A new low for the systemd gang and what it may mean (libblockdev udisks2 udiskie)

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WOW I can plug an external disk into my pc and it shows up on my MS look-alike filemanager right away, without even being an admin of the system!

WOW WOW I can plug an encrypted external disk into my pc and it shows up on my MS look-alike filemanager right away, without even being an admin of the system!

This linux is JUST LIKE MS-windows11!

And this is what you were after?  An open-free software system that acts and looks just like windows 10/11?

If your distro caters to morons keep expecting what it is you are getting.

If your distro doesn’t cater to morons, why keep getting what it is you are getting?

We can’t answer every philosophical question here, and we never intended, but circumstances keep drawing us back to the meaning of life.  libblockdev udisks2 didn’t change versions remained the same, but were rebuilt, why? Because the source address was changed, and also the ckecksums of the source changed, and their dependency to systemd changed, somehow.  Continue reading →

systemd and ipv6 – why should it/they not be disabled? Ever?

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This article is written on a reverse logic, starting from end and attempting to go towards the beginning, although we are not very clear on where to begin 😉

In the end of the article there is the reference article and direct quote of the error and why it is produced.  To sum it up, logind within systemd produces an error for a user process attempt to start an X session process through an ipv6 connection.  Although our allergic reaction to the fact the author on this article speaks in general about linux and displays a systemd related error, we will bypass this detail for the content’s importance.

error: Failed to allocate internet-domain X11 display socket

Now why does X get compiled with its own networking abilities?  Because “some people” like to get X access to the machine remotely.  A problematic reason on its own, but we are not here to solve all of the world’s problems.  It is systemd complaining because sshd is not working right, it prevents a remote ipv6 connection, but logind is there to make sure that a proper connection is made when it should.  Many other pieces of software have their own parts of ipv6 networking functionalities and abilities.  Hmmm,…… !!!  Scratch …scratch … why should they?  Should they not?

WHOSE PROBLEM IS IPV6 MEANT TO SOLVE?

Yours, mine, … my ISP’s, …..?   It has taken nearly 2.5 decades (since 1998) to transition from ipv4 to ipv6. Continue reading →

udevd is dead, long live mdevd – libudev-zero shines bright

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Getting close to our 4year birthday here and what more reason to celebrate than cutting one more tie to the IBM’s monolithic bloatware that is shoved down our throats by agents of dependence and control.

Thanks to the revamping of Kiss and its new commitment to independence, to offer a way to such independence, we noticed a tragic neglect of reality.  We started talking about independence from systemd, and all we thought it was necessary was to substitute pid1 for an alternative.  100 distros later, and many forks, seem to be systemd-free.  Some solutions pre-existed and worked, some fresher were hardly tried. Then came the substitution to systemd’s logind by consolekit2.

Then came the realization that not using systemd init, but using dbus and elogind, was the next worst thing to be doing, and while more and more non-systemd distros (on our long list) didn’t use systemd, they used – or later adopted elogind (void, slackware, and our beloved adelie, even antiX is using it here and there).  So beyond pid1 those systems were business as usual.  We then focused on the next best alternative, consolekit2 (which is recently receiving fresh attention) or not using it and dbus at all, which is fine for most of us wm, teminal, consoles users.

Now, as Kiss points out, udev is another piece that behaves as an IBM monolith in linux and it is our task to evade its dependence.  Maybe then we can set ourselves free, not so fast slick you will trip on your own myth here!  Most X-server subsystems depend indirectly to what udev provides, and IN THE WAY UDEV provides it.

Continue reading →

In the pandemic of global neo-liberal capitalist dictatorship we are still here

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… and so are all the projects we support and exhibit.

WordPress continues to make our life miserable, with all their new guis a web-client-google-apis.  As if they are no longer capable of developing their own code for a web-client interface they must add google functionality, which in turn is not supported by all safety and privacy minded browsers, only those produced by google and mozilla corporations, making it hard to protect yourselves against the corporate bandits and have adequate functionality to publish.

Continue reading →

Coming up next the new sysdfree resurrection

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Just so when “some” were happy this is done and over with, POP goes the sysdfree community project again.  From now on, we will have a summary article of what is coming up next, and a series of articles discussing in detail the most worthy or note-worthy topics of interest.  Since  YOU haven’t been contributiong much to the community, it will be OUR topics of interest.

Why did we vanish for a little while?  After all this closure and prohibition to end the covid diaspora we have been burning some skinny road bike tires enjoying the end of spring and the starrt of a very HOT summer.  So now that it is getting hot, we will stay indoors again enough to write something up.  Yeeahhheee!!!! Or is it Yaaayyyy….!!!

1  Devuan:  Boring new stable release a year later  (you wanted an article .. go find one elsewhere).

2  Debian:  Script that runs and removes systemd and installs sysvinit and reboots to a systemd init free system.

3  Adelie (and Alpine) free and non-free independent repository

4  Black Artix, as if Artix wasn’t shady enough

5  Adequacy of traditions scripts (sysV or BSD inits) necessity of supervision suites (s6, 66, synit, minit, perp) or other alternatives such as OpenRC.

6  Split Linux, based on Void, security, anonymity, real firewalling, and more ….

7  Enough with supervising dry-cut monolythic services, the future is in modules (modular services and bundles of services).  If systemd was already burried and done with, this builds a pyramid on top, just so nobody will ever dear to open the mummy’s coffin.

8  Live streaming with Terry Barentsen on 2 wheels, no gas or dirty coal electric motors!

9  Kiss gets a new package manager

10  The shit (green energy environmental disaster) has to stop.  A documentary about the end of the planet’s ecosystem and who are the deceiving actors causing it.  It may be the most revealing 100′ of your life, or at least your recent world perception.

11  A song for our own resurrection:

            __________   –  “*”  –   __________ Continue reading →

Arch Linux 2020 – what’s there to be happy about?

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Happy new year facebook fans and Arch friends (friends of who? we don’t know, not us, not on facebook, not in the past and not in the future, but you must have friends amongst yourselves).

Some of you may have taken the previous post about abandoning Arch as a joke, since most of what we do recently is promote Obarun, an Arch based distribution with s6 and 66 init and service management.   When we published that article we knew nothing of what Hyperbola was planning to do (we assume it was discussed within the community) or whether they were going to give-in to the pressure and incorporate arch’s pacman and packaging methodology change into their distribution.  (Note: Hyperbola may be based on Arch but has its own separate repositories and rebuilds everything on their own to ensure everything is Free).  All of their free packages, as far as we can tell are still compressed with xz.  The bomb was set and it will go off soon (in open/free software tradition of timing kind of soon).  Hyperbola is not just leaving Arch, it is leaving linux, for OpenBSD.  But this is not about hyperbola, it is about Arch….     or skip to here if you are in a rush! Continue reading →

antiX release 19 Marielle Franco

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Marielle Franco  antiX 19 Marielle Franco

Rarely a good deed goes unpunished, especially when someone is trying to do something good for the benefit of the many, the weak, the poor, those who are lacking power, against all odds, the rich and powerful of every society. The story of Marielle Franco is a reminder to those who forget in whose world we live in and what it takes to change it.

So antiX 19 is code-named after the late Marielle Franco who dared to turn against wealth and power.

antiX-19 is based on Debian Buster and is as systemd-free as it has always been.  As usual it offers the following systemd-free flavours for both 32 and 64 bit architectures: Continue reading →

What do we need computers for? What if!

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First I would like to welcome cynwulf1 to the community and in specific to the small sub-sector of the community of contributors.  Cynwulf1 appears to have been around this sport long and with a wide spectrum of experience.  He recently contributed an article and some comments on the world of BSDism.

While recently I have worked closer with some of the creators of systems we use I have tried to learn how they think, or how they think differently from us users of systems.  The question that appeared to me is whether they can possibly know or care what “people need” or are they just driven by what they need for themselves, which in some cases is a system to work on, while creating systems.

Continue reading →

New base and KDE-Plasma live images from Obarun

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On some very specific hardware a recent linux5.0 change caused a delay in tty/login appearance.  It was found and fixed.

05-2 Base image 564MB (iso and cksum files)
05-2 KDE-Plasma live image (iso and cksum files)

A few weeks from now a new set of images will reappear as s6opts/s6boot are deprecated and 66 will move into the main obarun repositories (obcore,obextra, observice).   Continue reading →

Foreshadow, the new Intel security threat

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After Spectre and Meltdown, and the wishful patching of Intel’s security holes, now there is “Foreshadow”

Intel has been notified by various researchers that yet another security gap has been found in their processors.  The vulnerability affects its chip security technology called Software Guard Extensions (SGX).  This technology has been used in Intel processors since  2015 (2nd generation i3,i5,i7,xeon 3400+, X99 and X299 and later/above.  1st gen i* and Core2Duo or earlier are safe.  Continue reading →

To swap or not to swap

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Swap space or swapfile use or no-use seems to be among the most common controversial issues in linux. If you wonder why would we engage in such a controversial topic we can explain. Most people using linux today who have relatively new multicore 64bit machines have huge disk drives and more ram than they can possibly use (except for video editors and game players). Most people who get on the hunt for lighter, simpler, easier to control and configure systems tend to end up searching among systems that don’t use systemd. So smart users with older cheaper equipment enjoy sometimes better computing performance than many who have the latest and hottest machine with a mediocre system. So using or not using swap is sometimes a choice between hunting for more RAM or more disk space use. So we thought we should take a shot and help out on this dilemma. Continue reading →

A closer look at a warrior, Obarun and S6

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https://web.obarun.org/assets/obsite/images/ob_logo_slogan.pngBack in August 2017, when this project had started and we were eager in expanding the spectrum of interest to this site to more distributions than Devuan and Artix, we reproduced a brief description of Obarun as it was self-reported in Distrowatch, I believe. The primary initial interest was to promote distributions that made a conscious decision to steer clear of systemd interdependency and utilized different methods, approaches, and init systems. Obarun features the S6 init system that is simple and quick. As far as we can tell Obarun may just as well be called a popular S6 as it is the only distribution we can find with this init system.  Cromnix uses it along with OpenRC but unless we are wrong, Cromnix seems as an individual experiment and the developer works within Artix. Continue reading →