Community Coffee Break

Topics Discussed:

bp9
- looks like he can restart development on the pinetime because he ordered a set of pogo pins to fit the programming pins on the pinetime.
- Will likely put infinitime on the pinetime intially but with the pogo pins, will later try building his own program.
- Peter asked if I tried blu-tack to hold the pins in place on the pinetime for programming but bp9 did and did not have much luck with that. :-)
- Laments the postal service that took 2-3 MONTHS to deliver third class mail :-)
- Notes that his UBPorts pinephone main board is an older revision that will not activate any USB-C dongles.
- The pinephone main board needs to be replaced or modified by removing some components that drive the USB-C port.
- Notes that the pinephone hardware is all open hardware except for the Quectel modem.
- Understands ofono a bit better now: ofono does not open any kind of graphical display like bp9 originally thought. It only drives the modem at low-level (with AT commends), and expects to be called by some other process to be told what to do.
- The process on the pinephone that opens windows and calls ofono is called "Calls" :-) It was renamed gnome-calls for about a month, and then renamed back to its original name.
- Although bp9 uses xubuntu, he does not use any of ubuntu's main desktops like Gnome or KDE.
- bp9 uses XFCE as his main desktop because it gives him access to the root window.
- bp9s root window displays XEARTH, a constantly rotating view of the earth from the sun's point of view.
- Notes the full-circle of Microsoft vs. linux: They sold UNIX, then had a strong rivalry with linux, then embraced linux.
- Mentions CORBA protocol, and specifically the message bus, with the importance of the order of the messages.

Solbu
- Relates that he is the packager for linux distro Magea. It is a fork of Mandriva (previously Mandrake), which is RPM-based.
- Also bought Connectiva, so they made Mandriva a portmanteu of Mandrake and Connectiva to get Mandrive.
- There are hundreds of distros out there to choose from.
- Once all the mirrors are updated, he will download about 200GB of the mirror so he has a local copy!
- He will pull all 32-bit and 64-bit packages plus source packages.
- He likes to have a local copy.
- Poses a brain teaser: Who first sold unix? Answer: Microsoft sold XENIX.
- We discuss the incredible cost of unix. If unix prices were reasonable back then, would the open-source industry still be as strong as it is now?
- Lots of discussion about the origins of linux as a printer driver way back when :-)

Doug
- Is having more issues with his Raspberry Pi as an entertainment system.
- It won't finish booting because it wants SSH keys?
- bp9 thinks ssh keys might be needed for package servers, but Solbu does not agree because packages are signed with GPG keys.
- Solbu thinks the boot process is stuck trying to gather entropy data for generating the SSH keys, whether Doug plans to use SSH or not.
- Solbu recommends either just moving the mouse, or opening a terminal and entering command `find /` to list all files on the filesystem. This should provide lots of random data for entropy.
- Since this is a text console, the mouse option probably won't work.
- Should be able to use Ctl-F2 to open another tty terminal and might allow login from there.
- Doug wonders about the difference between desktop and server distros and bp9 and Solbu agree the only difference is the packages that get included in the distro by default.
- Doug's cat supervises from the top of the chair to make sure we all behave :-)

Peter
- Relates stories about old PCs that had to have motherboards replaced because the PIN was set in the BOIS and could not be reset!
- Will be getting his first shot this week. The second one is a real pain.
- Peter's GPS clock works much better when he puts his GPS antenna outside.
- Peter discovered 5 volts on the GPS antenna, which makes sense because it is powered.
- Wants to know about RS-232 commands to retrieve the time from the device.
- bp9 thinks those commands still have to resemble English because most keyboards will not type Chinese characters.