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When will we dump the plastic? Plus clever scripts, and we find that recommending devices is hard.
Top Terminal
I just thought i’d brag about my .bashrc edit alias cd=userspace userspace() { clear figlet -w 100 Linux Master Race echo Hello, $User;date printf “%`tput cols`s”|tr ‘ ‘ ‘_’ uptime printf “%`tput cols`s”|tr ‘ ‘ ‘_’ builtin cd $1 && ls -i -CF printf “%`tput cols`s”|tr ‘ ‘ ‘_’
} userspace Tim
Neil says
Come on, this is pretty cool. _____
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Taking tablets
I am planning on buying a new tablet. Mostly I will want to play around with it and develop some applications that I intend to use on other platforms – for example, Windows (shock, horror) and an Android phone. The goal is to demonstrate the possibilities to my students – I’m a teacher, you see. I was originally excited by Unity, but then… well, you know! But C++ and Python can be made to work across platforms, and I’d also like this thing to be useful to me in managing the classroom and so on.
Can you suggest the best tablet, and what things I should really consider? If I have to buy an Android tablet, I’d really like to be able to install a ‘real’ version of Linux on it as well, although I suspect that will invalidate any warranty! Price (within reason) is not too much of a problem, but being in control is really important to me. As a long-standing Fedora user, I like the control it gives me. Neal Umney
Neil says
What a good question. In this very issue Jonni has written the Hack Chromeos feature, and the Google Pixel Slate looks like a lovely option. Almost any Intelbased Chromebook would be an interesting option,
as most can have full Linux installed on them (they use Coreboot). On many, you can also install full Linux apps alongside, or at least chroot Crouton for full Linux. The Intel part is useful over an ARM model as it offers easy GPU acceleration, as Intel very helpfully offers open source drivers, plus there are Android apps built in now too.
Any Android option is going to be more limited as they’re Arm-based, with the usual driver issues that causes. Perhaps once Purism releases its Librem 5, it might follow up with a tablet version? Do any readers out there have suggestions?
Mind meld
I love your magazine; I read with interest the letter from the reader wanting to match various lists for duplicates. I use a program called Meld for this, installed from the Ubuntu software centre. It’s great!
I also love the new distros on the cover DVD. To vary it, do you think it could also contain other software – for example, a game or a new office suite? It would make it even better; maybe some of the software reviews in the magazine could have the packages on the DVD. Many people like myself cannot get internet over a fixed line and have to rely on a 4G connection, with limited data allowances. As such, there’s only so much we can download each month and having it on the DVD makes trying things out much easier. Tom Morgan
Neil says
We used to run Roundup and Hotpicks on the disc. When we took disc production in-house we took the unilateral decision to drop these as we didn’t really think they were widely used by people – they’re generally small, dependencies would be required and by the time you get them (six weeks later) they’ll be out of date.
We’ll revisit the choice but it might be just larger standalone packages that go on the disc. There’s an additional issue these days of lack of room. Distros are now huge (1.5GB and up), so we often run into space constraints and these used to get dropped for that.