The Pangolin laptop is a thin and light notebook from Linux PC maker System76. Available with a choice of Ubuntu or Pop!_OS software, the notebook has a 15.6 inch full HD display, support for up to 64GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. And the Pangolin only weighs about 3.6 pounds and measures less than 0.8 inches thick.
When the notebook first launched earlier this year, customers had a choice of AMD Ryzen 5 4500U or Ryzen 7 4700U processors. Now System76 has given the Pangolin a spec bump – it’s now available with Ryzen 5 5500U or Ryzen 7 5700U processor options.
A surprise server outage at the studio requires we jump into action with a few last-minute solutions and deploy one of our favorite open-source tools.
Plus some community news, handy picks, emails, and more. It's a special edition of the Unplugged show.
I've only been Linux for a few years but over this time I've learnt a lot about how my system works so I thought I'd be fun to look back at where Linux started, where we are now and where the future might take us.
A while ago I blogged about finishing up ES 3.2. Then I didn’t mention it again because…well, I suppose I’ve only blogged four times since then, but I’m going to pretend this was part of my master plan to make everyone forget so I could build hype again.
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Zink is done.
The final boss has been beaten, there’s no more versions to support, no extensions left on my todo list, definitely no bugs remaining, and performance can’t possibly improve further.
If you think you’ve found a zink bug, report it to whoever wrote the test or app you’re running, because the only thing I plan on doing for the rest of 2021 is playing Cyberpunk 2077 on Lavapipe.
Mike Blumenkrantz in addition to addressing that big performance problem with Tesseract and other Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan improvements in recent days has now landed OpenGL ES 3.2 support.
Zink can now provide a working OpenGL ES 3.2 implementation over Vulkan. With a dozen patches merged today for getting FBFETCH working and then updating documentation, Zink with Mesa 21.3-devel now supports OpenGL ES 3.2 with all necessary functionality in place.
The Btrfs file-system updates have landed now in Linux 5.15 mainline with some exciting new features and improvements.
The Btrfs file-system developers have been quite busy this summer with a rather active set of changes ready to go for Linux 5.15. Among the Btrfs changes that were successfully merged today into Linux 5.15 Git include:
- FS-VERITY support as the kernel layer allowing transparent integrity and authenticity protection for read-only files. FS-VERITY already works with EXT4 and F2FS while now works with Btrfs too.
The 5.15 merge window is off to a fast start; stay tuned for our usual full summary. It is worth mentioning, though, that the realtime preemption locking code has been pulled into the mainline with little fanfare. This work began in 2004 and has fundamentally changed many parts of the core kernel. With this pull, the sleepable locks that make deterministic realtime response possible have finally joined all of that other work (though the kernel must be built with the REALTIME configuration option to use them).
Rspamd 3.0 has been released as the newest version of this leading open-source spam filtering software and it’s coming with plenty of changes.
Rspamd is an advanced high-performance spam scan software for Linux and Unix servers which delivers very accurate filter results. It is fast, open source, and designed to process hundreds of messages per second simultaneously.
Rspamd 3.0 can work with the most popular mail transfer systems, such as Postfix, Exim, or Sendmail. Each message is analyzed by Rspamd and given a spam score. The higher the score – the more likely the email should be considered unsolicited.
Compared to SpamAssassin, Rspamd is more actively maintained. Because it is written in C, Rspamd is much faster than Spamassassin which is written in Perl. Rspamd has a number of features that allow it to filter email on average 10 times faster than SpamAssassin, as well as provide better quality filtering. On top on that, Rspamd comes with a DKIM signing module so you will not have to use another software to sign your outgoing emails.
Phosh is an open source user, mobile-friendly user interface originally created by Purism for the Librem 5 smartphone It’s designed from the ground up to work with small, touchscreen devices. It’s now available for a wide range of mobile Linux distributions.
But some features that have been available for other mobile operating systems for years are still making their way to Phosh. For example, version v0.13.1, which was released today, is the first that has a “clear all” button that lets you dismiss multiple notifications at once.
Hardening network security devices minimize the risk of unauthorized access into a network’s infrastructure. Vulnerabilities in device management and configurations exploit weaknesses for a malicious cyber actor to exploit in order to gain presence and maintain persistence within a network.
In addition to, Hackers have shifted their focus from exclusively exploiting traditional endpoints to increasingly exploiting specialized and devices, including routers and switches. They do this through common weaknesses in configurations, specific routing protocols, and implanting malware in the OS.
So Ensure that all network security configurations are correct. Including static IP address assignments, DNS, WINS, whether or not to register a specific interface, binding order, and disabling settings on DMZ, 00B management, or backup networks. Also, check CSF configuration.
Due to recent political events there’s an increased interest in Afghanistan’s websites. This is a tutorial on how to run sn0int on .gov.af to enumerate as many sites as possible for archival purpose.
The grep command is the de facto tool for searching text files. However, when there are too many matches, finding the requested text in the search results can be difficult. So grep comes with --color='auto' option. It surrounds the matching string with the colour, thus resulting in enhanced output.Now you know grep can color-highlighting the matched text or words in its output. However, by default, that option is turned off. So let us see how to colorized grep by default for viewing the entire file with highlighted matches on Linux or Unix-like systems.
Keybase is an end-to-end encryption tool for messaging and for file sharing. It’s an excellent, easy-to-use tool for those that want to quickly encrypt and share files with friends. Here’s how to do it on Linux.
To address security issues posed by clear http communication in our previous crowdsec multi-server installation, we propose solutions to achieve communication between Crowdsec agents over encrypted channels. On top of that, the third solution allows server-2 or server-3 to trust server-1 identity, and avoid man-in -the -middle attacks.
A Metasploit framework is a sophisticated tool that cybercriminals and hackers can use to investigate systemic vulnerabilities on web servers. It can be simply modified and utilized with many operating systems since it is an open-source framework. It also includes tools for automatically comparing a program’s security vulnerabilities to its patched (repaired) version. It also includes anti-forensic and strong evasion features.
One of the nice things about the Unix philosophy that Linux inherited is that the filesystem is very modular. That’s good, too, because a typical system might want a choice of filesystems like ext4, reiserfs, btrfs, and even network systems like nfs. Besides that, there are fake file systems like /sys and /dev that help Linux make everything look like a file. The downside is that building a filesystem required changing the kernel or, at least, writing a loadable module. That’s not as hard as it sounds, but it is a little more difficult than writing a normal program. Then came FUSE — file system in user space. This is a single file system module that allows you to create new file systems by writing ordinary code.
In this video, we are looking at how to install the Brave Browser on Linux Lite 5.4. Enjoy! For the commands and more,
Today we are looking at how to install Super Smash Flash 2 - SSF2 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
The process of taking screenshots on a Chromebook may be different from doing it on a Windows PC or a Mac – but not drastically different. You may be a little unsure how to do this in Chrome OS, as even the best of them don’t have a Print screen key, but it’s fairly simple to learn. Whether you want to grab a portion of the screen or the entire thing, there are multiple ways to take screenshots on a Chromebook.
The gremlin detector script in A Data Cleaner's Cookbook now looks for zero width spaces (U+200B, hex e2 80 8b, ââ¬â¹).
Like a soft hyphen (SHY), a zero-width space (ZWSP) is usually non-printing and invisible, and indicates for a Web browser or word-processing program where a string of visible characters can be broken when wrapping a line. With SHY, the program will add a hyphen at the end of the wrapped line, while a ZWSP just means "You can break the string here when wrapping".
Also like a SHY (and a no-break space (NBSP)), a ZWSP can cause problems where it isn't needed. A quick googling for "problem with zero width space" turned up ZWSP-caused issues with
Plasma Mobile Gear 21.08 is here to improve the Shell by addressing issues that affected the virtual keyboard and improve its reliability when its opened or closed, as well as by implementing an infrastructure to facilitate creation of custom quick setting buttons.
Among the Plasma Mobile apps improved in this release, there’s the Clock app, which now lets users loop timers and specify custom commands that will run when a timer finishes. The Clock app now also offers Pinephone users a better landscape experience, and the animations were enhanced a bit.
Earlier this month we released elementary OS 6 Odin and we’ve been thrilled with the overwhelming amount of feedback we’ve received. So far OS 6 has been downloaded from our website over 75,000 times! Over the last three weeks we’ve been gathering up all of your feedback and jumping right into delivering the first batch of free fix and feature updates for OS 6.
Today, thanks to the Twitter user Jared McNeill, we have witnessed a first boot-up process of NetBSD OS on Apple's M1 processor. NetBSD is an open-source "UNIX-like" operating system, with an emphasis on speed, security and portability. This is one more step toward enabling the M1 chip for operating systems other than Apple's own macOS.
Great things come in pairs. Most of us will agree that food is good. Many of us also believe that wine is good. However, the pairing of the right food with the right wine clearly results in a fusion of flavors greater than the sum of its parts. If you pair the right things together, magic happens.
Rancher Labs, now part of Linux titan SUSE, has been a thought leader in containerization, and later Kubernetes, since the earliest days of Docker. This long history with containers and orchestration has enabled Rancher to carve out a successful place in a highly competitive market, propelled by a tight focus on adding value beyond “just the distro” or flavor of K8s being deployed.
There are many different reasons to be interested in Reproducible Builds. When I originally got involved in the project I wasn’t a maintainer in any Linux distribution yet, instead I was wondering if there’s a way to distribute pre-compiled artifacts as an independent open source dev without carrying all the responsibility alone.
A few years later I’ve now published a manual called i-probably-didnt-backdoor-this. It contains a hello world program and instructions on how to reproduce the various pre-compiled artifacts, explains all build instructions and why these controls are effective.
A similar project has been published in response by Michael Lieberman. This project also distributes binaries that can be rebuilt with very simple commands using NixOS and Bazel.
The project also got a shout-out at debconf21 in a talk about Reproducible Builds by Holger Levsen (around 11:23).
"The project also got a shout-out at debconf21 in a talk about Reproducible Builds by Holger Levsen (around 11:23)." https://vulns.xyz/2021/08/monthly-report/
We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.9.5 is generally available as of August 31, 2021.
Red Hat Satellite is part of the Red Hat Smart Management subscription that makes it easier for enterprises to manage patching, provisioning, and subscription management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure.
IBM has been sued by sales manager Mark Briggs for allegedly capping sales commission payments despite a written commitment not to do so, joining dozens of cases claiming Big Blue screws its sales staff.
The lawsuit [PDF], filed in a US federal district court in Northern California on Friday, challenges IBM's practice of insisting that it does not have a contractual obligation to pay commissions spelled out in written documents provided to its employees. It is at least the 30th lawsuit since 2014 in which IBM has argued its "incentive plan letters" are not enforceable contracts.
IBM provides its salespeople with different compensation plans that outline sales quotas, and spell out how they will be paid. Those plans typically specify that a salesperson's total compensation will be composed of something like 55 per cent base salary and 45 per cent commission, calculated as a percentage of revenue from sales deals closed.
Our last blog post announcing Kubeflow Pipelines on Tekton discussed how Kubeflow Pipelines became a primary vehicle to address the needs of both DevOps engineers and data scientists. As a reminder, Kubeflow Pipelines on Tekton is a project in the MLOps ecosystem, and offers the following benefits...
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We are excited to announce the 1.0 release for Kubeflow Pipelines on Tekton (KFP-Tekton) project. Many features such as graph recursion, conditional loops, caching, any sequencer, dynamic parameters support, and the like were added to the project in the process of reaching this milestone. These new features were not supported in the Tekton project natively, but they are crucial for running real-world machine learning workflows using Kubeflow Pipelines.
Linux is a widely used open-source operating system; it manages the connection between applications/programs and hardware like other Operating Systems. Applications make the requests, and operating systems map those requests to the hardware components. Linux operating systems have hundreds of distributions (distros); a Linux distribution is also an operating system made using Software collections based on Linux Kernel. The well-known distros of Linux OS include Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, MX Linux, Deepin, etc. The notable information is that Debian is a Linux-based distribution, and Ubuntu is a distribution based on Debian. Ubuntu and Debian are almost similar, but they have few differences, such as Ubuntu is inclined towards user-friendliness and Debian is more concerned with software freedom. In this piece of writing, we will present the difference between two distros, Ubuntu and Debian, and analyze which Linux distribution is better.
Debian
Debian is an old but very stable Linux distro: the initial version of Debian was released in 1993. In 1993, software engineer Ian Murdock issued an open invitation to various developers to develop a relatively new operating system based on the Linux kernel. This invitation was called the Debian Project; therefore, the development phenomenon of Debian is known as the Debian Project that includes hundreds of developers who contribute towards the development of Debian. Moreover, its features and stability forced the developers to consider it a benchmark for a few other Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint. It is noted that more than 100 distributions of Linux are derived from Debian. It is developed by hundreds of developers that form the Debian project.
Ubuntu
Ubuntu is marked as the most popular Linux distro and was firstly released in the year 2004. Ubuntu is designed for computers, smartphones, and network servers, and it is used globally, such as in offices, homes, programming, IoT devices, TV OS, etc. It releases twice (April and October) a year with a gap of 6months. The exciting thing about Ubuntu is that it is based on the Debian distro of Linux: this relationship between Ubuntu and Debian makes them similar in many features and functionality.
Adlink’s rugged “DLAP-211” edge AI systems provide a Jetson Xavier NX or Nano module along with 2x GbE, 4x USB 3.0, HDMI, M.2, mini-PCIe, COM, CAN (NX), and options including GPIO, relay, V-by-One, and Allxon device management.
Today, Adlink announced that its Nvidia Jetson powered DLAP-211 series of compact, fanless edge AI computers were available with Allxon Device Management Solutions (see farther below). We did not see any announcement for the Jetson Xavier NX driven DLAP-211-JNX system pointed to by the announcement, nor the similar, Jetson Nano based DLAP-211-Nano. Both of their product pages list them as “preliminary.” Then again, the same is true of is the relatively similar, Jetson TX2-based DLAP-201-JT2 that we covered back in 2019. The DLAP-211, however, is clearly more recent.
In this article, we want to share with you 10 free and open-source programs that are going to be great and help you if you are an author or a writer.
Every tool here helps with different aspects from story boarding, actual book creation to artwork creation as well, and so we're just to take a look at all of these best programs. We think would be valuable for writers and authors.
For someone who witnessed the old golden days of PalTalk, Clubhouse is a modern version of PalTalk with social networking characteristics rather than chat and messaging channels.
In different words, it is a social network which focuses on real-time voice conversations for groups. Although, it was first lunched for iOS users and with invites, many users could not join unless with workaround, it gained popularity among the new generation, especially for discussing politics.
But what about if a certain community wants to setup its own voice-based private social network? Here, the decision makers will face a problem with limited options: the idea is rather new and open-source developers need time to create the alternatives.
The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 93 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.
Chrome 93.0.4577.63 contains a number of fixes and improvements -- a list of changes is available in the log. Watch out for upcoming Chrome and Chromium blog posts about new features and big efforts delivered in 93.
Following version 92’s release on Android, Mac, Windows, and Linux, the next release of Google’s browser is rolling out. Chrome 93 is here today as a smaller update.
Google is shipping Chrome 93 today as the latest stable version of their web browser.
Chrome 93 brings WebOTP API cross-device support to the desktop where if connected via the same Google Account across devices can seamlessly handle one-time pass-codes sent to your mobile device. Chrome 93 on the developer front also exposes the Multi-Screen Window Placement API. This new API makes it easier to manage several displays and can be used for use-cases like presentations where one display may be showing a slide deck while another display is showing the speaker notes, managing multiple windows for tool panes like for image and video editors, or virtual trading desks with showing multiple related windows. With Chrome 93 this new Multi-Screen window Placement API is exposed as an origin trial.
Looking for a WordPress alternative to build your website? Look no further. This article will show you other Content Management Systems (CMS) you can use to build your site.
Creating a website is a lot of work; there's the aspects of designing, coding, and constantly updating your site. However, with a CMS, it doesn't have to be the case.
A Content Management System is a software application that helps you build and manage a website without calling for prior coding ability. The most popular CMS is WordPress, and it accounts for 40% of websites on the internet. However, it's not the only CMS.
There are other alternatives that you can use to build your website. This article will show you 7 open-source CMS you can use to create your website or blog.
Due to the Corona lock down we couldn’t man the traditional information stall at any Veganmania summer festival in Vienna in 2020. So we where pleased that from 27 to 29 August 2021 we were able to be present on one again. Officially, over 12.000 people visited the event this time and we had many encounters with people eager to hear our arguments for free software. Many hadn’t even heard about free software before. Others knew about open source or Linux. And of course we also met many people who already use free software at home or at work. In fact, maybe even more than ever before on those information stalls – except of course for those on our local Linux Week events.
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Once more our information materials proved to be useful for this not usually very technical audience. Especially our introduction leaflet to the idea for freedom in technology and our locally produced practical overview of well known distributions came in very handy. In addition, the guide for email encryption and the stickers and post cards with motives like: “I love free software, but I love you more …”, “There is no cloud, just other peoples computers.” and some other funny freedom related stickers found many happy new owners.
A short time ago I found the domain distrotest.net and was very pleased by how easy this web page makes it to explore different free software distributions. It is simply fun to quickly test many desktops by starting virtual machines directly in your browser. The people I told about it, obviously liked this prospect too. I will certainly include a link to this in future versions of our distribution overview leaflet.
Another well received leaflet we hadn’t had on our desk in previous years was a short practical guide on computer security for activists. In this we didn’t go into complicated advanced stuff but rather very practical things everybody can do to improve the trustworthiness of their used system. It elaborates on 12 very basic things like creating backups and using a password manager or using software as a service only if there is no other possible way of doing things. It also explains why relying on well known centralised social media platforms can be especially dangerous if you want to challenge powerful constitutions as an activist.
In addition we made good use of our little local online list of free software experts on freie.it who are ready to help out in case people lack the time or patience to dig through the extensive amount of online documentation and guides if they get stuck at any point in their adventure into the joyful free software world.
Object-Oriented Programming is a fundamental programming paradigm based on the concepts of objects and classes that can perform certain operations through their methods. We'll get into more details about OOP in this notebook.
In this post, we will see how to perform matrix multiplication using NumPy. Input parameters for numpy matrix multiplication are two array-like objects (it can be a numpy ndarray or python lists as well), and it produces the product of two matrices as output. Performing matrix multiplication on NumPy arrays is more efficient than performing matrix multiplication on python lists.
Let’s start by importing NumPy and performing a simple matrix multiplication using NumPy’s matrix multiplication np.matmul.
Some Linux distributions (like Alpine and Arch Linux) are shipping something called “python bytecode” in their packages. It’s stored in .pyc files and is generated during the package build. They’re stored in __pycache__ folders and can be seen here:
Kelly, born Robert Sylvester Kelly, is at the center of the other big Aaliyah milestone of this month. On August 18, opening statements began at Kelly’s trial on charges of racketeering and sex trafficking. Aaliyah appears as Jane Doe No. 1 on Kelly’s indictment, and she is likely Kelly’s first known victim.
In 2019, Facebook open-sourced Ent, an entity framework for the programming language Go that’s designed to make it easier to build apps with large data models. After roughly two years of development, Ent will move under the governance of the Linux Foundation, it was announced today, with the goal of fostering the community of companies using it.
Today, the Linux Foundation announced that Ent, an entity framework for Go that was developed and open sourced by Facebook in 2019, has moved under the governance of the Linux Foundation to help accelerate its development and foster the community of developers and companies using it.
The massive attack on Microsoft Exchange servers in March may have been China harvesting information to train AI systems, according to US government officials and computer-security experts who talked to NPR.
Docker will restrict use of the free version of its Docker Desktop utility to individuals or small businesses, and has introduced a new more expensive subscription, as it searches for a sustainable business model.
The company has renamed its Free plan to "Personal" and now requires that businesses with 250 or more employees, or higher than $10m in annual revenue, must use a paid subscription if they require Docker Desktop. There are no changes to the command-line Docker Engine. The $5/month Pro and $7/month Teams subscriptions continue as before, but a new $21/month Business subscription adds features including centralized management, single sign-on, and enhanced security.
Virtual machines were the cock of the walk fifteen years ago, but they have fallen out of favor in recent year in preference to Docker containers. But each of these DevOps tools have a role to play in the modern, enterprise development and deployment process. Here we will compare and contrast Docker and VMs and help guide you as to which of one is the best fit for your DevOps needs.
The NAS maker issued two security advisories about the RCE and DoS flaws, adding to a flurry of advisories from the vast array of companies whose products use OpenSSL.
HPE joins Apple in warning customers of a high-severity Sudo vulnerability.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is warning a vulnerability in Sudo, an open-source program used within its Aruba AirWave management platform, could allow any unprivileged and unauthenticated local user to gain root privileges on a vulnerable host.
Rated high in severity, HPE warns the Sudo flaw could be part of a “chained attack” where an “attacker has achieved a foothold with lower privileges via another vulnerability and then uses this to escalate privileges,” according to a recent HPE security bulletin.
An introduction to this article appeared in the monthly Creating Connections newsletter put together by the women of The CyberWire. This is a guest-written article. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors, not necessarily the CyberWire, Inc.
Last week, after years of delay caused by challenges in the German Federal Constitutional Court, legislation enabling Germany to ratify the Unified Patent Court Agreement came into force.
German ratification of the UPCA is a required step in setting up the unitary patent system and so this development moves the Unified Patent Court slightly closer to reality.
Counsel from China and the UK set out possible reasons for mass filings at the UKIPO, the effect on the register and potential solutions
US pharmaceutical manufacturer Fibrogen has partially won an appeal in a dispute with Akebia concerning an anaemia drug. The six patents in question all relate to a medication used in the treatment of anaemia, with the patents forming two families. Family A consists of EP 14 63 823, EP 2 289 531 and EP 22 98 301, while Family B consists of EP 16 33 333, EP 23 22 153 and EP 23 22 155.
Family A patents’ claims all concern a class of compounds defined for use in the treatment of chronic kidney disease (CKD). The claims of family B patents concern the same compounds, but for the treatment of anaemia of chronic disease (ACD).
At the end of August, Fibrogen received approval from the European Medical Agency (EMA) for the drug Evrenzo. Its active ingredient roxadustat is an HIF-prolyl hydroxylase inhibitor intended for the treatment of CKD. Now the UK Court of Appeal has released a judgment in favour of Fibrogen.
The decision establishes that the so-called COMVIK approach should be used for all computer implemented inventions.
In February 2019, a question of patentability for simulation methods was referred to the Enlarged Board of Appeal as G1/19. This was seen by the patent profession generally as an opportunity to soften the often very strict practice applied by the EPO for computer implemented inventions. To this end, the Enlarged Board of Appeal received 23 so called amicus curiae briefs regarding this case, many of them from international organisations and corporations such as e.g. Philips, Siemens, and IBM (see here under G1/19).
The decision has now been issued by the EPO, and unfortunately it rather goes the other way. The decision establishes that the so called COMVIK approach (described in detail in the decision) should be used for all computer implemented inventions.
