This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we have an exciting interview lined up for you, with Nico from Garuda Linux. Then we cover the controversial situation around the audio editor, Audacity, and their new desktop privacy policy. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
Dual Licensing is a very poorly understood way that corporations can undermine Free Software, no one really talks about it but they should. This allows for maintainers to take what looks like Free Software and take it proprietary without breaking any rules. but it's not all bad.
A quick look at Fedora Silverblue, your feedback including scanning and iOS vs Android, and FOSS devs actually making mony with guest Daniel Foré.
One of the many reasons people resist switching to an Open Source operating system (Linux) is a need to use the Microsoft Office suite. In this episode we discuss some of the most popular ways of running an office suite on Linux short of running a full copy of Windows and Office in a virtual machine.
I'd like to take a look at a browser that I've been starting to like more and more: Brave. They opened up their own search engine recently, in beta, and their browser has always been billed as a very privacy focused solution. So let's take a look at the browser itself, and the search engine, and see if this combo is deserving of the web browser crown
With last night's release of Linux 5.14-rc1 the merge window is officially over for this next version of the Linux kernel. With that, here is a look at the highlights for the forthcoming Linux 5.14 kernel based upon our original reporting during the merge window.
Linux 5.14 was another busy cycle with seeing changes like a new tracer for operating system noise, memfd_secret for allowing secret memory areas on the system, many CPU/architecture-related updates, core scheduling for allowing better security with Intel Hyper Threading, many open-source graphics driver improvements for Intel and AMD, removal of legacy IDE support, and much more.
We are pleased to announce that the File System Microconference has been accepted into the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference. File systems are key to any operating system, and especially for the Linux kernel. They are the gateway to the underling storage, or could simply live in RAM as a virtual information repository. The file system developers are constantly adding features and improvements. Some of these new features are slow to be utilized by the application developers, or they may be used in interesting ways that the file system developers never thought of.
Intel open-source engineers are back around with a new take on introducing a PECI subsystem for the Linux kernel to ultimately make their Xeon servers more attractive and friendly for OpenBMC usage.
PECI is the Platform Environment Control Interface and is for communication between Intel Xeon processors and BMCs / management controllers. The patches being worked on by Intel would bring-up a PECI subsystem within the kernel for managing this communication interface and provide various Intel drivers for PECI devices. The focus of this mainline support is to enhance the support for OpenBMC on Intel servers for that open-source BMC software stack that is Linux-based and in turn would benefit from mainline PECI support.
I just run through a howto where I was asked to execute a command which used the command output from a subshell as an argument for another command.
Sending emails from the Linux terminal is necessary, especially when you're automating emails using a shell script. Email programs like Thunderbird and Evolution might seem like the go-to tools, but they can feel bloated at times. If you are comfortable working with the command line, it might be beneficial for you to send/receive emails via Linux's very own heart system.
You can configure Gmail and other email clients within Linux to access your mailbox, send emails, and respond to emails from the terminal directly. To access your mailbox, you will first need to configure Mutt, which will make things easier for you in the long run.
Firewalld is a firewall management tool which acts as a front-end for the Linux kernel's netfilter framework. Its is powerful zone based firewall which monitor network traffic and apply a set of defined rules to control incoming/outgoing traffic.
Firewalld is written in Python and is part of systemd. It supports both IPv4 and IPv6 networks.
The main benefit are changes can be done without service restarts and with D-Bus interface configurations can be managed easily.
While I'm not a fan of programming, I do love working from the command line as much as possible and have great respect for programmers and what they can do. As I work on evolving my Linux skills, I find a lot of cross-pollination between Linux and macOS in the Terminal due to their shared UNIX-base, and I recently got into using some more advanced (for me) Linux commands on my scripts.
You can complete a VMware to AWS migration with Amazon's CLI tool and a few commands, but a migration with large data sets requires preparation and testing.
When a user logs into a system there are scripts that are executed. These scripts can be manipulated to allow specific programs to be run, services to be started or stopped, environment variables to be set or modified, etc.
There is no limit to what can be done with login scripts. The same can be done with logout scripts as well.
The login scripts are not specific to when a user logs into the system at the initial login screen. When a user changes privileges the scripts can also be executed.
Plex Media Player is a native Linux GTK application that makes it surprisingly easy to enjoy your Plex content from the Linux desktop and is excellent for those who use Plex on Linux and don’t want to use it in the web browser. In this guide, we’ll show you how to set it up on Linux.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Backdrop CMS on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Backdrop CMS is a simple, lightweight, and easy-to-use Content Management System used to build attractive, professional websites. It is very simple to use, that even users with minimal technical knowledge can easily create web content using this CMS tool.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Backdrop (CMS) Content Management System on a CentOS 8.
Linux is a multi-user operating system that allows multiple users to access the system at the same time.
As a Linux system administrator, you have to check who are logged into the system before starting to work on any issues, especially when you have a team members spread across multiple locations. Because, if multiple users are making the changes in the same configuration file, it may create additional problems.
So, make sure nobody is currently working on the issue before you take it up. To avoid these things, we need to check who all are logged into the system and what are they doing.
DigiKam as the popular open-source image organizer is out with its version 7.3 feature release.
The digiKam 7.3 release came together over the past quarter and brings a number of enhancements including:
- Official support for ExifTool for dealing with image metadata information.
- Faster support for finding duplicate images by making it multi-threaded where as previously it was single threaded.
Currently we have a handful of core printers working correctly, the intention is to make sure they stay working after adding new printers.
This is where testing comes in. before now testing had to be done manually by comparing the result from the gdb console to the expected output. This becomes inconvenient real quick if this is repeated for every class and its output. With manual testing you cannot test if the display_hint strings works correctly and if the index of a list, map or set shown correctly.
I reached out to my mentors Ralf Habacker and Thomas Baumgart, which we decided to use gdb batch argument pipe it to a file and compare. But the problem of testing when the variable is initialized, empty or assigned is still there although possible would take too much testing to get the tester working, we came up with a solution.
So back from where we left off, I completed majority of work on the other branches. Don’t be fooled from my casual attitude towards things, the work was still important since we had to add tooltips to various controls and keyboard navigation. Now the tooltips part was relatively simpler, both in coding as well as in reviewing, but for simplicity I merged both the issues into one. [...] I had to finish the API with more role names and incorporating it all into the QML side of things. That required an extensive internal debate as to using a dialog to display the feed overviews.
GNOME Gingerblue 0.6.0 is available and builds/runs on GNOME 40 systems such as Fedora Core 34.
It supports immediate, live audio recording in compressed Xiph.org Ogg Vorbis encoded audio files stored in the private $HOME/Music/ directory from the microphone/input line on a computer or remote audio cards through USB connection through PipeWire (www.pipewire.org) with GStreamer (gstreamer.freedesktop.org) on Fedora Core 34 (getfedora.org).
See the GNOME Gingerblue project (www.gingerblue.org) for screenshots, Fedora Core 34 x86_64 RPM package and GNU autoconf installation package (https://download.gnome.org/sources/gingerblue/0.6/gingerblue-0.6.0.tar.xz) for GNOME 40 systems and https://gitlab.gnome.org/ole/gingerblue.git for the GPLv3 source code in my GNOME Git repository.
The appstream specification, used for appdata files for apps on Linux, supports specifying what input devices and display sizes an app requires or supports. GNOME Software 41 will hopefully be able to use that information to show whether an app supports your computer. Currently, though, almost no apps include this metadata in their appdata.xml file.
Please consider taking 5 minutes to add the information to the appdata.xml files you care about. Thanks!
Linux has not had the best reputation for gaming, but that doesn’t mean you can’t game on it. In fact, there are several gaming-focused Linux distros that offer out-of-the-box support for gaming libraries and drivers for gaming-focused hardware, like graphic cards.
Here are the six best Linux distros for gaming, including the features that make each distro the best and its shortcomings.
IBM has announced CodeFlare, an open-source framework for simplifying the integration and efficient scaling of big data and AI workflows onto the hybrid cloud. CodeFlare is built on top of Ray, an emerging open-source distributed computing framework for machine learning applications.
CodeFlare extends the capabilities of Ray by adding specific elements to make scaling workflows easier.
To create a machine learning model, researchers and developers have to train and optimize the model first. This might involve data cleaning, feature extraction, and model optimization. CodeFlare simplifies this process using a Python-based interface for what’s called a pipeline—by making it simpler to integrate, parallelize and share data.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 691 for the week of July 4 – 10, 2021.
Win Enterprises’ rugged, IP66-protected “PL-50240” computer runs Linux or Win 10 on Intel’s Apollo Lake and offers 2x GbE, 2x USB, 2x COM, 2x CAN, HDMI, M.2, and 2x mini-PCIe with SIM.
Apple’s smartphones have Siri. Most Android phones have Google Assistant. And Samsung phones have Bixby. Voice assistant software has become an increasingly common feature for modern smartphones.
But what about Linux phones? While none of the GNU/Linux distributions available for smartphones like the PinePhone or Librem 5 have a voice assistant baked in, these are basically pocket-sized Linux computers. So of course you can install one – and redditor /u/SkippyTheMgnfcnt shows what happens when you get the open source Mycroft up and running on a PinePhone.
The Kobo Clara HD is an eReader with a 6 inch E Ink display and Kobo’s software designed for reading eBooks. But thanks to a new work-in-progress port of postmarketOS for the device, you can now use the Kobo Clara HD as a Linux tablet with an E Ink display.
That could make this device, which sells for $120, a much more versatile gadget. That said, there are always going to be some limitations when running desktop or mobile applications on devices with E Ink displays, and installing the Linux-based postmarketOS does require opening the case and replacing the pre-installed software, so there is a chance that you may mess up your device. So proceed with caution.
Some sundials are as simple as a stick pushed into the dirt, but they’re still reliable and accurate. The sun is, after all, quite consistent. But there are some caveats. The Earth’s orbit and its rotational tilt mean that the lengths of our days are variable and that means the simplest sundials are only perfectly accurate once a year. To compensate for those factors, Redditor Onemywaybackhome built this sundial that is capable of self-correction.
This sundial automatically compensates for the difference between solar noon (the time at which the sun is at its highest point) and civil noon (the time when the local clock is at 1200). Solar noon is dependent on the exact location on the planet’s surface. This sundial stays in a fixed location, so that variable in the solar noon calculation is known. The other important variable is the date. With the location and date, this sundial knows how to adjust itself so that it reads noon at the same time as a local clock.
Mozilla Firefox 90 is now available to download for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Since last month’s Firefox 89 release was a substantial one you won’t be surprised to know Firefox 90 is a more modest affair. The biggest feature addition is background updating for Windows users (it allows the browser to be updated even when it’s not running).
The new, if not-universally-loved ‘Proton’ redesign remains almost identical to the last version. Mozilla’s dev task force don’t appear to have made any significant changes based on its initial reception. Firefox 90 does not (in the version I tested) remove or retire any of the flags users can change to disable Proton entirely (or tame its excesses).
Last year a new phrase crept into the zeitgeist: doomscrolling, the tendency to get stuck in a bad news content cycle even when consuming it makes us feel worse. That’s no surprise given that 2020 was one for the books with an unrelenting flow of calamitous topics, from the pandemic to murder hornets to wild fires. Even before we had a name for it and real life became a Nostradamus prediction, it was all too easy to fall into the doomscroll trap. Many content recommendation algorithms are designed to keep our eyeballs glued to a screen, potentially leading us into more questionable, extreme or ominous territory.
[...]
Every day, Pocket users save millions of articles, videos, links and more from across the web, forming the foundation of Pocket’s recommendations. From this activity, Pocket’s algorithms surface the most-saved and most-read content from the Pocket community. Pocket’s human curators then sift through this material and elevate great reads for the recommendation mix: in-depth features, clever explainers, curiosity chasers, timely reads and evergreen pieces. The curator team makes sure that a wide assortment of publishers are represented, as well as a large variety of topics, including what’s happening in the world right now. And it’s done in a way that respects and preserves the privacy of Pocket readers.
Github recently announced Copilot, a machine learning system that makes suggestions for you when you're writing code. It's apparently trained on all public code hosted on Github, which means there's a lot of free software in its training set. Github assert that the output of Copilot belongs to the user, although they admit that it may occasionally produce output that is identical to content from the training set.
We made it! With your support, we quickly reached our summer fundraising goal. In fact, we surpassed it before our deadline. As of today, we've raised USD 51,798.
From now until just after the original deadline, July 19th, we are stretching our goal to add another USD 11,000 to the total, and this time, it will be matched! Thanks to a generous offer from Cristian Frâncu, Andreea Frâncu, and Andrei Pitis, we can push freedom forward even further this summer when you support us in this last week.
Leonardo da Vinci said “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication“, but it seems like the “modern” computing world never heard that quote, or ignore it. Today, a single application takes hundreds of megabytes, both of disk and RAM space. Slow, buggy, inefficient systems at every level.
Probably the best example on this cluttering mess comes from the mobile computing. Most phones are bloated with useless software that not only hinders the navigation experience, but pose a threat to your privacy. Yes, all this software is proprietary. Worst of it, you can not even uninstall it.
Fortunately, there is hope. Let me introduce SXMO, the Simple X on Mobile project. As the authors describe it, SXMO is a minimalist environment for Linux smartphones, such as the PinePhone. SXMO embraces simplicity, and simplicity is both elegant and efficient.
This weekend we (Lars and I) finished our first public alpha release of Subplot. Subplot is a tool for helping you to document your acceptance criteria for a project in such a way that you can also produce a programmatic test suite for the verification criteria. We centre this around the concept of writing a Markdown document about your project, with the option to write Gherkin-like given/when/then scenarios inside which detail the automated verification of the acceptance criteria.
This may sound very similar to Yarn, a similar concept which Lars, Richard, and I came up with in 2013. Critically back then we were very 'software engineer' focussed and so Yarn was a testing tool which happened to also produce reasonable documentation outputs if you squinted sideways and tried not to think too critically about them. Subplot on the other hand considers the documentation output to be just as important, if not more important, than the test suite output. Yarn was a tool which ran tests embedded in Markdown files, where Subplot is a documentation tool capable of extracting tests from an acceptance document for use in testing your project.
With less than a month to go, and the deadline for submitting presentation proposals approaching this week (15 July),
Linux drivers make working with devices so easy - assuming you know how. Here's how to get a Raspberry Pi to get data from the 1-Wire Bus.
The Rust project has a number of mechanisms for getting people involved in the project, but most are oriented around 1:1 engagement. Doc has been investigating some of the ways that other projects engage contributors, such as Python’s mentored sprints. She will discuss how some of those projects run things and share some ideas about how that might be applied in the Rust project.
The new version is OpenCL 3.0.8 and a prominent extension added this time is cl_khr_integer_dot_product. The new cl_khr_integer_dot_product extension adds support for SPIR-V instructions and OpenCL C built-in functions to compute the dote product of vectors of integers. The cl_khr_integer_dot_product extension was worked on by Intel, Arm, Qualcomm, and Imagination. This dot product extension can be useful and designed in mind for inferencing using quantized neural networks.
Industries including automotive, consumer tech, and health have been hit hard by the semiconductor drought, and fabrication plants are struggling to fulfill a backlog of orders.
The European Commission, for one, hopes to boost production of “cutting-edge and sustainable semiconductors” in Europe to 20 per cent of global output by 2030, up from about 10 per cent right now, according to its Digital Compass initiative. That, at least, might ensure Europe gets a decent supply for parts for the future.
Foxconn and TSMC have inked a procurement deal with Pfizer distributor Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group for 10 million vaccines on behalf of Taiwan, a plan approved by the Taiwanese government late last month.
Taiwan's Overseas Community Affairs Council said statements were released by the two Apple suppliers on Sunday confirming the agreement following details being made public on a social media story that appeared to come from Chinese state-owned Xinhua News Agency.
UChicago Medicine’s Stroke and Neurocritical Care teams will be participating in a global research study to learn if an experimental drug saves lives...
Fifteen hundred organizations around the world had their data locked up in the latest ransomware, including grocery store chains and schools. It’s unclear if any IBM i shops were included in the attack, which a Russian hacking group claimed credit for. But it’s clear that ransomware is a growing threat to all organizations, including IBM i shops.
About a month ago, a security researcher revealed what turned out to be zero-day bug in Apple’s Wi-Fi software, apparently without meaning to...
Microsoft's attempts to kill off resellable perpetual software licences infringe the EU constitution and UK competition law alike, according to the legal filings of a reseller suing Redmond for €£270m in London's High Court.
Details of ValueLicensing's lawsuit against Microsoft are now in the public domain after the US-based software megalith filed an acknowledgement of service earlier this month.
Whether you are a DevSecOps engineer responsible for managing your organization’s application infrastructure or you have your own personal Linux server that you use at home, the importance of keeping your systems safe and secure against malicious attacks by bad actors cannot be over emphasized.
While there are many aspects with regards to securing systems, one fundamental best practice is to continuously patch your systems and applications as soon as they are made available. The infamous WannaCry ransomware attack from the summer of 2017, that caused much grief to millions of users is a case in point. While the patch was made available much ahead of the actual attack, it was due to a sheer lack of security discipline that the attack was successful.
SolarWinds has issued an emergency patch after a critical security hole in its Serv-U Managed File Transfer and Serv-U Secure FTP was spotted being exploited in the wild.
The vulnerability, discovered by Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) and Offensive Security Research teams, can be exploited by an attacker to achieve remote code execution, and is present in Serv-U version 15.2.3 HF1 and all prior builds. The Redmond crew also said a "single threat actor" was abusing the programming blunder (CVE-2021-35211) though it's not known how many customers are affected.
"This attack is a Return Oriented Programming (ROP) attack," said SolarWinds in an advisory. "When exploited, the vulnerability causes the Serv-U product to throw an exception and then intercepts the exception handling code to run commands. Please note, several reasons exist for exceptions to be thrown, so an exception itself is not necessarily an indicator of attack."
ate last week, President Biden said he brought up the epidemic of ransomware hitting American businesses in a phone call with his Russian counterpart, and hinted America may start hitting back.
Biden said he and Vladimir Putin not only discussed the matter, their two countries are apparently going to try to coordinate some action to tackle the waves of extortionware infections, which seem to be mainly orchestrated by miscreants in Russia and typically avoid compromising computers configured to use the Russian language.
IT management software made by Kaseya was lately exploited to install REvil ransomware on as many as 1,500 businesses. The crew behind that software nasty is said to avoid targeting Russian organizations.
The FCC has granted Amazon permission to use 60GHz radar in some future device to monitor people’s sleeping habits and sense gesture commands.
Amazon requested a waiver [PDF] from the US communications regulator to build a gadget that emits radar waves and “operates at higher powers than currently allowed” in June. Ronald Rapasi, acting chief of the FCC’s office of engineering and technology, officially approved the request this month.
The mysterious gizmo, referred to as a “radar sensor” in the FCC’s response [PDF], would emit radar waves at frequencies between 57 and 64GHz. It was described as a “non-mobile device” that has to be constantly plugged into a power source to work. Amazon said the sensors would be used to help less physically able users interact with the device through gesture commands, and could promote for “sleep hygiene.”
Twitter verified a bunch of bot accounts, granting them coveted blue check marks, and then reversed the decision, admitting it made a mistake.
The debacle swung the spotlight on the social network's system for verifying accounts, which is normally reserved for qualifying celebs, politicians, sports stars, experts, journos, and similar netizens.
A tweeter going by the handle Conspirador Norteño, who claims to fight online disinformation, found that none of the six accounts in question, created in June, had actually posted any tweets and that, for each of them, their thousand or so followers were largely the same accounts. Yet, the sextet had been verified as supposedly authentic and notable people by Twitter when they were anything but.
Cash transactions are increasingly rare. More than half of transactions in the US involved cash in 2010. The number had dropped to 28% in 2020, even before the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to wider adoption of cashless and contactless payment among businesses.
But going cashless means a heavier reliance on private companies—banks, credit card companies, payment processors—all of which have delays and fees that hit poor people hardest. At the moment, a cash-free economy would exclude the 7.1 million Americans, or 5.4% of US households, that are unbanked, meaning they do not have a checking or savings account at a bank or credit union, according to the FDIC’s most recent study in 2019.
A Biden Administration executive order widely seen as an attack on the power of Big Tech hands Silicon Valley's titans all they could have hoped for when it comes to SEPs and FRAND
As an international treaty the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPCA) provides for the establishment of the Unified Patent Court (UPC). As a joint Court of the Contracting Member States, the UPC shall have its own legal personality. The UPC is supposed to obtain exclusive competence for an extensive catalog of dispute matters regarding European and Unitary Patents in each Contracting Member State.
An earlier Act to ratify the UPCA (UPCA-Approval Act I) had been declared invalid by the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court of 13 February 2020 (2 BvR 739/17). The Court held, that there was a lack of a 2/3 majority of the German Parliament (Bundestag), which had been necessary according to the German Constitution to transfer the judicial power to a newly established European Court.
On Friday 9 July 2021, the German Federal Constitutional Court dismissed two interim injunction applications, which have been delaying progress of Germany’s participation in the Unified Patent Court. The German Parliament (Bundestag) had adopted the Act of Approval enabling ratification of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) Agreement and its Protocol on Provisional Application on 18 December 2020, but the two constitutional complaints were filed on 20 December 2020 preventing the final ratifications steps being taken.
Today the German Federal Constitutional Court rejected two applications for an interim injunction against the German implementation of the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA). The outcome of the decisions is a clear yes to a European patent court system!
On June 29, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,500 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 9,397,627. The patent is owned by Dedicated Licensing, LLC, an NPE and IP Edge subsidiary. The '627 patent generally relates to a network-enabled audio device that provides a display device that allows the user to select playlists of music much like a jukebox. It is currently being asserted against Rhapsody, Vimeo, iHeartMedia, SoundCloud, Sound Hound, and Genius Media Group.
