Here's wishing each and every one of you and your loved ones a beautiful 2021 filled with the best of health and happiness :)

The last year has been one of the toughest years in recent history for all of humanity. It is a year that has left scars on us that shall show for many many years. In one way or the other we have all changed. Now it is upto us to take the lessons of the past year and help build a better future. This is the only true way to pay homage to so many of us who have sadly not made it and all the others who have been adversely affected.

To leave the world (hopefully) in a better position than how we found it - this is the driving force of many of us. This is why we want to create, to learn, to do. In a small way the eBrainPool project too and its developers want to give back to the society by bringing to life our vision of one day allowing users to just use software from any device around them. Work with any software regardless of whether it is installed on your device or not or even if it can run natively on your device or not. Software as a shared resource used remotely over different networks - LAN, Internet, Mesh, Decentralized or any other - on any device.

While practical considerations of a day job have meant we have not being able to dedicate as much time as we would like to - something I hope changes in the coming year - this doesn't mean we have not been working on our vision. A short note on what we have been working on :

  • Getting eBrainPool to run over the decentralized Retroshare friend-to-friend network remains a priority. Attempts have been on to create a SSH plugin for Retroshare. While text applications work well, forwarding X over SSH over Retroshare has kept failing. Many rewrites of this code trying to multithread the code and remove any bottlenecks have been in vain. The problem is that the X session on the SSH client end freezes the entire X session. This maybe because the X server is waiting for some more information but since Retroshare itself is running within the same X session, a freeze means no further data can come through and the session remains frozen till either the ssh client or Retroshare or the X session are killed. Another corroboration of this hypothesis is that if we launch a second X server - say a Xephyr instance - and route the remote X application to be displayed under this X server instead of being part of the X session under which Retroshare is running, then all works well without any freeze.

The next attempt will be to create a plugin on top of retroshare-service which is without a GUI and therefore can run outside the X session. I am in touch with the Retroshare developers to see how to go about building this plugin. Retroshare-service also has a lovely JSON API that can be used to extend it. We will need to see what is the best approach for both the eBrainPool and the Retroshare communities.

So what else? I leave you with a lovely project I have come across Anbox this allows us to run Android apps under Linux using the Linux kernel of the host system. How does this tie in with eBrainPool? Time shall tell ;) ;)

Once again a Happy and Healthy New Year :)