Wow, the situation has become complicated with Ubuntu 22.04
Since February, the development of Trisquel 11.0, code name Aramo, began officially, and to tell the truth, since we were developing version 10.0, we were already beginning to see the future challenges that Jammy would bring.
In the case of Firefox, Canonical, the company behind the commercial development of Ubuntu, is betting more and more on the use of its snap packages, in the same way I assume that Mozilla is trying to unify the distribution of its browser: Firefox due to the great loss of market share, and I assume they’d rather save themselves the trouble of maintaining debian binary compatibility in all versions of Ubuntu and derivatives, so when hunger meets the urge to eat, well this happens, we lose support for debian binaries from Firefox on Ubuntu 22.04
And well, the release of Ubuntu 22.04 made the threat valid, now in 22.04 we only have support for the snap version.
Despite several advantages that a unified package system can have, snap is a system that gives little control over the sources and packages that are distributed, this makes autonomous community development difficult, to say the least, I think Flatpak has a better future in this type of categories, however returning to the subject.
I have currently started working on compiling Firefox ESR on Ubuntu as a base for our Abrowser, however boy has this gotten messy. Debian and Trisquel have a second-degree relationship, which even though they are very similar, both the versions and the structure of some packages change evidently.
This has been a bit of a headache, as it would be the first time that I take the development of a helper from scratch from a package of this size, just to put in context Firefox ESR weighs around 450MB and its compilation can take several hours using multiple cores before crashing and finding the bug where it might be crashing.
After a couple of weeks, this project has helped me to learn little by little the different factors that come into play in the compilation of this browser and why not, meet the developers behind Firefox in Debian and some alternative projects such as LibreWolf is, for which I have learned a couple of things in those projects.
And despite all the headaches that Firefox has given me these weeks, as well as the understanding that I need a more powerful machine to compile large packages, it is not time to give up since there are other more interesting challenges to solve with all the changes Ubuntu has made to Jammy, such as the development of the debian installer for Trisquel.
There is a long and challenging stage of development ahead on the way to Trisquel 11.0, Aramo.
By the way, the ISOs of the first maintenance revision of Trisquel 10 will be published soon, version: 10.0.1
Impatient? Before reaching the official repositories, it can be downloaded here:
We are back once again, to comment on the release of 0ad A25.
From a gamer’s point of view, this is a much more stylized version of the past A24, it improves its playability and its visual art in a big way.
From a better order in the movement of large groups of units, to the implementation of new functions such as the launch of “flares”, which reminds us a lot of AoE.
0ad is a visual delight because of its landscapes, detail of objects and units, which is very gratifying to see that level of detail in a creative project of free software and open source.
I do not want to extend myself in praise and compliments, since the game does it very well by itself, from a technical point of view in its installation I have not found many changes on the part of the developers.
The official PPA repository of 0ad still shows no signs of wanting to update the game and even when A24 was kind of a calibration release, so it could be understood that it was not updated to that version, A25 should not be the case in its update process.
However, here are the instructions to compile A25 from Ubuntu 20.04 / Trisquel 10.0
As in the previous version we will rely on the PPA repository of 0ad, to obtain the dependencies for the construction of the binaries,
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E4FA953A
echo "#0ad PPA repository
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/wfg/0ad/ubuntu bionic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/wfg/0ad/ubuntu bionic main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
Being Mexican, and having a deep sense of Latin American roots, most of my talks and discussions I try to be in Spanish, trying to provide more content in my native language, as well as for the entire Spanish-speaking population that could benefit from find any of those texts through somewhere on the net.
However, without any feeling of judgment, I have noticed that some of the richest conversations in form y depth that I have had the opportunity to assimilate happen in languages other than Spanish.
So despite the fact that I will always try to prioritize expressing in Spanish, I invite you to overcome the borders of the world and of the mind, thanks to the Internet and the free flow of information without borders, through mastering other languages, in this case specific, English.
There is so much that can be improved in the life of societies when we can increase awareness and understanding focused on increasing the level of discussion, through communication.
That said, I invite you to listen to Damien Echols and a conversation regarding a western vision of enlightenment, through High Magic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyN788DJY_A
An excellent conversation. that can be downloaded through the Duncan Trussell podcast
Well, time goes by, and the most surprising thing is that the topic of this post is about software and video games.
0ad, for those who do not know it, is a real-time strategy game, a genre of games that achieved its greatest popularity and consolidation in the 2000’s, with simple, but very appealing 3D graphics.
The most popular games of this genre were Age of Empires from Microsoft and Starcraft from Blizzard, these two titles owned thousands of hours and hours of entertainment.
0ad, is a very symbolic case since it is one of the best games based on free and open software and its artistic content under a Creative Commons license, and developed by a small group of developers under a community model, I would like to think, being a living example of a final product with high quality, although mostly without the attention it deserves.
All this would not have much importance, if it is not that the pandemic made us resort to old ways of entertainment, which thanks to its multiplayer model, allowed several contemporary friends to have a good time. Precisely, the Alpha 24 version was published not long ago, after just over 2 years of its predecessor a23 in December 2018.
Unfortunately this version 024 only had packages for Microsoft Windows, which is understandable when you take demographics into account and Microsoft Windows is still the most used operating system worldwide.
And although understandable, it is unfortunate that GNU / Linux users are out of the release of this new version. Thanks to recent collaboration in the Trisquel project, I began to become familiar with the compilation of binaries and since I already had the infrastructure to compiling binaries, i decided to try compiling from source code.
Pleasantly this was much easier than it seems thanks to the community, so I hope it will be useful for others looking for how to use compile,
Trisquel 9.0 / Ubuntu 18.04
We will rely on the repository PPA of 0ad , to obtain the dependencies for the construction of the binaries,
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E4FA953A
echo "#0ad PPA repository
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/wfg/0ad/ubuntu bionic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/wfg/0ad/ubuntu bionic main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
We start the compilation using all available threads, Warning: This could leave the machine invested for this task only for several hours, so it is recommended to schedule the compilation in such a way that do not interrupt your activities.
cd 0ad/build/workspaces
./update-workspaces.sh -j"$(nproc --all)"
cd gcc
make -j"$(nproc --all)"
If everything goes well, we continue with the test
In any case, temporarily and until there are official binaries in the 0ad PPA repository, I leave these binaries available, and even though I hope they will be useful and entertaining, no guarantee is offered.
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