How many admins does it take to roll out 150 client PCs in one morning? The honest answer for most mid-sized companies: too many. If people are walking from machine to machine with USB sticks, the approach is fundamentally wrong and inefficient. What is missing are clear concepts, monitoring, automation, and scalability. In that order. Without automation, scaling turns into exploding personnel costs. Without monitoring, automation becomes a force multiplier for mistakes. Without clear concepts, monitoring ends up measuring the wrong things. Read more

At the end of October I switched my gaming machine from Win10 to Linux.1 Not without some 2nd thoughts how the games would perform. This weekend it was finally time to tackle the supposedly toughest one: The Microsoft Flight Simulator. It is likely Microsoft’s flagship product, significantly older than Windows.2 After 43 years, it remains one of Microsoft’s oldest continuously supported software products. That definitely won’t run on Linux I thought. How wrong I was. The images speak for themselves: Read more

Simple: Install Linux! Okay, that might sound too blunt, Tomas, but it’s true: The last bare-metal Windows installation in the household, my dedicated “gaming machine”, has recently been reinstalled with GNU/Linux Debian. Microsoft’s passive-aggressive Windows 10 EOL threat doesn’t work on me, or at least not in intended way. I was surprised to find out that Steam games not only just run but also have a approx 10–15% speed bump. And that’s on my old nVidia 1070. Impressive! Read more

Next Friday and Saturday (September, 19th + 20th 2025) you find me at the Kiel Open Source and Linux Days, also known as Kielux.1 As guest, I’ll be attending a few talks and workshops. Looking forward, Yours, Tomas Jakobs https://www.kielux.de/ ↩︎

A nice open source project from the industry. The new plant of a medium-sized company needed to be equipped with video surveillance and recording. Usually engineers use ready-to-use CCTV1 systems bought in DIY stores, consisting of a network-attached storage and a streaming server. Nowadays, not that cheap Chinese blackboxes, usually tied together with Apps, Cloud and Online functionality without any chance of customization. Better keep away from this especially when information security, valueable corporate assets and the lives of people are at stake. Read more

The Linux Presentation Day (LPD)1 on 19.11.2022 is intended to promote the free operating system and its applications to anyone interested. All over Germany2 universities, user groups, computer and chaos clubs will open their doors simultaneously and invite people to: Discover the various free operating systems and applications Exchange experiences in a cosy atmosphere Installation session of PCs, notebooks or media centres On this day, I will be present at the Chaostreff Dortmund from 1 p.m. on3 and will give two inspiring LightningTalks on the following topics: Read more

Part II - Please Refuel and some new Bumpers Just in time for the new year, the revived Apple Macbook Pro with Debian from the first part is back on my desk. It served well in December. Now, it’s time for a pit-stop: Would you refuel and change bumpers, please? Battery Replacement after 12 years I was way off the mark with the expected endurance: I wrote something about 1.5 hours last month. Well this may have been 7 years ago when I last worked with it. Today the battery doesn’t last for even half an hour. Over Christmas at home on lockdown this is not a problem, though it is a nuisance as it was carefully but clearly pointed towards me. Read more

Rescue-Ops before Christmas Eve What is the worst-case scenario right before Christmas during a Corona Lockdown? Let’s leave zombie apocalypses, too little toilet paper or slow internet connections aside for a moment. Right! A broken laptop. Exactly such a call for help came to me this afternoon from my own circle of friends. I was asked if I had a spare notebook available shortly. Coincidentally, yes. An old mid-2009 Macbook Pro 13" has been hanging around in the corner for years. Too valuable to be thrown away, technically perfectly okay, but unfortunately no longer supported by Apple. There she is again, the planned obsolescence1. Read more

Battery Today I will report a brief description of the battery and power management of Mobian on a Pinephone. Reading the battery parameters from the console was already quite special. The usual way with upower was not successful and provided only zero values. Without ACPI the readout only worked with: # cat /sys/class/power_supply/axp20x-battery/uevent My first measurements: At idle with active mobile network, BT and WLAN and 50% display brightness the power consumption is about 2.5 to 3W. At 100% display brightness it jumps up to 3.5 to 4W each time without any apps in the background. From the desktop perspective this may not sound bad, but in fact it is. Read more

Screenshots What was missing in the first part the day before yesterday, I will catch up today: Screenshots! This led to the question of how to do this? A hotkey like in iOS (home + on/off switch) is unknown to me on the Pinephone. The classic desktop Linux tools like Gnome Screenshots or Peek are installable but do not work properly. It’s quite banal, they fail due to the fact that I cannot trigger any hotkey on a touch display UI. As a solution I have chosen the workaround via SSH and grim taking screenshots remotely in the background while in the app in the foreground, Waylands makes it possible. Read more