xsnow, penguins & eyes

[pH]

Running Mint 20.1 Ulyssa here.

Is anyone successfully running xpenguins, xsnow or xeyes on modern distros?

The Christmas season has me wanting to run xsnow again...just thought I'd
ask around before I did the install.

Pureheart in Aptos

[John McCue]

pH <wNOS...@gmail.org> wrote:
> Running Mint 20.1 Ulyssa here.
>
> Is anyone successfully running xpenguins, xsnow or xeyes
> on modern distros?

Please define Modern Distro :)
All work great on Slackware 15.0, which is modern.

But my guess you are running a desktop like GNOME or KDE
or xfce. Those steal the root window, I think there may
be versions of Xsnow that work with KDE and may work with
the others.

Xeyes, should work everywhere except --

I am rather sure they will all fail if using Wayland.

<snip>

John

--
[t]csh(1) - "An elegant shell, for a more... civilized age."
- Paraphrasing Star Wars

[Bit Twister]

Running Mageia Linux with Xfce as my DE. xsnow is not released/supported.

I do miss xsnow but xpenguins, xeyes do run.

[Dan Espen]

xsnow is in the Fedora repositories.

--
Dan Espen

[Bit Twister]

My first rule is don't mix distribution packages.

I started with RedHat until some pointy headed manager decided to discontinue
the free RedHat distribution because he felt RedHat was being ripped off.

What was not taken into consideration was all those free testers helping
make it a better product. Very soon after that Customer problem reports
started climbing.

Fedora was the solution chosen to get all that free testing of their product.
Too late for me, I left for the Mageia Linux distribution because of the
Mageia Control Center which makes it very easy for user system administration
.

https://doc.mageia.org/mcc/8/en/content/index.html

[Bob Tennent]

On Sun, 18 Dec 2022 20:17:37 -0000 (UTC), pH wrote:

I'm running Linux Mint 21 and xsnow is installable using apt
and works fine. xeyes is in the x11-apps package. xpenguins
is installable using apt but I haven't gotten it working.

Bob T.

[pH]

Thanks for all the replies...think I'll try the snow at least.

pH in Aptos

[Dan Espen]

I liked Mandrake, I forget why I had to switch.
Fedora has pretty good repositories. It's rare I want something they
don't have.

--
Dan Espen

[Bobbie Sellers]

Maybe because they merged with Connectiva and became Mandriva?

I started seriously with Mandriva 2006 but in 2011 that company failed
to produce a system that would work on my then computer. After
some experimentation I ended up on PCLinuxOS and am using it right now
it is a lot like Mandriva but Mageia which is made up of former Mandriva
programmers, etc. adopted systemd and that is sad. PCLinuxOS is systemd
Free and it started with Mandrake images. All the history is on Wikipedia.

bliss - "Nearly any fool can run a GNU/Linux computer. Many do."
So here I am again...

--
bliss dash SF 4 ever at dslextreme dot com

[Marco Moock]

Am 18.12.2022 schrieb pH <wNOS...@gmail.org>:

> Is anyone successfully running xpenguins, xsnow or xeyes on modern
> distros?

On Debian Sid (currently bookworm) it works fine with X11 and Motif
Window Manager.

[Dan Espen]

My guess is Mandrake wouldn't work with some VPN software I had to use for
work.

> I started seriously with Mandriva 2006 but in 2011 that
> company failed to produce a system that would work on my then
> computer. After
> some experimentation I ended up on PCLinuxOS and am using it right now
> it is a lot like Mandriva but Mageia which is made up of former Mandriva
> programmers, etc. adopted systemd and that is sad. PCLinuxOS is
> systemd Free and it started with Mandrake images. All the history is
> on Wikipedia.

I'm very happy with a systemd based Linux.

--
Dan Espen

[Aragorn]

On 19.12.2022 at 08:13, Dan Espen scribbled:

> Bobbie Sellers <bl...@mouse-potato.com> writes:
>
> > I started seriously with Mandriva 2006 but in 2011 that
> > company failed to produce a system that would work on my
> > then computer. After some experimentation I ended up on PCLinuxOS
> > and am using it right now it is a lot like Mandriva but Mageia
> > which is made up of former Mandriva programmers, etc. adopted
> > systemd and that is sad. PCLinuxOS is systemd Free and it started
> > with Mandrake images. All the history is on Wikipedia.
>
> I'm very happy with a systemd based Linux.

I was opposed to systemd at first as well, but once I started looking
into what it really is, how it works and what it offered, I consider it
progress, and I wouldn't want to go back to SysVinit anymore.

systemd is modular, and one only has to use the parts one chooses. For
instance, I myself have no use for systemd-homed — even though I can see
where it might be useful — and so I'm not using that.

It's a lot easier to enable/disable, start/stop and even mask/unmask
services in systemd than in SysVinit, and the configuration is all done
through plain text files and symlinks, or even simpler — when sticking
to already existing services on your system — with a simple one-line
command.

As for my first distribution, that was Mandrake 6.0 PowerPack, back in
1999. I stuck with Mandrake until it became Mandriva, when they then
fired their own founder (Gaël Duval) and their main packager (Bill
Reynolds, alias TexStar/Tex). I then ran PCLinuxOS for a while, which
was created by Tex, then Mageia, then PCLOS again, and for the last
nearly four years, I've been running Manjaro, which is an Arch spinoff.

I've also used many different distributions on servers — Debian,
CentOS, Slackware, SuSE et al — and I've even dabbled with Gentoo for a
while, but the problem with Gentoo is that by the time you're finished
compiling a certain package, there's already a newer version waiting in
the pipeline, so to speak, and having monitored the developers' mailing
list, I also have my considerations regarding their attitude toward
both their users and their elitist development model with proxy
maintainers who get to do all the work, but who don't get any of the
credit for it and aren't even allowed to partake in the mailing list.

Being Arch-based, Manjaro isn't for everyone — notwithstanding that it
attracts a great number of absolute n00bs — but for myself, it's the
ideal distro now. It's a rolling-release, so it's sufficiently
cutting-edge, but it's also curated, so that cutting edge isn't exactly
covered in blood anymore either.

--
With respect,
= Aragorn =

[pH]

Following up to report xsnow works fine and even has a graphical set up
screen that pops up when run. Have not ran it a 2nd time yet to see if the
persists.

xpenguins was not in the repository, nor xeyes, but I was mainly after the
snow, so all is well.

pH in Aptos

[Richard Kettlewell]

Aragorn <telc...@duck.com> writes:
> On 19.12.2022 at 08:13, Dan Espen scribbled:

>> I'm very happy with a systemd based Linux.
>
> I was opposed to systemd at first as well, but once I started looking
> into what it really is, how it works and what it offered, I consider it
> progress, and I wouldn't want to go back to SysVinit anymore.

There’s a lesson there...

> systemd is modular, and one only has to use the parts one chooses. For
> instance, I myself have no use for systemd-homed — even though I can see
> where it might be useful — and so I'm not using that.

There’s a lot to like. I have been exploring the security hardening
features lately.

* DynamicUser generalizes the idea of running services as their own
unique user (to provide a basic level of isolation from the rest of
the system), by creating and deleting service users dynamically. Not
suitable for services which directly manage their own persistent state
but I have a bunch of things which fit well.

* Socket activation plays particularly nicely with DynamicUser since it
removes the need for a long-running service to have root (or at least
CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE) to bind to its listening port. inetd did it too,
but in systemd it’s better integrated with other service management
features.

* LoadCredential removes the need to run as root, or to have an ssl-cert
group, for https services to retrieve externally managed private keys.

* PrivateNetwork isolates services from the network ... in a way that
plays nicely with socket activation, i.e. your service can still
receive requests over the network via its preconfigured socket but
cannot each out to anywhere else.

* ProtectHome, ProtectSystem etc make whole chunks of the filesystem
completely unavailable to a services, providing a strong level of
isolation than unique UIDs alone.

* SystemCallFilter etc can be used to turn off unused parts of the
kernel API, reducing the risk from a compromised process by reducing
its scope to escalate privilege.

Other features I’ve found useful lately:

* Memory cgroups, to stop my backup process evicting everything else
from RAM for no good reason.

* Automatic journal integration (or syslog, but I’ve removed syslogd
now). Logging just means writing to stderr/stdout, rather than a
separate logging API.

* journald’s log filtering.

--
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/