Linux

Proton is a compatibility layer for Windows games to run on Linux. Running a Windows games is mostly just hitting the Play button within Steam. It’s that good that many games now run faster on Linux than on native Windows. That’s what makes the Steam Deck the best gaming handheld of the moment. But a compatibility layer is still a layer, so you may encounter … incompatibilities. Ember Knights is a lovely game with fun co-op multiplayer support. It runs perfectly on the (Linux-based) Steam Deck, but on my Ubuntu laptop I encountered long loading times (startup was 5 minutes and loading between worlds was slow). But once the game was loaded it ran fine. ...

(In case you don’t know rakudo-pkg: it’s a project to provide native packages and relocatable builds of Rakudo for Linux distributions.) The downward spiral of Travis since it was taken over by a Private Equity firm (there is a pattern here), triggered a long coming refactoring of the rakudo-pkg workflow. Until now the packages were created on Travis because it supported running Linux containers so we could tailor the build for each distribution/release. Almost at the same time JFrog announced it was sunsetting Bintray and other services popular with FOSS projects. The deb and rpm repos needed a new home. ...

There was an interesting discussion on #perl6 (irc.freenode.net) about the use of rakudobrew as a way for end-users to install Rakudo Perl 6 (see how-to-get-rakudo [dead link to page on Rakudo’s website]). rakudobrew, inspired by perlbrew, is a way to manage (and compile) different versions of rakudo. nine argued that it’s primarily meant as a tool for rakudo developers. Because of the increased complexity (e.g. when dealing with modules), it’s not targeted at end-users. While being a big fan of rakudobrew, I agree with nine. ...

On most Linux distributions, you can use the graphical “disks” application to create Luks+ext4 partitons. The defaults are sane. However, it’s still advisable to put random data on the new disk before encryption. If you use USB disks for off-site backups, it’s a good idea to encrypt them: Install the cryptography software: sudo apt-get install cryptsetup Write some random data to your disk (we will assume it’s called /dev/sdx, type “dmesg” after inserting the disk to figure out the device, or if it’s windows formatted and automounted have a look at the output of “mount”): sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdx bs=4K This will taken a long time, maybe a few days (create some IO). A good -shorter- compromise (a day) is: ...

You may have backupped your music CDs using a single flac file instead of a file for each track. In case you need to split the cd-flac, do this (instruction for Debian/Ubuntu): Install the needed software. sudo apt-get install cuetools ffmpeg flac shntool In case the source file is one unsplitted ape file, you can convert it to flac first. ffmpeg -i sample.ape sample.flac In case the cue file is not a separate file, but included in the flac file itself, split them. metaflac --show-tag=CUESHEET sample.flac | grep -v ^CUESHEET > sample.cue (NB: The regular syntax is metaflac --export-cuesheet-to=sample.cue sample.flac, however often the cue file in embedded in a tag instead of the cuesheet block). ...