March 10 2026 IPP, Linux Terminal on Android, Wayand, browsers, slide rules, CHERI, OPNsense, Tony Hoare

John mentioned that the problem with CUPS mentioned at the previous meeting turned out to be a slightly different problem. CUPS will be stopping using PPDs to connect to printers and only using the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). Linux Mint uses this as the default and the documentation tells you what you have to do to use PPDs. The problem for his friend was that he has a Samsung Laser Printer which will only work with a PPD. In due course support for PPDs in CUPS will be phased out.

Brian asked about an app to get Linux in an Android smartphone and John said that he had seen information about it while checking recent releases of Android [it’s part of Android 16]. David commented that Termux does enough of the things you would expect from a Linux terminal. Brian pointed to the NOMone Desktop which is a paid app. Perhaps someone has done it just to show it could be done. Steve noted that speed is not an issue with KVM, which the Linux Terminal feature uses, and hardware access.

David noted that the Home Assistant interface has changed.

Steve queried whether Kubuntu was bringing in Wayland in the next release [in fact it came in with 25.10]. John said that installing Wayland on the latest openSUSE release hadn’t excluded Xwayland.

Brian shared a problem he had had with Firefox whether downloaded as a Snap or a Flatpak, namely that, after a time, he cannot click into the search box to do another search. John suggested that he uncheck all the suggestions in Firefox: Settings: Search.

Steve suggested that he use Chromium to which Brian commented that some people expect you to use Chromium and their website won’t work in Firefox. John said that he used Chromium for some things but he had found it unreliable; he still uses Konqueror because it is so good for basic searching and uses Firefox for storing passwords for logins such as rail companies. Steve said that he had tried Brave but acknowledged that there are all sorts of problems with the owner of Brave. Brian also mentioned Vivaldi.

Steve noted that EndeavourOS works OK on a desktop with a fixed network but has difficulties on laptops with changing network connections.

Bernie gave a demonstration of using LyX for mathematics; he had found that the HTML exporter replaced the mathematics with images; however, the LyXHTML exporter generates MathML; he wrote the SVG for the slide rule images in his demonstration directly because it is XML and has Python support.

There are various national societies along with the International Slide Rule Museum.

Also he mentioned a wonderful YouTube video on Oilfield Units. [Check it out!]

Darren has been exploring Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI) which provides fine grained memory protection though at present this can constrain access to an array.

In relation to the issue which Darren had raised at the previous meeting, David suggested that, once he had updated his system, he should look at the bottom of the login screen where he could find a choice of desktop including Wayland. Standard Slackware has several desktops installed and you can install others.

Steve described his current adventures with pfSense and OPNsense; as his version of pfSense required more than one point update, he had saved his config and tried to update to the current version but found that he could not get a full install; he could only get a download installer; so he didn’t do the update.

OPNsense is a fork like pfSense of m0n0wall for which support ceased in 2015.

As his hardware is ten years old, he decided to get another piece of hardware to run gigabit speeds; he found a Smoothwall P2 PFSense Router, changed the SSD in the Smoothwall box and installed OPNsense on it.

As he is using his supplier router as a NAT, he added the OPNsense router; this has four routable ports and so he can have Internet access through a separate box if his Proxmox server goes down. He will now gradually move things over.

Brian noted the availability of Proxmox help scripts.

David noted that Tony Hoare has died and that, when Edsger W. Dijkstra was asked what emails people should keep after he died, he said, ‘Just keep the ones from Tony.’

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