Linux Blimp

Can “by hackers, for hackers” sell laptops? System76 sold an Oryx Pro
to Rob, and he’s here to tell you about it.

I should start by saying that although I’m definitely no newbie to
Linux, I’m new to the world of dedicated Linux laptops. I
started with Linux in 1996, when Red Hat 4.0 had just adopted the
2.0 kernel and Debian 1.3 hadn’t yet been released. I’ve run a variety
of distros with varying degrees of satisfaction ever since, always
looking for the Holy Grail of a desktop UNIX that just plain worked.

About 15 years ago after becoming frustrated with the state of Linux
on laptop hardware (in a phrase, “nonexistent hardware support”), I
switched my laptops over to Macs and didn’t look back. It was a
true-blue UNIX that just plain worked, and I was happy. But I
increasingly found myself frustrated by things I expected from Linux
that weren’t available on macOS, and which things like Homebrew and MacPorts
and Fink could only partly address.

My last MacBook Pro is now four years old, so it was time to shop
around again. After being underwhelmed by this generation of MacBooks,
I decided to take the risk on a Linux laptop again.

Oh my, an awful lot has changed in 15 years!

System76

System76 is a Denver-based firm with a
“by
hackers, for hackers” ethos. It’s not the first outfit to have tried to
deliver on this promise, nor will it be the last. It follows in a long
line pioneered by Red Hat and VA Research, and it will continue in the
future with businesses yet to be founded. At this moment in history
though, System76 seems to be doing a pretty good job of maintaining that
standard.

Inquiries

My initial contact with System76 came by visiting the website and
requesting a quote for one of its third-generation Oryx Pro models.
The sales staff were responsive, polite and didn’t seem to have their
personalities obliterated into uniform perfection like the Stepford
Salesforce of Lenovo or Dell. I also never caught a whiff of a hard
sell from any of them. On three occasions just before being able to put
down my hard-earned dinero on an Oryx Pro, my life went sideways, and my
laptop fund went to pay for strange emergencies that arose out of
nowhere, but the System76 sales staff were cheerfully uncaring about
this. The impression I got was they believed they knew were going to
miss a sale right then, but whether they missed it forever depended on
how they behaved in that instant. It’s an enlightened view from which more vendors
could stand to learn.

Sales

At last, my laptop fund regenerated, and there were no emergencies on
the horizon. I visited the System76 site again and discovered in the
intervening months that a new generation of the Oryx Pro had been announced,
and the first 100 pre-orders would receive some nice swag. Judging
from the swag I received (mostly a nice-looking promotional poster
that’s actually worth framing and putting on your cube wall), I was one
of the first 100. I placed my order May 7, 2018, and was told shipments
would begin the first week in June.

A couple minor problems arose. The first was that, as tends to happen
with pre-orders, the new units were not available quite on schedule.
The second was that System76 wasn’t proactive about informing me of the
delays. I was originally cited a delivery date of June 11th, but I
didn’t receive mine until June 15th. In the grand scheme of things, this
was a minor issue—I’ve had far, far worse delays from much bigger
vendors. Still, the fact that it was on me to ask about shipments,
instead of them telling me there would be a four-day delay was an
unforced error on their part.

Price

It’s sweet hardware, and it’s priced like sweet hardware. My laptop came
in at $2,704 (including expedited shipping).

Hardware

The new fourth-generation Oryx Pro is what was only a year ago called a
“desktop replacement”. But that class of computers refers to boat
anchors that were unpleasant to lug around in a messenger bag, not a
slim machine that’s approaching the dimensions of a MacBook. At 15″
wide, 10″ high, and 3/4″ deep, weighing less than 4.5 pounds, it’s
closer to an airweight than a boat anchor. (That’s 38cm by 26cm by 2cm
and just under two kilos, for you nerds out there in civilized countries
that use proper measurements.) And packed into this form factor is a
4.1GHz i7-8750H with six cores and 12 threads, 32 gigs of
DDR4 RAM at 2400MHz, a half-terabyte NVMe SSD, and—Maestro, cue the
drumroll—an 8GB NVIDIA GTX 1070 with a 15.6″ 4K HiDPI display. This
thing makes the Mac Retinas look jagged, and that’s not something I ever
thought I’d say.

The usual other things round it out. For video, it has HDMI and two
DisplayPort 1.3 outputs, two USB 3.1 Type-C connectors, two USB 3.0
Type-A connectors (one of them powered), audio and mike jacks, gigabit
Ethernet and 802.11ac WiFi up to 867Mbps. Oh yes, and Bluetooth. On
the 17″ models, you also can get Thunderbolt 3, but this isn’t an option
on my 15″ model. All of these are pretty much what you should expect on
any modern laptop, really.

The keyboard is what the kids today call a chiclet, but it has absolutely
nothing in common with the chiclet keyboards I remember. People hated
the IBM PCjr chiclet keyboard, but this one is as comfortable as any
laptop keyboard I’ve ever used. The scissor switches are responsive, and
the keyboard itself is nicely backlit by a rainbow of LED lights. It’s
a very nearly full keyboard too, with a full-size numeric keypad. Some
buttons are combined with others and accessed via function key-presses,
but that’s to be expected. The keyboard gets high marks.

Mouse support is provided via a trackpad with two buttons, which is one
of the very few mis-designs in the hardware. Although two-button mice
are better-understood by casual and business users, a lot of hard-core
Linux hackers like the third mouse button—myself included. The screen
bezel is a little larger than I’m accustomed to seeing on a modern
laptop, but if that’s the price I pay for this crisp 4K HiDPI display, I
consider that affordable.

There’s an integrated webcam that works well out of the box with Google
Hangouts, Google Meet and Skype. I stopped testing it at that point
and reached for a piece of electrical tape to cover it, and while
cutting off a piece of tape, I realized the final mis-design. In 2018,
when we’re all so keenly aware of our privacy and how malware can hijack
a webcam, all vendors should place sliding apertures over their webcams.
Getting video should never just be about turning it on in software.
There also should be a physical action performed by the user involved—something as simple as sliding away a cover.

Bezel, no third mouse button, no webcam physical aperture—if those are
my only complaints about the hardware, I think System76 is doing a
pretty good job.

Software

The Pop!_OS is Ubuntu with a skin job, but it’s a pretty nice skin.
Scratch the surface, and you can find standard GNOME underneath, which is
in my mind a positive thing—all those skills you’ve developed on other
distros will transfer over to Pop!_OS nicely. The app store takes
visual inspiration from Apple’s, but it could stand some better curation.
Clicking on the “Games” category gives you a nice list of them, but
there’s no facility to read user reviews or choose what kind of games
you’re interested in. Although graphically it’s heads and shoulders
beyond the package tools of yesteryear, usability-wise it still
could stand improvement. Given System76 has committed to making Pop!_OS a
first-class hacker distro, I suspect the app store experience is pretty
low on the list of priorities—but really, it would be such an easy
way to distinguish it from Ubuntu and its other derivatives.

My biggest complaint with Pop!_OS is that it’s almost a dark theme but
isn’t. “Dark muddy” might be a better way to describe the color
scheme.

Still, as mentioned earlier, it’s all GNOME under the hood, so you can
install whatever theme you’re accustomed to.

As far as development tools, it seems to all be standard Ubuntu 18.04
repositories, so I won’t rehash it except to say that it offers what you
expect: GCC 7.3 and 8.0.1, GNAT, Golang, OpenJDK, Mono and the like.
The Mono libraries are out of date (4.8, whereas the current is 5.12),
but that’s on Ubuntu, not Pop!_OS.

Sound and Video

Sound-wise, the Oryx Pro is a little bit of a letdown. There’s been so
much good stuff that describing the speakers as mediocre feels like a
criticism. They’re not bad speakers, mind you, they’re just not going
to impress you much. It’s a laptop. It’s really, really hard to put
good speakers in a laptop. I compromise with a USB headset and
everything’s great. I’ve also had fine results with a pair of external
USB speakers.

Video-wise, the Oryx Pro is a docile little lamb up until it turns into
the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man and starts stomping New York flat. It
ships with two different video chipsets: one an onboard low-power set by
Intel and the other the aforementioned NVIDIA GTX 1070 with 8GB RAM.
When you engage this monster, this machine stops being a laptop. I speak
from experience. An hour of it in my lap was enough to leave my left
thigh with first-degree burns. You’re aware it’s hot, but you tell
yourself that you can ignore it. Then you shut down an hour later, look
at your leg and wish you hadn’t ignored it. The price of machismo, I
guess.

The Intel chipset is sufficient for pretty much anything short of
intensive 3D, 4K gaming or mining cryptocurrency. If you want to use
the HDMI or DisplayPort external jacks, you’ll need to switch to the
NVIDIA chipset. Switching between chipsets requires a reboot and a
surprisingly long wait. My suspicion is some firmware is getting flashed
somewhere. By “surprisingly long wait”, I mean that I’ve seen it take up
to 20 seconds more to reboot on a chipset switch than to reboot
without a chipset switch.

Battery Life

Power is supplied by a pretty standard brick that ends in the expected
barrel plug. The trend nowadays is for laptops to be powered by USB-C
or Thunderbolt, but really, I don’t care much about that. What I care
about is whether the vendor-supplied power cable is long enough to be
useful, and there we’re on good ground. This contributes to the overall
weight, of course, which is why so many vendors are intent on giving you
power cables that aren’t long enough to let you be more than three feet
from a socket. System76 is having none of that: you’ve got about ten
feet of distance to work with.

According to System76, the Oryx Pro’s battery stores 55 watt-hours (~200
kilojoules) of energy. That’s the good news. The bad news is twofold:
one, power draw is significantly higher than I’d expect, and two, the
onboard battery monitor is completely useless.

I’ve been composing this article on my System76 laptop in battery-saver
mode. The screen is at minimum brightness, the graphics are being
provided by the Intel chipset, and I’m avoiding anything that’s
especially power-hungry. Still, after just 70 minutes, I’ve dropped from
a 98% charge to a 60% charge—assuming I can trust the battery
monitor, which I really can’t. 70 minutes ago it told me I had
92 minutes of charge remaining; now it tells me I have two hours
and seven minutes.

Whatever. The GNOME battery applet always has been painfully
inaccurate, in my experience, and that’s on GNOME, not System76.

Here’s what I can tell you: running purely on battery on a power-saving
profile and reducing my power-hungry apps, I’ve run this laptop for
three and a half hours before going dry. That’s a significant step
below what Apple’s getting with its MacBook line. I hope System76
invests in improving Linux and GNOME’s power infrastructure, because we
can do better than this.

Like other vendors, System76 has done away with the user-swappable
battery pack. It used to be that if I need more battery life I could
carry a spare battery, but apparently that ship has sailed.

Are we done with this? Good. Hold on while I find a socket, I’m going
to go plug this in.

Support

Here’s something that might surprise you: my laptop is defective.

Yes, it’s defective. That’s not unheard of in first-shipped units. Every
week or so, it’ll spontaneously reboot due to a hardware fault. These
reboots are infrequent enough that it’s not severely impacting my work,
but it still needs addressing, and that’s given me a good opportunity to
explore System76’s support offerings.

Let me give the bottom line first: they’re human beings and they care.
That’s both good news and bad news. It’s good news, because human beings
who care are so much better than all other alternatives that it’s like
comparing a supernova to a firecracker. It’s bad news, because for
things really to get screwed up, you need the involvement of people who
are so fervently committed to getting things right, they don’t notice
they’re digging the hole deeper.

I reported my first bout of reboots, along with a copy of my system log
for 30 seconds prior to reboot, via the web page the afternoon of June
20th. A few minutes after noon the next day, System76 had approved a
no-questions-asked return. On June 22, a customer service rep named
Aaron told me “We are shipping your replacement part and will provide
you with a tracking number as soon as it is available.”

Remember how earlier on when shipments were delayed they didn’t
inform me about it? Yeah, that happened again. On June 26th, I asked
them, “Where is this laptop? I’ve received no tracking information for a
product you said was shipping four days ago.”

About an hour later, Emma informed me, “The replacement laptop will take
some time to ship, because we are out of stock and awaiting the 4k
display, which is expected to arrive the week of July 10th. We are sorry
for the delays. We were just notified about the delays and apologize for
this inconvenience.”

On June 22nd, I was told it was shipping, not “we will ship it as soon as
new stock comes in”, but that it was shipping. Then, after it became clear
there was a delay in new arrivals, they didn’t reach out to let me know.
Instead, I found out four days later that I wouldn’t be receiving my
replacement for two weeks.

I complained loudly. Carl, the head honcho at System76, responded to me
directly and politely. He took responsibility for the error. System76
assures me it has changed the response system so the company no longer
will be sending “we are shipping” notifications ahead of, well, you know,
systems actually shipping.

Let me make it clear, I believe Carl. I also think Emma and Aaron and
everyone else I’ve interacted with are good people who genuinely want to
deliver the best user experience possible. I don’t think my experience
with System76 represents its character as a company, except insofar as it
represents a company going through growing pains as it adjusts to a
level of demand it wasn’t expecting.

And really, for how sweet this hardware is, I completely understand the
company
getting swamped.

The final question is, “if I had the $2,704 to spend again, would I be
better served with an System76 Oryx Pro, a MacBook Pro or a Dell XPS?”
And on balance, even taking into account the support growing pains, I
can say without a shadow of doubt, I would give my money to System76 again.

And I’ll also still be pestering System76 to do better. Because once
the support infrastructure is cleaned up, believe you me, System76 is
going to be giving everybody else in the Linux laptop space a run for
their money.

The Takeaway

Pluses:

• A desktop replacement laptop in a near-MacBook form factor.
• i7-8750H with six cores and 12 threads.
• Up to 32GB RAM, and a wide variety of HD options including large NVMe SSDs.
• 55Wh battery, ~3-hour life under real-world conditions.
• Pop!_OS is a nice-looking Ubuntu 18.04 derivative.
• GTX 1070 and Intel GPUs.
• Backlit near-full-size keyboard with numeric keypad.
• Lots of USB ports, including two USB-3.1 Type-Cs.
• Thunderbolt on the 17″ model.
• 15″ models offer 4K HiDPI displays, which are amazingly crisp.

Minuses:

• Sales and support departments are experiencing growing pains.
• No third button on trackpad.
• No physical aperture on webcam.
• Screen bezel slightly larger than expected.
• Laptop gets dangerously hot when the GTX 1070 kicks in.

Recommendations:

• If you’ve got the money, this is the best thing I’ve found for
  dedicated Linux laptops.
• Be patient with System76’s staff. They’re having growing pains.
• Tell them I sent you.

Source

Introduction

Nginx is a high performance web server. ANginx virtual host can be setup to host as many domains as your server can handle. If you have not already please see our guides on Nginx Compile From Source as well as PHP-FPM With PHP7 From Source. These 2 guides will lay the foundation of core services for Nginx to function as a web server. Once both of those have been completed or you already have a functioning nginx server you can continue with adding virtual hosts.

Nginx Virtual Host Preparation

First create a new directory to house the domains content

mkdir -p /etc/nginx/domain.com/public_html

Replacing domain.com with the domain you are intending to host. Make sure the directory is executable by all users

chmod 755 /etc/nginx/domain.com/public_html

Go ahead and create a php file to make sure Nginx is working with PHP-FPM

edit /etc/nginx/domain.com/public_html/index.php

vim /etc/nginx/domain.com/public_html/index.php

and insert the following php code

<?PHP
phpinfo();
?>

Nginx Virtual Host Configuration

Go ahead and create the site configuration file

vim /etc/nginx/domain_com.conf

and insert the following:

server {
listen 80;
server_name domain.com;
error_log logs/domain_com.error.log;
access_log logs/domain_com.access.log;
root /etc/nginx/domain.com/public_html;
index index.php;

location ~ .php$ {
try_files $uri =404;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}

}

Replacing all instances of domain.com with the domain you are wanting to host. After you have saved that file you will want to edit the main nginx.conf to include the virtual configuration

vim /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

and add the following at the end

include /etc/nginx/domain_com.conf

After you have done that you will want to update DNS to point to a IP address Nginx is listening on your server.

You can go ahead and restart nginx to load the new configuration file.

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

After that is all done you should be able to visit your site and it should load a PHP informational page that will display all of your configuration. If you would also like to setup your site in SSL, you can use Lets Encrypt to do this for free. The instructions on how to do that are Hwo To Setup Nginx To Use SSL With LetsEncrypt

Source

New updated Alt-Ruby packages are now available for download from our updates-testing repository.

Changelog:

alt-ruby23-2.3.8-20

• Please find the full changelog at https://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/tags/v2_3_8/ChangeLog.

alt-ruby24-2.4.5-8

• CVE-2018-16396: Tainted flags are not propagated in Array#pack and String#unpack with some directives.
• CVE-2018-16395: OpenSSL::X509::Name equality check does not work correctly.

alt-ruby25-2.5.3-3

• There were some missing files in the release packages of 2.5.2 which are necessary for building. See details in Bug #15232.
• This release is just for fixing the packaging issue. This release doesn’t contain any additional bug fixes from 2.5.2.

Update command:

yum update alt-ruby23 alt-ruby24 alt-ruby25 –enablerepo=cloudlinux-updates-testing

Source

PostgreSQL 11 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing customers to test the early production version of PostgreSQL 11 on Amazon RDS including 40+ extensions like PostGIS and support for hash partitioning. PostgreSQL 11 can now be deployed for development and performance testing in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment without the hassle of installing, provisioning, and managing the database.

The PostgreSQL community released PostgreSQL 11 on October 18, 2018. PostgreSQL 11 provides users with improvements to overall performance of the database system, particularly for very large databases and high computational workloads. Further, PostgreSQL 11 makes significant improvements to the table partitioning system, adds support for stored procedures capable of transaction management, improves query parallelism, adds parallelized data definition capabilities, and introduces just-in-time (JIT) compilation for accelerating the execution of expressions in queries.

Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are priced the same as production RDS instances created in the US East (Ohio) Region. The RDS Database Preview Environment supports both Single-AZ and Multi-AZ deployments on the latest generation of instance classes (currently T2, M4, and R4), and can be encrypted at rest using KMS keys. Database instances are retained for a maximum period of 60 days and are automatically deleted after the retention period. To move data in and out of the preview environment, customers can either use standard PostgreSQL dump and load functionality or use native PostgreSQL logical replication.

The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment Forum is available for customers and the Amazon RDS team to share information and concerns about both the early production versions of PostgreSQL 11 and the RDS Database Preview Environment. For details on Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, refer to https://aws.amazon.com/rds/databasepreview.

Source

Here’s your (almost) weekly look at some interesting games and bundles that are currently on sale that have an interesting choice for Linux gamers.

Firstly, Fanatical are offering a reasonably good deal with their new Origins Bundle which includes Punch Club, River City Ransom: Underground, Overfall, Comedy Night, STARWHAL and Gloom which all have Linux support. A favourite of mine from that is Overfall, which is well worth picking up.

Steam also has some great deals like:

• DiRT Rally – 75% off
• F1 2017 – 75% off
• Grow Home – 75% off
• RUNNING WITH RIFLES – 70% off

Humble also have some nice deals:

• Humble Monthly has HITMAN, 7 Days to Die and Hollow Knight which you would be mad to miss if you don’t own them
• The Humble Discovery Pack has 4 days left with War for the Overworld + DLC: Heart of Gold, Kentucky Route Zero season pass edition and Tricky Towers.
• Shadwen – 75% off
• Tabletop Simulator, which is actually great fun! – 50% off

Picked up anything good lately? Do let us know in the comments. We’re always on the look-out for a good deal and may add more later if the deal is good enough.

Source

Arm’s Pelion IoT Platform provides an end-to-end computing solution for IoT applications (see figure). When initially announced, Pelion devices could run Arm’s Mbed OS that targets Cortex-M class microcontrollers. It’s possible to run the compact Mbed OS on other platforms like Arm’s Cortex-A application processors, too, but these typically run higher-end operating systems like Linux.

Mbed OS is designed to be an IoT stack in a small footprint. It includes features like over-the-air (OTA) updates and basic operating system services that can easily fit into a microcontroller. A simple memory protection unit (MPU) can be used instead of the memory management unit (MMU) found in a Cortex-A platform. Mbed OS also assumes a single core.

Arm’s Pelion IoT Services encompasses the cloud and a plethora of IoT devices, including those running the Mbed OS and Mbed Linux.

Cortex-A platforms are often multicore. They have more memory and features like an MMU and often virtual-machine support. Mbed OS doesn’t even address this level of functionality, but it can be very useful for IoT gateway applications. This is where Mbed Linux comes into play.

Mbed Linux builds Mbed stacks and APIs on top of embedded Linux. As a result, developers can migrate Linux applications to Mbed Linux with Linux’s full functionality while gaining access to the Mbed APIs, including Pelion Device Management (PDM) support.

Mbed Linux is still a work in progress. The initial release is planned for the spring of 2019. A developer preview version will be available soon. Popular boards will initially be targeted, such as the Raspberry Pi 3 and NXP’s i.MX 7Solo-based WaRP7, but it can be ported easily to any Cortex-A platform. It will support Arm’s Platform Security Architecture (PSA) principles, including secure boot and signed updates.

Linux applications can be deployed using OCI-compliant containers, which helps improve security and provides developers with a modular platform.

Like Mbed OS, Mbed Linux is an open-source project. It can be used for free, including the latest updates. Arm will provide commercial support for customers who need firm SLA and platform longevity support. The cost for these services is available from Arm.

Source

Last updated August 24, 2018

If you are encountering “sub process usr bin dpkg returned an error code 1” while installing software on Ubuntu Linux, here is how you can fix it. One of the common issue in Ubuntu and other Debian based distribution is the broken packages. You try to update the system or install a new package and you encounter an error like ‘Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code’.

That’s what happened to me the other day. I was trying to install a radio application in Ubuntu when it threw me this error:

Unpacking python-gst-1.0 (1.6.2-1build1) …
Selecting previously unselected package radiotray.
Preparing to unpack …/radiotray_0.7.3-5ubuntu1_all.deb …
Unpacking radiotray (0.7.3-5ubuntu1) …
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.5-1) …
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.22-1ubuntu5.2) …
Processing triggers for bamfdaemon (0.5.3~bzr0+16.04.20180209-0ubuntu1) …
Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf-2.index…
Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.13.3-6ubuntu3.1) …
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.59ubuntu1) …
Setting up polar-bookshelf (1.0.0-beta56) …
ln: failed to create symbolic link ‘/usr/local/bin/polar-bookshelf’: No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing package polar-bookshelf (–configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Setting up python-appindicator (12.10.1+16.04.20170215-0ubuntu1) …
Setting up python-gst-1.0 (1.6.2-1build1) …
Setting up radiotray (0.7.3-5ubuntu1) …
Errors were encountered while processing:
polar-bookshelf
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

The last three lines are of the utmost importance here.

Errors were encountered while processing:
polar-bookshelf
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

It tells me that the package polar-bookshelf is causing and issue. This might be crucial to how you fix this error here.

Fixing Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Let’s try to fix this broken error package. I’ll show several methods that you can try one by one. The initial ones are easy to use and simply no-brainers.

You should try to run sudo apt update and then try to install a new package or upgrade after trying each of the methods discussed here.

Method 1: Reconfigure Package Database

The first method you can try is to reconfigure the package database. Probably the database got corrupted while installing a package. Reconfiguring often fixes the problem.

sudo dpkg –configure -a

Method 2: Use force install

If a package installation was interrupted previously, you may try to do a force install.

sudo apt-get install -f

Method 3: Try removing the troublesome package

If it’s not an issue for you, you may try to remove the package manually. Please don’t do it for Linux Kernels (packages starting with linux-).

sudo apt remove

Method 4: Remove post info files of the troublesome package

This should be your last resort. You can try removing the files associated to the package in question from /var/lib/dpkg/info.

You need to know a little about basic Linux commands to figure out what’s happening and how can you use the same with your problem.

In my case, I had an issue with polar-bookshelf. So I looked for the files associated with it:

ls -l /var/lib/dpkg/info | grep -i polar-bookshelf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 2324811 Aug 14 19:29 polar-bookshelf.list
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 2822824 Aug 10 04:28 polar-bookshelf.md5sums
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 113 Aug 10 04:28 polar-bookshelf.postinst
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 84 Aug 10 04:28 polar-bookshelf.postrm

Now all I needed to do was to remove these files:

sudo mv /var/lib/dpkg/info/polar-bookshelf.* /tmp

Use the sudo apt update and then you should be able to install software as usual.

Which method worked for you (if it worked)?

I hope this quick article helps you in fixing the ‘E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)’ error. If it did work for you, which method was it? Did you manage to fix this error with some other method? If yes, please share that to help others with this issue.

Source

Google Chrome, or Chrome, is a web browser software that tries to compete with major players, such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and even the Opera web browser. It is available for the Linux, Android, iOS, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. But Google Chrome is more than a web browser, as it combines sophisticated open source technology, borrowed from the Chromium application, into a minimal design, all in order to help users surf the web much faster, a lot easier, and safer than ever before.

Features at a glance

A unique functionality of the Google Chrome application is its ability to search the web directly from the address bar. Just type one or more words in the address bar and immediately get suggestions for popular web pages. The application displays thumbnails of your top websites on the new tab page, a function that is popularly called Speed Dial. This functionality is also available on other similar products, and it allows you to easily access your favorite web pages instantly, with lightning speed, from any new tab.

Comes with Private browsing mode

Private browsing is also a strong point of the Google Chrome web browser, enabling users to surf the Internet in an incognito window, when they don’t want to save their browsing history, or if they’re hiding from NSA (National Security Agency). Just like Mozilla Firefox, the Chrome web browser includes a handy cloud service, which allows you to safely and securely sync all of your passwords, browsing history, bookmarks, apps, extensions, autofill, themes, and opened tabs across multiple devices.

Will never replace Mozilla Firefox

Because we heard such good things about it, we’ve tried a little experiment with the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox products. We wanted to replace the powerful Mozilla Firefox web browser that we use on many computers here at Softpedia, with Google Chrome. Surprisingly, the Chrome browser proved to be a poor product for our needs, especially because it misses some important extensions that are currently available only on the Mozilla Firefox application, such as Clippings, Copy Plain Text, or InFormEnter.

You should try Mozilla Firefox

These days, you can’t avoid Google’s web services. Whether you sign up for Gmail and Google+, or you just want to use its quite powerful office tools (yes, this short review is written in Google Documents), you may find you end up asking yourself, “Why not use Chrome?”. The answer is simple, use Chrome if you just want to use Google’s powerful services and nothing more. But if you want a serious web browser, you should try Mozilla Firefox.

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Neil MacDougall and Richard Cox of SUSE gave a talk (and demo) at the recent Cloud Foundry Summit EU, detailing the past, present, and future of Stratos–an open source UI for Cloud Foundry. Like everything SUSE works on, Stratos is open source. Although SUSE remains the project lead on it, Stratos is now part of the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

The main purpose of the talk is to help grow awareness of Stratos and to get more people contributing to it via code, UX, ideas, or other improvements. Lots of people and organizations use Stratos currently, including IBM, Orange, and Cloud.gov, but it could improve more quickly if even more people actively contributed to it. Stratos is, of course, the UI in our SUSE Cloud Application Platform.

The most exciting part of the talk is news that Stratos is moving to regular monthly releases with an intriguing set of upcoming features, including extensions, GitLab support and support for private source repositories.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation has posted all recorded talks from the Summit on YouTube. Check them out if you want to learn more about the latest news from the Cloud Foundry community. We’ll be posting more SUSE talks here over the coming days. Watch Neil and Richard’s talk below:

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At a time when many companies are rushing to internationalize their products and
services to appeal to the broadest possible market, the Linux kernel is
actively resisting that trend, although it already has taken over the
broadest possible market—the infrastructure of the entire world.

David Howells recently created some sample code for a new kernel library,
with some complex English-language error messages that were generated from
several sources within the code. Pavel Machek objected that it would be
difficult to automate any sort of translations for those messages, and that
it would be preferable simply to output an error code and let something in
userspace interpret the error at its leisure and translate it if needed.

In this case, however, the possible number of errors was truly vast, based
on a variety of possible variables. David argued that representing each and
every one with a single error code would use a prohibitively large number of
error codes.

Ordinarily, I might expect Pavel to be on the winning side of this debate,
with Linus Torvalds or some other top developer insisting that support for
internationalization was necessary in order to give the best and most useful
possible experience to all users.

However, Linus had a very different take on the situation:

We don’t internationalize kernel strings. We never have. Yes, some people tried to do some database of kernel messages for translation purposes, but I absolutely refused to make that part of the development process. It’s a pain.

For some GUI project, internationalization might be a big deal, and it might be “TheRule(tm)”. For the kernel, not so much. We care about the technology, not the language.

So we’ll continue to give error numbers for “an error happened”. And if/when people need more information about just what _triggered_ that error, they are as English-language strings. You can quote them and google them without having to understand them. That’s just how things work.

[…]

There are places where localization is a good idea. The kernel is *not* one of those places.

He added later:

I really think the best option is “Ignore the problem”. The system calls
will still continue to report the basic error numbers (EINVAL etc), and the extended error strings will be just that: extended error strings. Ignore them if you can’t understand them.

That said, people have wanted these kinds of extended error descriptors forever, and the reason we haven’t added them is that it generally is more pain than it is necessarily worth.

Pavel still felt that, since David’s code was all new, there was no ancient
cruft standing in the way of implementing internationalization in this one
new area. He agreed there was no point in a lot of other cases, but for this
one, it felt like being given a fresh chance.

But Linus said, “Really. No translation. No design for translation. It’s a
nasty nasty rat-hole, and it’s a pain for everybody.”

He added, “the fact is, I want simple English interfaces. And people who
have issues with that should just not use them. End of story. Use the
existing error numbers if you want internationalization, and live with the
fact that you only get the very limited error number. It’s really that
simple.”

The discussion ended shortly thereafter. It’s a fascinating rejection of a
very politically popular attitude, based on the technical consideration that
keeping the programming interface simple is worth more than keeping the user interface friendly.

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