Back in the day, getting a laptop with Linux pre-installed was almost unheard of. For the most part, you had to buy a computer with Windows and then install Linux yourself. This wasn't bad necessarily, but it did mean that the price of the computer usually included a Windows license you maybe didn't want. In other words, Microsoft was profiting off of Linux users -- just because the consumer bought a Windows PC.
In 2021, however, there are many computers to be had with Linux pre-installed -- thanks to pioneers like System76. Of course, nowadays, big companies like Dell and Lenovo are selling Linux machines too. Today, yet another such laptop hits the market -- the Star Labs StarBook Mk V. This 14-inch notebook can be had your choice of several quality Linux distributions pre-installed, such as Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and Manjaro to name a few. And yes, Windows 10 is an option too.
"The StarBook Mk V features a 14-inch ARC display, a true matte display that prevents glare with an Anti-Reflective Coating. It also features a hard coat rated at 3H to prevent against damage. The Intel Core 11th-generation processors boast outstanding performance. The Iris Xe Graphics provides a 180 prcent improvement in graphical performance," says Star Labs.
Oracle Linux users in North America are gathering online tomorrow (Thurs. May 6, 10am PT) for the latest edition of the State of the Penguin. Wim Coekaerts, Oracle Software Development SVP and Linux Foundation Vice Chairman, will be leading what promises to be an enlightening conversation about the industry landscape, customer use cases, and the latest Oracle Linux technologies, including containers, KVM, open-source contributions, and developer tools, all to help Penguinistas "explore possibilities and update your plans."
Coekaerts' co-host for the event will be Sergio Leunissen, VP in Oracle’s infrastructure engineering team. Leunissen currently leads initiatives to deliver solutions for developers on Oracle’s operating system and Oracle Infrastructure Cloud, and he’s responsible for Oracle’s presence on GitHub.
I had the opportunity to talk with Coekaerts about the event last week. He's widely described as an "industry luminary," an appellation I found to be something of an understatement. He led the last online State of the Penguin, held six months ago.
In a a previous article I discussed using 2.5GbE NICs in my home lab. In that article I used the NICs on Windows 10 systems. In this article I will use the NICs on the same systems but with Linux installed on them. I will first give a quick overview of why I am interested in 2.5GbE networking, discuss my testing systems, test the network performance between a Linux and Windows 10 system, between two Linux systems, and then give you my final thoughts on 2.5GbE networking on Linux systems.
There are a few factors that got me interested in using 2.5GbE networking in my home lab; Intel release a NIC that supported it, wireless networking speeds, and the availability of routers supporting multigigabit networking.
As development teams adopt Kubernetes, they are challenged not only by a growing list of complex technologies but also an expanded role that now includes shipping and operating the systems they build. Built on major open source Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects including Envoy, Emissary-ingress, Argo, and Telepresence, the Ambassador Developer Control Plane is an integrated solution that manages the cloud native infrastructure that developers use to code, ship, and run applications for Kubernetes environments. Ambassador DCP unlocks developer productivity for local and remote environments, enables rapid human-centric service discovery across organizations, and lets entire teams safely deploy and manage applications for production.
There's always some chatter about Wayland but what even is it and what makes it so different from Xorg which the vast majority of people on Linux are still running.
What if you could run Ubuntu but also had access to a community software repository similar to the AUR? Pacstall attempts to become the "AUR" Ubuntu wishes it had.
Hello and welcome to the 409th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, we have an interview with Jordan Sherer, KN4CRD, the creator and developer of JS8Call, an amateur radio weak-signal application for having complete QSOs during poor band conditions. Jordan is also the winner of the 2021 Amateur Radio Software Award so we have the board of ARSA on the show discuss Jordan's achievement and the efforts of the ARSA board to promote free, open-source software in the amateur radio space. We hope you enjoy!
Dr. Andre Kudra of esatus.com discusses SSI, or Self-Sovereign Identity. It's a hot and fast-moving topic with a growing base of hackers, companies, nonprofits, and whole states, provinces and countries. Aaron Newcomb and Doc Searls probe Andre for lots of great intelligence about how SSI puts individuals in full charge of how they present minimized ID credentials safely, and inside a whole new framework. They also talk with Andre about his involvement with the demoscene and retro computing, which are especially huge in Europe. It's a great discussion on this episode of FLOSS Weekly.
Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) is a framework that is mostly used to build and install external kernel modules. However, it can also be used to install a specif patch to the modules of the current kernel, for example, to apply a specific fix.
For example, when PipeWire 0.3.20 was released earlied this year, it brought support for the mSBC codec which I had added, and which works natively or through the external programs oFono or hsphfpd, when connected to a Bluetooth Headset through the HFP profile.
Unfortunately, for kernels 5.8, 5.9 and 5.10, this support does not work with USB Bluetooth chipsets from vendors other than Intel.
While the fix was simple and has since been backported to the LTS kernels, if you are like me and are running a Linux distribution based on a non-LTS kernel, for example Ubuntu 20.04 with kernel 5.8, you will not be able to benefit from this fix. That is, unless you use DKMS to patch the kernel's Bluetooth module.
Mesa 21.1 is available today as the latest quarterly feature release to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. There are many features to show with this new release and it even managed to release on-schedule.
Mesa 21.1 brings a wide assortment of improvements to the many contained open-source user-space drivers, but as usual are dominated by enhancements to the Intel and Radeon driver components, especially the Vulkan drivers given the mature state of the OpenGL drivers these days.
Congratulations to the Audacity development team and Muse Group. In two significant developments, Audacity version 3 was released in March 2021 – its first major update in many years – and Muse Group announced that it has acquired the Audacity project and will take it forward as a free and open source project.
Audacity is a free and open source digital audio editing and recording application. Started by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg, it has clocked over 200 million downloads during its lifetime, and has been translated into dozens of languages. Eric Raymond once wrote of Audacity: “The central virtue of this program is that it has a superbly transparent and natural user interface, one that erects as few barriers between the user and the sound file as possible.” High praise, indeed.
According to Inkscape’s website, the software was created for designers of all kinds including those in marketing and branding, engineering/CAD, web graphics, cartooning and for individual uses. You can get started by downloading the software to your Linux, Windows or macOS device.
When I first downloaded Inkscape, the interface reminded me of Microsoft Paint. This made it really intuitive to use, and all of the features are available for free. According to the website, those features include object creation, object manipulation, fill and stroke features, operations on paths, text support, rendering and a variety of file formats.
There are tons of resources available on Inkscape's website under the "Learn" tab including an FAQ section, tutorials, books/manuals and a guide to how to use Inkscape for animation. Users also have access to Inkscape's community which includes user support and discussions in the form of chat, forums and more.
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If you're looking for a free alternative to Photoshop, GIMP is a graphic design software worth checking out. While you can't use the software online, it can be downloaded to Linux, OS X or Windows computers.
GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It's a free software that was designed for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring, according to the website. The interface is really similar to Adobe's Photoshop, so if you're already familiar with the tools and shortcuts, using GIMP will be easy.
You can get started by checking out the tutorials online which include beginner basics, photo editing tips, painting guides and more. If you're ready to try out the software yourself, you can download it here.
Since the Linux operating system is characterized as a multitasking operating system, a daemon is, by definition, a program that continuously executes as a background process. In short, the execution of this process is not dependent on an active user’s system interaction. A normal system user cannot control the periodic execution of a daemon process.
The naming convention that defines most daemon processes is the one letter ‘suffix’ d. This naming convention makes it possible to differentiate between normal system processes and daemon-powered processes. For example, sshd is a daemon process responsible for the management of incoming SSH connections. Another daemon process example is syslogd. It is responsible for the Linux system logging facility.
In a Linux environment, the launch of daemons is at boot time. Since the Linux system is a perfect Unix clone, an init process qualifies as the parent process to a daemon. To start and stop daemons on your Linux operating system, you first need to access the /etc/init.d scripts directory on your OS.
Today we are looking at how to install Wizard101 on a Chromebook with Crossover 20. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
In this video, we are looking at how to install LibreOffice on Deepin 20.2.
hen we update FreeBSD from 12 to 13, we get an updated version of ZFS. FreeBSD 13 released with OpenZFS support with various performance boosts. Sometimes OS patching and minor FreeBSD upgrade can also offer an updated zpool version. In any case, we need to upgrade the ZFS storage pools version to get newer functionality and bug fixes. This page explains how to update the ZFS storage pools version on FreeBSD.
The Raspberry Pi's convenience, versatility, and usefulness simply cannot be understated. With just a few clicks, you can set up just about everything, including the ability to set up Plex on a Raspberry Pi. After you've finished loading up your library of movies, TV shows, and even music, you can then download the Plex app on any of your devices and enjoy your favorite content from anywhere. Today, we're going to show you how you can get everything set up.
You can perform operations on SQS like list, create, delete Queues and send messages, receive messages from your terminal using aws-cli. In this article, we will see the commands to perform these kinds of operations. Before we proceed, it is assumed that you are familiar with AWS SQS Queue.
To know in detail about options available for aws-cli, visit the official documentation here.
The Tor Project now has a status page which shows the state of our major services.
You can check status.torprojet.org for news about major outages in Tor services, including v3 and v2 onion services, directory authorities, our website (torproject.org), and the check.torproject.org tool. The status page also displays outages related to Tor internal services, like our GitLab instance.
This post documents why we launched status.torproject.org, how the service was built, and how it works.
After a bit of an uproar from customers, Humble Bundle have decided to ditch their idea of replacing sliders that let people customize where their money goes.
In their original blog post, they mentioned the sliders that let you adjust the amount you give to Humble, Developers, Charity and Partners would be replaced with a static two-tier system that was giving a lot more to Developers and Humble. Now though, in a fresh blog post they're backtracking.
Return of Them: Eye of The Storm is the final update of the season for Don't Starve Together and so it's going off with quite a big bang along with a good discount too.
"With the three lunar altars now complete, the truth at the center of this ancient mystery will finally come to light... They've been here all along. Don't Starve Together: Return of Them - Eye of the Storm is now available for all players. With this conclusion of the Return of them Story Arc, worlds collide as old threats and familiar faces make themselves known."
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A fantastic time to get into a thoroughly enjoyable co-op survival game, from Klei Entertainment who have been a very Linux-friendly developer.
There’s something about having a portable Steam machine that fascinates me. Being able to play desktop, non-mobile games on the go is a concept that few seemed to have accomplish. The Smach Zero held a lot of promise, but I haven’t heard anything from the team in a long time, and who knows if the poor backers of the project will ever get their hands on it. There’s the GPD Win, and it looks great, but the thing is just too darn expensive. Finally, while the Aya Neo looks fantastic as well, it’s another big-budget gadget that I personally don’t want to spend that much on.
I’ve looked into making tablets/gaming handhelds in times past, but often transforming that project into reality requires a lot of tinkering. A lot of tools that need to be used that I don’t have. Soldering, splicing, 3D printing, scripting, hot gluing…the list goes on. Another problem that I had was, while the electronics market is littered with ARM-powered SBCs, especially from the likes of the Raspberry Pi, exploring into the x86 world was relatively untouched, as far as handhelds go. I wasn’t content playing retro games by means of emulation. I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t play my games on Steam on native hardware; it had to be done through streaming. I wanted something more, and I knew the only way I could do that was use an x86-based computer.
Hope people have had a lovely spring. This month has passed quickly! I have put off writing the monthly post because I was busy with a weekend project.
My master thesis was about how to apply transparency logs and reproducible builds to give package rebuilders the ability to produce tamper evident logs. This is handy since any one package build can easily be proven to be part of the log, and you can very easily fill inn the history from one point in time to another by hashing files in the correct order.
These days transparency logs has seen a larger adoption with projects like sigstore and trustix. What’s interesting is that kernel.org publishes a transparency log of all the git push operations.
I converted FatDog64 version 811 to run in a container. Get a desktop, looks OK, tested a couple of apps, such as Geany and LibreOffice, OK.
Ramachandra reported that the SSD in his new HP14 laptop was not detect by EasyOS.
The UBPorts team is set to roll out the next update to Ubuntu Touch on May 12th. While Ubuntu Touch OTA-17 won’t have as many user-facing changes as some previous builds of the operating system, there are still some goodies baked in, particularly for folks with a couple of specific devices.
For example, Ubuntu Touch OTA-17 is the first version to support NFC hardware. The feature only works on certain devices, including the Google Pixel 3a and Volla Phone, but it should allow developers to create Ubuntu Touch apps that make use of NFC to read or write NFC tags or communicate with other NFC-enabled hardware like wireless earbuds.
Warpinator allow you quickly and easily to transfer files between Linux PCs, Android phones, tablets, and other devices.
Warpinator is a local network file transfer application developed by Linux Mint. It is written with Python 3 and was released by the Linux Mint project in September of last year. Warpinator also can be installed on many other Linux distributions.
Server configuration (FTP, NFS, Samba) is overkill for casual file transfers between two computers, and it’s a real pity to use external media (Internet services, USB sticks, external HDDs) just to share files when there’s a local network which could do just that.
Developers and Tensorflow enthusiasts may be interested in a new smart artificial intelligent camera in the form of the Imago VisionAI. The VisionAI offers support for TensorFlow Lite or AutoML Vision Edge and runs on the Debian-based Linux operating system, making it easily programmable to meet the application needs through a Linux SDK with a VisionBox Interface C++ Library and FG camera library.
NASA’s Perseverance rover is equipped with a Linux-driven, Atom-based CompuLab COMEX-IE38 module designed to compress images. The rover also has a Qualcomm 801 Linux system like its Ingenuity copter, which is embarking on a new scouting mission.
As LinuxGizmos and many other sites reported in February, NASA’s semi-autonomous Ingenuity drone copter is equipped with an embedded Linux computer based on the Qualcomm 801 (formerly Snapdragon 801). Ingenuity, which has since run several successful test flights on Mars, making it the first craft to fly in the atmosphere of an extra-terrestrial planet, uses the Qualcomm 801 via the Qualcomm Flight platform for navigation and camera control and processing.
We wrote recently about how difficult it is to understand the data companies collect from you, and what they’re doing with it. These companies determine how your data is used and who benefits. Cutting people out of decisions about their data is an inequity that harms not only individuals, but also society and the internet. We believe that you should determine who benefits from your data. Today, we’re taking a step in that direction with the alpha release of Mozilla Rally. Rally is now available for desktop Firefox users age 19 and older in the USA.
Rally is aimed at rebuilding your equity in your data. We allow you to choose how to contribute your data and for what purpose. We’re building a community to help understand some of the biggest problems of the internet, and we want you to join us.
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We started Rally as an innovation program, building on earlier experiments with trusted research institutions. We are exploring new products and public interest projects that return equity to communities in the coming months. We are data optimists and want to change the way the data economy works for both people and day-to-day business. We are committed to putting our users first every step of the way, and building a community together.
LibreOffice 7.1.2 was released on April 1st
Here is a companion article to my upcoming PLI talk on the special risks and rewards of open source and standards in IoT. It was published on PLI PLUS, the online research database of PLI.
We are proud to announce Pyston v2.2, the latest version of our faster implementation of the Python programming language. This version is significantly faster than previous ones, and importantly is now open source.
Pyston 2.2 is out today as the latest version of this performant Python implementation. Separately, Facebook has introduced Cinder as a new incubator project providing a speedy Python JIT implementation.
Pyston 2.2 is out today as the new version of this alternative Python implementation. With Pyston 2.2 the developers claim their implementation is 30% faster now than the stock Python for web server benchmarks. Speed-ups this time around include work on their JIT and attribute cache mechanisms.
This has been a very busy day for releases and on behalf of the Python development community we’re happy to announce the availability of three new Python releases.
Three new versions of the Python programming language have been released, one of which is a beta release of the upcoming Python version 3.10.
It what the Python release team called "a very busy day for releases", Monday, 3 May saw the release of Python 3.8.10, 3.9.5 and 3.10.0b1.
According to user reports on the Apple Support Communities, the Safari 14.1 update breaks functionality on popular websites like eBay. The issue appears to predominantly affect Safari 14.1 on macOS Catalina and macOS Mojave.
There are reports from developers about ongoing problems with the latest versions of Apple's browser, too. Google Chrome developer advocate Jake Archibald reports that localStorage in Safari 14.1 is broken, causing tabs with use the same localStorage for text boxes.
A CNCF member since 2018, New Relic is committed to making observability a data-driven approach and daily practice for millions of engineers. The observability company has invested heavily in open standards, open instrumentation, and open collaboration with a number of its own open source projects. Previously a silver sponsor for AdoptOpenJDK, New Relic is a founding member of Eclipse Adoptium, which is becoming the leading provider of high-quality OpenJDK-based binaries.
The Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board has issued its report on the submission of (intentionally and unintentionally) buggy patches from the University of Minnesota.
On April 20, 2021, in response to the perception that a group of University of Minnesota (UMN) researchers had resumed sending compromised code submissions to the Linux kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman asked the community to stop accepting patches from UMN and began a re-review of all submissions previously accepted from the University. This report summarizes the events that led to this point, reviews the "Hypocrite Commits" paper that had been submitted for publication, and reviews all known prior kernel commits from UMN paper authors that had been accepted into our source repository. It concludes with a few suggestions about how the community, with UMN included, can move forward. Contributors to this paper include members of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board (TAB), with patch review help from many other members of the Linux kernel developer community.
UMN worked well within the kernel community for many years, submitting numerous bug-fixes that were merged into past kernel releases. Last year (2020), one member of the UMN community chose to do a research project that involved submitting patches that attempted to intentionally introduce flaws in the kernel. The trust between the kernel community and UMN was broken when this project was made public. The UMN developers went quiet for seven months and then started submitting a new handful of poor quality patches to the community. Many assumed that trickery was afoot, engendering a reaction that caused a halt to acceptance of UMN kernel contributions and forced us to re-review all prior submissions.
Due diligence required an audit to identify which authors were involved in different UMN research projects, identify the intent of any flawed patches, and remove flawed patches regardless of intent. Reestablishing the community's trust in researcher groups is important as well, since this incident could have a wide-reaching impact on trust in both directions that might chill participation by any researchers in kernel development. The developer community should be able to trust that researchers are sending quality patches meant to improve the kernel, and researchers should trust the developer community will not undermine the researchers' reputations when mistakes are made. The recommendations in this report aim to move beyond this conflict, providing a way to help both communities to work together better.
The fire between the Linux kernel community and the University of Minnesota (UMN) is being put out. Thanks to an ill-thought-out Linux security project, two UMN graduate students tried to insert deliberately buggy patches into Linux. Greg Kroah-Hartman, the well-respected Linux kernel maintainer for the Linux stable branch, responded by banning not only them but any UMN-connected developers from contributing to the Linux kernel. Now, UMN has addressed the Linux kernel developer's community's concerns. And, in a message to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) and volunteer senior Linux kernel maintainers and developers have reported on what they found when they closely and thoroughly examined patches from UMN academics.
Remote code execution, privilege escalation to root and lateral movement through a victim’s environment are all on offer for the unpatched or unaware.
A veritable cornucopia of security vulnerabilities in the Exim mail server have been uncovered, some of which could be chained together for unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE), gaining root privileges and worm-style lateral movement, according to researchers.
DDoS cyberattacks can happen anytime and devastate any business, but by understanding how they occur and how to prevent them, you can continue to surf the web safely.
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a type of cyberattack that hackers often use to breach a network and overload it with unwanted traffic to disrupt services. Once the system is strained to its limit, it no longer accepts legitimate traffic, and services start to fail.
Think of a DDoS attack as a crowd blocking the way into your favorite coffee shop: It's tough for you to get in, and it makes it difficult for that business to distinguish a real customer from the rest of the crowd. Because of that confusion, it's tough for businesses that are targeted by a DDoS attack to serve their customers and distinguish who's real and who's not.
NETFLIX'S FORMER VICE president of IT operations was convicted of taking bribes from technology vendors in exchange for awarding them contracts with Netflix, the US Department of Justice announced Friday. The former VP's illegal scheme forced colleagues to use a variety of products, including one that suffered from "severe" performance problems and another that Netflix employees objected to because they preferred a different product the company was already paying for, the DOJ said.
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Two days before registering that company, "Kail signed a Sales Representative Agreement to receive cash payments from Netenrich, Inc. amounting to 12 percent of the billings from Netenrich to Netflix for its contract providing staffing and IT services to Netflix," the DOJ announcement said. "Later in 2012, Kail began to receive 15 percent of all billing payments that VistaraIT, LLC, a wholly owned company of Netenrich, received from Netflix. From 2012 to 2014, Netenrich paid Unix Mercenary approximately $269,986, and VistaraIT paid Unix Mercenary approximately $177,863. The payments stopped in mid-2014, when Kail left Netflix."
Kail also had kickback agreements with the vendors Platfora, Sumo Logic, Netskope, Maginatics, ElasticBox, and Numerify, the DOJ said. For example, Kail "became an advisor and received options for shares in the company Sumo Logic" in June 2012 and then "authorized and signed on behalf of Netflix a vendor agreement between Netflix and Sumo Logic," the DOJ said, adding:
On May 4, 2021, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination against U.S. Patent 7,523,497, owned by PacSec3, an NPE. PacSec3 was formed in 2020 with NACAR IP LLC as its managing member. NACAR IP was also formed in early 2020 with Dynamic IP Deals, LLC (d/b/a DynaIP), a patent monetization company, identified as its managing member. The ‘497 patent has been asserted against F5 Networks, NetScout Systems, Palo Alto Networks, McAfee, Cisco, and Juniper Networks.
On May 3, 2021, continuing in the ongoing efforts in the SEP Video Codec Zone, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 6,877,038, owned by Sovereign Peak Ventures, a Dominion Harbor entity. The ’038 patent relates to video processing and has been asserted against LG and TCL.
