I’d like to say I must be doing something right when I end up on a couple podcasts or perhaps it means a laps in judgment by many others. I want to thank everyone that has taken time out of their busy day to listen to these noodlings.
The 8th Noodling brought to you in the lowest audio quality permitted
DLN Xtend
A few weeks ago, I was asked to be a part of the Destination Linux Network to which, without any though or consideration, seemingly on both sides, I said yes.
Started this podcast with Eric Adams called DLN Xtend. To be completely fair, he really carries the show, as you can tell by these noodlings of mine, I can barely carry myself.
I rather enjoy talking to Eric, we both geek out over so many tech topics. He has a different bend to his Linux and technology implementation views.
Sudo vulnerability Discussion
Snaps and Flatpak on openSUSE
Just a quick note, but setting up openSUSE with Snaps and Flatpak are both trivial. The great thing about openSUSE is that setting up either in openSUSE is super easy and if either not not first class citizens
Flatpak reference from the openSUSE Wiki
Installing snap on openSUSE
CAD Software
Thanks to my good buddy, Eric Adams, he sent me down a rabbit hole of looking at CAD software again. A link from FossMint.com titled “11 Best CAD Software for Linux”
I have had two CAD packages that get fairly regular use. One is for “real CAD” the other is for fun.
FreeCAD is a CAD application that I use periodically, it has 3D modeling and assembly package that are pretty decent. The drawing package is pretty decent too.
LeoCAD is an application I use when I want to play with virtual Lego bricks. Often when building with my kids, I will get an idea and when I find I want different parts, I will build it in CAD and order parts as necessary.
The highlights of this article that has inspired interest and I decided to do some installing, because, why not, CAD is fun.
BRL-CAD is a free and open-source, cross-platform CAD application. There isn’t an RPM for it but there is a Debian and a tar.gz. I am going to play with this and make some kind of determination if I could use it. On the surface, the interface looks a bit like it has a steep learning curve but it might be fun give it a whirl.
BricsCAD is a commercial, modern, multi-platform CAD software for 2D and 3D modeling. The focus on this software is to allow users to work faster and smarter while spending fewer resources
The cost of this for a lifetime license with the Mechanical package is $2095 USD. That is a bit steep for a home gamer like myself. There is a 30-day trial for this software and although I haven’t tried it yet, it does look pretty fantastic
VeriCAD is another paid CAD application that does 3D modeling. This has a “freemium” business model and is much less expensive than the previous with a one time fee of 699€ and a discounted 79€ for students and universities.
I am going to take the time to check these out, just because I am very curious to see how it compares to PTC’s Creo that I use in my mechanical design career. What matters most to me is the ability to create parametric 3D models that allow for geometric constraints. I also want an Assembly package that allows for making alignments with either datums or geometric features. I have had trouble with some applications that don’t allow for this very well.
11 Best Cad Software for Linux on FossMINT.com
BDLL Follow Up
Canonical has released Ubuntu 19.10 along with it’s many flavors. It’s interesting to see what new inclusions Canonical puts into their distributions, being an openSUSE guy, and knowing largely what goes on here and what the focus is, it’s nice to see what other distros are doing.
Overall I like what I see, and I still have to finish my review of Ubuntu Proper, I think Ubuntu does a great job with Gnome. Something about the way they package it makes it much more enjoyable to use than a vanilla Gnome experience and they have been putting a lot of resources into it.
It was great seeing Alan Pope and Martin Wimpress on BDLL interacting with the community and taking in feedback on user experience. Personally, I don’t use Ubuntu on hardware directly, but I always keep a VM of it to keep myself familiarized. Ubuntu Proper, running Gnome is a far better experience in VM than it ever has historically. It’s quite obvious that they are doing something good over in Gnome land.
Next Distro fore BDLL Review is Ubuntu MATE.
openSUSE Corner
Tumbleweed Snapshots 20191024 20191025 20191027 20191028
A lot has rolled out in the last two weeks on Tumbleweed. For the full news feed, visit news.opensuse.org as there is far too much to cover here.
The Mesa 3D graphical library was updated to 19.2.1 which brought several new features and a big RADV performance boost for AMD GPUs. VirtualBox hypervisor for x86 had a minor update to version 6.0.14 which fixed some potential networking with interrupt signaling for network adapters in UEFI guests. OpenSSH 8.1 had a major upgrade that included new features like experimental lightweight signature and verification ability.
KDE Plasma version 5.17.1 arrived with KDE Frameworks 5.63.0. The bug fixes that stand out the most to me on this is to KScreen as with 5.17 there were issues of not all the displays being represented in the Display Configuration tool forcing me to use ArandR instead. Kwin received some fixes, the Plasma Desktop Mouce KCM fixed the X11 mouse acceleration profile. Also, if you are running a touch screen device without a keyboard or with limited keyboard use, you may want to try Wayland again with this version of Plasma. It functions so much cleaner. I am using the Wayland not the “Full Wayland” desktop.
YaST, the greatest system administration and maintenance tool I have ever used, received updates to the Firstboot, Installation, Storage-NG and xml packages. I would like to see other distributions adopt YaST as part of their system configuration suite. Having that cohesive collection of tools is hugely valuable.
The Tumbleweed reviewer gives 20191024 a stable score of 93; 20191025 a stable 96; 20191027 a stable 98 and 20191028 a stable 94.
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