While Linux 5.15 has added KSMBD as an SMB3 in-kernel file server, the NFS code within the Linux kernel continues advancing as well for network file sharing needs. With NFS in Linux 5.15 are a few notable improvements.
The latest security effort being pursued by Google's Kees Cook is to provide full compile-time and run-time coverage of all detectable buffer overflows.
This compile/run-time detection of buffer overflows for the Linux kernel would include coverage of such overflows via array indexing or memcpy(), memmove(), and memset() while the str*() functions already boast full coverage.
Kernel developers have been working towards this mission for some time while in Linux 5.15 is a big batch of the buffer overflow detection improvements, including some new common helpers along with other low-level improvements.
It looks like Paragon Software's NTFS3 kernel driver providing much better Linux support for the Microsoft NTFS file-system will land for the 5.15 kernel!
Last year Paragon Software made the surprise announcement that they were looking to mainline their NTFS3 kernel driver that previously was commercial-only. But given that there are less organizations interested in NTFS these days but rather Microsoft exFAT and even file-systems like F2FS for Android, it's nice to see Paragon finally willing to mainline the driver and also commit to maintaining it upstream moving forward.
For Reddit users, Gtkeddit is another GTK app for Linux desktop and mobile.
It’s a free and open-source app written in C++. With the libadwaita library (formerly libhandy), it has an adaptive UI that works on Linux phones such as the Pinephone.
The software has dark mode for working at night, though I don’t find how to enable it in Ubuntu using the Flatpak package. And it allows you to browser without an account.
Compare to Giara, another Reddit App written in Python with GTK4, the UI navigation feels good and smoother in Gtkeddit. Though it freezes every time during loading new content, maybe due to my poor VPN network connection.
Here in this last blog post in our series, we focus on lessons learned from installing, maintaining, and verifying the connectivity of Cloudera Data Platform and IBM Cloud Pak for Data. If you haven’t read the first two posts — A technical deep-dive on integrating Cloudera Data Platform and IBM Cloud Pak for Data and Installing Cloudera’s CDP Private Cloud Base on IBM Cloud with Ansible, then I’d invite you to go back and read them for additional context.
In a separate tutorial, we highlighted the process to deploy full disk encryption on Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 with LUKS encryption during installation. In practice, this is the recommended method to protect an Ubuntu device since it encrypts all disk partitions including the swap space and system partitions, thus achieving full disk encryption.
If you already have Ubuntu installed without any encryption, then full disk encryption with LUKS may not be an option; however, you could still encrypt the home directory and swap space without requiring a complete reinstallation of the operating system.
By default, the home directory is the directory where most of your personal files reside. This can include documents, spreadsheets, music, videos, images, and any other files you may download. Swap space is the space on the hard drive that is used as virtual memory. When a Linux system is running out of RAM, the inactive pages are pushed to the swap space; while access time is a tad slower than the RAM, in doing so the swap space supplements the device’s RAM when it is almost exhausted.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ClamAV on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, ClamAV is an open-source antivirus engine for detecting trojans, viruses, malware, adware, rootkits, and other malicious threats. ClamAV offers a Command-line scanner, a Milter interface for Sendmail, an Advanced database updater, and built-in support for archive formats, ELF executables + Portable Executable files, and popular document formats.
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 ClamAV on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
You have probably received PDF files before and may have many PDF documents stored in your computer. Deleting them is not an option, and backing them up may take up a lot of storage space. One solution is to combine/merge multiple PDF files into a single PDF so that it is easier to manage, access, and back up. PDFtk Server is a command line tool that allows you to easily combine multiple PDF files into one.
There are software repositories in Linux, which are essentially servers from which we get packages. SIGs (Special Interest Groups) are smaller groups within the CentOS community that focus on a specific topic in order to raise awareness or focus on development.
SIGs have their own repositories, and in order to enable them, you must manually find the correct repository, download and install the package. AlmaLinux has now made CentOS SIGs release packages available in AlmaLinux's repository in response to the issue.
In this tutorial, we'll look at how to enable the CentOS SIG repositories in AlmaLinux using dnf.
UrBackup is a client/server backup tool that supports image backups as well as file backups. It is available for both Linux and Windows operating systems. A prominent feature of this backup system is that it never interrupts the current working of your system rather the backups are created in parallel while your target system is running. In this guide, we will take a look at the installation procedure of UrBackup on an Ubuntu 20.04 system.
In Linux, the cat command is one of the most commonly used commands. cat which stands for "concatenate", can read, write and concatenate file contents to standard output. The cat command is usually used to view the contents of one or more text files, combine files by adding contents of one file to another and create new files.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to use the cat command to its full potential with examples.
This step-by-step tutorial is going to show you how you can easily set up a reverse proxy with Nginx to improve security and performance.
One of the more popular reverse proxy tools at the moment is Nginx. Although Nginx itself is a web server, it does an outstanding job of serving as a reverse proxy.
Printing on Linux is easy, but sometimes it feels like a lot of work to launch an application, open a file, find the Print selection in the menu, click a confirmation button, and so on. When you're a Linux terminal user, you often want to perform complex actions with simple triggers. Printing is complex, and there's little as simple as the lpr command.
Monitoring IT assets is an essential task for any IT department. Still, due to the growing number of devices in corporate networks, it is getting more and more challenging to find an approach that is flexible enough to monitor the wide range of available systems properly. It's essential to have a monitoring tool that is flexible, scalable, and easy to use.
In this article, I demonstrate how to install Checkmk, the monitoring tool from tribe29, and how to monitor servers and network devices with it.
The device driver for the Canon Pixma TR4540 All-in-one Printer/Scanner does not come bundled with openSUSE, whether you are on Leap or Tumbleweed. It is non available from the official repositories as well, at least I didn't find them, neither on openSUSE Non-OSS or Packman repos.
However, Canon provides the drivers on its website along with an installation script. The tarball containing the the .rpm files and the script can be from its package-archive. At the time that I tested, the driver package was at version 5.70.
Emulation is the practice of using a program (called an emulator) on a PC to mimic the behaviour of a home computer or a video game console, in order to play (usually retro) games on a computer.
Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single non-technical user.
Back in the 1980s, home computers came to the forefront of teenagers’ minds. Specifically, the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Atari ST were extremely popular. They were hugely popular home computers targeted heavily towards games, but they also ran other types of software.
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Initially, the Dragon was reasonably well supported by the large UK software companies. Top-selling games available for the Dragon include Arcadia (Imagine), Chuckie Egg (A&F), Manic Miner and sequel Jet Set Willy (Software Projects), Hunchback (Ocean) and Football Manager (Addictive). Due to the basic graphics modes of the Dragon, converted games had a distinctive appearance, with colour games being usually played on a green or white background (rather than the more common black on other systems) or games with high-definition graphics having to run in monochrome.
After the release of the podcast released with James Ramey from Codeweavers a few days ago where we talked at length about the Steam Deck, here is full transcript as promised! Have a good read, you will learn quite a few things.
Today, the PC/OpenSystems LLC Development team has released Linspire 10 SP 2, a major update which begins a new chapter in Linspire’s story by taking it to the cloud. Linspire streamlines all of Google’s services into the distro; users can create any web app they want, on the fly, using the IceSSB utility which seamlessly turns any web page / web app into a dedicated desktop application utilizing the Chrome/Chromium framework. Which includes 1). full use of audio / video and 2). drag and drop from the Caja file manager. And never fear : all of the applications and resources of the Ubuntu repositories are available as well as installation from traditional Debian/Ubuntu packages, Flatpak and AppImage are available for traditional use cases. The underpinnings of Linspire still support a full-blown Linux desktop experience.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Linux Lite 5.6 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Snapshot releases of openSUSE’s rolling release Tumbleweed have been constantly trickling out to users since last week’s review.
This review will cover the five snapshots made available since August 26. Each of the snapshots delivered about a handful of updated software packages.
Snapshot 20210831 updated bind to version 9.16.20, which fixed a Common Vulnerability and Exposure; CVE-2021-25218 an assertion failure could have allowed an attacker to abused the Path Maximum Transmission Unit Discovery protocol to trick bind into exceeding the interface MTU. The C Library for manipulating module metadata files libmodulemd updated to 2.13.0 and the modulemd-validator enables a user to constrain a document type with a new --type option. The other packages to update in the snapshot were libqmi 1.28.8 and libjpeg-turbo 2.1.1, which fixed a couple regressions affecting AArch64 and arm 32-bit hardware.
Linux Kernel 5.13.13 was one of the two packages updated in the 20210830 snapshot. The Direct Rendering Manager had some fixes in the kernel update and added an AAL output size configuration. The kernel update also had an Advanced Linux Sound Architecture enablement for the 4-speaker output in the Dell XPS 15 9510 laptop. The other package to update in the snapshot was perl-Image-ExifTool, which had a version bump to 12.30.
This week has shown that Tumbleweed is indeed back at full speed. We have published new snapshots daily. Of course, that also means we could rely on not receiving broken things that managed to slip through stagings without being noticed. So thanks go mostly to the developers/maintainers who submitted pre-tested things. And openQA of course!
We are thrilled to announce the Public Release Candidate (RC 2) of SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro 5.1!
SLE Micro is an ultra-reliable, lightweight operating system purpose built for edge computing. Please check out our Product page to learn more, but for the beta program, please refer to our dedicated beta page.
SUSE Rancher 2.6, the latest release of SUSE‘s open source enterprise Kubernetes management platform, is now available. It features major updates across the platform that will help enterprise customers better manage their growing Kubernetes environments.
While testing my qubes_ansible project on the upcoming Qubes OS 4.1 project, I noticed something really strange. But, before getting into that, this Ansible module and the connection plugin are for Qubes OS only, and based on the excellent Python modules provided by the Qubes team.
The Linux kernel and the second version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) turned 30 this year.
Red Hat is said to be establishing a "small team" to work on activities around EPEL, the "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux" that is popular with RHEL/CentOS users for easily fetching extra packages not available via RHEL proper.
The Fedora-hosted Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) has been a great success for complementing the package selection available on RHEL, CentOS, and friends. This Fedora special interest group has done a great job providing and maintaining this wide assortment of additional packages for easy deployment on RHEL-based distributions.
As CentOS blog can be seen in the , Red Hat officially wants to upgrade the EPEL repository, which has been maintained since 2007, with a small team of full-time supervisors. The community-based special interest group EPEL SIG is not to be replaced, but supplemented. So far, Red Hat or the Fedora Project have not given any guarantees, support or certifications for EPEL packages, as is usual for packages in the official RHEL repository. This could change now.
EasyOS is an experimental distribution, a "new paradigm"; a blend of the best ideas from Puppy Linux and Quirky Linux, and a fundamental rethink of the security, maintainability and ease-of-use. Special features include a custom container system, named EasyContainers, a special isolated ultra-secure mode running in RAM, and all packages are compiled from source, in a port of OpenEmbedded with an EasyOS layer.
Version 2.9 is the latest in the "Dunfell series", the name derived from the Dunfell release of OpenEmbedded (OE). Version 2.9 is a complete recompile in OE, with package version updates. Also updated are SeaMonkey, now 2.53.9, and the Linux kernel, now 5.10.61.
EasyOS was born in January 2017, and since then there have been bits and pieces written here and there about how and why it is different from other Linux distributions. This includes some rather technical descriptions. What is needed is a simple plain-English list, so that anyone can get a quick idea of what EasyOS is all about.
So, here goes. Do note, though, that Easy is an experimental distribution, and the features may change, and some features are a work-in-progress. These items are not listed in any particular order...
A good sign of maturity and confidence in software is when said software utilizes its own components for future development and enablement. Snapcraft is a command-line utility that allows developers to package and distribute their applications as snaps. But Snapcraft itself is also distributed as a snap, and built in the same manner!
Today, Snapcraft is built using the core18, based off of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Very soon, Snapcraft will move to the latest LTS base, core20, both to ensure forward support and updates, as well as to make use of various improvements in the snappy ecosystem. This migration will bring a number of important changes, so we’d like to share our roadmap and plan for Snapcraft, and how these changes may affect you.
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For most developers and publishers, the release of Snapcraft 6.x will not cause any change to their existing processes. They will be able to continue building snaps as before, and utilize the latest features in the 6.x channel. For those who still need to support the i386 architecture, they can use the 5.x channel. Moreover, Launchpad will retain the ability to dispatch core18 tasks, with or without the i386 architecture.
Canonical is preparing to soon release Snapcraft 6.0 as the latest version of their utility for packaging and distributing Snaps, the Ubuntu-preferred route for sandboxed apps.
The principal highlight of Snapcraft 6.0 is shifting from an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS base to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. In turn with Snapcraft 6.0 switching to an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS core, 32-bit x86 (i386) support is phased out while RISC-V support is now available. But for those still wanting i386 support, the legacy track with Snapcraft will still allow using the older Ubuntu 18.04 base.
Lindenis’ open-spec, $125 “Lindenis V833” SBC runs a Linux-based Lindenis Video SDK on Allwinner’s 1.2GHz, single -A7 V833 camera SoC with a 0.4-TOPS NPU. Features include up to 3GB RAM, LAN, WiFi, 4-lane MIPI-DSI and CSI, and BT1120 HDTV I/O.
In Jan. 202, Shenzhen based Lindenis Tech. Ltd. launched a sandwich-style, 4K camera-oriented Lindenis V536 SBC based on an Allwinner V536 compute module. The Lindenis V536 is still available at Amazon for $109, but unlike its flagship Lindenis V5, the SBC is not listed on the Lindenis website. The V5 SBC is based on a similarly quad -A7 Allwinner V5 camera SoC.
Now Lindenis has returned with a lower powered, but AI-enabled Lindenis V833 video processing board equipped with MIPI-DSI/CSI and BT1120 vision I/O. Available for $125, the open-spec SBC is designed for smart camera, smart IPC, and SDV (switched digital video) applications.
Most WiFi IoT modules are designed to be integrated into products with an enclosure, but the M5Stamp Pico module based on ESP32-PICO-D4 SiP comes with a removable heat-resistant plastic shell that protects the 3D antenna and components, while leaving space to solder headers and/or a Grove connector.
The tiny module also comes with a button and RGB LED, and like other ESP32-based M5Stack hardware, M5Stamp Pico is programmable with UIFlow graphical programming platform and compatible with Arduino, MicroPython, and the ESP-IDF.
The Freedesktop SDK as a platform and SDK run-time for Flatpak apps/run-times is out with its first major stable update in one year.
Freedesktop SDK 21.08 is notable in that RISC-V is the latest CPU architecture supported by this SDK/run-time popular with Flatpaks. There is also a wide variety of updated packages contained within this SDK, GStreamer-VAAPI has been re-added as a supported extension, and the Rust extension was removed.
An article on techcrunch.com, which can also be found on the Jolla homepage under News, reports that Jolla has reached profitability in the 2020 financial year after 10 years. I do not know whether there are still claims from the crowdfunding campaign for the tablet and whether these will now be settled.
Opinion: Whether such claims are legally justified may be another matter, but one’s own reputation and moral claim beyond the requirements of national and international legislation should be worth something to owners and company management.
Welcome, September --we're opening the month with another great week. Here's what the Apache community has been up to...
That was Josepha Haden on the “The Art and Science of Accessibility” episode of the WP Briefing Podcast, talking about accessibility and exploring how it applies to the WordPress open source software. You will find that many of our updates from August 2021 tie in closely with the core principles of access, accessibility, and usability. Read on to find out more!
This is to announce gzip-1.11, a stable release.
There have been 43 commits by 5 people in the 2.7(!) years since 1.10.
See the NEWS below for a brief summary.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed! The following people contributed changes to this release:
Bjarni Ingi Gislason (1) Dmitry V. Levin (1) Ilya Leoshkevich (8) Jim Meyering (20) Paul Eggert (13)
The last release of Gzip was v1.10 back at the end of 2018 while now it's finally been succeeded today by Gzip 1.11.
But even with the two and a half years since the release of Gzip 1.10, the Gzip 1.1 release isn't all that exciting... Unless you happen to be using IBM Z hardware.
The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has upstreamed its GNU Binutils support.
For years the Haiku project has been maintaining their own GNU Binutils patches downstream but as of yesterday that work has been upstreamed.
A new release 0.4.13 of RQuantLib arrived on CRAN yesterday, and has been uploaded to Debian as well.
QuantLib is a very comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance; RQuantLib connects it to the R environment and language.
This updates RQuantLib to a few now-deprecated (daycount convention) interfaces in QuantLib release 1.23. As the last release was sixteen months ago, we also updated a few standard packaging aspects (such as use of r-ci), updated README.md and DESCRIPTION and fixed an old typo. No other changes, no new interfaces.
A brand new release 0.2.4 of the RcppSMC package arrived on CRAN earlier today, with a dual delay for CRAN closing for a well-earned break, and then being overwhelmed when reopening. Other than that the processing was again versy smooth.
RcppSMC provides Rcpp-based bindings to R for the Sequential Monte Carlo Template Classes (SMCTC) by Adam Johansen described in his JSS article. Sequential Monte Carlo is also referred to as Particle Filter in some contexts.
As you probably know by now, the Eclipse Foundation has become an European non-profit organization and they are strengthening their team in Europe. The organization reach has always been global including a team in Europe, but this formal movement means that there is now a solid Open Source organization to host collaboration projects created by corporations and companies for commercial purposes, under EU laws, which has interesting implications at different levels.
After contributing to KDE and being part of its Board of Directors, working at ASOLIF (Spanish trade federation of associations of FOSS companies) as executive, being a line manager at Linaro, leading the GENIVI distribution as supplier or contributing to different initiatives at the Linux Foundation as member representative, being part of one of the most relevant organizations that provides a neutral environment to different type of organizations helping to create and consolidate projects is very appealing to me.
GitHub's Copilot comes with a coded list of 1,170 words to prevent the AI programming assistant from responding to input, or generating output, with offensive terms, while also keeping users safe from words like "Israel," "Palestine," "communist," "liberal," and "socialist," according to new research.
Copilot was released as a limited technical preview in July in the hope it can serve as a more sophisticated version of source-code autocomplete, drawing on an OpenAI neural network called Codex to turn text prompts into functioning code and make suggestions based on existing code.
To date, the results have been interesting but not quite compelling – the code produced has been simplistic and insecure, though the project is still being improved.
Earlier today, Microsoft pushed a promotional message to early adopters of Windows 11. The promo intended to promote the upcoming operating system’s integration with Microsoft Teams. Instead, it caused Explorer (the Windows desktop shell) to stop responding and left users without a working Start menu and taskbar.
Hesk is a simple open-source ticketing system. It comes with two company versions that let you choose from them.
The platform downloaded from over than 650,000 times. It is a features-rich and comes with a large set of integration options that make it ideal to use for a company.
Osticket is a web-based customer ticketing support system. It comes to help you in customer service, make them happy, manage, organize and archive all your support requests and responses in one place, improve your customer experience.
This solution is widely used comes with a large set of feature with easily scale that empower businesses and customer experience.
Unlike its other competitors, Osticket focuses on improve customer service professionally by providing a simply and easily installation process that helps you to get started with it with no time.
This software is an alternative to higher-cost and complex customer support systems. It used from more than five million people from all around the world.
Osticket is a simple application, easy to use, suitable for all businesses, it comes with social features. It also supports ticket systems on the market.
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The software is an open-source app released and distributed under the GPL-2.0 License.
FAVEO is a web-based help desk ticketing system. It is focus on customer service management, incident management, SLA management, built in knowledge base. It also provides Businesses with an automated Helpdesk system to manage customer support.
Furthermore, it is a platform integrated with face book, Twitter, WhatsApp MSG91, and more.
With it, you will get a great customer service. It provides Businesses with an automated Helpdesk system.
The platform comes with a community edition that is totally free and open source, Pro Edition that is a paid version, Freelancer addition, and a service desk addition.
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 183. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ] * Add support for extracting Android signing blocks. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#246) * Format debug messages for elf sections using our diffoscope.utils.format_class utility. * Clarify a comment about the HUGE_TOOLS dict in diffoscope.external_tools.
[ Felix C. Stegerman ] * Clarify output around APK Signing Blocks and remove an accidental duplicate "0x" prefix.
As cybersecurity advances, threat actors develop malware with new tricks that exploit weaknesses in an IT environment. Once the malware finds a loophole, it spreads exponentially like a disease, corrupting files, exfiltrating data, redirecting traffic to other destinations, and performing other malicious activities.
Social platforms are powerful tools which allow a user to communicate with their friends and family. They also allow for activists to organize and manage political movements. Unfortunately, they also allow for users to harass other users and the mitigations available for that harassment are generally lacking.
By implementing networks of consent using the techniques presented, centralized, federated and distributed social networking platforms alike can build effective mitigations against harassment. Not all techniques will be required, depending on the design and implementation of a given platform.
What does consent mean here?
In this case, consent does not have any special technical meaning. It means the same thing as it does in real life: you (or your agent) is allowing or disallowing an action concerning you in some way.
As computers are incapable of inferring whether consent is given, the user records a statement affirming their consent if granted. Otherwise, the lack of a consent statement must be taken to mean that consent was not granted for an action. How this affirmation is recorded is platform specific.
In technical terms, we refer to these affirmations of consent as an object capability. Many things in this world are already built on object capabilities, for example Mach’s port system and cryptographic assets are forms of object capabilities.
