Alpine package ideas
CUPS filter for the Seiko RP-D10
I own a thermal printer, and it is currently setup on mountain. It is shared over Samba so that I can access it both through my old Windows laptops or through my Linux setups. That setup took me a while since I had to learn CUPS, Samba, and install the drivers from source. Fortunately, those drivers are under GPL, so it is in theory possible to package them for Alpine. The official drivers are kinda hard to find since you have to register with fake information about yourself to access the file list, so here is a quick link: https://www.sii-ps.com/common/CUPSFilter_Ver.1.2.0.zip
wifite
A Wi-Fi password finder, basically a simplified UI for aircrack-ng
and the like. I use it sometimes during my warwalking activities; although I mean for that warwalking to contribute public APs to OpenStreetMap, wifite can also be useful to find out if an access point is actually secure or not.
gqrx
A rather simple SDR GUI. I sometimes use it to listen to signals outside, such as listening in to the various conversations of the teams organizing the Tour de France when it passes by my city.
opensimulator
Remember Second Life? OpenSimulator is an open source server that runs on the same protocol as Second Life. I started really exploring computers right when SL came out, so I did play around with it a little bit even though I was really confused. A French website, on which I had learnt to code, had a tutorial on running your own SL-like server, and that is how I got to know about OpenSimulator. I recently connected to some existing servers and was amazed to see all the history, just like how amazed I am sometimes when I find old websites on geocities-like hosting services that still exist in France. I want to learn more about those worlds and the best way is probably to just get my own.
firestorm
While OpenSimulator is the server, Firestorm is one of the clients. It can connect both to Second Life and to OpenSimulator servers and seems to be still pretty actively maintained.
dictd
If I have the opportunity to replace a service on my web browser with some software available offline that uses a lot less resources, I take it. dictd
uses an old protocol to allow accessing dictionaries, thesauri, etc., and it is available on Debian and Ubuntu. While it is possible to connect to remote DICT servers and some are still online right now, it is also possible to run a DICT server locally and have your own dictionaries on your computer. I often use various dictionaries in English, French, or to translate between both, as well as a thesaurus.
I tried working on this one, but it is quite complex since the configuration is not trivial to manage when the dictionaries are in separate packages. Additionally, the dictionaries have strange licenses and finding their official source so I can rebuild them from source in the APKBUILD
is not simple.
sweethome3d
I sometimes like to design houses just for fun. There also are two buildings nearby that we regularly go urbexing into with friends and that we would like to reproduce in 3D for historical purposes as well as maybe just making a video game in that scene. While Sweet Home 3D is far from the tool any 3D designer reaches for, especially for a game, it is much easier to use for me than any actual 3D design tool like SketchUp or some Autodesk thing. It should also be pretty easy to package since it is in Java.
virtualbox
Being part of the things that got stolen by Oracle, this is the kind of software that Alpine would never want in its official repos. That doesn’t mean that that will stop me from packaging it in a private repo though.
QEMU is completely unable to deal with my Windows 2000 machine; technically, it will work, and there is an official wiki page that documents how to use it. However, there is no sound, the resolution is low and the VM is globally slow. Both VirtualBox and VMWare can run this just fine, just like Windows 98SE, and I put a lot of importance on those VMs, sometimes requiring them for my strange projects.
VirtualBox looks pretty hard to package, for rather obvious reasons since it is now Oracle and is an hypervisor. The alternative might be to move my setups to laptops as I have wanted to do for a while, for example with warrior. However, seeing as warrior
is visibly unable to handle Windows 98SE and I have no other laptop that could fit, that would mean giving up on that one…
inform7
Inform is a strange language that lets you create text-based games. I saw some townies use it to create pretty strange things and I really want to see just how far I could push it, as well as maybe, sometimes, create actual games.
Inform is currently proprietary, although its creator says he wants to make it open-source. Until then, it will go on a private repo…
bad ideas
A discussion on IRC led to some ideas for other terrible packages:
nuke
- Erases your disk upon installation.
landmine
- Erases your disk upon uninstallation.
nothing
- Just nothing. A completely useless empty package.
everything
- Its dependencies are everything that can be installed without causing a conflict.
kitchen-sink
- An empty package that conflicts with
everything
because of puns. bathwater
- A package that depends on
baby
, so that you can throw the baby out with the bathwater upon removal. - This could also install some e-girl wallpapers for maximum curse.
thanos
- Removes half of your packages upon installation.
russian-roulette
nuke
, but it only erases your disk with a 1/6 chance.russian-roulette-openrc
russian-roulette
as a service, erase your disk with a 1/6 chance on each boot or each shutdown.perl
- The official Perl package, but it triggers a Perl fork bomb when installed:
perl -e "fork while fork"
\u200b
- A package whose name is a zero-width space.
yodawg
- A full copy of the package repository itself.
systemd-openrc
- A bunch of OpenRC services that allow you to be confused between systemd and openrc without rewriting every command:
service restart something
calls/etc/init.d/restart
, which calls the properservice something restart
cant-touch-this
- A package that uninstalls itself as soon as you install it.
recursion
- A package that depends on itself.
evil-sh
- https://github.com/mathiasbynens/evil.sh
emacs
- Not only does it install Emacs, it installs systemE so your computer becomes Emacs.
- Alternatively, this could symlink every binary to emacs, so that anything you run is emacs:
find . -type f -executable -not -path '/usr/bin/emacs' -exec ln -s /usr/bin/emacs '{}' +
energystar
- Issues SysRq commands to shut the computer down as quickly as possible to save energy.