I didn't think playing BluRay on Linux was doable, yet I got it working!
I used the script `aacsdb-update.sh` to download the VUK for known
BluRay disks.
https://gist.github.com/CPT-GrayWolf/c26446298bc769238b349165a051e4b1
Plus, I installed the aacs packages.
```
sudo dnf install libaacs-utils libaacs-devel
```
# This allows Blu-Ray disks who's VUK is known
# to be played on systems using libaacs
Then, I set `JAVA_HOME` environment variable for my system.
```
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-21
```
Then I launched vlc and opened the disk (Top Gun) at /dev/sr0. It's
title is in the VUK database.
It plays!
More info on BluRay in Linux is available on the Arch site.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Blu-ray#Playback
Brian
--
Brian Lavender
https://www.brie.com/brian/
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture
Hi Folks,
I have some memory that I can't use, but may not be completely useless. If anybody is interested, speak up.
1 - 8GB PC3 10600 1333 MHz (2x4GB)
1 - 1GB PC3 1600 (1x8GB)
4 - 1GB PC2 6400 CL5
--
Chris.
V:916.799.9461
F:916.974.0428
A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right.
Q: > Why should I start my reply below the quoted text?
Don't forget the social at Kupros this evening.
Brian
--
Brian Lavender
https://www.brie.com/brian/
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture
I discovered that you can install custome kernel modules using secure
boot with Fedora.
https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Secure%20Boot
Brian
--
Brian Lavender
https://www.brie.com/brian/
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture
Future meeting location ideas.
Does anyone hang out at the Raley's on the Freeport? They have the
mezzanine area. I was thinking we could do a social there. I realized
that I could actually bring another monitor and plug it into my system.
That way we could just have people on both sides of the table.
--
Brian Lavender
https://www.brie.com/brian/
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture
January General Meeting
We will continue at Kupros for January.
If anyone has a different location in mind for February, please let me
know.
https://www.saclug.org/articles/2026/january-2026.html
When: Tue January 20, 2026 06:30 PM to 08:30 PM
Speaker: You
Location: Kupros
We will meet back at Kupros for this meeting! The last meeting we had,
some noted that it was too loud. I had been thinking about a different
location, but I didn’t investigate, so we will continue at Kupros
for now.
Bring your gadgets, laptop, etc., and we will discuss, evangelize and
strategize the upcoming meetings. We usually congregate on the second
floor. Look for a penguin printout or hackers with their laptops open.
Brian
--
Brian Lavender
https://www.brie.com/brian/
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture
We were discussing separate partitions for / and /home in an
installation and I noticed that my two separate partitions shared the
same space. btrfs to the rescue!
https://fedoramagazine.org/working-with-btrfs-subvolumes/
So where do the home and root subvolumes in Fedora Linux come from?
These are created by the installer at install time. Traditional
installations would often include a separate filesystem partition for the
/ and /home directories. During boot, these are then appropriately mounted
to assemble one full filesystem. But there is an issue with this approach:
Unless you use technologies such as lvm, it is very hard to change a
partitions size at some point in the future. As a consequence you may
end up in a situation where either your / or /home runs out of space,
while the respective other partition has lots of unused, free space left.
Since Btrfs subvolumes are all part of the same filesystem, they will
share the space that the underlying filesystem offers. Remember when
we created the subvolumes above? We never told Btrfs how big they are:
A subvolume can take up all the space the filesystem has, by default
nothing keeps it from doing so. However, we could dynamically impose
size limits via Btrfs qgroups, which can also be modified during runtime
(And we’ll see how in a later article in this series).
--
Brian Lavender
https://www.brie.com/brian/
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture
Don't forget the SacLUG tomorrow at Kupros.
https://www.saclug.org/articles/2025/december-2025.html
Brian
--
Brian Lavender
https://www.brie.com/brian/
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture
Now that you are all informed about AI due to my presentation! In the news this month there are two AI companies one US bound one from the UK they have released some impressive open source models.
One is Mistral from the UK https://mistral.ai/
On Huggingface they have 8 billion parameter model - this fits 8gb GPU memory space by Unsloth
https://huggingface.co/collections/unsloth/ministral-3
Another from the US is AllenAi https://allenai.org/olmo
Huggingface 8 billion parameter model by Unsloth
https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Olmo-3-7B-Instruct-GGUF
Why is this cool well for one thing the Chinese Deepseek and Qwen models have been the dominant opensource models to date. What is cool about the Olmo models is not only is the model open source but the training data is too. Huge win for them in regards to transparency
From a coding aspect UC Davis allows us to use Chat GPT 5 at work. With Visual Studio Code you run a tool called Codex with Chat GPT. In the last week or so I have automated a bunch of jobs and and deployments with it. Yes, I understand the code, but it does it faster than myself. I'm on a serous automation kick at work. Not only has the tool helped with automation but it helps me understand the code base on how some of these apps work that I have to trouble shoot. Franklin was a great place to work but tough to get anything done. It's been a breath of fresh air working at UC Davis, they let me fix and improve as needed. I feel super productive.
I hope everyone had a nice Holiday feast week last week and look forward to seeing you all at the next meetup!
Kevin
