Ultimate questions on Linux, the Universe and everything

For a long time, at least a year, Steam Family sharing has been broken on Linux PCs. Fortunately something has changed and it is suddenly working again (as of January 2017). I'm a bit disappointed at Valve's support, though. The problem hasn't been commented on at all by Valve, even though it has been reported both in the Steam support forum and on github: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/4051 At least the problem could have been acknowledged.

There have been efforts a few years ago in bringing 10 Gbit/s network speeds to PC motherboards. It has also been used in servers, but mostly using fiber cable. It is only recently when the standard has evolved to be usable with regular twisted pair copper cable. With CAT6a cable you could in theory reach 100 m using 10GBASE-T. Due to the high requirements of 10 Gbit ethernet, it is often not possible to communicate over longer links due to not spec compliant cable, or when using much more common CAT5e cable. What happens then is that the network link speed is lowered from 10 Gbit/s to 1 GBit/s. Recently a new standard has been evolving to lower the implications of this problem. New speeds of 5 Gbit/s and 2.5 Gbit/s have been introduced in a new standard IEEE 802.3bz and then later in practice as the NBASE-T alliance. With IEEE 802.3bz, a speed of 5 GBit/s can be used with up to 100 m CAT5e copper cable. What this means is that when your 10 Gbit/s link doesn't manage to k...

I've got a Razer Deathadder mouse connected to one of my PCs. This is a quite popular gaming mouse. It doesn't work fine in a standard Linux distro (at least on Fedora). The resolution is too high and it isn't possible to turn down. In the past I used a script and xinput to lower the mouse sensitivity . But there is a driver for Linux created by the free software community, in this case by Michael Büsch . The driver automatically sets the resolution to something usable and you can set different profiles and tune it from the command line or using a GUI application (the latter which doesn't currently work on Fedora due to missing python libraries, but no big deal). I've been using this driver for a long time, first by compiling it from source, and later through the rpmsphere-release repostory at https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:zhonghuaren . At one point it stopped working and I found out that it hadn't been updated in a few months in t...