July 9 2024 AWK, Alexa, Plasma 6.1

Brian commented that nmap is not working as it used to [as from 7.90, it changed its licence and is no longer considered free; the alternative would appear to be ZMap].

Darren is working on a demonstration of AWK, the data extraction program. He demonstrated some examples of basic conditional printing and of combining patterns to achieve more sophisticated results.

Brian uses Alexa a lot and was prompted by all the projects on Hackster.io to explore installing myMedia on a Raspberry Pi 2 running Raspberry Pi Media Server managing all his music; it had been a bit fiddly to set up but, after a week’s free trial, it costs £9 a year. He demonstrated issuing commands to Alexa to play different kinds of music.

He has also been using Raspberry Pi Connect which relies on WebRTC and requires Wayland.

Steve noted that there is a new version of Plasma, which includes a remote desktop, which led into a discussion of the various ways of updating distributions — some updates require you to install programs manually; Arch uses source files while openSUSE offers both an update which installs the system but where you add programs manually and a console based script which updates the system and all installed programs at once.

The remote desktop in Plasma 6.1 will be a great addition as the Microsoft remote desktop relies on its own technology.

Steve is also going to have a look at TrueNAS.

Past Meetings