Chrome OS, Linux Containers and Application Launchers

So I installed the great brunch framework on my laptop after a hiatus of a couple of months. I still dislike the fact that the Linux containers are running under a VM on Chrome OS. Sure it is more secure as the containers won’t be able to access the host hardware directly etc. It is also slightly inefficient. So I tried both chromebrew and brioche. Note that brioche only supports brunch (thus half of this post won’t apply to official Chrome OS builds).

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A New Termux Mirror

TL; DR. https://termux.librehat.com is a new Termux packages mirror! Maintained by me, synchronised every six hours, located in the United Kingdom, hosted by Oracle Cloud.

In the full article below, I’ll write up how to set up a Termux mirror (or in general, a Debian packages repository mirror).

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Building Qt for Termux Android

This is by all means, not the first blog post about Termux. It serves as a journal for myself, as well for anyone who’s interested in cross building Qt or Qt-related projects for Termux (which is a native Linux environment for Android) from their x86_64 machines.

We already have @xeffyr who has done a great amount of work on building Qt for Termux. The work I’ve done recently would be 10 times harder, if not for what’s achieved by them already.

If you’re new to cross building for Termux, I recommend you to start with Developer Wiki.

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Fedora Linux with MATE Desktop on Android

I know some of you geeks have already done something like that, running a GNU/Linux distribution on top of an Android device. It’s an interesting time, with projects like proot we don’t need root privilege on our Android devices to run a containerized Linux environment. Here in this post, I’ve written down the steps that I’ve taken to have a usable desktop environment up running on my Galaxy Tab S5e (this blog post has been written up purely within such environment).

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来份Brunch笔电瞬间变身Chromebook

自从几年前卖掉华硕的一台小Chromebook后,看到Android和Linux应用程式的支持增加,又开始有点馋涎Chromebook……不过因为今年疫情全球大爆发,电子产品(尤其是适合居家办公和学习的)价格一路上扬(或者缺货)。Chromebook今年出货量增长更是迅猛(Windows PC, MacBook, Chromebook分类中增长幅度最大)。问我这台2015年买的老笔电尚能饭否?答曰:Brunch

出厂预装的Windows 10早被我卸载干净了,单Linux系统(OpenSUSE)用了有一年多了,看到Brunch这个项目能在自己笔电上体验Chrome OS变身Chromebook,赶紧试验了一把,没想到效果出奇地好!这里特意用中文记载一下Linux下安装Chrome OS和后续升级的办法以供中文网络世界的朋友参考。

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Building Linux Kernel on Odroid-U3

This is the year 2020, Odroid-U3 is far from a powerful ARM development board in today’s standard, but it is still more than capable! Quad-core ARMv7 CPU and 2GB RAM, which means I can still run some light services and test my toy projects without paying any fees to AWS or Azure. The year 2020 also means that this little device can be powered by the mainline Linux kernel without many troubles (if any)! Better than that, the process is ridiculously straightforward!

In this post, I put together the steps I did to build the Linux kernel using upstream mainline source code natively on Odroid-U3. If you’re interested in cross-building from your x86 machines, you can find plenty of tutorials on that on the Internet.

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Virtual Linux Desktop Experience in Azure

I wouldn’t believe that I will be writing this 10 years ago. It’s 2020 though. Microsoft has improved a lot of services for Linux, ranging from developer tools like Visual Studio Code, to the protagonist today: Azure (cloud computing). Azure has steadfastly become a real credible alternative to Amazon EC2 (or AWS in general). Today, I want to share my experience of using a virtual machine on Microsoft Azure cloud. To be more specific, it is a Linux desktop virtual machine (SLES 15).

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Announcing YapStocks 2.0

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on a new plasmoid (KDE Plasma Applet) that provides a simple interface to monitor stocks. The first version was rather basic, being able to show the current market price only. Now it’s time to announce the availability of the second iteration of YapStocks (Yet Another Plasma Stocks Applet). I’ve recorded a short video clip showcasing all the features it has, ranging from the information summary to the historical price chart.

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Hands-on Sailfish OS on Redmi Note 7

Not sure if this is related to the COVID-19 lockdown, but we’ve seen a lot of geeky hobby projects coming up recently. A lot of community ports have been done over the last few months for niche mobile operating systems such as Sailfish OS. That’s exactly the one I played with briefly after purchasing a second-hand Redmi Note 7 on eBay (don’t ask me if I think it’s a waste of money now LOL).

If you come here hoping to find the resources, head to the GitHub repo directly where you can find the ROMs to download.

Make sure that you’ve unlocked the bootloader already! If not, you need to register a MI account and apply for unlocking here. You must log in to your MI account on both the unlocking tool and your phone (MI, POCO, RedMi). If you don’t have a Windows PC, I recommend using XiaoMiTool V2 which works on macOS, Linux, as well as Windows. Though I couldn’t find this on the official FAQ, you have to have a working SIM card inserted. You have to use the mobile data instead of WiFi when unlocking the bootloader on your phone because XiaoMi is doing some verification.

Another problem I encountered was that in fastboot mode, RedMi Note 7 would just say “Press any key to reboot” when any commands are sent from my laptop. After googling on this, there seems to be a driver bug that makes RedMi Note 7 fastboot USB3 unfriendly. Using a USB-Hub worked for most people, including me 🤷.

I wish you all a successful attempt to flash Sailfish OS into your RedMi Note 7. Here are some screenshots I took.

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OpenSUSE 15.1 Installation Notes

Although my personal laptop isn’t getting much attention from me because I’ve spent most of my time on my work laptop (a MacBook Pro) and my Android tablet (Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e), I’ve decided to take good care of its software over last weekend by wiping the SSD clean and installing a fresh OpenSUSE on it. As an old habit, I’m sharing some notes during the installation and later setup. This is, however, the first blog post written in English here (not counting the old ones on no-long-working en.librehat.com).

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