Diamond Rio PMP300
Posted on Tue, Mar 30, 2021
(Last modified on Mon, Apr 5, 2021)
| Alan Pope
My loft is a treasure trove of old crap. For some reason I keep a bunch of aged useless junk up there. That includes the very first MP3 player I owned.
Behold, the Diamond Rio PMP 300. Well, the box, in all its ’90s artwork glory.
Here’s the player. It’s powered by a single AA battery for somewhere around 8 hours of playback. It’s got 32MB (yes, MegaBytes) of on-board storage.
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Ubuntu 21.04 Testing Week
Posted on Thu, Mar 25, 2021
| Alan Pope
“Hirsute Hippo” is the project code-name for what will become Ubuntu 21.04 when it releases on April 22nd 2021.
On April 1st, the Beta of Ubuntu Hirsute will be released, but we’re no fools! This is a great time to do some testing!
So, starting on April 1st, we’re doing another Ubuntu Testing Week.
As always, everyone is welcome to test Ubuntu at any point in the year. But during the beta is a good time to focus on testing.
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GNOME OS 40 without GNOME Boxes
Posted on Wed, Mar 24, 2021
| Alan Pope
The GNOME team have announced GNOME 40. Along with this there’s a GNOME OS image to play with. You can grab that from here with the release notes.
The release announcement firmly (in bold) suggests “Do not use any other version including the distro version. Only GNOME Boxes 3.38.0 from flathub is known to work.”.
Personally I’ve never managed to have much success with GNOME Boxes, so I thought I’d test using something I already have installed, QEMU!
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Actually Upgrading Ubuntu Server
Posted on Wed, Mar 17, 2021
(Last modified on Thu, Mar 18, 2021)
| Alan Pope
Yesterday I wrote about my attempt to upgrade one of my HP Microservers, running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Well, today I had another go. Here’s what happened.
I followed the recommendation from yesterday, to compress the initrd.img using xz compression rather than the previous default gzip. Previously the upgrade failed because it needed 140M disk space in /boot. With the change to the compression scheme, I now have 154M, which should be enough to start the upgrade.
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Upgrading Ubuntu Server
Posted on Tue, Mar 16, 2021
| Alan Pope
I have a few old and crusty HP MicroServers in the loft at home. I started out with one when HP did a cashback offer, making them very affordable. Over time I’ve acquired a couple more. One, named colossus is running rsnapshot to provide backups of my other machines. Another, called shirka is a Plex Media Server and the last, robby is a general purpose box running various jobs and reports.
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Ubuntu Wiki Reboot
Posted on Mon, Mar 15, 2021
| Alan Pope
It’s time to replace the Ubuntu Wiki. In fact it was probably time to replace it a few years ago, but we are where we are. It should be a reliable and useful resource for the Ubuntu community. It’s failing at that. We have failed here.
Aside: There are actually multiple wikis in use in the Ubuntu project. The primary one is wiki.ubuntu.com, which has been in use since forever (in Ubuntu terms).
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Linux Application Summit: Call For Papers
Posted on Sun, Mar 14, 2021
| Alan Pope
The last event I went to before The Event was Linux Application Summit (LAS) in Barcelona, Spain back in November 2019! Time flies.
LAS is a community organised event, sponsored and supported by the GNOME and KDE projects. The conference is “designed to accelerate the growth of the Linux application ecosystem by bringing together everyone involved in creating a great Linux application user experience.”.
In November 2020, the LAS team organised a virtual version of the event.
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Book Review: We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
Posted on Sat, Mar 13, 2021
(Last modified on Sun, Mar 14, 2021)
| Alan Pope
I recently reviewed Split Second (Split Second Book 1) (affiliate link) by Douglas E. Richards. I’d not read any Douglas E. Richards books before, so it was very helpful to me for readers of my humble blog to recommend that and further titles from other authors.
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (affiliate link) by Dennis E. Taylor was highly recommended, and delivered. We Are Legion (We Are Bob) was published back in 2016, so as usual I’m very late to the party.
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The Old Desktop Switcheroo
Posted on Fri, Mar 12, 2021
| Alan Pope
In August 2019, I tweeted about how I’d been running KDE Neon for eighteen months, since February 2018, and how I was switching back to GNOME Shell on my primary laptop. In that thread I also suggested I might switch back!
Today I've in-place upgraded from that 18.04 KDE Neon install to @ubuntu 19.04 with @gnome. I still love KDE of course, and will likely switch back at some point, or may install it on another machine - maybe my Thinkpad X220.
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Back In The Studio
Posted on Thu, Mar 11, 2021
| Alan Pope
Last month I mentioned that myself, Mark and Martin have decided to come back for Season 14 of the Ubuntu Podcast. Well, we’re back today with S14E01, titled “Navy Chefs Remit”.
Over the thirteen years, the episode titles have had a theme in each season. We don’t reveal the theme, but let our listeners figure that out, for fun. Sometimes it has a bearing on the content of the episode, but often not.
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