My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Category: Me (Page 1 of 27)

Let me remind you who started the war in Ukraine and how

I am going to spit 77 million people in the face here, and it needs to be done. I am raging. If you live in the USA and do not want to be confronted by my ‘leftist’ or ‘commie’ political views then unsubscribe from this blog and get the fuck out.
Listen carefully. Blatant lies are coming from the Oval office with the intention to destroy an ally.

The war in Ukraine did not start in 2022, and it was not started by Ukraine.

In February of 2014 Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. NATO shied away from aiding Ukraine because of a justified fear of escalating the conflict. And in July of 2014, Russians shot down a commercial airplane over eastern Ukraine, killing hundreds of passengers. Hard work of a journalist collective provided the proof which held up in court.

In the years that followed, Russia kept arming and fueling the hatred of separatists in the eastern Ukraine. Why? Possibly because with the occupation of the Donbas, Russia now has control over 40% of Ukraine’s mineral riches. It’s always about the money, right? Or is the hunger for power stronger than greed?

In 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine from multiple fronts. Not because of what the traitor in the Oval office tells you – that  Ukraine started this war because of their request to join NATO – no, that request was sent to NATO in 2002, TWENTY years before Putin started his ‘special operation’. The invasion of Ukraine was ordered by a mad Russian dictator whose pride was hurt when the West kept ignoring him as a serious partner on the world stage.

Remember this account from what happened during those initial days?

This is not what happens if you pre-empt a strike because you fear your opponent. This is brutal sadism, trademark of Russian warfare where the state, not people, is the only thing that counts.

Those of you who put a traitor in the Oval office have made yourselves complicit, not just because you have enabled the autocracy or even dictatorship which is being created in the USA as we speak. But also complicit in the possible destruction of a European country: Ukraine. Your president with his delusions of grandeur will try again to grab Canada, Panama and Greenland and will leave Ukraine defenseless against Russia’s aggression. He does not care about you. He is a narcissist.
Next may be the start of an all-out war in Europe because Putin sees an opportunity. The USA now believes that Russia is not the enemy and Europe is its own enemy. And who the fuck cares about that in the USA?
I don’t understand you assholes who put this conman on a throne. All because you could not tolerate a black woman in the Oval office?
You don’t believe this? The orange guy keeps doing exactly what he has been telling you for years. There’s no reason to believe that he will change all of a sudden.

Fuck you all, maggots.

And indeed, I have disabled comments to this article. Suck it up.

Your input requested for DAW Live

It has been a long time since I had a serious look at my audio software set, and the Slackware DAW Live ISO image which is meant to showcase all of that software.

Life interfered and priorities shifted.

Now I am looking at 2025 and the Christmas holiday week which precedes it, and am pondering where to put my energy and time. Considering the lack of clarity about the next stable Slackware release (something which really annoyed me in the few years leading up to Slackware 15.0) and the relative certainty that KDE Plasma 6 is not going to be included in that next release, I am not looking forward to kickstarting my obsolete ktown repository for Plasma 6. It would eat up a lot of my time and I am a happy Plasma 5 user.
So, I decided it would be more productive and rewarding to revive the DAW and audio software project.

I will not focus on a refresher of my Slackware 15 based DAW Live Edition. I want to switch to Slackware -current, realizing full well that this may cause new frustrations along the way when stuff breaks as a result of a Slackware update, but I really want to experiment with Pipewire – for sure as a replacement for Pulseaudio but perhaps also as a replacement for the Jack Audio Toolkit. Who knows.

However, I have not been playing/experimenting with Slackware’s sound system since 2022, the whole Pipewire adventure has passed me by. If I want to rebuild & refresh that large set of software, I need to start with the basics and that is to get a low-latency ‘pro’ sound subsystem off the ground that I can understand and adapt to the needs of a Live Edition.

HELP!

Therefore a request to you, blog regulars, to help me understand how to get rid of Pulseaudo in Slackware and replace it with Pipewire. How does Jack still fit in this configuration? Should it remain the main sound server? Should Pipewire replace it, providing the binary API to Jack-enabled applications? Should the choice to have Pipewire or Jack as the main sound server be something you would want to make after login?

Anything you have already mastered and all the bugs and nasties that you have already eradicated, will save me some precious time and give me more motivation to restart the project during my Christmas break.  Use the comments section below to describe your challenges, your solutions and your resulting setup; or link to pages / pastebins that contain Slackware-specific information.

And somewhat related, since I am not a musician or audio technician: I want to understand better how to connect the audio software to audio hardware: how do you link up a DAW like Ardour to an external USB sound card, a MIDI controller keyboard, hardware synths, microphones etc.
Some synths present themselves as another external USB sound card as well – how do you deal with that when you already route your audio through your FocusRite Scarlett? It boggles the mind when you have to try and make sense of it when you do not have music-making friends in physical proximity.

Eventually I want to have a working studio in my attic and be able to create music, not just create a music production enviroment like Slackware DAW Live.

I would love to read all your feedback and hopefully it will be enough already next weekend to help me startup when my off-week starts 🙂

Cheers, Eric

Mastodon FollowPacks and more

I recently quit using Twitter altogether. Its owner has been abusing the platform for political gain and profit. It made no sense to keep supporting that. I am more active on Mastodon anyway, the friendly federated social platform that all of you should prefer over Twitter, BlueSky or Threads 😉
I wrote an article about switching to Mastodon a while ago, check out Migrating from Twitter to Mastodon. But after the recent mass-exodus from Twitter after the US elections, I thought it would be a good idea to write an update for those people who recently found their new home on a Mastodon instance.
When you are new to Mastodon, it can be a bit of a daunting task to get the information to flow. Unlike the other aforementioned platforms where the ‘algorithms’ ensure that your feed is constantly populated, you actually need to subscribe to one or more topics and/or start following actual people, to kickstart your federated timeline and see stuff worth reading.

Coming up with topics is not hard – just type something that comes into your mind in the search field of your client, and you will be able to look for hashtags, posts or people matching or containing that text string. Start following a hashtag is enough to start the flow of posts to read.
But finding people may be harder. Not everyone posts on Mastodon using their own name or with a recognizable nickname. How to find interesting people to follow? Here are some options.

Also called a ‘Starter Pack‘, the FollowPacks are a concept that was actually born on the BlueSky platform. Now they are also created for Mastodon and boosted by the MastodonMigration account. FollowPacks are a convenient way for new users of Mastodon to quickly populate their list of people to follow in the Fediverse.
In essence, a FollowPack is a CSV file containing the listname and Mastodon addresses of up to 35 people who have a relevance to a certain topic area. An example line in such a CSV file for an “OpenSource” list could be a reference to myself:

OpenSource,@alien@fosstodon.org

The MastodonMigration blog has a instructional article about FollowPacks and how to use/import them into your Mastodon account: the Mastodon Follow Pack FAQ, as well as a page with a directory of these packs that they themselves maintain – on topics of ‘Astronomy and Space‘, ‘Climate‘, ‘US Politics‘ and ‘Miscellany‘ and hopefully more to come: the Mastodon Follow Pack Directory.

Instructions for obtaining and importing the packs are simple: download the pack’s .csv file and import into Mastodon to follow all accounts contained in there. As the list content grows, you will be able to merge new names into existing lists. In more detail:

  • Click on a FollowPack’s .csv file link to download it
  • Click on the ‘Preferences‘ (gear) icon at the bottom right of your Mastodon homepage
  • On a mobile or narrow desktop click the  “hamburger” button located at the top right of the page
  • Click ‘Import and Export‘ > ‘Import
  • As the ‘Import type‘ in the dropdown: Select ‘Lists’ (NOT ‘Following list’)
  • Verify that ‘Merge’ is selected (IMPORTANT)
  • Click the ‘Browse…’ button and select your previously downloaded “[file name] – list.csv”
  • Press ‘Upload‘ > ‘Confirm

You can create such a FollowPack yourselves too of course, and share it with your friends.

What else is there? If you are in need of expansion of your personal ‘following‘ list, you could look at the accounts that someone else is following. For instance, here is the list of people I am following: https://fosstodon.org/@alien/following . In general, add “/following” to the Mastodon homepage of any person.

To broaden your search, look for people who are actively posting. The Mastodon server instance where I have my home, Fosstodon, is a place whose users have an affinity with Open Source. That may lead to the discovery of some interesting people. If you want to know who posted most recently on Fosstodon, check out the server’s directory like this: https://fosstodon.org/directory?order=active&local=true .
Mind you, Fosstodon is just one of many servers in the Fediverse, so everything that gets posted there will find its way to your own Mastodon home if you or other people on your server instance are following the topics mentioned in their posts. You will find more people to follow, if you visit other instances’ directories. Lists of Mastodon servers can be found here or here, or find them via a convenient search form here.

Yet another way to quickly find people that fall in certain categories is to use fediverse.info. For instance, this search string leads to a directory of accounts that are tagged with “OpenSource”: https://fediverse.info/explore/people?t=OpenSource .

Found anything else to boost your ‘following‘ list? Let us know in the comments section below!

Have fun! Eric

 

Down with COVID

I somehow avoided getting infected with COVID for all these past four years, but this week unexpectedly it hit me after all – and that while being inoculated multiple times. Oh well, they say that the inoculations keep the more severe symptoms at bay.
Still, this feels like a very bad flu, I have been in bed for two days, feeling delirious in the beginning but just nauseous and dizzy now, accompanied by the father of all headaches.
I have no energy left in me,  meaning package updates may be delayed. Pay supplied me with the sources for the to-be updated glibc package in Slackware, so that the computer can do all the compiling when I return to bed. That will be about all.

Stay healthy! Eric

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