Waterfox is sold out officially, it is part of the corporate world

We had dedicated much energy in the past,  2 years ago, to advocate for Palemoon and you should at least read the piece about the NoScript parody, and how we gave up on it for specific suspicious reasons (still holds unchanged, Palemoon has branded NoScript as “dangerous” because it breaks pages).  We had seeked refuge at Waterfox, retaining some old firefox functionality and ensuring us it is blocking all of Mozilla tactics of robbing you of private data and feeding it to “who knows who”.

Waterfox officially was sold by mr Alex Kontos to System1, a UK payperclick ad company, which it would be absurd to believe that it wouldn’t utilize the browser’s ability to feed their other interests with private data.  Or why else would they buy to promote their own browser, to make all others break while they are getting robbed?

Thank you Alex for your sincere efforts and sleepless nights of coding, all these years, it has been a great ride, and it is too bad it had to crash in such a bad time for browser variety and period.  Goodbye and good luck for all that you had done up to now.

Update your 66? no, you 66-update your 66

Coming up, any day now, is your new 66 package.

obcore-testing/66 0.2.4.0-5 (base s6-suite)
  small tools built around s6 and s6-rc programs

obcore/66 0.2.3.2-1 (base s6-suite)
   small tools built around s6 and s6-rc programs
 No .zstd packaging here, just good old xz, despite of the 0,0094 second decompression advantage. 🙂

Ok, 0.2.4 over 0.2.3… brings yet one more tool to you. Still, the package (66) is only a fraction of systemd, but it has more “features”. That database of trees and services you have created, after a major reorganization of 66 and its service file definitions and syntax do not have to be destroyed and recreated, not for the root and not for the user. Simply run 66-update as root and as user after each upgrade to ensure perfect transitioning to the upgraded software. 66-update -v4 for maximum verbosity.

The next step in development will be a more automated backup and restore of your trees and services structure.

In the past 9 months 66 evolved quite a bit and after each major evolutionary step the safest way to upgrade was to destroy old trees (delete them) and recreate them and populate them with services. Not any more. But that is not all. 66-update doesn’t mean it is a one way procedure, Say you found out something is wrong, you located the bug of the century, something wrong with 66, and you want to downgrade back to the previous edition of 66. You downgrade the package and run 66-update again.

 

PS  Now, if someone who is not banned from r/linux or r/archlinux could try and crosspost this important announcement there, to see if you can do this for a banned user like me, it would be nice to know, that I can still piss them off with my existence.

You want to update your 66, no, you 66-update your 66 from obarun

Are you confused about debian/antiX/MX/devuan/Refracta editions?

Debian 10 Buster became stable a few months ago, the rest of the systems had to follow but took their time.  This is done every two years and creates a wave of confusion, especially those on forked versions of Debian, like antiX, MX, devuan, refracta, etc.  Even more dangerous and confusing it is if you are using testing and although testing during debian stretch was buster it now becomes bullseye, while your antiX/MX/Devuan is testing alongside Buster still.

After antiX announced 19 (Marielle Franco) as its current stable branch, MS followed its mothership the week later (a few days ago), while Devuan/Refracta are still chasing Stretch (Debian 9), what they call Devuan 2 or ascii.

So here it is, to take the confusion away from numbers and names:

Debian         *   Debian       *  AntiX/MX   *  Devuan
the last good1 *   7   Wheezy   *    13       *  0  beta-testing
old old stable *   8   Jessie   *    15       *  1 jessie (old-stable)
old stable     *   9   Stretch  *    17       *  2 ascii (stable)
stable         *  10   Buster   *    19       *  3 beowulf(testing)
testing        *  11   Bullseye *    21       *  4 chimaera (next testing)
unstable       *       sid      *    sid      *       ceres

Artix new repository structure for testing [gremlins]

The new repository structure for testing in artix follows the pattern of arch and substituting labels to avoid confusion.

Gremlins is the term for what Arch calls testing, and goblins is the term for what Arch calls staging (where dev.’s place new packages while they are being debugged and getting ready for production –> testing).  For users not willing to contribute to development, other than “testing” their work, goblins is no place to be.  Most certainly things will be “broken” in goblins, and if they weren’t they would be in testing, or to be distribution correct “gremlins”.  For stable users, nothing has changed.

Devuan, EOL – trust, suspicion, and unanswered questions

First things first.  Those of us involved in this project had an internal debate from day one whether to cover Devuan development or not.  All but one person here, yours truly, argued that Devuan would never be able to overcome and change the psychopathology evident in Debian developer community and the inherent elitism against the common individual user.  If you are not directing the departmental budget of an IT enterprise nobody in that community would give a rat’s penny of what your problem may be.  Seeking help as a common user you must put up with tons of unsubstantiated arrogance, irony, and elitism.  This is also evident in the DNG list where devuan developers and their pre-split backroom buddies are larking, pretending they are Devian without the infrastructure of Debian.  It is like a life-raft’s  officers and buddies pretending to be the officers operating a supertanker.

Refracta Devuan 2 Openbox Eudev OpenRC ready!

It all started with curiosity and we all know what this may get for a cat.  But we are not cats, and discoveries were always made by the curious.  Neither the labels unstable, testing, experimental, nor the initial experience was enough to keep this bear away from the honey.

Temporary Artix web-forum server outage

artix-linux

Your linux, your init

24/11/17  artixlinux.org/forum  is back and fully operational

 

Artix: missing dependency and how to get it – [arch-testing]

This only applies to those using Artix-Testing and have no previous Arch-linux experience.

Today some meandering in the system-testing directory resulted in a package upgrade of libpsl that requires an additional pkg, libidn2.

Quote from: nous

If you use Artix testing repos, you should also use Arch testing repo, libidn2 is there and soon will be in ours.

You say “should” but this is the first time I encounter such a rule.

Devuan testing new amprolla3 powered repository

If you like to test the new amprolla3 powered repository system here is a small list of optional /etc/apt/sources.list

deb https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii main contrib non-free
deb https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-backports main contrib non-free
deb https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-proposed-updates main contrib non-free
deb https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-security main contrib non-free
deb https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-updates main contrib non-free
deb https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan/ ascii-proposed main contrib non-free
deb https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan/ ascii-proposed-security main contrib non-free
 

News about Devuan and little news about Artix

I’ll start with Artix, which made one step closer to its official stable edition by shifting its testing-repository into stable. It was also reported as a distribution on Distrowatch.  If you go to the main page and click on most popular in 7days it ranks as 16th today (10/21) and I believe as 3rd non-systemd distribution.

Devuan announced the official release of amprolla3,

Dealing with pacman’s updated .conf files

Read the edited WARNING at the bottom of the article! (Oct 17 2017)

Artix, being a modified distribution of ARCH-linux, follows Arch’s policy of updating packages and their corresponding .conf files.  In other distributions like Debian, you have to do work to protect your custom .conf files as sometimes updated packages replace your .conf files with new ones.  In Arch/Artix/Arch-Bang/Obarun etc. when a package incorporates a conf file that is new it installs a pkg-name.conf.pacnew and even when it is essential that the new conf file is mandatory for the package to work, or when the package is removed,

Freak Devuan experiment that did not backfire Devian/Debuan

As Devuan users have not been getting any feedback for why have things become so stale for two months, there are no updates seen in Jessie or Ascii, while the Debian train is running away with a daily influx of updated packages, there is not much convinvcing anyone can do for people to be patient.  Having bugs to deal with is one thing, not having bugs and expecting things to just evolve is a different issue.  So I thought what if?

What if questions sometimes break the best of systems.  So I cleaned my ascii installation and backed it up (using the classic dd on the installation’s partition).  If it broke I would not try to fix it too much, I’d rather just restore it and report back how and when it broke so others wouldn’t try the same thing.