Yet another sad story, maybe one of the reasons I prefer macOS (formerly OS X) as my primary OS. This post is more like a note to self. Hopefully things will change for the better one day. Today the “options” are quite limited:
Even though this is a mini article, I do anticipate some hits due to normal interest on the topic. Of course there is a 3rd option: just buy an external full featured BD player device.
Not always a success story. Since this is a work in progress kind of thing (I currently struggle with it), I will be very brief. I hit some issues (instability) on a brand new laptop using Debian derivate distro (both Ubuntu and Mint). I had a bit of comfort seeing that I’m not alone. The exact error and similar symptoms are to be found here. It seems to be either firmware or adapter settings related. I noticed that on Intel’s page there is a newer version of iwlwifi-3160-ucode-25.30.14.0.tgz versus iwlwifi-3160-ucode-16.242414.0.tgz on Linux Kernel’s page. I will follow this lead for the moment. If I feel that I need to spend too much time with it, I’m going to take more radical measures (install something else).
Update (5 min later):
It seems that version I downloaded from Intel’s page loads without problem.
dacbarbos@dacairone:~$ journalctl -b | grep firmware
iun 18 11:57:34 dacairone kernel: iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: loaded firmware version 25.30.14.0 op_mode iwlmvm
iun 18 11:57:36 dacairone NetworkManager[757]: <info> [1466240256.3999] manager[0x10721a0]: monitoring kernel firmware directory ‘/lib/firmware’.
iun 18 11:57:55 dacairone org.freedesktop.fwupd[741]: (fwupd:1955): Fu-WARNING **: Failed to coldplug: UEFI firmware updating not supported
dacbarbos@dacairone:~$
I’ve been quite ignorant about it like a true “modern” cloud services consumer. Well, this weekend I managed to catch up a little bit with them. It looks like there’s both good and bad news. The good news is: our data is now hosted on Dropbox’s own storage infrastructure (out of AWS where it was originally hosted). Yes, I missed that announcement. For me as a data storage professional, the details of their Magic Pocket architecture are quite interesting from a technical point of view. I’ve been reading before about somewhat similar approach (implemented by other provider/vendor). Now the bad news is about their ideas for future. They call it “Project Infinite” and you may read all the glory details here. Why I call it bad news? Simply because I share most of the views already expressed by other people on their page comments section. I’m already uncomfortable with Oracle’s VirtualBox kext. I don’t need more.
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