as though it will have the Sync feature officially added this time around. They are also making tremendous strides in their web mail client and as of late, I can say that it seems to work really well. Vivaldi has also added some useful toggles within the settin...

Puppy Linux is a distribution that few people really try out. Little is really known about the distribution and the ones who benefit most from it are the ones who never want to get their hands dirty fixing some bug(or even seeing bugs at all really). Puppy was pieced together file by file and is thus related strictly to no other distribution, but rather takes from all of them. It is based on GNULinux and follows the GNU licensing. Puppy runs on a limited portion of RAM which is negligible by today’s standards. Puppy boots to around 100 MB or less but it is recommended to have about 128 or better MB of memory in the machine. Puppy has versions built for ARM devices as well. The distribution was built to breathe life in older hardware and show users off a whole new set of modern software despite not necessarily having to be ran from a hard drive, in fact, the distribution can run on systems where the hard drive is dead or not present at all. To boot to the system, ...

Firefox 63 marks a big turning point for Firefox, not only will it see a new Content blocking feature implemented which will automatically allow users to block all kinds of tracking scripts and cookies(even slow ones) which will improve performance as well as security, but they are also working on a potential option to help secure users’ DNS traffic within the browser as well. This will use DoH or DNS over Https which will encrypt DNS data. The feature is in Nightly versions now and is not enabled by default, but users who wish to try it out can do so. Also, as with Google Chrome Canary, the browser is also trying to eliminate its future use of Symantec certificates. In the past, malicious apps and sites have used signed certificates from trusted websites such as Verisign and even Symantec. The Symantec certs will no longer be valid in Firefox and Chrome after the nightly/Canary versions become stable. Meanwhile, the browser is also undergoing minor UI and backend change...

A week ago, it was revealed that Ubuntu and its derivatives would be releasing patches to the Linux kernel to try and prevent a critical flaw with the L1TF or a flaw directly affecting memory cache found in L1 of an intel cpu core which was exposed to malicious code running in the background which would steal personal information and reveal it to attackers. This was patched previously, however, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu didn’t actually fix everything. There was an apology released by Canonical for in fact mucking some things up with their previous patch. It was revealed that there would be another patch to the kernel which came through about a week or so ago, however, this didn’t fix everything either. Intel Microcode is CPU instruction code which is updated by the CPU vendor to add security patches and new instructions to the CPU. Intel aren’t as forthcoming as some might like for them to be about their company’s updates to their CPU firmware. Intel has in th...