With the group meeting up together for the first time in person, it was decided that a live recording would be an appropriate venture. With the quartet squashed around a table and a group of adoring fans crowded into a room at the Pendulum Hotel in Manchester, the discussion turns to TuxJam reviews that become regularly used applications, what we enjoyed about OggCamp 2024 and for the third section the gang put their reputation on the line and allow open questions from the sea of dedicated fans.
Despite this being a live recording, it wouldn’t be the same if TuxJam didn’t have the usual mix of Creative Commons tracks:
The FOSSy foursome of Al, Andrew, Dave and Kevie return for another bout of linuxy software spiced with creative common tunes.
We begin as always with a round-up of recent releases from distrowatch. Next we review Waydroid which allows you to efficiently run an Android environment if you happen to be running Wayland. Then we take a look at Pachli which is an Android client for Mastodon forked from the Tusky/Husky codebase.
We finish up with a round-up of feedback and offer up a couple of dates that you might want to pop into your diary:
Podcrawl Late Summer 2024 on Saturday 31 August from 18:00 UK time (BST).
OggCamp 2024 on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 October 2024, Manchester UK.
Perhaps you would like some TuxJam merch? Thanks to the talents of our very own Kevie we now have designs in our Redbubble shop.
Al, Dave, Andrew and Kevie brave heat and cold and everything in between to bring you free bits and bytes and CC tunes. We start off with our usual roundup of recent releases on distrowatch.
We only have one item for review in this show: the Ultramarine distro based on Fedora. Dave and Al look at the version that runs on regular PCs whereas Kevie and Andrew try out the images provided for 64 bit Raspberry Pis.
We finish up with a brief round-up of feedback and how to contact us.
Music licensed under some kind of Creative Commons license played in this show are:
Don’t dial 112 but deign to digest our dalliance with Dillo and entertain our engagement with Entroware. Kevie, Dave (aka thelovebug), Andrew and Al are back with another helping of free and open source software peppered with Creative Commons musical goodness.
As ever, we begin with a nose around recent releases on distrowatch.com with a few having a distinctly ARMy aroma.
Dave and Andrew then discuss there experiences with Proteus laptops from the UK company Entroware. Andrew’s laptop was purchased earlier this year and Daves’ a couple of years ago and so the chipset revisions and specs do differ:
Andrew’s Proteus in action with his old Asus Zenbook displaced to the right.
Andrew’s 15″ Proteus £1648.96 including shipping and VAT
Processor: Core i7-1360P, 13th Gen 12 cores
Memory: 64GB DDR5 4800MT/s
Storage: 4TB PCIe NVMe SSD
Daves’s 15″ Proteus
Processor: Core i7-1165G7, 11th Gen 4 cores
Memory: 32GB
Storage: 1TB SSD
Al and Kevie then take a look at venerable no-frills, and somewhat retro Dillo web browser which has had a release after almost a decade of inactivity. Note that the official Dillo website is not dillo.org at present but dillo-browser.github.io for reasons explained here.
We finish with a review of the recent Podcrawl and a round-up of feedback since the last episode.
Creative commons tracks played in this episode include:#
Our quadriga of Al, Andrew, Dave and Kevie begin with their usual round-up of recent releases from distrowatch but then go off-piste from our usual format. There’s no distro review in this episode but we split into two teams to look at the Mealie self-hosted service and the unofficial Android client for it called Mealient. We finish up with a round-up of feedback received since the last episode.
Along with the usual mix of Creative Commons music:
TuxJam’s quartet of Al, Kevie, Dave (aka thelovebug) and Andrew (aka mcnalu) return to bring you picks from the world of free and open source software peppered with creative commons tunes. And, no, we have not become slaves to AI – Artifical Intelligence – but are grateful to Al, our newest co-host, for suggesting both reviews in this show. As usual, we begin with our usual round-up from recent releases mentioned on distrowatch.com.
We then take a look at the resurrection of the venerable Damn Small Linux which first appeared back in 2005. Originally this packed a lean but functional linux distro into a mere 50MB which could be put on credit card sized CDs or USB thumb drives back then. These days such a small distro wouldn’t be as useful so the limit has been increased to 700MB. We take a look at DSL 2024RC1.
Have you ever dreamt of simulating electrical circuits using free and open source software that you don’t need to compile or even install? If you have you might want to seek professional help, but dream no more, such a thing exists in the form of circuitjs: a menu-driven, point, click and drag app that runs in your browser.
A boost convertor in circuitjs boosting from 5V to 14V.
We finish up with feedback we have received. Please do leave feedback either by commenting here or using the various methods list here.
Creative commons licensed tunes played in this episode are:
New host Al has the previous co-hosts – Dave (aka thelovebug), Kevie and Andrew (aka mcnalu) on probation.
We start with our usual round-up of distrowatch.com which ranges from so easy to chaos (well, Kaos).
In this episode, prompted by a suggestion from Els Mussols, the guys look at a variety of Android based RSS reader apps,including ttRSS, Nextcloud News, and from F-Droid: Feeder, Read You, and Nunti.
The usual trio of Kevie, Andrew (when tore himself away from his telescope) and Dave are joined by Al, from the Admin Admin podcast, and have a show dedicated to retro gaming.
The Data Frog Gane (sic) Console
We start with our useful roundup from distrowatch.
Fellows feeling festive festoon followers with freedom! In this Christmas themed episode and the last one of the year, Kevie, Dave (aka thelovebug) and Andrew (aka mcnalu) have lovingly hand-picked a couple of FOSS goodies for their tenuous yuletide connections.
We look at Retropie (because everybody loves getting games at Christmas) which causes an outbreak of nostalgia amongst your hosts. Also, to make Santa’s life easier whilst he checks his list, we look at the hierarchical note taking app Cherrytree (Kevie also tested out the Android app SourCherry).
The steps that were spoken of in the show for setting up Retropie were as follows:
if you want to use external storage such as a USB thumb drive, then you need to create a folder called retropie-mount on the root of the drive using the PC. On Retropie go to the configuration page and select retropie setup. Then select configuration / tools and this will bring up another menu, scroll all the way down to the bottom and select usbromservice (this will be off the screen when you first look at this menu), select enable and hit OK. Go back to the home screen, press the start button on your controller and reboot the system from the quit option. When Retropie has loaded up to the home screen, plug in the USB drive and wait about 1 minute and then remove the drive again. This will have setup the USB drive with the appropriate folders. If you simply fire a load of ROMs onto a USB then it will not work; they need to go into the specific directory.
By default the sound is sent through the HDMI output, this is no use for me as my monitor does not have speakers. Press menu and select sound setting, you only get headphones or HDMI. Audio via bluetooth is not enabled by default on Retropie. The steps that worked for me on a Raspeberry Pi 400 were:
First I needed to drop out of this graphical UI to a terminal, you can’t use the pad for this, you will need a keyboard.
Press F4 to take you to a terminal
Install the pulseaudio-module-bluetooth with the command sudo apt install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
Add the user to the bluetooth group with the command sudo adduser pi bluetooth
Now we need to tell the Pi to use the connected bluetoooth audio speaker and for this we need to use a text editor, I used Nano as it was already installed: sudo nano /etc/pulse/default.pa
Add the line load-module module-switch-on-connect
Save and exit the file
Now we need to tell bluetooth to enable the audio service. Again we need to edit a file: sudo nano /etc/bluetooth/main.conf
Find the [General] section and add the line: Enable=Source,Sink,Media,Socket
Save and exit the file
Reboot the system with sudo reboot
On reboot select configuration on the home screen and select Bluetooth
Select Pair and Connect to Bluetooth Device (make sure that your device is in pairing mode)
Select Configure Bluetooth Connect Mode and then select background
I noticed after starting playing is that I had a black border around my screen. To remove this go to configuration, select raspi-config and then select Display Options, then scroll to Underscan and select No. This won’t affect you if you have this connected to a TV, but it will if connected to a monitor. Once you exit the settings it will ask if you want to reboot, you will need to reboot for this to take effect. Upon reboot the black border is removed.
The artwork is not loaded by default and it isn’t clear how to get this, however it is not difficult. When you have your ROMs listed in front of you, press start on your controller and select the Scraper option, then select Scrape Now and all of your ROMs will have their artwork. This is purely optional and only an aesthetic addition. A word of warning is that it will go through each ROM and ask which art you would like or which version of the game it is. If you are like me and have 1000s of ROMs then this is something that you may wish to skip unless you really wish to spend a lot of time configuring your system.
This episode is festively spiced with the following mix of festive tracks:
It is time for our annual list of things we really want for Christmas things we want geeks throughout the world to receive for Christmas. Partners, friends and relatives of geeks take note! TuxJam will return to its usual format for a December Christmas show.
