We are back for a proper episode but Félim is on holiday so it’s a 3 man show. We’ve been to OggCamp, we discuss some developments in the mobile space, Ikey is off to New York on Shuttleworth’s dime, Joe has an ancient Mac and we talk about Patreon saturation.
OggCamp Recap
Joe and Jesse briefly discuss their OggCamp Experiences.
News
Playing with old rubbish
Joe recently acquired an eMac that was destined for the rubbish tip. It turns out that getting Linux to run on it is more difficult than you might think.
Entroware
This episode of Late Night Linux is sponsored by Entroware. They are a UK-based company who sells computers with Ubuntu and Ubuntu MATE preinstalled. They have configurable laptops, desktops and servers to suit a wide range of Linux users. Check them out and don’t forget to mention us at checkout if you buy one of their great machines.
Admin
Ikey has been on Destination Linux again
New funding models
With the recent news that Disney is pulling (at least some of) its content from Netflix to start its own streaming service, we discuss how far a person’s budget can stretch. In a world where every company has a subscription service and every creator has a Patreon, can FOSS projects expect anything more than some beer money?
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Have you tried running some proper Unix like OpenBSD or NetBSD on your shiny new eMac, Joe? 😉
Can’t be harder than getting Gentoo compiled – which was possible on slightly better hardware (iBook G4@1.4GHz, 768MB) in 2006.
Over at garbage.fm they had an interview with Todd Weaver from Purism: https://garbage.fm/episodes/42
They sound quite convinced Purism could pull of the phone thing.
I would give OpenBSD a go. I run it on my iMac G3 and don’t have problems. All the hardware is supported, there are up-to-date binary packages, and the ISO is something like 250 MB.
Joe,
I do not understand your position regarding Purism’s attempt at the Librem 5, perhaps because I am younger and haven’t been jaded by previous dashed hopes. You seem to agree with what they are doing, want them to succeed, and recognise their experience but utterly deny that they have any chance of success and thus any financial support. Were everyone to think like that, they would not.
To turn it around, what would they, or anyone else, have had to have done for you to support them wholeheartedly?
If all those who were similarly sceptical chipped in $20/£15 they would get a lot closer to their goal. If they succeed, we have an open ‘phone. If they fail, what have you lost, a takeaway meal?
Steven
I recall Wimpy acknowledging a small but vocal group of PPC users of Ubuntu MATE when it dropped PPC support, so I’m surprised it didn’t work on the old Mac.
$600 over a year in advance for an underspec’ed phone is a tall ask (the most I have spent on a phone is $75). If they are getting close to the goal in a few weeks, I might be tempted to sign up.
Joe the ROMS on the eMac are probably valuable. Make sure you extract them:
http://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/capturing_rom
And hopefully you have the original install disks for OS 9 or a set somewhere. Now, why would you *WANT* to capture the ROMS? So you can legally emulate a Mac with Basilisk II. If you have old games or Hypercard stacks or even old multimedia CDs its the only way to run them on Linux or Windows or even a modern Mac. I’ve got some old games, Myst, Star Trek, plus a multimedia cooking CD ROM (4 Paws of Crab) that I can still use this way; before I ditched my old Mac I made sure to extract the ROM image.
If you do extract the ROM make sure you have no extensions loaded as you want a clean image.
MorphOS supports the eMac. It might be better to give it away to an Amiga fan, than to let someone have a crappy Linux experience with it.
Not sure why anyone would want to run the MATE desktop environment on an RPi (1MB, mediocre CPU). Mine barely runs the cut down LXDE + Raspbian.
However, it is good enough for my current purpose of downloading large ISOs without tying up my main x86 box. Very low 24×7 power consumption is the main benefit.
Joe still shows his hard wired Luddite brain that objects to an Xfce panel being on the ‘wrong’ side, boo hoo …. I’ve come to prefer left and top panels due to my Western language usually starting lists in That corner. Maybe I’ll move the window frame buttons there just to hear him whine :-).
TTFN, Mike