Sometimes the Open Source Community is too draining

Alright, it's been a while and welcome to yet another blog post. I've been on and off, to be honest I have some subjects to write about but I've been misusing my time on other matters.

 Today's subject is how the community reacts when there's a security issue in different distributions. I came across a security issue where Portal 2 crashes in SELinux, the initial response in reddit was "valve doesn't give a shit about security", such a title full of assumption and ripe with opportunities to magnify an issue. I do care about security, but sometimes people get.... a little emotional maybe?

The debates gets to the point where you don't know if they are discussing the subject or totally went off topic to keep their "knowledge pride" intact. I found it really draining and sometimes I just have to give kudos to the developers that have to endure hours of endless babbling reading the same responses in different grammar structures. I'll probably get some heat too on my part, but then again I'm just yet another GNU/Linux user out of the thousands out there so whatever people leave in the comment section will be either spite or some type of excuse for their behavior.

That aside, I'm hoping to get into my normal routine once I make a full recovery. I have a project that I want to work on and share with the world but due to my back problems my time is limited =/

Motherboard Failures / SSD / WINE Solutions And The Spirit of OSS

Welcome to yet another laundry post. It's been a long week for me. I'm still recovering after hurting my back, twice now in less than 7 months. So let's begin with motherboard failures

Recently I noticed that my motheboard SATA slots were faulty, sometimes I had to change cables or slots to make a SATA device work. Now, the cable I used was brand new, I didn't really think it had anything to do with the cable. Even before the new cable, before moving to a full linux environment this year I had ran into a problem where my DVD ROM had read errors. I was taken back with the issue because I did an integrity check after burning the disc.

So what happened is that I had to move the cable to another SATA slot. This was the first strike of something going wrong with the mobo. I ignored it back then.

Now I know I need to get a new motherboard. So with that I want to get an extra 8GB DDR3, and SSD with a debian-based distro.

I looked at the possibility of moving to a arch-based distro, but a question remained: Why bother with a rolling-release distro? Now, I might be biased because I lean toward debian-based distros, it doesn't have to be Ubuntu. It could even be Debian Sid or whatever.

In the end, I just didn't bother coming up with an answer. The ending result no matter what linux distro you go with is that you will end up with a linux system, different package manager. KDE, GNOME, OpenBox, whatever WM you choose won't change that experience.


That said, let's talk about WINE wrappers. Normally, I don't have any problems with WINE wrappers. I actually don't by the way. I just think that WINE
wrappers have been focusing on the wrong things.

There are too many problems with reporting bugs with WINE. If people used winetricks, developers complain, if users used playonlinux, developers would mark it as invalid even if they are using a vanilla WINE installation (no patch whatsoever), it's so, so tedious to fill a bug report with a wrapper. Even if the wrapper took care of basic stuff like library installations, it still would be "invalid". So how can I report bugs to WINE? God knows... if you know how, let me know.

So with that in mind. If you create a wrapper for WINE, users will use it, there's no doubt about that. WINE with patches? Yes, I understand the implications of why people shouldn't file a report.

Now, there have been many applications that handles WINE for you. Thanks to the OSS community we get to have many options available. I'm still thinking whether I should bother creating one or not. I don't know to be honest, maybe I'm having second thoughts on how an I create a tool that WINE developers wouldn't mind, at the same time the tool is aimed for users, not the developers.

Why not improve an existing one? Because they all have different ideology on how to handle WINE from under the hood to the frontend. I also have a different idea on how user interface should be handled, I still use POL btw.



Well,that's it for now.

MPD + Laptop issues

I had a hunch on the issue already... let me tell you that working with audio stuff in linux gets me a little "nervous", because a computer without any audio output is simply nothing to me... not having my good mate MPD shuffling through songs through a shared MPD music/playlists? it kills me.

So apparently, for me to run MPD system-wide I have to run pulseaudio system-wide, this is regardless on how many groups you add to the MPD user, it won't run. It kind of rubs me off the wrong way.

I just ended up making mpd making it run at a user-level... not happy about it.

I'm gonna join in the many who have a qualm with pulseaudio... sometimes it works... sometimes it just screws up your sound with WINE.

I'm still "wasting time": Setting up a shared MPD, PlayOnLinux brainstorming, WINE + NFS

I'm actually supposed to be learning C++ and golang (Go Language) to kill time, a long with a language I'm currently learning (not a programming language). I'm not really burned out, but I do feel a bit .... losing motivation maybe? Still, I feel confident about learning it. Priority for me is learning the language, and then the programming languages.

I finished my shared MPD setup through NFS. I exported my NTFS hard drive connected in my main desktop and the mpd config directory. I kind of needed to tidy things up. I have this habit of leaving a mess of directories and files, which at the end it gets hard to be organized.

I like it, it's still scanning through the music folder, but so far so good.

PlayOnLinux, while I was devising a way to isolate applications from the... tight grips of PlayOnLinux installers. I ended up thinking that the only good thing PoL provides are their patched WINE packages such as Guild Wars 2. Now, this might sound really harsh; I'm not trying to throw dirt at PoL. I think they have done an amazing job, but it makes you ponder that they could have done better user interface decisions... but seeing that half of the project is a set of bash scripts and the other half is a set of python scripts... it does bring a lot of questions, at least for me, behind their decision.

Anyway, that's just me. Don't take it to heart. I've done some brainstorming but I don't think it fits PoL's way. In the end, as all WINE wrappers I don't know what WINE really needs. I do know what the users need, but to help the project? not sure where to start.


WINE + NFS, one of my ideas which I'm sure it's possible is to set-up PlayOnLinux as a system-wide tool. However, PoL was made for per-user usage, how can I "fool it"? I do have a few ideas but... not sure if it's worth it. Let me know in the comment section if you are interested.

From now on, these type of posts where you see me babbling will be tagged as laundry posts. Check them out, it's just me talking whatever crap comes to my mind.